“Say that again, Mr. Garland.”
Devine’s chair scrapes the floor as he shoves back from the table and gets to his feet, wheezing from the effort. The kid looks like he wants to jump me, but Tarver just laughs and says, “Damn, I wish I had a camera.”
“I got one on my cell phone,” says the blond kid.
“Don’t worry, Buddy,” Tarver says calmly. “Cage won’t shoot. He’s the fuckin’ mayor.”
“Don’t do nothin’, Alois,” says the man with the pistol against his head. “Don’t touch your phone. Please.”
“He ain’t gonna shoot,” Tarver insists. “Take the picture, Alois. If we get a picture of this, Sheriff Dennis will have to throw him in jail. It’ll be front page news.”
As the blond kid digs into his pocket, the empirical reality of the situation finally registers in my brain. Tarver wants me to shoot. The life of the man at the end of my gun barrel means nothing when weighed against the prospect of me sitting on death row in Angola Penitentiary—which is where I’ll wind up if I kill a man on this side of the river.
As the blond kid holds up his cell phone, I lower the gun and take the empty chair at the table, concealing the gun below its Formica surface.
“I came over here to tell you guys something,” I say softly.
“What you waitin’ for?” asks Tarver.
“Snake sent me a message about three weeks back. Through a biker. He said, ‘Wives and children have no immunity.’”
The old man squints as though laboring to understand the words. “That don’t sound like Snake to me.”
“Yes, it does. It sounds like all you fuckers. I know you, Tarver. You’re the kind of backshooting coward that stands in the dark and executes a man who’s lying in a hospital bed, or throws a cup of acid into a young girl’s face. You’re the kind of shithead who kills an old lady who remembers being raped by you back when you could still get it up.”
Tarver’s head jerks at that, and his eyes fill with hatred.
“Oh, yeah,” I tell him. “I know all about that machine shop.”
Will Devine swallows audibly.
“But the thing is,” I go on, “guys like you and Snake, the ones who did the beatings and killings back in the sixties? You were nothing but pawns in the hands of the rich boys. White trash. Flunkies. In the grand scheme of things, you were only one cut above a nigger yourself. That’s why civil rights scared you so bad. You talked loud and wore your bedsheet proud, but if you ever really got out of line—or got ideas above your station—the boss in the big house would trim your wick so fast your head would spin.”
The blond kid looks like he’s about to have a stroke, but the truth of my words is written on the faces of the older men.
“My dad started as poor as every one of you,” I go on. “But he worked his way up and out. Now, sure, I’m the one living in the big house on the high side of the river. But I’ve never forgotten where I came from.”
I hear a siren in the distance. Did a cook in the back dial 911?
“Cops on the way,” says Alois, an edge in his voice.
“Just say your piece and get the fuck out,” Tarver mutters.
Sliding the Springfield from beneath the table, I lay it flat on the Formica in front of me, the barrel pointed at Tarver’s belly, my finger on the trigger.
“Back during the Civil War in Tennessee, there was a man named Jack Hinson. Came from Highland Scots stock. Hinson tried as hard as he could to stay out of the war. But one day, a Union patrol killed two of his sons, then had the heads mounted on Hinson’s gateposts. After that, Hinson had a special rifle made. Then he went to war against the Union army. He killed the lieutenant who murdered his boys first. But before he was through, he killed more than a hundred soldiers.”
The old men are watching me with rapt attention; this is the kind of story they would normally love.
“The point is, I come from Highland Scots stock on my mother’s side. And if the girl who got acid thrown in her face today had been my little girl . . . I wouldn’t have walked in here like I did. I wouldn’t have sat down to talk. I’d have walked in and shot you in the face.”
Tarver blinks slowly, appraising my words.
I look next at Garland, then Will Devine. The fat man looks afraid.
“Then I’d have shot these two. Center mass while they were still pissing themselves. And no jury within five miles of Natchez would convict me.”
The old men are watching Tarver now.
“Aren’t you the badass all of a sudden?” Tarver says softly.
“Why don’t you ask Forrest Knox that question?”
The old Double Eagle’s mouth drops open.
“Let me fuck him up, Earl,” says the blond kid. “Let me cut him.”
Suppressing the urge to smash the heavy Springfield against the kid’s skull, I stand and back slowly to the door. The siren is louder now.
“Remember what I said about my little girl. And make sure Snake gets the message.”
My last image is Will Devine’s face, white with fear, and behind it, the tall man in the leather jacket speaking into a cell phone. Reaching behind me, I open the door and walk swiftly to my car, then drive back up to the bridge over the Mississippi, the cello slowly pulling me earthward, stemming the tide of endorphins rushing through my blood and brain.
The man I was six months ago would never have done what I just did.
That man is dead now.
Maybe this is what it means to be born again.
Chapter 8
Two hundred miles from Natchez, just north of Sulphur, Louisiana, lay a thriving sod farm that ten years earlier had been a struggling horse farm. Being that Sulphur was one of the most polluted places in America, with twelve chemical plants pumping out toxic by-products twenty-four hours a day, the horses hadn’t done too well, so the owners had sold out to a nice fellow with a ponytail from Beaumont, Texas. That fellow was Lars Dempsey, founder of the VK motorcycle club.
Dempsey rarely brought club members to the sod farm, which he operated as a legitimate front business. When he did bring them, they weren’t allowed to ride their hogs in, or even to wear their jackets. This was because the fifty-nine-acre complex sometimes served as a storage and distribution depot for the VK’s meth and gun-running operations.
What had drawn Snake Knox to the sod farm was not only its relative isolation, but the fact that it had an airstrip. Parked out on that airstrip now was an Air Tractor crop duster, probably the least suspicious aircraft in the American South. Its tiny cockpit could hold only a pilot, which suited Snake down to the ground. If he had to make a quick getaway, he didn’t have to worry about taking anybody with him. And anywhere he flew between Texas and South Carolina—or even to Mexico—cops would assume he was only a crop duster ferrying his plane to a job.