Kaiser and I follow this hyped-up posse down the narrow paneled hall to a small dining room where the Double Eagles are waiting. By the time I stand on tiptoe and get a look into the room, I see pure shock on the faces of the six old men gathered inside. This is clearly the last thing they expected to happen.
“Sonny Thornfield?” Dennis says loudly. “Snake Knox? You are under arrest for possession of and trafficking in crystal methamphetamine. You other boys are under arrest on suspicion of conspiracy to traffic in methamphetamine. And I’ll tell you this right now: the first son of a bitch to come clean with me gets to walk, but the rest are gonna die on Angola Farm.”
Snake Knox looks defiant, but several other pairs of eyes widen in fear.
“Get off your asses and hold out your hands!” Dennis shouts. “Now, by God. I ain’t got all day!”
“I want a telephone,” Snake says calmly.
“I want a blow job from Angie Dickinson,” Walker replies. “Don’t mean I’m gettin’ it.”
“You’ve got to give him a phone call,” Kaiser says from behind us.
Dennis barks out an abrupt laugh. “Thank God you boys got the FBI lookin’ after you, Snake. Next best thing to the ACLU. I’ll bet you never figured the Bureau would be pickin’ up your slack, did you?”
“Fuck you, Dennis,” Snake growls. “You’re a dead man. You and yours, boy.”
Sheriff Dennis crosses the room in two bounds and seizes Snake Knox by the throat with one hand. Snake tries a judo chop on the sheriff’s massive forearm, but his blow barely leaves a pink mark on the muscle.
“You can threaten me all day long, scum,” Dennis says softly, backing Snake against the wall. “But if you threaten my family again, you’ll be eatin’ through a straw the rest of your life, if you live.”
Snake’s eyes bore into the sheriff’s with no fear in them at all. For a moment they almost seem to have the vertical irises of his reptilian namesake. In a raspy whisper, he says, “Both your boys, dipshit. And your old lady, too. Though that’d be a mercy fuck, from what I’ve seen.”
Walker Dennis closes his hand like a man crushing a beer can.
Snake’s eyes bulge, and his face goes red, then purple.
“Sheriff!” yells Kaiser. “Release that man!”
Two deputies bolt forward and try to pull their boss’s crushing hand from Snake’s throat, but they can’t do it. The old crop duster’s eyes have gone glassy. One deputy holds his nightstick over his boss’s head as a last resort, but Dennis finally comes to his senses and releases Knox.
“Throw that fucker in the drunk tank,” Dennis says, stumping toward us with blood in his eye. “Put Thornfield in there with him. Process the rest and put ’em in the main cellblock. We’ll separate ’em later.”
“What about that phone call?” Kaiser asks.
“Fuck him,” Dennis mutters, walking past the FBI agent without even a glance. “And fuck you, too. Stay out of my way.”
AFTER TWENTY MINUTES OF flying over the Lusahatcha Swamp, Caitlin realized that hunting for the Bone Tree in a boat would have taken weeks without a guide like Toby Rambin. From five hundred feet in the air, the swamp appeared vastly larger than it had on Google Earth, which Caitlin had used to scan the terrain this morning. The cypress forest seemed endless, and the thick undergrowth was caught in the transition from fall to winter, an uncertain process in the South. Though it was late December, a lot of green still dotted the landscape below, and a greenish-brown scum floated at the edge of the black water between the big trees. Caitlin now understood why Henry and the FBI had not found the Bone Tree during their relatively brief searches. With half a million trees between the east and west borders of the swamp, the odds of finding a single one by pure luck were practically zero.
“The X on your map,” Danny McDavitt said over the headset, “appears to lie in the borderland between the federal wildlife preserve and the private hunting club in this area. Some of it’s disputed borderland.”
“What do you mean, disputed?” Jordan asked.
“I’ve always heard that fence down there is in the wrong place,” Danny replied. “Some say the hunting club fenced in more land than they own. But they claim they actually own more than they’ve fenced. I never heard of any litigation over it, though. Too many senators hunt at that place.”
Caitlin figured this was her chance. “Have either of you hunted at the Valhalla camp?”
“I went once,” Carl said. “Sheriff Ellis took me. He’s tight with the people who own it.”
“The Knoxes?” Caitlin asked as casually as she could.
“That’s right,” said Danny. “Some of them are old Klansmen, but one is a big dog in the state police. I think that Brody Royal was a member, the one who died the other night.”
Caitlin wondered if Danny knew that she’d been in the room when Henry Sexton immolated the old multimillionaire. Of course he did. That would have been the talk of the county this morning, and certainly the sheriff’s department.
“I didn’t care for the place,” Carl said.
“Big surprise,” Danny cracked. “You’re definitely the wrong color.”
“Yeah. The sheriff only took me over there to show those assholes he’s got the best rifle shot in the state on his payroll.”
Caitlin looked over at Jordan, who was gazing out the window as though this were a commuter shuttle from New York to Boston.
“What the hell is with those huge fences?” Jordan asked. “We saw them on the way in. The whole place felt like a goddamn concentration camp.”
“That’s what it is,” Carl said glumly. “But for animals.”
Danny tilted the chopper so that they could see more landscape below. Caitlin scanned the swamp for cypresses noticeably larger than the others.
“What’s it cost to belong to one of those hunting clubs?” she asked.
“Ten grand a year for some, others ten times that much. Depends on what you’re after.”