Harold hesitated, then stepped to the bow of the pirogue and took Ozan’s hand. Forrest saw the Redbone’s other hand slip into his back pocket and take out his knife. In a single motion Ozan released the spring-loaded blade and drove it up beneath Harold Wallis’s sternum.
Nobody ever looked as surprised as people stabbed without warning. It wasn’t like the shock of a bullet, which often scrambled the brain in a millisecond. A blade gave people time to comprehend what had happened to them. The force of Ozan’s blow had surely knocked the wind from Wallis’s lungs, and the knife had probably punctured his heart, but his eyes were wide open and still full of life. The kid looked like some blackface cartoon from the 1920s, drawn to illustrate the question: “What the heck?” Or maybe, “Why me?”
Ozan lifted Wallis off the ground by main strength. The boy hung there, folded around the knife, his eyes bulging.
Forrest heard a low rumble that rose in volume, then faded. Probably an eighteen-wheeler back on the highway. He stepped up to the dying boy and looked directly into his stunned eyes.
“Your brother’s gonna rot in Angola, son. But I do appreciate the favor.”
Forrest nodded, and Ozan twisted his hand.
The light in the boy’s eyes went out. His body hit the ground with solid finality.
“What you want I should do with him?” Ozan asked as Forrest walked back to his cruiser.
“Load him into his truck. Have one of the boys drive him down to Baton Rouge and leave him behind a crack house. Too many eyes around here right now. The security cameras from the café will ID him as the person last seen with her, and after we get rid of her body, they’ll eventually write it off as a homicide.”
“True dat, boss. See you back at the camp.”
Forrest’s hand was on the door when a helicopter stormed over them at treetop level, its throttle wide open. For a moment Forrest stood paralyzed, back in Vietnam, trying to recall map coordinates for an artillery strike.
“Son of a bitch!” Ozan yelled. “Who the fuck was that?”
“Lusahatcha County Sheriff’s Department!” Forrest cried, shading his eyes and peering after the bird. “I saw the gold star on the door. That’s Billy Ray Ellis’s chopper.”
“Looked to me like it was coming from Valhalla.”
“From the Bone Tree is my guess,” Forrest said. “Goddamn it.”
“What would Sheriff Ellis be doing there?”
“That wasn’t Billy Ray, Alphonse. Shit. We’ve got trouble.”
“You mean you think they found the girl?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
“What you wanna do?”
Forrest’s mind was gearing down into combat mode. If Penn Cage had somehow discovered the Bone Tree, then a tectonic shift had occurred in the situation. A curtain was about to be stripped from the past, which meant casualties were inevitable.
“Boss?” Ozan asked softly.
“We’ve got an hour before the cavalry gets here. Maybe half that. We’ve got to move fast.”
“Where to?”
“First Valhalla, to clear out the safes and get some diesel fuel.”
Ozan gave him a puzzled look. “And then?”
Forrest smiled the way he once had before going out on night patrols when he expected contact.
“The Bone Tree, Alphonse. Where else?”
WALT HAD JUST WORKED his way into a spot from which he might see something when a Bell JetRanger came blasting over the treetops above him. Whatever Knox and Ozan had stopped to do, the appearance of the chopper had startled them. Even before the sound of the rotors faded, he heard an engine start up. Then a pickup truck he had never seen trundled over the hill with Ozan at the wheel and a pirogue in back.
Walt ducked down and waited for it to pass, then started running back toward his own truck. Knox was bound to be right behind the Redbone, and Walt had a feeling that things were going to happen fast from this point forward.
Just as he reached his truck, Forrest’s cruiser came racing past on the road. Walt cranked his engine and started to follow, but then he realized that he shouldn’t do that before driving back and checking the spot where they’d stopped. It might be that Tom had been held prisoner by whoever owned that truck and pirogue, and Knox and Ozan had killed both guard and captive.
Cursing like a sailor, Walt manhandled the truck out of the trees, then pointed it back into the woods and floored the gas pedal.
CHAPTER 73
I HAVE A friend whose son was accidentally shot in the chest by his brother during a hunting trip outside Natchez. For thirty-five miles my friend cradled his dying son in the backseat, trying to stanch the bleeding while the sobbing fourteen-year-old brother drove toward St. Catherine’s Hospital at nearly a hundred miles per hour. Twelve miles from Natchez, the boy’s heart stopped.
I used to wonder what those last twelve miles were like.
Now I know.
Under a sky so dark we could see the lights of the capitol from thirty miles out, Danny McDavitt piloted the JetRanger southward toward Baton Rouge at over 130 knots. In the chopper’s belly, Carl Sims gave Caitlin continuous and violent chest compressions while I got on the radio and fought to get landing clearance at Baton Rouge General Hospital. They had an active delivery in progress, and since we weren’t an authorized LifeFlight, they were trying to divert us elsewhere.
During the first minute of flight, Carl had determined that my father had a faint pulse and a heartbeat. After I used a fence-cutting tool to remove the handcuffs from his hands, I’d plundered Danny McDavitt’s flight bag, found a Snickers bar, and stuffed a chunk into Dad’s mouth. We couldn’t be sure that blood sugar was his problem, but there was little else we could do without real medical help.