Natchez Burning

by Greg Iles

  Walt shook his head with empathy. “Which was it?”

  “Bus.” Tom took another slug of bourbon. “You know why so many blacks from Mississippi ended up in Chicago?”

  “Why?”

  “It was the cheapest bus or rail ticket they could get to a major northern city.”

  “I’ll be dogged. It’s simple, when you think about it.”

  “Most things are, once you understand them.”

  Walt took back the bottle and let it hang from his weathered hand. “When did you next talk to her after she left?”

  “Six weeks ago.” Tom lowered his head and wiped tears from his eyes. “I loved that woman, Walt. And I didn’t see or talk to her for thirty-seven years.”

  “Goddamn, son. That’s rough.”

  “I know you know it.”

  Walt took a deep breath, then gave a long sigh. Tom knew he was thinking about a Japanese girl he’d fallen in love with during an R&R in Japan. She had haunted Walt for the rest of his life.

  “I’ve got no right to say I loved her,” Tom said, filled with anguish. “How can you say you loved a woman you didn’t try to talk to for thirty-seven years?”

  “Easy,” Walt said angrily. “Did you ever go a day without thinking about her? One goddamn day?”

  Tom thought about it. “Not for the first ten years or so. But after that … yes, I did. I don’t think I could have survived otherwise. Not sober, anyway.”

  Walt grunted with empathy. “How did it go for Viola in Chicago?”

  “Not good.”

  “That’s what I figured. The land of peace and plenty up north wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.” Walt took a sip of lukewarm coffee. “Did she ever try to contact you?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Walt’s eyes glinted in the dim light. “You think maybe she did, and Peggy put the quietus on it?”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think so. Viola had too much pride for that.”

  “Pride don’t last long when you’re tryin’ to survive.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Tom said. “I sent her money.”

  “How’d you know where to send it?”

  “Viola sent a few letters to the office. Not to me, but to the girls, you know. I sent money to the address those letters came from. Enough to buy staples and pay the rent. She cashed the checks. It was her signature on the back. I knew her handwriting, but I checked it against one of the letters to be sure.”

  “How long did you do this?”

  Tom looked down at his coffee. “Thirty-seven years.”

  Walt reached out and patted his shoulder. “Partner, you haven’t changed a bit, have you?”

  “Does anybody?”

  Walt smiled sadly. “Not in my experience. Did you ever tell Peggy about all this?”

  “No.”

  “She never found out you were sending the money?”

  “I don’t think so. She handled our money, but I always kept one account for myself that nobody ever saw but me.”

  “Jesus, buddy. This reminds me of some of the World War Two vets who looked after women they met while they were overseas.”

  “Yeah. Gregory Peck played in a movie about that. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.”

  “I saw that!” Walt smiled. “Damn, we’re old, ain’t we?”

  Tom took the whiskey bottle and looked at it, contemplating another swig. “Walt … when I first saw Viola after all those years, my heart seized in my chest. Literally. I remembered her as a perfect beauty of twenty-eight, and what I saw was an old woman a few steps from death’s door.” He took a sip of whiskey, but now it tasted like acid. “It wasn’t just the cancer that had done it. It was time and gin and cigarettes and God knows what else.” A lump rose into Tom’s throat, and he heard his voice break. “She didn’t have any teeth, Walt. Just dentures, and bad ones at that. I felt sick for two days afterward, every time I thought of her.”

  “But you treated her.”

  Tom nodded. “Hardest thing I ever did.”

  Walt took the bottle and slipped it back into the drawer above the microwave. “You helped her, buddy.”

  “I wanted to. I wanted to save her. But there wasn’t any way to—not by that time.”

  Walt squeezed his shoulder. “I know. You know I know.”

  Tom felt himself shivering. “That’s the only reason I can tell you.”

  “Tell me, then. Get it out.”

  “I’m tired, Walt.”

  “Screw that. Get the monkey off your back. This is me, son. We squatted in the mud and the blood and shit together. You can’t get no closer than that.”

  Tom began to speak in spite of himself. “It was like I told you on the phone. When I first called you. It was like the ambulance. Exactly like it.”

  “Goddamn it,” Walt whispered. “I knew it.”

  Tom jumped when his cell phone vibrated in his pants.

  “What is it?” Walt asked.

  “My cell,” Tom said, digging the shaking phone out of his pocket with difficulty. The LCD read QUENTIN AVERY.

  “I told you to keep the damned thing off! They can track you with that.”

  “I know. I turned it back on at the Sonic to check for messages, and I guess I forgot to turn it off.”

  “Jesus.” Walt thumped the side of his head. “Radio silence!”

  “Quentin?” Tom said, holding the phone tight to his ear. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here. Penn called me, and he knows I’m your lawyer now.”

  Tom swallowed. His throat was dry. “What else does he know?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Does he know I’m gone?”

  “I don’t know you’re gone.”

  “Okay … okay. Good.”

  “But I need to ask you about something.”

  “What?”

  “The Double Eagle group.” Quentin Avery said the name the way a German Jew might say “Schutzstaffel.” Hatred and contempt dripped from his tongue, but there was a trace of fear, too, even after all these years. “They attacked Henry Sexton tonight. He’s barely hanging on.”

  “Oh, God.” Tom felt nausea in the pit of his stomach. The cheeseburger was trying to come up. “What happened?”

  Quentin had hardly begun his story when Walt tapped Tom on the shoulder. “They’re moving, Tom. Snake and Sonny are headed back toward Natchez. I’m going to drive to the bridge and pick them up when they cross back into Louisiana.”

  Tom nodded and motioned for Walt to start the van. “Sorry, Quentin. Are you still there?”

  “Yeah. And I’m concerned that you seem to have forgotten your age. You and your buddy both.”

  “We’re all going to have to forget that for the duration, Quentin. You included. Finish your story about Sexton.”

  While Quentin told his tale of the assault on Henry, Tom saw an image of a worried little boy who’d stood by while Tom stitched up his mother’s arm after an accident with some kind of farming implement. Tom had met Henry several times as an adult, of course, while treating his parents, but for some reason Tom tended to remember members of the generation behind his own as children.

  Unlike Tom, who had spent most of his life trying to distance himself from the 1960s, Henry Sexton had tried to resurrect them, and he’d paid for his efforts tonight—possibly with his life, if he succumbed to his injuries. As the Roadtrek jounced out of the KOA park and onto Highway 61 South, and Quentin Avery’s mellifluous voice filled his ear, Tom said a silent prayer for the reporter. It was an atheist’s prayer, a foxhole prayer, but that was the only kind Tom had been able to manage for fifty years or more.

  He put his thumb over the mike on his cell phone and turned toward Walt. “Have you still got them on your scope?”

  The old Ranger nodded, his eyes glued to the screen mounted on the dashboard. “Still coming north. You still think Sonny Thornfield is the one to hit?”

  When Walt turned, and Tom met his old friend’s eyes, no words were necessary
.

  “Turn that damned phone off when you’re finished with your lawyer,” Walt grumbled. “I don’t fancy spending the rest of my days in Parchman.”

  “I will. You watch the damned road.”

  CHAPTER 48

  BRODY ROYAL POINTED through the windshield of his son-in-law’s pickup toward a small building at the end of the street.

  “Dark as a damn speakeasy,” he said. “I doubt they even have crime scene tape up.”

  Randall Regan braked, then tensed as the squeal of rotors echoed down the street. “I don’t see a soul. I figured after what happened to Henry, the sheriff would have posted a man outside.”

  “Amateurs,” said Brody. “Just like your nephew and his crew. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. They couldn’t drag one fifty-year-old man into a truck?”

  “They didn’t figure on a secretary packing a pistol.”

  Brody grunted and peered down the dark street. “This town’s dying. There’s nobody on this side, this time of night. Not during the winter, anyway. It was different back in sixty-four. That night we burned Norris’s store, the signal was the end of the last shift at the King Hotel. That meant Ferriday was shutting down for the night.”

  “When did the King close down?”

  “Oh, hell, thirty years back.”

  “There’s not even a crack dealer back here,” said Regan, chuckling as he rolled toward the Concordia Beacon building. “They’re all over on the main drag. They sell their shit right on Wallace Boulevard.”

  Brody shook his head with disgust. “We’d have strung them up from the lampposts in my day. One on every block. Slow down, Randall. Just ease right up to the door.”

  Regan craned his head over the steering wheel.

  “Nose your fender up there and just push the door open.”

  Regan drove over the glittering shards of Henry Sexton’s rear windshield, then turned his wheel to the right and slowed the truck to a crawl. The weight and momentum of the fender shattered every inch of glass in the door, like putting a finger through a sheet of ice.

  “Back up,” Brody said, reaching for his door handle.

  Regan did.

  “Get the Flammenwerfer.”

  Regan moved quickly. He’d been practicing with the flamethrower for the past two hours, and he’d become quite adept with the heavy unit. He strapped the two cylinders on his back, then took the firing pipe in his hand and walked through the door of the newspaper office.

  Brody followed him, his pulse quickening.

  “Computers first?” Regan asked.

  “No. We need to get his private workroom first, then work our way backward. My source tells me he calls it his ‘war room.’ If he taped Morehouse, that’s where the tape will be. Unless he had it at home.”

  “War room?” said Regan, heading down a hallway. “I’ll give him his war.”

  He tried a couple of doors but found only storage rooms. The third, however, opened into a small room with maps and photographs covering every wall. Brody stepped inside and whistled. He recognized most of the Double Eagles in the first few seconds. Other photos showed Dr. Robb, a Ku Klux Klan rally, and charts of various kinds.

  “Pay dirt,” he said, searching for his own face among the photos taped to the wall.

  “You think Forrest is gonna be okay with this?” Randall asked.

  “You think I care?” Brody caught sight of his daughter’s face, tacked to the far wall. He almost crossed the room for the picture, but then he backed out of the doorway. “Burn it, Randall,” he said in a strangled voice. “Burn it all.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Brody heard a clank and a hiss, followed by a roar that sent chills racing over his body. A jet of liquid flame reached out from the pipe in Regan’s hand, like Lucifer pissing fire on the world. Henry’s Sexton’s war room became an inferno, driving Brody back from the breathtaking heat.

  Randall shouted with exultation at the destruction, but Brody just stared into the flames, recalling a time before he’d lost his daughter, when the life he’d always wanted still seemed possible, and his hands had held something more than money and power. Across the room, his daughter’s face curled and turned to ash. Brody stumbled back, his nostrils stinging with the petroleum reek of battle, and staggered out toward the truck.

  TWO HUNDRED YARDS UP Tennessee Avenue, Sleepy Johnston sat behind the wheel of a GMC pickup, his Detroit Tigers baseball cap pulled low over his face, and stared at the truck parked against the Beacon building. Squinting through the dim light thrown off by the streetlamp, he saw a sign on the truck’s door: ROYAL OIL, INC.

  Sleepy hadn’t been sure what the old man and his son-in-law were up to at first, not even after he saw the big man put on the heavy backpack and walk into the newspaper office. But Sleepy recognized the deep red glow coming from the shattered door well enough. He’d seen that same glow on the night they burned out Albert Norris. A small crowd had gathered to watch the landmark shop collapse into itself while the firemen vainly played their hoses over the ruins, and Sleepy had been among them.

  A lot of grown men and boys had cried that week. Others had cussed a friend, punched a stranger, or spat in some cracker’s mashed potatoes before they served his plate. But despite this anger, a deep and shameful fear had been born in the hearts of many black men in the parish that night. That fear had ultimately driven Sleepy away, all the way to Detroit. For if the Klan could kill a respected businessman like Albert Norris and get away with it, what chance did he have?

  Sleepy thought about Albert as he watched the red glow rising in the Beacon’s door. Albert had given Sleepy his nickname because of the perpetual haze in his eyes—a haze induced by the reefer Sleepy and his cousins regularly ferried up from their auntie’s house in New Orleans. Sleepy had always wanted to work for Albert, like Pooky did, but Albert didn’t tolerate drug use among his employees, even though it was epidemic among the musicians he served. Still, Sleepy had loved the old man (“old” to the boy he’d been then, anyway—Sleepy was now ten years older than Albert had been when he died). Somehow, Albert had sensed that Sleepy had a tough home life, and always had a kind word for him. He’d also made sure that Sleepy stayed employed as a musician, usually with road bands.

  When he wasn’t on the road, Sleepy had lived part of the year in New Orleans and part over in Wisner, a few miles from Ferriday, but he often slept in the attic of a cousin who lived near Albert’s store. That was where he’d been on the night he heard the explosion that changed his life. Running out into the empty road, he’d seen three white men leap from the window of the burning store. One had been the man whose name was now painted on the door of the truck parked in front of the burning newspaper building. In 1964, talking to the police was not an option for a black boy, and Sleepy had left town as soon as he could. But not before the next afternoon, when Pooky had come to him wild-eyed with terror, crying that the Klan was combing the parish for him with dogs. Sleepy had known Pooky was fooling with a white girl, and he’d warned him about it, but Pooky wouldn’t listen. The fool had pussy on the brain and couldn’t think straight. And back in those days, white pussy was a powerful drug—a lot more powerful than the weed Pooky filched from Sleepy’s stash when he thought his friend wasn’t looking.

  The furnace glow from the Beacon’s door pulled Sleepy’s gaze like the fires of hell. Waves of heat distorted the air above the building. Why are they doing this? he wondered. They already stabbed poor Henry Sexton. Guilt made Sleepy squirm in the seat of his truck. He knew the reporter had been looking all over the parish for him. He thanked God Pooky’s mother had kept her promise and held his name back.

  Sleepy looked down at his cell phone and thought about dialing 911. It would be so easy. All he’d have to do was report that a Royal Oil truck had smashed open the door of the Beacon, and some men had set the building on fire. He wouldn’t even have to mention Old Man Royal. But he could …

  “And then what?” Sleepy wondered aloud. He could still see the haw
k-eyed white devil he’d known as a boy. And if Brody Royal could order a hit on a famous white reporter like Henry Sexton—even today—what chance did a retired electrician’s helper have?

  “Ain’t nothing changed down here,” Sleepy mumbled. “That motherfucker still owns this town. That’s why he’s burnin’ up the newspaper like he don’t care who comes along. He don’t. He don’t have to.”

  At bottom, this was the reason Sleepy hadn’t contacted Henry Sexton. Because in spite of all the progress since the bad old days, nobody could protect you from bastards like Brody Royal. Henry Sexton couldn’t even protect himself. Oh, they’d sing your praises at your funeral for doing the noble thing, but you’d still be dead.

  Sleepy touched the baseball card he’d taped to his dashboard before driving down from Michigan. The card bore the image of Gates Brown, one of the black stars of the 1968 Detroit Tigers team, which had won the World Series. Sleepy had actually made it to three of those games, and not much in life had come close to the joy he’d felt there. Feeling a part of that season was what had finally enabled him to tolerate living in the North. Ever since, he’d carried the Gates Brown card as a good luck charm, and it had often brought him peace during tough times.

  “I could throw my cell phone in the river,” he thought aloud. “After I called 911.”

  Then Sleepy realized that he knew too little about technology to feel safe even if he did that. Brody Royal probably knew people who could backtrack a 911 phone call and tell him exactly who’d made it. Sleepy was still arguing with himself when Royal stumbled out of the burning building and leaned against the side of the truck. The sight of the old man in such a vulnerable position made Sleepy want to drive down the street and squash him between the two trucks. His hand was rising to his ignition key when Royal’s son-in-law ran out of the building and pulled off his heavy backpack. Sliding down low in the seat, Sleepy watched the two men from beneath the arc of his steering wheel until the truck backed away from the burgeoning fire and disappeared down the dark street.