Natchez Burning (Penn Cage)

by Greg Iles

  Steeling my muscles, I try to hurl us both away from the wall, but Regan has such a bind on me that I can’t muster sufficient leverage. His knee digs deeper into my spine, which feels on the verge of snapping. Laughing, he lowers his voice to an intimate whisper.

  “Everything you said out there,” he hisses, “you got from Glenn Morehouse, and that fat-ass is dead as a hammer. All you did today is guarantee your little girl’s gonna grow up an orphan—if she makes it herself. Your old man’s as good as dead already, and you’re next. It won’t be quick, either, I promise you that. It’ll be more pain than you think a human body can stand. I’ve had a lot of practice killing slow. You’ll beg me to finish you.” Again the knee digs into my spine. “And after I’m done? I’m gonna send your little girl the pictures. How does that sound, Mayor?”

  He wrenches my neck backward, and something pops near the middle of my spine. Then he lets me fall and backs out of the stall.

  I clutch the toilet paper dispenser to stay erect, and it’s all I can do to keep from collapsing over the commode.

  Regan grabs a handful of paper towels and throws them at me, laughing. “You pissed yourself, Mayor. Better clean up before you go out there to your adoring fans.”

  Gripping the top of one of the stall walls, I manage to pull myself to a standing position. Regan watches me with animal curiosity, his wild eyes showing genuine pleasure. His blitz attack scrambled my higher thought processes, but my lower brain functions are still active. Fight-or-flee chemicals course through me like amphetamines, and Regan has barred the way to flight. As I stand paralyzed, the atavistic core of my being speaks in the voice of my old friend Daniel Kelly.

  When it’s life or death, forget the eyes, the balls, and all the rest of that crap they teach women. When it counts, there’s only one target—

  Knowing I must draw Regan closer, I begin to laugh. First a chuckle, then a snigger that grows into a hysterical cackle, like something out of a horror movie.

  “What the fuck you laughing at?” he growls, obviously annoyed. “Freak. I think your damn egg got shook.”

  My brittle laughter bounces off the mirror, filling the little room. “You’d better get moving. The FBI’s got everything you just said. You should have left while you were ahead.”

  Regan’s eyes narrow. He steps forward as though to give me another blow.

  “You missed the wire, Randall. The Bureau’s got a whole new bag of tricks since Nine-Eleven. You couldn’t find this bug in a week. They call it the ‘tick.’ ”

  He lunges forward, meaning to strip-search me, but as his right hand comes up, I drive my fist deep beneath his chin, hard into his Adam’s apple. Nothing cracks, but Regan reels backward, both hands flying to his throat. His eyes bulge when he hits the wall, and his mouth gapes while he slides down it. With one blow I’ve scrambled his cerebral cortex, as he did mine. Desperately clutching his throat, he sits heavily on the floor, looking like nothing so much as an actor trying to pantomime choking to death.

  Strangely, my lawyer’s mind tallies up the charges this assault could expose me to, up to and including murder. But I’m not a lawyer now. I’m a father. A father and a son. Randall Regan threatened my family, and he meant what he said. He assaulted me first. For a couple of seconds I consider calling 911, but that would trigger too many questions. Besides, if his larynx is just bruised, and he lives, I want him out on the street calling his father-in-law, not stuck in a police station explaining this fight to local cops.

  A high-pitched wheeze tells me that at least some oxygen is reaching his lungs, and therefore his brain. Otherwise he’d already be blue. Though it costs me blinding back pain, I kneel in front of him and speak close to his ear, as he did in mine.

  “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re dealing with a lawyer, Randall. Or a mayor, or a writer. If you ever come near me or my family, I’ll kill you. And if you kill me first, then a friend of mine will square it. He eats assholes like you for breakfast, and he’ll square it if it takes ten years. You hear me?”

  Regan still can’t speak.

  Using the sink, I pull myself back to my feet, then walk out of the restroom and make my way through the close-packed tables to the door. Our waitress gives me a puzzled wave, and I wave back. Then I’m out in the cold wind and winter sun.

  I doubt Regan is even off the bathroom floor yet, but just in case, I climb straight into my car, back up, and pull onto Carter Street, heading for the Natchez bridge. I was damned lucky back there. Regan thought he’d hurt me too badly to retaliate against him. I only pray that in the next hour or so, he and Brody Royal say enough on their phones to allow Kaiser to arrest them. Because if they don’t, he’s going to come after me. And the friend I warned him about is seven thousand miles away, in Afghanistan.

  CHAPTER 68

  “I TOLD YOU we should have killed that son of a bitch last night,” Walt Garrity growled. “He was dying anyway. Now every cop in five states is hunting us.”

  The Ranger sat in a leather chair in the den of Drew Elliott’s lake house, pecking irritably on a laptop he’d found on Drew’s desk. Tom lay on the nearby sofa, trying not to bitch about Walt’s steady typing. The only illumination in the room came from an overhead lamp. They had closed all the curtains to prevent anyone from seeing movement inside the house. Tom wasn’t much in the mood to talk. Walt had doled out three Lorcet today, and the hydrocodone had quieted his pain for a while, but now his shoulder throbbed relentlessly.

  “We did the right thing about Thornfield,” he repeated, recalling the terror in the old Klansman’s eyes as he realized he was having a heart attack—a terror Tom had experienced firsthand.

  “He might have seen me shoot that trooper,” Walt said. “Not that it matters. All he has to do is put us at the scene and tell what we did to him.”

  Walt looked over at the kitchen counter, where he’d rigged his police scanner to the battery he’d brought in from the van last night. This time the cop chatter was about something besides the APB, for a change.

  “I’m sorry, Walt,” Tom said for the twentieth time. “I should never have called you to help me with this. I realize that now.”

  The Ranger gave a sullen grunt. “Who else could you call? We need to get some more burn phones. Maybe Melba will take Dr. Elliott’s truck to the Ferriday Walmart and buy us a handful.”

  Having tended Tom’s wound throughout the night, Melba Price was napping in the back bedroom of the lake house.

  “Calling Mackiever was a big risk,” Walt said, “but I’m glad I did it. If we’d left this house not knowing about that, we’d likely be dead already.”

  A half hour ago, Walt had used his last TracFone to call the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police. Griffith Mackiever had served in the Texas Rangers early in his career and knew Walt personally. Walt believed there was no way Colonel Mackiever would knowingly tolerate a crook like Forrest Knox as the chief of his Criminal Investigations Bureau, but whatever the truth of that, they had little choice if they hoped to find a way out of the mess they’d created last night. A simple ruse had gotten Walt past Mackiever’s receptionist, but as soon as his old comrade in arms learned who the caller was, he’d told Walt about the APB, then given him a different number to call in two hours.

  “I can’t see a damned thing anymore,” Walt complained, squinting at the computer keys.

  “What are you trying to find out?” Tom asked, as Walt stabbed angrily at the keyboard.

  “I sent a text message to Carmelita over the Internet. Once she gets it, she’s supposed to log on to a chat site on a special Hotmail account. That’s the only secure way I can talk to her.”

  Walt’s voice told Tom he was worried about his wife. Carmelita Cruz had come along late in Walt’s life, and maybe for that reason he treasured her more than the women he’d known as a younger man. Of Mexican descent, Carmelita was twenty years his junior, but Walt claimed she ran the roost back in Navasota, refusing to put up with any of his �
��bachelor ways.” She had adult children of her own in Mexico, but she’d become an American citizen two years ago, after steadfastly refusing to marry Walt to get her green card.

  “Here she is!” Walt said with relief. “Wait—oh, no.”

  Tom’s heart thumped at the fear in Walt’s voice. “What is it?”

  “Something happened a little while ago. Hang on.”

  “Tell me, Walt.”

  Walt began typing with desperate intensity. “Somebody slipped a manila folder under our door. Photographs of a family that had been murdered. Their heads had been cut off. Goddamn it. That’s Mexican cartel bullshit.”

  “This happened because of us? You think the Double Eagles got someone to Navasota that fast?”

  “Distance doesn’t mean anything these days. Forrest Knox probably has contacts all over the South. Convicts, cops, Border Patrol guys.”

  Tom rose painfully into a sitting position, his shoulder screaming. “Take Drew’s pickup and go to her, Walt. Right now. Didn’t he say the keys are in the bathroom? Top of the medicine cabinet.”

  Walt stopped typing and turned to him. “She’s too far away to help that way. Seven hours, at least. They could take her and do whatever they want before I even got to Monroe. Besides, the whole reason they did this was to separate me from you.”

  “Well, they used the right tactic. There’s no way you’re sticking with me while Carmelita’s in danger. I won’t let you. I’ll be fine on my own, and I’ve got Melba to tend my wound.”

  Walt’s furrowed face was set with anger. “How long do you think the two of you could last here? They’d find you sooner or later. The police or Knox’s men, don’t matter which.”

  “What else can you do but go to her?”

  Walt worked his mouth around as though he were chewing tobacco. “When you Rangered as long as I did, you get pretty tight with the boys you work with. I think that’s something Mr. Knox ain’t countin’ on.”

  “Do you know anybody close enough to get to Carmelita fast?”

  After one brief nod, Walt went back to typing. “I’ve got a Ranger buddy who lives four miles outside of town. Still fish with him now and then. Got two more within fifty miles. Carmelita already called 911 and reported a prowler. And she’s got her own gun in the house, of course. Plus my collection.”

  “Are all these friends retired Rangers?”

  “Yep. And they’ve forgotten more about gunplay than most men will ever know.”

  Tom tried to gauge whether Walt was as optimistic as he sounded, or whether he was just trying to keep his wounded friend calm. Tom couldn’t help but recall the motto Walt had always quoted with mild sarcasm.

  “One riot, one Ranger?” he said.

  Walt’s lips barely cracked in acknowledgment. “I’ve told you that’s practically an inside joke. But three Rangers can sling a lot of lead, and they generally hit what they aim at.” He stopped typing and looked over at Tom. “How does that shoulder feel now?”

  Tom blinked in surprise. “I don’t even feel it.”

  A fierce grin split Walt’s leathery cheeks. “Ain’t that always the way?”

  CHAPTER 69

  SONNY THORNFIELD HAD never been as afraid as when he walked around the side of Snake Knox’s house after returning from the hospital. He hadn’t been sure whether to lie or to tell the truth, but in the end he decided his best chance of survival was to come clean with his old friend. He’d known Snake for too long to successfully deceive him, and the prospect of lying to Forrest Knox made his bowels squirm. Things seemed to have gone all right, so far. Snake had used some emergency communication system to pass Sonny’s story up the chain of command, and the fact that he was still alive was encouraging. But until he knew for sure how Forrest had reacted to the news, Sonny wouldn’t take an easy breath. That’s what he and Snake were waiting for now.

  Snake sat in a green metal lawn chair, chewing Red Man and watching a ring-tailed raccoon stare back at him from a rectangular wire cage. The cage was a live trap, meant to capture varmints so that they could be released into the wild or exterminated at close range. You baited the trap with fish heads, then waited for the greedy coon to walk in and trip the screen, jailing himself. The coon in Snake’s trap was a big female, maybe twenty pounds. Sonny could see her quivering with fear and rage. The slightest provocation would send her into a frenzy. Snake picked up an old golf club and tapped the top of the trap with it. The coon flew at the club, claws and teeth bared, screaming and hissing like a demon.

  “You little bitch,” Snake said, chuckling. “I was gonna pop you with a .22 short and let my neighbor’s feist come get you. But you’ve got a date with destiny. We’re going to put on a little show tonight, and you’re the star.”

  Sonny didn’t know what Snake was talking about, but he didn’t feel confident enough to ask.

  “How’s your chest feeling?” Snake asked.

  “It aches something fierce,” Sonny said truthfully, remembering the crazy Texas Ranger who’d threatened him with the blowtorch in the back of the RV.

  Snake leaned his rifle against the lawn chair and laughed. “You salty son of a bitch. Walking right out of the hospital!”

  Sonny forced himself to laugh despite the pain. “It sounds like something’s on for tonight, huh?”

  Snake grinned. “Yeah. A nice little op. Billy’s left for Toledo Bend already.”

  A vague answer, at best, but Sonny didn’t ask for clarification. Billy Knox owned a luxurious home on Toledo Bend, the vast man-made reservoir that lay on the Louisiana-Texas border. He called it his “fishing camp,” but it was nicer than the homes in the most affluent subdivisions of Natchez.

  Snake reached into an Igloo and handed Sonny an ice-cold Schaefer. “Yeah, him and Joelle Brennan pulled out before six this morning.” Joelle was Billy’s latest squeeze; she ran a local health club and was built like a brick shithouse. “You and me can leave as soon as you’re feeling steady.”

  “Are we flying over?”

  Snake shook his head. “Drivin’. Flying back, though. Alibi city.”

  Sonny couldn’t begin to fathom this strange arrangement. He looked at the beer, then handed the can back to Snake. “I’d better pass after all the drugs they give me.”

  Snake downed the Schaefer in five gulps.

  “You gonna fly drunk?” Sonny asked.

  “Shit. I’m twice the pilot drunk that most men are sober.”

  Sonny was only making conversation to divert his friend; Snake had walked away from a half-dozen crashes that would have killed less hardy men.

  “What gun is that?” Sonny asked, pointing to the rifle leaning against the chair. “That ain’t your regular .22, is it?”

  Snake gave Sonny an odd leer, then picked up the rifle and ran his fingers down its long barrel and checkered stock. “Something special. For tonight.” He held the rifle out to Sonny. “Check it out.”

  Sonny groaned as he reached for the gun. One of the bruises on his chest was shaped like the heel of a Red Wing boot.

  “Never mind,” Snake said, noticing his grimace.

  “You gonna shoot that damn coon or just torment it some more?”

  Snake laughed and looked down at the cage. “I was, but this little lady has a job to do tonight.” He touched the trap with the rifle barrel, and the coon went batshit. A blood-chilling scream came from the needle-toothed mouth and pointed snout.

  A shiver of foreboding went down Sonny’s spine. “Granny always said, if a coon was big as a bear, it’d be the baddest thing on God’s earth.”

  “She was right!” Snake kicked the cage, then whooped when the coon went for his boot. “Look at that bitch go. She’d rip my throat out if she could!”

  “Run right up your leg,” Sonny agreed.

  Snake stopped smiling. “Why do you think Dr. Cage and that Ranger didn’t kill you last night? That was a hell of a risk, dropping you off at the hospital like that.”

  A swarm of yellow jackets rose up in
Sonny’s chest. “The Ranger wanted to. It was Dr. Cage who saved me. He said he couldn’t kill a man in cold blood.”

  Snake shook his head in wonder. “I wish we could fly over to Toledo Bend. You oughta rack out in the backseat of the truck while I drive.”

  Not a chance, Sonny thought, despite his exhaustion. If Forrest decided that last night’s events made him a liability, he would never reach Toledo Bend alive. It was even possible that this decision had already been made. Billy Knox was a businessman; sentiment didn’t figure into things. And Forrest was like an admiral on a battleship, moving plastic figures around on maps with a stick. To him every soldier under his command was expendable.

  Sonny turned at what he thought was the sound of footsteps, and a tall, rangy man in black pants and a high-collared shirt walked around the corner of the house. Sonny was so jumpy that he leaped to his feet, but Snake raised his rifle in greeting. The newcomer was Randall Regan, Brody Royal’s right-hand man.

  “What are you doing here?” Snake asked.

  “Delivering a message,” Regan rasped, like a man with laryngitis. “Last night Forrest said no phones, period. And I think ours are being tapped.”

  “What’s wrong with your voice?” Snake asked. “You swallow a wasp or something?”

  Regan scowled, then unbuttoned his collar, revealing a nasty reddish-purple bruise that covered his throat.

  “What the hell did that?” Snake asked.

  “Penn Cage. He braced me in a public restaurant about the Royal Insurance bitches you dumped out in the swamp. He knew every detail. I didn’t say a word. But later, he sucker-punched me in the bathroom.”

  This answer worried Sonny, but Snake started laughing so hard that Regan buttoned his collar again, all the while looking like he wanted to strangle Snake Knox.

  Once Snake stopped laughing, he said, “What’s your message?”