Just now, though, Snake didn’t plan on flying anywhere.
He’d traveled a long way to get to this place, modest as it was; six different countries in eleven weeks, and none particularly enjoyable. Andorra had been the best of them, mainly because that had been the original emergency sanctuary set up by Forrest. Billy was still living there and grateful for every bit of luxury and security that Forrest’s planning had provided. But Snake had no intention of lolling around a French-Swiss tax haven with a bunch of expatriate millionaires. He’d actually felt happier when he was sneaking through Honduras on a third-rate fake passport bought in Mexico. For him, every place he’d been through had been but a waypoint on his journey back home.
The reason was simple: unfinished business.
That was why he was sitting on a tall kitchen stool in front of a mirror while Junelle Crick, one of the VK “mamas,” worked on him with an arsenal of beauty salon chemicals that smelled fouler than some of the poisons Snake used to spray on summer cotton.
Well past fifty, Junelle sported fried blond hair, bright red lipstick, and dark blue eye shadow, and she had a Salem Menthol 100 perpetually hanging from her bottom lip. She had pendulous breasts, a flat butt, a round paunch, and wore stretch pants. Snake couldn’t have felt any more at home if he’d been in Vidalia.
Junelle had set a piece of poster board in front of the mirror so that Snake couldn’t see himself until she had finished her makeover. While she tortured his eyebrows with tweezers, Snake reflected on the past three months.
With epic daring he’d brought down an FBI jet loaded with evidence against the Double Eagles. Then, despite relentless pursuit by the FBI, he had held the gang together and silent. One of his most effective moves had been to kill Silas Groom and frame him for the downing of the jet. Groom’s death had shaken every living Eagle, each of whom had assumed that old Silas had been betraying the group by ratting to the FBI. Frank would have been proud of Snake for that one.
More impressive still, in the midst of a crackdown by Colonel Griffith Mackiever’s Louisiana State Police, Snake had managed to forge an alliance with one of the most feared and powerful motorcycle clubs in Texas and Louisiana. He’d done this by offering the VK access to Forrest’s network of corrupt cops and judges. Snake could only offer that protection because he’d salvaged and maintained enough of the Eagles’ meth trade to keep paying about a third of Forrest’s network. That had been a tough trick. The files discovered in Forrest’s Baton Rouge storage unit had resulted in several statewide investigations, some into district attorneys and judges. Snake had held on to a handful of DAs by blackmail rather than continued bribery, but all that mattered was he still had them.
Still, it was a dangerous game to play. The VK naturally wanted the name of every contact at once; so far Snake had managed to dole out a few at a time. But the endgame was inevitable. Once the bikers had all those precious contacts, they wouldn’t need him anymore.
Snake did have some genuine support within the VK ranks. Some of the older members treated him like a rock-and-roll star. The JFK story had obviously made the rounds, and this earned a lot of respect among the guys who remembered the 1960s.
“All right, hon,” Junelle said, stepping back from the stool. “You ready?”
Snake nodded. “Let’s see the damage.”
When she yanked the poster board away, Snake didn’t recognize himself in the mirror. His long white rat’s nest was gone, replaced by perfectly trimmed black hair combed straight back from his face. And Junelle hadn’t stopped at his scalp. She’d dyed his eyebrows, too. Combined with the new dentures Snake had bought off an Indian dentist up in Shreveport, the total effect was stunning. A complete transformation.
Snake whistled long and loud. “I’ll be damned. I look like Ronald Reagan at the Neshoba County Fair.”
“Better, darlin’,” croaked Junelle, sending ash floating from the tip of her cigarette onto his lap. She snipped an errant hair above Snake’s left ear. “Did Reagan go to the Neshoba Fair?”
Snake turned around on the stool. “Did he go there? Baby doll, when Reagan first ran for president, he got up on a platform five miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, and gave a talk about states’ rights. Summer of 1980, and I was there. He put it right in their faces, boy. States’ rights, and the hole where they buried them three civil rights workers not a stone’s throw away. The country responded, too. They knew what he was talkin’ about. Nobody left like Reagan these days. No, sir. Or it don’t seem like, anyway.”
“Well,” Junelle said, her head tilted to one side as she assessed her handiwork. “I think you may be my masterpiece.”
Snake gazed into the mirror like a septuagenarian Narcissus. “I’ll be dogged,” he marveled. “If those Arabs are as good with passports as you are with hair dye, I might just buy me an antebellum home in the middle of Natchez and sit on my veranda all day sippin’ bourbon.”
“I’m not sure I’d try that.”
“I might, though,” Snake murmured. “I just might. After my book advance comes in, that is.”
He felt his newest burner phone buzz in his pocket. Getting to his feet, he took out the phone and clapped it to his ear.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Toons.”
Terry “Toons” Teufel was the SA, or sergeant at arms, of the VK motorcycle club. Snake didn’t trust the man—who seemed like a nut job—but under the present circumstances he had no choice but to rely on him for protection.
“Yeah,” Snake said again.
“I think we got a problem.”
“I’m listening.”
Ever attuned to the needs of the men around her, Junelle signaled that she was going into the kitchen so Snake could have some privacy.
“The splash went perfectly today,” Toons said.
“That don’t sound like a problem.”
“But an hour later, somebody showed up at the Kuntry Kafé with a hard-on for you and your buddies.”
“Who? That FBI man, Kaiser?”
“No. The doctor’s boy. The mayor.”
Snake went still. If he remembered right, Penn Cage had faced off with Randall Regan in the Kafé. “Is that right?”
“Yeah. I had a guy in there, sitting in the corner booth. Cage walked in with a pistol and held it to one of your guys’ heads.”
Snake tried out a couple of different expressions in the mirror. When he scowled, he looked like a banker who’d missed a putt on the eighteenth green. “And?”
“One of your guys told him, ‘Ain’t you a badass all of a sudden.’ Then the mayor said something that you might be interested in.”
“Which was?”
“He said, ‘Why don’t you ask Forrest Knox that question?’”
Snake went still. As he stared blankly into the mirror, acid flooded into his belly. He suddenly looked like a clown to himself.
“You need to dump your phone after using that name,” he said in a monotone. “And I gotta dump this one.”
“Relax, man. That’s what we use ’em for.”