One Blood (41 page)

Angola, LA

After the staged embrace, Moses held Jhonnette with his piercing, mahogany gaze. Moses was a wise man; she knew he wouldn’t believe a word she had to say. And why should he really? For all he knew, she might be the culprit behind his current pain and suffering. She hoped their mutual need for survival could thaw his frosted glare.

Jhonnette became aware of the growing chaos around her. Doctors and nurses filled the treatment center, running around like hyperactive preschoolers as they grabbed medical supplies. The warden had said there would be no evacuation, so why all the commotion?

Jhonnette stepped into the corridor to catch an orderly, nurse, or anybody who could tell her what the hell was going on. They flowed around her as if she were a boulder in a river.

“
You better move before you get trampled,” a smooth, even voice spoke from the bed.

Moses was smiling at her. Jhonnette returned to his bedside. “Thanks for the heads up.”

“
I should really be thanking you,” Moses said, his eyes never leaving her face. “I can’t have my savior getting taken out of the picture, now can I?”

So he read Lincoln’s little note. Good.

With firmer footing to stand on, Jhonnette asked, “Do you know what all the fuss is about?”

“
Looks like they’re moving supplies to the camps to prepare for the hurricane.”

“
The warden said they were going to try and ride this one out.”

“
Very unfortunate for us, isn’t it?”

Jhonnette nodded. “How are you feeling?”

He mulled the question over like a professional wine taster and then said, “When I was a kid, a friend’s cousin dared me to climb a tree and try to knock down an old wasp’s nest we all thought had been abandoned. I got up there, showboating and what not, and hit that wasp’s nest with a stick. Before I could blink, six angry wasps were on me. I fell out of a tree and landed on the roof of a neighbor’s old car with wasps stinging me the whole way down.”

“
Ouch!”

“
Right. Now multiply that pain times ten and you’d be close.” He smiled again, in spite of the pain.

Jhonnette was charmed, but reminded herself she was there for information, nothing more. In this condition, Moses was no threat to her father. He could rot here for all she cared.

“
Don’t worry about that,” Moses said, misreading her expression of concern. “We’re not going anywhere either.”

As if to confirm this, an orderly walked over with a clipboard in his hands. “Takin’ dinna orduhs,” he said. “Sloppy Joe or Spam?”

Neither
. Jhonnette caught Moses in the corner of her eye wearing the same expression.

“
What’s it gonna be?” he asked again.

“
I’m not planning on staying for dinner,” Jhonnette replied.

The orderly gave a knowing smirk. “Whetha’ or not you decide ta’ eat, you gone be here, Miss. Warden’s got da whole prison on lockdown.”

“
I think what my daughter was trying to say was, is there anything on this evening’s menu that doesn’t come out of a can?” Moses asked. “I know that beggars can’t be choosers, but…”

The inmate gave Moses a strange look. Then he said, “Lemme go check.”

“
Wow,” Jhonnette said after he’d walked away. “You’ve really got a way with people.”

“
Some people,” Moses corrected, a shadow crossing his features.

“
If you’re talking about Linc—”

“
Shh! Not in here. You don’t know who’s listening.”

Jhonnette looked around the near-empty infirmary and gave Moses her “who the hell are you worried about” look. Her eyes settled on what appeared to be a corpse directly across from Moses’ bed.

Father?

“
I apologize for being harsh,” Moses said, “but we need to take certain, uh, precautions in here. You’ve already taken a huge risk in coming. I don’t want that risk to be in vain.”

“
Uh huh,” Jhonnette replied, barely hearing. Needing confirmation, she slowly unzipped the body bag. It was her mental image in the flesh. Panama X lay enshrouded in plastic, dead to the world.

Jhonnette searched his petrified features for proof of her parentage. Her shaking hands were drawn magnetically to his eye-patch. Without thinking, she removed it and shoved it down her blouse.

“
What are you doing?” Moses hissed.

Silence was her only reply. Then the sirens started, and a surreal wailing sound emanated from the walls. Jhonnette jumped as a bedpan clattered to the linoleum floors

“
Get back over here!” Moses beckoned.

Jhonnette let the image of her father’s corpse sear into her brain. She felt the old anger swelling and stretching beneath her skin and relished the feeling. Then she calmly re-zipped the body bag and walked back to Moses.

“
Here comes the dinner committee,” he said. “That’s strange…”

She followed Moses’ gaze. Two armed guards in riot gear trotted toward them.

“
What’s happening?” Jhonnette asked the guard in front.

“
We’ve got an, uh, situation. You both need to come with us.”

“
Like hell we do,” she replied, gripping the railing of Moses’ bed like she planned on swinging it at the man. “This ma—my father is injured and shouldn’t be moved.”

The guard gave Moses a cursory glance. “Sorry Miss, we’ve got our orders.” With sneaky dexterity, the guard grabbed Jhonnette in a bear hug, despite her loud protestations. The other guard looked at Moses as if to say, “What’s it gonna be?”

Moses didn’t know if he’d be able to walk, so he made one request. A moment later, Moses lowered himself into a wheelchair. The guard told Jhonnette he’d let her push Moses if she shut up.

* * * * *

“
Where the hell are you taking us?” Jhonnette asked for the fifth time. They had exited the Treatment Center into the waiting storm outside. Flanked by guards, Jhonnette pushed Moses in the rickety wheelchair.

The guard with the name Jones stitched on his uniform gave her a dirty look. “Miss, please shut the hell up and just follow us.”

Jhonnette stopped. “Not until you explain what’s going on.”

“
Listen Miss, we don’t have time for this shit.”

Moses’ strong hand found her wrist and squeezed. Jhonnette managed to stop herself from screaming obscenities at the guard and let out an angry exhale instead. The wailing siren muted as they entered the prison camp. Jhonnette pushed Moses down a wide corridor until they reached a large basketball gym. Cots were laid out military style in twenty or so rows, each with a footlocker at the base.

“
Minimum security,” Moses whispered.

The inmates seemed docile as if they’d been drugged. She whispered this thought to Moses.

“
They probably are,” he whispered back.

Jhonnette could tell he wasn’t kidding. Warden Winey had said they were going to try and ride out the storm. He probably ordered the cooks to mix some sedatives into the lunch sludge to calm the inmates.

“
Stop here,” the other guard named Burton ordered.

Jones unlocked a small cell with a triple-enforced steel door. SOLITARY was printed in block letters on the front.

“
I’m not going in there,” Jhonnette protested. “You might as well take us back to the Treatment Center right now.”

“
I was hoping you’d say that,” Jones replied, bearing a determined smile. He swiftly removed something from his utility belt.

* * * * *

Moses saw this happen with the sluggishness of a bad dream. He screamed, “Wait! Don’t! We’ll go!” But he was too late.

Jones jabbed a taser into Jhonnette’s midsection. She spasmed like she’d caught a seizure. She would have collapsed backwards busting her head on the door had Burton not caught her mid-faint. He dragged Jhonnette into the cell and placed her on the cot.

“
What about you, Pops?” Jones asked. “Wanna do the ‘lectric slide, too?”

“
Why are you doing this?” Moses asked, hoping his voice didn’t sound as full of fear and despair as he felt.

“
Don’t worry ‘bout that, Pops,” Jones replied. “The warden wanted to send a little message is all. Said he knew what you were planning and to tell you that it won’t work. Not unless one a you’s is related to Houdini.” He rolled Moses into the cell.

As Burton shut the door, locking them in, Moses was consumed by a rage that left purple spots in his vision. He felt reconnected with the spirit of the nineteen-year-old boy who had once stabbed a guard to death inside this place.

* * * * *

Chapter Seventy-Four

Lake City, LA

Randy sat alone in his father’s study. The room was as silent as a grave. The muted flat panel television screen on the far wall silently broadcast Isaac’s rapid progress. The storm, which had inexplicably hung suspended in the Gulf of Mexico earlier that morning, had finally chosen its course. Swirling radar imagery depicted the hurricane’s outer wall over Lake City and most of Southwest Louisiana. The bleak visual resembled a death scythe.

The meteorologists had it all wrong, though. The storm wasn’t causing irreparable damage to the oil refineries along the Gulf Coast and decimating the wetlands. It was right here in this office. Randy felt its energy pulsating throughout his frame.

He stared at the expansive desk before him and stroked the solid, reassuring surface, remembering what he’d done to possess it. This desk had long ago belonged to Walter Simmons, the only item salvaged after that fateful fire. Randy took the desk places Walter could never have reached. He and Coral once joked, that Randy would one day replace the famous centerpiece of the Oval Office with this simple cypress desk from Louisiana. That dream had fizzled, however, after his failed presidential bid in 2000, his first unsuccessful political campaign since losing the mayoral election to Simmons back in ’72.

Randy’s thoughts turned to his father. “Well, Joseph, I didn’t get to the White House,” he said aloud. “But I got further than you ever thought I would.”

And if he could go back in time, he’d do it all again. He had no regrets about the life he’d lived. He’d chosen this life path and set everything in motion, starting with the bullet that stopped his father’s heart.

A small piece of him wished he could have handled Kristopher better. He wondered if his own father ever felt the same way after his mother’s death.

Randy pushed back from the desk and turned toward the credenza behind him. There was a safe imbedded in the second drawer. Here Lafitte’s had safeguarded important things, secret things, for over eighty years. Randy pulled out a slim, leather portfolio with the letters RL engraved in gold leaf on the cover.

He avoided his father’s dingy old Klu Klux Klan hood, which stared at him from the back of the safe like a headless ghost. He gently opened the portfolio and stared down at several pieces of paper, ripped years ago from Kristopher’s journal. Randy read slowly, digesting every syllable of every word, even though he knew them by heart.

There is no curse. Abby hit me with that one tonight. Just an urban myth invented by the slaves and recycled over the centuries to scare massa. But how can that be? Isaac and Melinda are in my head; they offer me no peace. They are real. I should run a knife through Randy tonight, just in case. But I can’t risk getting caught. I’ve got to get to Link tomorrow. Once I save him, I’ll take care of Randy once and for all. Curse or no curse.

A single tear fell onto the journal pages. Randy acknowledged these foreign tears as the first he’d cried for his dead son. Staring bleary-eyed at Kristopher’s last recorded thoughts, Randy sat up rod straight. His tear had plopped down on top of a name he hadn’t thought of in years.

Abby.

It had been Coral’s idea to hire the old Cajun woman. Randy hadn’t been particularly fond of having a black woman around his children, but he’d been too busy running for Senate re-election to offer much protest. And by all accounts she’d done a good job with Kristopher and Karen, hadn’t she? Still, something tickled the back of Randy’s mind, waiting to be scratched and sniffed.

He’d planted Carla Bean all those years back to seduce Walter Simmons. What if Abby had been a plant, too? Everything made sense now. Panama X had planted Abby inside his home. She had filled his children’s heads with tales of the Lafitte curse. Kristopher had believed her and sacrificed himself to save Randy and Karen!

By orchestrating the events leading up to the gang war, Randy had succeeded in ensuring his own son’s demise that day at Simmons Park. And why?

“
Because I could,” Randy said stonily.

Well here it was. The cold, hard truth, out in the open. And damn it hurt. But Randy knew how he could make things right again. He should have done this long ago.

He removed a smooth walnut box from the safe. Inside was Robert E. Lee’s most famous gun, which he lifted out of its crevice with the care it deserved. He felt the weight of legacy and responsibility as he opened the chamber. Clean as a whistle.