Natchez Burning (68 page)

Billy shook his head. “She’s thirty-five, dipshit.”

Jake nodded. “That’s what I meant.”

“A thirty-five-year-old woman is better in bed than anything you ever had, numbnuts.”

“You want us to do something to her?” Charley asked, sensing they still had ground to make up with Billy.

“I’ll let you know. Right now, carry your boy to the skinning shed and leave him there. Then hose off the deck, go to the mudroom, and clean yourselves up. Leave your clothes there. Sonny will bring you fresh ones. Then go home and think about how you screwed up tonight. Say a prayer, and thank the Lord your dipstick is still connected to your body.”

“Yessir,” said Jake Whitten. “We’ll do that. Thank you.”

“Get out of my sight.”

Sonny pulled back the curtain once more, and the boys disappeared onto the deck.

Snake laughed softly. “I’ll be damned. Those punks ain’t
ever
gonna talk about what happened tonight. Did you think of that, son?”

Billy inclined his head toward the door through which Forrest had disappeared.

“They shit their pants when Forrest walked in with that mask on,” Sonny said.

“The only problem with all this,” Snake reflected, “is that Henry Sexton’s still breathing. I don’t blame Brody Royal for what he done, only that Randall picked a crap crew to handle the job. Now Henry’s spilling his guts to the FBI, and he’s probably being guarded around the clock. I could have shot him from four hundred yards out, from that cotton field across from the
Beacon
.”

“Henry may die yet,” Billy reminded them. “The last report I got said critical condition.”

“What does Forrest say?” Snake asked.

Billy gave his father a warning glance. “He’ll tell you what you need to know.”

“What about the Masters girl?” Sonny asked. “You’re not thinking of going after her? Her old man owns a shitload of newspapers.”

Billy shrugged. “Again, Forrest’s decision.”

“Well, where the hell is he?” Snake asked. “We need to talk about this. Is he already gone?”

“Ozan was waiting for him outside. I imagine they’ve gone to see Brody.”

“Whoa,” Sonny whispered. “That’s one face-off I’ll be happy to miss.”

“Forrest won’t do nothing,” Snake said. “Deep down, he knows Brody was right to hit Henry, and Brody’s the man with the power in his pocket.”

Billy was amazed by his father’s lack of perception. He couldn’t count the times he’d thanked his dead mother for her genetic blessings. “Don’t be so sure,” he said. “Forrest has his breaking point, like anybody else.”

“Well, I ain’t seen him hit it for a lot of years now.”

“I have,” Sonny whispered. “You’d better pray you never do. Forrest is his daddy made flesh again. Frank Knox come to life, only smarter.”

Snake smiled strangely. “Now
that’s
something I’d dearly love to see.”

Billy got up from his desk. “Before this mess is over, I’m afraid we’re all going to see it.” He turned to the door, then looked back. “Get those boys some clothes, Sonny. Camo jumpsuits are fine.”

Sonny walked to the side door, but Snake held his ground, staring at his son in silent reproach. Billy shook his head, then walked back to the bedroom, hoping to find Forrest still there.

He was.

Forrest stood before the dresser mirror, buttoning the double-pocketed shirt of his state police uniform. He spoke to Billy without looking at him.

“Brody’s gone off the reservation. We’re liable to get the FBI down here over the attack on Sexton. We’re going to Al Qaeda rules.”

“Al Qaeda rules” meant radio and phone silence. All messages from this point forward would be passed in person, face-to-face. “Okay,” Billy said, worried by the anger in his cousin’s voice. “When are you going to talk to Brody?”

“Tonight.” Forrest quickly tied his tie and cinched the knot tight. “I’ll send word to you later, let you know how it goes.”

“Brody must be pretty worried to have done this. You going to go easy on him?”

Forrest looked back at Billy, his eyes dark and cold. “What do you think?”

Then he placed his Stetson on his head, adjusted it in the mirror, and walked out without another word.

Billy sat on the bed, turned up the sound on
Bullitt,
and tried not to think about the future. His father worried him. Because as hard and cunning as Snake was, he somehow failed to grasp a central fact about his life: if Forrest ever decided that “Uncle Snake” was a threat to his plans, he would kill him with no more remorse than he’d felt killing VC cadre leaders in Vietnam or crack dealers in New Orleans. The same logic applied to Brody Royal, regardless of the older man’s money and power. Billy wondered whether Brody understood that any better than his father did. He hoped so. If he didn’t … the consequences didn’t bear thinking about.

TOM AND WALT
sat in the rear cabin of Walt’s RV, drinking chicory coffee and waiting for Sonny Thornfield and Snake Knox to leave their hunting camp in Lusahatcha County. It was tight quarters inside the Roadtrek, which was more a customized van than a conventional RV. Fitted out in Canada, its high-tech interior held a gas cooktop, a microwave oven, a marine toilet, a pullout shower with hot-water heater, a refrigerator, a flat-screen TV, and beds enough to sleep four, if you folded down the two captain’s chairs. Later Walt would stow the table and convert the U-shaped couch on which they sat into a six-foot-long bed, but for now they hunched over the table as they’d once hunched over campfires in the snow of Korea.

Walt had parked in a KOA campground near the old entrance to the Natchez Trace, on Highway 61 North. There were about thirty other RVs in the park, so it was a good place to avoid police attention. RV-owning tourists weren’t generally the perpetrators of crimes in the Natchez area, or any other. Every few minutes Walt would walk forward and check the screen that monitored the GPS position of the trackers he’d placed on the Double Eagles’ vehicles. After leaving Knox’s vehicle in a Natchez parking lot, both Snake and Sonny had traveled southward out of town in Thornfield’s pickup. At first Tom had been confused about their destination, but then he recalled Ray Presley telling him about a hunting camp that the Knox family maintained in Lusahatcha County, which they called Fort Knox, predictably. Soon enough, the GPS tracker confirmed his theory.

While waiting for the Eagles to move again, Tom had been telling Walt the story of his relationship with Viola, which the Ranger had known nothing about before tonight. Despite their close bond, the two men had rarely seen each other face-to-face after Korea—probably only seven or eight times in the past fifty years. A chance meeting between Penn and Walt in Houston had rekindled their friendship, but despite some good conversations since that time, Tom had never felt the need to confide what had happened between him and his nurse so long ago. But now he had no choice. If Walt didn’t know enough background, he wouldn’t be able to make good judgments during the present crisis.

Walt remained silent throughout the tale, and had even turned off his police scanner so as not to be distracted from Tom’s soft words. He occasionally raised his eyebrows, as when Viola stood over the dying Frank Knox in Tom’s office. But Walt had seen and heard most everything during his years as a Texas Ranger, and now, nursing his coffee, he prompted Tom for the end of the story.

“Is that when she left town?” he asked. “After Knox was dead and the two of you had talked it out?”

Tom shook his head. “I wish to God she had, because things went to hell right after that. Viola thought her brother was still hiding out in Freewoods, but the rape rumor had already done its work. Jimmy and Luther had come out of hiding the previous day, and the Eagles kidnapped them late that night.”

“Shit.”

“Viola got word that her brother had left Freewoods, and when he didn’t call her, she just about went out of her mind. She was sure the Klan had them. She didn’t know what to do. How could she go to the police, when she’d just committed murder herself? She knew the cops wouldn’t do anything anyway. She begged me to help, but I didn’t know what I could do.”

“I’m glad you didn’t call me,” Walt said. “I was caught up in the same kind of mess over in Texas. Nothing but Klan trouble for a few years, seems like. For once the Mexicans actually got put on the back burner. Anyway … what happened next?”

“The Double Eagles took Viola.”

Walt had been toying with a cold french fry, but he stopped and looked up. “What?”

“The very night we killed Frank Knox, they grabbed her right out of her house, about two in the morning. I didn’t know any details then, of course. But when she didn’t show up for work, I went straight to her house and saw the signs of a struggle.”

“Did you call the police?”

“
Hell
no. You know I couldn’t do that. I called Ray Presley.”

A hard smile cracked Walt’s wrinkled face. Ray Presley was one chapter of Tom’s life that Walt did know about. More to the point, Presley’s reputation as a crooked cop and former New Orleans Mafia enforcer stretched all the way to Texas. “You wanted her back,” Walt said. “What choice did you have?”

“None that I could see. I told Ray to find her, no matter what he had to do. I told him I’d pay any price.”

“And?”

“He did.”

Walt smiled. “How long did it take him?”

“Less than twenty-four hours. He called in a lot of favors to do it, but he found her in a machine shop out in Franklin County, north of where we are now.” A wave of heat crossed Tom’s face. “It was bad, Walt. Snake Knox was enraged over his brother’s death. Sonny Thornfield and a couple of others were with him. They’d been torturing Luther and Jimmy out of anger, but also out of pure sadism. The worst torture, of course, would be to hurt Viola, so they kidnapped her.”

“What did they want from the boys?”

Tom hesitated, but then he told Walt about Carlos Marcello’s plan to lure Robert Kennedy to Natchez by murdering Jimmy Revels. Walt’s eyes went wide, and he opened a beer when Tom began describing Brody Royal’s part in the plot.

“But it was all for nothing,” Tom concluded. “When Frank died, Royal or Marcello called off the operation. Ray didn’t think they trusted Snake to handle it professionally.”

Walt nodded, then gave Tom a piercing look. “You’re not telling me everything you know about the Marcello angle, are you? The Kennedy stuff?”

“Maybe another night,” Tom said. “That had nothing to do with me.”

“Well. Did those bastards torture your girl at the machine shop?”

A flush of heat came back into Tom’s face as the killing fever rose again. “Ray told me that when he first approached the machine shop, he heard a woman screaming, then a man screaming for them to stop. I figure that was Viola and Jimmy. Ray took out his pistol and went in. He was ready to kill them if he had to.”

“Which he’d done before.”

Tom nodded. “Plenty of times. Ray was a bad customer, but he didn’t lack guts. He found Viola half naked and blindfolded. He told the Eagles he was taking her out, but that he’d leave the two boys behind. He hadn’t been paid to get them out, see? And he told them that.”

“Smart,” Walt said. “That’s probably the only way he could have got out alive.”

“I’m sure of it. Ray said Viola was shrieking like a madwoman when he dragged her out of there, begging him to go back and get her brother.”

“I imagine she was.”

“Ray called me from a pay phone. Twenty minutes later, we met down an oil field road and he put her in the backseat of my car. I had my black bag, and I sedated the hell out of her. Didn’t have any choice.”

Walt opened a tin of Skoal and tucked a pinch under his bottom lip. “Don’t tell me you took her home to Peggy.”

Tom snorted. “I wasn’t that desperate. Not then, anyway. I couldn’t make up my mind where to hide her, though. I knew the Klan would be combing the city for her, not just the Double Eagles. That meant cops and deputies in those days. I needed somewhere they’d never think of looking. And this was the middle of the night, for Christ’s sake. Then it hit me.”

“Where?”

“Nellie Jackson’s place.”

Walt’s eyes narrowed. “The whorehouse?”

Tom nodded.

Amazement and admiration showed on Walt’s face. Nellie’s was a Natchez institution that lasted from the late 1920s until 1990. The internationally known brothel operated in the downtown area without interference from police for its entire history. Among those in city politics, it was generally believed that Nellie had maintained an extensive photo collection of her clients—many of whom were politicians—and this made her remarkable business run possible. But in fact, what had allowed Nellie Jackson to flourish was the fact that Nellie was based in Natchez, a city with a long history of libertinism, more spiritually akin to New Orleans than to the corrupt but conservative parish across the river.

“I figured the last place in the world they’d go looking for a churchgoing girl like Viola would be Nellie’s,” Tom said. “And I didn’t even tell Ray where I’d taken her.”

Walt grinned. “I knew I taught you something in Korea.”

“I’d been treating Nellie for five years when this happened,” Tom continued. “She brought her girls in regularly for VD checks. New girls every few weeks, most times. Anyway, I went back to the pay phone and called Nellie about Viola. Nellie told me she’d be happy to help. The first night Viola stayed in a back room at the whorehouse, but the next day Nellie moved her to a rent house she owned on the north side of town. She stayed there six days.”

“And they never found her?”

“Nope. I found out years later that Nellie had worked as an informant for the FBI. She kept girls of every race, but they entertained white clients only. Nellie took the rednecks’ money, listened to their conversations, filmed them in bed, and reported everything of interest back to the Bureau. She did more for the civil rights movement than most fine, upstanding church people ever did.”

“Whatever happened to Nellie?”

Tom closed his eyes and tried to vanquish the horror that always followed that question. “In the late eighties, some drunk college kid she wouldn’t let in the door got angry. He went across the street, filled up an ice chest with gasoline, and rang the doorbell. When Nellie answered, he dumped the gas all over her and threw a match. She was eighty-seven years old then, and she died in agony.”