I look at my watch. “Enough of this. Let’s get to bed.”
After Jenny and I part, I speed-dial Doris Avery on my way back to the basement.
“Hello, Penn,” she says in a sleepy voice, but then I hear her exhale what is almost certainly cigarette smoke. “Do you need Quentin?”
“I do.”
“He’s right here.”
“Last call,” Quentin says. “I’ve got to get some sleep.”
“Yeah, good luck with that.”
“Speak for yourself. Doris just rubbed my neck, and I’m nearly out. You hear anything more from Kaiser?”
“The FBI supercomputers are churning away. I feel like I’m being forced to lie still while termites devour the walls of our house.”
“Let me save you some oxygen. Don’t ask me about Tom testifying tomorrow. It’s not my decision, and it never has been. If Joe Elder tells us to proceed, Tom’s going into that witness box.”
“Did you press him about the Dumpster tape?”
Quentin’s labored breathing comes over the connection for a while. Then at last he says, “I didn’t get anywhere.”
“Fuck.”
“I’m sorry, Penn. Keep the faith. I’ll see you in court.”
“Wait! I’m worried about Dad staying in the jail tonight. After getting the news about Walt, you know? What if he gets angina?”
“They’ll get him his medicine. Stop worrying. I’ve done what I can to be sure Tom’s all right in there, and we can’t get him out tonight anyway.”
“What do you mean? What have you done?”
“All I can, like I said. But Christ, Penn. Have you ever considered that Tom dying in his sleep in that jail might be better than what’s waiting for him after this trial?”
“What? Hell, no! Have you?”
“Not until tonight, I confess. But if Tom did kill Viola, and it wasn’t euthanasia—if they had some conversation beforehand—an argument, let’s say, and the world sees that on tape—then Tom’s going to wish he’d died tonight.”
Chapter 61
Alois Engel stood on the wet sand west of Rodney and watched a pushboat driving a string of barges up the dark river. Only the moon cast a faint wash of light over the water, and every couple of minutes a blue-rimmed black cloud would scud across its face.
A couple of yards away, his father crouched on the sand, peering out over the water. Snake had asked for silence, but Alois could not contain his frustration any longer.
“Why the hell did they use beanbag rounds?” he muttered. “I thought you said those VK guys were supposed to be stone killers.”
Snake raised a hand and signaled for Alois to shut up.
“We won’t get within a mile of that little girl now. And she was our only damn leverage!”
“For fuck’s sake,” Snake muttered. “Let me think. It’s that old nigger woman we gotta find, and Penn Cage is the only one I figure knows where the FBI’s taken her.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Alois said, “but I’ve got to speak my piece. We need to cut loose of those VK bastards. Those no-’count pussies ain’t done us a bit of good. They’re scared of the damn FBI! That’s why they used that toy ammo.”
“The FBI came down hard on them over the past week,” Snake said. “Damned hard. Lars don’t want to make the top of the most-wanted list on our account. But his boys killed that driver when it went sideways—or as good as, anyway—and he lost two more of his own men.”
“Men, my ass,” Alois grumbled. “That driver got himself shot by a rickety old gomer from Texas. I say to hell with those bikers. We don’t need ’em. Didn’t you tell me Uncle Frank always said, ‘If you want something done right, do it yourself’?”
Snake took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and lit it with a Zippo. “Shut up, boy. You never knew Frank.”
“That’s not my fault, is it?”
Snake grunted and blew out a long plume of smoke. “I guess it ain’t.”
“Well?” Alois pressed. “Did Frank say that or not?”
Snake straightened up and rubbed his forehead with his palm as he watched the pushboat pass. Alois felt the ground beneath him vibrating from the torque of those big engines.
“Frank said a lot of things. And he did some big-time shit, back in his prime. But in the end, he drank himself into a stupor, walked under a load of batteries, and let a nigger woman kill him like a damn hog.”
Alois felt his throat knot up with a boy’s anger. He’d always been told that Frank Knox was the toughest and smartest damn soldier ever to come out of Louisiana, which was saying something. Frank was the alpha dog in any group of men who ever got close to him.
“Where were you when he died?” Alois asked, voice quavering with anger and fear.
At last his father turned to him, and what Alois saw in those eyes was something utterly removed from anything he’d seen in them before. Snake’s eyes reminded him of a demonstration he’d seen in his junior college lab. A reckless professor had used a vacuum pump to put cyclohexane into a state where it flirted with the triple point: simultaneously boiling and freezing, cycling through the solid, liquid, and gaseous states. Snake’s eyes told his son that a similar reaction was occurring behind them now. Rage and guilt were bleeding into one another, threatening to explode, and Alois knew that the resulting detonation, when it came, would kill anyone close to it.
“I had just got to Dr. Cage’s office. I’d been holding Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis at the machine shop when Sonny called me. I hauled ass back to town quick as I could, but I was too late. Dr. almighty Cage had told Sonny and Glenn to stay in the waiting room,” Snake said in a guttural voice. “Said there wasn’t room for them in his surgery room.”
Alois nodded, knowing he’d found the proper lever with which to trigger his father. “And now you know why.”
The corner of Snake’s mouth twitched, something Alois had never seen it do before. “Doc come out and told us Frank had expired in spite of his best efforts. Expired. Like a fucking magazine subscription.”
“So what are we going do about it? I don’t see the point of waiting for no fucking jury.”
Snake looked back out over the dark water.
“We’ve got to do something,” Alois said.
Snake smoked his cigarette in self-absorbed silence. After a while, he said, “Tom Cage is beyond being threatened, or blackmailed. I’ve seen it before. He’s shaking hands with Death. That’s what a guy in my unit used to say.”
Helpless fury was building in Alois’s chest. “So what are you saying, Pop? Huh? Do nothing?”
Snake tossed the glowing butt into the fast-flowing current and said, “Don’t worry about it. I’m gonna take care of the doc before he does something against all reason.”
Alois’s arteries expanded with excitement. “What are we going to do?”