Natchez Burning (Penn Cage)

by Greg Iles

  Her eyes flash with anticipation. “Where?”

  I look down at my hands for a few seconds, then meet her gaze again.

  “Not here.” I touch the page button on my desk phone. “Rose, please find Quentin Avery’s home number for me.”

  “Washington, D.C., or Jefferson County?”

  “I’ve been trying both his cell and his D.C. number without any luck. Try his Jefferson County place.”

  “Tom doesn’t want to hire Quentin?” Caitlin asks, as I mute the intercom.

  “Not yet. But we can’t wait for reality to sink in. You said it: this is war. Shad needs to be reminded that actions have consequences, and that we’re not without resources.” Opening my desk drawer, I lift out a Baggie that contains a small USB flash drive and press my intercom again. “Rose, get me Shad Johnson, too, please.”

  “Will do. Just a sec.”

  “Are you going to hit him with the photo now?” Caitlin asks.

  I nod once, my jaw tightening.

  “God, I wish I could go with you.” She sits on my desk and touches my wrist. “Tell me one thing. Are we going to treat this case like every other? In terms of the wall we keep between our jobs?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “With your father’s life at stake? No way. But I suppose we might need to keep some things compartmentalized. I guess we can negotiate each development as it comes up.”

  I look hard into her eyes. “I made Henry a promise.”

  She smiles. “You won’t have to keep it long. He’ll be working for me by tonight.” She looks pointedly at her watch, then slides off my desk. “I need to get back to the paper.”

  “You’re going to wait until you hear from Henry before you publish anything, right?” I’m thinking of the Web edition. “Even online?”

  While Caitlin glares, my intercom clicks. “Shad Johnson on One, Mayor.”

  With a quick surge of adrenaline, I put Shad on the speakerphone.

  “I’m accepting your earlier invitation,” I tell him. “I need a couple of minutes of your time.”

  “You’ll have to wait forty-five minutes. I’ve got somebody coming in.”

  “Not a campaign consultant, I hope?”

  The DA chuckles, and his voice doesn’t sound even slightly anxious. “Still got your sense of humor, I see. That’s good, considering. Later, Mayor.”

  Shad’s confident tone unsettles me, but when I hang up, Caitlin gives me the pitiless stare of a warrior’s wife. “No mercy,” she intones. “I mean it. You show that arrogant prick a future working as a goddamn paralegal.”

  “I intend to.”

  She gives my hand one last squeeze, her eyes burning into mine. “You know what’s thicker than water.”

  I nod once.

  After a light kiss on my forehead, she’s gone.

  I look down at the nearly weightless stub of plastic and metal in my hand. Can this harmless-looking object keep my father out of jail? For two months I’ve believed that the digital image stored within this USB flash drive represented Shad Johnson’s career. But today I have an unsettling feeling that my old nemesis is a step ahead of me.

  CHAPTER 37

  TOM CAGE STOOD over his office desk, packing a leather weekend bag with necessities. After a brief stop at home, and a not-so-brief disagreement with Peggy, he’d returned to the office and seen quite a few patients. He’d worked on his records through lunch, trying not to dwell on the possibility that he might be making the last written notes of his medical career. Then he’d driven to the mall bookstore, a minor rebellion against the strictures of his bail agreement, and also a journey meant to gain time alone, where he could reflect one last time on his plan. After returning to the office and seeing a few more patients, he’d retired to his private office and begun packing the things he’d secretly brought from home.

  Melba knew not to disturb him when the door was closed. Already in the bag were two changes of clothes, a Ziploc containing a month’s worth of prescription drugs, a prescription pad, and a short-barreled Magnum .357. To these Tom added a plastic case containing diabetic syringes, two packs of insulin vials, and his first edition of The Killer Angels, which contained the fading Polaroid of Viola he’d shot in 1968. After compulsively looking up to be sure the door was closed, he opened the bottom drawer of his desk and removed another Ziploc bag. This one contained two vials of adrenaline, a syringe exactly like the one stored in the evidence room at the sheriff’s department, some powerful narcotics, a vial of local anesthetic, and six pairs of latex gloves. It also held a small pewter box that concealed three baby teeth belonging to Lincoln Turner. Tom tucked this Ziploc carefully into the weekend bag, then closed his desk drawer.

  On impulse, he turned to the shelf behind his desk and picked up a framed family photo. A neighbor had taken it in 1988, before Jenny left for her teaching job in England. In it, Tom, Peggy, Jenny, Penn, and Sarah stood before their old house—the one the kids had grown up in, the one that had held Tom’s beloved library. That library was gone now, up in smoke, just like Penn’s first wife. Annie had not yet been conceived when this picture was shot; nor had the first malfunctioning cell in Sarah’s breast begun to fulfill its terrible destiny. Tom closed his eyes and thought of his daughter-in-law for a few moments, a penance for the relief he’d felt when Penn finally proposed to Caitlin Masters.

  For some years, Tom had worried that part of his son had died with Sarah, the way part of Tom had perished when Viola left for Chicago. But Caitlin had not only proved stronger than Penn’s grief; she’d also brought some light back into Tom’s life. The medical books on Tom’s shelves described no clinically measurable “life force,” but after more than forty years of practicing medicine, he was certain that some people were born with an extra ration of it. Caitlin certainly had been, as had Viola Turner. A few boys in Korea had possessed this special quality, the ones who’d survived wounds that would have killed any ordinary soldier. Viola’s thirty-seven years in Chicago had all but killed her unique vitality, and Tom knew now that he’d had more to do with that premature death than he ever suspected.

  Taking a wooden tongue depressor from a jar, he pried the back off the picture frame, then slipped the family portrait into The Killer Angels alongside the snapshot of Viola. All that remained on his desktop now was a Sony videotape cartridge, the tape he’d removed from Henry Sexton’s camcorder on the morning Viola died. Tom stared down at the tape but did not touch it. After some reflection, he walked to the window and looked out at the office parking lot. For the past quarter hour he’d been watching for a tall, silver conversion van called a Roadtrek. The only silver vehicle in the back lot now was a Natchez city police car. The cruiser appeared to be empty, but Tom’s heart began laboring every time he looked out at it.

  Returning to his desk, he fixed his gaze on the tape, an artifact of one of the stupidest decisions he’d ever made. Rubbing his eyes hard, he turned to another framed photo on his shelf. This one showed two shirtless young men of eighteen standing in front of a snow-covered mountain. Both men wore army fatigues, both held cigarettes, and both were grinning despite the fact that dried blood covered their hands and forearms.

  Tom jumped at a loud rapping on his office door. Before he could say anything, the door opened and Melba Price leaned in, her face somber.

  “I just got a strange call on the main office line,” his chief nurse said softly. “A man. He gave me a private message for you, but he wouldn’t say who he was.”

  Melba’s view of the videotape was blocked by the weekend bag on the desk. Closing his hand over the tape, Tom picked it up and dropped it into the bag, then zipped the bag shut. “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘I was at the Frozen Chosin.’ Then he said to tell you he was parked on the south side of the office.”

  It took a few moments for Tom to orient himself. In all the years he’d practiced medicine here, he’d never had occasion to think about how the building lay in relati
on to the cardinal directions. Thinking about the sunlight in the late afternoons, he realized that the rear of the office faced east.

  “Dr. Cage,” Melba said, stepping fully inside and closing the door. “You’re free on bail, right?”

  “You know I am.”

  “And there are conditions to the bail, you said.”

  “That’s right.” He glanced down at the zipped bag. “And I’ve already broken at least one of them.”

  Melba sighed, her eyes clouded with sorrow and anxiety. “Where are you going?”

  Tom avoided her gaze. “I’m going home to lie down. I’m having some angina. Just as you told Penn I was.”

  She shook her head with regret. “You mean that’s what I’m supposed to tell the police.”

  Tom finally looked into her eyes. “That’s all you know, Mel. I went home to lie down, and I never came back. And you never got that phone call.”

  The nurse waved her hand dismissively. “I just want to know you know what you’re doing. You’re not about to try anything crazy, are you?”

  He gave her the most confident smile he could manage. “Have you ever thought I was crazy?”

  “All the time, thank goodness.” The nurse smiled, but the worry lines remained around her eyes.

  Tom went to the window and pulled back the curtain. The police car was still there. And still empty, or so it appeared.

  “Who you going to meet out there?” Melba asked.

  Tom let the curtain fall, then turned and picked up his bag. As he moved to the door, he reached out and squeezed his nurse’s warm hand. “A friend, Mel. A very old friend. You take care of yourself.”

  She reached after him as he departed. “You call me if you need help. I mean it. I’ll do anything you need, Doc. You know that.”

  Tom felt wetness in his eyes. If only I were the man everyone seems to believe I am.

  TOM FOUND THE SILVER conversion van exactly where Walt had told Melba it would be, on the south side of his office building. Framed in the open driver’s window was a face tanned so deeply that even in December it looked like varnished wood. Walt Garrity had spent thirty years as a Texas Ranger, and every hour in the sun showed on his face. But Walt’s eyes still smoldered with the fire that had driven him to hunt men across trackless wastes in the days when Sputnik was still on the drawing board and the only computers in America were in the Pentagon. In more recent years, the retired ranger had worked as an investigator for the Houston DA’s office, where Penn had first met him.

  “Itty-wa deska, Private!” Walt snapped.

  Tom found himself grinning. Itty-wa deska was phonetic Korean for “Get the hell over here!”

  “Police car scare you?” Tom asked, walking up and slapping his hand against the van’s side.

  “It didn’t reassure me.”

  “City cop,” Tom said. “Probably here as a patient.”

  Walt shrugged. “Will that nurse I talked to be any problem?”

  “No. Mel’s good people.”

  “Get in, then. There’s a full-size door on the other side. Good for crips like you.”

  Tom scanned the parking lot, wondering if Sheriff Byrd had anyone watching his office. This side of his office bordered an apartment complex, and he saw no one between the buildings. Cars were passing on the boulevard to the east, but too fast for their drivers to notice anything back here. He walked around the Roadtrek and found the door Walt had described. Tom had to stoop to get through it. As he pulled the door shut behind him, he found himself in a spotlessly clean RV, small but laid out with supreme efficiency.

  “We’ll stow your bag later,” Walt said. “Sit behind me till we get out of here.”

  Garrity was sitting in a captain’s chair, but another seat lay directly behind him. Tom collapsed onto cushy leather and felt the van lurch as Walt put it in gear. A police radio turned down low chattered in the background.

  “I’ve run down a lot of bail jumpers in my time,” Walt said. “This is the first time I ever helped one skip.”

  “Thanks for getting here so fast.”

  “Hell, I’m just glad for the chance to make up for last time.”

  Two months earlier, the old Ranger had tried to help Penn with some dangerous business, and he’d failed in a way that left Walt thinking that age had finally robbed him of the ability to do what he’d done so well for so long.

  “Glad to accommodate you,” Tom said. “Get this kimchee cab moving.”

  He expected a belly laugh, but instead, Walt rotated his captain’s chair and looked intently at him. “You know they can try you in absentia if you skip bail, right?”

  Tom’s stomach rolled. “I didn’t know that.”

  Walt nodded. “I only mention it because they indicted you so fast. The DA obviously has a burr up his ass about you.”

  “We’ll be done with our work long before this ever gets to trial. Hopefully before they even know I’m gone. Let’s go.”

  Walt slapped him on the knee, and Tom winced as the Ranger turned back toward the steering wheel. Fifteen seconds later, Walt drove past the empty police car, turned onto Jefferson Davis Boulevard, and joined the traffic moving toward Highway 61.

  “Did you bring the things I asked for?” Tom asked.

  “That and a lot more. We could track a whole terror cell with this van, and wipe ’em out anytime you say.”

  Tom nodded with relief. “Good.”

  “You gonna tell me who we’re after?”

  “All in good time, compadre. Let’s get the hell out of town.”

  CHAPTER 38

  WAITING IN MY office for my confrontation with Shad Johnson, I plugged the USB flash drive into my computer and opened the JPEG that has hung over the DA like a sword of Damocles for the past seven weeks. The fresh sight of it still engenders disbelief. I can’t quite get my mind around the fact that a calculating manipulator like Shad would put himself in a situation that could destroy his career overnight. On the other hand, he certainly wouldn’t be the first.

  In the photo, a blood-soaked pit bull hangs by its neck from a rope tied to a tree limb while three men look on. The dog appears to be jerking its hindquarters away from something in the hand of one of the men. It’s an electric cattle prod, and the man holding it is Darius Jones, an All-Pro wide receiver. Standing to the left of Darius is Shadrach Johnson, his face shining with something like rapture. Few things in life have shocked me more than seeing Shad in this context, but it only proves the lesson I’ve learned time and again: none of us truly knows anybody. How Shad could possibly try to use my father’s plight to get revenge on me is unfathomable, given the existence of this image. I recall former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards’s campaign boast that the only thing that could keep him from retaking the governor’s office was “being found with a dead woman or a live boy.” But Governor Edwards hadn’t seen this picture. In this day and age, being seen torturing a dog is political suicide.

  As the screen trips over to my screen saver, my mind turns to Quentin Avery. Among trial lawyers, Quentin is known as “Preacher” for his awe-inspiring ability to sway juries. But even in dry history books, his name figures prominently in some chapters. During the 1960s and ’70s, Quentin argued four cases before the United States Supreme Court—one a landmark civil rights case—and won them all. He became a hero to many, and his name was mentioned in the same sentences as Thurgood Marshall and James Nabrit. But by the mid-1980s, the young firebrand had turned his mind to lucre rather than to justice, taking on high-profile (and very profitable) drug cases. In the 1990s he moved on to personal injury cases, two of which made him genuinely wealthy. Throughout those years, Quentin did enough pro bono work that the people who mattered maintained their respect for him, but the image of a black knight on a shining steed had been forever tarnished, and his name was never again spoken with the same reverence as those of the men with whom he’d rubbed shoulders during the most dangerous years of the movement.

  “Mayor?” Rose says over m
y intercom. “I haven’t been able to reach Mr. Avery, but I have his wife on the phone.”

  “Thank you, Rose. I’ll pick up.”

  Though in his seventies, Quentin is married to an attorney in her early forties, a woman very protective of her husband. When Quentin and I worked a case together two years ago, it took Doris Avery some time to warm up to me. I like to think that she and I ended up in a state of mutual respect, but from what Dad told me about Quentin’s health, Doris has probably been under immense strain in recent months.

  “Doris, this is Penn.”

  “Hello,” says the weary alto voice I remember.

  “Thank you for taking my call. I know things have been difficult for Quentin lately, and I wouldn’t call unless it was an emergency.”

  “Emergency is a relative term. I know why you’re calling. A friend from Natchez told me Tom was arrested this morning, and why.”

  “Does Quentin know?”

  “No. He’s a sick man, Penn. Very sick. I will tell him after he wakes up, but only because he’ll be angry if he finds out later that I kept it from him.”

  “Are you guys in D.C.?”

  “No, Jefferson County. Your father has actually been treating Quentin, despite his heart attack.”

  Yet another fact Dad has kept from me, and possibly from my mother as well.

  “Tom has been a godsend,” Doris continues. “But I have to tell you this: Quentin can’t handle a murder trial. Not a case he’d be as personally invested in as this one. If they lost, and your father went to jail, it would kill Quentin. He can certainly give you advice, but please don’t ask him to handle the trial.”

  “I hope there won’t be a trial, Doris. But Dad’s already been indicted. It happened only a couple of hours after his initial appearance, and I think Shad’s going to try to have his bail revoked.”

  “Hmm. That sounds fishy.”

  “It is. Joe Elder is the judge, at least for now. And unless I’m mistaken, Joe clerked for Quentin back in the day. I’m hoping Quentin can help me get the charges reduced, if not dismissed altogether.”