“I can have it delivered here in ten minutes.”
“That’s more like it. Do you know where Knox is now?”
“The hunting camp. He told me he was going to spend the day catching up on work while he waited for my answer, but he’s up at Valhalla. He fully expects to be appointed acting head of the state police by five P.M. I think even the governor expects it, though she doesn’t know the details.”
Walt stroked his mustache, thinking. “And where’s his house?”
“Less than five miles from here, near the LSU campus.”
“I’ll hit his house first, then swing up to the camp after he leaves. Where’s Captain Ozan?”
“Probably Concordia Parish. Last night Forrest sent him up there to investigate Trooper Dunn’s death, but now he’s got that Redbone son of a bitch leading the Henry Sexton investigation.”
“Inmates running the asylum,” Walt muttered. “What about bugging Knox’s cruiser and his phones? Have you tried that?”
“I don’t trust my tech division. They work too closely with the CIB. I’m sure Forrest has them checking his phones and sweeping his cruiser regularly. If he found a bug today, he’d release that porn stuff five minutes later. I’d be done, Walt.”
“Won’t a sweep find the GPS transmitter on his car?”
“They tell me it won’t. I borrowed this unit from a federal intel guy I know in Texas. It only transmits coordinates in bursts, at predetermined intervals. Otherwise, it’s electronically transparent.”
“All right, then. Get the tracker here. I’m ready to move.”
Mackiever held the tiny screen of his phone at arm’s length so that he could make out the keypad, then punched in a text message. “I wish I could do more to help you.”
“You can,” Walt said bluntly. “Find a way to kill that goddamn APB. You’re still the head of the LSP. I’ve got false identification, but it’s damned hard to move around this state with my face on every TV screen and dashboard computer for three hundred miles.”
Mackiever put down his cell phone and nodded. “It won’t be easy, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“Do it fast. Tom and I are lucky to have lived this long.”
Mackiever leaned forward and looked at Walt as though trying to penetrate a shell of bravado. “Are you sure you want to do all this? Why don’t you just go back to Navasota, lock the door, and take care of Carmelita? Let Dr. Cage sort out his own mess?”
The tone of surrender in his old comrade’s voice made Walt’s throat constrict. “Tom and I served in Korea together, Mac. He saved my life over there. And if I have to die for him over here, well . . .”
Mackiever picked up his glass and raised it in salute, but Walt saw only an empty gesture. He closed his eyes to spare himself seeing how far his old friend had fallen.
“Walt,” said the colonel, sensing his friend’s disgust, “if you’d seen that pathetic kid in that motel, his face painted up, his eyes dead, you might understand. After a lifetime of good work, I can’t stand to see it all tainted by something like that.”
Walt gripped Mackiever’s shoulders and squeezed to the point of pain, his eyes burning. “You can’t resign. You hear me? If you cave in to Knox’s threat, Tom and I are dead men. But there’s more to it than that. You took an oath. The Ranger oath, if the LSP oath don’t mean enough. You owe it to every man who ever wore the star to stand tall, no matter what. Don’t kid yourself that you have a choice. You don’t. You break that oath, you won’t be no damn good to anybody. Not your wife, not your grandkids, not even to yourself.”
Through the fear in Mackiever’s eyes, Walt saw a faint flicker of the old esprit de corps. “I hear you,” the colonel said. “I’ll do what I can. You just be careful, take care of yourself.”
Walt waved off the warning. “Don’t waste time worrying about me. I’m taking Knox down, and God help any man who gets in my way.”
CHAPTER 15
FORREST KNOX SAT behind the desk in the study at Valhalla, peering into the terrified face of the cop who had lost his partner to Dr. Tom Cage. Floyd Grimsby looked like every other North Louisiana cop who ended up on the take, a bullying Baptist deacon who liked screwing the church secretary on the side. He’d relayed Dr. Cage’s message in a voice quavering with equal parts of fear and anger, watching Forrest’s face as attentively as a dog waiting for a beating from its master. Forrest was surprised the man hadn’t fled the state after a fuckup of that magnitude. He’d probably figured that Forrest would find him eventually, and it was better to face the music and try to make up for his mistake.
Alphonse Ozan stood against the wall beside the door to the great room, maintaining radio contact with the scouts he’d placed at the perimeter of the camp. There was still a chance that the Bureau had sent Grimsby as a stalking horse, so they had to be ready to run for the river on a moment’s notice. If the feds brought a helicopter, Ozan had a man outside with a BAR that could take it down. Of course that would mean leaving the country, but Forrest and Billy had always been prepared for that. They had paid-up property in Andorra, in the Pyrenees on the French border, waiting for the day when fate finally caught up with them. But as Forrest had often told his cousin, many times success came from holding your nerve when other men would bail. In this time of maximum danger, Forrest stood to gain more money and power than he could have imagined only a year earlier.
“So Dr. Cage took a phone call while he thought you were unconscious,” Forrest said. “How much did you hear?”
“Not enough to know where he was going. I think it was that Texas Ranger though. Garrity. Later, Dr. Cage told me his friend had told him to kill me.”
Forrest smiled. “A wise man. Did anything you heard give you any idea where he might be running?”