The Bone Tree (77 page)

Walt smiled to himself. Many times during his life he had looked up or turned at the smell of certain cigars and expected to find Tom Cage standing there.

Pithy Nolan let her gaze fall on Tom for half a minute. “I’ve heard some upsetting news,” she whispered. “About the girl Penn was set to marry.”

“I know about that.”

“Have you told Tom?”

“He knows. It’s weighing mighty heavy on him, too.”

The old woman regarded Tom again. Walt had the feeling she saw very deeply, despite her lack of medical knowledge.

“How much danger is he in?” she asked. “I don’t feel that he’s dying, but . . .”

“He could die, all right. He should be in a hospital. But this is the way he wants it.”

Pithy nodded. “He’s a stubborn man.”

“Do you know why he’s doing this?” Walt asked.

The wise eyes returned to Walt’s face. “Do you not?”

“Up to a point, I guess. But no further.”

Pithy Nolan reached down and sucked a deep inhalation from the oxygen mask on her lap. Then she said, “He’s not doing it for himself. Tom Cage almost never did anything for himself. This man takes care of people. That’s his purpose on earth. And he’ll die fulfilling it, if the gods require it.”

Walt thought about this. “Makes it a mite tough on the people who care about him.”

Pithy nodded, the ghost of a smile upon her lips. “Those who love heroes must walk a stony road.” Then the smile vanished, and her eyes pierced Walt to the quick. “Sometimes we must share their end, as well.”

At some level, Walt figured, he had always known this. “I understand.”

“I read Classics at university,” Pithy said, a hint of wistfulness in her reedy voice. “Do you remember the Spartans?”

“I think so, ma’am.”

“I didn’t care much for them. The Spartans didn’t deserve the glorification they got. But they did have a rather succinct saying that’s never left me. Nothing is more apt when things come to the sticking point.”

“What was that?”

The piercing eyes found his eyes. “‘Come back with your shield—or on it.’ Did you ever hear that saying?”

“Yes, ma’am. And I’ve been in that situation myself. With Tom, as a matter of fact.”

“You must have acquitted yourself well.”

Walt wasn’t so sure.

“My husband never returned from the war,” Pithy said quietly. “He’s resting somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. But his shield is with him. He’s sleeping in it. A Curtiss Warhawk.”

In his mind, Walt saw a brave American boy in an aging P-40 being cut to ribbons by a swarm of quicker-turning Zeros. He jumped when Pithy reached out and laid her papery hand on his. It felt featherlight, and neither warm nor cold. But through her thin skin Walt felt something like an electric current running into him.

“I’m going to send Flora in with food and tea,” she said. “Then you need rest, Captain. Marshal your strength. There’s no telling what might be required of you before this business is concluded.”

The regal old woman gave him a sad smile, then turned her chair with the touch of a finger and whirred out of the room like a queen borne upon a royal litter.

WALT AWAKENED TO
pale light leaking through the heavy drapes of the guest room. His back ached from sleeping on the cot, and his head throbbed from lack of caffeine. Rising onto one elbow, he saw that Tom was not in his bed, and his heart began to race. He scrambled up off the flimsy cot and hurried around the bed, afraid he would find his friend lying dead on the floor.

The floor was empty.

Walt rushed out to the hallway, into darkness. A column of light rose from the well of the staircase, filled with dust motes, and through its lambent swirl he saw a crack of brighter light beneath a door at the end of the corridor. Relieved, he rubbed his eyes and trudged down the hall to the bathroom.

When he opened the door, he saw Tom standing before the sink in shorts, hacking at his face with a safety razor like a man who’d decided that his beard offended God. The IV bag hung from the brass stem of a wall sconce, still trickling saline into Tom’s arm. Last night’s exhaustion had vanished from his eyes. Now they looked . . . not quite
wild,
but filled with almost messianic intensity.

“What the hell are you doing?” Walt asked.

“Shaving.” Tom hadn’t even looked in Walt’s direction. “You finally got some sleep?”

“
Why
are you shaving?”

Tom shrugged and kept hacking at his face. “It’s been a while.” He rinsed white hair from the blade and went back to the task.

Yeah, like fifty years,
Walt thought. He hadn’t seen his friend without facial hair since Korea. Tom’s white mustache and beard had become so
much a part of his identity that their absence was almost tangible. The new face being revealed in the mirror disoriented him. The strong jawline Walt remembered from the army had emerged, taking ten years off his friend.

“You look like a man with a plan,” Walt said.

“Maybe. Where’s Caitlin’s body?”

Walt didn’t like the sound of that. “I imagine they’ve got her down in Baton Rouge, awaiting autopsy. She was DOA from a gunshot, so it’s a coroner’s case.”

Tom closed his eyes and breathed like a man forced to expend a significant fraction of his energy just to move his diaphragm.

“Are you okay?” Walt asked.

“I’m functioning. Which is more than I can say for that poor girl.”

Walt waited for whatever was going to come next. Grief did strange things to people, and Tom was unlikely to be an exception.

He turned to Walt, squinching his mouth up so that he could shave the whiskers between his lips and chin. “What was Caitlin doing down in that swamp? I didn’t even ask her.”

Walt shrugged. “Searching for bodies, probably. And if she hadn’t gone down there and found you, yours would have been the next one.”

“So she took my place. You think that’s a fair trade? A thirty-five-year-old with her whole life ahead of her for a man at death’s door?”

Walt shook his head. “Life don’t work that way, pard, and you know it. What happens, happens. There’s no sense to it.”

Tom rinsed the razor again, examined his face, then went back to scraping off the remains of his beard.

“Come on,” Walt said. “What are you thinking?”

“First . . . I need to call Penn. I need to apologize.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Not unless you’re ready to turn yourself in. Penn’s being guarded by the FBI, and he’s probably pretty upset with you today. If you call him, they’re going to trace you, and—”

“I am ready, Walt.”

Walt blinked in confusion. “Ready for what?”

“On top of everything else I’ve done this week, I got Caitlin killed and I’ve turned you into a fugitive. It’s too late for me to help Caitlin, but not to help you. I figure we’re down to two choices. We can either kill Forrest Knox, or I can turn myself in to the FBI.”

Walt didn’t answer right away. He’d given the first option considerable thought during the night, and he’d decided it was suicidal. Of course, Tom already knew that, and he was probably resigned to it. Or maybe
resigned
wasn’t the right word. He was at peace with it. Drawn to it, even. The way a lot of guilty men were drawn toward death.

“As for door number one,” Walt said, “I’m not anxious to make Carmelita a widow. And I can’t see us getting out of that play alive.”

Tom turned to him and held out his right arm. “Then will you pull this damned IV out? I did it once yesterday, and it wasn’t much fun.”

“I will, if you tell me about that second option.”

Tom dropped his arm to his side. “On Thursday, Caitlin told me that Agent Kaiser would offer me protective custody if I could give the Bureau information about the Kennedy assassination.”

Walt had to think about this for a minute. “The Kennedy assassination?”

“That’s right.”

“What the hell do you know about that?”

“More than you’d think, I’m sorry to say. I knew Carlos Marcello back in New Orleans, when I was a medical extern at the parish prison. Our paths crossed a few times after that, and I got pulled into something I didn’t really understand.”

Walt felt as though the floor had shifted beneath him. “Well, ain’t you full of surprises.”

“The point is, I may be able to buy protection from Kaiser with what I know. Hopefully for you and me both. And I think it’s high time I did.”

“How exactly are you going to do this without getting killed?”

“You’re going to coordinate the negotiation, with those burn phones of yours. And I’m going to arrange a surrender in a very public place.”

“It sounds like you already have somewhere in mind.”

“I do.”

Walt sighed, dreading the answer. “I’m afraid to ask.”

“It’s somewhere I would have gone anyway. Henry Sexton’s funeral.”

“Oh, hell. That’s crazy. You’d be recognized and arrested before you could cross the church parking lot.”

Tom patted his clean-shaven face. “I don’t think so.”

“
That’s
your idea of a disguise?”

Tom nodded with surprising confidence.

Walt had to admit he might not have recognized his friend in a crowd if he hadn’t known about the missing beard ahead of time. And even then . . .

Tom tossed his wet towel into the bathtub, where it landed with a slap. “I’m the last person the Knoxes would expect to show up at that funeral. And if
they
show, we’ll let Kaiser worry about them.”

“Where’s Sexton’s funeral gonna be? Louisiana, I’d guess.”

“The Early Funeral Home in Ferriday,” Tom confirmed. “Jim Early owns that business. I’ve known him thirty-five years. He’s buried many a patient of mine. Visitation probably doesn’t start until nine
A.M.
at the earliest. It’s only six thirty now. Jim’ll let us in before anybody gets there, and then he can smuggle us over to the church without anybody the wiser.”

Walt slapped his thigh. “You’re some damn piece of work, I swear. You’ve got cops from two states and the FBI on your tail, and you want to visit a funeral home to see a dead man who’ll never even know you were there? If you want to turn yourself in, call Kaiser and arrange to do it in the middle of nowhere. Hell, do it
here
! This old mausoleum is perfect.”

Tom’s gaze remained on Walt, his eyes cold and leaden with intransigence. “Henry Sexton died in part because of things I did. Also things I didn’t do. I’m going to pay my respects to him, even if it is too late.”

Walt shook his head. “You’re suicidal, bud.”

“What if that was you lying dead over in Ferriday?”

“I’d yell up from the fiery furnace for you to light out while you could and pour a whiskey for me later, once you were safe and dry.”

“No, you wouldn’t. So get this damned IV out of me.” Tom held out his arm and made a fist.

“Mrs. Nolan ain’t gonna like this plan,” Walt grumbled.

“Wait and see.”

Remembering last night’s strange conversation, Walt decided Tom might be right. “I think she’s had some sort of vision about the end of this business. And I think maybe we die in it.”

Before Tom could answer, Walt yanked the IV catheter out of his wrist and pressed Tom’s free thumb against the bloody hole.

“We all die,” Tom said, scanning the floor for something. “I’ve been watching it from the bedside for fifty years. It’s
how
you go that matters—not when. You know that. That’s why you came to Mississippi when I called. Now, help me find my goddamn pants.”

SPECIAL AGENT BOYD
Bertolet watched Snake Knox and four other men in their seventies walk out of the main entrance of the Concordia Sheriff’s Department and pause at the top of the stairs.

“Looks like a geriatric walking club,” said his partner, Sheila Stowers.

Boyd saw at least three vehicles waiting to pick up the newly released Double Eagles. “Watch who gets in what car. Do you recognize Snake?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sheila said. “He’s the wiry old fucker. The crankiest-looking bastard in the bunch.”

“I don’t even get why the boss is letting them out. You know they killed Thornfield yesterday. Even if that meth disappeared, we could have held them—especially with Kaiser invoking the Patriot Act.”

“Kaiser knows what he’s doing,” Sheila said. “If he’s letting these guys walk, he’s got a damn good reason. But you and I won’t ever be told what it is. We’ll just have to pay attention down the line.”

Three Double Eagles walked down the steps, then climbed into the waiting cars and pickup trucks. Snake accompanied the last man, but Boyd didn’t see him get into any vehicle. Instead, Snake seemed to be walking along the front wall of the courthouse, away from the vehicles.

“Where’s he going?” Boyd asked.

“I don’t know,” Sheila said, a note of concern in her voice.

“Do you see anybody waiting to pick him up over that way?”

“Nope. Just parked cars.”

Bertolet grunted and watched Snake Knox walk toward the edge of the parking lot, which abutted the parking lot of a single-story shopping center on the east side of the courthouse.

“I’ll bet somebody’s waiting for him in a car over in that lot,” Sheila guessed. “Whoever it is didn’t want the courthouse cameras to record their face. Let’s see if we can get a look.”

She picked up her radio and called a second surveillance car, asked
them to pull into the shopping center lot and be sure they saw Knox get into whatever vehicle was waiting for him.

“He moves pretty good for a seventy-year-old man,” Boyd commented.

“He still flies crop dusters, which means he’s a long way from dead. Let’s pull out to the main road. We’ll pick them up when they leave the lot.”

“Let’s give it a minute,” Boyd said, keeping his eyes on Snake’s diminishing figure.

“Uh-oh,” Sheila said.

“What?”

“Look.” She pointed toward the shopping center. Snake Knox had just climbed onto an orange-and-white motorcycle and kick-started it. Bertolet could see smoke blooming from the exhaust pipe.

“Tell me that’s not a dirt bike,” he said.

“It’s a dirt bike. Looks like a 250.”

“Fuck.”

Boyd jammed the Ford into gear and hit the accelerator, but even as he did he saw Snake pull onto the grass lawn beside the shopping center, then spin a shower of gravel into the air as he took off toward the tree line far behind the stores. His front wheel lifted off the ground from the force of his acceleration.

“Look at that shit!” Boyd cried.

“I told you,” Sheila said. “A goddamn crop duster. What do you expect?” She keyed her radio and said, “What are you waiting for? Get this car up onto the grass and try to stay with him.”

“There’s no way,” Boyd said. “He’ll be in those trees in thirty seconds, and without air support, he might as well be in Mexico. He’s gone.”

“I know.”

“We need a goddamn drone.”

“I wonder if we have an aircraft close,” Stowers said. “Kaiser might divert the chopper to keep eyes on Snake Knox.”

“Give it a try,” Boyd said, aiming the Ford at the space between the courthouse and the shopping center. “I sure wish this was a rental.”

SNAKE WAS THREE MILES
from the courthouse when he stopped the Honda. He’d lost the FBI after the first half mile, as he’d known he would,
so he’d taken care to ride the last two miles under heavy tree cover. He’d found the pistol and the cell phone he’d requested in a leather bag attached to the handlebars, and during the ride over, he’d called his illegitimate son and told him to be parked by a certain borrow pit fifteen minutes later. Unlike the pit where Deke Dunn had died, this one lay north of Highway 84, but otherwise the topography was the same.

Snake put the motorcycle back in gear, rode to the edge of the water, then stashed the bike behind some thick cottonwoods and waited. If Forrest meant to kill him, it was likely to happen here, now.

After two minutes, a navy blue pickup truck nosed up the little dirt road, stopped thirty feet from the water, and fell silent. Through the windshield Snake saw two familiar faces. One belonged to Alois Engel—his son—the other to Wilma Deen. He wondered how far he could trust them. Most bastard sons carried a heavy burden of anger, and Alois was no different. And while Wilma was no fan of Forrest’s, she didn’t like Snake much better, considering how he’d treated her over the years. He’d screwed her when she was young and attractive and ignored her all the decades since.

Snake listened hard for other engine sounds, but he heard none.

After another minute, he walked into the open with his pistol in his hand and beckoned them out of the truck. They moved naturally as they got out—no shared glances or any other signs of nerves—so Snake calmed down a little.

“Everything cool?” Alois asked.

“Worked like a charm,” Snake said, walking toward the truck. “The Fibbies don’t know what hit ’em.”

“What do we do now?”

Snake studied the boy before he answered. Alois looked nothing like him. Snake saw his mother in the blond hair and too-close-together eyes. “Dump the bike in the water,” he said, “and get the hell out of here. It’s over behind those trees.”

Alois nodded and went to take care of it. When he was out of earshot, Wilma said, “I don’t like your boy much. Thinks he knows everything.”

“Shows the apple don’t fall far from the tree.”

She laughed bitterly. “You got that right.” Wilma looked over her shoulder and watched Alois run the Honda into the black water. “Look, before he gets back,” she said, “I heard something you might want to know.”

“What’s that?”

“I got a friend who works part-time at the motel where them FBI agents are staying.”

“And?”

“She tells me her manager asked her to plant some bugs in their rooms yesterday.”

Snake went on alert. He’d heard nothing about this from Forrest. “Keep going. Who’s this manager?”

“Name’s Wade Kimball.”

Snake smiled. Kimball’s father had been a Klansman back in the day, and the son fancied himself a right-wing blogger. “Little Wade,” Snake said. “Forrest must have put him up to that. Where else would he get the bugs? Does your friend know who’s monitoring the transmissions?”

“Kimball himself, she thinks. He’s been locked up in his office ever since the bugs went in.”

Snake couldn’t believe his luck.

Alois walked back up to them and said, “What now?”

“Now?” Snake grinned. “Now we’re gonna kill some people.”

The boy’s mouth twitched a couple of times, then broke into a slit of a smile. After years of waiting, the hard-core action he’d been craving was at hand. Snake had figured Alois would be more than ready.

“Who?” Alois asked.

“Penn Cage and his old man. Maybe even that FBI agent, Kaiser.”

Wilma drew back her head, her eyes unbelieving. “That sounds pretty damn stupid to me.”

“You want to go sit home and watch your soap operas, go ahead.”

“I’m ready,” Alois said. “Where are they?”

“The mayor’s home right now and covered by about twenty cops. But later on, he won’t be. And neither will his father.”

“Where’ll they be?”

“I’d lay odds on Henry Sexton’s funeral.”

“How do you know that?” Wilma asked.

“Because that’s what guys like them do. They follow the rules, observe the social niceties. And that makes it easy for us to pick them up.”

“Are we going to hit them
at
the funeral?” Alois asked, his eyes wide.

“Depends on who else is there. We might do it there, or right after. Or we might wait and stage something interesting. But either way, we move today.”