Tom stirred, but thanks to a hefty dose of oxycodone, he did not awaken.
Walt smoked thoughtfully, watching the man he’d fought with like a brother through the killing snows of Korea. In the deep shadows, he turned his mind away from the war and thumbed back through the years he’d spent chasing desperate men across Texas, first on a horse, then in motor vehicles of various types. He recalled times that he’d followed the rules, and other times when he’d thrown the book away and simply done what was necessary. He wasn’t proud of those occasions but he wasn’t ashamed, either. While Tom slept fitfully, Walt wondered whether John Kaiser and the FBI could take on Forrest Knox—who personified the endemic corruption of an entire state—and win. Even if they did, how many more people would become casualties in that war? Caitlin Masters’s death had already come close to destroying Tom. As the cigar slowly burned down, Walt pondered Colonel Mackiever’s final words, and what it might cost him personally to relieve the world of the burden of Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest Knox.
CHAPTER 78
CLAUDE DEVEREUX HAD waited nearly two hours before the FBI agreed to admit him to the visiting room in the Concordia Parish jail. In the end it took not constitutional arguments, but threats to go public with the Bureau’s use of the Patriot Act to supersede the Bill of Rights to gain him access to his clients. An agent confiscated Claude’s cell phone at the door of the visiting room, then patted him down for weapons, but as Forrest had anticipated, they left the cigarette pack in his briefcase alone.
Claude had worried that an FBI agent would stay in the visiting room with them, but after searching it thoroughly, the agent posted himself outside the door. As Claude waited for Snake, he cursed himself for trying to see his daughter and grandkids before fleeing the country. Forrest had put out a statewide APB, and they’d caught him easily. Had he run north to Memphis—through Mississippi—they never would have found him.
The door opened behind him, and two deputies ushered Snake into the room. The Double Eagle looked down at Claude, gave him a game wink, then sat in the chair across the scarred old table. Claude got out his legal pad as if to take notes, then looked up at the deputies and waited for them to leave.
The two men glared at him as though they’d like to kill him—which was no surprise, considering they’d lost two fellow deputies in the past thirty-six hours—but at length they turned and left the room.
“So what are you doing here?” Snake asked. “I’m supposed to be out of here.”
“We’re working on it. Somebody wants to talk to you.”
Snake chuckled softly. “You got smokes in that pack?”
“Four.” Claude lowered his voice. “But I’ve got something else for you in there.”
Claude ripped off the taped-down top of the pack and brought out an analog flip phone and a thin wire with an earpiece wrapped around it.
“It’s encrypted,” he whispered. “Hit star-one, and Forrest will pick up.”
Snake smiled.
FORREST JUMPED WHEN THE burn phone finally rang. He and Ozan had been waiting two hours in Forrest’s home office in Baton Rouge, and he’d just about given up hope that Devereux would be allowed into the CPSO jail. But the caller ID told him that, unless the FBI had discovered the cell phone hidden in Claude’s briefcase, the man on the other end of the call was his Uncle Snake.
Forrest clicked SEND and said, “Identify yourself.”
“This is Jerry Lee Lewis. The Killer.”
Despite the circumstances, Forrest laughed. It was just like Snake to cut up at the very moment the world was crashing around him. Snake had known Jerry Lee his whole life, and he’d often used that connection to get bar sluts to sleep with him.
“I’m going to talk fast,” Forrest said, clicking on the speakerphone, “in case they figure out what you’re doing. Keep your answers short, and don’t use names.”
“Well, get with it, Tahyo.”
Ozan scowled in confusion, but Forrest smiled. “Tahyo”—a Cajun expression that meant “big, hungry dog”—was a childhood nickname that only Snake and very few others would remember.
“Did your lawyer bring you up to speed on recent developments?”
“I hear the girl’s dead, shot at the Bone Tree.”
“That’s right. And she met somebody else there. Somebody she didn’t expect.”
“And he lived?”
“He walked out of the hospital under his own power.”
“He’s a tough one, I’ll give him that. Do you know where he is now?”
“No.”
“Find out. He knows way too much about too many people in our past. If that doesn’t pucker your asshole . . .”
“I’m working on it. There was a fire at the Bone Tree. You understand? Somebody went to a great deal of trouble to destroy whatever evidence was there.”
Snake chuckled. “That was mighty nice of somebody.”
“That same person also cleared out the safe. Everything that was there is somewhere else.”
“Sounds good.”
“It’s not going to be enough. That’s why I’m calling you. I wish I could tell you you’re going to be okay, but the FBI isn’t going to let this go. Neither is Penn Cage. You were part of everything the Eagles ever did, and no matter how much evidence was destroyed, they’re eventually going to tie you to one of those killings. And one’s all it takes. If that doesn’t happen, somebody’s going to flip on you. Whichever it is, your days are numbered.”
Snake grunted but didn’t comment.
“At least here they’re numbered.” Forrest watched Ozan’s expressionless face for clues to how his pitch was playing. “It’s time to use your golden parachute, Uncle.”