We’ll see about that. “Aren’t you an attorney yourself?” I call.
“Not like you. I didn’t go to a high-dollar law school with a world-class library and scouts from the big firms waiting for the graduates. I went to a night school, the kind ‘real’ lawyers joke about. Until I hand them their asses in court, that is. I’ve been scrapping out a living since the day I was born, Mayor. I’ve seen things white-shoe lawyers like you can’t even imagine. So don’t be thinkin’ we’ve got anything in common. Just remember what I told you: your daddy’s going down—all the way down—like he should have done a long time ago.”
This guy just lost his mother, I remind myself, but she was terminally ill for nearly a year. His fury is clearly based on a perception of insult much older than that. Could he have some idea that he was likely conceived during his mother’s rape by Mississippi rednecks?
“What do you really know about my father?” I ask.
The eyes narrow to slits. “More than you, I’ll bet. I know what my mama knew. Your daddy might have shut her up last night, but I’m still vertical.” Turner thumps his big chest with his fist. “I’m the chicken come home to roost, brother, the cat that got thrown in the river but finds his way back home. I’m the avenging motherfucking angel. A black angel! Men reap what they sow, Mr. Mayor. You’ll find out the details when reaping time comes.”
“When will that be?”
The low thunder rolls in his chest again. “When the judge and jury are listening. When all the cameras are switched on, and the lights are shining bright as noontime.” Turner jams his truck into gear with a lurch. “You take care now.”
The big wheels spin with a scream that makes me shudder, and the truck reverses up Washington Street to the intersection, where Turner executes a stunt maneuver that spins his vehicle 180 degrees. Gunning the engine, he fishtails up Washington, narrowly missing sedans parked on both sides of the crape myrtle–lined street. I stare after the pickup, recalling a night two months ago when a man far more frightening than Lincoln Turner ambushed me on my porch. But fear and danger aren’t always directly proportional. We’re all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us.
CHAPTER 26
HENRY SEXTON’S GIRLFRIEND lived in a leafy neighborhood near the western end of one of the two bridges spanning the Mississippi River from Vidalia, Louisiana, to Natchez. As per Penn’s instructions, Henry had gone straight there and loaded her shotgun, then waited for a retired cop that Penn had hired to pick up Henry’s mother and deliver her to Sherry’s house. He’d told Penn that the two women had never gotten along and never would, but Penn had persuaded him that twelve hours of constant fighting between Sherry and his mother would be preferable to both of them being killed. Of course, Henry had the much harder job of making the women understand what was at stake—without sending them into total panic.
Sherry cottoned on pretty quick. She’d always insisted that Henry was courting disaster by probing old Klan murders, and she’d often tried to dissuade him from pursuing potentially dangerous leads. His mother, on the other hand, believed that since nothing had happened to Henry up to now, nothing was likely to in the future. The white-haired old lady perched in a club chair in Sherry’s den like a dowager countess being forced to accept the hospitality of a peasant, while Sherry made futile offers of coffee, biscuits, fried chicken, and even banana nut bread.
“For the life of me,” sniffed Mrs. Sexton, “I don’t see how someone expects to host anybody without a drop of sherry in the house. No pun intended.”
Henry announced that he was running over to McDonough’s package store to buy a bottle of Dry Sack, but James Ervin, the heavy-jowled old cop that Penn had hired to watch over them, told him they’d better make do with what they had. After Henry got his mother to accept some Chardonnay, Ervin led him and Sherry into the guest room to give them a quiet refresher course on handling her shotgun. Unlike 98 percent of the boys he’d grown up with, Henry had little experience with guns, but the 12-gauge Ithaca was pretty simple to operate, and after some dry-firing, he felt he could repel an intruder if necessary. The wisest course in that circumstance, Ervin suggested in a kindly voice, would probably be to let Sherry handle the shotgun.
Once the ladies had settled into an uncomfortable truce, Henry retreated to the kitchen, took out his Moleskine notebook, and pretended to work on an article at the Formica-topped table. The fact was, he could barely keep his thoughts in any kind of order. The knowledge that Glenn Morehouse now lay on a slab in the hospital morgue, after they’d talked intimately only hours ago, was disorienting enough; but to be nearly certain that his interview had triggered the old man’s murder had given Henry a far more visceral appreciation of the dangers of his quest.