Natchez Burning

by Greg Iles

  Morehouse strained upward, squinted around the room, then finally settled back against the mattress. Wilma fed him another ice chip. After a minute or so, his eyelids began to fall again. Sonny wondered whether she meant to wait until he was completely unconscious to go for the gun.

  Ten seconds later, she laid her left hand on her brother’s arm and began to stroke it. She sponged his forehead with her right hand, then moved it away as if to dip the rag again. But this time her hand disappeared behind his leg, and a moment later Morehouse cried out in terror.

  Wilma backed away from the bed, a Colt .45 automatic in her hand.

  While her brother gaped at her, Snake shoved Sonny into the room and moved quickly around him the bedside.

  Morehouse turned his skull, his eyes going wide in recognition. “Snake! Sonny!”

  Snake smiled with a cobra-like expression suited to his namesake. “Surprised, pardner?”

  “What are ya’ll doin’ here?”

  “You know.” Snake’s eyes glittered in the television light.

  “What do you mean? What do I know?”

  “You’ve been jawin’ to people you shouldn’t. Tryin’ to get your name in the papers.”

  Morehouse’s mouth opened, but he did not speak. He raised his hands and covered his eyes like a child trying to pretend that the horror in front of him wasn’t real. “I ain’t done nothin’!” he cried.

  “That’s a lie.”

  The big hands slowly fell from the anguished face. “Oh Lord,” Glenn said in a slurred voice. “Ya’ll done come to cut my throat, ain’t you?”

  “We damn sure ought to.”

  “Wilma!” Morehouse cried. “Call the sheriff! They’ve come to kill me!”

  Snake laughed. “Wilma ain’t callin’ nobody ’cept the coroner.”

  Glenn froze, his eyes on the doorway. His sister stood there like an avenging angel, as silent as a witness to an execution. Morehouse started to speak, but she held up a warning finger, and he began to sob.

  “We know you’ve been talking to Henry Sexton,” Sonny said. “We need to know what got said, Glenn.”

  “I ain’t told that bastard nothing! He ambushed me. How was I supposed to stop him?”

  “Come on,” muttered Snake. “At least you can be a man and admit what you done. The question is why. Did you get to thinking ’bout hellfire or some such nonsense? You scared of that Baptist Hay-des that Preacher Gibbons was always rantin’ about?”

  Morehouse shuddered in his bed.

  “Remember the oath you swore? Same one we all did.”

  “I was just a kid,” Morehouse said, almost crying. “Just a stupid kid without sense to know right from wrong.”

  “Bullshit! You were thirty-five and proud to swear it. And if it was up to me, I’d do just what the oath says to do. But lucky for you, it ain’t.”

  Glenn cut his eyes at the phone on the table beside his bed. “Who’s it up to?”

  “You know.” Sonny lifted the cordless phone from the bedside table and tossed it onto a chair across the room. “Billy said give you a choice.”

  Glenn’s eyes ping-ponged from Snake to Sonny and back again. “What kind of choice?”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Snake, smiling again. He drew a deer-skinning knife from a scabbard on the side of his belt. “On one hand, I’ve got this blade, which’ll take off your nuts before you even feel the sting. You know a man can bleed to death after that, ’cause you’ve seen it.”

  Morehouse shut his eyes.

  “But in Sonny’s backpack, there’s a vial of fentanyl that’ll send you off to fairyland as sweet and easy as Rip van Winkle.”

  Snake had chosen fentanyl because Glenn’s doctor had prescribed the fentanyl patch once his pain became intractable.

  Morehouse was praying, Sonny realized, a droning murmur of indistinct words.

  “Glenn!” Sonny said sharply. “Snap out of it!”

  The drone only grew more insistent.

  “You know how easy morphine is,” Snake said in an oily voice. “You saw it in the war. Fentanyl’s a hundred times more powerful. If I had to meet St. Peter tonight, no question which route I’d pick.”

  Morehouse’s eyes opened, looking suspicious. “How do I get the fentanyl?”

  “Tell us everything you told the reporter. You hold back, you die a gelding.”

  Morehouse was struggling to swallow. Sonny picked up a glass of water from the bedside table and helped him take a sip.

  “There you go,” Sonny said. “All primed up now. Spill.”

  “I didn’t tell Sexton nothin’, boys. I didn’t trust him.”

  “He was here for a whole hour this morning,” Snake said. “You must have told him something.”

  Morehouse shook his head.

  Snake held up the knife and turned it in the lamplight. “I’ve only got three questions, Mountain.” Stepping forward, he slid the point under Morehouse’s inflamed eye. “First, did you say the name Forrest Knox? Did your lips form those two words?”

  “Jesus, no. I ain’t crazy!”

  “You’re lying, Glenn. I’m gonna cut this eye out.”

  “No!” Morehouse wailed.

  “What about Brody Royal? Did you say anything about Brody?”

  At the mention of this name Morehouse lost his color. “I swear before God, boys. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Did Sexton ask about Brody or Forrest?”

  “Neither one. He just wanted to know about …”

  “Us?” Snake finished.

  Morehouse nodded, then pulled up the covers and hugged himself beneath them.

  “How much did you tell him?”

  “Nothin’ about ya’ll. I talked about the war mostly. All he cared about was Albert Norris. I think him and that nigger was related or something. I told him I thought Pooky had killed Albert and run off with whatever whiskey and cash Albert had stashed in the store. Or reefer, that he kept for them musicians.”

  “Did Sexton tape any of this?”

  “Hell, no. I wouldn’t let him. I told him that, straight up.”

  Snake gave Sonny a sidelong look. Glenn actually sounded convincing.

  “I can’t sleep no more, Sonny!” Morehouse cried. “Every time I close my eyes, I see the things we done. I can’t get no peace. It’s like when I got back from the war. I keep seein’ Jerry Dugan down in that acid tank, and that Lewis boy a-bleedin’ under that tree. That alone’s enough to send us all to hell.”

  “Do you see Jimmy Revels?” Snake asked in a perverse voice. “I figured you’d see him most of all. Considerin’ what you done to him. And how much you liked it.”

  “Ya’ll made me do that! I didn’t know what I was doing. That still don’t make it right, I know. Not to God.”

  “That’s between you and God,” Snake said. “Not you and some newspaper reporter.”

  Glenn’s shallow respirations sounded like a breeze blowing through dry leaves. Sonny saw tears running down his pale cheeks. He seemed to struggle on the bed, his movements spastic.

  “You drugged me,” Glenn said, his accusing eyes searching out Wilma in the darkness. “You … you helped them kill me. God sees you, Sister.”

  Wilma’s slippers hissed on the parquet floor. “I’m gonna wait in the kitchen,” she said. “Ya’ll don’t hurt him no more’n you have to.”

  “Can’t stand to see your handiwork?” Glenn cried, his eyelids falling, rising, falling again.

  Sonny motioned for Wilma to leave, but she leaned over her brother with bitter anger in her eyes. “You broke faith. You didn’t leave me any choice.”

  “Not with God, I didn’t!” Morehouse bellowed.

  “Blood first, Glenn,” she said with utter conviction. “God after.”

  Wilma gave her brother a glare of challenge, but he said nothing. As she turned to go, Sonny caught her arm and whispered, “When was the last time a nurse stuck him for blood?”

  “The home health nurse pulled some this morning. They po
ke him all the time now.”

  “Where? Has he still got a good vein in the elbow?”

  “He’s got a PICC line in.” She slid her arm from Sonny’s grasp. “You can inject whatever you want in there.”

  “I didn’t tell Henry half of what I should have!” Glenn cried with newfound strength. Sonny heard righteous anger, and saw the fear draining from Glenn’s face like life from a dying body.

  “I didn’t tell Henry nothin’ about Forrest,” Glenn vowed. “Or Brody. But I’ll say it now. The hell I’m going to tonight is nothing compared to what awaits you two with them.”

  “I’ve had enough of this,” Snake growled. “He’s gettin’ off easy, you ask me.”

  “Let’s just get it over with,” Sonny said. Unzipping his camo shoulder pack, he drew out a syringe prefilled with a lethal dose of fentanyl. “You want me to do it?”

  “No. Just hold it till I’m ready.” Snake walked around the hospital bed and took hold of Glenn’s forearm—an arm once strong enough to snap a man’s cervical spine—to examine the PICC line. When Glenn started to struggle, Snake passed his knife over the bed to Sonny. “He keeps fightin’, sever his jugular.”

  “Don’t fight it, baby,” Wilma said from the doorway, shocking Sonny. Apparently she meant to stay to the end. “You’re just making it worse.”

  Glenn stopped struggling at the sound of his sister’s words, but his eyes had taken on a sudden alertness. They had been dull before, but now they glinted with … what? Triumph?

  “Something’s wrong,” Sonny said, and Snake looked up sharply.

  “His hands!” Wilma yelled. “Check his hands!”

  Sonny ripped back the coverlet. One of Morehouse’s fists was clenched around a chunk of plastic with a chain on it.

  “Shit!” Snake cursed. “That’s one of them Live Alert things!”

  Snake tried to wrench the necklace from Morehouse’s clawlike grasp, but Wilma cried, “Don’t worry about it! That thing don’t even work! I quit paying the bill after he moved in with me.”

  Sonny couldn’t take his eyes from Morehouse’s face. His old friend wouldn’t look so proud of himself unless he’d foxed them somehow.

  “Make him give it to you,” Sonny said, passing the knife back to Snake.

  Snake followed the catheter line to where it disappeared under Morehouse’s boxer shorts. The knife vanished under the shorts.

  “I’m counting to three,” Snake said. “After that—”

  Morehouse hurled the Live Alert necklace across the room, where it caromed off the wall and rattled on the floor.

  “I oughta cut ’em off anyway,” Snake said, “just for the aggravation.”

  The ringing telephone froze them all where they stood. When it rang the second time, Morehouse began to laugh.

  “I called ’em with my credit card last Friday!” he cried. “What you gonna do now?”

  Wilma snatched up the cordless phone and checked the caller ID. “Oh, God. He really did. It’s the Live Alert people.”

  “Goddamn it!” Snake shouted.

  “I’ll tell them it was a false alarm,” she said, moving quickly to the door.

  “You need a password for that,” Morehouse told her, giving Snake a defiant glare.

  The phone kept ringing in Wilma’s hand.

  “False alarm’s no good,” Sonny said, thinking aloud. “Not if he turns up dead in the morning.”

  Something changed in Snake’s demeanor. He looked like a big buck realizing he was being watched from a tree stand. Turning to Wilma, he said, “Tell the dispatcher Glenn just died.”

  Wilma’s mouth fell open.

  Glenn began to scream.

  “Hurry!” Snake shouted. “Go in the other room. Tell ’em it looks like a stroke or a heart attack. No breath sounds, no heartbeat. He’s already going gray.”

  Wilma scuttled through the door on her macabre errand.

  Sonny saw Snake looking at him the way Frank used to look at him when they were about to assault a hostile beach. “Take his right hand, Sonny,” Snake ordered. “Don’t bruise him any more than you have to.”

  Without a word, Sonny laid the fentanyl syringe on the bedside table, then grabbed his old friend’s thick wrist and held it against the mattress. Snake had already done the same on the opposite side. Sonny was surprised it was that easy, even after the cancer. Glenn Morehouse had been physically stronger than any man he’d ever known.

  “Pass me that syringe,” Snake ordered.

  “Wait!” Wilma cried from the doorway. “They’re sending an ambulance anyway, just to be sure. It’s already on the way.”

  Fear bloomed in Sonny’s chest, and his mouth went dry.

  “You son of a bitch,” Snake said, looking like he wanted to stab Morehouse in the heart. “Give me that syringe, Son.”

  “Will it kill him in time?”

  “If you’d hurry up it will!”

  As Sonny reached for the syringe, Morehouse yanked both arms up off the mattress with such power that Sonny’s head crashed into Snake’s. It was all Sonny could do to cling to the big wrist.

  “Watch out!” he cried, stunned by the strength flowing through Morehouse’s arm. His old comrade’s eyes were nearly white with panic, like the eyes of a coyote trying to rip itself out of a trap.

  “This ain’t gonna work!” Sonny shouted, as Morehouse slung him against the bedside table with almost superhuman strength. The impact knocked the syringe to the floor. “What do we do?”

  “I heard a siren!” Wilma shouted. “Jesus, do something!”

  “You’ve gotta do it, Willy!” Snake told her. “Grab that syringe and shoot it into the port!”

  Wilma had gone white. “I can’t do that!”

  “It’s got to be done, and we ain’t got enough hands.”

  Morehouse howled like a senseless brute with no power of speech. He had become fear incarnate. Wilma stood shaking like a child pushed beyond its limits. Sonny heard the siren now; its distant scream turned his bladder to stone.

  “Do it!” Snake roared at Wilma. “Do it now, or we’re all going to jail!”

  Morehouse was still fighting, but Sonny felt the great strength waning at last. Wilma’s eyes sought him out, silently asking permission for this act of blood betrayal. Sonny had done many things he regretted, and this might be the worst sin of all, but they had no choice anymore. As Snake cursed and Morehouse bellowed like a steer going to slaughter, Sonny nodded.

  Wilma closed her eyes, her lips moving in silence. Then she picked up the syringe off the floor and moved quickly to the far side of the bed.

  “Don’t fight me, Glenn,” she said softly. “It’s time to go see Mama.”

  CHAPTER 21

  I’M NO STRANGER to perverse crimes, but Henry’s tale of Brody Royal’s revenge on two female whistle-blowers has sickened me.

  “Royal’s son-in-law forced one woman to kill the other?” I ask in disbelief. “And then he killed the other one anyway?”

  “He had Snake kill her. That’s the story I got today. And I believe it.”

  I gulp the rest of my bourbon and hold out my cup for a refill. “You hate him, don’t you? Royal, I mean.”

  “Yessir, I do.”

  Henry’s hatred for Brody Royal is obviously proportional to his love for the Norris family, but I don’t have time to plumb that connection now. “There’s no way my father was friends with a man who could do that,” I tell him. “No way.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Henry says, but he sounds less than sure.

  “My daughter’s going to be wondering where I am. Tell me about the Revels case. No offense, but I came to find out about Viola Turner. I came to help my father.”

  “I know. And though I don’t quite understand how yet, I believe that whatever saves your father is going to be what destroys Brody Royal.”

  This idea has an appealing symmetry, but I have yet to be convinced. “Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis. Go.”

  “Jimmy and L
uther were last seen in Natchez, Mississippi, on March twenty-seventh, 1968. After that, they dropped off the planet. Two months earlier, they’d gotten into a brawl with three Double Eagles at a whites-only drive-in that resulted in a highway chase and a fight on the road. Shots were fired, but no one sought treatment at any area hospital. I suspect your father may have patched them up, but I can’t prove that. The FBI never classified these cases as murders, because they had no bodies. But everyone knew they’d been killed by the Double Eagles. I always assumed Jimmy was the main target, because he was a civil rights activist. He’d worked hard to register black voters, he played a role in the Natchez boycott, he led marches, and he played music at civil rights rallies.”

  “Why did people assume the Double Eagles killed them, rather than the Klan? Because of the brawl?”

  “Mostly. After the brawl, Jimmy and Luther went into hiding at a place called Freewoods, a kind of outlaw sanctuary. Nobody knew where they were. When the Eagles couldn’t locate those boys after six weeks, they decided to rape Viola.”

  “To draw Jimmy out of hiding.”

  “Exactly. The rumor started spreading on March twenty-seventh. I wasn’t sure it was more than a rumor until today. My Eagle source confirmed it.”

  “So how were you wrong about the Revels case?”

  Henry’s basset hound expression returns. “I was wrong about the most critical part—the motive behind it. Jimmy Revels wasn’t the real target.”

  “Who was?”

  Henry takes a long pull of coffee. “Hold on to your ass, bubba. The target was Robert Kennedy.”

  I set down my cup and stare at him in shock. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. Are you familiar with the Ben Chester White case?”

  “I think so. Three Klansmen murdered a harmless old black man in the Homochitto National Forest.”

  “Do you remember their motive?”

  My mind races back through endless case summaries. “The Klansmen asked the old man to help them find a lost dog. But …” The answer hits me like an unexpected blow. “They wanted to lure Martin Luther King to Natchez. To assassinate him.”

  Henry’s cheeks have flushed red, and not from the whiskey. “They weren’t the only guys to have that idea.”