Snake laughed. “I wouldn’t expect any less. I taught my nephew everything he knows in that line. Now get the fuck out, shitbird.”
After the cops filed out of the van’s narrow side door, Snake walked down the little aisle and stood looking down at Tom. Looking up into his eyes, Tom saw the wild light he would have expected in the eyes of Quantrill’s Raiders, men who’d rebelled against all authority and who in anger and defeat had burned towns and slaughtered women and children.
“Well, Doc,” Snake said in a sandpaper voice. “I hear you and your Texas Ranger buddy gave Sonny a rough time in this van the other night.” Snake raised a boot and planted it squarely on Tom’s chest, then pressed down until Tom gasped for air. “I’m glad to be able to return the favor.”
Tom grabbed the heavy boot and tried to pull it off his chest, but he hadn’t the strength to even shift it.
Snake grinned beneath the brim of the John Deere cap. “This is how death comes for you, Doc. I never trusted you. No matter what the others said. You liked that nigger nurse way too much. And now it’s me that God sends to cut your string. Ain’t that something? I can’t say I won’t enjoy it.”
Tom knew Snake Knox would give no quarter. “If there is a God,” he gasped from beneath the crushing force of the boot, “I hope there’s a hell, too. Because that’s where you’re bound.”
Snake only laughed.
Tom’s breath was failing and his mind growing dim. “At least I left something good behind me,” he whispered. “My son . . . my daughter. At least I helped some people. All you brought into the world was death and pain . . . and that’s all you’ll leave behind. It won’t be long, either.”
The glow in Snake’s eyes rose like a stoked furnace. Snake drew a pistol from his pants and aimed the barrel down at Tom’s face.
“Snake, don’t!” cried a frightened voice from somewhere in the van. “You can’t do it! Not yet. Think about Forrest. Think about tomorrow!”
“Fuck him,” Snake said. “You know the score. It was always gonna come to this.”
I COME OUT OF blackness grabbing for the cell phones on the bedside table, but all are dark. Propped on my elbow, I try to orient myself in time. Only after I switch on my new BlackBerry and read its face do I see that it’s two thirty in the morning.
What woke me up, if not a cell phone?
Swinging onto the edge of the bed, I pull on my pants and shoes, then take my .357 from the table and walk onto the landing outside my bedroom.
A quick glance into Annie’s room tells me she and my mother are fine, their fragile forms outlined beneath a chenille bedspread. Moving carefully, I descend the narrow staircase with my gun at the ready and alight on the ground floor of the Abrams house. Ambient light from the outside streetlamps leaks through the cracks in the curtains, giving enough illumination to navigate the furniture.
After checking the ground floor, I open the back door and slip into the backyard. The cold night air raises the hair on my skin, but I move steadily around the perimeter of the house, my eyes focused in the darkest parts of the yard. My eyes will pick up movement in the lighter areas; it’s the pools of blackness where death may wait. My forefinger twitches against the thin metal curve of the trigger. I’d hate to have to explain firing a .357 Magnum in the middle of town, but better that than the alternative.
After making a full circuit of the house and finding nothing, I return to the front yard and gaze out over the old ninth hole of the Duncan Park golf course, a long, misty slope that falls away from Duncan Avenue, then terminates at the fences where I played Little League baseball as a boy. The sight triggers one of those temporal dislocations I’ve sometimes experienced since moving back to my hometown. At my back stands a house where I studied for advanced chemistry exams with my high school friends, yet now it’s a makeshift safe house that protects my family from men who were killing people while I was learning how to make a double play on the baseball field down the slope. How is it that, decades later, it falls to me to bring those men to justice? Perhaps it’s only fitting. This is my town, after all. And its legacy is the one my father and his contemporaries left me and mine: a community crippled by unresolved conflict, anger, and grief.
I wish that I felt equal to the task, but in truth I feel as lost as I’ve ever been. I began this week by investigating a relatively simple murder. Now I find myself caught in a skein of connections I never knew existed. Through my father’s secret actions, and possibly by blood, I am bound to Viola Turner’s family, to the Knox family, and through them to the Royal and Marcello families, and their crimes. At the farthest reach of this tangled web may lie the assassination of a president.
Surely I must stand at that hinge point where in novels and films the hero suddenly reexamines his situation and discovers that the answer has been staring him in the face all along. Alas, I feel no looming epiphany. All I possess is a plan for disruption: sow discord among the enemy and pray for a miracle.
Centuries ago, Heraclitus made a famously sweeping assertion: Character is fate. Almost without fail, men make choices based on instinct, eternally proving his maxim. As a lawyer I exploited this knowledge to dissect defendants, opponents, and even judges. As a novelist, I use it as a charting compass. But to profit from the principle in my present circumstance—to see where I must go and what I must do—I need to know my own character.