Translation: Quentin got onto something with that last line of questioning. Both drivers honk angrily now, drawing the attention of a deputy beyond the big glass door behind me, but I still don’t get into the truck. “You’re talking like this is a civil suit and you want to cut a deal.”
Lincoln shrugs. “There’s different kinds of settlements. I’m driving away in five seconds. The deal leaves with me.”
I hate to be manipulated, but before five seconds pass, I climb into the truck’s passenger seat, wishing I had my pistol. But I never take a gun into court.
Lincoln drives around the block, then heads down to Canal Street and turns toward the twin bridges over the Mississippi. He looks at me a couple of times as he drives, but he doesn’t say anything.
“What’s across the river?” I ask as the bluff drops away and a hundred feet of space yawns beneath us.
“Rednecks. All the way to New Mexico.”
“Lots of brothers, too.”
“Yeah. But outside the cities, they’re an endangered species.”
“This recess may not last long. Let’s hear your offer.”
Lincoln laughs heartily, turning south at the foot of the bridge. After passing between a few houses and a one-story school, he drives over the top of the levee to the Vidalia, Louisiana, riverfront. Compared to the Natchez shore, where growth has been stymied for years by a multimillionaire, the Vidalia shore has seen the construction of hotels, restaurants, an outpatient surgical center, and a public amphitheater. Lincoln drives slowly past the train of new buildings, then pulls onto a white shell road that leads to the steep boat ramp beneath the bridge. My stomach flips as we tilt nose-first toward the vast river. Stopping the truck within a few feet of the water, Lincoln switches off the motor but leaves on the battery.
“You planning to shoot me and drop me in the river?”
He grins gamely. “That is kind of a tradition on this side of the river, isn’t it? Only it’s my tribe that gets dumped.”
I roll down my window and listen to the deceptively faint trickle of water moving over and through the gray riprap rock placed here by the Corps of Engineers to retard erosion. Beneath that sound I hear the nearly subsonic drone of tugboat engines pushing a quarter-mile-long string of barges upriver. If this truck rolled five feet farther down the ramp, the river would snatch us and send us tumbling toward Baton Rouge like a child’s toy.
“Look over there,” Lincoln says, pointing across a mile of open water at Natchez Under-the-Hill, and the great bluff above it. “Looks like a storybook, doesn’t it? The big antebellum mansions on the hill and the bars below, the lumber mill south of town and the Victorian palaces to the north. The cemetery and the Devil’s Punchbowl beyond them. But just a few streets back from all that, there are houses with holes as big as car tires in the floor. Shotgun shacks that look like they’re in some third-world country. And you’re the mayor of all that. How does that make you feel?”
“Tired. What’s your proposition, Lincoln? What are you selling?”
“I’ll let my product speak for itself.”
He reaches out one big hand and presses a button near the center of the dash. The truck’s cab fills with hissing static. Then I hear an old woman’s voice, cracked and reedy.
“I ain’t scared of you two,” Viola says. “You want to do what you done before, go ahead. I’ll bet you can’t do it anymore, anyway. You’re too old, like me.”
“You don’t want to test us,” says a strangely familiar male voice. “I promise you that.”
“I ain’t scared of you, Snake Knox. Or you either, Mr. Sonny Thornfield. That’s right, I recognize the both of you. I can call you by name. And I will, any time I feel like it. Your kind don’t rule this world anymore, not even down here in Mississippi.”
“You keep talking to that reporter,” growls Sonny, “you’ll find out what we can do around here.”
“Any damn thing we want,” says Snake. “Same as it always was.”
“I talk to who I please,” Viola says bravely, but then she coughs herself into a fit that lasts half a minute. Lincoln’s eyes probe mine as I wait for the voices to resume, but I give him nothing. “You’ll have to kill me to stop me from telling what I know,” Viola goes on, “and you can’t do worse to me than God’s doing already. I’m getting my punishment. I only wish I’d live to see you get yours. There’s a fearsome reckoning coming for you two. Yes, Lord.”
“Listen here, nigger,” says Snake. “You can die easy or you can die hard, like your brother.”
“Don’t call me that, scum. That’s not even a word. You show me where it says ‘nigger’ in the Bible.”
Viola starts to wheeze, and both men laugh. “What if I just come over there and pinch that oxygen hose shut?” Snake asks. “Probably wouldn’t take more’n a minute to shut off the lights, shape you’re in. Your days of jawin’ with liberal reporters would be over.”
“Go on, if you want another stain on your soul. Do it. That’s the only way you’re going to shut me up.”
“Just keep on,” Sonny says, sounding like a nervous grade-school bully, “and one of these nights, we will.”
I don’t realize how hypnotized I am until Lincoln ejects the tape with a mechanical click and whir. I grab for the tape, but by the time my fingers jam against the empty slot, Lincoln is holding the old-style cassette outside his open window, smiling with confidence.
“I’m waiting,” he says.
“For what?”
“Your offer.”
Acid has flooded my stomach. “That’s evidence, goddamn it. You’re obligated to give that to the police.”
Lincoln belly laughs at this. “Is that your considered legal opinion, Mr. Mayor? That redneck sheriff you got over in Natchez might just misplace something like this. He’d love to see your daddy go down for killing my mother.”
“He’s your father, too.”
As the words leave my lips, Lincoln’s face lightens a shade—his blood is draining from it.
“Where did you get that tape?” I ask. “Who made it?”
“You heard Henry Sexton’s mother. Henry left Mama an audio recorder a week before he set up that video camera. He wanted her to put down her memories of the 1960s, and especially anything she remembered about her brother, Jimmy. She had it in the bed with her when them two come in. She just hit the button and taped what they said.”
This I can believe. “Okay. What do you want for it?”
“Look in the glove box.”
I do. Lying atop the truck’s owner’s manual is a white notecard. Typed on the card is a series of numbers and the name of a bank: Cayman West Holdings, Limited.
“I’m going to check the balance of that account in one hour,” Lincoln says, looking out over the river. “And if I feel happy after the call, the tape you just heard will turn up in time to be used as evidence in the trial. If I’m not happy—”
Lincoln flicks his wrist, and the cassette goes sailing out over the brown water of the Mississippi. It stays afloat, swirling gently, but it’s moving south fast. “Just a copy, of course. What you’re paying for is the original.”
“Goddamn it,” I mutter. “If you’ve had that tape all along, why are you pushing to have your own father convicted?”