“Can he hear me?” Wilma had asked in a cracked voice.
Snake leaned over their old comrade, then stuck a finger under his jaw. “If you’ve got anything to tell him, you better say it quick.”
She shoved Sonny out of the way, then climbed onto the bed and lay beside her brother. Cradling Glenn’s head against her breasts, she began to sing, so softly that Sonny couldn’t recognize the tune. He thought it might be a hymn, but the more he heard, the more it sounded like a children’s song. Snake was shouting from the door that they should go, but Sonny couldn’t pull himself away.
“Get out,” Wilma said coldly. “Get out, you bastards.”
After a last look at the eerie tableau, Sonny bolted and followed Snake through the back door at a run. He could still hear the screen door slam in the night, its screeching spring like the howl of a tortured soul.
“Looks like the water’s rising,” Snake said, staring out over the moonlit backwater. “Temperature’s dropping, too. Might be good fishing tomorrow.”
Sonny had always known he was different from Snake, but in that moment he wanted to leap from the truck and run until he’d forever separated himself from this man who had led him into so much violence. But it was far too late for that. He was bound inextricably to Snake, as surely as to his own blood.
“Might be,” Sonny said, his throat parched with fear. “Maybe we’ll go out early.”
CHAPTER 23
HENRY SEXTON AND I sit locked in his war room, waiting for an escort from the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office. It took me a couple of minutes to reach Sheriff Dennis, who sounded as amazed as the 911 operator to get a call from the mayor of Natchez. I said nothing to him about the possible murder of one of Henry’s sources, but I did tell him I was concerned for Henry’s safety. The sheriff agreed to send a cruiser around to escort us home within ten minutes.
“They really killed him, didn’t they?” Henry says in a dazed voice.
“I’d say so. After decades of silence, this guy decides to open up to a reporter investigating unsolved murders in which he was involved. Then he dies that very night?”
“His cancer was terminal,” Henry says halfheartedly. “Maybe the stress of today pushed him into some fatal event. I mean—”
“Henry, wake up. They killed him.”
The reporter looks at me like a sailor who doesn’t want to admit that a hurricane is headed his way. “They must have found out he talked to me today. Which means I killed him.”
“Don’t even start down that road. He lived by the sword, he died by it.”
He squints at me as if trying to decide whether we’re two different kinds of men.
“Do you have any idea who might have blown your source to the Double Eagles?”
Henry stares blankly at the cracked tile floor. “I know Glenn didn’t trust his sister.”
“Glenn?”
Henry shakes his head at the absurdity of trying to keep a dead man’s name secret. “Glenn Ed Morehouse.” Rising from his chair, he stabs the heaviest of the men in the group of pictures he tapped only a few minutes ago. In the photo beneath his finger, a man with the corn-fed build and flattop haircut of an offensive lineman from the golden age of Ole Miss football stares out with irrepressible good humor.
“One the four founding Double Eagles,” Henry says. “Frank Knox gave him his gold piece five days after the Neshoba County bodies were found. I saw that coin this morning, Penn. The man was in torment over the things he’d done.”
“Well, he’s at peace now. You need to think about yourself for a change.”
“There was so much I still needed to ask him.”
Don’t go there, either, I say silently, cursing Henry’s failure to record the answers to the questions he did ask.
“Are you sure we can trust Sheriff Dennis?” he asks worriedly. “Ever since Huey Long’s time, the sheriffs have run this parish like a third-world dictatorship. At one point, there were no jury trials for nine years straight. And the Kiwanis types didn’t care, so long as the country club stayed white and blacks moved to the other side of the street when a white man walked down it. Things have changed on the surface, but that Magnolia Queen mess you exposed back in October makes me wonder.”
“You’re being paranoid, Henry. The old sheriff and six deputies have been indicted. Walker Dennis was the one deputy that everybody in this parish agreed was clean. That’s why they appointed him.”
Henry doesn’t look convinced. “But they’re all out on bail right now. And all that dogfighting and prostitution … how could Walker Dennis not have known about that?”
“Maybe he did,” I concede. “A lot of people probably knew about it, on both sides of the river. But it’s pretty hard to fight the current when everybody else is swimming downstream.”
“And the meth stuff?” he asks, looking far from reassured. “How could the Knoxes be moving that much stuff without Sheriff Dennis’s knowledge?”
“I don’t know. Tell me more about their operation.”
“Morehouse said it’s a big-time drug ring. They supply dealers statewide, and possibly in Arkansas and Texas as well. Crystal meth is their main product, but God only knows what else they’re into.”
“Meth trafficking carries heavy mandatory sentences. A DA could pressure the hell out of the Double Eagles by offering immunity on the trafficking charges in exchange for information on the old civil rights crimes—not to mention Viola’s death. We need to keep that in mind as we go forward.”
Henry nods skeptically.
“Who leads the Knox organization now?”
“Morehouse said Billy Knox runs the drug ring.”