Mississippi Blood

by Greg Iles

  When the others spin, they’re staring straight into our raised weapons. My heart is pounding so hard my vision blurs, but my brain can’t fix my gaze on any object for more than a fraction of a second anyway. All it registers is eyes: panic in Wilma’s, rage in Alois’s, and Snake’s ravenous eyes vacuuming up details, devouring everything—

  “Hands up or die!” Lincoln yells. “You’ve got two seconds!”

  Alois goes for his gun.

  Lincoln swings his aim onto the kid, but before he fires Snake drives his elbow into his son’s arm, ensuring he can’t get to his gun.

  “Stand down, goddamn it!” Snake yells. “They’ve got us!”

  For a couple of seconds Alois looks like he might still go for his gun, but the urgency in his father’s eyes—and the hate in Lincoln’s—finally tips the balance.

  The acrid stink of powder fired in anger hurls me back to nights when I was the one who did the killing, and my stomach threatens to betray me. The man on the floor is already dead, thank God. I don’t know if I could stand here watching a stranger gurgle out his last living breaths.

  “People heard those shots,” Lincoln says. “You want to talk to him, get to it.”

  It takes a few seconds for me to regain control, but then I motion toward the sofa with my pistol. “I want to talk to all of you. Get over on the couch.”

  “Fuck you,” snarls Alois, his blue eyes filled with contempt.

  “Shut him up,” Lincoln growls at Snake. “Or I’ll blow his fucking spine out.”

  “Alois,” Snake intones.

  The kid’s eyes drip disdain.

  I can’t get over Snake’s appearance. Someone has transformed him from a wild-haired hell-raiser into a dyed-black, Brylcreemed church deacon. But even this new incarnation is tied to death in my mind, to the writhing body of Will Devine dying on the floor of the Adams County courthouse—

  “Throw your guns in that sink,” Lincoln orders. “Right now.”

  Alois starts to say something, but Snake says, “Do it, Junior. This ain’t the time.”

  The guns ring dully as they go into the sink: Snake’s first, then Alois’s. Wilma Deen’s hands are floating about head high, and her eyes look like those of a panicked hostage, but she must be carrying something. When Lincoln jerks his gun toward her, she points to her pants pocket, then pulls out a small black automatic—it looks like a .25—and drops it into the sink with a clang.

  While Lincoln herds them onto the broken-backed sofa, I reach into my pocket with a shaking left hand and take out the Sony tape recorder I use for memos during the day. I prop it on the back of the sink and face the three on the couch. Snake sits on the left, Wilma Deen in the middle, Alois on the right.

  “Go,” Lincoln tells me, obviously frustrated.

  A premonitory shiver runs through my body, a feeling that by doing this I might be sentencing Lincoln or myself to death. If we simply killed them now, we could walk away. Every passing second probably brings someone else closer. The owner of the main house . . . one of the living ghosts of Rodney . . . VK gang members . . . We don’t have to kill these three to stay safe, of course. We could call the FBI, and Kaiser would have a tactical team here in less than an hour. Maybe half that, if he has a chopper on call. The proper call would be to Sheriff Byrd, of course, but Byrd already knows Snake is here—

  “You had two minutes,” Lincoln says, “and you’re burning the second one right now.”

  “The tape recorder’s not on yet,” I tell my captive audience. “When I hit Record, I want somebody to tell me who killed Viola Turner. If you do that, I’ll have some evidence, and you’ll get to live a while longer. If you don’t, I’m going to walk outside and let this man do what he came here to do. Do you understand?”

  Snake’s eyes look like those of a professional gambler calculating odds in Las Vegas.

  Alois says, “Nothing we say here could be used as evidence in court. It would be under duress.”

  “That’s bad news for you, Junior,” Lincoln says. “Real bad.”

  “Keep your fuckin’ mouth shut,” Wilma snaps at Alois, but her eyes are on Snake. She’s looking for a magic escape card from her fearless leader.

  “You ready, Snake?” I ask, reaching for the record button.

  “That nigger’s gonna kill us no matter what,” Snake says. “I see it in his face.”

  “You got good eyes for an old man,” Lincoln says, and I hear a wild edge in his voice.

  “Not if you tell the truth,” I say evenly.

  Snake laughs. “Bullshit. I can see it, even if you can’t.”

  “He’s already called the FBI,” Wilma Deen says in a shaky voice. “Don’t say nothin’. This is a trick. He’s trying to get us to talk.”

  “No, darlin’,” Snake says, his eyes on Lincoln. “Kunta Kinte there is gonna shoot us.”

  Wilma Deen’s eyes are wide with fear. I figured her for a stone-cold bitch, but this obviously isn’t her kind of situation. Maybe the dead guy on the floor has given her a premonition of her future.

  “Will you talk?” I ask.

  Snake’s eyes move from Lincoln’s to mine. “You killed my nephew, Cage. Hard to believe, really. I guess he figured you didn’t have it in you.”

  “You raped my mama,” Lincoln intones. “You tortured my uncle. And you either killed him or ordered it done.”

  “Your mama killed my brother, Mr. Turner.” Snake turns up his hands. “But hey . . . what’s done is done. Right?”

  “Except we ain’t done, cracker.”

  “Do you know how an air bubble kills a person?” Alois asks in a strange voice.

  “Shut up,” Snake says softly.

  “It moves through your veins until it reaches your heart. Then, if there’s enough air, it creates a vapor lock, the way air will do to any pump. The heart muscle is fighting for all it’s worth to pump blood, but there’s nothing there. No blood to prime it, see? So you lie there with a sledgehammer slamming the inside of your breastbone, and then your heart starts squirming, and then finally your whole inner works just seize up, and then”—the blond kid snaps his fingers with a startling report in the little room—“your brain burns out like a light.”

  Snake Knox has maintained a placid expression through his son’s description of his brother’s murder, but I’m pretty sure he’s gritting his teeth. After a long, slow breath, he says, “My son’s clearly got a lot to learn about forgiveness. He wasn’t raised on the Good Book.”

  I feel I’ve just heard Satan preach the gospel. Knox’s words trigger a memory of Dolores St. Denis describing Snake howling scripture as he raped her in the Lusahatcha Swamp, and that brings to mind the preacher father who raped both Snake and Forrest when they were boys.

  “They’re playin’ us!” Wilma cries, her eyes frantic. “They got the FBI outside listening!”

  While Snake disabuses her of this notion once and for all, I press record on the little Sony.

  “You blinded a young woman,” I say to Wilma. “Didn’t you? Threw acid in her face.”

  Wilma Deen shakes her head violently. “I didn’t do no such thing.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Alois mutters. “Own it, why don’t you? Sure, she did. That little nigger bitch asked for it.”

  Lincoln says: “I’m gonna enjoy straightening you out—” but I cut him off and say, “We’re on tape, everybody. Let’s say what needs saying.”

  Lincoln cuts his eyes at me, but he doesn’t finish his sentence.

  “Keep your mouth shut, Junior,” Snake says. Then he looks at me again. “Your father pleaded guilty to killing Viola. That’s the end of it, so far as the law’s concerned.”

  “We’re not concerned with the law right now. We’re concerned with the truth. I know when my father walked out of Cora Revels’s house, Viola was alive. Somebody went in and injected her with enough adrenaline to blow up her heart. I think it was you. All I need is a yes or no.”

  Snake’s eyes move from me to Lincoln
, then back again. Despite the dire straits in which he finds himself, the glint of humor never leaves his eyes. I can almost feel Lincoln’s hunger to snuff out that light.

  “So that’s what this is about,” Snake muses. “What do I get, if I tell you? You’re gonna let me walk out of here?”

  “No. But I’ll call the FBI.”

  “Why haven’t you called them already?”

  “He’s stalling,” Lincoln says, glancing at one of the windows.

  “No, he’s talking for the tape. He’s making sure that anything he says will be inadmissible in court.”

  “So what’s the point in going on?”

  I never had much chance of using my tape as evidence. But looking into Snake’s eyes—eyes that watched Jimmy Revels bleed as he cut the navy tattoo from the boy’s arm, that watched Viola scream as Klansman after Klansman climbed on top of her and raped her, that watched Glenn Morehouse and Sonny Thornfield and countless others choke out their last breath—I realize that I am truly not concerned with the law. All I want is the certainty that only Snake can give me—that he, and not my father, murdered Viola Turner.

  “You were in Viola’s sickroom that night,” I say softly. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I was there, all right,” Snake says, and I feel Lincoln go absolutely still beside me. “But I don’t think you want to know what happened.”

  “Are you talking to me or him?” I ask.

  “Both. But you more than him, Cage. You think you want the truth, but you don’t. It’s like Jack Nicholson says in that movie. You can’t handle the truth. My daddy was a preacher, did you know that?”

  “You know I do.”

  “He used to quote scripture all the time. You know what scripture says about the truth?”

  “What?”

  “It’s a terrible thing to fall into the grace of God.” Snake smiles strangely, and I remember all the depraved acts this preacher’s son has committed in his life. “That’s it, right there. Are you sure you’re ready for that?”

  “You’re the one ought to be worried about meeting God,” Lincoln says.

  “Let’s hear it,” I say, gesturing with my gun.

  Snake clucks his tongue a couple of times, then looks at the floor. “Me and Sonny had been out there a couple weeks before Viola died. Just to remind her of the deal she made back in ’68. We told her to stop talking to Henry Sexton, and if she didn’t, well . . . we’d have to shut her up for good.

  “I could see right off she wasn’t going to stop. I wanted to go ahead and finish her, but Forrest didn’t want any trouble that might get in the papers. Forrest was always more worried about the dollar than anything else. So, me and Sonny would ride out that way every day or so, see who was out there. We saw Doc Cage’s car quite a few times, sometimes his nurse. But then we saw Henry’s car again. I decided we had to finish it, no matter what Forrest said.”

  Maybe Snake really is crazy. I can’t believe he’s about to confess to killing Viola in front of her son.

  “So that night, we parked in the trees up above the house, where Doc testified he saw our truck—Devine’s truck, really, but we were in it. Anyway, Doc was already there when we got there that night. I figured we’d wait for him to leave, then go in and do it. Well, after about fifteen minutes, Doc comes out and drives off. But just as we was walking down there, here comes another car.” Snake looks up at me, his eyes shining brighter. “And who’s in it . . . but your mama? Mrs. Peggy Cage, mistress of the plantation.”

  My face feels hot. I start to glance at Lincoln, but I can feel his gaze on me like a lamp. He wants to know if Snake is making this up.

  “She was in there a while, then she come out in a hurry. Once she drove out, me and Sonny went in.”

  I want to say This is bullshit, but Lincoln would hear the lie in my voice.

  Snake looks at Lincoln and shrugs. “When we got in there, your mama was gone. She looked just like she did in the picture I saw from that video. There was no tape in that camera, either.”

  “You’re lying,” Lincoln says. “He’s lying, right?”

  “He’s lying,” I affirm.

  “You wish I was,” Snake says. “You had no idea, did you?” His eyes watch mine with almost sexual pleasure. “Thought you wanted the truth, huh? The truth is, your mama killed the woman your daddy used to screw back in the day. Maybe out of anger, maybe out of trying to keep things secret. Or maybe just out of shame.”

  “Tell me he’s lying,” Lincoln says.

  “He is. My mother was there that night, all right, but he’s only telling part of the story.”

  “She what?” Lincoln asks, unbelieving.

  “I just found out today. Dad didn’t want to go through with the suicide pact. To fool your mother, he injected a diluted solution of morphine into a deep vein, to give himself time to process everything she’d told him. About you, especially. But Mom had followed him there that night. She’d followed him a few nights earlier, too, and discovered he was seeing your mother again. That second time, Mom went into the house after he left, to find out exactly what was going on. Viola woke up while she was in there. They talked, and your mother begged mine to do what Dad had been unable to do.”

  “Bullshit,” Snake says.

  Hot anger rises in my gullet. “It’s the truth! Mom tried to do what Viola wanted, but she screwed up. She was the one who botched that morphine injection. She didn’t have the skill to hit in the vein.”

  “So she injected adrenaline instead,” Snake says. “However you slice it, she killed the nurse.” The wily old bastard fixes Lincoln in his gaze. “You see? I didn’t kill your mama, boy.”

  “Yes, you did,” I insist, wondering if there could be any truth to what he’s saying. “My mother left thinking she’d succeeded. But Dad came back, just as he’d planned to do when he left. He found Viola still sedated, and he found the tape in the camera. He saw on the tape that Mom had been there, what she’d tried to do, and that ended up being the thing that drove everything that happened afterward—his desire to protect his wife from a potential murder charge.”

  “Who told you that fairy tale?” Snake asks in a taunting voice. “Your daddy, I’ll bet.”

  “They both told me—separately.”

  “Because they finally got their story straight. They had months to work on it before that trial, didn’t they? How many people died to protect your mama, Mayor? The mistress of the plantation couldn’t go to jail for killin’ an old used-up slave, could she? Even if that slave kept the master’s bed warm all those years ago—”

  “Shut up,” Lincoln mutters.

  Black glee fills Snake’s laugh. Our suffering is like liquor to him. “I never killed your mama, boy. And now you know it.”

  I hear Lincoln take a long breath, and when it passes out, I feel him shifting into another state of consciousness, like a truck downshifting to climb a hill.

  “You did worse than kill her,” he says, his bass voice nearly inaudible. “You broke her. You wounded her soul.”

  At last I turn and meet my brother’s eyes. All I see there is pain. He will call me to account for keeping what I knew from him, but not until this business is done. As I stare, I see a question in his face: Do you want to stay in here, or do you want to go outside while I do it?

  “Wait, now,” Wilma Deen says, as though talking to herself. “Hold up, mister. Don’t do this. I can’t die like this. This ain’t fair.”

  “Fair?” echoes Alois, mocking her. “Fair? I am so goddamn sick of your shit—”

  Wilma Deen slaps Alois so hard that the sound reverberates through the little shack. For maybe two seconds, the kid gapes at her; then he slugs her in the temple. He looks like he’s gearing up to do it again when Lincoln fires a bullet into the couch an inch from his shoulder. I don’t know if Lincoln meant to miss or not, and I sense that the next bullet is going into someone’s head.

  “I didn’t kill nobody,” Wilma says, first softly, then with escalating f
ear. “I didn’t kill nobody. I threw the acid on that girl, but that’s it, I swear to God.”

  She looks up at me, then Lincoln, her eyes imploring us. “I didn’t kill your mama, sir. I never even met her. Snake and Sonny done it—just like they killed my brother Glenn. You hear me? He bragged about it all during that trial!”

  Alois’s face is so pale that I know he’d kill her if he had a weapon ready to hand.

  “All my life Snake used me,” Wilma goes on, “used me and threw me away, over and over again. I ain’t dyin’ for him!”

  Snake hasn’t said anything. He’s calmly watching his minion turn on him, and probably gauging whether anything she’s said could be used against him if he somehow survives this night.

  “That tape won’t help you,” Wilma says breathlessly. “I know that much law. But I can help you. I can testify, like Will Devine was gonna do. But you have to protect me, okay? You gotta put me somewhere he can’t reach.”

  “There’s nowhere I can’t reach,” Snake says softly. “You know that, baby girl.”

  Wilma shivers at this sound of what must be a pet name between them. Lincoln and I share another glance. I know what he’s thinking: Right now she’s dying to confess, but let her get out of this shack and lawyer up, and we’ll never get another word out of her—

  Wilma’s truncated scream brings both our gazes back to her, but too late.

  True to his namesake, Snake has pulled a knife from somewhere and he has the blade to her throat, with most of his body concealed behind hers.

  “All right, now,” he says, getting his legs under him and lifting Wilma to her feet.

  The guy’s survival instincts are breathtaking. Even before Wilma finished speaking, Snake realized that she had taken on value to us—and in that instant she became his ticket out of here.

  As Snake moves laterally toward the door, Alois’s eyes flick from Lincoln to me and back again, alert for any chance to make a move to help his father.