Iron Prayer

Memphis. February 8, 2022. 2:47 a.m.

Captain Dyson Mills shoots a sleeping man through the windshield of a Honda Civic at the back of a Walmart parking lot on Elvis Presley Boulevard. The dead man is Jermaine Whitaker, twenty-three, an architecture student who was four months from his degree and engaged to a young nurse in Orange Mound named Erica Boudreaux. The shooting is ruled justified. The captain's rookie son, Russell, signs the report.

Two years later, Russell Mills walks toward a youn...