“What the fuck you laughing at?” he growls, obviously annoyed. “Freak. I think your damn egg got shook.”
My brittle laughter bounces off the mirror, filling the little room. “You’d better get moving. The FBI’s got everything you just said. You should have left while you were ahead.”
Regan’s eyes narrow. He steps forward as though to give me another blow.
“You missed the wire, Randall. The Bureau’s got a whole new bag of tricks since Nine-Eleven. You couldn’t find this bug in a week. They call it the ‘tick.’”
He lunges forward, meaning to strip-search me, but as his right hand comes up, I drive my fist deep beneath his chin, hard into his Adam’s apple. Nothing cracks, but Regan reels backward, both hands flying to his throat. His eyes bulge when he hits the wall, and his mouth gapes while he slides down it. With one blow I’ve scrambled his cerebral cortex, as he did mine. Desperately clutching his throat, he sits heavily on the floor, looking like nothing so much as an actor trying to pantomime choking to death.
Strangely, my lawyer’s mind tallies up the charges this assault could expose me to, up to and including murder. But I’m not a lawyer now. I’m a father. A father and a son. Randall Regan threatened my family, and he meant what he said. He assaulted me first. For a couple of seconds I consider calling 911, but that would trigger too many questions. Besides, if his larynx is just bruised, and he lives, I want him out on the street calling his father-in-law, not stuck in a police station explaining this fight to local cops.
A high-pitched wheeze tells me that at least some oxygen is reaching his lungs, and therefore his brain. Otherwise he’d already be blue. Though it costs me blinding back pain, I kneel in front of him and speak close to his ear, as he did in mine.
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re dealing with a lawyer, Randall. Or a mayor, or a writer. If you ever come near me or my family, I’ll kill you. And if you kill me first, then a friend of mine will square it. He eats assholes like you for breakfast, and he’ll square it if it takes ten years. You hear me?”
Regan still can’t speak.
Using the sink, I pull myself back to my feet, then walk out of the restroom and make my way through the close-packed tables to the door. Our waitress gives me a puzzled wave, and I wave back. Then I’m out in the cold wind and winter sun.
I doubt Regan is even off the bathroom floor yet, but just in case, I climb straight into my car, back up, and pull onto Carter Street, heading for the Natchez bridge. I was damned lucky back there. Regan thought he’d hurt me too badly to retaliate against him. I only pray that in the next hour or so, he and Brody Royal say enough on their phones to allow Kaiser to arrest them. Because if they don’t, he’s going to come after me. And the friend I warned him about is seven thousand miles away, in Afghanistan.
CHAPTER 68
“I TOLD YOU we should have killed that son of a bitch last night,” Walt Garrity growled. “He was dying anyway. Now every cop in five states is hunting us.”
The Ranger sat in a leather chair in the den of Drew Elliott’s lake house, pecking irritably on a laptop he’d found on Drew’s desk. Tom lay on the nearby sofa, trying not to bitch about Walt’s steady typing. The only illumination in the room came from an overhead lamp. They had closed all the curtains to prevent anyone from seeing movement inside the house. Tom wasn’t much in the mood to talk. Walt had doled out three Lorcet today, and the hydrocodone had quieted his pain for a while, but now his shoulder throbbed relentlessly.
“We did the right thing about Thornfield,” he repeated, recalling the terror in the old Klansman’s eyes as he realized he was having a heart attack—a terror Tom had experienced firsthand.
“He might have seen me shoot that trooper,” Walt said. “Not that it matters. All he has to do is put us at the scene and tell what we did to him.”
Walt looked over at the kitchen counter, where he’d rigged his police scanner to the battery he’d brought in from the van last night. This time the cop chatter was about something besides the APB, for a change.
“I’m sorry, Walt,” Tom said for the twentieth time. “I should never have called you to help me with this. I realize that now.”
The Ranger gave a sullen grunt. “Who else could you call? We need to get some more burn phones. Maybe Melba will take Dr. Elliott’s truck to the Ferriday Walmart and buy us a handful.”
Having tended Tom’s wound throughout the night, Melba Price was napping in the back bedroom of the lake house.
“Calling Mackiever was a big risk,” Walt said, “but I’m glad I did it. If we’d left this house not knowing about that, we’d likely be dead already.”
A half hour ago, Walt had used his last TracFone to call the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police. Griffith Mackiever had served in the Texas Rangers early in his career and knew Walt personally. Walt believed there was no way Colonel Mackiever would knowingly tolerate a crook like Forrest Knox as the chief of his Criminal Investigations Bureau, but whatever the truth of that, they had little choice if they hoped to find a way out of the mess they’d created last night. A simple ruse had gotten Walt past Mackiever’s receptionist, but as soon as his old comrade in arms learned who the caller was, he’d told Walt about the APB, then given him a different number to call in two hours.
“I can’t see a damned thing anymore,” Walt complained, squinting at the computer keys.
“What are you trying to find out?” Tom asked, as Walt stabbed angrily at the keyboard.