The Quiet Game (64 page)

Ike is standing by my passenger door, between his car and mine. I get out and walk around the trunk of the Maxima, extending my hand to shake his.

“What have you got, Ike?”

He holds out his hand, but instead of shaking he grabs my wrist and jerks me to my knees on the concrete floor. As I try to look up, something slams into the top of my skull. The blow drives every thought out of my head, leaving only white noise. My first coherent perception is of something cold and hard pressed against my hairline.

“That’s a gun,” he says. “Don’t fucking move.”

The terror generated by the gun barrel is absolute, paralyzing. If any muscle in my body is moving, it’s the sphincter of my bladder. “Ike? What the hell are you doing?”

His breath is ragged above me, like a sick animal’s.

“Ike?”

“Where the fuck you been?” he shouts, and the reek of cheap whiskey rolls over me like steam. “Answer me, goddamn it!”

“Ike, what’s wrong? Let’s talk face to face, man.”

“I said, where the fuck have you been?”

“Colorado! I went back to see Stone.”

“I knew it! You sneaky son of a bitch. You been holding out the whole time. What that motherfucker tell you?”

“He told me what we want to know. He told me what happened here in sixty-eight. I’ve got Marston nailed, man.”

He twists around me and jabs the gun into my cervical spine. “What did Stone say happened?”

“He told me why Marston wanted Payton dead. It was a land deal . . . Marston stood to make a lot of money off some land, but he had to make an example of a black union worker first. He paid Presley to do it for him. Presley chose Payton.”

“Bullshit!” Another fog of whiskey blows over me.

“What do you mean, bullshit?”

“Don’t lie to me, goddamn it!
Don’t you lie!
”

He jerks back the slide on the gun, and everything inside me goes into free fall. My thoughts, my courage, my blood pressure. “Ike, please . . . I’ve got a little girl, man. Just tell me what the problem is and—”

The gun barrel rakes around my neck, under my jaw, up my right cheek to my eye. All I can see now is the taut belly of Ike’s brown uniform.

“Get up,” he says coldly. “Get up!”

The gun barrel stays screwed into my eye socket as I rise, but my terror abates slightly. The prospect of dying on my knees was as debasing as it was frightening.

Ike’s gun is shaking. As he pulls it out of my eye socket and lays the barrel against my forehead, I see his eyes, bloodshot and jerky, the eyes of a man in agony.

“You a goddamn liar,” he says. “I shoulda known a white boy wouldn’t go against his own in the end. You been dicking that Marston bitch all along. You in with ’em all the way.” He shakes his head as though at his own stupidity. “Setting up to get the nigger. Like always.”

“Ike, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m setting up to get Leo Marston, and I’m going to use Ray Presley to do it. If I can find him. Dwight Stone and Ray Presley are going to send that bastard to the extermination chamber at Parchman.”

But Ike isn’t listening. At the word Presley, his eyes glaze over with blind rage. “That fucking Presley . . . he told you, didn’t he?”

“Told me what? Talk to me, Ike! Something’s been eating you up since we started this. What is it?”

He bites his lip and presses the gun harder against my forehead. Then suddenly he lets it drop to his side. “I didn’t know what I was doing, man,” he says in a desolate voice. “Hadn’t been back in the World but three months. Couldn’t get no kind of job. I applied with the police three times. They wouldn’t even talk to me. Had all the
Negro
cops they needed, they said. Didn’t have but three.
Same with the sheriff. I’d done more police work in Saigon than them motherfuckers done their whole lives, and they wouldn’t even give me a
chance
.”

I’m more confused than I’ve been since the start of this mess, but I’m not about to interrupt him.

“What else could I do, man?” he almost wails. “Wasn’t gonna go on no welfare! I had to deal.” He slaps at a mosquito on his sweating face. “Presley got me on a traffic stop. Just speeding, but he pulled his weapon and made me open my trunk. He found half a pound of white lady. Illegal search if I ever saw one, but you think that mattered back then? In them days he coulda sent me to Parchman for fifty years behind that much heroin.”

A dark perception is blooming in the corner of my brain. A fetid, cloying orchid of a thought. “What did he want you to do, Ike?”

“Don’t play that shit! You already know!”

The pain in his eyes is terrible to behold. I hold up both my hands. “I know what you tell me. That’s all.”

“What you
think
happened, man? Motherfucker put it to me right there on the side of the road. Said he had somebody needed killing. Said I’d been killing for Uncle for two years, what was one more?
I
knew what one more was. But what could I do, man? He had me. I didn’t want to die on Parchman Farm. Presley took my dope and told me if I tried to back out, he’d plant it on me and bust me all over again.”

“He wanted you to kill Del Payton?”

“What you think I been saying?”

The nausea of a roller coaster that hurtles in only one direction—down—sweeps over me as the whole sick plan falls together in my head.

“You asked Presley to get the C-4, didn’t you?”

He stares at me with strangled emotion. “Presley wanted the car blown up. I didn’t know nothing about dynamite, but I’d worked with C-4 in ’Nam. I told him if he could get me some plastic, I could do the job.”

“Jesus, Ike. Did you know Del?”

“No. He was ten years older than me. Grew up out to Pine Ridge.”

“Did you know about his civil rights work?”

“Hell, no. I thought he was dicking a white woman or something. Didn’t matter, though. I was so fucked up, I didn’t know nothing ’bout nothing.”

“Ike, listen . . . what you did was terrible, but—”

“Don’t you judge me!” he cries, the whites of his eyes making him look wild in the dark. “Don’t you cast no stone! I been torturing myself thirty years. After I realized the work Del was doing, I just about went crazy. The whole town was marching for him. I wanted to scream out what I’d done, what Presley made me do. But I didn’t have the guts. I couldn’t face my own sin.”

The diabolical irony of Ray Presley’s plan leaves me cold. He actually blackmailed a black man into committing a civil rights murder. He and Marston must have laughed for weeks over that one. They’ve been laughing for thirty years.

“Does Stone know this? Or does he really believe Presley killed Payton?”

“Stone? ’Course he knows. He came to see me back then. He had the whole thing dogged out.”

“Why didn’t he arrest you? Why didn’t he tell me about you?”

Ike seems only partially aware of what I’m saying. “I don’t know why. He was different, I guess.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this at the start?”

“What could I tell you, man? I knew what I’d done. I knew about Presley. But that’s all. I knew
what
happened, but I didn’t know
why
. And that was the only way you were gonna get Marston.”

“But how did you know Marston was involved? Did Presley tell you?”

“He didn’t tell me shit. A year after it happened, somebody called me on the phone. Wouldn’t say nothing. I was about to hang up when they started playing this tape. It was Marston and Presley, talking about Del being killed. Talking about
me
. I figured it was Stone. Had to be.”

Stone must have called and played Ike Ransom the copy he’d made of the evidence tape he’d sent to J. Edgar Hoover. And his reason, I suspect, was a dark one. “Thirty years, Ike. Thirty
years
. Couldn’t you figure a way to trade what you knew for immunity, or—”

“Who was I gonna go to, man?”
Spittle flies from his mouth. “The FBI
already knew
what had gone down. And they didn’t arrest nobody! A few years later I tried to find Stone, but the Bureau had fired his ass. Portman was a U.S. attorney, and I knew better than to trust that Yankee piece of shit. And Marston was on the state supreme court! What’s a drunk nigger cop from Mississippi gonna do against people swingin’ that kind of weight? You tell me.”

“Then why tell me? Why try at all after thirty years?”

His broad shoulders sag as though under a great weight, and he speaks toward the floor. “I didn’t have no choice. It ate at me so long . . . I thought it would get better over time, but it got worse. A few months back, I found myself going to church. Not wanting to . . .
needing
to. You know? Being raised Catholic, I guess. Don’t matter if you stop goin’. You can give up on God, but it don’t matter. ’Cause He don’t give up on you.”

The tortured paths this man has pushed himself down are beyond any imagining. “Ike, you came to me knowing you could go to jail for the rest of your life. That you could be executed. That means a lot. And I’ve figured a way to turn Presley against Marston. If you’ll get on that witness stand tomorrow and tell the truth—”

“Is Stone gonna testify?”

“Yes.”

“Is he here in town?”

This isn’t the time to lie. “No. But he’s on his way here. Some people tried to kill us last night. Portman’s guys probably. We got split up.”

Ike starts pacing back and forth, patting the Sig-Sauer against his leg. “But he’s alive?”

“You can’t let your decision be based on what Stone does. This thing’s eating you alive because you know you did wrong. Terrible wrong. It’s got nothing to do with you or me. You owe it to Althea Payton to tell the truth. You owe it to Del. You owe it to yourself, man.”

“I don’t owe nobody but God!” The Sig jerks up again, aimed at my chest now. “You don’t know how close it’s been. At first I thought maybe you could nail Marston without me having to go down. But that was stupid. Crazy. The closer you got to the truth, the more I saw I was gonna have to pay the piper, no matter what. One night I got so drunk I thought about killing you, just to stop it all. That night you left the newspaper by yourself . . . I was right behind you.”

My heart feels like a ball of lead.

“I couldn’t do it, though. Part of me just wanted to pay, I guess. Father Tom says you got to. But I can’t go to Parchman Farm. I done sent too many brothers there myself. I can’t die in them cotton fields up there.”

“You won’t have to, Ike. CNN will be covering that trial tomorrow. You get on the stand and tell the story you just told me, you’ll have Johnnie Cochran down here begging to defend you. What you did was wrong, but you’re the least guilty of the three by far. I think Stone believed that too. You know what the right thing is. That’s why you came to me in the first place.”

He lets his gun fall again, then half turns from me and murmurs in the dark. “I started out all right. But I turned off somewhere. That day my shoulder got hurt, everything started going down.”

He holsters his pistol and walks past me, toward the wide door, and looks out at the luminous clouds scudding over the river. Beyond him I can see a few stars, infinitely small on this first cool night. He turns back to face me, but since he’s silhouetted in the door, I cannot see his features.

“I’ll do it,” he says. “Father Tom gonna think I’m the best man he ever knew. But he gonna be the only one. Every black man, woman, and child in this country gonna curse my name.”

He half turns again, and a dim shaft of light illuminates his face. In eight years as a prosecutor, I never saw a man look so lost.

Ike opens his mouth to say something, then flings an arm out as though to
grab me, but he can’t because he’s flying backward, snatched like a puppet on a string. Before he hits the floor, a peal of thunder booms through the warehouse.

“Ike!”

He doesn’t answer. He’s lying facedown on the dirty floor, blood pumping from a fist-sized hole where his left shoulder blade used to be.

I run to Ike, then drop to the cement floor as a second shot booms through the building. A third punches through the front and rear windshields of the Maxima, which is parked two feet to my left, and the concussion of the gun echoes around the old structure for three or four seconds.

The shooter is inside the building.

Inside, and probably at the front, shooting across the open floor. But he must not have a night-vision scope. He shot Ike as the deputy framed himself against the lighter background of the open loading door. Now that we’re flat on the floor, his shots are far off the mark. Ike’s face is less than six inches from mine, his eyes wide and glassy, like those of a wounded deer.

“Ike,” I whisper. “Can you hear me?”

His eyelids blink once, slowly, but he doesn’t speak. The man is dying before my eyes.

I need a gun.

Kelly’s Browning is in the glove box of the Maxima, but I’m not about to try to reach it. If I rise off the ground, I will silhouette myself against the open door, just as Ike did. If I had walked to that door first, I would be dying now.