I stand and pace around the table, trying to control my anxiety. What I would give to be a prosecutor again, with subpoena power. A suffocating sense of foreboding has taken hold of me. “How careful were you today, Henry? Where did you interview this guy?”
“At his sister’s home. He sent her out of town on an errand. It’s a pretty isolated place. He doesn’t think the Eagles are onto him, but they’ve clearly cut him out of the loop on sensitive stuff. I think it’s going to be fine, Penn. He—”
A loud, old-fashioned ringing stops Henry in midsentence. He digs for an office phone buried under some loose papers. “That’s probably Sherry, my girlfriend. I’m way late getting home.” He lifts the black receiver to his ear. “Concordia Beacon … Oh, hey, Lou Ann.” Henry covers the mouthpiece with his hand and looks up at me. “It’s Mrs. Whittington, the lady you met when you came in.”
My mind is ranging through all Henry told me, searching for moral pressure points that might induce my father to open up to me before tomorrow.
“When?” Henry asks in a shocked voice. “Just now? … Who told you that?” He fishes a cell phone from his front pocket and checks its LCD. “I had my ringer off. Damn it!”
I give the reporter an inquisitive look, but he turns away to concentrate on the conversation. “What do they think happened? … Okay, do me a favor and call Sherry back. Tell her I’m with a source and I’ll call her as soon as I can … Thanks, Lou Ann … I know … I sure will … You, too. Bye.”
When he turns back to me, Henry looks five years older than he did only a minute ago. “That was about my Eagle source. Paramedics just brought him in to the Mercy Hospital emergency room. He was DOA.”
A blast of neurochemicals blanks my mind. Where before I had anxious thoughts, only fear courses now. “Henry, Viola Turner and your secret source just died within twelve hours of each other. What do you think that says about your future?”
The reporter blinks as though he doesn’t quite comprehend my point.
“Do you have a gun here?” I ask.
“A gun? No. I’ve never carried one.”
“You’re working day and night to send ex–Ku Klux Klansmen to Angola, and you don’t carry a gun? Angola is filled with pissed-off black convicts. Those old white men would kill almost anybody to stay out of there.”
Henry shrugs, looking dazed. “My girlfriend carries a pistol, and my mother keeps a shotgun at her house. The PBS guys making the film about me think I’m nuts for not carrying a gun. Do you carry one?”
“I’m licensed, but I don’t have one on me now. Not in the car, either.”
A stubborn defiance creeps into the reporter’s eyes. “I promised myself when I started that I wasn’t going to change my way of living because of these lowlifes. The fact that I’ve pursued these cases without fear, publishing things as I go, living unafraid … that makes a statement. Even to scum like Snake Knox and Brody Royal. It says that I know what I’m doing is right, and what they did was wrong.”
While Henry preaches, I move to the war room’s metal door and lock it. The Beacon stands on the very edge of town, across the road from an empty cotton field. “We need to get out of here. Does that phone still have a dial tone?”
“The office phone?”
“The landline! Check it.”
Henry lifts the black phone from its hook and puts it to his ear, then nods with relief.
“Dial 911 and ask for Sheriff Dennis.”
The reporter looks uncomfortable. “Walker Dennis isn’t exactly a fan of mine.”
“I’ll do the talking.”
CHAPTER 22
“SLOW DOWN, GODDAMN IT!” Snake ordered. “Ain’t nobody chasing us.”
Sonny Thornfield eased off the gas as he approached the shore of Old River, where he maintained a fishing camp that almost no one in the world knew he owned. Though it stood only a few miles from where Glenn Morehouse had died, no one could find them here in ten years of searching.
The clammy sweat of panic still soaked Sonny’s shirt, which made it miserable inside his coat. He and Snake had been only halfway to the tree line behind Wilma’s house when the ambulance came barreling up the gravel road, red lights flashing. Sonny worried that in the chaos of the death scene, Wilma might break down and tell the paramedics everything. Snake disagreed.
“She handled it pretty good, I thought,” he said. “Wilma’s a tough old girl. You wouldn’t think it to look at her now, but she was a fine-lookin’ thing back in her day.”
“I remember,” Sonny said dully. “I can still see her in her bathing suit out by Lake Bruin.”
Snake grunted. “She was a decent piece of ass, in a pinch.”
“I never got to find out.”
“You’re about the only one.” Snake stuffed his hands into his pockets and sucked at the cigarette clamped between his teeth.
“I wish I hadn’t seen Glenn that way,” Sonny said, peering into the darkness to the left of his headlights. All the camp houses here were built on thirty-foot stilts to escape the perennial flooding from the backwaters of the Mississippi.
“Yeah,” Snake said, toying with his heater vent. “But damn, he fought like a demon at the end, didn’t he? Sumbitch picked me right up off the floor!”
Sonny tried to suppress the awful memory. “Remember back in the summer of sixty-four, when we tested that C-4 during those family picnics?”
Snake laughed. “Hell, yeah! I’d wrap that Primacord around a stump and cut the top right off, like slicing sausage for jambalaya. The kids loved it.”
“Glenn loved that even more than they did. He was like a kid himself.”
Snake nodded in the dashboard light. “He always was the weakest of us, though. But he’s gone now. Best forgotten.”
Sonny wished this were possible. All he could see was his old friend’s last moments on earth. After his sister injected the PICC line’s port with fentanyl, Snake and Sonny had held the emaciated giant down for another twenty seconds. Then his arms had gone limp, and he’d sagged back against the mattress, breathing only once every fifteen seconds or so.