by Greg Iles
“Not if you don’t make me,” he says, an offer of clemency in his eyes. “Why would you defend her now, anyway? After what we heard tonight? Christ, you heard what Pop said. How disgusting was that? She fucked him, and she loved it. She fucked us all, betrayed us all. She’s poison, man. End of story. Now step aside.”
“You make me sick,” Jet says from behind me. “Both of you. You say you love me? Love me. But tonight Max slandered me, and who did you believe? Him. A lying psycho, and you take his word over mine. If I didn’t know how badly Kevin needs me, I’d just as soon you shoot me.”
Paul is edging to his right, prepping for his shot. I move left with him, still using my body as a shield. My nerves are vibrating like I’ve taken hold of a live wire.
“Get out of my way, Goose,” he says. “Let me do it clean. No pain.”
Abject fear raises every hair on my body.
“Do it, Marshall,” Jet says in surrender. “Move clear.”
For a second I wonder if she means to shoot at Paul when I move. Surely she’s not that deluded, to think she’d have any chance of killing him first. “Jet—”
“There’s no use in you dying, too.” Nadine’s gun clatters to the floor. “He’s past all sense, all caring. He doesn’t see that by killing me, he’s killing himself. But this is where we are. And maybe I did bring us here. I just wanted love. You know? I wanted to be loved.”
As when Max spoke from the heart, truth has its own ineffable power. Paul’s face goes from that of resigned executioner to a man tortured by the fires of hell. He stops moving toward me, and in this odd lacuna of time and intent, my eye is drawn to the white rectangle of notebook paper on my kitchen table.
My breath stops.
“Paul,” I say, pointing at the note. “Where did you get that?”
“What?”
“That note was in my bedroom dresser for the last three months. Either you broke in here and stole it or Max did. Which is it?”
“Max gave it to me at UMC. Today.”
Epiphany washes over me like blessed grace. “I think I understand! Max was lying about sex with Jet. Put your gun down for two minutes. That’s all I ask. Come to my bedroom. I’m almost certain about this.”
I can’t risk moving out of the shooting lane between them. Instead, I reach back and catch hold of Jet’s wrist, then spin and push her up the hall before me, as I’ve done so many times during these past weeks, anticipating hours of sex.
“Stop!” Paul warns, but I ignore him.
His heavy steps follow us up the hall.
Pushing Jet through the bedroom door, I hit the light switch and walk up behind her, to be sure I stay between them. Then I glance back and see Paul walk in, his eyes fixed on my chaotic, unmade bed.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asks.
“Max watched us,” I explain, looking high into the corners for a wireless camera or even a small hole in the wall.
“What are you looking for?”
“We’ve all assumed that patio sex video was the first time Max watched us. But why?” I catch Jet’s eye. “Didn’t you tell me he’d been stalking you?”
She nods, and something in Paul’s face tells me this makes sense to him, too. Even so, I see no sign of any surveillance gear. Keeping Jet in front of me, I move around the room, but nothing stands out as unusual.
Paul is still staring at my bed. His jaw works steadily, flexing and relaxing like he’s chewing a piece of leather. I’m starting to wonder if coming back here was a mistake. In his mind, Jet and I are flailing naked on that bed, and she’s screaming with an ecstasy she never experienced with him.
“I could shoot you both in this room,” he says. “No jury in Mississippi would convict me.”
He’s right about that. Jet knows it, too. But even as I try to think of a graceful way out of here, she steps away from the protection of my body. She walks to the threadbare curtains covering the picture window that the old farmer who sold me this place cut into the wall after he became confined to his bed. Reaching out, she runs her right hand down the curtain, creating a wave in the thin fabric.
“Analog,” she says. “Not cameras. The oldest recording device in the world: the human eye.”
“We never thought about privacy out here,” I realize. “Because of the acreage . . . and being behind the gate.”
I walk to the door to the right of the window, turn the bolt, and yank it open. The scent of impending rain fills the room. I walk out into the dark. Jet follows, Paul on her heels.
The picture window is blocked by huge Elaeagnus shrubs, nine feet tall at least. But the light streaming through the bedroom curtains silhouettes the branches behind the thick leaves. Taking out my iPhone, I switch on the LED and push between two of the bushes.
Behind the outer layer of foliage, I see a sort of doorway consisting of broken branches. Somebody has created a comfortable “hide” outside my window, the way snipers do in the field. And from where I stand, I can see every detail of my bed through the thin curtain.
“Where are y’all?” I ask. “Come in here.”
“What is this bullshit?” Paul asks in a warning tone.
“Just get in here, damn it. You’ll see why.”
He violently pulls aside the brush, then he and Jet push into the shrubbery. It only takes Paul one glance to pick up the broken branches. Then Jet sees them. Switching on her LED, she drops to the ground, like a young Miss Marple searching for footprints.
“I don’t see any shoe prints,” Paul says. “The ground’s pretty hard, but we ought to see something. And I don’t.”
“There is something here,” Jet says. “It looks like dog poop. Or maybe . . . some other animal? A fox, maybe?”
“Get out of the way,” Paul says, crouching in the darkness at the base of the brick wall.
He switches on his own light and illuminates what Jet was talking about: small brown clumps that look like animal scat. As I watch in disgust, Paul picks up a clump and crumbles it between his fingers. Then he lifts it to his nose and sniffs.
“Wintergreen,” he says. “That’s Skoal.”
With one sweep of his gun arm, he pulls a mass of branches away from the wall. We all shine our lights on the exposed bricks, revealing a long brown line of dried splatter.
“He was here,” Paul says. “Dipping. He spit behind these bushes to hide it.”
“I told you!” Jet cries angrily. “I’ve watched Max suck that nasty stuff at the baseball field a thousand times, spitting in a cup or a Coke bottle.” She shudders in revulsion. “I can see the outline of that little round can in the back of his Levi’s, or on his truck dash. Gross.”
I almost feel Max standing with us, a chilling incarnation of lust and envy. “Well,” I say softly. “Here goes nothing.”
Inhaling deeply, I lean close to the window glass and exhale a rush of warm air against the pane. Out of the condensation appears the ghostly outline of a nose and forehead, leaving eerie spaces where the eyes should be. To the left and right of this ghostly face float the outlines of splayed hands.
A soft gasp escapes Jet’s throat. “That sick fuck.”
“Goddamn,” Paul mutters.
Though Max Matheson lies dead in my house, his essence is alive here, staring back at us like a demon summoned by my breath. Radiating from the silhouette on that glass is pure obsession, the desire to possess Jet in whatever way he could. How many days and nights did Max stand here watching us make love in blissful ignorance, in the full glare of the bedroom lights?
“This is how he knew,” Jet says. “My God. I told you. I told you both.”
I’m shocked and shamed by the relief I feel.
She turns to Paul. “I told you, damn it. I’m not the poison in the family. He was.”
“Great,” says Paul, bulling his way out of the shrubbery. “Such a relief. I guess I’m supposed to be happy it was only Marshall’s finger up your ass instead of Max’s?”
Jet glares at him wit
h fiery indignation, then pokes him hard in the chest. “Yes. And fuck you for believing otherwise.”
Here we stand, three people stripped of illusions. Three people who have known one another since childhood and now face a future that seems unimaginable. Exhaustion gives Paul’s face a haunted look, and surely mine must look the same. As I try to think of what to do or say next, the clouds open up, and the rain finally comes. Cold, heavy drops smack into my scalp and shoulders, making me want to run. But Paul stands oblivious, his gun in his hand, like a soldier assigned sentry duty. For him the rain doesn’t exist. He probably does feel some relief, but the losses he endured tonight will never be made up. In his mind, he is utterly alone in the world.
“What now?” I ask. “A lot’s happened, I know. But we’ve got an urgent situation in that kitchen.”
“Nothing’s changed,” Paul says. “She still wants Kevin. And you.”
“Oh, come on, man,” I say in frustration. “If we just wanted Kevin, we could have stood there and watched you eat your gun. You were about to do it.”
Paul shakes his head, but at some level he knows it’s true.
“For God’s sake!” Jet cries. “I meant what I said back there. The one thing I’m certain of is that Kevin will never—never—doubt who his father is. He’s your son, Paul, and that’s it. It’s our job to make sure he never thinks different. No matter what happens.”
She’s finally broken his trance. “How do we do that?” he mumbles.
“I don’t know yet. What I do know is that none of us is going to jail over this. Here’s what’s going to happen now. You two are going to get rid of Max and his truck. I don’t know how or where. Just make it happen. I’m going to stay here and scrub that kitchen from floor to ceiling with Clorox.”
“You think that’ll keep us safe?” Paul asks.
Jet nods in the rain. “You’re damn right. Max killed Sally, he lied about the assault last night, and today he jumped bail. For all we know, he’s fled the country. I’ll tell the FBI that he confided to me he was guilty. Max exits stage left, never to return. Now, let’s get out of this damned rain.”
I’m ready, but Paul doesn’t move.
Jet claps her hands as though demanding the attention of toddlers. “Get it together! Come on!”
I look warily at Paul, who’s staring at the bedroom window.
“Paul?” Jet presses, looking fearfully at me.
After fifteen or twenty seconds, Paul says, “I’ll sink his truck in the river. Take backroads to the sandbar below the industrial park.”
Jet’s eyes flicker with hope.
“You call Tallulah,” he goes on. “Tell her Kevin needs to sleep over with her. He’s probably already asleep now. Tell her we’ll pick him up in the morning.”
Jet nods, somehow masking her immense relief.
“What about me?” I ask.
Paul spits on the wet ground, then looks over at me the way he has for most of our lives. “You and me are going down to the swamp.”
Chapter 54
While Jet began scrubbing the blood and tissue from my kitchen floor and walls, Paul and I wrapped Max in a gray tarp and carried him out to Paul’s F-250. I figured we needed at least a car with a sealed trunk, but after we laid Max in the truck bed, Paul pointed to an iron rack in my yard that held most of a cord of firewood from last winter. After ten minutes of steady work, we buried Max under the split logs. No cop without a canine escort would be likely to hassle us, even during a traffic stop.
After making a trip inside to hit the head, Paul went into the kitchen and spoke softly to Jet. I went inside long enough to change into dry clothes, but I avoided making eye contact with her as I passed the kitchen. They were still speaking with quiet intensity when I came back up the bedroom hall, so I exchanged the stink of Clorox for the wet leather smell of the F-250 and waited another five minutes for Paul to emerge from the house. Two minutes after that, we pulled out onto Highway 36, heading west toward the junction with Highway 61 near Bienville.
Instead of turning south and driving through Mississippi—which I’d expected—Paul remained on 36, then crossed the Bienville Bridge into Louisiana and turned south on Whitetail Road. Whitetail Road follows the big levee south toward St. Joseph, Waterproof, and Ferriday. In a few places the road ascends to the crest of the levee, but for most of its length it runs on the landward side. Just over that big wall of land lie the “borrow pits”—swampy, snaky sloughs filled with snakes and gar and alligators that live in the miles-long trench left by the excavators that built the levee. And beyond that trench runs the big river.
The rain has mostly stopped. Our headlights cut through the spring night, catching millions of bugs in the beams. Objects flash out of the night and vanish: a mailbox, an abandoned car, a snake crossing the road, the red eyes of a transfixed possum. The truck’s air-conditioning makes me shiver, partly because my clothes are wet from the exertion of piling logs over Max’s body. But sleep deprivation has also taken its toll. I have that flu-like feeling where any sudden noise makes me jump and curse. I suppose I could be in shock, but since the stress isn’t likely to end any time soon, I have no choice but to gut it out.
Paul turns away from the levee and drives inland into Louisiana, but I don’t question him. When we left Bienville, he tuned the radio to an album-oriented rock station and set the volume low, probably to spare us the awkwardness of sitting in silence that begs to be filled. To keep from confronting the obvious, I focus on the faint strains of Led Zeppelin, Traffic, the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd. Though Paul and I are in our forties, both of us—me through Buck, him through Max—grew up listening to the music of the sixties and seventies. Not many of the later-era bands ever quite took.
At some point during this AOR parade, I must have drifted off, because when I wake up, we’re driving along a levee again. Maybe it’s exhaustion, but I feel like we’ve driven in a big circle.
I’m about to question Paul about this when he says, “How’s your mama doing? Pop kind of freaked out after Mom died.”
After Mom died? I’m not going to touch the question of whether Max murdered Sally. “She seems okay,” I tell him. “Dr. Kirby told me to assume that’s a front, though.”
“Yeah. I imagine so.”
Paul drives another mile in silence. At last I summon the nerve to ask him where we’re headed.
“Boar Island,” he tells me.
A chill runs up my damp back. “Isn’t that the island Wyatt Cash owns?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t know where we were headed, but I would never have guessed Boar Island. “Is Wyatt there?”
“Nah, it’s off-season. Just the empty hunting camp.”
“We’re not dumping Max in the river, are we? He could float up anywhere tomorrow.”
Paul glances at me in the blue-white dashboard light. “They never found your brother, did they?”
His casual mention of Adam’s death disconcerts me. “That was an anomaly. Most bodies that go into the Mississippi get found.”
Paul turns his attention back to the road. “Relax. There’s plenty of old sloughs on Boar Island. We sink him in the right one, the gators and turtles will eat him in less than twenty-four hours. Bones and all.”
Tactical considerations aside, this man is talking about his father. Paul’s apparent detachment only adds to my disquiet. “I figured we were taking him to a swamp somewhere. When you turned inland a while back.”
“I planned to,” Paul says in a low voice. “But that’s too far to go. Too risky.”
I settle back into my seat, but I’m no longer anything like calm. Boar Island is less than fifteen miles from Bienville by road, and it’s walked every year by dozens of hunters who pay thousands of dollars for the privilege. It’s probably rooted up by hundreds of hogs and dogs as well. That makes it a damned unlikely place to dispose of a corpse—especially for a man who owns and manages thousands of acres of forest and swampland untrampled by human feet. Mo
st worrisome of all, we’ve been on the road for an hour and we’re not there yet.
“So, you made some kind of deal with Buckman today?” Paul says, not taking his eyes from the road. “To keep quiet?”
“How’d you know that?”
“Claude called me this afternoon to ask whether I thought you’d honor an agreement like that. I told him you would.”
“Did he tell you the terms?”
“Not specifics. I didn’t much care at the time. What did you ask for in exchange for keeping quiet?”
I don’t see any way to avoid answering. “The moon.”
“And the club agreed?”
“Except for two points, yeah.”
“What two points?”
For a guy who just experienced one of the most harrowing traumas of his life, Paul seems damned curious all of a sudden. “Do you know about their China deal? The Senate thing?”
“I figured it out on my own. They had a little celebration one night, and I stopped in. Damn, they were proud of themselves. Sell out your country and pop the cork on the Veuve Clicquot. A half hour didn’t pass before they were bragging about it.”
“Except for the matter of treason, it’s a hell of an accomplishment. I told them Avery Sumner has to resign. Give up his Senate seat.”
“Huh. No wonder they had a problem with that. What was the other sticking point?”
“I said whoever killed Buck Ferris has to stand trial or plead guilty to murder. I assume that’s Beau Holland. One way or another, I want him in Parchman.”
Paul glances over at me again, his skepticism plain. “Beau’s an asshole, but they’ll never let him stand trial. Or plead out. He knows way too much to risk letting him talk.”
“I gathered that. Buckman offered to have him killed instead.”
Paul chuckles. “Claude’s a hard old bastard. Why didn’t you let him do that?”
“I want justice for Buck, not another murder.”
Paul shakes his head like a sergeant dealing with a naïve recruit. “Eye for an eye’s about as fair as it gets in this world, Goose.”
“Yeah? Well. That’s where you and I part ways.”
