Just off Fulton Street and immediately south of the Keesler Bridge, the Leflore County Courthouse is a grand piece of old architecture surrounded by magnolia trees and the ghosts of racial injustice meted out before the shift of power brought by the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
It still houses the sheriff's department and the jail, which gives the building and parking lot a 24/7 buzz of activity that does little to suppress the drug dealing and companion violence plaguing the mostly black city beyond.
On this evening, two dark, unmarked federal government sedans sat among the sheriff's cruisers, their engines ticking away the heat of their swift journeys, one from Jackson, the other from Memphis. The highway patrol cars that had accompanied them on their high-speed trips on 1-55 sat nearby next to the personal vehicles of the sheriff himself and the chief of the Greenwood Police Department.
The occupants of those vehicles and a host of others jammed a third-floor conference room. A tall, lean federal agent with close-cropped, gunmetal-gray hair and a thin, red birthmark slashing into the hairline on the left side of his forehead addressed the group. He wore pinstripes with knife-sharp creases, an immaculately knotted red power tie. He had declined to tell the gathering much at all about his position or precisely whom he worked for, only that he had been sent by Homeland Security.
John Myers stood in the back of the room next to the sheriff, a fit, linebacker-like man with "high-yellow" skin and deep freckles that took an edge off the menace of his otherwise impressive presence.
"Check out how the Fibbies and the brass from the Pentagon defer to him," the sheriff whispered to Myers.
"Doesn't bode well."
"We should have a tactical unit in place by noon," said the man from Homeland Security. "If any of your personnel make contact with this man, do not-repeat do not — take any action whatsoever. Bradford Stone is a deadly capable man and has shown his ability by killing at least seven people in the past forty-eight hours, six of them highly trained Special Forces members, and one man from his own search-and-rescue team.
"This is the cover legend you need to remember: Stone was involved in a drugsmuggling operation with a vicious cartel headquartered in Guadalajara. Our personnel attempted to apprehend him and he killed them all. We do not want a general alert. We will not be issuing mug shots, and our operation here should be restricted to the personnel in this room. We will take all the risk."
Myers raised his hand. "Sir?"
The man from Homeland Security frowned at the interruption. "Yes?"
"As you know, I talked to this man not two hours ago. He'd just saved the life of a gunshot victim and appeared pretty normal."
The man from Homeland Security smiled indulgently "Yes, Stone can seem normal. But we believe he's cracked after six years of dealing with his wife's injury and coma. He's like a serial killer, only he's a serial thriller. The rush from the danger associated with the drug running gives him a release allowing him to lead a normal life. Until it builds up."
He looked around the room, tried to meet every set of eyes, then focused on Myers.
"Does that make better sense, Sergeant?"
Myers glanced at the sheriff, who raised a skeptical eyebrow only his subordinate could see. Myers put on the "Yassuh, Mr. White Man" mask he had perfected as a young child, looked at the man from Homeland Security, and lied.
"Yes."