Zion (23 page)

Tom went outside and talked to the deputy marshal at the end of the driveway. Wentworth radioed and relayed to Brownlow that the cat had climbed out of the sack. Brownlow drove over immediately in his pickup truck.

The marshal and Tom sat on the front porch.

“Look, Tom, this is just a real heartbreaking thing that’s happened to your family. And I’d understand if you were not agreeable, but I have a plan on how to go after Jim Cate. I want to make you my deputy marshal, unpaid, of course, so we can apprehend the man together. I really need your help.”

Tom was surprised. He was silent, unsure what to say. His wife was in shock where she lay inside the old farm house. He had his son’s services to plan, and his own grief to bear.

The marshal stared at Tom. “I hate to be direct, but I need your answer now and not later. Yes or no? If you want to help me, I need you to follow my lead. Categorically, I don’t want no mavericks going off the reservation. We’ll need to go hunt him down today. Hell, I need you to help me find him.”

“I’ll do it,” Tom said.

The marshal drove Tom to get a late breakfast at Pete’s Café in Milltown. He went inside and brought back two bags of egg, bacon, and sausage biscuits, and two paper cups of coffee. They ate the meals in the truck.

By the time they returned to Zion and finished loading the truck for the trip to Mississippi, it was already noon. The marshal put the hounds in the cage-like dog kennel in the truck bed. He warned Tom about Dixie. “Tom, the gyp’ll bite. Be careful around her,” he said.

They returned to Tom’s house a mile away. The truck had a siren, lights, and NINTH WARD MARSHAL stenciled on both doors. Brownlow sat in the cab and waited for Tom to gather his things.

Tom put his Savage 99 lever action rifle in the gun rack in the marshal’s truck glass, and he carried his Smith and Wesson .38 pistol strapped to his side in a leather holster. This was his old hog hunting sidearm, and it was loaded with copper jackets.

Inside the Hardin home, Sara was on tranquilizers. She had been visited by Dr. Carl Roswell, the only doctor left in the parish who still made house calls.

Tom walked into the bedroom. He was restless, barely coherent. He gazed at his wife for a few moments. She sat in a chair and either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak to him, so he left the room.

He talked to Corrine in the living room. “I’m going to go with the marshal to help find James Luke. He’s the main suspect, and when I get back, I’ll plan the funeral,” Tom said.

She clenched her teeth, shook her head. “Tom, you couldn’t have stopped it.”

“You might be right, but I could have tried a little harder than I did.”

“Wesley was completely sold on staying at that house with that damned woman. That’s what Sara said to me. She says she doesn’t blame you. It’s not your fault.”

“I don’t know.”

“You believe James Luke is the one that did this, Tom?”

“Yeah, he’s the killer. And a lot of things make sense now that haven’t made any sense to me for twenty years or longer.”

“He was more or less family.”

“Yeah, that’s the worst of it.”

Out at the truck, the marshal made Tom raise his right hand. He said he was a duly commissioned deputy marshal of the Ninth Ward. He gave Tom a tin badge, and he told him to clip it to his shirt.

“Look, if you have to shoot Jim, be sure he has a gun on him somewhere,” Brownlow said.

“Okay,” Tom said.

“If not, I’ve got a throw down weapon in the truck, but you’ve got to be careful with such things.”

Outside of the Ninth Ward of Baxter Parish, they were both on thin legal grounds, especially in Mississippi, where they’d be foreigners at best and would have no rights to arrest James Luke. The marshal explained to Tom that three-fourths of their job consisted of trying to get the local authorities interested and involved, motivated to arrest Jim Cate, just to help locate him. The other part was finding him. However, he wasn’t particularly confident they’d even find the man anyway.

They left out from Zion in the marshal’s pickup truck and headed north toward Natchez. The hounds were riding in the big cage behind the cab, occasionally letting out a stray howl. It was warm and sunny, a beautiful day.

Tom was feeling an acute sense of grief that grew worse with each mile he traveled north away from Baxter Parish. He kept pushing it down into his gut. His regret overwhelmed him like a growing cancer, and he wondered what he had done to deserve this pain. He could not find an answer in the short time he had to contemplate it, and he doubted he’d ever have enough time in this life to understand why the events came to pass. The catastrophe of the past twenty-four hours had left the most important person in his life dead and gone in his youth.

They checked into a room on the sixth floor of the Rosalie Hotel overlooking the Mississippi River, which was higher than normal with Midwestern floodwaters coming down like an avalanche of wasted history. The room had two double beds and was charged to the marshal’s office. The two men ate an early supper downstairs in the hotel restaurant. They had not eaten since breakfast. Tom was having trouble talking. He didn’t care to say much, and he was choking up, trying hard to get his words out. He could hear the dogs barking outside where the truck was parked on a side street underneath a shady oak.

Marshal Brownlow and Tom met with the Natchez chief at his office on D’Evereaux Drive. Brownlow was careful not to stir the hornet’s nest with local Mississippi politicians, so he asked up front to assist the Mississippi officials in finding Cate. He said repeatedly that they were there only to assist, especially since he had the dogs, if tracking dogs were ever needed, and he’d be there any time in the future for manhunts that came up in the environs around Adams County. He carried with him a warrant for James Luke’s arrest for capital murder.

At the Slocum Cottage on South Pearl Street, they met with James Luke’s wife, Heloise. She said little other than to deny any knowledge of his exact whereabouts or what he might be doing. As far as she knew, he was fishing near Hot Springs, Arkansas, with a bunch of Army Corps managers. Her father’s attorney, Theodore Barnett, a respectable ambulance chaser, sat with Heloise at the dining room table. He wore a pinstriped seersucker suit, and the edges of his bowtie were as sharp as glass. The lawyer drank milk from a coffee cup and interjected from time to time to reinforce the denial. James Luke had given no phone number due to the remoteness of the lake, she said. Her husband was staying at a park owned by the Corps of Engineers somewhere near a reservoir, he’d told her. He had some new business associates to get to know in the upper echelons of the agency.

“It’s just a bunch of good old boys doing what good ol’ boys always do,” Heloise said. “That’s all James Luke is about anyhow. He’s just a fun-loving good ol’ boy.”

The Natchez chief had said earlier that his office would telephone the Corps and the Hot Springs sheriff.

“Ma’am, does Jim have some place he might try to stay here in Mississippi?” asked the marshal.

“My husband has more than thirty properties, most of them in North Natchez, but they’re all occupied, as far as I know. You’re quite welcome to check any place if you like, but we’ll have to go to the business office to get a list of rentals and addresses,” she said.

Lawyer Barnett agreed with the offer though he said it was pointless.

“Does he have a hunting or fishing camp?” Brownlow asked.

“No,” she said.

“He doesn’t hunt anymore?” asked Tom, speaking for the first time.

“He hunts. He either hunts in the swamps up in the Delta near Greenville, or he hunts at my daddy’s old camp in the Homochitto National Forest. But Daddy never hunts anymore. All he does is play golf, but James Luke uses it every deer season,” she said.

“Where is the place in the Homochitto?” Brownlow asked.

“It’s on Union Church Road near Meadville,” she said.

“You ever been there?” the marshal wanted to know.

“A number of times, but not in years. It is, shall we say, ‘primitive,’ with no electricity and an outhouse. I don’t desire to spend much time in such a place,” she said, her nose turned up slightly.

“Can you give us directions on how to get there?” the marshal said.

“I believe so,” she said.

The marshal had a hunch, a burning in his gut when he heard about the camp. At the hotel, the marshal phoned the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office and spoke to the first deputy, the only person on duty for the entire county, and also the dispatcher on duty at the moment. His name was Chesterton Lewis, and he said he would go see if anyone was out at the property. The marshal warned Deputy Lewis how dangerous the man was. The deputy said he’d meet them over at the national forest in an hour. Brownlow gave him directions, sending him there from what Heloise Cate had offered as the easiest route to the camp.

Brownlow had already paid for their room at the Rosalie, a room they’d never sleep in. It was almost six o’clock when they drove southeast toward Franklin County through the piney woods. “I’ve barely heard of a faster room check at a hot-pillow joint,” the marshal said, smiling.

Tom didn’t laugh.

The national forest was an expanse of land owned by the federal government. It covered parts of several counties and was known as the notorious place where two young black men were murdered by the Klan in 1964. Some locals suspected they were civil rights activists, radicals planning an armed uprising, which was false. But to venture into the Homochitto’s dismal labyrinth was to court danger in and of itself, 189,000 acres of backwoods mystery, and the risk weighed heavily on the men as they traveled in the marshal’s truck.

James Luke had a large first-aid kit in the back of the Suburban. He’d bought it stolen from an ambulance driver in Vicksburg for five dollars cash. He sat at the camp table. The remote place was surrounded by forestland. He worked a pair of small tweezers through the proud flesh of his shoulder, pulling out nasty woolen fiber and festering flesh that had gone into the muscle from the little .25 pistol round. He had already done this the night before, but more of the cloth seemed to be working toward the surface now. He poured hydrogen peroxide into the crevasse of his shoulder, the hole ripped open by the bullet. After he got fatigued from doctoring it, he taped down the gauze on his shoulder. The muscle felt like a burning mound of meat, and the pain hardly eased.

He wondered how he’d made the two-hour drive in such pain the night before. A few more inches, and I’d probably be dead or crippled, he thought. That crazy bitch was a better shot than I’d’ve ever bet good money on.

Charity’s automatic lay on the kitchen table. He gazed at it, a Beretta with black plastic handles and a pop-up barrel. “That little piece of shit liked to have got me,” he said.

James Luke was sick to his stomach with no appetite. He had plenty of food, and though the camp had no electricity or telephone, it had kerosene lamps and a propane stove and refrigerator. The silver tank behind the camp was full of propane. The well was outside near the front porch, and water came from a hand pump. James Luke tried to eat, but he had vomited up his breakfast. When he finished the vomiting spell, all of the food was gone from his stomach. He just sat drinking Old Crow, smoking, and thinking.

He hadn’t wanted to involve anyone but Charity. It compounded the risk of getting caught. Now he thought it was stupid to go to the house instead of catching her alone in her car someplace. One of the last people in the world he would have wanted to shoot was Wesley Hardin, but he told himself it was an accident, that he was aiming at Charity who had the gun. Moreover, he reasoned that it was all self-defense in a roundabout way. He’d planned to scare her, beat her with the only thing she respected, the Holy Word. Knock her senseless, pound her with the Good Book until she quit confessing her misdeeds and the sins of others. He never realized he’d dropped the Bible until he was north of the Mississippi line, and he almost turned around to go back for it, but he quickly and wisely decided not to return to Pickleyville. He was worried now, very worried. That Bible could get him executed. At the minimum, the shoulder injury would take some time to heal, and this was evidence enough to make him mortally fearful. He needed to keep out of sight.

The plan was to leave the camp by the next evening and report to his attorney in Vidalia. But he also needed to conceal the truck someplace safe until his lawyer could offer counsel. Surely they had out an alert for his vehicle.

At least the hunting camp enjoyed the advantage of a clear view across the patch of forest on all sides. It sat atop a ridge that was surrounded by thick hardwoods and pines that were almost impassable at the edges of the property. It was clear around the house and out front to the road. He could see in all directions. Most importantly, the lane in front went straight to the gravel Forest Service road. Unknown to anyone but the best-schooled locals, there was an old logging road at the back of the property that led to Sarepta Baptist Church. It was so obscure that he wasn’t concerned about being flanked from the rear. This was where his Suburban was parked just below the ridge, out of view from the front of the camp at the Forest Service road, and no one but a bona fide local woodsman would be aware of the route away from the pasture behind Sarepta to the camp.

Last winter, he took the Suburban on the logging road to go and get a spike buck that he’d shot too far away to drag on foot. The strip was overgrown with grass and had twists and turns, an almost undetectable escape route.

On the kitchen table, he rigged a C.B. radio left at the camp with an extra battery retrieved from his truck, planning to listen to the emergency channel, but the radio was broken. He couldn’t fix it. He wished he could call his lawyer, but he was far too worried to wander around Meadville looking for a payphone under such circumstances, a gunshot wound in the shoulder making him look like an escapee from Parchman Farm. His best hope was waiting until the dark of night and driving directly to his attorney’s house in Vidalia where he had done business before. Besides, it might be better to let the dust settle and see if he was actually going to be accused of a crime before getting his lawyer involved. He needed to get some tabs on the investigation, see if there were any fingers pointing toward him. His luck, until recently, was the stuff of legend. The wound in his shoulder, however, made him think that perhaps all of the good luck had run dry, and the nausea in his stomach confirmed it.

He kept trying to work up a reasonable alibi if he got stopped. He’d say he was lying to his wife about the Arkansas destination. He’d say that instead of going to Lake DeGray, he traveled to meet a prostitute in Pickleyville at the Camellia Motel. Indeed, he’d done that very thing. They got high on some cocaine she’d brought with her, first time he’d ever used dope. He felt bad for the prostitute and gave her his Bible because he thought she needed it worse than he did. Beyond that, he didn’t know anything. So what about the wound on his shoulder? They must have gotten so high on dope that he might have been rolled by the prostitute’s pimp. When he woke up, his wallet was missing, stolen when he passed out cold. He didn’t go to the police for obvious reasons. Regardless of the tale, he’d have to figure it all out before talking to the authorities, assuming they came for him. In the end, far better to admit infidelity than murder. Heloise’s sympathy was more lenient than the law. If called before the authorities, he’d let his lawyer talk for him no matter what.

Not having much sleep the night before, he lay wary and fatigued on a makeshift couch built from pine two-by-fours and plywood, an almost useless homemade cotton cushion placed on top of it. During the night, he took whiskey and aspirins as painkillers for his shoulder. He was at least pleased the bleeding had stopped. In the steel barbeque pit out back, he’d burned his bloody dress pants, jacket, and shirt. He ran his finger through the bullet hole in the jacket and almost laughed as he tossed the clothes into the fire. He wished he’d actually brought some cocaine with him or some painkillers. This was by far his biggest regret.