by Greg Iles
This earns me a smile from teacher. “Sally adapted that doctrine to marital warfare.”
I think about this for a quarter mile. “Here’s where I’m confused. How was the cache itself supposed to function? What were you supposed to do with it? Sally created this weapon, which she gave to you. Then she warned Claude Buckman that if Max ever revealed his secret, the Poker Club would be destroyed. But they don’t know what the secret is. So how did Sally’s Dead Hand system work? How does the cache keep Max quiet? Was it meant to be a threat only? Never used?”
“Oh, no. If it were only a threat, Sally wouldn’t have needed to create it.”
“Except to bolster the threat at the beginning.”
“Uh-uh. That cache exists to destroy them all if Max ever tells Kevin or Paul the truth about Kevin’s paternity. Sally was deadly serious about that.”
“Well, that’s a crappy plan. Once Max tells the secret, Kevin and Paul are screwed for life, whether Max and the Poker Club are ruined or not.”
Nadine smiles with secret knowledge. “Unless there’s an early-warning system. A trigger to alert me if it looked like Max was going to spill the beans.”
“What could that be?”
Nadine raises her eyebrows. “You mean who. Tallulah, of course.”
The elegance of Sally’s system takes my breath away. “Tallulah practically lives with Max and Kevin,” I think aloud. “She’d know if Max was coming apart, edging up to the line.”
“Exactly.”
“And she loved Sally. Tallulah probably saw Max becoming obsessed with Kevin long before Sally did. Max was lucky she kept quiet about it for so long.”
“I think his luck is running out.”
“I’m surprised the club didn’t kill Max the day after Sally called Buckman. To remove all risk of the cache being used. Pine told me that some members wanted to do that.”
“Give them time. They’ve only known about the cache for two days,” Nadine reminds me. “You know they’re shitting bricks right now. But most of those old bastards love Max. And from my analysis of the cache, Max seems to be the main liaison between the Poker Club and Azure Dragon. That probably makes him especially valuable to them.”
“So . . . that night at the hotel, when Max and Sally fought in public. Was she planning to execute her plan? Or did the fight push her to it?”
“I think Sally knew what she was going to do that night. She started that fight to bolster her frame-up of Max.”
I’m amazed by the cold precision of Sally’s plan. “What if she hadn’t been able to reach Buckman on the phone that night?”
“She’d have moved down the list to Blake Donnelly. If she couldn’t get Blake, then down again until she reached a club member. But Sally knew all those men well, and their wives even better. She knew Charity Buckman would put her through to Claude—especially after seeing them fight at the Aurora.”
“I can’t get over how gracious Sally was to us that night, while this was in her head. But . . . you had to suspect something?”
“I didn’t, really. Not that night. She looked so alive, even happy, right up until that argument.”
I think back over the timeline of that night. “You stayed at my house that night. I’m the one who told you she’d been shot. You didn’t show much emotion.”
“I was shattered, Marshall. All I could see was Sally sitting at my kitchen counter, drinking wine and trying to pretend things weren’t hopeless. That night, when I left you to get dressed for our digging expedition at the mill site, I stuck my finger down my throat and threw up.”
“I’m sorry. You know, some of this would have been useful to know these past couple of days.”
“I realize that. It’s been hard watching you struggle to figure all this out, when I knew the answer all along. But I promised Sally I wouldn’t tell a soul. And I took that promise seriously.”
“I get it. She was your mother’s best friend.”
Nadine looks over at me, and I see her lower lip quivering. For the first time, I feel like she’s about to lose her composure.
“There’s the road,” I tell her, and she looks grateful for the distraction.
We turn left, and kudzu-choked trees close around the car. Instead of voicing the next thing that comes into my head, I lay my hand on her arm, and she smiles sadly. Crunching over gravel in the dark, I feel the fatigue of an endless day burying me like sand. Then the trees open out to the clearing and the pond, which has a cold sheen in the moonlight. Three cars and a pickup truck sit outside the barn. Yellow light leaks from beneath the big sliding door, and as Nadine parks, I see a cigarette flare in the dark.
Opening the passenger door, I hear a deep voice say, “Yo. Who goes there?”
“Marshall McEwan. This is my dad’s place.”
“What’s the password?”
“Purple Rain,” Nadine says from behind me.
“Yes, ma’am. Welcome back.”
A big black man holding a rifle materializes out of the darkness. He reaches out and slides the barn door to the side, spilling light into the night. The sentry who challenged me looks about fifty, and his rifle is an AR-15 with a forward pistol grip and military scope.
Once through the door, I smell chemicals, ink, and heated paper. Aaron and Gabriel Terrell stand over by the big German offset press, while a group of teenagers sits in a circle of folding lawn chairs, all looking at their cell phones. Aaron waves and starts toward us. Before he covers ten feet, the kids break into an a cappella gospel rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.”
“Looks like you recruited a youth army,” I say, shaking Aaron’s hand.
He grins through his white beard. “We gon’ be all right on the foldin’ and delivery. Got some more drivers comin’ soon.”
Despite the excitement I felt about witnessing this spectacle—or even taking part in it—I wobble on my feet. “I noticed you have some security out there.”
“My idea,” Nadine says from beside me.
“That guy didn’t look like any church security guard.”
Aaron chuckles. “Hey, man, just ’cause I grew up in the church don’t mean I don’t know some brothers from the other side of the street. We got somebody riding shotgun with Ben, too.”
Nadine says, “Is anybody using those army cots you found earlier? Marshall’s hit a wall.”
“I see that. They’re all free right now. Got three set up in the back corner over there. Two more on the other side. We keep the boys separated from the girls when they lay down. On my watch, anyway.”
“You going to be able to get that front page printed?” I ask.
Aaron smiles. “You’re kidding, right?” He walks to the linotype, reaches down to a stack of paper on the floor, then brings back an eleven-by-seventeen sheet of paper. “We had some trouble with the Heidelberg. Had to use the old ABDick.”
He hands me the page, which is topped by a beautifully printed version of the original Watchman masthead, with the eagle and the banner in its beak. Vincit Omnia Veritas. Below the masthead runs a series of large headlines with brief descriptions of the stories to be found within what will be the most unusual edition of our paper ever printed. poker club rife with corruption? blares the first. photo puts holland at likely murder scene with victim, announces the second, in smaller type. real estate scam defrauds homeowners, reads the third. Then comes bones discovered on mill site. Beneath that in smaller type are the words: “New Artifacts Support Dr. Ferris’s Theory. MDAH Must Investigate.”
“Truth conquers all,” I say softly, looking at the eagle again. “Thanks for this, Aaron.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m glad to give Duncan something to smile about.”
“You’re going to do more than that. The Poker Club’s going to go to war. I’m glad you’ve got that security here.”
“We’ll be all right. Problem is our max size on the jobbing press was eleven by seventeen. It’s a long way from perfect, but the kids are folding it around the main
edition and then rubber-banding it. They takin’ a break now, but they work fast. They been foldin’ five hundred copies an hour per person.”
“Wow. Well, we can live with the size difference. Wake me if you need me, or if Ben says get me up.”
Gabriel Terrell laughs and walks up behind his brother. “Ben? That boy passed out an hour ago.”
“Well, he did a good job.”
“Look now,” Aaron says, “ain’t no blankets on them cots.”
“We’ll make do,” Nadine tells him.
She leads me through the antique machines to a couple of Korean War–vintage army cots set up side by side against the wall. Three feet away stands a fifty-five-gallon drum with an Evinrude outboard motor bolted inside it. The prop has probably rusted to powder by now. Beyond the motor stands another cot with Ben Tate sprawled across it, snoring up at the rafters.
“Lie down,” Nadine says, laughing softly. “I’ll take the one on the outside.”
The voices of the choir fade into empty silence. Then a soft tenor voice begins singing “Hey Ya!” by OutKast. Other singers mimic instruments beneath the vocal, filling the barn with sounds not quite like any I’ve ever heard.
“You’re about to fall down,” Nadine says, taking hold of my upper arms and easing me down onto a cot.
“What about tomorrow?” I ask, curling into the barn wall. “The meeting with the Poker Club?”
“We’ll deal with that tomorrow. I’ve got a little treat you can take with you. A silver bullet.”
“What’s that?” I ask, my eyes already closed.
“A recording of Claude Buckman waxing poetic about committing treason with China. It was so damning that I made a recording to keep with me, separate from what’s in the safe-deposit box. Fifteen seconds of it was enough to get you out of jail.”
“Awesome,” I mutter, not even sure what she’s talking about.
A moment later I feel her drop something soft and heavy on top of me, and that sends me over the edge into oblivion.
Chapter 45
At 7:55 a.m. I walk out of the elevator on the second floor of the Bienville Southern Bank. As thankful as I was for that army cot, I’m still shaky from sleep deprivation. I’m also a little nervous. Before going into the conference room, I duck into the men’s room to take a leak. While I’m standing at the sink washing my hands, the door opens behind me. In the mirror I see Tommy Russo walk in, wearing one of his body-hugging suits. He doesn’t go to a urinal or a stall, but stands by the door, looking at me. He’s holding a folded newspaper in his hand.
“This a social call?” I ask, wiping my hands on a paper towel.
He takes two steps forward and slaps my back with the newspaper. Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I take the paper and hold it in front of me. It’s this morning’s edition of the Watchman.
“I thought we had a deal,” he says, his eyes bright with anger.
“We did. Then Arthur Pine showed up and shut down my father’s business. So, no, we don’t have a deal anymore.”
Russo takes back the paper and opens it to page two, where several photographs show the principals in the main Poker Club story. One pairs Tommy with a man who looks very much like him and is identified as “New Jersey syndicate figure Anthony Russo.”
“That your brother?” I ask.
“Yeah. Tony. And he ain’t happy today. My old man, either, who’s still alive, the stubborn son of a bitch.”
“Well, you’re lucky, Tommy. Because my old man’s in a coma. He’s not going to be around long. And I wasted last night in the county jail.”
“I feel for you, Marshall.” Russo taps the photo. “But this ain’t good for business. And there’s worse ways to die than in a hospital.”
I let his threat hang in the air.
“I thought we had a private understanding, you and me,” he insists. “After we talked yesterday.”
“We did. I listened to your speech about family and not messing with a man’s living. And then you dropped a truck on my family.”
“Look, that debt-purchase thing, that wasn’t my call. With the paper, I mean. That was Buckman and Holland and that prick Pine. I thought they’d settled things with you. Next thing I hear, everything is off.”
“That sums it up, Tommy. Business is business, right? But physics matters, too. You’re a serious guy, I know that. But you’re about to learn a lesson about leverage.”
“You got some balls on you, McEwan. You know that?”
I look past him to the restroom door. “What are you really doing here, Tommy?”
He steps right to be sure he’s blocking my exit. “You need to understand something. Those guys you’re about to talk to in that conference room, those so-called Southern gentlemen . . . they’re local, okay? My partners ain’t local. They’re from Jersey. So remember this: whatever gets said in that room in the next few minutes, those clowns don’t speak for my partners.”
“You got bigger problems than me, Tommy. That paper mill deal? Selling U.S. Senate votes? The FBI will bury you under a federal prison for that. Ask the governor of Illinois. Correction, the ex-governor. The thing is, you’d never get to prison, because the Chinese would kill you first. The Chinese intelligence services, Tommy. They make the mob look like Girl Scouts. So listen hard in that conference room and make sure I stay healthy. That’s your best survival strategy. Now, let me out. I’ve got a meeting.”
Unlike my first formal encounter with the Poker Club, this time eight of twelve members are present. I feel like I’m facing an all-male Senate committee, not least because it’s being chaired by an irascible octogenarian.
As before, Claude Buckman sits at the head of the long rosewood table, Donnelly to his right, Arthur Pine to his left. On Donnelly’s side sit Senator Avery Sumner, Wyatt Cash, and Dr. Lacey. On Pine’s side sit Beau Holland and Tommy Russo. I’m at the far end, opposite Buckman. Cell phones lie in front of each man, all switched off. This time, I was wanded and searched by a security man before entering the conference room, to be sure I’m carrying no recording devices. When he searched me, I suppressed a sigh of relief that I’d left Nadine’s pistol in the Flex. As I prepared to leave the barn this morning, Nadine insisted that I bring her gun with me. I assented, but on the condition that she would remain behind while Aaron Terrell dropped me outside the sheriff’s department to pick up the Flex.
Not one man has spoken since I entered the conference room. I suspect that’s because of the Chinese man sitting in a plush chair against the wall to my right. Though no one has introduced him, he looks like the fiftyish man who made the speech at the groundbreaking ceremony three days ago. I believe the Watchman story referred to him as Jian Wu, a corporate officer of the Azure Dragon paper company.
“Mr. McEwan,” Buckman finally begins in his gravelly growl. “This morning’s newspaper articles have placed several members of this club in legal jeopardy. Azure Dragon has also informed us—privately—of their intent to pull out of Tenisaw County and relocate to Alabama. Mr. Wu is only here this morning as a courtesy to me. Needless to say, you have our full attention.”
“Before I address the new developments,” I reply, “I want to remind you that as of yesterday at twelve p.m. we had a deal that would have prevented those articles from running. You not only took that deal off the table, you chose to blackmail me instead. You also shut down my father’s newspaper, which resulted in him having a massive heart attack. Last night, I was waterboarded in the city jail, and Beau Holland was present throughout. That’s why we’re all sitting here.”
Blake Donnelly, the most likable member of the club—and also the second richest—gives me a wry smile and says, “Marshall, I heard you had a little trouble over at the sheriff’s department. I want to apologize. Those guys get a little out of hand over there. They need to be kept on a tight leash. You know what power does to people.”
“That I do.” I look pointedly at Beau Holland. “I need to use my phone to play a recording. I’ll switch it off
as soon as I’m finished.”
“Proceed,” says Buckman.
From my pocket I remove a small Bluetooth speaker I borrowed from one of the choir kids this morning, then check to be sure it’s paired with my iPhone. “I’ll be as brief as possible, gentlemen. First, this is not a negotiation. To prove that, this recording represents a tiny fraction of the material Sally Matheson gathered to implicate this club in a broad spectrum of felonies.”
The general feeling in the room seems to be a mix of repressed fury and extreme discomfort. I press play, and a hiss of static fills the conference room. Then Claude Buckman’s unmistakable voice says, “Gentlemen, before tonight’s toast, let me say this.”
Every face around the conference table goes pale.
“If, when you’re away from the club, you start to ponder the ethical dimension of our undertaking, remember one thing. This is one of those times when sectionalism must trump nationalism. I don’t say that lightly, but our ancestors lived through a similar period, one that led to the founding of this group. Every man here knows that in our time, the Yankees and Jews and California flakes won’t put any more major factories in Mississippi until we give up the last of our traditions.”
“Fuck ’em!” barks a voice that sounds like Donnelly’s.
“And the Priuses they ride in on!” jokes someone else.
“After all,” Buckman continues, “we long ago reached the point where national boundaries mean little. And if we must deal with a foreign country, I’d prefer the Chinese to a lot of others. My uncle flew the Hump in Burma, and he loved the Chinese. Hell, General Chennault himself married a Chinese woman.”
Claire Lee Chennault, the commander of the Flying Tigers, was raised just down the river near Ferriday, Louisiana.
“The Chinese know their history,” Max says on the tape. “Mr. Wu told me General Chennault had been a great friend to the Chinese people. That surprised me, given Chennault’s anticommunist work, but the guys who run China these days are about as communist as Henry Ford.”