TOM AND WALT sat in the rear cabin of Walt’s RV, drinking chicory coffee and waiting for Sonny Thornfield and Snake Knox to leave their hunting camp in Lusahatcha County. It was tight quarters inside the Roadtrek, which was more a customized van than a conventional RV. Fitted out in Canada, its high-tech interior held a gas cooktop, a microwave oven, a marine toilet, a pullout shower with hot-water heater, a refrigerator, a flat-screen TV, and beds enough to sleep four, if you folded down the two captain’s chairs. Later Walt would stow the table and convert the U-shaped couch on which they sat into a six-foot-long bed, but for now they hunched over the table as they’d once hunched over campfires in the snow of Korea.
Walt had parked in a KOA campground near the old entrance to the Natchez Trace, on Highway 61 North. There were about thirty other RVs in the park, so it was a good place to avoid police attention. RV-owning tourists weren’t generally the perpetrators of crimes in the Natchez area, or any other. Every few minutes Walt would walk forward and check the screen that monitored the GPS position of the trackers he’d placed on the Double Eagles’ vehicles. After leaving Knox’s vehicle in a Natchez parking lot, both Snake and Sonny had traveled southward out of town in Thornfield’s pickup. At first Tom had been confused about their destination, but then he recalled Ray Presley telling him about a hunting camp that the Knox family maintained in Lusahatcha County, which they called Fort Knox, predictably. Soon enough, the GPS tracker confirmed his theory.
While waiting for the Eagles to move again, Tom had been telling Walt the story of his relationship with Viola, which the Ranger had known nothing about before tonight. Despite their close bond, the two men had rarely seen each other face-to-face after Korea—probably only seven or eight times in the past fifty years. A chance meeting between Penn and Walt in Houston had rekindled their friendship, but despite some good conversations since that time, Tom had never felt the need to confide what had happened between him and his nurse so long ago. But now he had no choice. If Walt didn’t know enough background, he wouldn’t be able to make good judgments during the present crisis.
Walt remained silent throughout the tale, and had even turned off his police scanner so as not to be distracted from Tom’s soft words. He occasionally raised his eyebrows, as when Viola stood over the dying Frank Knox in Tom’s office. But Walt had seen and heard most everything during his years as a Texas Ranger, and now, nursing his coffee, he prompted Tom for the end of the story.
“Is that when she left town?” he asked. “After Knox was dead and the two of you had talked it out?”
Tom shook his head. “I wish to God she had, because things went to hell right after that. Viola thought her brother was still hiding out in Freewoods, but the rape rumor had already done its work. Jimmy and Luther had come out of hiding the previous day, and the Eagles kidnapped them late that night.”
“Shit.”
“Viola got word that her brother had left Freewoods, and when he didn’t call her, she just about went out of her mind. She was sure the Klan had them. She didn’t know what to do. How could she go to the police, when she’d just committed murder herself? She knew the cops wouldn’t do anything anyway. She begged me to help, but I didn’t know what I could do.”
“I’m glad you didn’t call me,” Walt said. “I was caught up in the same kind of mess over in Texas. Nothing but Klan trouble for a few years, seems like. For once the Mexicans actually got put on the back burner. Anyway … what happened next?”
“The Double Eagles took Viola.”
Walt had been toying with a cold french fry, but he stopped and looked up. “What?”
“The very night we killed Frank Knox, they grabbed her right out of her house, about two in the morning. I didn’t know any details then, of course. But when she didn’t show up for work, I went straight to her house and saw the signs of a struggle.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Hell no. You know I couldn’t do that. I called Ray Presley.”
A hard smile cracked Walt’s wrinkled face. Ray Presley was one chapter of Tom’s life that Walt did know about. More to the point, Presley’s reputation as a crooked cop and former New Orleans Mafia enforcer stretched all the way to Texas. “You wanted her back,” Walt said. “What choice did you have?”
“None that I could see. I told Ray to find her, no matter what he had to do. I told him I’d pay any price.”
“And?”
“He did.”
Walt smiled. “How long did it take him?”
“Less than twenty-four hours. He called in a lot of favors to do it, but he found her in a machine shop out in Franklin County, north of where we are now.” A wave of heat crossed Tom’s face. “It was bad, Walt. Snake Knox was enraged over his brother’s death. Sonny Thornfield and a couple of others were with him. They’d been torturing Luther and Jimmy out of anger, but also out of pure sadism. The worst torture, of course, would be to hurt Viola, so they kidnapped her.”
“What did they want from the boys?”
Tom hesitated, but then he told Walt about Carlos Marcello’s plan to lure Robert Kennedy to Natchez by murdering Jimmy Revels. Walt’s eyes went wide, and he opened a beer when Tom began describing Brody Royal’s part in the plot.
“But it was all for nothing,” Tom concluded. “When Frank died, Royal or Marcello called off the operation. Ray didn’t think they trusted Snake to handle it professionally.”
Walt nodded, then gave Tom a piercing look. “You’re not telling me everything you know about the Marcello angle, are you? The Kennedy stuff?”
“Maybe another night,” Tom said. “That had nothing to do with me.”
“Well. Did those bastards torture your girl at the machine shop?”
A flush of heat came back into Tom’s face as the killing fever rose again. “Ray told me that when he first approached the machine shop, he heard a woman screaming, then a man screaming for them to stop. I figure that was Viola and Jimmy. Ray took out his pistol and went in. He was ready to kill them if he had to.”
“Which he’d done before.”
Tom nodded. “Plenty of times. Ray was a bad customer, but he didn’t lack guts. He found Viola half naked and blindfolded. He told the Eagles he was taking her out, but that he’d leave the two boys behind. He hadn’t been paid to get them out, see? And he told them that.”