Mississippi Blood, Page 2

  As Pops and Mavis Staples begin singing harmony like dark angels floating down from heaven, some semblance of peace washes over me. How much soul and conviction must a white man have to sing lead in front of angels like that? Levon is an Arkansas country boy as rail-thin and tough as the bastards who killed Caitlin, yet he somehow sings with the wounded humanity of a man without a tribe, a man who has known both love and grief and understands that one is the price of the other.

  I wish I believed in God, so that I could blame Him for Caitlin’s murder. But as a man without faith, I’m left to blame my father. My mother believes Caitlin brought about her own death and would have done even had my father not turned all our lives upside down. I haven’t the strength to argue the case. Mom simply wants me to forgive Dad enough to visit him in prison. But I can’t bring myself to do that. So I sit outside in the car, or else down the street in a Wendy’s restaurant, while Mom and Annie go through their ritual at the prison, Mia tending to Annie while Mom spends time alone with Dad.

  More times than not, I set aside the perpetual pile of crap that comes with being a mayor and sit pondering the chain of events that brought me to this pass. It’s true that Caitlin let her ambition drive her to a cursed place she should never have gone alone, and she died for it. But had my father not hidden the truth of what transpired on the night Viola Turner died, Caitlin would never have become obsessed with Henry Sexton’s quest, or picked up his torch after he martyred himself to save us, or followed a bloody trail to the abomination called the Bone Tree.

  She would be alive.

  We would be living with Annie in Edelweiss, our dream house overlooking the river, and well on our way to giving Annie a brother. That thought haunts me, probably more than it should. The night before Caitlin was killed, we made love in that house for the first and last time: a desperate attempt on her part to calm me down after a standoff with a corrupt sheriff. I had no idea then that Caitlin was pregnant. Forrest Knox told me later, as a torment, and the autopsy confirmed his revelation. Had I foreseen the doom we were racing toward on that last night, I would have locked the door of Edelweiss and held her inside until . . . what? It’s pointless to speculate. Somehow, I sense, no matter what I did that night, Caitlin would still have died, and Annie and I would still have wound up here. Which is . . . where?

  Lost.

  When someone you love is murdered, you learn things about yourself you’d give a great deal not to know. If you kill the person who robbed you of that life, you discover that vengeance can’t begin to fill the fulminating void that murder leaves behind. Nothing can, except years of living, and then only if you’re lucky. Annie and I learned that the first time, when cancer took her mother.

  Caitlin was our luck.

  Nine weeks ago, our luck ran out. Caitlin’s murder hit us like an artillery shell from a clear blue sky. And the first thing blown apart by that kind of shell is time. Day and night lose their meaning. The passage of moments and hours wobbles out of kilter. Clock faces trigger confusion, even panic. In the demi-world of mourning, one’s sense of selfhood begins to unravel. The strong find ways to re-orient themselves to the superimposed temporal structure observed by the rest of the world, but no matter how hard I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to do that.

  My work has suffered so badly that everyone at City Hall is engaged in a conspiracy to pretend I’m functional. That’s hard to admit, but if I’m honest, something isn’t quite right with me. My hold on reality is more tenuous than it should be. My sense of control has eroded to the point that I’ve questioned my sanity. But given all I’ve been through . . . perhaps that’s a sane response. Perhaps the only one. Because my family has imploded.

  My mother lives in a motel near the Federal Correctional Institution at Pollock, Louisiana, where my father is being held by the FBI (thirty miles behind us now, and thankfully fading farther every minute). I had to withdraw Annie from middle school, and only Mia Burke’s altruistic intervention has prevented her from becoming paralyzed by grief and terror. Mia’s done a lot to hold my head above water also, which isn’t fair to her, but she volunteered, and frankly there’s no one else to lean on.

  My cell phone pings beneath the music. It’s lying sideways beside the Audi’s central handbrake. Pinning the steering wheel in position with my left knee, I reach across my lap with my left hand to check the phone without disturbing Annie.

  The message reads: U ok? Not getting sleepy, are u?

  It’s from Tim Weathers, our bodyguard for the night, tailing us in his Yukon. Actually, the vehicle doesn’t belong to Tim. It’s the property of Vulcan Asset Management, the Dallas-based security firm that employs him.

  I’m fine, I type. Girls sleeping.

  They need it, he replies.

  Apart from Caitlin’s death, this may be the most difficult adaptation of all. We live surrounded by bodyguards. A necessity, of course, everyone agreed. Total security, twenty-four hours a day. And not the oversized guidos you see guarding pop divas and pro athletes, but retired Special Forces soldiers like my friend Daniel Kelly, who’s been missing in Afghanistan for months now. Men who understand the job of protection and have the skills, restraint, and experience to do it right.

  The financial burden of maintaining such protection is crushing. Over the past almost two and a half months, security firms have billed me more than a hundred thousand dollars. But I see no alternative. It’s like hiring round-the-clock nurses for an ailing parent: until you have to do it, you have no idea what ceaseless attention really costs. To my relief, Caitlin’s father has paid half the balance of every bill. He offered to pay every cent, but I still have some pride left. I can’t afford this level of expenditure for long, but every time I wonder whether we might be able to relax our vigilance and stem the hemorrhage of cash, John Masters’s words ring in my ears:

  “Penn, if anything were to happen to you or Annie, Caitlin would never forgive me. I accept that my daughter is dead, but I don’t accept that my obligations to her will ever end. So you hire the best and send me the bills. I don’t give one goddamn how high it goes. You killed Snake Knox’s nephew. Until that son of a bitch is pumped full of embalming fluid, I want you living like the president of the United States. I failed to protect my daughter, and I can barely stand to look in the mirror. Don’t make the same mistake with yours.”

  I don’t intend to.

  Thus we have lived with at least one bodyguard—and sometimes three—within yards of us twenty-four hours a day. Today, during our weekly drive to and from the Pollock prison, we’ve had only Tim, an ex-SEAL from Tennessee. Tim has become like a favorite uncle to Annie, and a brother to Mia and to me. As usual, Annie saw her grandmother first today, and then her grandfather while Mia walked down the road and shared a cheeseburger with me at Wendy’s.

  Juvenile, maybe, but that’s the way it is.

  More eyeshine flashes out of the empty fields beyond the shoulders of the highway. This drive is like a night tour of some vast wildlife refuge, a southern safari inundated by the sulfurous, miles-long reek of a skunk’s defensive spray. The bright orbs flashing in the darkness run the color spectrum: yellow for raccoons, green for deer, red for foxes and possums, blue for the occasional coyote. The land seems peopled by luminous ghosts, yet the explanation is simple enough. The tapetum lucidum layer of crystals behind all those retinas evolved to enhance night vision by reflecting light back through the eye, so that it can be used twice, not once. But like the TV lights that always blinded me when I arrived at the Walls Unit at Huntsville to witness executions, the blaze of my Audi’s xenon headlamps renders that adaptation useless, blasting all those sensitive eyes sightless—

  “Daddy?” Annie’s hand lightly squeezes my right arm. “I need to pee.”

  My daughter is eleven years old, but when she speaks from half sleep, her voice sounds exactly as it did when she was three or four.

  There are no lights ahead, only blackness. But my brain quickly riffles through its file of st
opping points in this near desolate landscape. “I think there’s a gas station about eight minutes ahead, Boo. Can you wait?”

  “Uh-huh. Don’t forget and pass it, though. I gotta go bad.”

  A voice from behind me says, “I second that sentiment.”

  Glancing up at the rearview mirror, I see Mia watching me, a wry smile on her face.

  “I’m hungry, too,” she adds. “I’m going to be huge by the time I go back to school.”

  Mia must be tired; otherwise she would never mention the prospect of leaving us—not within Annie’s hearing—even though the eventual day of parting is inevitable. Mia’s very presence is a miracle, one based on a generosity I can scarcely comprehend. Two years ago, when she was a superachieving high-school senior at my alma mater, Mia took care of Annie for one summer, then during the school year on afternoons when I was working. She was the perfect babysitter: a smart, vivacious, and motivated girl from a family of modest means, driven to work for the things her private school classmates took for granted. Her drive and practicality rubbed off on Annie every day, and I was thankful.

  But late that year, a classmate of Mia’s drowned in a nearby creek, and a childhood friend of mine was charged with killing her. Mia proved instrumental to solving that murder, and as a reward, my grateful friend—a physician—helped her attain something that had proved beyond her reach, no matter how hard she worked: tuition money for her first-choice college, Harvard.

  By pure chance, Mia was on her way home for Christmas break when Caitlin was killed. As soon as she heard the news, she came over and did all she could to comfort Annie, who had already begun to regress to the paralyzing, hyper-anxious state she’d experienced after her mother died in Houston. Within a week, Annie developed a worrisome dependence on Mia. I didn’t know how I was going to keep her from losing control when Mia had to return to Massachusetts. To my amazement, though, three days before Mia was scheduled to leave, she sat me down and said she’d decided to take a semester off in order to help Annie “get back to normal.”

  I argued, but not too hard or for too long. Mia told me she’d been scheduled to do a semester at an archaeological dig in the Yucatán, so it wasn’t like ditching a real semester. By this time, my mother had already decided to relocate to be near Dad’s prison, and that settled the issue.

  “There’s a light,” Mia says. “Up on the left.”

  She’s right. What I remember as a solitary service station stands on the edge of the flat fields about a mile ahead, like some radio relay station in the desert. Taking out my cell phone, I speed-dial Tim behind us.

  “What’s up?” he asks.

  “We’re pulling off at that gas station. Girls need a bathroom.”

  “Let me catch up before you turn.”

  “Copy that.”

  This kind of tactical conversation has become second nature over the past weeks. Sixty seconds’ driving carries us to the turn, and Tim is behind us by the time I roll the wheel left and clunk onto a gravel-studded dirt lot near the concrete pad that supports the old gas station.

  I park on oil-stained concrete under the sagging awning/canopy that covers the pumps, and Tim pulls in behind us. As soon as he exits the Yukon, Annie jumps out and runs into the station. Tim follows, and Mia and I trail them inside.

  The temperature’s dropped ten degrees since we left the prison. The interior of the station smells of scalded coffee, old grease, and disinfectant. A lone attendant is working the night shift, an elderly woman wearing a hairnet. She stands behind a greasy glass case holding the last of some fried chicken and potato logs. While Annie uses the restroom, I scan the meager offerings on the snack rack, then ask if the woman has fresh coffee. She says she’ll make a new pot.

  “Where’s your men’s room?”

  “Outside. Turn right when you walk out.”

  Tim starts to follow me out, but I point at my left ankle and ask him to stay with the girls. He nods and tells me to keep my eyes open.

  The darkness outside carries the faint sweet scent of airborne herbicide. I didn’t notice it during my short walk into the station. It’s too early for crop dusting; maybe a farmer is mixing chemicals somewhere nearby. That odor hurls me back to childhood. When I was a boy in my grandfather’s fields, I’d run beneath the toylike biplane as it dropped billowing clouds of poison, joyfully waving my arms, never dreaming those clouds could seed cancer in my blood and bones.

  The men’s room also takes me back to childhood. A closet-size cubicle, cold as a deep freeze yet fetid with the stench of human waste and chemical cleaners, a heavy funk with an astringent tang that would burn your throat if you breathed it too long.

  Sliding the flimsy bolt into a hole in the door frame, I square up to the tall old wall urinal, unzip my fly, and piss against the stained porcelain. How many times have I made this drive between Natchez and the federal prison? I wonder. Two and a half months, driving it once and sometimes twice a week. Nine times, I guess, and every time I waited alone while Mom and Annie met with Dad in the visiting room.

  Zipping up, I reach out to flush, then decide not to touch the rust-pitted handle. As I turn to the door, a shoe crunches on the walk outside. It’s probably Tim, but for some reason the sound makes me freeze.

  Ten seconds pass . . . then twenty.

  Did I imagine it? Female laughter penetrates the wall behind me. The girls are still inside the station. And if they’re still inside, then Tim is, too.

  So whose footstep did I hear?

  Taking my cell phone from my inside coat pocket, I start to call Tim, then stop. I’m probably being paranoid, but I don’t want to drive him into an ambush. Shifting my phone to my left hand, I crouch, pull up my left pant leg, and draw my Smith & Wesson Airweight .38 from the ankle holster I’ve worn since December. Then I back against the urinal.

  The pistol’s wooden grip is chipped from being hammered against Forrest Knox’s gravestone. Using only my left thumb, I text Tim: Heard something outside rr. Possible threat. Stay inside with girls. I’m locked in.

  As I press send, the bathroom door handle turns, then stops.

  My hand tightens on my pistol.

  Then the door presses against the bolt, testing its resistance.

  “Just a minute!” I call, as any man would in a normal situation. “Almost done in here.”

  No reply.

  Using my left thumb, I text Tim: Call cops.

  Out of the pregnant silence comes a muffled voice, barely audible through the thin metal door: “I’ve got a message for you, Mayor. Come out and get it.”

  Jesus.

  With a shaking hand I text: Threat real!

  “A message from who?” I ask.

  “You know. Now come out and hear what I got to say. If you keep fucking around in there, your daughter’s gonna walk out of the station, and things are going to get bad real quick. So shake your dick and come on out.”

  There’s no way that’s Snake out there, I think, even as I wonder if it could be. John Kaiser is positive that the old Double Eagle has fled to a foreign country. But if it’s not Snake . . . then who? And whoever it is, is he alone?

  “Are you coming, Cage? Or do you want your little girl to take the message for you?”

  All the saliva has evaporated from my mouth. A strange compulsion pushes me to open the door, but somewhere in my brain burns the certainty that I’ll be shot the moment I expose myself.

  My heart lurches when my phone pings in my hand.

  Backup on way, reads Tim’s reply. I’m coming to you. Stay put unless you hear shooting. If you do, come out firing, just like I taught you.

  Don’t leave the girls! I think, but before I can text those words, the man outside jiggles the handle, then rattles it hard. For a half second I consider firing through the door.

  Who would I be killing? What if the guy isn’t armed?

  Either way, I can’t stand here while Tim risks his life to protect my child.

  Moving to the side of the door,
I reach toward the bolt with my left hand, but before my fingers touch metal, the door crashes open, numbing my arm to the elbow.

  I see no one.

  Then an indistinct figure takes shape a few feet from the door, a white T-shirt cloaked in darkness. No one is more surprised than I when my right forefinger pulls the trigger on the .38. Thunderous concussions blast through the tiled cubicle, and the bald crown of a head appears as my target stares down at the holes stitching his belly and chest.

  I’m suddenly, sickeningly sure that I’ve shot some hapless truck driver who was too deaf to hear me say the bathroom was occupied.

  Then the figure falls onto his back.

  One leg of his jeans rides up his calf as he falls, revealing the bone hilt of a Bowie knife protruding from a motorcycle boot. Then the glint of nickel flashes in his left hand—a pistol. Edging up to the bathroom door, my .38 still gripped tight, I peek outside, glancing left and right.

  Nothing.

  Darting forward, I kick the pistol from the downed man’s hand, then jerk back like I would from a shot rattlesnake, half expecting it to strike in a death spasm. The pain etched in the downed man’s face signifies life.

  “Goddamn it!” shouts someone from my left.

  As I whirl toward the voice, a stranger standing at the corner of the station levels a pistol at me, and before I can aim my own a shot rings out. I tense against an impact that never comes. The stranger teeters, then grabs for the wall to steady himself.

  “Freeze!” shouts a voice with military authority.

  The wounded man raises his gun again, but before it comes level with me, something snatches away part of his skull.

  He drops to the cement with a thud that tells me he was dead when he hit.

  “Sitrep, Penn!” Tim calls from around the corner.

  “Two down. I don’t know if there’s anybody else.”

  “Assume there is! I’m coming to you.”

  Tim appears at the corner in a combat shooting posture, then turns in a fast but deliberate circle, reading the encircling darkness.

  “Annie and Mia?” I ask.