The Bone Tree Page 4

  That left two options. He could try to turn himself in to some arm of law enforcement—preferably the FBI, if he could reach them—and hope to survive the encounter. Or he could do exactly what he’d advised Penn not to do—deal with the devil direct, and try to remove his family from harm’s way by any means necessary. Given that he was likely surrounded on all sides by Louisiana’s state and local cops, the chance of safely delivering himself into the arms of federal agents was small. Simply using his personal cell phone was likely to bring a state police helicopter down on his head within five minutes, and the last burn phone Walt had left him might well be compromised by now. They had used it too many times already.

  The ring of the very phone Tom was thinking about stunned him, and his shoulder began to pound, telling him his blood pressure had spiked at the sound. He stared at the phone for two more rings, then answered.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” said a voice that made him sag against the truck’s door. “Are you okay?”

  “I thought you were dead.” Tom craned his neck around to try to see if the hit man had woken up.

  “I didn’t want to put you at risk by calling you. Even now we shouldn’t spend more than a minute on the phone.”

  “Did you have any luck with Colonel Mackiever?”

  “No. And don’t say his name again. He got delayed, but he’s on his way up here now.”

  “Up here” meant Baton Rouge.

  “FK has already moved against him,” Walt said.

  Forrest Knox, Tom thought.

  “I don’t know the details,” Walt continued, “but it sounds like they’re trying to discredit Mac and take his job.”

  “So he can’t get the APB revoked?”

  “Not with a phone call. He needs to hear our side of the story before he can move. That’s the next step. But that’s not why I called. The colonel just told me something you need to know. Brody Royal was killed tonight, in his house on Lake Concordia. That reporter died with him, Henry Sexton.”

  “No.” Tom’s heart began to pound again.

  “Yep. And there’s more bad news.”

  The hammering in Tom’s chest began to solidify into angina. “Not Penn—”

  “No—hell, no. But Penn was apparently there when it happened, and Caitlin, too. They’re alive, but that’s all I know right now. Mac just caught it over his radio. Royal’s son-in-law died there too, and a black fellow I never heard of. Nobody Mac trusts seems to know what really went down.”

  “Where are Penn and Caitlin now?”

  “In custody. Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Department. State police heard it from firemen on the scene. Alive and in squad cars, only minor injuries. I’ll try to learn more, but you don’t hear from me, they’re fine. If anything’s seriously wrong, I’ll call you. Don’t call me back except in an extreme emergency.”

  “Okay.”

  “How you doing? Melba still there?”

  “No. I’m not either.”

  “What?”

  “FK sent two guys to the lake house, and they nearly got me. I’m lucky to be alive, to tell the truth.”

  “What?”

  “He sent them to kill me. I turned the tables. One’s KIA, the other tied up in the backseat.”

  “Jesus. How the hell did you manage that, the shape you’re in?”

  “A little luck and a lot of drugs. What the hell do we do now?”

  Walt only paused for a few seconds. “You need to go to ground somewhere while I talk to the colonel. And don’t try to cover any distance—you’ll hit a roadblock. Can you think of anywhere close that’s safe?”

  “Actually, yes. But your part’s done. You need to get back to Texas. You’ve got Carmelita to think about. Just get clear, buddy.”

  “That’s enough of that. Look, we’ve been on the phone too long already. Let me ask you one more question.”

  Walt’s voice sounded strange.

  “What is it?”

  “What do you plan to do with the survivor in the back?”

  “I’m not sure. I figured I’d ditch him somewhere. Cotton field, probably.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Nowhere.” After a pause, Walt said. “He’s KIA. Just like the first one.”

  It took a moment to absorb Walt’s meaning. “I can’t do that. Too much has . . .” Tom trailed off. “Too many people are dead already.”

  “Listen to me,” Walt said in a voice that came all the way from their days in Korea. “Mercy is a virtue you can’t afford. We already made that mistake once this week.”

  Tom thought of Sonny Thornfield and wondered if saving the old Klansman had really been a mistake, or whether he might yet play some positive role before events resolved themselves.

  In the backseat, Grimsby stirred. Tom looked back but could see little in the darkness.

  “Hey,” Walt said. “Did I lose you?”

  “Now that I think about it,” Tom said, in case Grimsby had awakened, “going to Mobile was about the smartest thing you could have done.”

  “What?” Walt said. “Oh. I get it.”

  “I wish to God I was there with you,” Tom added, meaning it. He waited about ten seconds, then said, “Well, I don’t like it, but I guess it’s my best chance. Mobile it is.”

  “That’s enough dinner theater,” Walt said in a quieter voice. “Listen to me now. Get yourself a new burn phone at a Walmart. Better yet, send someone you trust to get you a half dozen. Then call this number. I want you to use a code to tell me where you are—a basic code. Three steps. Number the letters in the alphabet from one to twenty-six. Then spell out your message, convert it to numbers, and multiply each letter-number by the number of men who died in the ambulance at Chosin. We clear on that number?”

  Just the mention of that ambulance made Tom grimace. “Yeah.”

  “Call and give me a string of numbers, nothing else. Like thirty-six, break, two-seventy-five, break, one-fifty, break. You got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Remember, if you don’t hear from me, Penn and Caitlin are fine.”

  Tom nodded wearily in the dashboard light. “It’s good to hear your voice, Walt.”

  “Same here, buddy. Time to go, though. Just remember, you’ve got one tough thing to do before you do anything else. Finish that son of a bitch. This is war, Corporal.”

  “Walt—”

  “He meant to kill you in cold blood, didn’t he?”

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  Tom broke the connection and put down the phone.

  The revelation that Walt was alive had buoyed him in a way that nothing else could. With Walt still working to get the APB revoked, the most immediate threat to their lives might actually be removed. The news about the killings at Lake Concordia, on the other hand, had deeply unsettled Tom. He knew he bore some of the blame for those deaths, as he did for the earlier ones. Worse, Penn and Caitlin could only have turned up at Royal’s house because of their efforts to help him. But it was Henry Sexton’s death that most haunted him. To think that Henry Sexton had survived two earlier attacks only to die at Brody Royal’s house . . . it seemed almost incomprehensible.

  Tom squinted down the twin headlight beams illuminating the narrow road between the empty cotton fields, watching for deer or stray cattle. He couldn’t afford an accident that might disable the truck. In his present state, he was incapable of walking to safety.

  He tensed as a pair of headlights appeared in the distance, and his heart and shoulder began to pound in synchrony. Unless he stopped dead, turned around, and made a run for it, he had no choice but to continue toward the oncoming vehicle.

  As the two vehicles closed the distance, a sharp pain stabbed him high in the back, and his breath went shallow. If whoever was in that car or truck was a cop, Tom knew, he was likely to die in the next minute. His photo—along with Walt’s—had been circulated across the state for the past few hours, sat
urating all media. Any cop who stopped him would recognize him. And what police officer was going to give a fugitive cop killer time to explain a corpse and captive in the backseat? Tom had treated plenty of cops over the years, and in this situation, eight out of ten would shoot first and take the glory.

  The skin on his neck and arms crawled as he waited for the bright red flare of Louisiana police lights. His face was pouring sweat, and angina had locked his back muscles by the time the blinding lights flashed past him, and he saw that they belonged to a Louisiana Power and Light bucket truck.

  “Christ,” he gasped, as his stolen truck rolled out of the sucking vacuum between the two vehicles and plowed back into the darkness.

  As his heartbeat slowly decelerated, Tom realized that Grimsby had awakened in the backseat. Some ancient survival instinct had flickered to life and told him that the hit man was now staring at the back of his head, trying to work out a way to kill him. If Tom tried to turn, Grimsby would close his eyes and pretend to be asleep. But Tom knew different. Behind the lids, those eyes would be alive with lethal malice.

  What had Walt said? Mercy is a virtue you can’t afford. . . .

  As the truck rolled through the dark fields, Tom reached down and laid his hand on the cold checkered butt of the .357.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE MOMENT SONNY Thornfield saw Billy Knox standing beneath the lights on the floating dock outside his fishing camp on the Toledo Bend Reservoir, he knew something had gone wrong. Sonny and Snake had just carried out one of the most nerve-wracking missions he’d taken part in since the war, and he was elated simply to be alive. In the dead of night, Snake had secretly flown them via floatplane to a small lake near Ferriday. After being ferried by car to the lawn outside Mercy Hospital, Snake had assassinated Henry Sexton by shooting him through his hospital window. Then, because Forrest had given the order that everyone with direct knowledge of the Sexton attack had to die, they had drugged two boys in their twenties and drowned them in the Atchafalaya Swamp. No one could have seen that crime. Snake had set the plane down in the middle of a pitch-black pool, miles from human habitation.

  That can’t be it, Sonny told himself, staring at Billy’s grim face as Snake taxied the Beechcraft up to the dock. As carefully as he could, Sonny climbed out onto the starboard pontoon and caught the mooring line that Billy tossed him.

  Billy didn’t look much like his father had as a young man. Snake had always been wiry and hatchet-faced. Billy was stockier and blond, with the shoulder-length hair and beard of a 1970s rock singer. Normally his eyes glinted with an amused light, but tonight he looked as grim as Sonny had ever seen him.

  “What’s the matter?” Sonny asked. “What’s happened?”

  “Wait till Daddy gets out,” Billy said.

  When the pontoon bumped the dock, Sonny stepped onto the floating square of wood. “Trouble?”

  Billy nodded once. “Big-time.”

  A chill raced up Sonny’s back.

  Snake climbed down onto the pontoon and stepped lightly onto the dock, his inquisitive eyes on those of his son.

  “What’s the matter, boy? You look like you need a dose of Ex-Lax.”

  “You won’t be laughing when you hear this. You missed Sexton tonight.”

  “Missed . . . ? Bullshit.”

  Billy shook his head. “Captain Ozan called. You definitely missed him. You killed his girlfriend, if that makes you feel any better.”

  “I saw the round hit him in the head!” Snake barked.

  “You only grazed him.”

  “No way. That was a .22 Magnum round, and I drilled him.”

  Billy shrugged as if tired of arguing the point. “Maybe your eyes aren’t what they used to be. Ozan was there, and he knows what happened. The FBI moved Sexton to an interior room—an office—and tried to pretend he was dead, but Ozan got the truth out of a CPSO deputy. Now we’ve got a world of shit over there.”

  “Does Forrest know?” Sonny asked worriedly.

  “Haven’t talked to him. But he sure as hell won’t be happy.”

  “Where is he?”

  “New Orleans. He’s making his move on Colonel Mackiever.”

  “Shit, shit, shit.” Sonny couldn’t hide his fear.

  “I hit that son of a bitch!” Snake insisted.

  “The window glass must have deflected your shot,” Billy said.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Snake bellowed. “I know what I saw.”

  “Why didn’t you kill the Masters girl?” Billy asked, ignoring his father’s anger. “Ozan says she should have been visible through the window. Killing Sexton’s girlfriend didn’t do a damn thing for us. At least wiping Caitlin Masters off the board would have bought us a margin of safety, if Sexton told her anything about us.”

  “The other woman was trying to close the blinds. She filled up half the fucking window! Besides, I figured Forrest would have a stroke if I told him I’d killed that newspaper bitch without his okay. If I’d have known he wanted that, I’d have marched right up to the window and blasted them all.”

  “Forrest wouldn’t have okayed the Masters girl,” Sonny said. “That’s only hindsight talking.” He rubbed his arms and shivered. “How about we get up to the house?”

  “Fuck that,” Snake said. “We need to head back to Ferriday and finish off Henry. We can’t risk him talking.” Sonny looked longingly up the slope at the luxurious condo on the shore of the reservoir, where warm yellow light glowed through the windows.

  “Forget Sexton,” Billy said firmly. “He needs to be finished, all right, but you’d never get close to him now. Forrest will make that decision.”

  Snake kicked a tackle box that was standing on the dock. “This is bullshit, Billy. What does Brody say? You talked to him?”

  “No. We’re not supposed to be using the phones, remember? Ozan broke the rules, but he figured we needed to know. You’re to stay here in Texas until you get further word.”

  Sonny waited while Snake cussed and spat.

  “Let’s just hope,” Billy said, “that Forrest is the new superintendent of state police by this afternoon. Then we can start some realistic damage control.”

  Snake kicked the tackle box into the dark water, then marched up the wooden steps toward the house.

  Billy’s cell phone rang, and he answered it immediately. After ten seconds, his face went pale. After ten more, his mouth hung slack. He turned away from Sonny and walked a few steps along the pier. Looking up the slope, Sonny saw that Snake had stopped climbing and was hovering near the top step, watching his son. When Billy hung up, he walked back toward Sonny like a man trying to pass a field sobriety test.

  “Who was that?” Snake called, coming back down the steps. “What’s happened?”

  “That was Ozan,” Billy said in a dazed voice. “Henry Sexton’s dead.”

  Snake laughed and pumped his fist. “I told you I got that son of a bitch!”

  Billy shook his head slowly. “No, you didn’t. Brody’s dead, too.”

  “What?” Sonny whispered.

  “Brody, Sexton, Randall Regan, some old nigger from Detroit, a couple of Brody’s guards, and a Natchez cop to boot. Brody’s house is burning to the ground right now.”

  “Bullshit!” said Snake.

  “Ozan just heard it on fire department radios in Concordia Parish.”

  “What does Forrest say?”

  “Ozan can’t get Forrest on the phone. Not since he went into a hotel in New Orleans to meet Colonel Mackiever.”

  “Oh, God,” Sonny breathed, looking for a place to sit down.

  CHAPTER 4

  SHERIFF WALKER DENNIS’S Tahoe hums swiftly through the Louisiana night, his roof lights dark, his siren silenced. The dry blast of the heater sweeps past my face, the muted crackle of the police radio barely audible beneath it. The heat aggravates the cigarette burn on my left cheek, but after enduring all I have tonight, the pain seems inconsequential.

  “I tried to keep a lid on this to delay t
he state police,” Sheriff Dennis says, “but some firemen mentioned names on the radio. It’s out now. And when a man as rich as Brody Royal dies, people are gonna want to know everything. We’ll be lucky to make the station without state police cruisers flagging us down.”

  Twelve miles east of us, this highway crosses the Mississippi River into Natchez, but our destination lies several miles short of that. The Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office is housed in the basement floor of the parish courthouse between Vidalia and Ferriday, Louisiana. The highway between those two towns runs through the worst sort of sprawl: small-engine repair shops, oil field service companies, salvage yards, boat dealerships, and an ever-changing line of marginal enterprises. All have parking lots where state police vehicles could lie in wait for us.

  “I’m going to videotape your statements when we get there,” Sheriff Dennis says, “but I’d just as soon know ahead of time what you’re going to say. I don’t want to talk you into a corner you can’t get out of.”

  “Thanks, Walker.”

  “Are you and your fiancée straight on your stories?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Because whatever you say is gonna get picked apart by a lot of agencies.”

  I nod but add nothing.

  “I got the basic gist of what went down, but why don’t you tell me who killed who, and in what order.”

  I take a breath and organize my thoughts before speaking. “Two of Royal’s men knocked out the Natchez cop who was guarding the parking lot at the Examiner before they snatched us. I think they probably killed him, because I felt no pulse in the van. Once we reached Royal’s, those two guys hauled his body away.”

  “Can you give me a good description?”

  “Decent. I’d like to kill the sons of bitches.”

  “If they killed a cop, you’ll have to get in line. Who died next?”

  For a moment I can’t speak. Walker considers it a given that cop killers will die violently, and he’s so caught up in the moment that he doesn’t realize he just condemned my father by extension.

  “Royal and Regan were torturing Caitlin and me in the basement,” I tell him, “in Royal’s gun range.”