Natchez Burning

by Greg Iles

  A deafening blast of flame and thunder scorches my face, and Regan tries to twist from my grasp. If my strength fails now—if he moves the gun another inch upward—I will die. There’s no way I can strangle him before he brings that pistol to bear. Purely out of instinct, I release my forearm lock from his neck, then chop the inner edge of my hand back down on his injured throat with all my strength. His body jerks, and the power in his gun arm wavers. Before he can recover, I drive my hand down three more times, each blow harder than the last. Cartilage crunches beneath my final strike, and then both Regan’s hands fly to his throat, the gun forgotten.

  With a single heave I roll him off me, then grab his gun and scramble to my knees. Smoke is billowing through the basement tunnel. Regan’s mouth gapes as he gasps for oxygen, his eyes wide with terror. As I aim the pistol at his chest, he claws the air like a drowning man grasping at a rescuer. Then he slowly drops his arms and goes still.

  Sprinklers in the ceiling have begun spraying water like rain. Fans must be churning somewhere, but I feel like I’m choking on soot. The heat and smoke will soon overwhelm me. Laying the muzzle of Regan’s pistol against my leg chain, I fire. The first bullet fractures one link; the second severs the chain.

  Getting to my feet in the smoke, I make my way to Caitlin’s pole. Freeing her proves more difficult, but a third and fourth bullet snap the ropes, and she stumbles away from the pole.

  “We’ve got to get out!” I shout. “Now!”

  “Make sure Johnston’s dead!” she cries, lifting the fire extinguisher and stumbling downrange to where the bank boxes still burn.

  I turn and find my way to Sleepy’s body, then drop to the floor and press two fingers into his neck, searching for a carotid pulse. I feel nothing at first, but as I dig for any pressure, he says, “I can’t move, man. I think my back’s broke.”

  “He’s alive!” I shout, scarcely able to believe it.

  I whip my head back and forth, trying to find Caitlin again. Then the smoke parts, and I see her charging toward me with a charred box in her arms. Beyond her, orange flame still rages in the smoke. At the center of a burning sphere, two black figures appear locked in eternal combat, like soot-shadows seared onto a Hiroshima wall.

  “Is Mr. Royal dead?” Sleepy Johnston rasps from beneath me.

  “Yes,” I assure him, squeezing his hand.

  The black man settles into a deeper stillness.

  The charred banker’s box drops heavily to the ground beside me, then Caitlin falls to her knees. “We’ve got to get him out,” she says.

  “We can’t move him. His spine’s hit.”

  “He’ll burn alive!”

  She’s right, of course. I must be in shock. We’re all about to burn.

  “I’ll take his arms!” she says, scrambling to her feet and the suffocating smoke. “You get his legs. I’ll do what I can.”

  “What about Henry’s files?”

  She looks down at the charred box, then shakes her head. “Screw it. This man saved our lives.”

  “Get back,” I tell her, recalling a moment much like this one seven years ago, when I carried my maid from our burning house. “Take your box and go.”

  “Penn, you can’t—”

  “Go, goddamn it! Don’t wait for me!”

  Stunned by my anger, Caitlin bends and shoves her hands beneath the heavy box, then heaves it up to her waist. With an inchoate fury impossible to contain, I set my knees against the floor, shove my right arm under Sleepy’s back, then strain to heave him bodily over my shoulder. Fear and adrenaline surge through me, and my muscles bulge with blood.

  “You’re going to fall!” Caitlin yells.

  “Get out!”

  Straining every fiber of muscle, I get one foot under me, then balance the load across my right shoulder and lunge upward, whipping my left foot under me as I rise. Once both feet are beneath me, it’s only a matter of steadying myself before I can start across the floor toward the far door.

  Caitlin leads the way, and I follow the white flag of her blouse through the smoke. She pauses at the stairs, meaning to help, but I bull forward and she scrambles out of the way.

  There are only a few steps to climb. This stairwell leads out to the yard and not up to the next floor. As I reach the top, pure cold air flows into my lungs like the breath of God, and the load on my shoulders vanishes to nothing.

  CHAPTER 96

  TOM STOOD AT the edge of the lake, shivering in a raincoat he’d found in Drew’s closet. His wounded shoulder throbbed relentlessly, but he fought the urge to take another pain pill. The dose of narcotics required to dull that pain could easily depress his respiratory function to a lethal level. On the other hand, going without relief might raise his stress level to the point that it triggered another heart attack. The bullet wound was relatively minor, as missile injuries went. A battlefield medic would have popped him with a syrette of morphine, patched the holes, and moved on to the next foxhole. But at seventy-three, alone in the night, he felt the pain of that wound beginning to work on him.

  Most M.D.s understood pain about as well as most lawyers understood prison. Doctors believed they understood pain, since they’d experienced the mild or moderate forms at some point in their lives. But two years in Korea—and twenty years of living with psoriatic arthritis and diabetes and coronary artery disease—had taught Tom the true nature of pain, from the slicing, electric burn of a nerve to the bluntest fist crushing the chest. Melba hadn’t been gone long, but already her words of faith seemed distant and ephemeral. In all his life, he had never felt so alone as he did now.

  Just after his nurse left, he’d sat on the sofa and immediately fallen asleep. Jerking awake a few minutes later, he was gripped by the certainty that if he sank into deep sleep he would never wake again. Many of his patients had experienced this premonition over the years, and often enough reality had borne it out. In the end, he’d chewed up half a Lorcet with a nitro chaser, then walked down to the water’s edge, where the cold would keep him awake.

  He sensed that his mind had come partly unmoored from the present. That might be a result of the wound, or the drugs, but it might simply be sleep deprivation, or the cumulative shocks he’d sustained over the past three days. His emotions swirled and eddied like a dark body of water in his skull, and his thoughts bobbed and slipped over the surface, only tenuously tied to reality.

  Snatches of his last conversation with Melba sounded in his mind, like something overheard on a train. The word sin resonated again and again. Tom had committed the usual sins during his life, but there were other, more profound transgressions that he seldom acknowledged, even to himself. He’d done terrible things during the war. He knew the common guilt of the combat survivor, and the special guilt of the combat medic. He carried the deadened grief sense of the civilian physician, who lost so many battles with death in lonely sickrooms, his only weapon at the end his ability to ease pain, and sometimes not even that. As for the more universal sins: the familiar guilt of the adulterer had been dwarfed by that of the absentee father, who brought life into the world and then left it to struggle like a seed abandoned on the ground. A dozen rationalizations came to him, of course, the first being that he hadn’t known of the boy’s existence. But at his core, that brought no comfort.

  Ever since Viola had told him about her son, Tom had been reflecting on Thomas Jefferson. Tom been named after the third president, but that was only an accidental irony. At some level, though, he had always strived to follow in Jefferson’s footsteps. How could you not love a man whose library had contained six thousand books in an era when public libraries held only half as many volumes? A man who called himself a Christian but spent six years painstakingly cobbling together a customized Bible that contained no miracles, prophecies, angels, or resurrections?

  Six days hence, historians would celebrate the nation’s acquisition of the very land beneath Tom’s feet, one of Jefferson’s greatest accomplishments. And yet, this mental giant whom he�
��d studied in school like a demigod now shared with him a unique sin. Upon his death, Jefferson had left behind an enslaved black mistress and mixed-race children. He had freed some of his Negro descendants before his death, but others, along with most of his remaining slaves—more than a hundred human beings—had been sold at auction to pay his debts, a monumental hypocrisy and surely a sin by any measure. How, historians asked, could the man who authored the Declaration of Independence have done this?

  Tom knew the answer. Moving with the same passive blindness, he had fathered a child by a black employee in her twenties. And though Viola had loved him as surely as Sally Hemings must have loved Jefferson, Tom had to wonder how much choice either woman had really had in their circumstances. He hated to think of himself as a man who during difficult times had offered a troubled woman only temporary comfort and not real help. He was no Thomas Jefferson in intellectual terms, but that probably meant only that Jefferson had found some more facile way to justify actions that went against the grain of all he had championed during his life.

  Rubbing his hands together against the cold, Tom recalled a quote from Peggy’s distant cousin, Robert Penn Warren: “And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.”

  An image of Penn rose in Tom’s mind, but he pushed it away. What of my other son? he thought in desolation. I don’t even know him, much less love him. My Sally Hemings is dead, and my own dark descendant wants only to see me die behind bars. Would Jefferson’s bastards have wanted the same, if they’d had the power to bring about that result? Would they have punished the man who gave them life but not his name? Tom knew one thing: he would not compound his sin by following Jefferson’s example of neglect. If he lived through this nightmare, he would take steps to ensure that his illegitimate child would never suffer in the same way, no matter how much he might hate his father.

  Tom felt his keenest guilt over his firstborn son, and all those loved ones who he knew would risk everything to save him. Walt Garrity was risking his life now, though he had a wife waiting for him at home. Melba would have stayed all night, knowing full well that she might die because of it. Tom couldn’t bear to think of what Penn and Peggy would give up to save him, and he had no intention of letting them do so. To that end, he had struck out on his own, separated himself from the lawful community of men, because he believed he had one chance to keep his family intact. The death of the state trooper had complicated matters, but one chance remained. The attempt might cost him his life, but Tom had risked his life before, and only for his country, not his family. This time, if he died, he would do so knowing he hadn’t died in vain.

  But the price of freedom would be high. In order to keep his family together, he would have to make a deal with the devil, or that incarnation which had prospered in this country for the past fifty years. Tom was intimately acquainted with evil in its many forms, and in a way that Penn was not. Penn had seen some of the horrific things that humans did to one another, but almost always from the safe perspective of the government prosecutor. As young men, Tom and Walt had entered that transformative zone where the border between “moral” and “amoral” blurred into something not distinguishable by the human mind. In that existential arena, the soul could be seared and scarred or lifted into radiant ecstasy, but none who entered it emerged unchanged.

  Most of the Knox family had spent decades in that zone. After leaving sanctioned combat, they hadn’t weaned themselves from the extreme emotions experienced there, but instead found ways to continue living in that realm where violence held ultimate sway. Inevitably, this involved crime, for only in life-and-death struggle could the most primitive and intense emotions be experienced. Normal men brushed up against those feelings by hunting animals or participating in dangerous sports, but men who had known combat—and thrived in it—achieved no rush from substitutes. And such men, Tom knew, were capable of any act. Even normal men and women would kill to protect their families or themselves. What, then, would monsters like the Knoxes do to preserve their freedom?

  Tom had never forgotten something Leland Robb told him back in 1965, four years before he died in that plane crash. Lee had been home eating supper with his family when an FBI agent called with a medical question. The agent wanted to know whether it was possible for a human being to survive being skinned alive. He hadn’t given the reason for his inquiry, but Dr. Robb had known that it must concern the fate of one of the young black men who had recently disappeared. Strange to think that the FBI had so little forensic knowledge at that time, since now they were considered the experts. Dr. Robb had been unable to answer the agent’s question. But Tom, as an amateur historian, would have referred the agent to any detailed history of the medieval period, when flayings were quite commonplace. To think of such things in academic terms was one thing; to contemplate dealing with men who had actually performed such horrors was another. Yet Tom now found himself in exactly this position.

  As if summoned by Tom’s thought, the low hum of an engine rolled down the slope to the shore of the lake. He wondered if his ears were playing tricks on him. Maybe a night fisherman had taken to the lake, and his motor was reverberating along the shore. But the sound steadied and continued, long enough for Tom to realize that a vehicle had parked in the driveway of Drew’s lake house. Logic said Walt had returned from Baton Rouge. And yet … something deeper told Tom not to walk up the hill just yet. The engine of Drew’s old pickup hadn’t sounded nearly so smooth as Walt had chugged way from the house.

  As suddenly as it had appeared, the engine noise died.

  Some part of Tom hoped that Drew or Melba had broken their promises and told Penn where to find him; another hoped that Lincoln had somehow run him to earth. At least then he could pose the questions he longed to ask the boy, with no one around to witness his pain upon hearing the answers. And yet, without any evidence, Tom knew that none of those people was at the top of the slope.

  The men in that vehicle had come to kill him.

  Tom was armed, but even as he felt the pistol in his pocket, cold against his skin, he knew he didn’t have the will to murder a stranger in order to remain free for a few more hours. What was the point? At bottom, he believed that Walt was already dead. Killed on a fool’s errand, trying to save a friend who had doomed himself.

  Sure that he was living his last moments on earth, Tom did what Walt had warned him countless times not to do. He took out his cell phone and switched it on. If it connected with a tower fast enough, he might be able to call Penn and tell him he was sorry. Peggy, too, if he had time. Turning his back to the house on the hill, he cupped the glowing screen inside his coat to block the light, then watched the device strain to link with a transmission tower.

  There! Two bars …

  Tom was about to dial Penn’s number when a string of text messages appeared on his screen. Seventeen of them. He started to ignore them, but the most recent had been sent by Caitlin, and for some reason, he tapped on it. The message expanded to fill the tiny screen:

  Tom. Whatever happened the night Viola died, you don’t have the right to sacrifice yourself, because I’m pregnant. Penn doesn’t know. I’m telling you because my child needs you in his life. It’s time for you to come home. This family can get through ANYTHING together. Caitlin Masters Cage ( your future daughter-in-law).

  As Tom stared in dazed comprehension, he heard a wet compression behind him. Then another. Footsteps. On damp grass. He turned. Two shadowy figures were moving swiftly down the hill, toward the water.

  With his heart pounding dangerously, Tom slipped the phone into his coat and shoved both hands into his trouser pockets.

  Ten seconds later, they stood only a few feet away: two strangers in their thirties, their pale faces lighted by the moon. One pointed a pistol at Tom’s belly. As it glinted ominously in t
he moonlight, a nauseating flash of déjà vu went through him: two Chinese soldiers had confronted him exactly this way in Korea. Only it had been snowing then, and Walt had shot them both.

  “Don’t shoot,” he said in a level voice. “I need to talk to your boss.”

  “Just who do you think we work for?” asked the man on the left, the shorter of the two.

  Tom’s life now depended on a fifty-fifty gamble. Was the answer Brody Royal? Or had Frank Knox’s son eclipsed the older man in power? After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Forrest Knox.”

  The two men looked at each other. Then the one on the right said, “You’ve got a syringe and some vials with Sonny Thornfield’s fingerprints on them. Where are they?”

  “I’ll discuss that with Forrest when I see him.”

  The man with the pistol shook his head. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, Doc. This is the end of the road for you.”

  Tom was sickened by the fear that surged through him. Only minutes ago he had resigned himself to death. But Caitlin’s message had resurrected the hope of something he’d given up expecting to live to see. Another grandchild. Maybe a grandson, this time. The realization that these two men meant to take that from him—to kill him on this lonely black shore—summoned a blast of adrenaline from his aging glands. Pain stabbed him beneath the left shoulder blade. He needed a nitro tablet, fast. But if he reached for one, the man holding the pistol would fire.

  “That stuff isn’t here,” Tom said in a strained voice, closing his right hand around the pistol in his pocket. “Walt’s got it.”

  “That Texas Ranger?”

  “He’s lying,” said the taller man. “I’ll bet that junk’s right up there in the house.”

  The shorter man was working up the nerve to pull the trigger—Tom could see it. The abstract thoughts that occupied his mind earlier had flown from his head like dandelion seeds. He was back in Korea, facing two captors who couldn’t understand a word he said. What he’d learned all those years ago was that speed didn’t matter that much in a gunfight. It was deliberation that counted. Deliberation and steady nerves.