“Yes, I do. But I also understand the penalties for aiding and abetting a fugitive—especially one wanted for killing a state trooper. You’ll lose your law license, Quentin. So would I. Maybe forever.”
“Maybe,” Quentin conceded. “So maybe it’s best if you go on and leave this to me.”
“To you?” Doris snorted at the suggestion. “Between the two of you, you haven’t got the strength to get Tom into a bed, much less do anything substantive to help him.”
“I just might surprise you,” Quentin growled. “You go if you need to go. Just don’t tell me what I’m risking to help this man. If the police come for him, I’ll sit in our front door with the Constitution in one hand and a rifle in the other. At least until somebody convinces me he’ll make it to a courtroom alive. After that, I won’t need a damned rifle.”
“You’re a hardheaded old fool,” Doris said, but Tom heard love beneath her frustration. “I don’t know why I put up with you.”
“Yes, you do,” Quentin said. “Let’s get him to a bed.”
“No,” Doris said.
“What?” Quentin asked, sounding truly worried for the first time.
“I don’t think he can make it to a bed. I’ll get some quilts and a pillow. He’s going to sleep right here. And if he’s still alive in the morning, we’ll decide what to do then.”
As the swish of Doris Avery’s slippers receded, Tom felt Quentin’s hand close around his again. “That’s a good woman right there,” Quentin intoned. “Between you and Doris, I’ve been a lucky man. You gonna be all right now, Tom. Just let go. Let go of everything and trust old Q.”
Tom squeezed his friend’s hand. Then he let go and slipped beneath the surface for the last time.
THURSDAY
CHAPTER 18
SHERIFF WALKER DENNIS and I are roaring down a Louisiana back road at ninety miles per hour in a supercharged Ford sedan, a SWAT van struggling to keep pace with us. I feel a little like I’ve stepped onto the set of a 1970s Burt Reynolds movie, but none of the other cast members seems to be in on the joke.
Walker Dennis certainly isn’t playing games. At 5 A.M. he assembled twenty-four deputies in a staging area beside the Concordia Parish courthouse. Half wore SWAT gear, and all were armed to the teeth. From the warmth of my car in the main courthouse lot, I watched Walker brief his troops. After a short speech, he got into his cruiser and drove toward my car, while his deputies broke into teams and climbed into several different vehicles. As they drove out to Highway 15 and turned left or right depending on their destinations, Walker pulled up beside me and motioned for me to get into his cruiser. When I did, I found a plastic bucket of cell phones on the passenger seat. There were at least twenty handsets in the bucket, of every imaginable make.
“Sorry,” he said, lifting the bucket into the backseat.
I got inside the car, my left thigh brushing against a cut-down shotgun mounted in a rack between us. “What’s with the phones?”
“I collected them before I told anybody where they were going.”
I’ll be damned, I thought. “How’d they take that?”
“Not well.”
“Do you think you got every phone?”
“Yep.” Sheriff Dennis winked, then backed out of the parking space. “My brother-in-law walked behind the ranks with a scanner while I was giving my speech. I’m pretty sure the two who had extra phones are having extramarital affairs, but I’ll double-check it later. For today I’ve paired them with reliable partners.” He stopped and put the powerful cruiser in Drive. “Fasten your seat belt, Mayor. This is gonna be a hell of a morning.”
During the next hour, I listened to Walker direct a parishwide assault on the Knox family’s meth operation. His tactical teams rousted users and dealers out of their beds, busted cookers in the midst of their work, and searched a half-dozen probable storage sites for illegal chemicals. By 5:55, twenty-seven people had been arrested without a shot fired. Walker handled the whole operation with absolute professionalism, save for one detail: he’d failed to get wiretap warrants on any member of the Knox family prior to the raids. Had he done that, he probably would have gathered enough evidence in the first hours to put Snake, Billy, and Forrest Knox in Angola Penitentiary for twenty years apiece. But the sheriff explained his oversight pragmatically. The judge who’d granted the search warrants (and kept his mouth shut about them) hated the Knoxes enough to help Walker take a shot at their meth operation, but not enough to sign wiretap warrants on the Knoxes on the basis of rumor alone. Apart from arousing the ire of the state supreme court, that might make him a target of violent retaliation.
After a team of female deputies ferried the prisoners back to the station in vans to begin processing them, Walker told me we were about to lead a tactical team out to the western edge of the parish, where he had a man keeping watch on a suspected Knox drug warehouse. And that’s how I found myself riding shotgun in this rattling car as it threatens to lift off the pavement on every sweeping turn.
“There it is,” Walker says, pointing through the windshield.
All I see is a white metal storage building about the size of a small gymnasium standing at the edge of a fallow field. Walker keys his radio and says, “This is Whiskey Delta. Give me a sitrep.”
His radio crackles, and then a male voice says, “I see you. I’m in the ditch to your left. Nobody’s gone in or out since I’ve been here.”
“Did you see any lights before dawn?”
“Negative. I think it’s empty.”
The SWAT van pulls up beside us, and Walker signals for its driver to get out. Seconds later, a tactical team wearing full body armor and black face screens stands lined up beside the car. As Walker gets out and walks around to address them, I crank down my window a couple of inches.