The guns ring dully as they go into the sink: Snake’s first, then Alois’s. Wilma Deen’s hands are floating about head high, and her eyes look like those of a panicked hostage, but she must be carrying something. When Lincoln jerks his gun toward her, she points to her pants pocket, then pulls out a small black automatic—it looks like a .25—and drops it into the sink with a clang.
While Lincoln herds them onto the broken-backed sofa, I reach into my pocket with a shaking left hand and take out the Sony tape recorder I use for memos during the day. I prop it on the back of the sink and face the three on the couch. Snake sits on the left, Wilma Deen in the middle, Alois on the right.
“Go,” Lincoln tells me, obviously frustrated.
A premonitory shiver runs through my body, a feeling that by doing this I might be sentencing Lincoln or myself to death. If we simply killed them now, we could walk away. Every passing second probably brings someone else closer. The owner of the main house . . . one of the living ghosts of Rodney . . . VK gang members . . . We don’t have to kill these three to stay safe, of course. We could call the FBI, and Kaiser would have a tactical team here in less than an hour. Maybe half that, if he has a chopper on call. The proper call would be to Sheriff Byrd, of course, but Byrd already knows Snake is here—
“You had two minutes,” Lincoln says, “and you’re burning the second one right now.”
“The tape recorder’s not on yet,” I tell my captive audience. “When I hit Record, I want somebody to tell me who killed Viola Turner. If you do that, I’ll have some evidence, and you’ll get to live a while longer. If you don’t, I’m going to walk outside and let this man do what he came here to do. Do you understand?”
Snake’s eyes look like those of a professional gambler calculating odds in Las Vegas.
Alois says, “Nothing we say here could be used as evidence in court. It would be under duress.”
“That’s bad news for you, Junior,” Lincoln says. “Real bad.”
“Keep your fuckin’ mouth shut,” Wilma snaps at Alois, but her eyes are on Snake. She’s looking for a magic escape card from her fearless leader.
“You ready, Snake?” I ask, reaching for the record button.
“That nigger’s gonna kill us no matter what,” Snake says. “I see it in his face.”
“You got good eyes for an old man,” Lincoln says, and I hear a wild edge in his voice.
“Not if you tell the truth,” I say evenly.
Snake laughs. “Bullshit. I can see it, even if you can’t.”
“He’s already called the FBI,” Wilma Deen says in a shaky voice. “Don’t say nothin’. This is a trick. He’s trying to get us to talk.”
“No, darlin’,” Snake says, his eyes on Lincoln. “Kunta Kinte there is gonna shoot us.”
Wilma Deen’s eyes are wide with fear. I figured her for a stone-cold bitch, but this obviously isn’t her kind of situation. Maybe the dead guy on the floor has given her a premonition of her future.
“Will you talk?” I ask.
Snake’s eyes move from Lincoln’s to mine. “You killed my nephew, Cage. Hard to believe, really. I guess he figured you didn’t have it in you.”
“You raped my mama,” Lincoln intones. “You tortured my uncle. And you either killed him or ordered it done.”
“Your mama killed my brother, Mr. Turner.” Snake turns up his hands. “But hey . . . what’s done is done. Right?”
“Except we ain’t done, cracker.”
“Do you know how an air bubble kills a person?” Alois asks in a strange voice.
“Shut up,” Snake says softly.
“It moves through your veins until it reaches your heart. Then, if there’s enough air, it creates a vapor lock, the way air will do to any pump. The heart muscle is fighting for all it’s worth to pump blood, but there’s nothing there. No blood to prime it, see? So you lie there with a sledgehammer slamming the inside of your breastbone, and then your heart starts squirming, and then finally your whole inner works just seize up, and then”—the blond kid snaps his fingers with a startling report in the little room—“your brain burns out like a light.”
Snake Knox has maintained a placid expression through his son’s description of his brother’s murder, but I’m pretty sure he’s gritting his teeth. After a long, slow breath, he says, “My son’s clearly got a lot to learn about forgiveness. He wasn’t raised on the Good Book.”
I feel I’ve just heard Satan preach the gospel. Knox’s words trigger a memory of Dolores St. Denis describing Snake howling scripture as he raped her in the Lusahatcha Swamp, and that brings to mind the preacher father who raped both Snake and Forrest when they were boys.
“They’re playin’ us!” Wilma cries, her eyes frantic. “They got the FBI outside listening!”
While Snake disabuses her of this notion once and for all, I press record on the little Sony.
“You blinded a young woman,” I say to Wilma. “Didn’t you? Threw acid in her face.”
Wilma Deen shakes her head violently. “I didn’t do no such thing.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Alois mutters. “Own it, why don’t you? Sure, she did. That little nigger bitch asked for it.”
Lincoln says: “I’m gonna enjoy straightening you out—” but I cut him off and say, “We’re on tape, everybody. Let’s say what needs saying.”
Lincoln cuts his eyes at me, but he doesn’t finish his sentence.
“Keep your mouth shut, Junior,” Snake says. Then he looks at me again. “Your father pleaded guilty to killing Viola. That’s the end of it, so far as the law’s concerned.”
“We’re not concerned with the law right now. We’re concerned with the truth. I know when my father walked out of Cora Revels’s house, Viola was alive. Somebody went in and injected her with enough adrenaline to blow up her heart. I think it was you. All I need is a yes or no.”
Snake’s eyes move from me to Lincoln, then back again. Despite the dire straits in which he finds himself, the glint of humor never leaves his eyes. I can almost feel Lincoln’s hunger to snuff out that light.
“So that’s what this is about,” Snake muses. “What do I get, if I tell you? You’re gonna let me walk out of here?”
“No. But I’ll call the FBI.”
“Why haven’t you called them already?”
“He’s stalling,” Lincoln says, glancing at one of the windows.
“No, he’s talking for the tape. He’s making sure that anything he says will be inadmissible in court.”
“So what’s the point in going on?”
I never had much chance of using my tape as evidence. But looking into Snake’s eyes—eyes that watched Jimmy Revels bleed as he cut the navy tattoo from the boy’s arm, that watched Viola scream as Klansman after Klansman climbed on top of her and raped her, that watched Glenn Morehouse and Sonny Thornfield and countless others choke out their last breath—I realize that I am truly not concerned with the law. All I want is the certainty that only Snake can give me—that he, and not my father, murdered Viola Turner.
“You were in Viola’s sickroom that night,” I say softly. “Tell me what happened.”
“I was there, all right,” Snake says, and I feel Lincoln go absolutely still beside me. “But I don’t think you want to know what happened.”
“Are you talking to me or him?” I ask.
“Both. But you more than him, Cage. You think you want the truth, but you don’t. It’s like Jack Nicholson says in that movie. You can’t handle the truth. My daddy was a preacher, did you know that?”