Natchez Burning (71 page)

“Who are you?” Sonny asked.

“Captain Walt Garrity, Texas Rangers.”

Sonny’s mouth worked around as though trying to raise a plug of spit. There was a lot of white showing in his eyes.

“Life or death, Sonny?” Tom said. “Life is in the van.”

“Shit,” Sonny said. Then he started walking toward the Roadtrek.

IF A MAN
is forced to choose between the truth and his father, only a fool chooses the truth.
That quote rings in my head like a mocking mantra as I pull into my parents’ driveway. Annie sits puzzled beside me. I woke her from a dead sleep an hour after realizing why I’d sought out the old photograph of Viola. After my epiphany about the night my father left me stranded at the hospital, I struggled to understand what might have resulted from their relationship, and I quickly came to the conclusion that Lincoln Turner was one possible answer. This realization must have overwhelmed me, because I quickly slipped into a dreamless coma. But while I slept, a key of some kind turned deep within me, for I started awake with my second revelation of the night. To my surprise, it concerned my mother, not my father.

When I called my mother earlier tonight—my second call of the evening—she told me my father was still asleep. The wrongness of that answer should have hit me instantly. Had this not been one of the most stressful days in all our lives, it would have, but I assumed that Dad was exhausted from the day’s events, and from grief over Viola. But when I snapped awake in my chair the second time, I knew how mistaken I’d been.

I can’t remember ever being at my parents’ house at night with my father asleep and my mother awake. Invariably, my mother lay in bed while my father dictated medical charts by phone, painted lead soldiers, read in his library, or watched movies in bed while Mom snored under the influence of her sleeping pills. Only during the day would I find my father asleep and my mother awake. As soon as this realization hit me, I knew I had to go to my parents’ house. I calmed Annie as much as I could after waking her, but during the drive over, she quickly sensed my anxiety. I took her hand in mine and told her everything would be fine, but I’m not at all confident of this.

Together we get out of the car and walk hand in hand to the carport door. On the way over, I called Chief Logan and told him to warn his patrolmen that I would be coming, but I didn’t call my mother. Ringing the bell at this hour might frighten her, but I’m unwilling to let her manipulate me any longer. If I must choose between the truth and my father … I choose the truth.

“Who is it?” Mom calls through the door.

“Penn.”

“
Penn?
What on earth? Why didn’t you call?”

“Mom, it’s cold. And I have Annie with me. Open up!”

After five seconds of silence, she flips the bolt and opens the door. I see many emotions in her face, but fear is dominant. I also see one hand hidden in the pocket of her housecoat. Whatever she’s holding there looks heavy—probably the .38 Special my father gave her decades ago.

“Why don’t you make Annie some hot chocolate?” I say, slipping past her and into the kitchen.

“I don’t need any hot chocolate,” Annie says. “Gram? Are you okay?”

I walk into the den and toward the hallway that leads to their bedroom.

“Penn!” Mom calls after me. “Your father’s exhausted. Please don’t put any more stress on him today.”

With a last look back at her, I enter the dark hall and move along it, my heart pounding with dread. Her hurried footsteps rush up behind me.

“Penn, please don’t wake—”

I whirl on her, my face hot. “He’s not in there, is he?”

She takes a deep breath and looks at the floor.

“Mom?”

When she looks up, her eyes are red. “No.”

For a few seconds the world seems to shudder on its axis. A couple of hours ago I learned my mother would lie on the stand to protect my father. But now I realize she’s been lying to
me
. How could that deception possibly help Dad? Who could it protect him from, other than me? But then the answer comes to me: my parents believe they’re protecting me by keeping me ignorant of my father’s insanely desperate act.

“Daddy?” says a small voice.

Annie stands watching us from the end of the hall. I want to comfort her, but I can scarcely get my mind around what’s happening myself. “Where is he, Mom? Tell me.”

“I don’t know,” she says, hurrying to Annie’s side.

“Is that the truth?”

She looks back at me in surrender. “Yes.”

“Do you have a way to reach him?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She hugs Annie and whispers something in her ear.

“Why do you look so mad, Daddy? Is Papa okay?”

“I’m not mad, baby. Please go back to the kitchen for a second. We’ll be right there.”

After my mother whispers something else, Annie reluctantly obeys.

I step closer to my mother so that I can keep my voice low. “He’s jumped bail?”

She nods.

“How long ago?” I ask, trying to compute how much time has elapsed since I called earlier. “Two or three hours?”

“I think he left just after lunch. I’m honestly not sure.”

I feel like a man blinded by some injury, suddenly having his bandages ripped off. I spent the second half of this day working on the assumption that I’d have the opportunity to try again to persuade Dad to save himself, and that Quentin Avery might help me do that. But the truth is that my father jumped bail hours ago, and probably fled the city.
Maybe even the country
.

A primal blast of fear surges through me. Two days ago, Viola Turner was murdered in her sickbed. Last night Glenn Morehouse was murdered almost the same way. Tonight someone tried to kill Henry Sexton. Right after that, Special Agent John Kaiser asked me if I could protect my “folks” until the FBI arrives tomorrow. I said I could. What the hell was I thinking?

“Mom, pack a bag. Right now. Clothes for three days.”

Her eyes go wide. “What?”

I take her arm and start leading her up the hall. “We’re in danger. All of us. When was the last time you talked to Dad?”

“Around noon,” she says, trying to hold her ground. “Wait!”

“We can’t. Pack the bag and bring your pistol. Don’t take more than five minutes. Annie and I will be in the kitchen.”

She stops. “Penn, I can’t leave this house.”

“Why not? Is Dad going to call you here?”

“No, but …” She doesn’t know what to say. “Where are we going? To your house?”

“Only long enough to get Annie packed. We’ve got to go into hiding. At least you and Annie do, until I can find out what’s really going on. The FBI will be here tomorrow, and things should be safer then.”

“Penn, this is crazy. Why are you saying this?”

“Because Dad’s put us all in danger! Maybe more than he understands. I hope so. But either way, I’m going to need your help with Annie.”

Mom shakes her head, reflexively resisting me. Gripping her shoulders, I lean down and look hard into her eyes. “
Annie needs you
. Now, go.
Go!
”

She hesitates five or six seconds, but then her resistance crumbles. Annie is the future of our family, and my mother cannot contemplate exposing her to danger. The decision made, she takes her pistol from her pocket and darts through the bedroom door.

TOM SAT IN
the back of Walt Garrity’s Roadtrek van, looking into the flat, uncommunicative eyes of Sonny Thornfield. They’d sat him on the edge of the six-by-six-foot bed in the rear of the van. The old Double Eagle’s hands and feet were bound with a pair of flex-cuffs that Walt had brought from Texas.

“What the hell am I doing here?” Thornfield asked.

Neither Tom nor Walt answered. Walt had explained to Tom that for their plan to work they must instill genuine terror in Thornfield. If they had more time, a different approach might work. But under the pressure they faced now, they couldn’t afford gentleness. Sonny Thornfield had to believe that they didn’t care whether he lived or died. Only then would he grasp at the only escape route they offered him.

To ensure privacy, Walt had parked the Roadtrek on the river side of the levee, near the edge of the borrow pits—the long trenches left behind where earth was “borrowed” after the 1927 flood to build the levee system that protected Louisiana from the wrath of the Mississippi River. In the decades since, those huge pits had filled with black water, cottonwood trees, and scrub vegetation, a perfect environment for snakes, fish, and alligators to thrive. More than one corpse had been found in the borrow pits over the years, and at this time of night, the only people likely to drive down here would be poachers or teenagers looking for a place to have sex. They would give the polished silver RV a wide berth.

“You guys just kidnapped me,” Sonny said resentfully. “That’s a fucking felony.”

Walt backhanded him across the face, just to set the tone of the occasion.

The old Klansman let out a screech of anger. “What the hell are
you
up to?” he asked Tom. “You aren’t supposed to leave Mississippi.”

Tom reached into his weekend bag and brought out his .357 Magnum. “I’m not supposed to be handling firearms, either. But I’m making an exception tonight.”

Thornfield’s demeanor hardly changed. He didn’t seem to believe he was in lethal danger, even after they’d driven so far from town. The low chatter of the police scanner seemed to puzzle him, but he hadn’t asked about it yet.

“You did kidnap Viola Turner in 1968,” Tom said. “You helped gang-rape her, and then you helped torture her. I know, because I’m the one who sent Ray Presley to take her back.”

For the first time, fear flickered in Thornfield’s eyes. Even dead, Ray Presley scared most people more than a live man could.

“I ain’t sayin’ shit to you,” Sonny said. “Either one of you. You might as well take me back home.”

Walt punched him in the gut, driving the wind from his lungs. Drool rolled down the old man’s chin as he straightened up.

“Are ya’ll taping this or something?” he asked, coughing violently. “The statue of limitations has run out on rape, you know. A
long
time ago. It’s like it never happened, far as the law’s concerned.”

Tom spoke patiently, as though he had all day to make his points. “You also murdered Viola’s brother, and a man named Luther Davis. There’s no stat
ute
of limitations on murder, Sonny.”

“You can’t prove that. The FBI doesn’t even think those two were murdered.”

“We’re not concerned with what the FBI thinks. Do you remember the night you got shot in the leg? The night Frank and Glenn brought you to my office? February 1968?”

Thornfield glanced down at his left leg. “What about it?”

“Viola was there that night. Her brother and Luther Davis, too. You’d gotten into a brawl with them, and I was patching them up when you got there. I know you were looking to get revenge on them. But they hid out in Freewoods, so you raped Viola to smoke them out.”

A little more of Thornfield’s defiance evaporated.

Walt squatted before him with surprising flexibility. “If you think we snatched you and drove you down here because we give a flying fuck about the law, you’re dumber than I figured.”

This time Sonny held his silence. Like Ray Presley, Walt gave off an aura of impending violence, and Sonny recognized it.

“We know you tortured them boys,” Walt said. “Presley told Tom all about it. You sliced off their service tattoos, which I take personally, you no-’count son of a bitch.”

Sonny swallowed and drew back a couple of inches.

“I’m no fan of torture,” Walt went on, as though discussing his preference in fishing lures. “Ain’t productive, as a rule. But I’ve seen it produce results. Tom and I were medics during the Korean War. We saw a lot of pain. You know what I’m talking about. You saw what the Japanese did on the islands.”

Sonny made a sour face. “I’m not scared of you, you Texas shitkicker.”

Walt sighed and glanced back at Tom. Then he patted one of the Roadtrek’s seats. “Sonny, I’ve got a toolbox under here. And Tom’s got his black bag with him. I feel pretty confident that between us, we can make whatever you and Snake Knox did to them colored boys back in sixty-eight look like a Girl Scout picnic.”

Sonny glowered at them in silence.

Walt chuckled patiently. “Yeah, a dull pocketknife dragged over one tooth for ten minutes will turn a bad outlaw into jelly. An old Ranger showed me that trick. When the blade cuts down into the dentin, the pain kicks in something fierce. Most men start talking right then. But if you go all the way down to the nerve … hell, you can’t shut ’em up after that, not even if you try. You gotta knock ’em out with a two-by-four just to stop the screamin’.”

“I’ve got some local anesthetic,” Tom said, playing the good cop as instructed. “Once you tell us what we need to know, I’ll make the pain stop.”

Sonny’s eyes tracked from Tom to Walt, then back again. “All this goddamn gummin’,” he muttered. “You haven’t said what it is you want.”

“Who killed Viola?” Tom asked.

Thornfield looked blank. “
You
did. Didn’t you?”

Walt straightened up and kicked him in the gut. Sonny doubled over, gasping for air. After half a minute, he croaked, “That’s what everybody says, ain’t it?”

“You were there that night,” Tom said. “At her sister’s house. I saw the pickup truck with the Darlington Academy sticker on the back windshield, parked a quarter mile up the road. Not long before dawn.” Darlington had been founded by the White Citizens’ Council in 1969, the year of forced integration in Natchez. “Nobody in that part of town ever went to Darlington Academy.”

Sonny was obviously working something out in his head. “Unless you got a picture, nobody’s gonna believe you about that.”

Walt lifted the seat that concealed his toolbox, then brought out a green metal case and set it in the narrow walkway between the RV’s toilet and cooktop counter. Thornfield’s eyes locked on to the box. Walt opened it and brought out a small propane torch and a friction striker. With two quick compressions of his forefinger, he lit the torch, which filled the van with a chilling hiss as he adjusted the flame to a blue needle with a white-hot core.