“Come on, Doc. You’re going to make me doubt you’ll stand by any deal.”
Tom felt angina tighten the muscles of his back as they neared the big van. Forrest opened the Roadtrek’s rear doors. The sound made Tom think of Walt threatening Sonny Thornfield in this van only two nights ago. How swiftly the tables had turned. The stretcher banged against the van, and he tensed against the pain.
“Hold it,” Forrest said, and then he leaned over Tom once more. “You were with my daddy when he died, right?”
Tom nodded, wondering where this was going.
“Did he say anything at the end? I was only sixteen, and nobody ever mentioned any last words. But Snake said Daddy was in and out of consciousness when they took him to your office, and I’ve always wondered.”
Tom shut his eyes and saw Frank Knox gasping on the floor of the little surgery room as his blood poured onto the tile and the air embolism hit his heart like a sledgehammer. For the first time in his life, Tom took pleasure in the memory.
“No,” Tom said, opening his eyes. “He passed out when I started working on him, and never regained consciousness. Frank was tough, but his injuries were catastrophic.”
Forrest stared into Tom’s eyes for a few seconds, then nodded slowly. “That’s what I figured.”
Tom heard the men holding the stretcher breathing harder.
“I’ve gone out on a limb for you, Doc. The easiest thing would have been to take you down and hang Viola around your neck. I hope your son wants you back as bad as I’d like to see my daddy. If he doesn’t, this RV’s gonna wind up at the bottom of the river. And you’re gonna be in it.”
Forrest gave the stretcher-bearers a hand signal, then walked away. Tom felt a hitch as the SWAT troopers lifted the stretcher high, then slid him into the tomblike darkness of the van.
CHAPTER 45
IT WAS NEARLY midnight when Sheriff Dennis called me back and told me to meet him in the parking lot of the Ferriday Walmart Supercenter. He didn’t tell me the reason, but the near-panicked urgency in his voice told me I’d been right about the planted drugs. It took all my strength to haul myself out of bed and walk down to my car, and it took most of the drive over to Louisiana to bring myself fully awake.
Driving west on the dark, flat artery of Highway 84, I suddenly spy the Walmart glowing like a fluorescent island in the vast black fields between Vidalia and Ferriday. Fewer than twenty vehicles dot the parking lot when I pull alongside Sheriff Dennis’s cruiser. As I get out and cross between our two cars, I see a black cat with three kittens crouching in the shadow of a parked tractor-trailer, eating from a wet McDonald’s bag.
A hot wind escapes from Walker’s cruiser when I open his passenger door, and when I close myself inside, I see that the sheriff has mounted a sawed-off shotgun in the floor rack between us. His police radio chatters on low volume, and a dashboard computer glows softly with a screen saver that reads: GO TIGERS!
Dennis appears barely in control of his emotions, so I speak in the calmest voice I can muster.
“Hey, bud. Looks like you’re sweating bullets. Why don’t you turn the heater down?”
Dennis wipes his face like a man waking from a trance. “You’re right. Shit, I didn’t realize.”
After he turns the heater to low, I turn and brace my back against the passenger door. “What did you find, and where did you find it?”
The sheriff shakes his head in disbelief. “A shitload of crystal meth, cooked and bagged and ready for sale. Right under my goddamn house!”
“How much is a shitload?”
“Three-quarters of a pound. Enough to put me in Angola for thirty years, not counting corruption charges.”
A strange serenity flows over me at this news.
“You were right,” he says, an edge of hysteria in his voice. “Those goddamn Knoxes.”
“Well, at least we have our answer. This is why the Double Eagles agreed to come back for questioning. They think you’ll be busted by your own men before you ask them your first question.”
Sheriff Dennis goes pale. “My own men?”
“Unless Forrest brings in the DEA—which I doubt—I’d bet on it. I imagine one of your deputies will receive an ‘anonymous’ tip sometime prior to tomorrow’s interrogations. A team will drive over to your house to search it, with the expectation of ‘discovering’ the hoard you found tonight. And if the dope was there, you’d have helped teach your colleagues a valuable lesson: crossing the Knoxes is career suicide for a cop.”
“And you figured this out from a story your kid told you?”
“That triggered it, yeah. Kaiser’s certainty about the Eagles not coming had been bothering me all evening. To submit to questioning, they had to have some kind of insurance. Subconsciously, I must have been wondering what the easiest way to move you off the board would be. I saw drugs planted on cops in Houston before. With this parish’s history of corruption, that would have been a slam dunk.”
Sheriff Dennis wipes the sheen of sweat from his forehead with his uniform sleeve. “So what now?”
I don’t answer for a while. Then, after some thought, I say, “Are you asking me as the mayor of Natchez? As a former prosecutor? Or as a friend?”
“A friend, goddamn it.”
“These are the same guys who killed your cousin, right?”
“Yep.”
“They booby-trapped the warehouse that killed two of your deputies.”
Dennis nods soberly.
I turn and look over at the harsh light spilling out of the Walmart doors. “An elegant solution came to me while I was driving over the bridge.”
“What’s that?”
“Send that meth right back where it came from.”