“All right, hon,” Junelle said, stepping back from the stool. “You ready?”
Snake nodded. “Let’s see the damage.”
When she yanked the poster board away, Snake didn’t recognize himself in the mirror. His long white rat’s nest was gone, replaced by perfectly trimmed black hair combed straight back from his face. And Junelle hadn’t stopped at his scalp. She’d dyed his eyebrows, too. Combined with the new dentures Snake had bought off an Indian dentist up in Shreveport, the total effect was stunning. A complete transformation.
Snake whistled long and loud. “I’ll be damned. I look like Ronald Reagan at the Neshoba County Fair.”
“Better, darlin’,” croaked Junelle, sending ash floating from the tip of her cigarette onto his lap. She snipped an errant hair above Snake’s left ear. “Did Reagan go to the Neshoba Fair?”
Snake turned around on the stool. “Did he go there? Baby doll, when Reagan first ran for president, he got up on a platform five miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, and gave a talk about states’ rights. Summer of 1980, and I was there. He put it right in their faces, boy. States’ rights, and the hole where they buried them three civil rights workers not a stone’s throw away. The country responded, too. They knew what he was talkin’ about. Nobody left like Reagan these days. No, sir. Or it don’t seem like, anyway.”
“Well,” Junelle said, her head tilted to one side as she assessed her handiwork. “I think you may be my masterpiece.”
Snake gazed into the mirror like a septuagenarian Narcissus. “I’ll be dogged,” he marveled. “If those Arabs are as good with passports as you are with hair dye, I might just buy me an antebellum home in the middle of Natchez and sit on my veranda all day sippin’ bourbon.”
“I’m not sure I’d try that.”
“I might, though,” Snake murmured. “I just might. After my book advance comes in, that is.”
He felt his newest burner phone buzz in his pocket. Getting to his feet, he took out the phone and clapped it to his ear.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Toons.”
Terry “Toons” Teufel was the SA, or sergeant at arms, of the VK motorcycle club. Snake didn’t trust the man—who seemed like a nut job—but under the present circumstances he had no choice but to rely on him for protection.
“Yeah,” Snake said again.
“I think we got a problem.”
“I’m listening.”
Ever attuned to the needs of the men around her, Junelle signaled that she was going into the kitchen so Snake could have some privacy.
“The splash went perfectly today,” Toons said.
“That don’t sound like a problem.”
“But an hour later, somebody showed up at the Kuntry Kafé with a hard-on for you and your buddies.”
“Who? That FBI man, Kaiser?”
“No. The doctor’s boy. The mayor.”
Snake went still. If he remembered right, Penn Cage had faced off with Randall Regan in the Kafé. “Is that right?”
“Yeah. I had a guy in there, sitting in the corner booth. Cage walked in with a pistol and held it to one of your guys’ heads.”
Snake tried out a couple of different expressions in the mirror. When he scowled, he looked like a banker who’d missed a putt on the eighteenth green. “And?”
“One of your guys told him, ‘Ain’t you a badass all of a sudden.’ Then the mayor said something that you might be interested in.”
“Which was?”
“He said, ‘Why don’t you ask Forrest Knox that question?’”
Snake went still. As he stared blankly into the mirror, acid flooded into his belly. He suddenly looked like a clown to himself.
“You need to dump your phone after using that name,” he said in a monotone. “And I gotta dump this one.”
“Relax, man. That’s what we use ’em for.”
“Don’t fuckin’ tell me when to relax.”
“Take it easy, pops. Look, I’m gonna be comin’ by soon. You and me got something to talk about.”
“News to me.”
“I’m gettin’ tired of waitin’ on those names you promised us.”
Snake kept his voice cool. “You’ll get ’em when I said you’ll get ’em. Not an hour before.”
“We need ’em now, Knox. We got guys coming up for trial in St. Tammany Parish. One in St. Landry, too.”
“Talk to Lars. He’ll set you straight.”
“I’m always talkin’ to Lars. He told me I should ask you about it. The names, man.”
“After you’ve fulfilled your half of the bargain. That’s when you get ’em. Then and only then. That’s the deal. I’m hangin’ up now.”
“Wait. That woman of yours, the one who did the splash? She wants to come to where you’re at.”
“Tell her forget it. Nobody comes here. Not till the new passports come in. She’s gotta stick to the rules like everybody else.”
“That’s what I told her. But her and that boy of yours don’t seem to care much for rules.”
“Are you saying you can’t handle them?”
“I’m saying if I have to handle that boy, don’t bitch at me if you have to pay to have him fed through a tube for the rest of his life.”
Snake scratched at his hairline. The dye seemed to be irritating his scalp. “Do what you gotta do. But you’ll want him around later, when the shootin’ starts.”
“I got plenty of gun hands, Grandpa.”
Snake laughed softly. “Alois is more than a gun hand. He’s a mechanical genius. You’ll see what I mean pretty soon.”
“Yeah, yeah, I can’t wait. I’m out.”
Snake hung up. Then he switched off the cell phone, removed its SIM card, and dropped it in the bowl of hair dye Junelle had left on the nearby card table. As he looked down at the black fluid, Penn Cage’s words echoed in his head: Why don’t you ask Forrest Knox that question?
“Everything copacetic, Daddy?” Junelle asked, easing back into the room.
Snake looked into the mirror at the handsome stranger staring back at him. “What do you think about Toons, Junelle?”
She took a deep breath, then gave Snake a sidelong glance. “Just between you and me?”
He nodded.
“He’s a mean son of a bitch. Paranoid. Which I guess is sort of his job. But Toons takes it too far, you ask me. He’s a fuckin’ psycho. The younger girls say he’s sick in the bedroom, too. Which in this club is sayin’ something.”
“I’m a psycho, too, June-bug.”
Junelle gave him a knowing grin. “Yeah, but you’re my kind of psycho.”
Snake gazed back into the mirror and forced a smile so that he could examine his new teeth. Damn, but they were white. Like Chiclets. Yeah . . . the new look would take some getting used to. He looked more like Brody Royal than himself.
“You okay, Daddy?” Junelle asked, lighting a fresh Salem with a kitchen match, then shaking it out and drawing deep on the cancer stick. “You look tense.”
He grunted, turning left to examine his profile.
“You want me to suck it for you?” she asked, blowing out a long stream of blue smoke. “Take the edge off?”
Leaning away from the menthol cloud, Snake turned back to the glass, thinking about his unfinished business. I wonder how far this face can take me? I wonder how close it can get me to Penn Cage—
“Daddy?”
“Later,” he snapped. “After dinner. Jesus.”
“Okay, okay. Don’t get pissy. I’m just tryin’ to help.”
He felt a flash of anger. “You wanna help?” He started to tell her to get the hell out, but upon reflection he unzipped his fly and hung his dick out instead. “Help.”
Junelle laid her cigarette on the edge of the card table and dropped to her knees with a contented smile. Hell, he thought as he disappeared into her bright red mouth. She’s probably been doing that since she was thirteen. Happier sucking dick than doing anything else.
Wh
ile Junelle fulfilled her destiny, Snake thought about the Cage family.
Chapter 9
When I got home, I told no one what I’d done at the Kuntry Kafé, but on my way into the house I told Tim Weathers to keep his men especially alert tonight. After the acid attack, my warning was redundant. On the orders of John Masters, Tim had already posted extra men outside. They’d come on a plane with eight others from Dallas, the contingent sent to guard the reporters of the Natchez Examiner. There’s nothing like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.
Once more my family has been thrown into shock. Annie tried to put up a good front, but I saw right through it. By the time I got home they had heard through the rumor mill how serious Keisha’s condition was. And they weren’t the only ones receiving updates by text message. Mia’s mother, Meredith Burke, called me and demanded that I release Mia from her employment and send her straight home. I didn’t blame her one bit. The problem was, Mia refused to leave. I must admit I was glad, because if she’d simply left, Annie would have fallen to pieces. But obviously changes must be made. I invited Mrs. Burke—who has been a single mother for the past sixteen years—to come by our house and discuss the situation with me and John Kaiser about seven p.m.
An hour before she arrived, Drew Elliott stopped by and delivered six tubes of 2.5 percent solution of calcium gluconate, the only known treatment for hydrofluoric acid burns. I’d called Drew at his office and asked if he could get us enough for the girls to carry some at all times, and he was glad to do it. Watching him instruct them on how to use it brought home the danger like nothing else had. Drew answered several tough questions from Mia and Annie about Keisha’s prognosis, then hugged them both and left.
I took that opportunity to discuss the possibility of moving one or both of them to another city, or even another country. I also raised the possibility of my going with them, though none of these options seemed practical. Where could Annie go that she would feel safe and secure? Not England. My sister, Jenny, is flying in for Dad’s trial. My mother isn’t about to leave Dad during this crisis. That leaves me to take Annie somewhere “safe.” But can I flee Natchez while my father stands trial for murder and my mother walks a tightrope between hysteria and catatonic despair?
I voiced none of these concerns, of course. And despite the danger, Annie made it clear that she had no intention of leaving her home, especially while “Papa” was about to be tried for murder. Mia took her own counsel for some time before answering. Then she grasped my daughter’s hand and said that Annie needed her, and she had no intention of abandoning her job. Since Mia is only twenty, I wasn’t about to leave it at that. But when Kaiser arrived, he surprised me—and also Mia’s mother—by telling us that the safest option, without question, was for Annie and Mia to remain where they were.
“You see, Mrs. Burke,” Kaiser explained, “as unpleasant as the thought is, by working with this family for the past three months, Mia has already made herself a target. If she were to go home to your house, for example, what protection would she have? Here, she’s got former Navy SEALS guarding her around the clock. Plus police patrols and some FBI protection. Even if she went back to Boston, she wouldn’t be nearly as safe as she is here.”
Meredith Burke began to sob quietly. Her daughter took her hand and squeezed it. “We’ll be okay, Mom, really. Keisha had no protection this morning. But they guard us like the royal family.”
“But when will this end?” asked her mother. “When Dr. Cage’s trial is over? Or will it just go on?”
“If I have anything to do with it,” Kaiser said, “the danger will end before the trial does. Jury selection begins Monday—four days from now—and the trial proper will be under way by Tuesday. Between you and me, I believe Dr. Cage’s trial is going to function like a baited trap. Snake Knox is the source of all this violence, and one way or another the trial is going to bring him to us. Once we have Snake, we’ll roll up the rest without any problem.”
Kaiser’s plan sounded good, in theory. It was the execution I doubted. But I didn’t raise my doubts then. What I wanted was to get Annie and Mia safely and peacefully into bed.
After I’d accomplished that, I went down to my basement office and paced the floor for a while. On some level, I’d been expecting retaliation for my visit to the Kuntry Kafé—a drive-by shooting or Sheriff Billy Byrd’s deputies pounding on the door with an arrest warrant. But either Earl Tarver had decided not to report what I’d done, or my friend Sheriff Walker Dennis had encouraged him not to make a fuss, because by ten p.m. nothing had happened. At eleven Tim Weathers texted me that everything outside was quiet.
Once I began to believe we were in the clear, I started to reflect on what I’d done after leaving Keisha in the ER. As potentially self-destructive as that confrontation was, it broke something loose in my congested soul, a dense impaction of hate, shame, and impotent rage that only action could remedy. This brought fresh clarity to my mind, and I found myself pondering the most puzzling mystery of the past three months—the location of Snake Knox. Unlike Kaiser, who seems willing to accept the proposition that Snake has fled these parts for a life of expatriate comfort, I’m convinced that, like any predator, the old Double Eagle could not bear to be away from his home territory for long.
Despite the hour, I picked up the house phone and called Carl Sims, my good friend and a deputy for the Lusahatcha County Sheriff’s Department. I asked him to keep his eyes and ears open for the slightest sign of unusual activity down his way. The Knox family, while Louisiana natives, had become deeply embedded in Lusahatcha County, Mississippi, over the years, and I had no doubt there were dozens of people down there who would gladly shelter Snake from the FBI. More disturbing still, Carl’s boss, Sheriff Billy Ray Ellis, had been a frequent guest at the Valhalla Exotic Hunting Reserve, and he wouldn’t be particularly zealous in following up tips about Snake Knox sightings. Carl said he’d been thinking the same thing, but so far he’d had no luck along that line.
While I had him on the phone, I told the former marine sniper that my father had known a woman from Athens Point who lost her son to a lynching in Lusahatcha County in the mid-1960s. I didn’t know her name, but her daughter-in-law had supposedly been raped the same night. She had ultimately committed suicide, but I hoped that if we could locate the mother, she might remember something damning about the Double Eagles—in particular Snake Knox. Carl told me he’d put his father on it. Reverend Sims knew everybody in Lusahatcha County, and if the woman was still around, he would know her. The question was, would he reveal what he knew?
I thanked Carl and hung up.
I was about to switch off the lights and go upstairs when my cell phone rang. When I looked at the LCD, I was surprised to see the name of my literary agent displayed there.
“Peter?” I said, after pressing send. “What in the world?”
“I’m sorry it’s so late, Penn. I called to ask you a favor, and for someone else, if you can believe it.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
He laughed. “I know, right? I assume you know who Serenity Butler is?”
Serenity Butler. “She’s a black Mississippi writer. Nonfiction. Just won the National Book Award, right? For a memoir?”
“That’s right. The Paper Bag Test. They sent you an ARC about a year ago, hoping for a blurb, but I don’t think you got around to it.”
“Things were pretty crazy around that time.”
“I know. The reason I’m calling is, it turns out that Serenity was close to the reporter who was attacked in Natchez this morning.”
“Keisha Harvin? Really?”
“Serenity teaches journalism at Emory in Atlanta. Apparently Harvin took two of her classes and really impressed her. The girl has been sending Serenity copies of every story she’s written on the Double Eagle stuff.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, the point is that Serenity is driving to Natchez tomorrow.”
“What?”
> “Yep. She’s taken a leave of absence from Emory. She’s coming back to Mississippi to find out what happened to Keisha and why. I know because her editor called me. She asked if I could set up a meeting between you two. I told her you were probably buried under the stress of the upcoming trial—”
“Shit. You think?”
“I know, I’m sorry. But my friend says Serenity is totally sincere in her feelings for this girl. And I tell you . . . I read her book. It’s breathtaking.”
This stopped me. I hadn’t heard Peter Smith use language like that about a writer in a long time. While I ruminated over my answer, I walked to my bookshelf and scanned the bottom row, where I tend to stuff galleys sent by hopeful writers, agents, and editors. There it was.
The Paper Bag Test.
I bent and pulled the volume from the shelf. The galley had a plain white front with the title and author’s name, but on the back was a color photo of a remarkably pretty black woman in her midthirties. She was light-skinned, about the color of a paper grocery bag, and her features proclaimed a provocative mixture of Caucasian and African blood. She had luminous eyes, even in the flat photograph, and her camera-ready looks made it hard to believe the bio beneath the photo, which stated that Corporal Serenity Butler had served as a line soldier for the U.S. Army in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm.
“Penn? Are you there?”
I swatted the galley against my thigh. “Yeah, Peter. I’ve got the ARC right here.”
“Well. What should I tell them?”
“Tell them you couldn’t reach me.”
I heard him sigh in disappointment.
“I’ll take a look at the book tonight and give you a call in the morning. Things are insane down here, you wouldn’t believe it. But if I like what I read, I’ll carve out fifteen minutes for her.”
“Oh, man. That’s great, Penn. I know you’re going to love it.”
“You’re that certain?”
“She’s a Mississippi girl, down to the bone. I can’t believe you haven’t met her before now.”