“Is my rifle still down here?”
Brody smiled and pointed to the display case closest to the shooting stations of the firing range. Every case in this room featured polycarbonate glass for security, but the last case was unique in that it could be sealed with a wooden insert that concealed it altogether. Broader than the others, it held two scoped rifles mounted horizontally at chest height, and below them a German Flammenwerfer 41, the most advanced flamethrower of World War II.
Snake walked over to the cabinet and gazed at the rifles. As Brody stepped up behind him, Snake shook his head and whistled long and low.
“What you figure these beauties would fetch on eBay?” he asked.
The top rifle was a 1959 Remington 700, chambered for a .243 cartridge and mounted with a 7x Kahles scope. Beneath it was a 1962 Winchester Model 70, chambered for .30-06 Springfield and mounting a 5x Leupold scope. The Winchester was “Snake’s rifle.”
“Two million apiece?” Brody guessed. “Hell, maybe five. But we’d never see the money.” He chuckled at the thought. “Our kids would be spending it while we rotted in jail.”
Snake shook his head again. “You’ve got balls, Mr. Royal. Damn … I’ll give you that.”
Brody’s chest swelled. Before he turned back to the sofa, he read the engraved brass plaques mounted beneath the rifles. Each was decorated with a small, full-color American flag. The plaque beneath the Remington read: November 22, 1963. The one beneath Snake’s Winchester read: April 4, 1968.
OUT ON THE NARROW lane outside Brody Royal’s house, a sixty-seven-year-old black man wearing a Detroit Tigers baseball cap drove his pickup truck along the shore of Lake Concordia. He saw a guard with a rifle slung over his shoulder standing a few yards down the driveway. Sleepy Johnston waved happily with his right hand, playing the part of an elderly fool, and kept driving with his knee. His right hand held a Glock .40-caliber pistol. He’d have to go around the lake now, and drive out the other way. But at least he’d gotten a look at the pickup truck parked before Brody Royal’s garage door.
It belonged to Snake Knox. One of Albert’s killers …
Sleepy had made his usual rounds tonight, which was how he’d recently gotten reacquainted with the characters from the bad old days of his youth. It was also how he’d discovered the Audi S4 parked outside the Concordia Beacon. While he waited to see who would come out and claim that car, a sheriff’s cruiser had pulled up and scared him off. By pulling around to Main Street and waiting a couple of minutes, Sleepy had managed to follow the Audi back to Natchez, to a town house on Washington Street. There the car’s owner had gotten into some kind of confrontation with a black man in a white pickup truck with Illinois plates. By rolling down his window at the nearest intersection, Sleepy had heard the truck’s driver refer to the white man as “Mayor.”
Then he’d understood. Henry Sexton had been meeting with the mayor of Natchez, the son of a doctor who had sewed up Sleepy’s right knee when he was a little boy. Rumors were already circulating that Dr. Cage had killed his old nurse as part of some suicide pact, but most folks seemed to think that she had been ready to die. All Sleepy knew was that Viola had been the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, before or after he left the South. And her brother Jimmy had been one hell of a musician—far better than Sleepy or Pooky would ever be.
Sleepy turned on the radio and searched for an R&B station. The sound of rap drove him crazy. He finally settled on Sly and the Family Stone playing “If You Want Me to Stay,” circa 1973. As the bass guitar pumped sinuously around him in the closed cab, Sleepy lit a Salem and wondered at the tragedy that, of Jimmy, Pooky, and himself, only one had survived to hear this song on the radio.
If God has a plan, he thought, it’s a piss-poor one.
TUESDAY
CHAPTER 33
SHERIFF BILLY BYRD personally arrested my father at 8:45 A.M. Dad was sitting at the breakfast table when the law arrived. Mom sat opposite him with a cup of coffee and a Dopp kit filled with prescription drugs in front of her, while I talked to her on the telephone, reassuring her that I would be waiting at the sheriff’s department. A strangled sob came over the line.
As I sped toward the sheriff’s department, my mother called my cell phone and told me that a deputy had handcuffed Dad before they put him in the backseat of the cruiser, with all the neighbors watching. She was terrified that he would develop chest pain on the way to the station; his nitro tablets were sitting in a Ziploc bag on the passenger seat of her car. Surely, I thought, Dad kept a couple of tablets in his pocket for the ride downtown.
To my relief, Shad Johnson had arranged things with Sheriff Byrd so that, after being booked, Dad would be taken directly before the Justice Court judge, and not spend any time in a cell. Shad apparently remains intimidated enough by my possible exposure of the dogfighting photo not to push too hard. Still, being photographed and fingerprinted like a common criminal always takes a toll on a man of my father’s integrity. When Dad finally emerged from the bowels of the station, his face already looked haggard. What, I wondered, would a month in a cell do to him? Or six months while awaiting trial?
It would kill him.