Mississippi Blood

by Greg Iles

  “Locked in a cold storage inside. Your guy dead?”

  “Not yet. I disarmed him.”

  “Let’s get clear. We’ll have to come back to talk to the sheriff and staties, but that’s later.”

  “Just a second.” I breathe, looking back at the man I shot. “Cover me.”

  Walking forward, I look down at the gasping man. A high whistle accompanies each breath, and a black circle the size of a dinner plate has soaked his shirt.

  “He’s gone,” Tim says from behind me. “We need to get the girls into the Yukon, Penn.”

  “Go do it. This guy said he had a message for me.”

  “I can’t leave you.”

  “You work for me, Tim. I’m ordering you to cover the girls. I can take care of myself.”

  The ex-SEAL’s shoes scrape as he sprints around the corner of the service station.

  Kneeling beside the wheezing man, I move so that he can see my face above his.

  “You the mayor?” he rasps, his breath almost corrosive with decay.

  Meth addict, I think. “That’s right.”

  “You shot me, motherfucker.”

  “You asked for it.”

  He raises a leather-clad arm and tries to grab my throat, but I easily bat his weak limb out of the way.

  “You said you had a message for me.”

  “Call the paramedics, man. I’m hurt bad.”

  “Give me the message first.”

  “Call the medics or I won’t tell you!”

  “Tell me the message, or I’ll shoot you in the heart and tell the FBI you tried to stab me with that knife in your boot.”

  The man starts to speak, but his words disintegrate into a wracking cough that sprays a mist of blood between us. I jerk back instinctively.

  “Tell me, damn it!”

  “It’s not for you. It’s for your old man. The doc.”

  Something in me goes cold. “What?”

  “Your daddy’s nigger lawyer’s gonna try to blame that old woman’s death on Snake.”

  “What old woman? Viola Turner?”

  He coughs again, but this time I manage to dodge the spray. “That’s the one,” he hacks. “The nigger nurse.”

  “How the hell would Snake know what Quentin Avery is planning to do?”

  The man shakes his head. “I’m just passing the message, man. Snake says: ‘Wives and children have no immunity.’ Those exact words. You got that?”

  “I heard you.”

  “If Avery tries to blame Snake, your daughter won’t live to hear the verdict.”

  “You’re paying a high price to be a delivery boy.”

  “Call the ambulance, man! You got the message.”

  “I don’t like that message. I’ll call you an ambulance from the road. But I’ll be honest with you: I don’t think you’re gonna last till they get here. Better make your peace with whatever you believe in.”

  His eyes roll back, then lock onto me again. “You son of a bitch.”

  I rise to my feet and wipe my face on my sleeve.

  “If I die,” he croaks, “you’re a dead man. And not just you . . . your whole family. That’s VK law.”

  “VK? What the hell’s that?”

  “The Kindred, man. You let me die here, you’ll find out more about it than you ever wanted to know.”

  “Guess I’ll deal with that when the time comes. You shouldn’t have threatened my little girl.”

  The roar of an eight-cylinder engine shakes the ground and buffets the air to my left. I look up and see Tim beckoning me from behind the Yukon’s bulletproof glass. I can’t see the girls, but after I climb in, I realize why. They’re hunkered down in the well between the second- and third-row seats. Safe as houses. The Yukon’s armor package will stop .308 Winchester FMJ rounds. After hugging both girls from above, I kneel on a second-row seat with my pistol out, ready to provide defensive fire if we’re attacked.

  As we pull onto the dark ribbon of Highway 65, bright metal glints in Tim’s headlights. He brakes when the lights pick out the silhouettes of two big Harley-Davidson motorcycles parked on the shoulder only forty yards from the station.

  “They must have been following me with their lights off,” he says. “Did it feel like a simple robbery attempt?”

  “No way. He had a message from Snake Knox.”

  “What was it?”

  “He couldn’t get it out.”

  Tim shakes his head. “Too bad. They must have followed us all the way from the prison. It’s time to call the FBI.”

  “Daddy?” Annie whispers from the darkness behind me.

  “Stay down, Boo. We’re all okay.”

  “Are we going home?”

  Scanning the dark road and shoulders, I reach back into the blackness and squeeze what feels like Annie’s shoulder. “Not yet. We have to go back to the gas station and talk to the police. But we’re not going back until it’s safe. Maybe half an hour.”

  “We heard shooting. Is everything going to be all right?”

  “Absolutely,” I tell her, but it’s a lie. Given what just happened, things are going to get worse before they get better.

  The question is, How much worse?

  Chapter 3

  John Kaiser got three FBI agents to the service station within thirty minutes of the shooting. To my relief, the biker I shot had been dead for some while when they arrived. He hadn’t even survived until the local deputies who first reached the scene found him. Kaiser himself showed up a half hour later. He was sorry I’d had to kill the guy, but after examining the corpses, he couldn’t hide his excitement. Both dead men were wearing black leather jackets, and among the various insignia on those jackets, the letters VK were emblazoned on the right arm of each in a kind of neo-Gothic script.

  “Most cops think VK stands for ‘Viking Kindred,’” Kaiser tells me as he crouches in the dark with a flashlight aimed at the jacket patch. “Actually, the true gang name is Varangian Kindred. ‘Varangians’ is an old Slavic name for Vikings, and ‘vikings,’ of course, means ‘raiders.’ But Varangian Kindred is too hard to remember, so the name devolved into Viking Kindred, or in most conversations, just ‘VK.’”

  “Why the hell would these VK guys be following me to deliver a message from Snake Knox?”

  Kaiser continues to study the various insignia on the jacket. “In the last couple of years, we’ve started to see a cross-pollination between white supremacist prison gangs and the one-percenter biker gangs. You know what those are?”

  I had dealings with one-percenters like the Bandidos MC when I was an assistant district attorney in Houston. “The term comes from Heraclitus, right? ‘In any battle, out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t be there. Eighty are just targets. Nine are good soldiers, and we’re lucky to have them. But one, that one is a warrior, and he will bring the others home.’”

  Kaiser’s eyes stay on mine for a few seconds. “I actually found that to be true in Vietnam. The old Greeks knew a thing or two.” The FBI man gets to his feet and walks to the restroom door, then turns, seeming to check the angle of the body.

  “That was good shooting, Penn.” He looks back at me. “Are you sure he didn’t tell you what the message was?”

  I lied to Kaiser because I didn’t understand the meaning of the message. I mean, I understood it on a literal level, but I also sensed that there was more to it. And to find out if I’m right, I’m going to have to see my father.

  “Positive. He could barely talk. All he did was cuss me. Threaten me.”

  “Okay.”

  “So—Snake Knox and the VK?”

  Kaiser taps the palm of his left hand with the back of his right. “I think it’s pretty simple. After Forrest died”—he gives me a quick look to let me know that he knows I killed Forrest Knox—“the Double Eagles began to disintegrate as a criminal organization. I think they relied on crooked cops for muscle, and with Forrest dead, that cadre evaporated. Snake must have had some kind of line into the VK and decid
ed to use them to replace his old muscle. Probably a drug connection, since the biker gangs move a lot of guns and drugs.”

  “Where are the VK based?”

  “East Texas and Louisiana. They’re not huge, but they’re bleeding-edge violent. Bigger on ideology than most other clubs.” Kaiser points at two Nazi lightning bolts stitched onto the jacket. “SS sig-rune insignia. Typical Aryan bullshit.”

  “Why would these guys help Snake, though? Is he paying them?”

  “Doubtful. The lightning bolts can mean Klan, as well. The new Klan, of course, not the original. I think it’s the Kennedy angle that gives Snake his cachet.”

  “How so?”

  Kaiser clucks his tongue as though trying to decide how much to reveal. “I haven’t told you a lot of this . . . you had enough on your plate.”

  “Well, I need to know it now.”

  “Not long after Snake disappeared, we started seeing some blog chatter about the JFK assassination, and it tracked pretty closely with what Sonny Thornfield told you and me in the Concordia Parish jail on the day he was murdered.”

  “About Frank Knox being the second shooter in Dallas?”

  “Right. Lots of the same details. That’s like blood in the water to conspiracy theorists, and it made the rounds of all the hate-group websites. There’s no doubt that groups like the VK would have seen it. Snake would be a hero to those guys. And the Knoxes being Louisiana boys would have gotten them really interested. VK bikers meeting Snake would be like stoners meeting Ken Kesey. He was there. Present at the creation. Snake could tell them about all the Double Eagle murders, plus God only knows what bullshit he spun them about the Martin Luther King assassination.”

  “So Snake might be hiding out in Texas or Louisiana.”

  “It’s possible. But I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  Kaiser hesitates once more, then continues. “Because a ghostwriter named Blair F. Edelman has spent the last two weeks in Andorra.”

  Andorra is a small republic on the mountainous border between France and Spain, a notorious tax haven that conveniently has no extradition agreement with the United States. Forrest, Snake, and Billy Knox had always planned to run there if their drug operation ever came under attack, and the FBI has a record of Snake and Billy entering the country by car under their own names. But as soon as they did, Snake promptly disappeared.

  “You ever heard of Edelman?” Kaiser asks, leading me back around to the front of the station.

  “He’s written some big celebrity bios, right?”

  “That’s him. I think he’s been meeting with Snake in Andorra. We only picked up that he was there four days ago, and we’re watching him now. But I think he’s onto us. We’ve seen him with Billy Knox, but Billy claims to have no contact with his father.”

  “You think he’s writing about the Kennedy stuff?”

  “Has to be. No Double Eagle book would interest Edelman without that. He’s used to seven-figure deals. And Snake wants to make the biggest splash he can. Some of the blog chatter made it into the National Tattler, but that wouldn’t satisfy Snake. I think he wants to go mainstream and take all the credit he can for killing Kennedy.”

  “That’s practically begging to get caught.”

  “What else does a bitter old bastard on the run have to do with his remaining time? There’s no deal he can cut that wouldn’t involve him dying in prison. This way, he makes a martyr out of his brother, Frank, and grabs some immortality for himself. And if he does end up going to prison, the Aryan Brotherhood will receive him like a god.”

  I think about my experiences with New York publishers. “And someone will publish it, all right.”

  “You bet your ass they will. After forty years, the definitive truth about Dallas comes out at last? Mobster Carlos Marcello uses ex-Klansmen to kill John Kennedy? Teenage Lee Harvey Oswald sexually exploited by David Ferrie? That’s number one for months.”

  “Do you have enough evidence to debunk the story?”

  Kaiser takes a deep breath and sighs heavily. “Penn . . . I think the goddamn story is true.”

  A chill races over my skin. “Then why not beat Snake to the punch? Go public with it?”

  “For one thing, the Bureau can’t make pronouncements like that without rock-solid evidence. Snake, on the other hand, can say any damn thing he feels like. He’s not even worried about libel—hell, he’s wanted for multiple murders. But we’ve drifted afield.” Kaiser wipes his hands on his jacket. “What matters tonight is that the VK involvement is a gift to us. Up to this point, Snake’s been moving completely underwater. But now we can start pressuring the VK. Bring in every member that’s got an outstanding warrant and squeeze them, hard. Sooner or later, somebody will talk.”

  “That’s what you said about the Double Eagles.”

  “These guys aren’t the Double Eagles. They’re hard-core by today’s standards, but not one VK in fifty could have stood toe to toe with Frank Knox.”

  “I hope you’re right this time.”

  Kaiser motions for my bodyguard to join us. Tim sidles over and waits to hear what the FBI man has to say.

  “I’m afraid these VK assholes are all about payback,” Kaiser tells him. “The fact that you and Penn put down two of them isn’t going to be forgotten. They’ll try to hit back. You need to double up on security for a while. I might be able to augment what you’re doing, but in the end it’s going to come down to more money for private protection.”

  “Caitlin’s dad will help out,” I say. “Tell Tim what you think we need. I’m going to get back to Annie and Mia.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Tim says. “You take care of those girls, Penn.”

  I walk a couple of steps toward the glass door, but before I get out of earshot, Kaiser calls, “Are you sure the guy said nothing else to you before he died?”

  I look back at the corpse lying in the dark. “Positive, John.”

  After a long look, Kaiser says, “Okay. You’re good to go.”

  I walk back into the station, where Annie and Mia sit drinking Diet Dr Peppers. Both have been seriously shaken, but as usual, Mia is doing a good job of managing Annie’s anxiety.

  “You guys ready?” I ask wearily.

  “Way past,” Mia says. “Let’s get this girl home.”

  Hours later, despite my exhaustion, I find it almost impossible to sleep. When I do, I dream of helmeted men on black horses pursuing me through dense fog. After I can stand no more of lying restless in the dark, I get up and go down to the kitchen, where I fix a bowl of raisin bran and watch the second half of To Have and Have Not with the volume set low.

  As I watch Humphrey Bogart and his alcoholic first mate suffer through a hellish fishing charter, a dark memory rises into my mind. It wears the face of Lincoln Turner, my half-black half brother. I’ve only seen Lincoln three times since he confronted me in the Adams County jail, where I was being held on suspicion of murdering Forrest Knox. Twice from a distance, without him seeing me—not that I could tell, anyway. But the third time I realized he was following me across town in his truck. With the confidence imparted by the pistol under my seat and the bodyguard in the car behind me, I called Tim Weathers and told him what I planned to do. Then I pulled into a barbershop parking lot on Homochitto Street and waited to see if Lincoln would follow me.

  He did.

  He pulled his Chevy F-250 alongside my Audi, rolled down his window, and waited for me to do the same. In the truck, he was three feet higher than I off the ground, and his eyes smoldered with anger. My right hand gripping my pistol in my lap, I lowered my window with my left as crazy scenarios swirled through my brain. For some reason I was thinking of Cain and Abel, only I had no idea which of us was Cain and which was Abel. Maybe that would depend on who fired first—for I was strangely sure that Lincoln, too, had a weapon in his hand.

  “You have something to say?” I asked, searching, as I always did in his presence, for my father’s face in his—or even f
or traces of my own. I saw none, and once more, I could not get over how dark he was. Passing him on the street, I would never have suspected a high percentage of Caucasian blood. But my skepticism was moot: a DNA test had proved Dad’s paternity beyond all doubt.

  “So they let you out of jail,” Lincoln said in his deep bass voice. “You killed a state police officer with a spear, and they let you right out. So sorry, Mr. Mayor, all just a misunderstanding. It must be nice to throw that kind of weight.”

  “I’m late for an appointment. If you have something to say, say it.”

  The dark eyes regarded me with discomfiting intensity. “We got the same blood running through our veins, Penn Cage. So answer me this. How come you got everything and I got nothing?”

  My half brother’s face was hard, but his curiosity seemed genuine. How could I answer his question? Summarize five hundred years of tragic history? Or would that simply be an evasion? Was the fault my father’s alone? I thought back to the report I’d received from the Chicago private detectives I’d hired three weeks before. Their information was sketchy, but what it revealed sobered me. In almost every way, Lincoln Turner and I are mirror opposites. While I was reared as the son and heir of a highly respected physician and a mother who could have modeled for a poster from the Eisenhower era, Lincoln grew up in government-subsidized housing on Chicago’s South Side, with an alcoholic mother and a brutal con man stepfather always in trouble with the law. Statistically speaking, my success and Lincoln’s failure were practically foreordained. While I was striving for a baseball championship and attending American Legion Boys’ State, Lincoln was scrapping in the streets and running from the Chicago PD. When his stepfather—whom Lincoln had believed was his real father—wasn’t in prison, he was gambling away his wife’s salary. It was a miracle Lincoln made it through law school without being convicted of a felony himself. And while I was transitioning from a successful legal career to a more lucrative one as an author of legal thrillers, Lincoln was slaving in a small firm, chasing small-time cases until he was finally busted for embezzling escrow funds from a client trust account. According to my sources, he did this in a desperate attempt to save his “father” from a long prison term, but that didn’t stop the Illinois State Bar Association from suspending his license.