Natchez Burning (110 page)

As Brody reaches into his pocket for his cell phone, a staccato series of bangs reverberates through the house above us. The ceiling muffles the explosions, but they’re clearly gunfire.

“Son of a bitch,” Regan curses, trying to shrug the straps of the flamethrower off his shoulders. “Time to bolt. We’ll take them with us. The Rover’s in the garage.”

“Stay where you are,” Brody says, watching the ceiling like an astronomer trying to decipher unexpected celestial movements. “It’s too late to run anyway.”

“But—”

“Shut up, damn you!
Listen
.”

HENRY SEXTON FELT
like he was trapped in a childhood nightmare, so slowly did his body obey his brain. The gunfight had started in the hall, as soon as Sleepy Johnston tried and failed to respond to a question called by one of the guards to “Lee”—who now lay dead out by the road. Sleepy had already fired half a clip, crossing the hall to another bedroom as he did, trying to get a clean shot at the men at the end of the dark corridor. A man had screamed down there, and Henry hoped he’d been hit, but he couldn’t be sure.

“
Henry!
” Johnston screamed from across the hall. “Need some help here!”

When Henry finally reached the bedroom door, three shots blasted from the end of the hall, and splinters of Sheetrock stung his eyes. Sleepy let off two quick shots in return, and something fell heavily down the hall.

“
Don’t fire!
” Sleepy shouted, and then he rushed into the hall, firing as he ran. As Henry peeked out, four shots exploded from the direction of the TV room. Something punched his left shoulder, and wetness ran down the left side of his rib cage. He looked down. Dark blood covered the white plaster of his cast.

Not again,
he thought dully.

Henry backed into the bedroom, wobbling as he went, then fell on his ass. From the noise in the hall, Sleepy seemed to be holding his own, but then everything went quiet. That silence filled Henry with dread. If Sleepy was dead, he’d never make it out, either.

He heard footsteps creeping up the hallway.

“
I’m empty!
” Sleepy shouted, his voice desperate. “
Now or never, Henry!
”

Swearing to himself, Henry scrabbled to his knees, then knee-walked to the open door, twisted to his right, and fired blindly at a figure only ten feet away.

The shotgun roared, then roared again, lighting the hall with fire. The dark figure hurtled backward and fell heavily to the floor. A forearm rose like a flag of surrender, but then Henry saw a pistol in its hand. He shut his eyes and fired twice more, then began crawling forward.

“Sleepy?” he called. “Where are you?”

Johnston stepped out of a door to Henry’s left, his dark face covered with white dust. “Jesus, man, you sure took your time.” He carefully pulled Henry to his feet. “They got your shoulder, looks like. Hurt bad?”

Henry shook his head. “I can’t really feel it yet. I’ve got a lot of drugs in me.”

Sleepy looked down at the gunman lying nearest them. Henry followed his gaze. At least one of Henry’s shots had taken the man dead center.
Dead,
he thought, thankful that his emotions were dulled by chemicals.

“We’d better move,” Sleepy said. “Shouldn’t be anybody left but Mr. Royal and his son-in-law, if that guy outside told the truth. But if we don’t find that basement quick, they’ll be gone and your friends dead.”

A searing pain arced through Henry’s abdomen, and the OxyContin didn’t blunt it at all. Either his knife wound had reopened, or something else was going on. As he tried to gather himself, the hand that held his mother’s shotgun began to shake.

“Let’s go,” he gasped, after he got his breath. “You’re right. I don’t think we have much time.”

WHILE THE GUNS
thundered upstairs, Royal told his son-in-law that if the FBI had come, there was no point trying to break out. Better to wait for an arrest and try to find a way to flee the country. But as he listened to the pounding of feet, the quick pops of pistols, and the muffled roar of a shotgun, he said, “I don’t think that’s the FBI. They’d have hit both floors at once. And we wouldn’t be hearing their rounds.”

“Sheriff Dennis?” Regan suggests, his body taut with the effort of holding his ground while his instincts tell him to run.

Royal shakes his head, one hand held high like a sensitive antenna. No guns have fired for several seconds. “Get over by a shooting station and cover them. Then sit tight and see what comes through that door.”

In the subsequent silence, Caitlin and I look steadily at each other, more feeling passing between us than ever has through the medium of language. A few moments ago, death seemed certain; now our hearts thunder with hope that someone has come for us.

Regan backs into one of the shooting-station partitions, his flamethrower trained on Caitlin and me, but we ignore him. Brody moves quietly across the floor to the firing range door. Flattening himself to one side, he waits with his pistol drawn and ready.

In the adjoining gun room, a door crashes open with a muted impact. Twenty seconds of silence follow.

“Mayor Cage!” shouts an unfamiliar voice. “Are you in there?”

My heart leaps. Whoever has come for us seems to have won the gun battle upstairs.
But who are they?
SWAT officers led by either John Kaiser or Walker Dennis? The leader’s voice sounds older, though.
Walt Garrity, maybe?
Or Chief Logan, from Natchez?
Sometimes the local departments practice mobilizing a multi-force SWAT team.

I want to shout a warning, but Regan’s face tells me he’ll fire the flamethrower if I do. Yet waiting will guarantee casualties among our rescuers. No amount of body armor will protect a man from burning gasoline.

Brody tenses at the sound of further movement in the gun room, but there’s no fear in his face or posture. Still glaring at me, Regan aims the flamethrower at Caitlin to ensure my silence.

“Royal!” yells the voice from the gun room, now sounding strangely familiar. “We know you have Mayor Cage and Caitlin Masters down here! Send them out!”

I know that voice, but the speech seems impaired … yet even that sounds familiar. “Oh, no,” I say under my breath.
Henry? Impossible
—

“The FBI’s on their way!” yells the voice.

Hope dies within me. In Caitlin, too, I can tell. If John Kaiser were coming for us, Henry Sexton would still be back in his hospital bed.

Brody looks back at Regan with a smile, then gives him a thumbs-up. Ever the astute gambler, he’s already guessed the truth: a SWAT assault would have unfolded very differently from this. I’m almost ready to shout a warning regardless of the consequences, but Caitlin beats me to it.

“Stay back, Henry! It’s an ambush!”

Before her last word fades, someone kicks open the firing-range door.

No one comes through.

As we stare at the empty doorway, a black object skitters through it and slides across the floor. Royal and Regan throw up their arms, expecting a grenade, but it’s only a walkie-talkie.

A tinny version of Henry Sexton’s voice emerges from the black radio. “You’re surrounded, Royal. Send out your hostages.”

While Royal and Regan stare at the walkie-talkie, a black man darts through the door, a pistol held in front of him as he scans the room for targets.

Brody takes one step and lays his gun against the back of the man’s head. “Drop it,” he says. “Drop it now, or I pull the trigger.”

Left with no choice, the man drops his gun.

He’s obviously no SWAT operator. Dressed in work boots, jeans, and a dark jacket, he looks like a stranger to me. A sixty-five-year-old stranger. Then I see the gothic
D
on his black baseball cap, and a sadness unlike anything I’ve ever known suffuses me. Henry has done the
one thing
that could worsen our situation—and make our defeat more complete. He’s brought “Gates Brown” straight into the arms of Brody Royal.

As I turn toward Caitlin, Henry steps through the basement door in a raincoat, a shotgun held before him, its barrel aimed at Royal’s head. Henry’s head is bandaged, and a huge bloodstain soaks his shoulder and sleeve, but he looks ready and willing to pull the trigger.

“
Wait!
” Brody cries, total submission embodied in the word.

Henry shakes his head and answers in a mournful voice: “I’m tired of waiting.” And then he fires.

The deadest click in the world echoes through the tunnel.

Brody reels backward as though hit, then rebounds and cracks his pistol across Henry’s face. The black man starts to go for Brody, but spies Regan covering him with the flamethrower from his left. Henry wobbles on his feet, then falls to the concrete like dead weight and doesn’t move. I jump to the end of my chain, but it’s pointless. Brody and the stranger are at least fifteen yards away from me, and Regan is even farther.

Brody kicks the black man’s gun across the floor to Regan, who aims the jet pipe at the stranger and barks, “Who the fuck are you?”

“You heard the man,” says Brody, covering the newcomer with his pistol.

“Nobody,” says the stranger. “I ain’t nobody.”

Brody knocks the baseball cap off the man’s head, exposing nappy white hair. “Henry?” Brody says with obvious curiosity. “Who’s your pet nigger?”

Henry doesn’t stir. Brody steps hard on the reporter’s shoulder wound, but a muffled groan is the only response.

“Give me your wallet, boy,” Brody says, jerking his pistol.

The stranger stares sullenly into Brody’s eyes, but he obeys.

Royal snatches the outstretched wallet, extracts a driver’s license, and reads aloud from it: “Marshall Johnston, Junior. Detroit, Michigan.
Michigan
?”

Randall Regan shrugs.

Brody pulls out his cell phone and dials a number. “Claude Devereux knows every family in this parish, black or white.”

One minute later, Royal’s lawyer fulfills his client’s faith. Marshall Johnston Jr. belongs to a black family from Wisner, a one-horse cotton town about fifteen miles away. According to Claude Devereux, folks called the son “Sleepy.”

“Well, well,” Brody says to Johnston. “You’re the friend of that Wilson boy, aren’t you? The one who raped my daughter.”

“Pooky never raped nobody,” says Sleepy Johnston. “Your little girl chased him first. That’s what got them together in the first place.”

A strange tremor goes through Brody. He walks slowly around Johnston. “You know what’s pathetic, boy? You ran away from Louisiana after your friend died. You did whatever you did up north all these years—some factory job, I imagine—but you never really got away. All that time you were circling right back home, like a rabbit to the hunter.”

Brody stares at Johnston for several seconds, then motions for Regan to cover him as he walks back to the gun room. I hear a drawer open and close. When Brody returns, he’s holding something in his hand. All the humanity has drained out of his face, leaving only stony hatred.

“Your daughter loved Pooky Wilson,” Caitlin says suddenly. “I could see it this afternoon, when I spoke to her.”

“That’s a
lie,
” Brody growls. “That boy defiled my flesh and blood. He broke the law.”

“What law?”

“The
first
law.”

“Miscegenation?” I offer.

Brody nods. “Trust a lawyer to know his history. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I meant the
unwritten
law. I never had any real problem with nigras. But you don’t mix blood through the white female. Albert Norris knew that rule, and he flouted it. The Wilson boy did, too. Even his friends warned him away from my daughter, but he wouldn’t listen.
That
nigger had to have his way, like a mutt wanting to mount a pure-blooded bitch. And the result?”

Brody holds up the item in his hand. About eight inches long, it looks like an ivory file with a leather handle. “I’ve been opening letters with that boy’s cock for forty-one years.”

Caitlin gasps.

Johnston stares in horror at the obscene artifact.

“Handsome, isn’t it?” Brody turns it in the light, which reflects dully off the osseous material. “Frank Knox carved the blade out of that boy’s arm bone, and Snake tanned the skin of his cock for the handle. They made me a razor strop, too. White man’s skin on one side, black on the other. The black side is used for coarse sharpening, the white for finishing. I’ll use that on Pithy’s razor before I go see her.” He touches the duct tape on his neck. “I think it’s gone a little dull over the years.”

“How did Pooky die?” Johnston asks through clenched teeth, eyeing the gun that Brody still wields with his other hand. “You crucify him, like I’ve heard?”

“Not exactly. When I first heard he’d spilled his seed in my little girl, I told Frank I wanted that boy skinned alive. Well, they caught him quick enough. And they took him out to that tree in Lusahatcha County. The Bone Tree. But flaying a man’s a tricky business. To do it right, you need a knife called a dermatome. Snake didn’t have one. He tried his best with a Buck knife, but it turned into such a mess they couldn’t hold that boy still no matter what they used.”

Hearing the old man describe this atrocity with such clinical detachment short-circuits some part of my being, leaving me nearly paralyzed.

“You were
there,
” Caitlin intones.

The light in Brody’s eyes tells me that he was. “In the end, they just nailed him up to the tree. Frank said it had been done there before, back during the War Between the States.”

With a sound like the voice of retribution, Johnston says, “I know why you done what you did. Why you tore that poor boy up so bad. Your little girl not only loved Pooky. She was carrying his child.”

Brody jerks back as though the words had struck him physically. Then he smacks Johnston across the face with his gun.

Johnston staggers but holds his feet, his eyes filled with irrefutable truth. “You didn’t just kill Pooky. I know that child was never born. You killed your
own flesh and blood
. You might as well have killed your daughter, too. You killed her soul right then. And you damned your own.”