“Tell him yourself,” Molly said. She was holding a heavy cast-iron skillet, the kind used to cook large breakfasts for bunkhouse crews.

The man with black hair rubbed his thumb and forefinger up and down the whiskers on his throat, his eyes roving over Molly’s figure, a matchstick elevating in his mouth. “Sounds like somebody is whipped to me,” he said.

I stepped down off the porch, my old enemy ballooning in my chest, tingling in my hands. “I strongly recommend y’all drag your sorry asses out of here,” I said.

Lyle Hobbs continued to stare directly into my face, his eyes jittering. “We’re leaving. But don’t make us come back,” he said. “Those aren’t idle words, sir.”

He walked back toward his truck, then turned around, cleaning one ear with his little finger. He ticked a piece of matter off his fingernail. There was an indentation at the corner of his mouth, like a wrinkle in clay. “It’s Robicheaux, isn’t it?” he said.

“So?”

“Sally Dee purely hated you and Mr. Purcel. Used to talk about what he aimed to do to y’all. I saw him knock the glass eye out of a hooker because she mentioned your name. He was a mean little shit, wasn’t he?”

The sunlight was red across the valley as he and his friend drove back toward the state highway.

“Who are they, Dave?” Molly asked after they were gone.

“Trouble,” I said.

AFTER SUPPER, I talked with Albert about our visitors, the summer light still high in the sky, the valley blanketed with shadow, Albert’s gaited horses blowing in the grass down by the creek.

“They do security for a man name of Ridley Wellstone? From Texas?” he said.

“They seemed to know you,” I said.

Albert had fine cheekbones, intense eyes, and soft facial skin that belied the nature of his earlier life. His hair was white and grew over his collar, and he often wore an Australian digger’s hat that hung from the back of his neck on a leather cord. His profile always suggested Byronic images to me, a poet wandering in the wastes, kicking at stone fragments along the edges of a collapsing empire.