Quentin’s smile broadens. “You’ll find out soon.”
Doris Avery is heading down the aisle toward the door when Judge Elder says, “Mr. Avery, I’ve reconsidered your earlier request, and I think we should adjourn for the day. Tomorrow we can be assured that your witnesses will be present and ready to testify, that the jury will be fresh, and that your health needs will be attended to.”
Quentin is taken aback by this decision, but he recovers quickly. “Thank you, Judge. I know the jury will appreciate the break as much as I do.”
Shad says, “Your Honor, as I said before, if Colonel Eklund wasn’t present in the ambulance, his testimony is obviously irrelevant to the present case.”
Every lawyer in the courtroom looks at Shad, amazed that he would have the nerve to say this when the entirety of Major Powers’s testimony should never have been allowed.
“Mr. Johnson, you opened the door to Korea. How do you suggest I stop Mr. Avery from walking through it?”
“But Your Honor—”
“I’ll rule on relevance as his testimony proceeds,” Judge Elder says ominously. “Court is adjourned until nine a.m. tomorrow.”
Chapter 43
Snake Knox stood on wet sand just south of Rodney, Mississippi, and watched a fiery sun slip into the river. Sky and wind told him there would be rain tomorrow, and that suited him fine. It had taken most of the day to set up a secure hideout and redundant escape routes, but Snake no longer settled anywhere, not even for a day, without doing both. His Air Tractor was chocked under some trees in a field one mile north of Rodney. Across the river, just west of St. Joseph, Louisiana, was a Cessna 182 he’d had a share in for the past twenty years. And thirty feet away, tied to a cottonwood tree, floated a twenty-four-foot Four Winns Horizon speedboat. The city of Natchez lay only twenty-five miles to the south by river. Snake could get there in forty minutes in the Four Winns, and he was only thirty minutes from Natchez by road, if he used the old pickup he had borrowed from Red Nearing, who owned the little farm they were using at Rodney.
Snake could scarcely imagine a safer hiding place. In the early 1800s, this little town had nearly become the capital of the Mississippi Territory. Though small, it had been a famous crossing point of the Mississippi River since Indian times, and it was surrounded by wealthy plantations. But a sudden shift in the course of the river had changed all that, and by 1870, Rodney had become a ghost town. Today about fifty people clung to their old houses, but they were ghosts themselves. Nobody came here but a few tourists, to stare at the Yankee cannonball that had stuck high in the brick wall of the church during some brief shelling by an ironclad during the Civil War. It wasn’t even the original cannonball, Snake knew, the real one having been stolen long ago. Rodney’s surviving public buildings were falling to pieces, and you could barely see most of the houses, thanks to the chest-high weeds choking the yards. The main traffic was hunters, and most of them had Confederate flag decals behind the gun racks in their pickups.
Rodney was friendly territory.
Alois and Wilma had wanted to stay by the boat and watch the sunset, but Snake had told them to get back up to the house. He was sick of listening to them yap. They wanted to know what he was going to do next, but if he’d learned anything from Frank, it was keep your plans to yourself until the last possible moment.
Being forced to leave the sod farm at Sulphur hadn’t sat well with Snake at first, but once Wilma had told him about Viola Turner killing Frank in Dr. Cage’s office—and Tom Cage likely covering it up—Snake had been glad to get closer to Natchez. The truth was, while Forrest was alive, Snake had had to be careful about how he approached Dr. Cage’s situation. Forrest believed violence was bad for business, except where it was a direct requirement of business, and he wanted it minimized. But with Forrest’s death at the hands of Penn Cage, Snake had gained the freedom to deal with Dr. Cage as he wished, though being hunted as a fugitive had limited his options.
Initially, he’d been content to let Dr. Cage be convicted of murder and die in Parchman. Snake had meant to let the son endure this heartbreak, then suffer his own retribution for killing Forrest. That would likely involve the death of his daughter first, and only later the death of the mayor himself. But the revelation that Dr. Cage had covered up Frank’s murder for his nurse had scrambled Snake’s thinking. His sense of being in control of events had slipped.
Worse yet, he’d received a report from someone attending the trial that Quentin Avery had got up on his hind legs and shocked the court with his opening statement. That meant that Tom Cage might mean to make a fight of it after all. Snake had been trying to figure out why Cage would do that, and he couldn’t. He’d put out all the feelers he safely could, and as yet no answer had come back to him.
As the upper rim of the flaming sun sank below the horizon, Snake turned to go, but before he took two steps, his burner phone rang.
“Yeah?” he said.
“This is BB,” said a voice Snake recognized as coming from a mouth stuffed with chewing tobacco. He also heard wind roaring in the phone. He could picture Sheriff Billy Byrd driving down the highway in his cruiser, sticking his big head and Stetson out the window to spit.
“About fuckin’ time,” Snake said. “What you got?”
“It ain’t good.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“That nigger girl those VK boys thought must be FBI?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She’s a friend of the mayor’s. Another writer, believe it or not.”
Snake had already learned that Cleotha Booker had been visited by Penn Cage and a young black woman, but he’d assumed the girl was one of Kaiser’s FBI agents. “A writer? You’re telling me this gal going around bending her pistol over bikers’ heads is a writer?”
“Truth is stranger than fiction, man. She apparently served in Desert Storm. Army.”
“I’ll be goddamned. What about the older woman? Dolores?”
“I sent patrols up Washington Street as many times as I could today”—Byrd spat loudly in the rushing wind—“helping out with security, don’t you know. Turns out Kaiser and four of his agents went crashing into Cage’s house after lunch yesterday and got the St. Denis woman out of there. One of my deputies talked to a neighbor who saw it happen. So the St. Denis woman had probably been staying in Cage’s house since Monday night.”
“Son of a bitch, Billy. Any idea where they took her?”
“None yet.”
Snake sighed and looked out over the darkening water. Dolores St. Denis could put him on death row at Angola, and he had no desire to test the ability of the Aryan Brotherhood to protect him from the most violent niggers in America.
“Billy, I got to know where that high-yellow bitch is being hid.”