“That was back in the sixties. This happened only two years ago.”
Two years ago? Again Henry has stunned me. I look down at the photo of my father in the boat with Brody Royal. “Do you have anything stronger than coffee?”
He opens a drawer and takes out a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey. Unscrewing the top, he pours double shots into paper cups.
“Confusion to the enemy,” he says, raising his cup.
CHAPTER 20
SONNY THORNFIELD STOOD in the hallway of Wilma Deen’s house, peering through a crack in the door of the room where Glenn Morehouse lay on a motorized hospital bed, his torso raised at a thirty-degree angle. The flickering blue light of a television washed over his shockingly skeletal form. His sister had carried in a cup of ice chips, and Wilma alternated between placing these on his tongue and sponging off his sweating forehead. Glenn’s head was to Sonny’s left. Wilma had placed herself on the far side of the bed. Sonny couldn’t see any pistol from where he stood, but he believed it was there. Glenn might have it in his left hand, under the covers. It would be a damned .45, Sonny thought, recalling men he’d seen knocked down by the Colt cannon.
“Jesus,” Snake whispered from behind Sonny. “Ain’t been but a month since I last saw him, and he done shrunk to half of what he was.”
Sonny nodded. It was hard to believe that anything, even cancer, could change a man so much. Like a half-drowned man, Morehouse sucked in a deep breath. Then his eyes opened wide, as if something had frightened him.
“Take it easy,” Wilma half sang, like a doting grandmother. “Everything’s fine. You were almost asleep. You fell off that sleep cliff.”
“Something’s wrong,” Glenn said. “I can feel it.”
“No, everything’s fine. You remember what the doctor said. Everybody gets that feeling when they get this poorly.”
Morehouse strained upward, squinted around the room, then finally settled back against the mattress. Wilma fed him another ice chip. After a minute or so, his eyelids began to fall again. Sonny wondered whether she meant to wait until he was completely unconscious to go for the gun.
Ten seconds later, she laid her left hand on her brother’s arm and began to stroke it. She sponged his forehead with her right hand, then moved it away as if to dip the rag again. But this time her hand disappeared behind his leg, and a moment later Morehouse cried out in terror.
Wilma backed away from the bed, a Colt .45 automatic in her hand.
While her brother gaped at her, Snake shoved Sonny into the room and moved quickly around him the bedside.
Morehouse turned his skull, his eyes going wide in recognition. “Snake! Sonny!”
Snake smiled with a cobra-like expression suited to his namesake. “Surprised, pardner?”
“What are ya’ll doin’ here?”
“You know.” Snake’s eyes glittered in the television light.
“What do you mean? What do I know?”
“You’ve been jawin’ to people you shouldn’t. Tryin’ to get your name in the papers.”
Morehouse’s mouth opened, but he did not speak. He raised his hands and covered his eyes like a child trying to pretend that the horror in front of him wasn’t real. “I ain’t done nothin’!” he cried.
“That’s a lie.”
The big hands slowly fell from the anguished face. “Oh Lord,” Glenn said in a slurred voice. “Ya’ll done come to cut my throat, ain’t you?”
“We damn sure ought to.”
“Wilma!” Morehouse cried. “Call the sheriff! They’ve come to kill me!”
Snake laughed. “Wilma ain’t callin’ nobody ’cept the coroner.”
Glenn froze, his eyes on the doorway. His sister stood there like an avenging angel, as silent as a witness to an execution. Morehouse started to speak, but she held up a warning finger, and he began to sob.
“We know you’ve been talking to Henry Sexton,” Sonny said. “We need to know what got said, Glenn.”
“I ain’t told that bastard nothing! He ambushed me. How was I supposed to stop him?”
“Come on,” muttered Snake. “At least you can be a man and admit what you done. The question is why. Did you get to thinking ’bout hellfire or some such nonsense? You scared of that Baptist Hay-des that Preacher Gibbons was always rantin’ about?”
Morehouse shuddered in his bed.
“Remember the oath you swore? Same one we all did.”
“I was just a kid,” Morehouse said, almost crying. “Just a stupid kid without sense to know right from wrong.”
“Bullshit! You were thirty-five and proud to swear it. And if it was up to me, I’d do just what the oath says to do. But lucky for you, it ain’t.”
Glenn cut his eyes at the phone on the table beside his bed. “Who’s it up to?”
“You know.” Sonny lifted the cordless phone from the bedside table and tossed it onto a chair across the room. “Billy said give you a choice.”
Glenn’s eyes ping-ponged from Snake to Sonny and back again. “What kind of choice?”
“I’ll tell you,” said Snake, smiling again. He drew a deer-skinning knife from a scabbard on the side of his belt. “On one hand, I’ve got this blade, which’ll take off your nuts before you even feel the sting. You know a man can bleed to death after that, ’cause you’ve seen it.”
Morehouse shut his eyes.
“But in Sonny’s backpack, there’s a vial of fentanyl that’ll send you off to fairyland as sweet and easy as Rip van Winkle.”
Snake had chosen fentanyl because Glenn’s doctor had prescribed the fentanyl patch once his pain became intractable.
Morehouse was praying, Sonny realized, a droning murmur of indistinct words.
“Glenn!” Sonny said sharply. “Snap out of it!”
The drone only grew more insistent.
“You know how easy morphine is,” Snake said in an oily voice. “You saw it in the war. Fentanyl’s a hundred times more powerful. If I had to meet St. Peter tonight, no question which route I’d pick.”