“Are you safe now?”
“Yeah. Kaiser has FBI agents here, and Sheriff Dennis is on the way. Penn … what about the recording? Katy must have known her father was going to try to kill Henry. Do I tell Kaiser about it?”
My stomach knots. “Ahhh … not yet. Stay close to Sheriff Dennis and away from the windows. I’m on my way.”
“What happened?” Kirk asks as I hit END.
“A sniper just shot Henry Sexton through his hospital window. They only grazed him, but they killed his girlfriend.”
Kirk holds up his hands like weapons at the ready. “This is wild, man. Tell me what to do. Is our thing still on?”
“Yes. I want you to track down Royal for me. As soon as I can get loose from this murder scene, I’ll come to you.”
Kirk grips my hand with startling strength, then springs out of the Audi, closes the door, and leans back through the window. “Do what you gotta do, man. I’ll stay on these guys till you’re ready to brace them. And if it turns out they shot Henry Sexton … I might just take it out of their asses myself.”
CHAPTER 79
SONNY THORNFIELD THOUGHT he’d been afraid during the afternoon, but that had been nothing compared to now. This was like the war all over again. The plan that put a bullet into Henry Sexton’s brain had been pure genius; nobody would argue that. It was the aftermath that had Sonny worried. He and Snake were flying five thousand feet over the Atchafalaya Swamp in a darkened Cessna Caravan with two half-drunk boys in the backseats: Jake Whitten and Charley Wise, the two surviving punks who’d bungled Brody Royal’s first hit on Sexton. Sonny had been told that his job was to help Snake kill the boys and dump them in the swamp, but he feared that the real purpose of this mission was to leave him in the same dark hole.
Until he’d heard about this flight, Sonny had felt pretty sure that Forrest still trusted him, despite his being kidnapped by Tom Cage and that Ranger bastard. But then—on Forrest’s orders—Snake had carried him to Claude Devereux’s office to videotape a statement about what happened, which was then notarized and duplicated on the spot. With that video statement in Devereux’s safe, Forrest could still order Sonny’s death whenever he liked. Sonny looked out at the stars and thought about the successful hit on Sexton. Surely Forrest would give him partial credit for that?
Forty minutes ago, he and Snake had dropped out of the clouds over an empty Concordia Parish cotton field, then descended toward a line of chemical glow sticks. Snake had set the floatplane down on a narrow stretch of water owned by a friend of Billy Knox, then taxied to a stop near the shore, where a Chevrolet parked at water’s edge switched on its headlights. Charley and Jake had brought this car to meet the plane, with Snake’s raccoon trap in the trunk.
Snake took the trap out of the trunk, shot the terrified coon, then climbed into the Chevy and headed for Mercy Hospital. Twenty minutes later, he dumped the dead coon beneath Henry’s window, then set up his rifle on a spot he’d marked that morning with a tent stake, just thirty yards from the window. Using a modified photographic tripod as a bench rest (just as he had when practicing the shot through the windows of an abandoned house near Jonesville), he executed Henry Sexton with a perfect head shot, then took out his girlfriend, just in case she’d seen something.
Sixty seconds after killing the reporter, Snake was back in the Chevy and headed for the Cessna, where Sonny and the boys waited. Slick as snot on a doorknob. No flight plan, no airport, not even a dirt strip. Just an airplane floating on a patch of water in some empty fields. Charley and Jake had no idea they were going to take the return flight to Toledo Bend, but they didn’t argue much, especially after Snake pulled his pistol. They left their keys in the Chevy as instructed, then handed over their cell phones to Snake and climbed into the rear of the plane.
Sixty seconds after the Cessna lifted off, a four-wheeled ATV carrying two former Double Eagles emerged from the trees. It stopped beside the Chevy long enough for one man to dismount and get behind the wheel. After driving out to the highway, he wouldn’t stop until he reached Memphis, Tennessee, where he’d dump the Chevy in an abandoned salvage yard, then ride the bus back to Natchez. After the four-wheeler disappeared, it was as though none of the vehicles had ever been there.
But they had, Sonny reflected. And now Henry Sexton is dead.
Snake had ordered him to keep the boys calm while he flew them toward their deaths. That was easier said than done. You could smell the fear coming through the boys’ skins, a sour sweat that permeated the Caravan’s cabin. But they’d tried to put on brave faces and pretend this was all part of some grand plan to protect them, rather than the opposite. Sonny knew exactly how they felt.
Twenty minutes into the flight, he’d given each of them a bottle of Budweiser laced with Versed, a short-acting benzodiazepine often given to children to sedate them for medical procedures. Sonny and Snake were drinking Schaefer (supposedly to be sure they got the nondoctored beers, but Sonny kept thinking his tasted funny, and tried to drink as little as possible). Long before the plane reached the black glassy sheet of the Atchafalaya Swamp, the two boys fell unconscious. The longer Sonny remained conscious, the better he began to feel.