WALT GARRITY LAY half-asleep on a double bed in the Sheraton Casino Hotel in Baton Rouge, just inside the downtown levee. He’d planned to spend no more than an hour in the city; now he’d wasted more than eight, and Tom was out on the night roads, wounded and carrying a hostage, with every cop in Louisiana on his trail.
Walt had come here to meet Colonel Griffith Mackiever of the Louisiana State Police, hoping to get the statewide APB for Tom and himself revoked. He had at least some reason for optimism. Long before Colonel Mackiever joined the LSP, he’d served as a Texas Ranger with Walt, and despite the passing years, they still shared the Ranger bond. When Walt arrived at the hotel, however, he hadn’t found his old comrade-in-arms waiting, but a faxed note telling him Mackiever had been forced to take an unexpected trip to New Orleans to check out their “mutual problem.” Walt assumed this referred to Forrest Knox, and he hoped to God Knox hadn’t suckered his old compadre into a trap. There was talk that Forrest might be next in line for superintendent of the state police, and Mackiever’s death would open up that powerful position sooner rather than later. Untimely deaths were far from uncommon in this godforsaken state.
Garrity had never liked Louisiana: shitkickers in the north and Frenchmen in the south—Baptists versus Catholics, praise Jesus. Driving down Highway 61 from Natchez, he’d thought of Angola Farm out in the darkness between the road and the Mississippi River, glowing like some fortified island of lost souls. Most of the prisoners chained inside the Farm belonged there, but the hypocrisy of harsh punishment for men who’d ripped off a few hundred dollars in Louisiana stuck in Walt’s craw. People thought Huey Long had set the high bar for state corruption in the 1930s, but the Kingfish was a latecomer to the public trough. A wise man once said that any territory colonized by the French eventually settled into a state of lassitude and corruption. As regarded Louisiana, he was right. Like some third-world island appended to America, the state had decayed as steadily as an old whore working the darkest den in Marseilles. During the 1950s and ’60s, Texas Rangers had viewed certain Louisiana parishes as feudal fiefdoms more akin to the realms of warlords than to American counties, and Walt wasn’t sure that the foundations of those fiefdoms had been completely uprooted.
Rolling past the vapor-lit machinery of the refineries and chemical plants along old Highway 61, he’d reflected on what bad odds Mackiever must have faced trying to run the state police in such a place. New Orleans had become so lawless during the 1990s that the Justice Department had considered federalizing the NOPD. The chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina hadn’t surprised Walt a bit; the cataclysmic storm had merely laid bare the systemic corruption that had been festering downtown for three centuries, and which had doomed the city itself by allowing a substandard levee system to be built.
With that kind of rot eating away at the state’s largest city, no one should have been surprised to learn that rural parishes had also become dens of vice and violence—a perfect environment for predators like Forrest Knox. Clothed in the uniform of the state police, an ambitious sociopath could pretty much do as he pleased in the boondocks. When the officials above him had so many secrets to hide, which of them would risk confronting a man who had a high-tech intelligence division under his command?
Walt had hoped Mackiever could explain how Forrest Knox had risen so high in his organization, but with every hour that passed, his faith that he would see his old buddy faltered. Tossing and turning on the hotel bed, Walt dreamed of his wife, who had begged him not to leave home to try to help his old friend. The night before Tom called, Carmelita had actually dreamed of Walt’s funeral. But Walt felt he had no choice about helping Tom, and he’d told her as much. As he drove away from their house, Carmelita had watched with her face forlorn and her arms folded, like a woman sending her husband off to war. Walt had felt an ache like an ulcer in his belly, but he hadn’t turned around.
Yesterday, when some Knox-controlled asshole shoved photos of a beheaded family under Carmelita’s door to frighten her, it had taken all of Walt’s self-restraint not to walk up to Forrest on the street in front of LSP headquarters and blow his brains out. Though Walt now had three old Ranger buddies covering his house in Navasota, every second of fear his wife had suffered stung him like a hornet. Before this mess was through, he would exact retribution for each sting.
Picking up his derringer from the bedside table, Walt rubbed his eyes and headed for the toilet to take a leak. He was zipping up his pants when the landline rang beside the bed. Walt walked out and stared at the phone for three rings, then picked it up and put it to his ear.
“Cap’n McDonald?” said a familiar voice.
Walt said nothing, but his rapid pulse began to subside. “Bill McDonald” was the alias that Colonel Mackiever had instructed him to use when he registered at the hotel. McDonald had been one of the toughest and wisest Texas Rangers ever to wear the star, but he’d died in 1918. It was unlikely anyone else would think to use such a code. Nevertheless, Walt said, “Name a president that Bill McDonald guarded.”
“Teddy Roosevelt.”
Walt sighed with relief. “Where are you, Mac?”
“Coming up the hall. Sorry to make you wait.”
“I’m opening the door.”
Walt took his derringer to the door, opened it, then extended the bolt and backed away so that his visitor would have to push open the heavy door to gain entry. Then he stood just inside the open bathroom door and aimed the derringer at head level.