Natchez Burning (84 page)

I’ve seen that casual toss of the head countless times in my life, usually under friendly circumstances. It generally means “Be seein’ you.” Today it means the same thing, but the context isn’t friendly at all.

As Regan’s V-shaped back disappears through the door, the obvious reality finally breaks through the daze that Walker’s news knocked me into:
Regan assumed I was wearing a wire. That’s why he didn’t speak to me
. If I had been wearing one, anyone listening to the recording would have concluded that I’d sat in the diner and talked to myself for ten minutes. Still, I reflect, that doesn’t mean my plan didn’t work.

“Randy left already?” asks the waitress, startling me.

“Yes.”

“Well, dern. He usually orders dessert. I’ve got it right here.”

She lowers a saucer with a slice of chocolate pie on it. “You want it instead?”

“No, thank you.”

As she walks away, I go to the restroom to get some privacy. I don’t fancy walking out into the parking lot until I know Regan is gone. Once inside, I sit on the edge of the sink and call John Kaiser’s cell phone. He answers immediately.

“Get ready,” I tell him. “I think the music’s about to start.”

“What did you do?”

“Poked a stick in the rattlesnake’s hole.”

Kaiser is quiet for too long. “You haven’t heard, have you?”

“Heard what?”

“Penn, there’s no good way to tell you this. A few minutes ago the Louisiana State Police sent a flash APB across five states for Thomas Jefferson Cage, M.D., and Walter Roark Garrity, a retired Texas Ranger. They’re wanted in connection with the murder of Trooper Darrell Deke Dunn, who was shot and killed last night near the borrow pits in rural Concordia Parish.”

As I sit dumbstruck on the sink, my head roars as though I’m standing in the middle of a highway. I feel like someone just told me that a friend of mine ran over a child in the street and fled the scene. Life will never be the same.

“The bulletin says both fugitives are known to be proficient with firearms and should be considered armed and dangerous. Penn? Are you there?”

“Yeah,” I manage to grunt. “What else can you tell me?”

“Forrest Knox visited the crime scene in a helicopter a little while ago. He issued the APB himself, and there’s not a chance in hell of getting it recalled. I’m sorry. I know this is tough, on top of everything else.”

“John, what the hell is going on? There’s no way my dad killed a cop.”

“What about Garrity?”

The time it takes me to ponder this possibility tells Kaiser all he needs to know.

“John, it doesn’t matter if they did it or not. When an alert goes out for a cop killer, it’s open season. Every cop within five hundred square miles will be looking to shoot them on sight.”

“I know. The only good news is that your father seems to have dropped off the face of the earth, right along with Captain Garrity. My advice is, put on your thinking cap and try to figure where he’d go to ground with his life on the line. Nobody knows him better than you, right?”

I shake my head, not sure of this at all.

“I’ll let you know if I hear anything else,” Kaiser promises. “And I’ll be monitoring Royal’s and Regan’s communications for you.”

I almost laugh at this. “Like it matters at this point? After what you told me, who killed Viola Turner rates about a two on a one-to-ten scale. At this point I’d be happy to have Dad on trial for murder. At least he’d stand a decent chance of surviving.”

“You work on finding him, Penn. I’ll work on a way to take him into federal custody.”

My heart leaps. “Will you really?”

“I don’t think Dr. Cage will survive an encounter with Forrest Knox’s troops, even if he gives himself up with his hands over his head.”

“Thank you, John.”

“Keep your head high, man. I know who the good guys are.”

As I press
END,
my eyes well with hot tears, and my throat spasms shut. Never have I felt so angry or impotent or cut off from my family. Two minutes ago, I was trying to save my father by solving a murder mystery. Now I’ll be lucky if I can keep him alive long enough to go to prison.

My bladder, which felt like stone as I talked to Kaiser, suddenly ambushes me with a desperate need to pee. Stepping up to the urinal on the wall, I see a piece of duct tape stretched across it. A handwritten sign reads:
BROKEN! USE THE STALL!

Pushing open the stall door, I unzip and stand over the commode, but despite my urgency, nothing comes. My heart is pounding, and sweat has broken out on my face and neck. Did the news of the APB cause this? Or did it begin during my confrontation with Royal’s son-in-law? Though Regan didn’t say one word throughout, he made it clear that a state of war now exists between us. Just as my urine starts to flow, the restroom door opens.

“It’s a one-holer today!” I call. “I’ll be out in a second.”

“No problem,” says an amicable voice.

While I strain to empty my bladder, the stall door crashes against my back, knocking me into the wall and spraying piss all over me. An arm like an iron bar locks around my neck and bends my spine back over what must be a knee, pulling me into an agonizing bow. A blast of air bursts from my diaphragm, but the choke hold traps it in my throat. I can neither speak nor breathe. While I try in vain to free myself, a big hand gropes me from armpits to ankles, not missing any place where I could conceal a weapon or a wire.

My vision’s going black. The hold loosens slightly. When the voice speaks again, it’s a savage rasp in my right ear, the mouth so close I feel its heat and moisture.

“You think you’re smart, don’t you? Well, you’ve got a lot to learn, Mayor. You think you saw some shit over in Houston? Well, you didn’t. That’s bush league over there, and you’re about to find it out
.
”

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.

“
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.