The Quiet Game

  My heart feels like a ball of lead.

  “I couldn’t do it, though. Part of me just wanted to pay, I guess. Father Tom says you got to. But I can’t go to Parchman Farm. I done sent too many brothers there myself. I can’t die in them cotton fields up there.”

  “You won’t have to, Ike. CNN will be covering that trial tomorrow. You get on the stand and tell the story you just told me, you’ll have Johnnie Cochran down here begging to defend you. What you did was wrong, but you’re the least guilty of the three by far. I think Stone believed that too. You know what the right thing is. That’s why you came to me in the first place.”

  He lets his gun fall again, then half turns from me and murmurs in the dark. “I started out all right. But I turned off somewhere. That day my shoulder got hurt, everything started going down.”

  He holsters his pistol and walks past me, toward the wide door, and looks out at the luminous clouds scudding over the river. Beyond him I can see a few stars, infinitely small on this first cool night. He turns back to face me, but since he’s silhouetted in the door, I cannot see his features.

  “I’ll do it,” he says. “Father Tom gonna think I’m the best man he ever knew. But he gonna be the only one. Every black man, woman, and child in this country gonna curse my name.”

  He half turns again, and a dim shaft of light illuminates his face. In eight years as a prosecutor, I never saw a man look so lost.

  Ike opens his mouth to say something, then flings an arm out as though to grab me, but he can’t because he’s flying backward, snatched like a puppet on a string. Before he hits the floor, a peal of thunder booms through the warehouse.

  “Ike!”

  He doesn’t answer. He’s lying facedown on the dirty floor, blood pumping from a fist-sized hole where his left shoulder blade used to be.

  CHAPTER 37

  I run to Ike, then drop to the cement floor as a second shot booms through the building. A third punches through the front and rear windshields of the Maxima, which is parked two feet to my left, and the concussion of the gun echoes around the old structure for three or four seconds.

  The shooter is inside the building.

  Inside, and probably at the front, shooting across the open floor. But he must not have a night-vision scope. He shot Ike as the deputy framed himself against the lighter background of the open loading door. Now that we’re flat on the floor, his shots are far off the mark. Ike’s face is less than six inches from mine, his eyes wide and glassy, like those of a wounded deer.

  “Ike,” I whisper. “Can you hear me?”

  His eyelids blink once, slowly, but he doesn’t speak. The man is dying before my eyes.

  I need a gun.

  Kelly’s Browning is in the glove box of the Maxima, but I’m not about to try to reach it. If I rise off the ground, I will silhouette myself against the open door, just as Ike did. If I had walked to that door first, I would be dying now.

  “Ike, I need your gun.”

  As I reach down to his holster, something cracks through the air less than a foot above us, and the report that follows seems trivial compared to that supersonic passage of metal. Fighting down panic, I try to wrest the Sig-Sauer from Ike’s holster, but it won’t budge. He must have snapped the strap when he holstered it. Unsnapping it by touch, I yank out the Sig and take the safety off. As I aim it across Ike’s back, a bullet crashes into his body, knocking us both a foot across the cold floor.

  He doesn’t make a sound.

  Then, like a rising wind, a wail of inhuman agony escapes his throat. I shove my arm across his waist and fire three quick rounds into the darkness at the front of the building. Something sharp pricks the skin of my forearm.

  Bone splinters.

  The last shot smashed Ike’s pelvis. He screams again, the sound sickeningly reminiscent of those Sarah made when the narcotics began to lose their race to keep up with the pain of her bone lesions.

  Who is shooting at us? An anonymous sniper, like the one who shot at me on the levee that night? The one Kelly killed? With a strange rush of clarity I realize that the levee sniper wasn’t shooting only at me, as I’d thought at the time. What did Ike say that night? How you know he was shooting at you? Ike had known from the beginning that he carried knowledge people would kill him for. As I cower behind his body, a voice calls out from the other end of the building.

  “Give it up! The nigger’s dead!”

  Before I can process these words, another truncated wail bursts from Ike’s lungs. “Brrrraaaaaaah!”

  My instinct is to run for the door, run until my legs buckle beneath me. But that would be suicide. The moment I rise, I’ll make myself a target. I could probably crawl out . . . but Ike isn’t dead yet. I can’t leave him. My next thought, born from rage, is to stand up and charge the darkness that shields the sniper, emptying Ike’s automatic as I run.

  With a defiant yell, I fire off two more rounds, then jump to my feet and grab Ike’s legs. Two shots boom through the building as I drag him facedown and screaming behind his cruiser, but the bullets crack past without finding flesh or bone.

  Kneeling beside him, I break the most fundamental rule of first-aid by turning him over onto his back. At this point it can’t matter much. His eyes are still open. His jaw is moving, but no sounds come from his throat. I lean over his mouth.

  “Brrr—” he groans.

  I take one of his hands in mine and squeeze the cold flesh. “Ike? What are you saying?”

  “Press me.”

  He must think I can stop the bleeding. “Where? Your shoulder?”

  “Pressleee . . .”

  Press lee? The nigger’s dead—

  Son of a bitch. No sniper hired by John Portman would talk that way. He wouldn’t talk at all. The man at the other end of this building is Raymond Aucoin Presley. The trial is tomorrow, and Presley has no intention of being indicted for murder. That’s why he wasn’t at his trailer when I called earlier. He’s been following Ike around, laying for a shot.

  “Ray!” I yell at the top of my voice. “Stop shooting! I need to talk to you!”

  Both windshields of Ike’s cruiser star into chaos as safety glass rattles across the floor.

  “What you got to say I want to hear?” comes the voice I recognize so easily now. “You want it in the head or the heart?”

  I will live or die by my actions in the next minute. “Listen to me, Ray! You want to hear this!”

  “I want to hear you choke on your own blood!”

  Every hair on my body is standing erect. Presley isn’t nearly as far away as he was a moment ago. He’s moving up for a kill shot. Crawling to the left side of the cruiser, I fire two quick rounds into the dark, then dart back to avoid return fire aimed at my muzzle flash.

  “Not even close, boy.”

  The tire beside my head explodes into ragged strips of rubber as Presley’s next shot reverberates through the building. When the echo dies, I call: “You want to know who sent you to Parchman, Ray? I think you’ll be surprised.”

  He fires again, smashing up a divot of cement beside Ike’s head.

  “Parchman, Ray! Didn’t you ever wonder who ratted you out?”

  Silence. Then: “Talk fast, boy, I’m getting close!”

  He is close. It takes every bit of nerve I possess to hold my ground. “It was Marston, Ray! Leo sent you up! Stone solved the murder, but Hoover didn’t want Leo going down for it. Leo’s old man had too much political clout. Hoover cut a deal to protect him, but he said you had to go down for shooting at Stone and Portman on the highway. It was Leo who gave you up!”

  “That’s bullshit!” For the first time the voice has come from more or less the same place.

  “Stone said Marston didn’t even hesitate! He fed the state police details of your drug business so they could catch you in the act. That’s why Stone was at the bust!”

  “You lying piece of shit! You’re just trying to save your own ass!”

  He’s buying it. “Leo
didn’t give a shit about you, Ray. How else do you think they got you? You must have had a lot of time to think about it. Five years, man!”

  More silence.

  “Ray?”

  No sound at all. Nothing but the slow ticking of the two cars, barely audible through the ringing in my ears. The son of a bitch is probably moving up to kill me, and if I don’t move, I’m going to die. But if I break for the door, I’m framing myself for a shot. Shivering against Ike’s body, I realize that I no longer hear his breathing. His eyes are still open, but they are fixed and dilated.

  Ike the Spike is dead.

  “Ray. . . ? Talk to me, Ray!”

  Nothing.

  The loading door beckons. But as I gather my legs beneath me, Ruby Flowers’s voice sounds in my head, an echo from childhood. “Broad is the gate that leads to destruction, but narrow the way that leads to salvation. . . .”

  To my left—in what must be a corner of the old shelling plant—is a pool of darkness so black it could be the bottom of the Marianas Trench. My legs are tensed beneath me like steel springs. Gripping Ike’s gun in my right hand, I launch myself low and hard toward that black hole. As the darkness envelops me, a stroke of lightning flashes in my brain, and I know no more.

  Consciousness returns like blood to a sleeping limb.

  Pain is the first sensation.

  Then light.

  The pain radiates from my forehead. The light is faint but real, thirty yards away, illuminating a parked police car. Not a police car. A sheriff’s cruiser.

  Ike’s cruiser.

  I roll over slowly and feel along the cold cement for Ike’s gun. My right wrist bangs into something cold and immovable. I touch it with my hand and feel along it. A steel rail. It’s one loading arm of a forklift. That’s what I slammed into when I ran into the pool of darkness. A goddamn forklift.

  The gun is underneath the fork.

  Closing my hand around its butt, I get to my feet and walk toward Ike’s car. Strangely, I am unafraid. Unafraid because I know I’m alone. If I wasn’t, I would be dead. Ray finally believed what I was telling him, and once he did, his priorities changed.

  At the edge of the darkness I look at my watch. Eight forty-five. I met Ike around eight. Ray started shooting about ten minutes after we started talking. I don’t know how long the shooting lasted, but he’s had at least twenty minutes to reach the target I offered up to him to save myself.

  Ike’s body lies behind his cruiser, where I dragged it in that last furious rush. His eyes are open but unseeing. I feel his carotid artery to be sure, then hold my hand over his mouth.

  Nothing.

  Climbing into the Maxima, I start the engine and dial Tuscany on the cell phone. While it rings, I floor the accelerator and make a wide squealing turn on the cement floor, then roar through the main loading door. The phone clicks as I hit Canal Street and nearly skid into the curb on the other side.

  “Liv Marston,” says a clipped voice. “If you’re a reporter—”

  “It’s Penn.”

  “What do you want?” The voice hasn’t warmed even one degree.

  “I know you don’t want to listen to me, but you’ve got to.”

  “Is it about the trial?”

  “No. You’ve got to get out of the house.”

  “What?”

  I hesitate before I reply. Some savage part of me wants to get Livy away and leave her father to face the retribution of his past. Poetic justice, if ever there was any. But I can’t do it.

  “Ray Presley’s on his way to Tuscany. He’s going to try to kill your father. He could already be at your house. Or on the grounds somewhere.”

  Silence.

  “Did you hear me, Livy?”

  “I heard you.”

  “Tell your father to call the police. They’ll send an army out there to protect him.”

  “Are we done now?”

  Are we done? “Did you understand what I just told you? Presley is coming there to kill your father.”

  “I hope he comes here.”

  “You what?”

  A police car tears around the corner of Main and Canal, lights flashing, heading in the direction of the pecan-shelling plant. In fifteen minutes every cop and deputy in this town will be combing the downtown streets.

  “You’re playing in things you don’t understand, Penn. I tried to tell you the other day. You were a fool to involve yourself in any of this.”

  “I understand more than you think. I know now why you did the things you did in the past. The choices you made.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t want to discuss it on the phone. It has to be face to face.”

  “We don’t have anything to say to each other.”

  “I’m begging you, Livy. Meet me one last time. For the sake of whatever it is that’s bound us together all these years. If you will, I think it will change both our lives. Maybe forever.”

  This time she hesitates. “It’s not about the trial?”

  “I don’t give a damn what happens at the trial. Name a place. Anywhere, I don’t care. I’ll even come to Tuscany.”

  “No. Jewish Hill.”

  “Jewish Hill?” Yet another landmark from our past. “In the cemetery?”

  “That’s about as private as you can get.”

  “Isn’t it locked at night?”

  “Park at the foot of the hill. By the wall. It’s not like we’ve never done it before.”

  “Do you still have the gun you had in the motel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bring it. And drive fast leaving the house.”

  “What time?”

  “I’m five minutes from the cemetery. Leave now.”

  “All right.”

  Livy’s borrowed Fiat is parked at the foot of Jewish Hill when I arrive, next to the low stone wall of the city cemetery. She got here first because I took a wide circle through town to avoid the police. I park behind the Fiat and shove Ike’s pistol into my waistband, then get out and walk up to the Spyder.

  Livy is not in the car.

  To my left, across Cemetery Road, stands the dark silhouette of Weymouth Hall, an antebellum mansion that marks the two-hundred-foot drop to the river, its widow’s walk silhouetted against the stars. To my right is the low wall and the nearly vertical slope of Jewish Hill. One mile south along the bluff, the police are taping off the pecan plant as a crime scene.

  I climb the wall and push through the shrubbery, then dig my hands into the face of the hill and begin climbing. As I near the top, a ghostly figure appears at the edge, looking down at me.

  It’s Livy. Her hair is flying behind her, caught in the wind blowing up the bluff from the river. She’s wearing a white blouse, a fitted jacket, and slacks tapered to the ankles. She bends and catches my hands, then pulls me up to the flat plateau of gravestones, statuary, and mausoleums.

  “Did you call the police?” I ask.

  She brushes a strand of hair from her eyes. “Daddy called some off-duty cops. They got there before I left.”

  “How did he react when you told him Presley might be coming to kill him?”

  “What do you want, Penn?”

  “It scared him to death, didn’t it? Livy, your father gave the cops what they needed to send Presley to Parchman when we were kids.”

  “Really?” A hard smile tightens her mouth. “Good.”

  “What I don’t understand is why my call didn’t scare you.”

  She walks past me to the edge of the hill. The lights of Vidalia, Louisiana, a mile away, outline her like another marble angel among the stones. “Why are we here, Penn? What’s the big mystery?”

  “You are.”

  She turns back to me. “I’m the mystery?”

  “You’re the mystery of my life. But I understand you now.”

  Something flickers in her eyes. I can’t tell if she’s intrigued or afraid. “Do you? Enlighten me, then.”

  “I know who Jenny’s father is.”

/>   Even in the dark I can tell she has gone rigid. She turns away from me, then back, her chin held high. “How do you know? Did he tell you?”

  “Tell me? God, no. He hates me. Why would he tell me?”

  She shakes her head. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you know this. It’s so pathetic.”

  “I know it’s bad, Livy. I realize I can’t ever understand what it was—what it is—to be in your position.”

  “How could you possibly know unless he told you? No one knows. He doesn’t even know. Not as far as I—”

  “Your father doesn’t know about Jenny?”

  She blinks. “My father? Of course he knows. But he doesn’t know, you know . . . who the father is.”

  My mind reels, trying to parse the semantics. “Livy, who is Jenny’s father?”

  “You just said you knew.”

  “Pretend I don’t.”

  Suspicion now. “If you don’t know, I’m not telling you.”

  “Livy—”

  “Who do you think it is?”

  I take a step toward her, but she moves back, nearer the edge of the hill. As though she knows what I am about to say. As though she could fly from the edge of the hill if I dare speak the truth. “I think Jenny’s father is your father.”

  She stares at me like she hasn’t heard correctly. Then she closes her eyes and lowers her head into her hands.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I say softly. “You—”

  “Shut up, Penn. Please just shut up. You might say something even more asinine than you already have.”

  “What?”

  She takes her hands away from her face. She is not crying. She is staring at me with what looks like morbid curiosity. “Did you actually think my father raped me?”

  Her voice is strong, but that could be the strength of denial, not truth. “I still think so. What I can’t figure out is how he forced you when you were eighteen.”