Third Degree: A Novel

by Greg Iles

  She opened the door.

  Laurel was standing behind a table laden with boxes from the Indian restaurant a couple of blocks away. She was wearing a bright blue skirt and a white linen top, and she looked like nothing so much as the lovely teacher who had welcomed Michael with a smile two years ago. Danny had only seen her in black since Warren’s death, and then only from a distance. The change almost took his breath away. He looked back to thank Marilyn, but all he saw was a closing door.

  “I heard,” Laurel said. “About Michael.”

  Danny nodded. “I can’t really believe it.”

  “You see? The worst didn’t happen.”

  “No.”

  Laurel’s face was still pale, and she had lost seven or eight pounds she could ill afford. Danny saw darkness under the makeup beneath her eyes.

  “Are the kids in school?” he asked.

  “Only a few more days.”

  “Have you made any plans for the summer?”

  She looked away. “I was thinking of getting out of town for a while. I can’t take all this gossip. Grant and Beth have had a really hard time at school.”

  “You probably should,” Danny said, trying to mask his disappointment.

  “I guess you’re going to be busy with the divorce?”

  “I don’t know. With Michael more than that, I imagine.”

  Laurel nodded, then gestured at the bags on the table. “Are you hungry?”

  “I couldn’t hold anything down.”

  She smiled as if at a fond memory. “Me either.”

  “I miss you, Laurel. Bad. I’ve been worried about you.”

  Her smile cracked, and she put up her hand to cover her eyes. He started to go to her, but she waved him back. “It’s been hard,” she said. “I have a lot of guilt about what happened.”

  “I don’t feel too good about it myself.”

  She dropped her hand, revealing bloodshot eyes. “I don’t know where to go, Danny. Do I get in the car and drive to the beach? Take the kids to Disney World? There’s this huge hole in our lives now, and I don’t know how to fill it.”

  He cleared his throat. “I have an idea.”

  “What?”

  “Go down to the travel agency and buy three plane tickets for Disney World. Forget the Internet. Tell everybody you know that you’re leaving town. Pack up the SUV where all the neighbors can see you. When it gets dark, load up the kids and drive out to Deerfield Road. We’ll close the gate and shut out the world. There’s fifty acres for everybody to get to know each other in. I can move out to the cabin by the pond, and you guys can take the house. We’ll fish, cook out, let your dog chase the four-wheeler, whatever. If the kids get bored, I’ll rent a plane and fly us anywhere they want to go. Even Disney World. Nobody will know where you are or what you’re doing. And you can have all the time you need to get over things.”

  He thought he saw hope in her eyes, but he wasn’t sure.

  “Do you think . . . ,” she said, faltering. “Would it be all right, considering the kids? Or would it just be selfish?”

  He walked around the table but stopped a foot away from her. “There’s something I haven’t told you. I didn’t think you were ready to hear it.”

  She drew back, obviously afraid of learning yet another nightmarish fact about her husband’s death. “Do I need to know this?”

  “You do. Before Warren died, he asked me if I would take care of you and the kids.”

  She looked back at him in disbelief. “Don’t lie to make it easier for me.”

  “I swear by all that’s holy. He asked me to take care of you. He was a good man in the end. He wasn’t thinking of himself.”

  Fresh tears flowed from Laurel’s eyes. Then she collapsed against his chest and began to sob. He stroked her hair and held her gently, letting her cry it out.

  “What do you think?” he asked at length. “About that fake vacation?”

  She nodded into his chest.

  “When?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow.” She pulled back and looked up at him with guarded hope. “Will you take care of us?” Before he could answer, she took his hand and placed it on her abdomen. “All of us?”

  Danny felt the heat of her body through the linen. Memories of all the days he had thought he would die young flooded through him, bringing an awareness of years granted that seemed a pure grace, given those he had seen stolen from men much younger than he. “I will,” he said. “Till there’s no life left in me.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned on his shoulder. “That better be a long time from now.”

  He squeezed her tight, knowing only one thing with certainty: that every moment was a gift.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to CW4 John P. Goodrich, USA. Ret., for his assistance in understanding what it means to fly a helicopter in peacetime and in war.

  My heartfelt thanks also to Tom Johnson, a Vietnam helicopter pilot and wonderful writer whose book, To the Limit, I recommend to everyone with the highest possible praise.

  Thanks also to Jane Hargrove, Chuck Mayfield, Jerry Iles, M.D., Betty Iles, Geoff Iles, David Gaude, Doug Wike, and Curtis Moroney.

  As usual, I take responsibility for any and all mistakes in the book.

  I would also like to stress that the actions and attitudes of the deputies in this novel are not representative of the deputies or police officers I have known in Mississippi. The simple fact is that in a thriller someone has to be the bad guy. In real life, the law enforcement officers I have known have been dedicated and sometimes heroic individuals who serve the public for very little compensation. Without their constant labor, few of us would get any sleep at night. I urge everyone to make an effort to see how they might be able to help their local departments to acquire such technology as FLIR, which is mentioned in this novel. The greatest beneficiaries will be you and your children.

  THE DEVIL’S PUNCHBOWL

  GREG ILES

  Coming in January 2009 from Scribner

  Midnight in the garden of the dead.

  I wonder whether any previous mayor has taken a meeting in the city cemetery? Given that Natchez has existed since 1716, and knowing her history, I would not be surprised to find it so.

  But why am I here?

  If a patrolling cop should stop and ask, I will answer that I’ve come to meet a friend. But there will be no police here. At dusk they chain all four entrances shut to keep out the vandals who’ve cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, much of it to irreplaceable statuary and wrought iron. The friend I’m waiting for knows that; it’s one reason he picked this place. But I haven’t come here out of friendship.

  I’ve come out of guilt.

  And fear.

  The man I’m waiting for is forty-six years old, yet in my mind he will always be nine. That’s when our friendship peaked, during the Apollo moon landing. But you don’t often make friends like those you make as a boy, so the debt is a long one. The pricking at my conscience is the kind you feel when someone slips away and you don’t do enough to maintain the tie, the guilt more acute because over the years Tim Jessup managed to get himself into quite a bit of trouble, and after the first eight or nine times, I wasn’t there to get him out of it.

  My fear has little to do with Jessup. Tim is merely a messenger who may bear tidings that confirm the rumors men have been murmuring over golf greens at the country club, passing beside high school gridirons, and whispering through the hunting camps like a rising breeze before a fall storm. When Jessup asked to meet me, I resisted. He couldn’t have chosen a worse time to discover a conscience, for me or for the city. Yet in the end, I agreed to hear him out. For if the rumors are true—if a uniquely disturbing evil has entered into my town—it is I who opened the door for it. I ran for mayor in a Jeffersonian fit of duty to save my hometown. In my righteousness I was arrogant enough to believe that I could deal with the devil and somehow keep our collective virtue intact. But that, I fear, was wishful thinki
ng.

  My watch reads 12:21 a.m., yet there’s no sign of Jessup among the faintly luminous stones standing shoulder high about me on Jewish Hill. Thirty-five minutes ago a lone pair of headlights drifted up the lane that stretches along the great bluff bounding Mississippi on the west. They trundled past me, the rumble of the engine behind them bouncing off the shotgun shacks across from the cemetery, then vanished around the bend, headed toward the Devil’s Punchbowl, a vast defile in the deep woods of the county, still choked with kudzu despite the falling mercury of October. Two hundred feet below the bluff road, the Mississippi River gleams like a cold, black mirror, not the reddish-brown tide of mud that during the day flows straight from the pages of Twain. A curved sliver of moon hangs over the flat Louisiana delta, and pinpoint stars glitter high above me. I’m cold, I’m tired, and I have a babysitter watching my sleeping daughter at home. Annie is fourteen now, but I never leave her alone at night.

  Having waited past the appointed hour, I’m tempted to leave. My car is parked on the narrow shoulder by the wall at the foot of Jewish Hill. If I were to slide down the steep hill and push through the shrubbery behind the wall, I could be homeward bound in thirty seconds. But my fear keeps me where I am. I first thought Jessup insisted on this unlikely trysting place and time to make our meeting convenient for him; he works on one of the riverboat casinos at the foot of the bluff, and midnight marks the end of his shift. But he claimed that the cemetery’s isolation was a necessity for me—swore, in fact, that I could trust neither my own police department nor any official of the city government. He also warned me not to call his cell phone or his home for any reason. Part of me considers these precautions ridiculous, but a warier part knows that Jessup’s employers routinely use surveillance equipment employed by the CIA. I used similar technology myself not so long ago.

  I was a lawyer in another life. A prosecutor. I started out wanting to be Atticus Finch and ended up sending twelve people to death row. Looking back, I’m not even sure how that happened. But one day, I woke up and realized that I had not been divinely ordained to punish the guilty. So I resigned my position with the Houston district attorney’s office and went home to my joyous wife and daughter. Uncertain what to do with my newfound surplus of time (and facing an acute shortage of funds), I began writing about my courtroom experiences, and like a few other lawyers slipstreaming in the wake of John Grisham, found myself selling enough books to place my name on the bestseller lists. We bought a bigger house and moved Annie to an elite prep school. An unfamiliar sense of self-satisfaction began to creep into my life, a feeling that I was one of the chosen, destined for success in whatever field I chose. I had an enviable career, a wonderful family, a few good friends, lots of faithful readers. I was young enough and self-righteous enough to believe that I deserved all this, and foolish enough to think it would last. Change came like the tractor-trailer that nearly ran me down when I was hitchhiking through Germany in college. As I stared down into the silent Rhine valley, a roaring steel giant crested the ridge behind me and blasted by like an artillery shell, spinning me to the pavement and sucking the air from my lungs. One second everything was static, familiar, in place; then reality shattered into fragments that flew far past the edge of the known universe. Lawyers grow familiar with the traumas that do irreparable damage—accidents, divorces, violent crimes—but my small-scale apocalypse was the death of my wife. I loved her. And four months after my father diagnosed her with cancer, she was dead.

  The shock of losing Sarah almost broke me, and it shattered my seven-year-old daughter. For days we floated un-tethered in an airless, unwatered vacuum too empty even for tears. In desperation I fled the city, taking Annie back to the small Mississippi town where I’d been raised, where I had buried Sarah, back to the loving arms of my parents. There—here—even before I could begin working my way back to earth, I found myself drawn into a thirty-year-old murder case, one that ultimately saved my life and ended four others. By the time it was through, I felt more grounded than I had in years, and back in the soul-nourishing footsteps of Atticus Finch. That was seven years ago. Seven years ago we stood a simple stone less than a hundred yards from this spot. On it are chiseled the words: SARAH ELIZABETH CAGE. Daughter. Wife. Mother. She is loved. I’m thinking of walking down the hill to visit her when an urgent whisper breaks the silence.

  “Penn? Penn, are you here?”

  I whirl from the river, keeping a tall gravestone between me and the voice. A wiry figure is advancing along the rim of Jewish Hill from the interior of the graveyard. From my vantage point, I can see all four entrances to the cemetery, but I’ve seen no headlights, heard no engine. Yet here Tim Jessup is, materializing from the stones like one of the ghosts so many people believe haunt this ancient hill. He calls my name again, but I don’t answer. I haven’t spoken more than twenty words to Tim in years, not face-to-face. I want to study him without him sensing the objectivity in my gaze. He was a junkie once, and he still moves like one, with a herky-jerky progress in which his head perpetually jiggers around as though he’s watching for police while his thin legs carry him forward in the hope of finding his next fix. Jessup claims to be clean now, thanks largely to his new wife, Julia, who was a year behind us in high school. Julia Stanton married the high school quarterback at nineteen and took ten years of punishment before forfeiting that particular game. When I heard she was marrying Tim Jessup, I figured she wanted a perfect record of losses. But the word around town is that Julia has worked wonders with Tim. She got him a job and has kept him at it for three years, dealing blackjack on the Magnolia Queen.

  “Penn? It’s me, man. Come out!”

  Jessup is closer now, and the gauntness of his face is unmistakable. Though he and I are the same age—born exactly one month apart—he looks ten years older. His skin has the leathery texture of a man who’s worked too many years under the Mississippi sun. Passing him on the street under that sun, I’ve seen more disturbing signs. His salt and pepper mustache is streaked yellow between his nostrils and his mouth from decades of cigarette smoke, and his skin and eyes have the jaundiced cast of a man whose liver hasn’t many years left in it. Jessup passes my position and walks to the edge of Jewish Hill, where a strained wire bench awaits lovers, mourners, and all the rest who come here. He peers out over the river, then looks down toward the road, where my car hugs the cemetery wall.

  Now he knows I’m here.

  Still I do not call out. There’s something besides guilt and fear working in me. It’s almost revulsion. What bound Jessup and me tightly as boys was that we were both doctors’ sons. We each understood the special weight of that particular burden, the way preachers’ sons know that emotional geography. Having a physician as a father brings benefits and burdens, but for eldest sons it brings a seemingly universal expectation that someday you will follow in your father’s footsteps. In the end both Tim and I failed to fulfill that expectation, but in very different ways. Watching him now, turning haplessly in the moonlight in search of me, it’s hard to imagine that we started our lives in almost the same place. Maybe that’s the root of my urge to remain separate from him. For though Tim Jessup made a lifetime of bad decisions—in full knowledge of the risks—the one that set them all in train could have been, and in fact was, made by many of us. Only luck carried the rest of us through. With a sigh of resignation, I step from behind the gravestone and call toward the river.

  “Tim? Hey, Tim. It’s me, Penn.”

  Jessup whips his head around like a frightened deer, and his right hand darts toward his pocket. For an instant I fear he’s going to pull a pistol. Then he recognizes me, waves me toward him, and starts walking in my direction. As he closes the distance, memory overrides the present, reminding me how unlucky this man has been. When he was a freshman at Ole Miss, Jessup agreed to entertain two seniors from St. Stephen’s Prep, our alma mater, during a football weekend. Like a lot of other students, he made several high-speed trips to the county line to procure cold beer, w
hich was not available in Oxford, Mississippi (and still isn’t). During his third beer run, Tim managed to drive his Trans Am eighty-eight feet off the highway and into a hundred-year-old oak standing at the edge of a cotton field. Jessup and one of the high-school boys were wearing their seat belts; the third boy was not. The impact hurled him from the backseat through the front windshield and into the branches of a pecan tree, where with any luck he died instantly. Because of the alcohol found at the scene, both sets of parents sued Jessup’s father, and Tim served a year in jail for manslaughter. Pleading the case down from vehicular homicide probably cost Dr. Jessup all the goodwill he’d built up in twenty years of practicing medicine, not to mention the cash that must have changed hands under the table. But despite the light sentence, things were never really the same for Tim after that. As his life slipped further and further off track, people blamed drugs, weakness of character, even his father, but in my gut I always knew it was the wreck that had ruined him.

  “Penn,” he calls softly, “I thought you’d chickened out.” Jessup flattens both hands against his pants pockets, then scratches his arms above the elbows and glances back toward the road. Only after he’s sure the road is empty does he turn and give me the glint of his eyes. “Shit, man. You shoulda said something.”

  I smile and hold out my hand, marveling that at forty-six, Jessup still sounds like a strung-out hippie. “You’re the one who’s late, aren’t you?”

  He nods steadily, like a man who will do anything to keep from being still. How does this guy deal blackjack all night?

  “I couldn’t rush off the boat,” he says. “I think they’re watching me. I think they suspect something.”

  I want to ask who he’s talking about, but I assume he’ll get to that. Looking at him now, in all his jittery anxiety, I realize just how badly I hope that I have come on a fool’s errand, that all the rumors I’ve been hearing are the lurid speculation of bored townspeople. “I didn’t see your car. Where’d you come from?”