“Stand him up,” ordered Snake. “Quick, now.”
Powerful hands seized Sonny’s arms below the shoulders, then hoisted him to his feet. In the dim haze he saw Snake’s slit-eyed face inches from his own, and then a pair of hands looped something thick and dark around his neck. A towel, maybe? He tried to pry his arms loose, but the hands that held them were far too strong, and the towel quickly choked off his air. He thought briefly of Glenn Morehouse’s giant hands twisting Jimmy Revels’s coffee-colored arm down to the workbench . . . but Glenn was dead now. Sonny blinked in confusion. Everything he saw and felt was distorted by the prism of agony in his chest.
“Traitor,” spat a venomous voice near his head.
The words that followed penetrated no deeper than Sonny’s eardrums. The terror he’d felt when the cell doors opened had yielded to an eerie sense of separateness—as though he were some Gemini spaceman whose tether had been cut, so that he drifted steadily away from his ship with its life-sustaining oxygen. Was this how Jimmy Revels had felt when he spoke the three words that had haunted Sonny every day of his life?
I forgive you. . . .
Sonny couldn’t forgive Snake Knox for stealing the last few years of his life—the only ones that might have really mattered. Sonny couldn’t even forgive himself. He’d bitten so hard on the deal Kaiser had offered him, the dream of a life unburdened by association with men who’d goaded him to do things he would never have done on his own. How could he have been such a fool? When you’d gone as far down the road to damnation as he had, there was no getting back.
Snake’s face loomed before him, the familiar flattened smile of the hooded cobra swaying before its prey. “You know the rules, Sonny,” he hissed, his eyes filled with wounded pride. “Damn, but I never figured it’d be you who turned.”
Sonny’s eyelids began to close. He wanted to speak, to tell the rest of the boys to get away from Snake as fast and as far as they could, but whatever they’d wrapped around his neck had sealed his throat shut.
“Next stop, Hell, brother,” Snake whispered. “Say hello to Glenn for me.”
Sonny thought of his grandson, flying toward Louisiana at five hundred miles per hour, hoping to see his grandfather and to get a reprieve from war. He thought of his daughter, who would see his murder as a fitting end for a selfish old man. Then he thought of the eager-eyed FBI agent back in the interrogation room, who longed to tell the world who’d really killed President Kennedy. What could it matter after all this time? America had swerved so far off course since then that nothing would ever bring the country back to what it had been. As the last light winked out in Sonny’s mind, his final thought was a prayer that God had heard Jimmy Revels forgive him in the shadow of the Bone Tree.
CHAPTER 66
CAITLIN HAD INTENDED to approach one of the black patrons of the Crossroads Café without Terry, but in the end, her nerve had failed her. It was the audience of white men that had stopped her. Instead, she’d sat down in the booth farthest from the white men and taken Jordan’s map photo from her pocket. Toby Rambin’s hand-drawn graphic left a lot to be desired, but it was better than anything the FBI had. More even than the Lusahatcha County Sheriff’s Department had—unless they’d known where the Bone Tree was all along.
A waitress walked up to Caitlin’s booth and asked if she needed help. Caitlin explained that her friend was ordering from the counter, but she asked for a cup of coffee and borrowed a pen from the waitress—a clear hexagonal Bic like the ones she’d used in grade school. Just holding it gave her a surprisingly nostalgic feeling. She pulled a napkin from the dispenser on her table and began drawing a map of where they’d found Casey Whelan’s body.
While Terry waited for their order at the counter, Caitlin stole glances at the men who were doing the same to her. In between looks, she would go back to her napkin, her mind on whether or not she might be able to lure Carl Sims away from work to help her locate the X on Rambin’s map.
She nearly jumped out of her skin when a boy of about nineteen walked up to her booth and stared down at her. At least six foot two, he wore the traditional uniform of the gangbanger, with a bright designer sweatshirt and oversized shorts that hung so low that his butt crack had to be on constant display.
“You pretty, baby,” the boy said, shifting his package with his hand. “You got a boyfriend?”
Caitlin glanced over at the men in the booths, but no one seemed inclined to come to her aid.
“I’m married, baby,” she said, holding up her engagement ring.
“ ’Course you is, hot as you are.”
A table of truckers were now watching the interchange, but no one interrupted.
“That’s a big rock,” the boy said. “Your husband rich?”
Caitlin looked up with all the hardness she could muster. “Listen, baby. I work for the DEA, and I’m in town to consult with Sheriff Ellis on the crack trade. Do you really want to sit down and get to know me better?”
The boy gaped at her for a few seconds, then shuffled back toward the glass-fronted beer cases, his ass crack in plain view. The men in the booths went back to their papers. A couple chuckled softly.
The waitress brought Caitlin her coffee. Someone left the café, and two more men walked in. Caitlin sipped the harsh mixture, then jotted some numbers on the napkin, trying to remember exactly how long she’d been off the Pill when she’d conceived. She didn’t care that people were going to realize she’d been pregnant before she was married. She just wanted to know that her body had cleared the artificial hormones before her egg was fertilized.