Lincoln takes his time with this. “Old Mr. Snake’s been in contact with Sheriff Billy Byrd.”
“How on earth could you know that?”
“I’ve been talking to a black deputy who works for Byrd. Been paying him for information.”
“How long?”
“Ever since I got to town. I’ve even got a phone number for a burn phone Knox is using, and this morning I got the GPS coordinates on the Rodney place. I drove down right after the trial and checked it out. He’s there.”
“How did you keep from being seen?”
Another low chuckle fills the truck cab. “Ran a little con, of course. I borrowed a piece-of-shit truck with a lawnmower in back, threw in some cane fishing poles, then rode up here wearing some old yardman shit. Told the only two people I talked to I was looking for work up this way. Gave ’em the idea I needed to get out of Natchez in a hurry. They didn’t think anything about it.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“After tonight, you may be, if you’re not already.”
Thanks for that. “I need to ask you something. Did you put the videotape in Henry’s camera on the night your mother died? The tape Sheriff Byrd’s men found in the Dumpster?”
Fresh bitterness comes into Lincoln’s face, but then a faint smile shows in profile. “Cora loaded that tape in there, like she testified. But it was me who told her to do it. And I told her how to set it so the red light wouldn’t come on. The tally lamp, they call that, in case you’re interested.”
“I figured that was you.”
“Didn’t do me no good though, did it? Daddy Tom found the tape and nuked it in that MRI machine. Pretty smart, really.”
To this I say nothing.
After staring into the darkness for a while, I say, “You said there are three people where we’re going?”
“Last I checked.”
“Do you know who they are?”
“Snake. That blond kid. And a woman, about sixty-five. Looks like a bitchy old redneck.”
“Wilma Deen, probably. Glenn Morehouse was her brother. The kid is Snake’s son. Illegitimate.”
“Lot of that going around, seems like.” Lincoln grunts and scoots forward on his seat like a man feeling drowsy.
“Sorry. The FBI thinks Wilma Deen threw the acid in that reporter’s face. Keisha Harvin.”
“Blinded her, didn’t it?”
“She’s got about ten percent of her vision left.”
“Well, then. No need to worry about collateral damage with those motherfuckers.”
In the silence after this assertion, I realize that I haven’t seen a light for several miles, other than the moon. We have to be getting close to our destination. Though I’ve seen no visual sign, I sense that the Mississippi River lies just to the west of us, a great tide of mud and water that alters the very atmosphere for miles on either side of it.
“Do you have any sort of plan?” I ask in a neutral tone. “Or do you just plan to bust into this little shack with guns blazing?”
“I can come up with something better than that. But don’t kid yourself. We don’t have any options here. You think of that house as a nest of snakes, if it helps you. But don’t start looking for some other way. There isn’t one.”
“There’s got to be. I want to see the layout. How far do we have to go?”
Lincoln taps the brakes and points through the windshield as he eases onto the dark shoulder. “Not far. We’re here, brother.”
A quarter mile ahead, a single light flickers through the trees like a distant star. Lincoln kills the headlights and stops the truck with a crunch of gravel. The high thrumming whine of night insects is so loud it penetrates the window glass.
“Rodney, Mississippi,” he says. “Get your guns. And get your game face on, Mayor.”
The trip from the truck through the nearly lightless skeleton of the old town is like walking back through history. I feel that we are the ghosts who earned the town its name. We walk past the place where the pavement gives out on the east-west access road coming in from the highway, then down the single lane that was the only real street Rodney ever had. The rifle in my hands sends energy vibrating along both arms, and my heart flutters at the realization that I cannot hear our footsteps. There’s enough humidity in the air to keep the dust settled around our shoes, so maybe that’s deadening the sound.
Lincoln keeps to the center of the dirt street, staying well clear of the broken string of buildings that line it, as though they hold sickness. Several appear to be abandoned, including a gutted old Baptist church of brittle wood. The brick church I remember stands across the road from the wooden wreck, and it perfectly matches the image in my mind. I can even see the cannonball in the moonlight, set high in its face. Out front a Confederate battle flag flies from a short pole, and a sign on the pole reads these colors never run.
“Time to get off the main drag,” Lincoln whispers, grabbing my arm and pulling me under some trees where a tiny gravel road runs behind a large, dark house.
As soon as I feel grass beneath my feet, he drops down and begins belly-crawling through it. Slinging the rifle over my left shoulder to avoid aggravating my bruise, I do the same. The pale soil feels sandy beneath the grass, and even here it smells to me of the river.
“There,” Lincoln whispers.
Fifty yards ahead, two windows in a small frame house glow yellow with what looks like lantern light.
“No electricity?” I ask, pausing to adjust the strap of the .308 across my back.
“Listen,” Lincoln says, stopping beside me. “Isn’t that a generator?”
He’s right. A hollow, rattletrap rumble like a car engine from the 1920s fills the bass spectrum of the wild hum of night insects in these deep woods. All I see beside the house is an ancient pickup truck parked near a big poplar tree.
“The generator must be in its own shack or something,” I think aloud. “Not to be any louder than that.”
“Good cover for us.”
“How far behind that house is the river?” I whisper.
“Couple of miles. Straight shot through the swamp on a dirt road.”
The little house before us appears to be a dependency of the larger house nearer the road. We saw no lights in it as we slipped past, but that doesn’t mean it’s empty.
“What are you planning to do?” I whisper.
“Wait a little, see if they’re moving at all.”
I grunt but say nothing. I’m not a hunter. Never have been—at least not since I shot my first deer at eleven, on a trip with a friend. My dad never liked it, either. I have hunted men, by necessity, with Daniel Kelly. But this doesn’t feel like that. Lying in the humid dark with gnats buzzing my face and mosquitoes draining my arms of blood feels like hunching in a hide waiting for a deer to walk by, one preoccupied enough or oblivious enough to let me shoot it from thirty feet away. But it’s not deer sitting in the yellow light beyond the windows of that little house, I remind myself. It’s people. Armed people. And we don’t even know how many.
“You ready?” Lincoln says suddenly.
“Fuck, no! Listen, I know where you are, believe me. But you’re crazy if you want to just bust into that house. We don’t know shit yet about what we’re facing. You’re better off setting it on fire and shooting them as they run out.”
He turns to me, his eyes glinting in the moonlight. “Like the old cowboy movies, right? I bet there’s a can of gas back at one of those houses we passed.”
“There’ll be dogs, too.”
He grimaces.
“This is the country, Lincoln. You can’t assume nobody saw us walking in here.”
“All the more reason to move now.”
I grab his arm. “Wait—”
The door to the house has opened. First through is a wiry figure that even from this distance I recognize as Snake Knox. The mere sight of him starts my heart pounding. Next through is another male figure, probably Alois, and then a woman.
??
?They’re leaving,” Lincoln hisses, panic in his voice.
I grip his arm tighter. “Stay still, goddamn it. Let’s see.”
I breathe a little easier when the trio walks past the truck and heads across the grass, on a line that will take them about forty yards to our left. A faint but steady flicker tells me Snake is using his cell phone. Behind him, the woman lights a cigarette and starts puffing away. The orange eye bumps up and down as they walk.
“Must be going to the main house,” Lincoln whispers. “We could take them right now.”
“Would you please calm the fuck down? You don’t want a shootout on open ground, without cover.”
“I’ll be smoking that bitch’s cigarettes in two minutes.”
“You charge them now, you’ll do it alone.”
“We don’t have to charge them. Use your rifle to take out the blond kid. Keep firing as they scramble. I’ll go get Snake. Kill the woman if she turns to fight. If not, let her go till we’ve got Snake under control.”
“You’re not going to kill him?”
“I’m going to have a word with him first.”
I’m hearing Lincoln’s tone more than his words, and he doesn’t sound like a man using objective judgment. “I’m no sniper, okay? Especially not at night. And you’re not, either.”
His jaw flexes angrily as the three figures recede, then disappear into the main house nearer the road.
“So what’s your plan, genius?” he growls.
The best course of action seems obvious to me. “They just made it easy, actually. Let’s just go into the dependency and wait for them. They’re bound to come back.”
Lincoln watched the trio vanish like a hunter being forced to let prize game walk in and out of his sights. But he says, “Okay. Let’s go.”
“Crawl or run?”
“Let’s run it. I’m tired of crawling.”
Unslinging the rifle, I work the bolt and chamber a round. Then, with a last glance at the main house, I start running.
Eight seconds of sprinting carries us to the door of the dependency.
Snake didn’t bother to lock the door; it opens almost soundlessly. The interior barely qualifies as spartan. Moth-eaten sofa, a Formica table, a couple of chairs. One sink with rusting fittings. The stink of mildew permeates the air, and I’d bet my last dollar termites have eaten 80 percent of the wood in the walls. The back room contains two cots and a scarred end table. There’s no toilet I can see. Probably an outhouse in the back.
“How you want to play it?” I ask, gripping the rifle tight.
Lincoln looks around. “Stand to each side of the door, so we’re behind them as they come in. Put ’em together on that sofa, too low to jump up and make a move.”
“You’re not planning to shoot them as they come in?”
Lincoln shrugs. “That’s fine with me. I thought you wanted to talk to them. I saw you put your tape recorder in your pocket.”
“I’d prefer it.”
“I’ll give you two minutes. But if they even think about shooting, they’re dead.”
I nod.
“If we have to open up,” he says, “I’ll shoot Snake, and you take whichever one of the others looks likely to fire first. That way we don’t throw away our lives shooting the same person.”
“Maybe you are thinking after all.”
Lincoln starts to move toward a window, but I hiss at him, and he freezes.
“You hear something?” he asks.
“No. But don’t go near a window. Your night vision will suck, being in this light, and they’ll see you long before you see them. Let’s sit with our backs against the front wall. They shouldn’t see us as they come in, and we’ll be behind them. They’ll also be walking in out of the dark, which should give us a slight edge.”
Lincoln nods slowly. “Thinking about it like that . . . it seems best to shoot right away. At least take out the woman and the blond kid.”
“Alois.”
“Whatever. If we shoot them outright, Snake will realize it’s suicide to keep fighting.”
“Been in a lot of gunfights, have you?”
Lincoln glares at me. “More than you.”
“Not as many as Snake, though. Whatever that old bastard does, the one thing he won’t do is lose his nerve. Don’t think of him as an old man. He’s a wily old crop duster who never refused a dare in his life. He’s walked away from two plane crashes that I know about, and he was a sniper in Korea. He’s killed a lot of people, both legally and otherwise. So don’t count on being able to predict what he’ll do.”
“Then let’s shoot him in the back of the head and take away his options.”
I breathe deeply, then sigh. “I’d rather talk to him, if we can manage it. All of them. If not . . . we’ll do what we have to do.”
After a few moments of reflection, Lincoln kneels on the floor, then turns and sets his broad back against the front wall. I crouch and move to the other side of the door, then sit and press my back against the mildewed wallpaper. Leaning my rifle against the wall, I take my Springfield nine millimeter from my pocket and jack the slide, then lay my arm across my knees.
Maybe a minute passes. Then Lincoln says, “What you think they’re doing in the main house?”
“Eating. No stove or fridge out here.”
“Yeah. No shitter, either.”
“You saw Snake was on his phone?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s hope he’s not calling reinforcements.”
Lincoln says nothing at first. Then he laughs with bitter humor. “I’d hate to be surrounded by a trigger-happy motorcycle gang in this place. These walls wouldn’t keep us safe from a BB gun.”
Looking around the shack, it strikes me how odd it is that Snake passed up a chance to live out his days with his son Billy in the luxury of Andorra in order to try to rebuild his former criminal enterprise—without the benefit of his nephew’s political connections or army of dirty cops. Did Snake realize when he made that choice that his life would likely end in a mildewed shack near the Mississippi River? Probably not. But even if he had, he might have made the same choice. Snake Knox is a southerner through and through, and dying on soft sheets in a tax haven between France and Spain would almost certainly feel to him like a coward’s way out.
“What’s the point of this place, anyway?” Lincoln asks.
“Keep your voice down.”
“This town, I mean. You know anything about it?”
“A little. This two-bit place was almost the capital of the Mississippi Territory. During the Civil War, a Yankee gunboat was stationed down in the river, and the sailors on board broke regulations to come ashore. With some regularity, apparently. Enough to make time with the local belles. Some local Confederates got word of it and busted into the church one Sunday, captured most of the crew. One of the Yankees actually hid beneath the hoopskirt of his girlfriend. The whole thing made national news in 1863.”
“You a history buff or something?”
“Not really. My dad brought me—our dad, I mean—he brought me up here when I was about eight, I guess. Maybe ten.”
Lincoln nods, his expression hard to read. “Old Junius Jelks didn’t waste time with that kind of field trip when I was growing up. If he took me anywhere, it was to work a con.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“Yeah . . . fuck it. That’s life, ain’t it?”
I let some time pass. “What did you think about Dad changing his plea?”
Lincoln shakes his head and doesn’t say anything for a while. “I guess he came out a lot better than he could have. Three years in jail, when he could’ve got life. Pretty smart, in the end.”
“That jury was going to acquit him, Lincoln.”
“I think you’re probably right. And when he yelled out like that . . . I swear, I thought he meant to plead guilty to the full charge. To first-degree murder.”
“He did mean to. He tried to. Quentin got it pled down.”
Lincoln nods. “I been thinking about that.”
“And?”
“I don’t think Doc killed Mama.”
“He didn’t.”
“But I think he knew that, in a way, he done worse than killing her. You know? And he wanted to be punished for it.”
“That’s exactly it. But he didn’t have to go to prison.”
Lincoln shrugs. “Maybe he did. For himself. But tell me this. You know for a fact he didn’t kill her?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Who did?”
“The man who’s about to walk into this house. And Sonny Thornfield.”
Lincoln takes a long, deep breath and looks down at the semiautomatic pistol in his hand. “There’s not really anything else to say, is there?”
“I guess not. You all right?”
This time he says nothing.
Chapter 76
I feel the footsteps through the floor before I hear voices. When you’re listening so hard you can hear your pulse in your ears and watch your belly jump with each heartbeat, the impact of three people walking comes through your butt and your feet like the vibrations of a timpani drum.
I look across the ten feet that separate me from my half brother, knowing that in ten seconds one or both of us could be dead.
What if only one walks in while another stays outside to finish a cigarette? Or two walk in but one stays out? If Wilma stays out, Lincoln will probably open up on the guys—
The door swings open and Alois Engel comes through, two feet to my left, wearing Levi’s and a red T-shirt and a shoulder holster. My hand tightens on my pistol to the point of pain. If he turns before the others come in—
The second body through belongs to someone I don’t recognize, but he’s bigger than Alois. He’s young, and there’s a pistol in the holster on his belt. My Springfield comes up with a will of its own, lining up on the stranger’s back as the smell of cigarette smoke floats through the door. He starts to turn as someone else comes through behind him. I’m expecting Wilma, but it’s Snake, thank God, because the last thing I want is a gunfight with Snake Knox outside.
Somebody laughs, but I don’t know who because Wilma is right on Snake’s ass, and before I can think the stranger turns, sees Lincoln, and grabs for his gun. I pull my trigger, but Lincoln shoots him first, right under the breastbone, probably in the heart because the stranger drops like a steel girder hit him in the chest.