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  Which is why the night Mack pulled a gun on Ronnie Malvo, Darren made it from Houston to Mack’s house in San Jacinto County in less than an hour. Lisa had begged him not to go. He was off duty, she said. But they both knew there was no such thing. He’d just come off a month on the road, and she was furious that he would so easily leave her again. Darren, don’t. But he left her anyway, flying to Mack’s aid, and now he was a witness in a homicide investigation. He’d been paying for Lisa’s I told you so ever since.

  Vaughn nodded and glanced at the grand jurors, local men and women pulled off farms and out of post offices and barbershops, for whom a day at the courthouse counted as genuine excitement—entertainment, even—no matter that a man’s life was at stake. The DA had a storyteller’s instinct for pacing and plot twists, the leisurely parceling out of key information. There was no judge here, only a bailiff, the prosecutor, a court reporter, and the twelve members of the grand jury, who had the solemn task of deciding whether or not to indict Rutherford McMillan for first-degree homicide. Because all grand jury proceedings are private, the honey-colored benches in the gallery were empty. The deck was stacked squarely in the state’s favor. Neither the defendant nor his counsel was allowed to weigh in on the state’s presentation of evidence. Darren was ostensibly here on behalf of the prosecution. But he planned to do what he could to sow a seed of doubt in the grand jurors’ minds. The trick was to do that and keep his job, a risk he was willing to take. He didn’t want to believe that Mack had killed someone in cold blood.

  “In what capacity does he work for your family?” Vaughn asked.

  “He looks after our property in the county, fifteen acres in Camilla. It’s the house where I was raised, but no one lives there anymore, not full-time, not for years,” he said. “Well, I guess I technically live there now. See, my wife and I are going through a little something, and she asked for space to—”

  Objection: nonresponsive.

  It’s what he would have said if he were Vaughn, if this were a real trial.

  But there was no judge here. And Darren, the former law student, knew he could use that to his advantage, too. He wanted the jurors to get to know him, to be more inclined than not to believe he was telling the truth. He didn’t trust that the badge would be enough, not looking the way he did now. The pits of his dress shirt were damp, and there was a rank funk seeping from his pores. He felt the first roil of a hangover that had been hiding behind the pain in his hand. His stomach lurched, and he belched up something moist and sour.

  He’d broken one of his uncles’ cardinal rules: never go to town looking sorry or second-rate or like a man who felt like explaining himself fifteen times a day. Even his uncle Clayton, a onetime defense lawyer and professor of constitutional law, was known to say that for men like us, a pair of baggy pants or a shirttail hanging out was “walking probable cause.” His identical twin and ideological foil, William, a lawman and Ranger himself, was quick to agree. Don’t give them a reason to stop you, son. The men rarely stood on common ground—belying the trope of twins who think with one mind—but for the fact that they were Mathews men, a tribe going back generations in rural East Texas, black men for whom self-regard was both a natural state of being and a survival technique. His uncles adhered to those ancient rules of southern living, for they understood how easily a colored man’s general comportment could turn into a matter of life and death. Darren had always wanted to believe that theirs was the last generation to have to live that way, that change might trickle down from the White House.

  When in fact the opposite had proved to be true.

  In the wake of Obama, America had told on itself.

  Still, they were giants to him, his uncles, men of stature and purpose, who each believed he’d found in his respective profession a way to make the country fundamentally hospitable to black life. For William, the Ranger, the law would save us by protecting us—by prosecuting crimes against us as zealously as it prosecutes crimes against whites. No, Clayton, the defense lawyer, said: the law is a lie black folks need protection from—a set of rules that were written against us from the time ink was first set to parchment. It was a sacred debate that held black life as holy, worthy of continuance, and in need of safekeeping, a debate that Darren had been following since he was toddling between their long legs under the kitchen table, when the brothers still lived together, before they’d had a falling-out over a woman. They’d raised Darren since he was only a few days old, and he’d spent his life straddling the family’s ideological divide.

  Vaughn cut him off, moving to his next question. “So when Mr. McMillan called you that night, was it as a friend or as a member of the Texas Rangers?”

  Objection: calls for speculation, Darren thought.

  “Both, I imagine,” he said.

  “And do you know why Mr. McMillan called you instead of calling nine one one?”

  Lisa had asked the same thing. Sitting on their bed, in a faded SMU T-shirt, she asked why Mack hadn’t called local authorities, why Darren was getting involved at all. Darren had assured her that Mack had called the local sheriff. He was wrong, which he found out too late. But he wouldn’t tell the grand jury that. “I think he felt more comfortable dealing with someone he knew,” he said.

  Vaughn’s sandy eyebrows drew together. He was a white man in his midforties, a few years older than Darren, with chestnut-colored hair that was two shades darker than his eyebrows. Darren guessed he dyed it, and he got a sudden and terrible image of Vaughn wandering the aisles of the Brookshire Brothers grocery in town, hunting for Miss Clairol. Vaughn was a government man through and through, dressed plainly in a blue suit and polished tan ropers. He’d been told that Darren didn’t want this indictment, that he thought the Rangers and the state of Texas were making a mistake. And he’d been sniffing out a trick on Darren’s part since they’d first met to prepare his testimony.

  “Someone he knew, yes,” Vaughn said, glancing at the jurors. “An officer of the law. But still a friend, wouldn’t you say?”

  Darren was careful with this one. “Friendly, yes.”

  “Well, you drove up from Houston to help him. Don’t think you’d do that for just anyone.”

  “The man had a known criminal on his property.”

  “A peckerwood, didn’t Mack call him?”

  “After Malvo called him a nigger,” Darren said.

  The word, laid plain in court, shot a jolt of alarm through the room. Several of the white jurors visibly tensed, as if they believed that merely saying the word aloud in mixed company might incite violence, or summon Al Sharpton.

  But Darren wanted it made clear: Ronnie “Redrum” Malvo was a tatted-up cracker with ties to the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a criminal organization that made money off meth production and the sale of illegal guns—a gang whose only initiation rite was to kill a nigger. Ronnie had been harassing Mack’s granddaughter, Breanna, a part-time student at Sam Houston State, for weeks—following her in his car as she walked to and from town, calling out words she didn’t want to repeat, driving back and forth in front of her house when he knew she was home, cussing her color, her body, the way she wore her “nappy” hair. The girl was understandably terrified. Ronnie was known to shoot a dog for shitting in his yard, to threaten that and more to any black person who came within fifteen feet of the tilting shack he called home. He used to beat up kids in high school, vandalize black-owned farms, yanking up crops and tearing down fencing, and he got arrested once for setting fire to an AME church in nearby Camilla, Darren’s hometown. Ronnie was built like a fireplug, short and barrel-chested, with a pointy head and thinning hair he hid beneath bandannas. Mack was a seventy-year-old black man who remembered the Klan, remembered huddling behind his daddy and a shotgun, fears of nighttime raids and tales of Klansmen riding up from towns like Goodrich and Shepherd. But this was 2016, and Rutherford McMillan wasn’t having that shit.

  “That’s right,” Vaughn said. “A known criminal and, as you say, kno
wn white supremacist was threatening the defendant—”

  “I don’t know for a fact that Ronnie threatened him.” He looked at the first row of jurors, four men and two women, all white. “But Mark had every right to protect his property,” Darren said. Two of the white jurors nodded.

  There were grade-schoolers in Texas who could recite the Castle Doctrine, the state’s “stand your ground” law, as easily as the pledge of allegiance.

  Mack’s was a textbook case.

  Ronnie Malvo had breached Mack’s property line by cover of darkness, pulling up in a late-model Dodge Charger, hopped up on twenty-inch wheels, likely paid for with drug money. He’d left the engine idling with the lights off, warm air curling up from the twin tailpipes and disappearing like smoke among the steeple-topped pines lining Mack’s little plot of land at the edge of San Jacinto County, the nearest neighbor at least a fourth of a mile down the single-lane road that ran in front of Mack’s house.

  Breanna, who was home alone, stepped on the porch of the clapboard cottage she shared with Mack, trying to see who was sitting out there in the dark, watching the house. When she saw the Dodge and Ronnie Malvo’s silhouette in the front seat, she screamed and dropped her cell phone, cracking it in two places. She ran inside and bolted the door, then called her granddaddy from the kitchen phone. From the cab of his ancient Ford pickup, Mack then called Darren as he sped home from a job in nearby Wolf Creek. When Mack pulled into his driveway, his truck blocked Ronnie Malvo’s only way out.

  Mack hollered for Breanna to grab his pistol from the house. She came out a few seconds later with a snub-nosed .38 revolver. Mack didn’t know if Ronnie was armed. But pulling a gun on a man was certainly the fastest way to find out.

  By the time Darren arrived, the two men were in a standoff.

  He’d rolled up to Mack’s place with his headlamps dark, parking his truck under the branches of an old oak tree. Toeing his way up the dirt-and-gravel drive, Darren came upon the following scene: Mack, standing among the junk in his yard, .38 to Ronnie’s head, and Ronnie swearing he was just trying to talk to the girl, saying, “But I ain’t gon’ stand here and let this nigger shoot me cold.” He had a .357 aimed at Mack’s chest, a gun with more firing power than the Colt .45 Darren pulled from his holster. Ronnie seemed exasperated by the foolishness on display. He needed the “old cotton-head nigger” to move his goddamned truck if he wanted him off his property so goddamned bad. Mack told Ronnie to get his “peckerwood ass” in the Dodge first. Spit was flying, foreheads slick with rage.

  “Put down the gun, Malvo,” Darren said. “Let’s all get out of this clean.”

  “Tell that to the nigger,” Ronnie said, nodding his head toward Mack.

  “Which nigger you talking to, Ronnie?” Darren said. “And before you answer, remember one of these niggers is a Texas Ranger who got out of bed for this. I’m not exactly in a patient frame of mind.” The Colt caught light off the front-porch lamp. For a moment, Ronnie looked cornered and scared, but Darren knew that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Ronnie was starting to twitch. Two guns at his head, he was shaking in his biker boots, late to the realization that he’d carried a prank too far, had been called out and made a fool of. Pride was a hell of a thing, and Darren knew men had been shot over far less.

  He made a quick tactical shift.

  “Mack, drop the gun,” Darren said. Of the two, Mack was the one he figured he could talk some sense into. But he was wrong.

  “The hell I will,” the older man said.

  “I got this, Mack.”

  “I don’t want no trouble, man,” Ronnie said.

  Darren could hear Breanna crying on the porch.

  “I want this motherfucker off my property,” Mack said.

  “Put the gun down, Mack. It’s not worth it.”

  “I got every right to protect my property.”

  “Yeah, but every minute you holding that pistol brings us closer to a situation I can’t get you out of. Listen to me, Mack. Don’t let him goad you into prison. I’ll get him on trespassing, okay, if you just put down the gun.”

  “Don’t care about that,” Mack said, his rheumy eyes glistening. “I want him dead or gone, nothing in between.”

  “Just move the truck, and I’ll go,” Ronnie said. “Was just messing with the girl. Ought to be happy anybody wants to look at her monkey ass.”

  “Toss Bre your keys, Mack,” Darren said. The old man did as he was told, but he didn’t lower his pistol—what looked like a toy pop gun in his large hand. Darren told Breanna to get in Mack’s Ford and ease it out onto the road, giving Ronnie Malvo a way to get out of the driveway and off the property.

  By now, Mack was damn near crying himself, mumbling so that strings of spit gathered in the corners of his mouth. “Got no right coming onto my land, sniffing around my girl. Don’t have to take no shit off a cracker like him.”

  Darren felt a shift in Mack’s breathing, which was bullish and on the march. He thought they had but a few seconds before the old man gave in to the rage that was pulling at every muscle in his lean body. “Move the truck now!”

  As Breanna ran off the porch to Mack’s Ford, Darren used the distraction to move in on Mack. He reached for his right arm at the wrist, yanking it down in one motion while keeping his Colt trained on Ronnie. Mack cursed but then let go, collapsing onto the patchy grass. Ronnie immediately lowered his weapon. He tossed it through the open driver’s-side window of his Dodge, then jumped into the front seat behind it, moving like his ass was on fire.

  Darren capped this testimony by reciting the Castle Doctrine verbatim.

  Vaughn bristled. “I’ll handle the law in here, Mr. Mathews.”

  “That’s Ranger Mathews.”

  “The fact of the matter, Ranger Mathews, is that instead of calling nine one one, the defendant made sure to call a Ranger he knew, a fellow African American who would certainly understand the anger this incident stirred—”

  “Objection.” This one Darren said out loud.

  Vaughn glared at him from the podium, his right hand grasping its edge so tightly that his knuckles blanched. “Mr. Mathews—”

  “I’m a Texas Ranger, counselor.”

  “Then act like one.”

  Vaughn knew he’d gone too far as soon as he said it. The women in the front row of the jury box shook their heads at the way he’d spoken to a member of the most revered law enforcement agency in the state. One of the two black men in the second row crossed his arms sternly, rocking a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, a little dagger pointed right at the DA.

  “Ask another question,” Darren said, pressing his advantage.

  “Mr. Malvo left of his own accord that night, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. Malvo threw his weapon into his vehicle and fled the scene.”

  Two days later, when Ronnie was found dead in a ditch alongside his property, two .38 slugs in his chest, it was Darren’s incident report that put Mack on the suspect list. He felt responsible for this whole ordeal. A hundred times a day Darren wished he’d never shown up that night, that he’d never filed that report. He’d actually paused after typing it up, staring warily at the pages as he pulled them from the printer, knowing that just putting Mack’s name on an incident report, victim or not, was opening a door through which Mack might never return. Criminality, once it touched black life, was a stain hard to remove. But Darren was a cop, so he did his job. He’d followed the rules, and it had landed them all here—a grand jury deciding whether to charge the old man with murder. If indicted, he’d go to trial, a man in his seventies who’d done nothing but work and love his family his whole life. If convicted, he’d be put on death row.

  The truth was that Ronnie Malvo was affiliated with one of the most violent gangs in American history, men who ate their own, especially the ones they suspected of betraying them. Darren knew of an Aryan Brotherhood of Texas captain who once ordered a particularly vicious hit on an underling suspected of talking
to the cops. They found the nineteen-year-old rumored snitch, strung up by what little flesh was still on his bones, hanging from a fence on a wheat farm in Liberty County. Anybody could have killed Ronnie Malvo, who actually was a criminal informant for the federal government. Darren was the only person in the courtroom, including the DA, who knew this. He was based out of the Rangers office in Houston, and a few months before the Malvo homicide, he’d begged his way onto a multiagency task force that was investigating the ABT with the feds. Of course he wasn’t allowed to utter a word about it, but he knew the Brotherhood had reason to put Ronnie in a bag—if someone had found out he was talking.

  “Mr. McMillan was pretty angry that night, wouldn’t you say?”

  Darren downgraded it to “concerned,” adding, “He didn’t seem bent on revenge, if that’s what you mean.”

  “We don’t want you to speculate.”

  “All I can tell you is what I saw, and Mack didn’t shoot anybody.”

  Vaughn pursed his lips together. This was off the script, and Darren knew it.

  “Ronnie Malvo was shot with a thirty-eight revolver, correct?”

  “I did not work the investigation.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Didn’t get assigned,” he said casually.

  “Lieutenant Fred Wilson said you were too close to this, did he not?”

  “Yes, Ronnie Malvo was shot with a thirty-eight.” Darren conceded the point.

  “And the night you were on his property, you saw Mr. McMillan brandish a thirty-eight revolver at the deceased, correct?”

  “Which he didn’t fire.” Darren shifted in his seat. “He just wanted to be left alone, to feel safe in his home. That’s why he had me stay.”

  The moment Ronnie fled Mack’s property, revving his engine and churning up a cloud of dirt and gravel, Darren had knelt beside Mack, a man he’d never seen sniffle in twenty years, let alone cry openly the way he did that night, undone by how close he’d come to killing a man. Darren made it clear he could go after Ronnie or he could stay with the man and his granddaughter.