Chapter 1 Dying Billy In his retirement, which wasn't kingly but pretty sweet, Billy Ferrell loved sitting on the dock of his lake house, watching Taco, his Labrador-blue heeler mix, splash around for bream and shad and the occasional white perch. It didn't matter a doughnut that the dog seldom got anything. It was good just to be down at the pier by himself or with a crony, in a peeling metal chair on the moss-green unpainted wood, looking out over the shallow water of the skinny, torpid lake. Hazel Ferrell would be up at the house, fussing with something or other, and so he'd sneak a smoke, cupping it on the inside of his fist so his wife wouldn't know, saying to himself, Well, hell, what is life but a series of doing a bunch of little things you're not supposed to do? Sometimes she'd bring down coffee for him. Seeing his spouse coming, the high sheriff of Natchez-which is how everyone still thought of Billy Ferrell, even if he wasn't sheriff anymore, that was his boy Tommy's show now-would quickly stub the cigarette out on the backside of the deck and toss it in the water. His arteries were clogging and the circulation in his legs wasn't good and there was a cancerous mass growing secretly in his lungs, but he was still a handsome man and he knew it. Vanity and pride had always been core Ferrell flaws. He wore gold-rimmed glasses now.

The teeth were in trouble and his coal-black hair, which once had glistened in pictures and was parted forty-five degrees to the left, had thinned to long swipes of dirty white. He'd become ruddy-faced and gargly-voiced, and his breath seemed to emerge from him in hard little pants. And yet, this final Billy Ferrell-weakening, sedentary, semidepressed, widened out-was still capable of coming at you with that old incisored, tough-guy, top-dog grin; with that noted, flat-lined, crow's-footed, predatory squint. The grin and the squint-didn't they explain everything about the Mississippi doctrine of Might Is Right? Both had been there when he'd campaigned for sheriff the first time. That was in 'fifty-nine. He was a young man then, in his mid-thirties, good-looking as all get-out, albeit with a kind of blocky, sober, big-eared, straight-ahead earnestness in his speech and manner. He'd run ads for himself before the Democratic primary that summer, as all the candidates had, and there were a slew of them, candidates that is, something like eight or nine. He was already well known, since he'd been a sheriff's deputy for eight years, and since he'd lived in Adams County all his life, except for when he'd been to the war.

"He has never been known to conduct himself in any manner that would bring discredit to his badge or the people he represented," the ads said. "We know Billy Ferrell and his Devotion to Duty, His Character, His Sincerity of Purpose, His Unrelenting Courage and his High Principles. Let's elect William T. 'Billy' Ferrell Our Sheriff and Tax Collector." And Natchez did. They elected him for the next twenty-eight years, with the exception of one four-year window of time, 1964-68, when he couldn't succeed himself because, back then, a sheriff in Mississippi could be sheriff for only four years at a stretch. In some counties (there are eighty-two in the state), sheriffs would get their wives elected as interim sheriffs, while they did the real thing behind the scenes. Billy Ferrell laid out a term (he sold Ford clunkers at Bluff City Cars and tried to run a Gulf station and hauled some gravel and worked for Premo Stallone's plumbing business and did a stint as a city policeman, but everybody knew he was just whiling his time), and then he came back in, and then the succession law was changed, and then Natchez and the county seemed willing to make him pope of the county for life.

Well, white Natchez always seemed willing, and they had the majority. But after six terms, the high sheriff decided not to run anymore and handed the job over to To.