Natchez Burning (108 page)

He was breathing pretty well, in spite of his swollen tongue, and the pounding in his head had settled down to a tolerable backbeat. The cast on his left arm gave him no difficulty driving, but he worried about what might come later. As he neared the lake house, he tried to keep his mind engaged with reality. He couldn’t allow the combination of white-hot anger and potent painkillers to handicap him.

He braked as he spied a pickup truck parked on the street beneath some trees at the border of Brody Royal’s property. There was a man sitting behind the wheel. For a moment Henry was paralyzed. If he stopped and tried to turn around now, he’d look suspicious as hell. But if he went on …

He must be a guard of some sort,
Henry decided,
posted to stop people like me
. Henry lifted his foot off the brake, thanking God he hadn’t removed his mother’s wig from his head.
My brights are on,
he thought.
I should just drive past like I’m headed home after a late night
.

As he came within a few feet of the pickup, Henry realized that the man sitting outside Brody’s house was black.

That made no sense.

Twenty yards past the truck, Henry braked again.
A black security guard?
Here?
He shook his head. Emboldened by the drugs, he put the Impala in reverse and backed up until he was even with the truck. Then he pulled off his wig and rolled down his window.

The man in the cab of the pickup turned his head casually toward Henry, peering through his window with open curiosity. Something about him seemed familiar. He was about Henry’s age, for one thing.
Maybe I know him,
Henry thought.
But … no
. He couldn’t place the man.

“Are you Henry Sexton?” asked the black man, sounding far from certain.

Henry nodded slowly.

“You shaved off your goatee?”

Henry laughed painfully. He’d been through a hell of a lot more changes than that in the past two days.

“Well, I guess you found me,” said the man. “What you doin’ out here? I thought you were in the hospital.”

“I sneaked out.” Henry cocked his head. “Who
are
you?”

“Sleepy Johnston. I’m from Wisner, originally. I been living in Detroit for the past forty-one years.”

This revelation arced like lightning through Henry’s narcotic fog.
One of Albert’s boys,
he thought. With considerable effort, he opened the door and got out of the Impala, a movement that quickly punctured his OxyContin cushion.

Sleepy Johnston got out and carefully shook his hand, each man assessing the other. With gray hair and whiskers showing under his Detroit Tigers cap, Sleepy looked close to seventy, but his body appeared strong and healthy.

“Did you work for Albert Norris?” Henry asked. “I don’t remember you.”

After he puzzled out Henry’s mumbled words, Johnston smiled. “Not officially. But I hung around the store whenever I could. By the time you came along, I was on the road, playing with bands. I only came back this way for family reunion gigs, things like that. That’s how I met Pooky. He sat in with my band a couple times. But I knew Jimmy and Luther real good.”

Henry shook his head, still dazed by the sudden appearance of a man he had hunted so hard.

“So,” Sleepy went on, “why’d you sneak out of the hospital?”

A knot of foreboding formed in Henry’s stomach. He pointed at the darkened Royal house. “I’ve come to see the man who lives in there. He killed my girlfriend tonight. And he damn near killed me.”

It took Johnston a while to make out the words, but as he absorbed their meaning, his eyes widened. “Have you come to kill Old Man Royal?”

Henry thought about this. “I don’t know. I just had to come. When a man kills the woman you love, you’re supposed to do something about it. Aren’t you?”

“I reckon so. But there’s a lot of distance between ‘s’posed to’ and actually doing. I can tell you all about that.”

“Have you seen Brody here tonight?” Henry asked. “Is he in there?”

Sleepy licked his lips and nodded. “He’s in there, all right. Just before you got here, two of Brody’s thugs drove up in a van. They took a man and woman into the basement, all tied up.”

Henry felt adrenaline rush into his bloodstream, mixing with the heady cocktail of drugs that were keeping him upright. “Black or white?”

“White, both of them.”

“What did they look like?”

Sleepy ran a hand across his mouth, thinking. “Tall man, dressed pretty good. The woman had dark hair, classy looking. I was prowling back near the garage, and I saw the bastards drag them out of the van.”

Penn Cage and Caitlin Masters
. Henry knew it as surely as he knew that he had to abandon his confrontation plan and call for help.

“What you doing?” called Sleepy as Henry turned and opened his passenger door.

“I’m—” Henry slapped his forehead. In his haste at the hospital, he’d forgotten to ask his mother for her cell phone. The drugs were having more of an effect than he’d realized. He turned around. “We need to call for help. Not the local police. We can’t trust them. We need the FBI. Or … wait.” Henry fought through the cobwebs in his head. “Maybe we should call Royal’s house. Let him know we know they have the mayor and his girlfriend in there.”

“The
mayor
? Hold on,” said Sleepy. “I don’t know any of those numbers.”

“Well, we could call Information—”

“
Hands up!
” ordered a sharp voice from behind Sleepy.

A middle-aged white man in a dark jacket held a pistol to the back of Sleepy’s head.

There’s the guard,
thought Henry numbly.
The real one this time.

Sleepy put up his hands, and Henry slowly followed his example. He thought of the shotgun in the backseat of his mother’s car, but he couldn’t make a move toward it without endangering Sleepy. Especially in his current condition.

The guard searched Sleepy’s windbreaker pockets and pulled out his cell phone. Taking a step back, he dropped it on the asphalt and crushed it with his boot heel. Then he walked forward and patted down Henry.

“You got a gun in that truck?” he asked Sleepy, straightening up. Without waiting for an answer, he opened the driver’s door of the truck. “Move back,” he ordered. Then he searched the truck, quickly coming up with what appeared to be a small-caliber revolver.

“Head to the house,” he barked. “Both of you. Walk in front of me. Double time.”

In a daze, Henry began trudging ahead of Sleepy toward Brody Royal’s lake house, which lay some eighty yards away.

“Hurry up,” said the guard. “You old fucks.” He prodded Henry with the pistol. “What’s wrong with you, anyway? You bust out of an asylum or something?”

Henry stopped and turned, which forced Sleepy and the guard to stop as well. “I’m going as fast as I can,” he said. “They’ve got me on strong medicine.”

Sleepy, hands jammed in his coat pockets, turned to face the guard. “Can’t you see the man’s hurt? What’s your problem?”

“You’re my problem, asshole.”

As the guard reached out to prod Henry forward, Sleepy’s right hand rose from his pocket in a fluid motion, and a bright blade flicked in the moonlight. Before the guard could jerk back, Sleepy had buried his knife in the man’s neck with one hand and swatted his gun away with the other.

The guard staggered, both hands gripping the wound in his throat. Henry watched black blood pump through the man’s hands. As the guard fell backward, Sleepy quickly closed the distance between them and pressed a boot onto his chest.

Henry tried to recover his composure, but something kept causing breaks in his train of thought. “See if he has a phone!”

The guard had stopped moving. His eyes were open, but they looked sightless to Henry. Sleepy knelt over him, rummaged through his clothes, then stood. “Nothing but a walkie-talkie and some keys.”

Henry tried to think clearly. “Do you think we should call inside? Tell Brody we know who he’s got in there? Tell him the FBI is coming?”

Sleepy considered this suggestion, then shook his head. “We can either drive back to town and call the cops, or go in there and do what we can. But we
ain’t
calling and letting them know we’re out here. Mr. Royal don’t react like other men would. You radio that we’re out here, he’ll kill your friends and us, too.”

Henry nodded slowly. “If the guard has a house key … we could call 911 from inside the house as soon as we get in.”

Sleepy nodded. “I guess we could. Especially if they’re still in the basement.”

The guard suddenly groaned in pain, startling Henry so badly that he almost fell over.

“Wait here,” Henry said. “Let me get my gun.”

He turned and trudged back to his mother’s Impala. The altercation with the guard had apparently spurred his metabolism. Or maybe it was just the exercise, loosening unused muscles. He was moving much faster than before.

Back at the car, he paused, his mind a frazzle of conflicting impulses. Sleepy Johnston represented the Holy Grail he’d sought for years: a witness who could put Brody Royal on death row. Taking Sleepy into Royal’s house was like finding the grail and then carrying it into Hell. Yet something had driven Sleepy to this place, as surely as it had Henry. What was it? A private quest for justice? Foolish, perhaps, but maybe that compulsion had put them both in a position to save Penn and Caitlin. To
prevent
more murders like Albert’s, and Sherry’s, instead of avenging them. Gritting his teeth against imminent pain, Henry opened the back door of the car, bent at the waist, and lifted the shotgun from the backseat floor. Then he staggered back to where Sleepy awaited him.

“Glad to see that scattergun,” Johnston said. “You’re not in much of a state for target shooting.”

“That’s why I brought this. What you want to do?”

“Our buddy on the ground said the mayor and his lady are in the basement. There are two more guards in the house.” Sleepy held up the walkie-talkie. “Been listening to this. From what I can tell, I think he told the truth.”

Henry looked at the man on the ground. “I thought he was dead.”

“He is now. Let’s go.”

Henry took two deep breaths and shifted his weight from foot to foot, trying to be sure of his balance.

Sleepy reached out and gripped his left arm. “You sure you’re ready for this, Henry? You’re hurt pretty bad already.”

“I’m going. You can stay out here if you want, or go for help. But if I don’t come back … swear to me you’ll tell the FBI what happened to Albert that night. And who did it.”

Sleepy shook his head. “Take it easy, brother. I was just askin’ for your sake. I got Albert on my mind, myself. Pooky, too. Have had for too many years now.”

Henry saw his own grief reflected in the black man’s face. “Yeah. It’s Swan I see, though. That bastard in there killed Swan’s daddy.”

Sleepy’s teeth flashed in the moonlight. “Swan Norris,” he said, as though hearing a song he’d forgotten years ago. “Lord, that man in there owes for a lot of people. For a long time, too. He’s got a big account to pay.”

“Maybe it’s time we collected.”

Sleepy nodded, then turned and started toward the great dark house beside the lake.

Holding his shotgun like a balancing pole, Henry followed in his wake. When they neared the front porch, Henry covered the approaches to the house while Johnston opened the front door with the guard’s key. Holding a finger to his lips, Sleepy stepped over the threshold, into a dark foyer. Henry followed, trying not to stumble.

No alarm sounded.

There was a lighted keypad on the wall, but the LED read
DISARMED.
Henry saw no other light, except the flicker of a television far down a hallway to their right. Gripping his shotgun like a lifeline, he started forward, but Sleepy caught his arm and held him back. The black man reached down to a credenza in the foyer and lifted an envelope from a pile of mail. Then he took a cigarette lighter out of his pocket and set the envelope alight.

Henry watched in bewilderment. Was Sleepy Johnston crazy, or was it that Henry’s addled brain couldn’t keep up? Johnston scanned the ceiling, then walked over to a smoke alarm and held the burning envelope directly beneath it. At last Henry understood. Even with the security system disarmed, the fire alarm should sound and summon the fire department.

He waited for an earsplitting Klaxon, but again none came. Sleepy stretched up higher, until the flame actually touched the smoke alarm.

Still nothing.

Henry went back to the keypad on the wall and punched the fire alarm and police buttons. When nothing happened, he pressed several buttons, trying to arm the system, but the readout didn’t change.

“Don’t make sense,” Sleepy whispered. “Something ain’t right.”

Why would Brody Royal disable his own alarm system?
Henry wondered.
Especially when he’s holding people prisoner downstairs?
He shuffled quietly into the first darkened room off the hall, watching the light of the television flicker at the end of the long corridor.

A guest room.
There
. A telephone sat on the bedside table. A landline. Laying his shotgun on the bed, Henry dialed 911 with shaking hands, then lifted the receiver to his ear and waited. He heard neither a ring nor an answer.

“Hello?” he said, wondering if the drugs were playing tricks on him.

“Hey, Lee!” called a male voice from the direction of the TV’s glow. “What the hell you doing inside? Mr. Royal said not to leave your post unless we relieved you.”

Still confused by the silent telephone, Henry set down the receiver and considered trying to fake a response. Before he could try, Sleepy raised his finger to his lips, then pointed at the shotgun. Tensing for the shock of pain, Henry bent at the waist and picked up his father’s old Winchester.

I COME AWAKE
with my head pounding like a kettledrum, but a baritone counterpoint of voices penetrates the pain. My captors must be close. Keeping my eyes closed, I try to glean what I can of my surroundings. I’m lying on my side, on a cold concrete floor. The voices belong to Brody Royal and Randall Regan, and they’re coming from beyond my head, not my feet. Before I can make sense of their words, Caitlin’s higher-pitched voice asks a question. As the old man answers, a stunning realization hits me:
my hands have been freed
. The sticky residue of duct tape remains on my wrists, but the tape itself is gone. After a moment, I carefully open one eye and realize why. My left leg has been manacled to a ring bolt set in a cinder-block wall.