“Informants,” Sonny explained. “Like Jerry Dugan, out at the plant.”
Frank smiled at Sonny’s deduction, but once more he shook his head. “It may come to killing Jerry one day, but right now he’s off-limits. I want him feeding the FBI a steady stream of bullshit on the regular White Knights. We want Hoover’s boys thinking they have their finger on the pulse around here.”
“Then who?” Sonny asked, genuinely stumped.
Frank grabbed two wooden paddles and shoveled the alligator steak off the grill. One venison tenderloin remained on the hot iron mesh, cut from a doe poached off the International Paper woodlands last night. After fishing a fresh Jax from the cooler, Frank swallowed half the beer in the can, then leveled his gunner’s eyes at them.
“If I dropped each of you in a hole with three rattlesnakes and gave you a machete, what would you do?”
“Shit my pants!” Morehouse cried. “And jump right back out.”
“You can’t get out, Mountain. You’re stuck in the hole. So what would you do? Start flailing around at everything that moved? Chopping snakes left and right?”
“No,” said Sonny, trying to visualize the situation. “That’s how you get bit.”
“Okay, Corporal. So, what do you do?”
Sonny thought about it. “Stand still, take my time … and when the moment’s right, chop off their heads. Closest one first.”
Frank grinned. “Outstanding.”
“What the heck is this about?” Morehouse asked.
“Killing leaders,” Sonny thought aloud. “Killing the guys who matter. You kill the head, the body dies.”
“De-capitation operation,” Frank said with a savage grin.
“What leaders?” Morehouse asked. “You talking about the head of the Deacons for Defense or something?”
“I don’t think so,” Sonny said, a strange thrumming in his chest.
Frank picked up a long barbecue fork and drew three letters in the sand at their feet: KKK.
“What the hell?” asked Morehouse. “You don’t mean kill Klan leaders!”
Frank scrubbed out the letters with his boot, then redrew them as corners of an equilateral triangle.
“I still don’t get it,” Sonny said.
Frank smiled, then reached into his back pocket and unfolded a page torn from a magazine. A photograph filled the top right quarter. In it, Attorney General Robert Kennedy stood beside Martin Luther King, while Lyndon Johnson towered above Kennedy to his left. An old black man Sonny didn’t know stood to the right of King. Bobby Kennedy was smiling in the picture, but King looked troubled, even afraid. Red crayon circles had been drawn around the heads of King and Kennedy. The caption said the photo had been taken in the Rose Garden of the White House.
Morehouse asked Frank something, but Sonny missed it because blood was pounding in his ears. He knew without asking what those red circles meant; he only wondered who had drawn them.
“What you think, Son?” Frank asked softly.
Sonny swallowed and tried to formulate an answer. Frank Knox was no deluded redneck with grandiose fantasies. Though largely self-educated, he was a tactical genius. He’d led successful assaults on Japanese positions that Marine officers had declared impregnable, and he had the medals to prove it. With Sonny and Glenn working under him, Frank had carried on a lucrative trade in Japanese trophy skulls right under the noses of the MPs—and he was his own supplier. If Frank was thinking about killing Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, those men were already in mortal danger.
While Morehouse jabbered in bewilderment, Frank took the long barbecue fork and added letters before each of the K’s in the sand. JFK. MLK. RFK. Then he drew an X over JFK, looked up, and said, “One down, two to go.”
After Sonny remembered to breathe, he cleared his throat. “How do you propose we get those guys, Top? We going to Atlanta and D.C.?”
Frank gave him a serene smile. “No need. We’re gonna do it the same way the Jap snipers killed us on the islands. Think about it. They never shot to kill with their first round. They always wounded somebody. They let him lie out there yelling in agony until somebody decided to save him. Then the sniper shot that poor son of a bitch. And on and on until we finally pinpointed his position and called in the arty on his ass.”
Sonny instantly grasped the elegance of this plan, and its real possibility of success. Morehouse, of course, still looked mystified.
Frank gave the big man the look of forbearance he’d give a slow child and said, “Imagine it’s 1936, Glenn. You want to assassinate Hitler. You don’t try to kill him in his bunker, do you? You get him out in the open.”
“I hear you. But how, though?”
Frank sighed wearily. “I don’t know … maybe you run over Max Schmeling in a car. Schmeling has just beaten Joe Louis on American soil, so Goebbels organizes a state funeral. Hitler’s gotta show, right? And that’s where you’re set up, waiting with a long rifle.”
“Sweet,” said Sonny, as understanding finally dawned in Glenn’s eyes. “We bring the targets to us. But who’s going to be our Max Schmeling?”
Frank clucked his tongue. “I been studying on that. There’s no rush. Mississippi’s gonna be popping for the next couple of years, and I guarantee you’ll see both King and Kennedy sticking their noses in here before long.”
“Just like JFK did at Ole Miss in sixty-two,” Sonny said.
“Hell, that was mostly Bobby, even then.”
“Is Brody Royal up for this kind of thing?”