Natchez Burning (35 page)

I nod slowly, weighing the odds. “If someone made that threat, and Dad believed they’d carry it through … yes, he might sacrifice himself without a fight.”

“Today I heard a story that I wish I’d never heard. The man at the center of it was Brody Royal. I’ve heard some pretty horrible things in my time, but this …”

“You already told me Royal was involved in horrific murders.”

“That was back in the sixties. This happened only two years ago.”

Two years ago?
Again Henry has stunned me. I look down at the photo of my father in the boat with Brody Royal. “Do you have anything stronger than coffee?”

He opens a drawer and takes out a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey. Unscrewing the top, he pours double shots into paper cups.

“Confusion to the enemy,” he says, raising his cup.

SONNY THORNFIELD STOOD
in the hallway of Wilma Deen’s house, peering through a crack in the door of the room where Glenn Morehouse lay on a motorized hospital bed, his torso raised at a thirty-degree angle. The flickering blue light of a television washed over his shockingly skeletal form. His sister had carried in a cup of ice chips, and Wilma alternated between placing these on his tongue and sponging off his sweating forehead. Glenn’s head was to Sonny’s left. Wilma had placed herself on the far side of the bed. Sonny couldn’t see any pistol from where he stood, but he believed it was there. Glenn might have it in his left hand, under the covers.
It would be a damned .45,
Sonny thought, recalling men he’d seen knocked down by the Colt cannon.

“Jesus,” Snake whispered from behind Sonny. “Ain’t been but a month since I last saw him, and he done shrunk to half of what he was.”

Sonny nodded. It was hard to believe that anything, even cancer, could change a man so much. Like a half-drowned man, Morehouse sucked in a deep breath. Then his eyes opened wide, as if something had frightened him.

“Take it easy,” Wilma half sang, like a doting grandmother. “Everything’s fine. You were almost asleep. You fell off that sleep cliff.”

“Something’s wrong,” Glenn said. “I can feel it.”

“No, everything’s fine. You remember what the doctor said. Everybody gets that feeling when they get this poorly.”

Morehouse strained upward, squinted around the room, then finally settled back against the mattress. Wilma fed him another ice chip. After a minute or so, his eyelids began to fall again. Sonny wondered whether she meant to wait until he was completely unconscious to go for the gun.

Ten seconds later, she laid her left hand on her brother’s arm and began to stroke it. She sponged his forehead with her right hand, then moved it away as if to dip the rag again. But this time her hand disappeared behind his leg, and a moment later Morehouse cried out in terror.

Wilma backed away from the bed, a Colt .45 automatic in her hand.

While her brother gaped at her, Snake shoved Sonny into the room and moved quickly around him the bedside.

Morehouse turned his skull, his eyes going wide in recognition. “Snake! Sonny!”

Snake smiled with a cobra-like expression suited to his namesake. “Surprised, pardner?”

“What are ya’ll doin’ here?”

“You know.” Snake’s eyes glittered in the television light.

“What do you mean? What do I know?”

“You’ve been jawin’ to people you shouldn’t. Tryin’ to get your name in the papers.”

Morehouse’s mouth opened, but he did not speak. He raised his hands and covered his eyes like a child trying to pretend that the horror in front of him wasn’t real. “I ain’t done nothin’!” he cried.

“That’s a lie.”

The big hands slowly fell from the anguished face. “Oh Lord,” Glenn said in a slurred voice. “Ya’ll done come to cut my throat, ain’t you?”

“We damn sure ought to.”

“Wilma!” Morehouse cried. “Call the sheriff! They’ve come to kill me!”

Snake laughed. “Wilma ain’t callin’ nobody ’cept the coroner.”

Glenn froze, his eyes on the doorway. His sister stood there like an avenging angel, as silent as a witness to an execution. Morehouse started to speak, but she held up a warning finger, and he began to sob.

“We know you’ve been talking to Henry Sexton,” Sonny said. “We need to know what got said, Glenn.”

“I ain’t told that bastard nothing! He ambushed me. How was I supposed to stop him?”

“Come on,” muttered Snake. “At least you can be a man and admit what you done. The question is why. Did you get to thinking ’bout hellfire or some such nonsense? You scared of that Baptist
Hay-des
that Preacher Gibbons was always rantin’ about?”

Morehouse shuddered in his bed.

“Remember the oath you swore? Same one we all did.”

“I was just a kid,” Morehouse said, almost crying. “Just a stupid kid without sense to know right from wrong.”

“Bullshit! You were thirty-five and proud to swear it. And if it was up to me, I’d do just what the oath says to do. But lucky for you, it ain’t.”

Glenn cut his eyes at the phone on the table beside his bed. “Who’s it up to?”

“You know.” Sonny lifted the cordless phone from the bedside table and tossed it onto a chair across the room. “Billy said give you a choice.”

Glenn’s eyes ping-ponged from Snake to Sonny and back again. “What kind of choice?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Snake, smiling again. He drew a deer-skinning knife from a scabbard on the side of his belt. “On one hand, I’ve got this blade, which’ll take off your nuts before you even feel the sting. You know a man can bleed to death after that, ’cause you’ve seen it.”

Morehouse shut his eyes.

“But in Sonny’s backpack, there’s a vial of fentanyl that’ll send you off to fairyland as sweet and easy as Rip van Winkle.”

Snake had chosen fentanyl because Glenn’s doctor had prescribed the fentanyl patch once his pain became intractable.

Morehouse was praying, Sonny realized, a droning murmur of indistinct words.

“Glenn!” Sonny said sharply. “Snap out of it!”

The drone only grew more insistent.

“You know how easy morphine is,” Snake said in an oily voice. “You saw it in the war. Fentanyl’s a hundred times more powerful. If I had to meet St. Peter tonight, no question which route I’d pick.”

Morehouse’s eyes opened, looking suspicious. “How do I get the fentanyl?”

“Tell us everything you told the reporter. You hold back, you die a gelding.”

Morehouse was struggling to swallow. Sonny picked up a glass of water from the bedside table and helped him take a sip.

“There you go,” Sonny said. “All primed up now. Spill.”

“I didn’t tell Sexton nothin’, boys. I didn’t trust him.”

“He was here for a whole hour this morning,” Snake said. “You must have told him something.”

Morehouse shook his head.

Snake held up the knife and turned it in the lamplight. “I’ve only got three questions, Mountain.” Stepping forward, he slid the point under Morehouse’s inflamed eye. “First, did you say the name Forrest Knox? Did your lips form those two words?”

“Jesus, no. I ain’t crazy!”

“You’re lying, Glenn. I’m gonna cut this eye out.”

“No!” Morehouse wailed.

“What about Brody Royal? Did you say anything about Brody?”

At the mention of this name Morehouse lost his color. “I swear before God, boys. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Did Sexton
ask
about Brody or Forrest?”

“Neither one. He just wanted to know about …”

“Us?” Snake finished.

Morehouse nodded, then pulled up the covers and hugged himself beneath them.

“How much did you tell him?”

“Nothin’ about ya’ll. I talked about the war mostly. All he cared about was Albert Norris. I think him and that nigger was related or something. I told him I thought Pooky had killed Albert and run off with whatever whiskey and cash Albert had stashed in the store. Or reefer, that he kept for them musicians.”

“Did Sexton tape any of this?”

“Hell, no. I wouldn’t let him. I told him that, straight up.”

Snake gave Sonny a sidelong look. Glenn actually sounded convincing.

“I can’t sleep no more, Sonny!” Morehouse cried. “Every time I close my eyes, I see the things we done. I can’t get no peace. It’s like when I got back from the war. I keep seein’ Jerry Dugan down in that acid tank, and that Lewis boy a-bleedin’ under that tree. That alone’s enough to send us all to hell.”

“Do you see Jimmy Revels?” Snake asked in a perverse voice. “I figured you’d see him most of all. Considerin’ what you done to him. And how much you liked it.”

“Ya’ll made me do that! I didn’t know what I was doing. That still don’t make it right, I know. Not to God.”

“That’s between you and God,” Snake said. “Not you and some newspaper reporter.”

Glenn’s shallow respirations sounded like a breeze blowing through dry leaves. Sonny saw tears running down his pale cheeks. He seemed to struggle on the bed, his movements spastic.

“You drugged me,” Glenn said, his accusing eyes searching out Wilma in the darkness. “You … you helped them kill me.
God sees you, Sister
.”

Wilma’s slippers hissed on the parquet floor. “I’m gonna wait in the kitchen,” she said. “Ya’ll don’t hurt him no more’n you have to.”

“Can’t stand to see your handiwork?” Glenn cried, his eyelids falling, rising, falling again.

Sonny motioned for Wilma to leave, but she leaned over her brother with bitter anger in her eyes. “You broke faith. You didn’t leave me any choice.”

“Not with God, I didn’t!” Morehouse bellowed.

“Blood first, Glenn,” she said with utter conviction. “God after.”

Wilma gave her brother a glare of challenge, but he said nothing. As she turned to go, Sonny caught her arm and whispered, “When was the last time a nurse stuck him for blood?”

“The home health nurse pulled some this morning. They poke him all the time now.”

“Where? Has he still got a good vein in the elbow?”

“He’s got a PICC line in.” She slid her arm from Sonny’s grasp. “You can inject whatever you want in there.”

“I didn’t tell Henry half of what I should have!” Glenn cried with newfound strength. Sonny heard righteous anger, and saw the fear draining from Glenn’s face like life from a dying body.

“I didn’t tell Henry nothin’ about Forrest,” Glenn vowed. “Or Brody. But I’ll say it now. The hell I’m going to tonight is nothing compared to what awaits you two with
them
.”

“I’ve had enough of this,” Snake growled. “He’s gettin’ off easy, you ask me.”

“Let’s just get it over with,” Sonny said. Unzipping his camo shoulder pack, he drew out a syringe prefilled with a lethal dose of fentanyl. “You want me to do it?”

“No. Just hold it till I’m ready.” Snake walked around the hospital bed and took hold of Glenn’s forearm—an arm once strong enough to snap a man’s cervical spine—to examine the PICC line. When Glenn started to struggle, Snake passed his knife over the bed to Sonny. “He keeps fightin’, sever his jugular.”

“Don’t fight it, baby,” Wilma said from the doorway, shocking Sonny. Apparently she meant to stay to the end. “You’re just making it worse.”

Glenn stopped struggling at the sound of his sister’s words, but his eyes had taken on a sudden alertness. They had been dull before, but now they glinted with … what?
Triumph?

“Something’s wrong,” Sonny said, and Snake looked up sharply.

“His hands!” Wilma yelled. “Check his hands!”

Sonny ripped back the coverlet. One of Morehouse’s fists was clenched around a chunk of plastic with a chain on it.

“Shit!” Snake cursed. “That’s one of them Live Alert things!”

Snake tried to wrench the necklace from Morehouse’s clawlike grasp, but Wilma cried, “Don’t worry about it! That thing don’t even work! I quit paying the bill after he moved in with me.”

Sonny couldn’t take his eyes from Morehouse’s face. His old friend wouldn’t look so proud of himself unless he’d foxed them somehow.

“Make him give it to you,” Sonny said, passing the knife back to Snake.

Snake followed the catheter line to where it disappeared under Morehouse’s boxer shorts. The knife vanished under the shorts.

“I’m counting to three,” Snake said. “After that—”

Morehouse hurled the Live Alert necklace across the room, where it caromed off the wall and rattled on the floor.

“I oughta cut ’em off anyway,” Snake said, “just for the aggravation.”

The ringing telephone froze them all where they stood. When it rang the second time, Morehouse began to laugh.

“I called ’em with my credit card last Friday!” he cried. “What you gonna do now?”

Wilma snatched up the cordless phone and checked the caller ID. “Oh, God. He really did. It’s the Live Alert people.”

“God
damn
it!” Snake shouted.

“I’ll tell them it was a false alarm,” she said, moving quickly to the door.

“You need a password for that,” Morehouse told her, giving Snake a defiant glare.

The phone kept ringing in Wilma’s hand.

“False alarm’s no good,” Sonny said, thinking aloud. “Not if he turns up dead in the morning.”

Something changed in Snake’s demeanor. He looked like a big buck realizing he was being watched from a tree stand. Turning to Wilma, he said, “Tell the dispatcher Glenn just died.”

Wilma’s mouth fell open.

Glenn began to scream.

“Hurry!” Snake shouted. “Go in the other room. Tell ’em it looks like a stroke or a heart attack. No breath sounds, no heartbeat. He’s already going gray.”

Wilma scuttled through the door on her macabre errand.

Sonny saw Snake looking at him the way Frank used to look at him when they were about to assault a hostile beach. “Take his right hand, Sonny,” Snake ordered. “Don’t bruise him any more than you have to.”

Without a word, Sonny laid the fentanyl syringe on the bedside table, then grabbed his old friend’s thick wrist and held it against the mattress. Snake had already done the same on the opposite side. Sonny was surprised it was that easy, even after the cancer. Glenn Morehouse had been physically stronger than any man he’d ever known.

“Pass me that syringe,” Snake ordered.