Natchez Burning (109 page)

My chain appears to have about five feet of play in it. The slightest leg movement will make it rattle. As slowly as I can, I arch my neck back, searching for Caitlin.
There
. Fifteen feet away, she stands trussed to a steel pole like a witch condemned to burn at the stake. Her right cheek looks pink and swollen, as from a blow, and her eyes are bereft of hope.

Beyond my line of sight, Brody says something to Randall Regan in a low voice, but I hear nothing of the men from the van. With any luck, they’re gone. Hoping to further assess our situation before Royal or Regan realizes I’m awake, I tilt my head a little farther back, taking great care to keep my eyes barely open.

Brody Royal’s firing range appears to be a long tunnel cut deep into the earth. Five shooting lanes wide and forty yards long, it’s lined with cinder-block walls, floored with cement, and fitted with ceiling-mounted sprinkler heads every few yards. Steel support poles rise from the concrete floor to the basement ceiling, and it’s one of these to which Caitlin has been tied. Harsh fluorescent light floods the vast space, giving it the look of a chamber Reinhard Heydrich designed to torture Czech resistance fighters.

As I expected, long metal tracks line the ceiling, receding into the distance, where targets with human figures printed on them hang against a wall of bullet-pocked railroad ties. Three targets show Muslim terrorists with red crescents painted on their checked keffiyehs. Two more show the famous “running nigger” from the 1960s: a cartoonish silhouette of a black man with an Afro haircut, running in profile, with red target dots printed on his kneecaps, his buttocks, his chest, his mouth, and his temple.

Halfway to the far wall sit the two boxes brought by the professional guards, as though awaiting disposal. A few feet away from me sits an odd collection of equipment, so carefully laid out that it must have been brought here for us: a large chrome fire extinguisher; a thick roll of Visqueen; a red plastic bucket; and, strangest of all, what looks like some sort of man-portable welding system, with two gas cylinders on a frame, connected to a woven hose and a pipe. Beside this antique-looking apparatus I see the legs of Royal and Regan, who seem to be staring at Caitlin.

As I try to divine the purpose of the equipment, Regan takes a couple of steps toward me and kicks me savagely in the ribs. Air explodes from my throat as something cracks in my side.

“He’s awake now.”

“Then let’s find out where we stand and get this done,” Brody says. “Suit up, Randall.”

Regan hands Brody his pistol, then walks to the eerily familiar contraption on the floor. Slipping his arm through one khaki strap, he shoulders the horizontal cylinders like a backpack, then settles the thing squarely on his frame. It actually looks like some sort of antique scuba rig, but instinct tells me its purpose is to end life, not to preserve it.

“Recognize that?” Royal asks, as I finally guess what Regan is wearing. “It’s a Flammenwerfer 41. Kraut flamethrower. Excellent unit, like most German-engineered gear. Shoots a mixture of oil and tar. The combination comes out a lot like napalm.”

To my amazement, Brody seems to have patched his neck wound with duct tape, though I remember him saying something about superglue. “As a point of interest,” he goes on, “this is the very weapon we used on Albert Norris. It’s a bit heavy for me now, so I’m going to let Randall do the preliminary work.”

Henry Sexton’s description of Norris’s awful death comes back to me in a rush, triggering a cold sweat from head to toe. Caitlin’s eyes beseech mine, searching for a sign of hope, but I can’t summon any.

Royal turns a valve on the back of the unit, then taps one of the cylinders twice and says, “Light up the jet pipe, Randall.”

When Regan pulls a trigger on a striker unit, the basement fills with a sound that starts my bowels roiling. It’s a hiss blended with a soft roar, the sound of liquid fire waiting to be unleashed. At the end of the firing pipe in Regan’s hand, a deep blue jet with an orange core glows like the key to hell.

“Hydrogen pilot flame,” says Royal, taking a pack of Camel cigarettes from his pocket and shaking one loose. As if replaying an old routine, Regan holds up the jet pipe and Brody leans down over the hissing flame with the Camel in his mouth. He draws on the cigarette once, puffing blue smoke, then straightens up and takes a long drag.

“Best damned cigarette lighter in the world. Ask any Wehrmacht veteran. Singe off your eyebrows, though, if you’re not careful.”

“Let’s do it,” Regan says.

“Wait,” says Brody, picking up the paper bag from in the gun room and dumping our cell phones into the red bucket. Then he removes the microcassette from the recorder we used to make my copy. “A little demonstration.” After dropping the crumpled bag into the bucket, he carries it downrange and sets it atop the two banker’s boxes.

An involuntary whimper comes from Caitlin’s throat.

Regan laughs.

“Aim low,” Brody tells him, taking care to stay near the wall as he walks back to us. “I switched off the fire alarms. You don’t want to burn the goddamn house down.”

Bracing the pipe against his hip, Regan pulls the trigger.

A blast of flame reaches downrange like the hand of Lucifer. In less than three seconds, the ravenous fire devours the bucket and its contents like a campfire eating a paper cup, and the smell of burnt plastic joins that of gasoline and tar. When the flame vanishes, what remains is a red puddle on the burning boxes. Half the oxygen seems to have been sucked from the tunnel.

“So much for your evidence,” Brody says.

Acrid black petroleum smoke is gathering beneath the ceiling like a fog, but he appears unconcerned. “Don’t worry, this place has OSHA-grade air handlers and a world-class sprinkler system.”

“There are two more copies of that tape,” I tell him, wondering why I didn’t go this route before. “They’re with lawyer friends of mine, and they’ll be given to the FBI upon my death.”

Royal probes me with his gambler’s eyes. “The tapes don’t actually worry me much, Mayor. My daughter was delusional all her life. Katy was a known alcoholic and drug addict, and she had a suicidal dose of narcotics in her system when that recording was made. It’s the witness I care about. He’s the only reason you’re still alive.”

Holding the cigarette at shoulder height—the height of Caitlin’s face—Brody steps closer to her. While her eyes track the glowing orange flame, Royal takes Pithy’s straight razor from his back pocket and turns it in the air until it catches the light.

“I do remember this,” he murmurs. “Quite well, actually. I bought it off a madam who’d worked in Storyville as a girl. It’s a terror weapon, really, made for teaching whores lessons, not for killing. The blade is too fragile.” He cocks his head at Caitlin. “You actually remind me of Pithy Nolan in some ways. She thought she knew it all, too. How strange that this gift circled all the way back to me after all this time … and nearly killed me. I believe I’ll pay Pithy a visit next week. Get reacquainted.”

As I try to hide my fear for Pithy, he says, “Ladies’ choice, Ms. Masters. The flame or the knife?”

She gazes back at him without fear. “What are you hoping to find out? I don’t know the name.”

Royal touches the duct tape ringing his neck. “I’m sorry I can’t take your word for that.”

After another contemplative drag off the Camel, he reaches out and cups his left hand behind Caitlin’s head. Then he draws the blade of the straight razor from the corner of her eye to the crease at the edge of her mouth.

I scream, but when he pulls away the blade, I see no blood.
He was just teasing her …

As Caitlin and I sag with relief, Royal stabs the tip of the cigarette into her left cheek, pressing it deep into the skin. The pole clangs as she yanks her head away, banging her skull against the steel.

An angry red welt like a bullet wound has risen in the center of her once-perfect cheek. I kick my manacled leg away from the pillar, hoping to break a weak link, but it’s pointless. Caitlin is moaning now. Tears pour from her eyes. Stooping, I seize the chain with both hands and yank it as hard as I can. In seconds, my palms are lacerated and bleeding.

“All is vanity,” murmurs Royal, stepping behind her. “Amazing what the prospect of a permanent scar will do to motivate a woman.”

Now Caitlin’s trembling from head to toe. The old man draws on the cigarette, and its tip glows bright again. My chain clinks and rattles as I try to break free from the wall, but it’s no use.

Royal beckons his son-in-law forward, and Regan obeys, brandishing the flamethrower. “Do you know what German infantrymen nicknamed the Flammenwerfer?” Brody muses.
“Skinstealer.”

This nickname has its intended effect. Brody may not see it, but the threat of imminent agony and disfigurement has unsettled the deepest part of Caitlin’s being. Outwardly, though, she somehow remains composed.

“Now … about that witness.”

Caitlin closes her eyes and turns her head away from her tormentor.

“The tip of that cigarette was about a thousand degrees Fahrenheit,” Brody says. “The Flammenwerfer burns at twenty-five hundred. The pain you feel now is like a paper cut compared to it.” He pulls a strand of black hair from her eyes. “Can you imagine? I honestly can’t.”

As I struggle maniacally to free myself, Brody stares at me as he might a troublesome dog. “Save yourself the pain, Cage. That chain is tempered steel.”

Still I struggle, shredding my palms on the chain. Only one thing is going to stop this torture—a name
.
But whose? I don’t even have enough raw data to make up a credible candidate for “Huggy Bear.” What was the name from her phone? Rambin …?

“I don’t know the witness’s name,” Caitlin says in an exhausted voice, “but he’s out there. And he
will
tell his story. It will probably be our deaths that finally push him to go to the FBI. He’ll tell them what he knows”—Caitlin looks Royal full in the face—“and that will be the end of
you
.”

He peers into her eyes as though intrigued. “How subtle are you, I wonder?” Then he walks behind her again, and her whole body shudders. When Brody circles back in front of her, she practically folds her shoulder blades around the pole to get away from him. On the third circuit, he takes out the razor and severs the rope binding her wrists. Then he backs away to give his son-in-law a clear field of fire.

“Pay attention, Princess. I want you to hold your arm as far away from your body as you can. It’s for your own good, believe me. If you can keep it far enough away, you might lose no more than your hand and forearm.”

I realize I’m clenching and unclenching my own hands. Why else would they have freed my hands except to use them in the same way?

Whatever self-control Caitlin still possesses is fast draining away. Her face is so pale that even the cigarette burn has lost its redness.

“
We don’t know the name!
” I scream at Brody. “Torturing us won’t change that!”

“
You
don’t know it,” he says with calm assurance. “But I’ll tell you what I think. I think she winkled the name out of Sexton but kept it from you. She knew she couldn’t trust you not to use it as currency to buy your father back.”

Could he be right?

“Your arm,” Brody says patiently, trying to penetrate Caitlin’s now-infantile terror. “Hold it
way
out to the side, like this.” The old man extends his left arm, then tilts his head far in the opposite direction and covers his eyes with his other hand. “You don’t want your face spoiled any worse than it already is, do you?”

As Randall Regan tests the trigger, a three-foot jet of fire spurts from the pipe in his hand, roaring like an overfilled propane barbecue grill erupting into flame. Royal motions him farther back.

Regan backs up until he’s twenty yards away from Caitlin, then squares the cylinders on his shoulders, preparing to fire. “I’m going to walk it up from the floor.”

“Try to keep it off her legs. I want her able to talk, at least, after the first blast.”

My field of vision tunnels down to Caitlin’s face: the fresh burn scar on her cheek, the abject terror in her eyes. I half expect her to faint, but after five or six seconds, she slowly lifts her right hand and holds it away from her body. As the pilot jet roars softly, I say a silent prayer:
For God’s sake, give him a name, any name at all
—

Regan’s finger crooks into the trigger guard.

“
Gates Brown!
” Caitlin screams. “His name is Gates Brown!”

After so much tension, these two simple words silence the room as surely as the arrival of a stranger.

To my surprise, Brody holds up his hand to stop Regan from firing. Caitlin is sobbing softly, like a broken woman. “Gates Brown” seems to have triggered some association in Royal’s mind, one he can’t quite place. I only pray that he’s not as big a baseball fan as John Kaiser’s radioman in Vietnam. Of course, his son-in-law might be—

“She’s lying,” Regan says. “Look at her. Let me do her, Brody. It’s the only way to know for sure.”

“Quiet,” Royal snaps, watching Caitlin with suspicion. “I remember that name, Randall.
Gates Brown
…”

Sweat glistens on Regan’s face. “She’s lying, I tell you!”

When Brody ignores him, Regan fires another blast downrange, filling the tunnel with a hellish flare. The burning oil flies thirty yards in the air, then hits the concrete floor and slides along it like a fiery flood until it meets the wall of rail ties.

“
Goddamn
it!” Brody shouts. “I said
wait
!”

Regan refuses to meet Brody’s eyes. “She’s not gonna tell you without the fire.”

Picking up the fire extinguisher, Brody hurries down to the wall and sprays the base of the blaze that Regan unleashed, but the foam does little to smother the napalm-like mixture. After a few more attempts, he sets down the silver canister and walks back up to Caitlin.

“Are you playing me, girl?”

“No. Gates Brown visited Henry Sexton in the hospital, and he signed the deputy’s book. The man had to show his driver’s license. I’ll bet Forrest Knox can have somebody check that.”