The Bone Tree (73 page)

WALT GARRITY SAT
half-conscious in the backseat of a massive silver Bentley, Tom’s head cradled in his lap. The only light came from the dashboard, but the muscular shoulders of the young man called Xerxes looked a yard wide in the passenger seat ahead. To Xerxes’s left, his more conventionally sized father, Darius, gently steered the vehicle through the night without benefit of headlights.

It had taken Tom’s last conscious effort to guide Walt to the front gate of Corinth, which was one of the most magnificent plantations Walt had ever seen. Eighty-eight acres of virgin land right in the middle of Natchez, fenced from prying eyes and owned by a woman who had loved Tom for more than forty years. No better sanctuary existed in the world for the two fugitives, and they’d been lucky to reach it at all. Only moments after the great iron gate came in sight, Tom had finally collapsed from exhaustion.

As Darius and Xerxes carried Tom from Drew’s pickup truck to the gleaming Bentley, Walt had felt lost in a dream. Once inside the car, he’d nearly fallen asleep himself. Now, after what he judged to be a slow ride of about a minute, the heavy Bentley came to a gentle stop like a boat settling against a dock.

Walt leaned over to make sure that Tom was still breathing, then looked between the shoulders of the two men in front and saw a pair of white columns as thick as oak trees beyond the car’s winged hood ornament.

“Home safe,” Darius announced from behind the wheel. “Tell Doc hang on jes’ half a minute.”

Walt felt a cold rush of air as both back doors opened and Tom was slid off his lap. Tom groaned but did not wake. Walt clambered out of the luxurious backseat and trudged up the steps of a
Gone with the Wind–
era palace. As Darius and Xerxes approached a great
walnut door with Tom in their arms, the door receded before them as if by magic.

Walt followed the men into some sort of entry hall, where they laid Tom out on a worn red sofa. Thirty seconds later, a door at one end of the hall slowly opened, revealing an old woman seated in a motorized wheelchair. Behind her stood a black woman who had clearly once been beautiful, but now looked as stern as any general’s batman. The wheelchair whirred forward, and in the dim light Walt gradually made out its occupant’s features. The woman was at least ten years older than he, but age had not stolen the refinement from her face. Her paper-thin skin was the color of bone china, and Walt could see that it had once been soft as cream. The eyes beneath her high brow held many things, but most of all intelligence. They settled upon Walt and seemed to take in the whole of his being at a glance. Then her gaze moved to Tom.

“Can he survive without a hospital?” she asked.

“For a while,” Walt replied. “If his heart doesn’t give out. He needs medicine, though. Insulin, antibiotics, nitro—God knows what else. And it sure wouldn’t hurt to get his partner here to look at him. I was a medic in Korea, but that was a long time ago.”

The woman looked back at him, her eyes filled with something he couldn’t quite make out. “Was it? To me that was yesterday.”

Before Walt could analyze this, she said, “Take Dr. Cage upstairs, Darius. My old chamber, if you please.”

The two men moved as one to obey.

“He’ll get all he needs here, Captain Garrity,” the woman said. “I’ll see to that. You need rest now. Can you make it up the stairs? Or do you need to use my elevator?”

Walt was now certain he’d fallen into a dream, or maybe a hallucination. He blinked several times, waiting to awaken in a gully off Highway 61.

“Who are you?” he asked dully, but
What are you?
was the question that ran through his mind.

“I’m Pythia Nolan. You may call me Pithy.”

“Pithy,” Walt repeated. “Yes, ma’am.”

The spectral woman reached into a bag attached to the arm of her chair and brought out some sort of mask, which the stern maid fitted
over her face with an elastic strap. Then she pointed up the hallway like a military officer ordering a charge.

Walt followed blindly, glad to be only an infantryman once again.

WALT AWAKENED SOME TIME
later in the half darkness of a guest room on an upper floor of Pithy Nolan’s great mansion. Darius and Xerxes had installed Tom in a hospital bed just up the hall from Pithy’s bedroom. When Walt found him, his first thought was that he was watching his old friend die.

It had been fifty years since he’d done any real medicine, and back then most of his patients had been soldiers in their twenties with various holes in their bodies. Treating a wounded seventy-three-year-old man with a multitude of co-morbid conditions was far beyond his abilities. Drew Elliott had done a good job with Tom’s shoulder wound on Tuesday, but Tom belonged in an ICU now, not on the second floor of a decaying antebellum mansion.

Still, you worked with what you had. Afraid to risk calling Dr. Elliott yet again, Walt dispatched Xerxes on a dangerous mission to Tom’s clinic to retrieve a list of medicines and equipment. After the young man succeeded, Walt caught Tom up on his cardiac and diabetic drugs, then hung an IV “banana bag” by duct-taping it to the four-poster bed. But what really worried him were the rales he’d heard when he put a stethoscope to Tom’s chest. Wet rales could be signs of pulmonary edema secondary to congestive heart failure, which Tom had experienced long before the crisis of the past few days. Walt had little choice but to pray that the diuretic he’d administered would drain some of the fluid off Tom’s heart.

Pithy Nolan had twice driven her electric wheelchair into the room, but Tom had been asleep both times. The matron’s breathing sounded even more labored than Tom’s, but her oxygen mask seemed to give her some relief. If Walt was honest with himself, the old lady gave him the creeps. She seemed almost incorporeal, masked and wrapped in her voluminous blanket, yet her love for Tom could not be questioned.

Xerxes remained outside the door like a sentry, ready to run whatever errand Walt might command. Walt had already sent his father, Darius, to Walmart to buy four more TracFones. No matter what
course of action he and Tom took now, they were going to need secure lines of communication to get out of this mess alive.

It was one of these phones he used to call Griffith Mackiever when he checked his old burn phone and saw that the embattled superintendent of state police had tried to reach him only minutes earlier.

“What’s the situation?” Walt asked when Mackiever answered.

“We’ll get to that,” Mackiever said. “Did you check the GPS coordinates on Forrest’s car around the time the Masters girl was killed?”

“Why?”

“I figure he was within eight miles of that Bone Tree when she was shot.”

“That’s about right, I’d guess.”

“I’d like to prove Forrest killed her, but we also have a videotape of Ms. Masters leaving the Crossroads Café with a black kid.”

“I’ll go you one better. I saw Ozan drive away from the swamp in that kid’s truck. And I found blood on the ground at the edge of the water.”

“
What?
Christ, Walt. I could do something with that.”

“A statement from a fugitive cop killer? Wake up, son. You’d be a lot better off using that Katrina video I gave you.”

“I’m working on it. I haven’t had any luck reaching my former friends in state government. I think my only choice now is the feds.”

“I agree. What’s happening at the Bone Tree now? Who’s got control of the scene?”

“It was shaping up to be a jurisdictional dispute, but then the FBI went in there like the goddamned Marines and cordoned off about twenty acres. A U.S. attorney issued some kind of special directive under the Patriot Act, and they ran the goddamn Lusahatcha County sheriff right out of there. The senior agent is Agent John Kaiser out of the New Orleans field office.”

“That’s who you want to see, Mack. He and Penn Cage know each other. Do you know where Penn is now?”

“They flew him back to Natchez in the Lusahatcha County air unit. He and his family are under twenty-four-hour FBI protection at his residence.”

Walt sighed in relief. “Okay, good.” Walt hesitated as Tom stirred in the bed, but he didn’t awaken. “Are you going to go see Kaiser now?”

“That’s my plan. I wish to God I didn’t have to bust open this Katrina sniping mess in order to do it. But I guess that’s the only way to take Forrest down.”

“There’s always my derringer.”

“Don’t even mention that.”
Mackiever was silent for a few seconds. “I tell you, Walt, when I think about what happened this afternoon—those Eagles killing Sonny Thornfield right in that jail, while it was under FBI control—I wonder if even the feds can stop Forrest. It’s like he’s three steps ahead of us all, no matter what we do.”

“No,” Walt said. “He’s scrambling just like the rest of us. Worse, he’s got dissension in his ranks.”

“How do you know that?”

“Trust me. Him and his uncle, Snake, don’t exactly see eye to eye. Sooner or later, one of them’s going to have to go.”

“Not soon enough for me. I’m gonna talk straight to you, Walt. I’ve got a bad feeling about those Knoxes. They remind me of a couple of crews back in Texas, in the old days. I don’t think even the FBI scares them much. And I think that rather than let themselves be taken, they’ll try to take down everybody. I think a lot of people could die.”

“What are you saying, Mack?” Walt asked, but he already knew.

He and the LSP chief had been Texas Rangers in an era when they’d gone after certain outlaws with the tacit understanding that they were not to return with a prisoner. And to Walt’s ear, Mackiever’s voice had echoed into the present from that time.

“It’s not 1955 anymore, Griff. Not even 1965.”

“You could have fooled me, these past coupla days.”

Walt listened to the phone hissing in his ear. Mackiever wasn’t speaking hypothetically. He saw a malignant cancer eating his department from within, and he wanted a fellow Ranger to rip it out by the roots.

“I’ve got a wife now,” Walt said.

“I know. I’ve got no right to ask anything of you. But the situation is fluid, and I just want you to know that . . . if anything were to happen to Knox, I can promise you’d have an angel on your shoulder in the aftermath. I’d move heaven and earth to protect you. You and Dr. Cage both.”

“I hear you. And my advice is, take everything you’ve got to Special Agent Kaiser.”

Mackiever was silent for several seconds. Then he said, “I’ll do that, Cap’n. Just don’t forget what I said.”

The connection went dead.

Walt stared at Tom for a long time after he set the phone down. Then he reached over to the bedside table and opened a box of Tom’s precious cigars. Xerxes had retrieved them earlier when he’d gotten the drugs from Tom’s clinic. Walt knew that lighting one would be bad for his friend’s lungs, but he needed to settle his nerves. He also knew Tom would thank him for the vicarious pleasure he would experience upon waking. Biting off the end of a Partagas, Walt picked up the lighter Xerxes had brought in and lit the cigar, savoring the flavor of one of the few luxuries Tom Cage allowed himself each day.

Tom stirred, but thanks to a hefty dose of oxycodone, he did not awaken.

Walt smoked thoughtfully, watching the man he’d fought with like a brother through the killing snows of Korea. In the deep shadows, he turned his mind away from the war and thumbed back through the years he’d spent chasing desperate men across Texas, first on a horse, then in motor vehicles of various types. He recalled times that he’d followed the rules, and other times when he’d thrown the book away and simply done what was necessary. He wasn’t proud of those occasions but he wasn’t ashamed, either. While Tom slept fitfully, Walt wondered whether John Kaiser and the FBI could take on Forrest Knox—who personified the endemic corruption of an entire state—and win. Even if they did, how many more people would become casualties in that war? Caitlin Masters’s death had already come close to destroying Tom. As the cigar slowly burned down, Walt pondered Colonel Mackiever’s final words, and what it might cost him personally to relieve the world of the burden of Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest Knox.

CLAUDE DEVEREUX HAD
waited nearly two hours before the FBI agreed to admit him to the visiting room in the Concordia Parish jail. In the end it took not constitutional arguments, but threats to go public with the Bureau’s use of the Patriot Act to supersede the Bill of Rights to gain him access to his clients. An agent confiscated Claude’s cell phone at the door of the visiting room, then patted him down for weapons, but as Forrest had anticipated, they left the cigarette pack in his briefcase alone.

Claude had worried that an FBI agent would stay in the visiting room with them, but after searching it thoroughly, the agent posted himself outside the door. As Claude waited for Snake, he cursed himself for trying to see his daughter and grandkids before fleeing the country. Forrest had put out a statewide APB, and they’d caught him easily. Had he run north to Memphis—through Mississippi—they never would have found him.

The door opened behind him, and two deputies ushered Snake into the room. The Double Eagle looked down at Claude, gave him a game wink, then sat in the chair across the scarred old table. Claude got out his legal pad as if to take notes, then looked up at the deputies and waited for them to leave.

The two men glared at him as though they’d like to kill him—which was no surprise, considering they’d lost two fellow deputies in the past thirty-six hours—but at length they turned and left the room.

“So what are you doing here?” Snake asked. “I’m supposed to be out of here.”

“We’re working on it. Somebody wants to talk to you.”

Snake chuckled softly. “You got smokes in that pack?”

“Four.” Claude lowered his voice. “But I’ve got something else for you in there.”

Claude ripped off the taped-down top of the pack and brought out an analog flip phone and a thin wire with an earpiece wrapped around it.

“It’s encrypted,” he whispered. “Hit star-one, and Forrest will pick up.”

Snake smiled.

FORREST JUMPED WHEN THE
burn phone finally rang. He and Ozan had been waiting two hours in Forrest’s home office in Baton Rouge, and he’d just about given up hope that Devereux would be allowed into the CPSO jail. But the caller ID told him that, unless the FBI had discovered the cell phone hidden in Claude’s briefcase, the man on the other end of the call was his Uncle Snake.

Forrest clicked
SEND
and said, “Identify yourself.”

“This is Jerry Lee Lewis. The Killer.”

Despite the circumstances, Forrest laughed. It was just like Snake to cut up at the very moment the world was crashing around him. Snake had known Jerry Lee his whole life, and he’d often used that connection to get bar sluts to sleep with him.

“I’m going to talk fast,” Forrest said, clicking on the speakerphone, “in case they figure out what you’re doing. Keep your answers short, and don’t use names.”

“Well, get with it,
Tahyo
.”

Ozan scowled in confusion, but Forrest smiled. “
Tahyo
”—a Cajun expression that meant “big, hungry dog”—was a childhood nickname that only Snake and very few others would remember.

“Did your lawyer bring you up to speed on recent developments?”

“I hear the girl’s dead, shot at the Bone Tree.”

“That’s right. And she met somebody else there. Somebody she didn’t expect.”

“And he lived?”

“He walked out of the hospital under his own power.”

“He’s a tough one, I’ll give him that. Do you know where he is now?”

“No.”

“Find out. He knows way too much about too many people in our past. If that doesn’t pucker your asshole . . .”

“I’m working on it. There was a fire at the Bone Tree. You understand? Somebody went to a great deal of trouble to destroy whatever evidence was there.”

Snake chuckled. “That was mighty nice of somebody.”

“That same person also cleared out the safe. Everything that was there is somewhere else.”

“Sounds good.”

“It’s not going to be enough. That’s why I’m calling you. I wish I could tell you you’re going to be okay, but the FBI isn’t going to let this go. Neither is Penn Cage. You were part of everything the Eagles ever did, and no matter how much evidence was destroyed, they’re eventually going to tie you to one of those killings. And one’s all it takes. If that doesn’t happen, somebody’s going to flip on you. Whichever it is, your days are numbered.”

Snake grunted but didn’t comment.

“At least
here
they’re numbered.” Forrest watched Ozan’s expressionless face for clues to how his pitch was playing. “It’s time to use your golden parachute, Uncle.”

Snake still did not reply.

Forrest thought he heard his uncle blowing out cigarette smoke. Right now the old man was thinking about the arrangements Forrest and Billy had been perfecting for the past five years: new identities, clean passports, three separate properties in Andorra—one of the few nonextradition countries left in the world where a white man could live well. But something told Forrest that his uncle wasn’t itching to retire in the Pyrenees.

“You still there?” Forrest asked.

“I’m here. And I hear what you’re saying. But all in all, I think I’d rather take my chances where I’m at. I got no desire to spend my last years with a bunch of foreigners. I don’t ski or hike or hang-glide, and I don’t care to live with a bunch of Pernod-sippin’ faggots who do.”

Ozan groaned softly.

“Do you realize what you’re saying?” Forrest asked. “How long do you think you can—”

“What you don’t seem to understand,” Snake cut in, “is that I don’t give a shit what they accuse me of. They’ve been calling me a killer for forty years. So what? A few more accusations ain’t gonna matter. Proving guilt in forty-year-old murders is a tough job, and it gets tougher with every passing day. I don’t think they got the evidence to do it.”

“Maybe not, but half a dozen people have died in the past week.”

“I don’t know nothing about those killings. Do you?”

Forrest shook his head at Ozan, who cursed in exasperation.

“You sound nervous, nephew,” Snake said. “Take it easy. Have a drink. I’m not nervous. See, I’m not in the position you’re in. With me, they can either prove a crime or they can’t. But you? Even the appearance of wrongdoing could end your career. So maybe it’s time for
you
to pull that golden ripcord.”

“Goddamn it, Snake.”

Snake laughed softly. “Have you shoved your boss out of his job yet?”

“Not yet.”

“That doesn’t sound promising. What’s your next play?”

“I’m not going to get into that on the phone. We’ll talk when you get out.”

“When will that be?”

“Soon. Tomorrow, probably.”

“
Probably?
Shit, boy. Sounds to me like you don’t know whether you’re going or coming.”

Forrest slammed his hand down on the table. “What the fuck were you thinking taking the doc like you did?”

“Covering my bets,
Tahyo,
the way Frank taught me. Now, seriously, when do you see me walking out of this dump?”

Forrest forced himself to try to calm down. “That depends. The meth disappeared during the bomb scare, so they have no drug evidence to hold you on. In theory, you could be released tomorrow morning. But I don’t know what forensic evidence they may get from Sonny’s corpse.”

“Don’t worry about it, nephew. I’ve figured my own way out of this place. All five of us will walk out before noon tomorrow. You watch. I’ll give Claude instructions on how to pick us up.”

Forrest didn’t like the sound of this. “What are you planning?”

“That’s my business. Now listen. You need to calm down. Things are actually falling our way. The girl’s gone. So’s our latest traitor, and none of my crew’s gonna open his trap to the government again. The next thing that needs to happen is for Doc to be shot as a fugitive. And that Texas Ranger needs to die with him. As for the FBI, you just get your ass into Mackiever’s job and the federal hassle will die down quick.”

Forrest was far from sure about this. Worse, Snake was right about one thing: he could endure anything the FBI threw at him and laugh,
while Forrest could not. If the moneymen in New Orleans decided he was a magnet for scandal, they’d cut him off like a gangrenous limb.

“I know you’re thinking about pulling in your horns,” Snake said, “but Frank would have done the exact opposite right now. When the enemy comes for you, you don’t turn tail or lie low, you hit back so hard that nobody will ever think about fucking with you again. Right?”

“I told you I’m not going to talk about tactics.”

“You don’t have to. I know how your mind works. If I’d agreed to retire into the sunset, you’d have made sure all the loose crimes around here got blamed on me. Since I’m refusing that option, you’re gonna start exploring other options. But you know me well enough to know I’ll see bad news coming. So be real careful if you’re tempted to think in that direction. You could wind up on the row yourself.”

Ozan actually rose from his seat at that remark.

“Don’t worry, Uncle,” Forrest said. “You want to stay in Louisiana and take the risk, be my guest.”

“Always a pleasure,
Tahyo
. I’ll see you tomorrow, when I get out.”

Snake clicked off.

Forrest tossed the phone on the table and joined Ozan standing to pace.

The conversation hadn’t gone anything like he’d hoped. He hadn’t actually had much faith that it would. Where Snake was concerned, nothing could be predicted. It had been that way for as long as he could remember. That was why Carlos Marcello had canceled the RFK plan after his father died in ’68; the pragmatic old mobster had known Snake was too crazy to trust with an operation like that.

“That didn’t sound too promising,” Ozan said.

“He’s not going to leave the country, that’s for sure.”

“Then they’re going to get him. And sooner rather than later. He’s popped too many people, boss. They’re going to find some forensic evidence, or somebody will flip, and then he’ll be sitting in an interrogation room playing
Let’s Make a Deal
.”

Forrest sat on the edge of his desk. “There’s only one thing to do now.”

“What’s that?”

“Let Snake do what he wants.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s not going to sit still and wait for the Bureau to come at him, no matter what he said on the phone. And with Caitlin Masters dead, her paper might come at us twice as hard as they did before. Snake won’t sit still for that. He figures we’ll take Tom Cage and Walt Garrity out of the equation—as fugitives—so he’ll move against the mayor, and maybe even Kaiser.”

“Bullshit. You think he’d hit an FBI agent?”

“Alphonse, Snake would kill the pope and twelve nuns if he thought it would keep him out of jail. He does not give a fuck.”

“And you’re saying we should let him do that? The heat would be unbearable.”

A tight smile came to Forrest’s lips. “You’ve forgotten the plan I brought up the night Snake missed killing Sexton and Brody got killed instead.”

“Which was?”

“We let Snake hit the people he wants to hit. Then we paint him as an out-of-control psycho. Once the pursuit starts up, he’ll come to me for an escape route. I’ll send him to what he thinks is a safe house, then when he’s cornered, I’ll go there myself to ‘arrange a surrender.’ Once I’m inside . . . I’ll blow him away. After that, I’m not only washed clean—I’m a hero. I was willing to kill my own uncle in the name of justice.”

Ozan nodded steadily. “That’s a cold play, boss, and a ballsy one. Which pretty much makes it perfect. But Snake has to be out of jail to make that work. Do you really think he can get himself out?”

“If he says he can, I believe it.”

“You think he’s planning on
busting
out?”

“I hope so. The bloodier it is, the better.”

Ozan looked like he was thinking hard.

“What is it?” Forrest asked.

“I had another idea. Didn’t you say our hotel bugs told you the FBI’s planning to fly their evidence up to D.C. on that Bureau plane out at the airport?”

“They’re still discussing it.”

“If you tipped Snake about that flight . . . he’d probably go after the plane.”

Forrest shook his head. “We don’t want that. For one thing, the feds
might capture Snake alive. For another, Snake might actually succeed in destroying the evidence.”

It took a while, but a smile slowly spread on the Redbone’s face. At last he understood the reason Forrest had thrown more than fifty bones into the water near the Bone Tree before they’d set it afire.

“Once Snake’s dead,” he said, “you’re gonna bury him in blood and bones.”

“That’s right.” Forrest snapped his fingers. “I want him to look so demonic that I look like a saint by comparison.”

Ozan rubbed his eyes, then shook his head. “One thing. I’ve read up on the mayor a little bit. He’s been in some scrapes before, and he did what he had to do to get out of them. He’s killed some people. And after what happened to his girl today, he’s never going to stop trying to nail us. Never.”

“That’s what Snake is for,” Forrest said. “It was probably always coming to this. Sometimes you just have to wait and see which way things break.”

JOHN KAISER STOOD IN
the study of the Valhalla hunting lodge and stared into the eyes of the seven-hundred-pound hog that stood opposite the desk. He’d spent most of the night working beneath the Bone Tree, in shadows thrown by klieg lights like the ones Londoners had used during the Blitz. Kaiser had visited countless crime scenes during his career, especially during his time with the Investigative Support Unit, but few could compare in scale or horror to the Bone Tree. From the Civil War–era chains hanging from the limb outside to the inverted skeleton wired to the wall within—now badly charred by the diesel fire—the whole scene forced you to contemplate the essential savagery of the human species.

The tree had still been burning when Kaiser arrived. From the helicopter it looked like a colossal column of flame burning on a vast landscape. After bringing in some pumps on airboats, a fire department team from Baton Rouge had managed to douse the flames. Even so, Kaiser and his team had been forced to wait to get inside the tree. He lost no time getting divers into the water around the gigantic cypress, and they’d already brought up more than a hundred human
bones. Once the interior of the tree cooled sufficiently, an evidence team began using archaeological picks and brushes to sift through the layers of bone and human remains buried beneath the new ash.