HENRY SEXTON FORCED himself to keep the Impala’s speedometer on forty as he drove up the lane toward Brody Royal’s lake house. The IV narcotics were fading; he knew because his abdominal pain was climbing quickly up the scale. He’d taken a second OxyContin to compensate for the missing pump, and a couple of minutes ago, he’d realized he was only driving ten miles per hour.
He was breathing pretty well, in spite of his swollen tongue, and the pounding in his head had settled down to a tolerable backbeat. The cast on his left arm gave him no difficulty driving, but he worried about what might come later. As he neared the lake house, he tried to keep his mind engaged with reality. He couldn’t allow the combination of white-hot anger and potent painkillers to handicap him.
He braked as he spied a pickup truck parked on the street beneath some trees at the border of Brody Royal’s property. There was a man sitting behind the wheel. For a moment Henry was paralyzed. If he stopped and tried to turn around now, he’d look suspicious as hell. But if he went on …
He must be a guard of some sort, Henry decided, posted to stop people like me. Henry lifted his foot off the brake, thanking God he hadn’t removed his mother’s wig from his head. My brights are on, he thought. I should just drive past like I’m headed home after a late night.
As he came within a few feet of the pickup, Henry realized that the man sitting outside Brody’s house was black.
That made no sense.
Twenty yards past the truck, Henry braked again. A black security guard? Here? He shook his head. Emboldened by the drugs, he put the Impala in reverse and backed up until he was even with the truck. Then he pulled off his wig and rolled down his window.
The man in the cab of the pickup turned his head casually toward Henry, peering through his window with open curiosity. Something about him seemed familiar. He was about Henry’s age, for one thing. Maybe I know him, Henry thought. But … no. He couldn’t place the man.
“Are you Henry Sexton?” asked the black man, sounding far from certain.
Henry nodded slowly.
“You shaved off your goatee?”
Henry laughed painfully. He’d been through a hell of a lot more changes than that in the past two days.
“Well, I guess you found me,” said the man. “What you doin’ out here? I thought you were in the hospital.”
“I sneaked out.” Henry cocked his head. “Who are you?”
“Sleepy Johnston. I’m from Wisner, originally. I been living in Detroit for the past forty-one years.”
This revelation arced like lightning through Henry’s narcotic fog. One of Albert’s boys, he thought. With considerable effort, he opened the door and got out of the Impala, a movement that quickly punctured his OxyContin cushion.
Sleepy Johnston got out and carefully shook his hand, each man assessing the other. With gray hair and whiskers showing under his Detroit Tigers cap, Sleepy looked close to seventy, but his body appeared strong and healthy.
“Did you work for Albert Norris?” Henry asked. “I don’t remember you.”
After he puzzled out Henry’s mumbled words, Johnston smiled. “Not officially. But I hung around the store whenever I could. By the time you came along, I was on the road, playing with bands. I only came back this way for family reunion gigs, things like that. That’s how I met Pooky. He sat in with my band a couple times. But I knew Jimmy and Luther real good.”
Henry shook his head, still dazed by the sudden appearance of a man he had hunted so hard.
“So,” Sleepy went on, “why’d you sneak out of the hospital?”
A knot of foreboding formed in Henry’s stomach. He pointed at the darkened Royal house. “I’ve come to see the man who lives in there. He killed my girlfriend tonight. And he damn near killed me.”
It took Johnston a while to make out the words, but as he absorbed their meaning, his eyes widened. “Have you come to kill Old Man Royal?”
Henry thought about this. “I don’t know. I just had to come. When a man kills the woman you love, you’re supposed to do something about it. Aren’t you?”
“I reckon so. But there’s a lot of distance between ‘s’posed to’ and actually doing. I can tell you all about that.”
“Have you seen Brody here tonight?” Henry asked. “Is he in there?”
Sleepy licked his lips and nodded. “He’s in there, all right. Just before you got here, two of Brody’s thugs drove up in a van. They took a man and woman into the basement, all tied up.”
Henry felt adrenaline rush into his bloodstream, mixing with the heady cocktail of drugs that were keeping him upright. “Black or white?”
“White, both of them.”
“What did they look like?”
Sleepy ran a hand across his mouth, thinking. “Tall man, dressed pretty good. The woman had dark hair, classy looking. I was prowling back near the garage, and I saw the bastards drag them out of the van.”
Penn Cage and Caitlin Masters. Henry knew it as surely as he knew that he had to abandon his confrontation plan and call for help.
“What you doing?” called Sleepy as Henry turned and opened his passenger door.
“I’m—” Henry slapped his forehead. In his haste at the hospital, he’d forgotten to ask his mother for her cell phone. The drugs were having more of an effect than he’d realized. He turned around. “We need to call for help. Not the local police. We can’t trust them. We need the FBI. Or … wait.” Henry fought through the cobwebs in his head. “Maybe we should call Royal’s house. Let him know we know they have the mayor and his girlfriend in there.”
“The mayor? Hold on,” said Sleepy. “I don’t know any of those numbers.”
“Well, we could call Information—”
“Hands up!” ordered a sharp voice from behind Sleepy.
A middle-aged white man in a dark jacket held a pistol to the back of Sleepy’s head.
There’s the guard, thought Henry numbly. The real one this time.