GREG ILES

The Devil’s Punchbowl

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Greg Iles 2009

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Greg Iles asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007317486

Version: 2018-07-16

For Madeline and Mark Who pay the highest price for my writing life. Thank you.

No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a comin’.

— Captain Bill McDonald, Texas Ranger

‘You’re an animal.’

‘No, worse. Human.’

— Runaway Train

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

1

Midnight in the garden of the dead.

A silver-white moon hangs high over the mirror-black river and the tired levee, shedding cold light on the Louisiana delta stretching off toward Texas. I stand among the luminous stones on the Mississippi side, shivering like the only living man for miles. At my feet lies a stark slab of granite, and under that stone lies the body of my wife. The monument at its head reads:

SARAH ELIZABETH CAGE

1963-1998

Daughter. Wife. Mother. Teacher. She is loved.

I haven’t sneaked into the cemetery at midnight to visit my wife’s grave. I’ve come at the urgent request of a friend. But I didn’t come here for the sake of friendship. I came out of guilt. And fear.

The man I’m waiting for is forty-five years old, yet in my mind he will always be nine. That’s when our friendship peaked, during the Apollo 11 moon landing. But you don’t often make friends like those you make as a boy, so the debt is a long one. My guilt is the kind you feel when someone slips away and you don’t do enough to maintain the tie, all the more painful because over the years Tim Jessup managed to get himself into quite a bit of trouble, and after the first eight or nine times, I wasn’t there to get him out of it.

My fear has nothing to do with Tim; he’s merely a messenger, one who may bear tidings I have no wish to hear. News that confirms the rumors being murmured over golf greens at the country club, bellowed between plays beside high school gridirons, and whispered through the hunting camps like a rising breeze before a storm. When Jessup asked to meet me, I resisted. He couldn’t have chosen a worse time to discover a conscience, for me or for the city. Yet in the end I agreed to hear him out. For if the rumors are true–if a uniquely disturbing evil has entered into my town–it was I who opened the door for it. I ran for mayor in a Jeffersonian fit of duty to save my hometown and, in my righteousness, was arrogant enough to believe I could deal with the devil and somehow keep our collective virtue intact. But that, I’m afraid, was wishful thinking.

For months now, a sense of failure has been accreting in my chest like fibrous tissue. I’ve rarely failed at anything, and I have never quit. Most Americans are raised never to give up, and in the South that credo is practically a religion. But two years ago I stood before my wife’s grave with a full heart and the belief that I could by force of will resurrect the idyllic town that had borne me, by closing the racial wounds that had prevented it from becoming the shining beacon I knew it could be, and bringing back the prosperity it deserved. Halfway through my four-year term, I’ve learned that most people don’t want change, even when it’s in their best interest. We pay lip service to ideals, but we live by expediency and by tribal prejudice. Accepting this hypocrisy has nearly broken me.

Sadly, the people closest to me saw this coming long ago. My father and my lover at the time tried to save me from myself, but I would not be swayed. The heaviest burden I bear is knowing that my daughter has paid the highest price for my illusions. Two years ago, I imagined I heard my dead wife’s voice urging me onward. Now all I hear is the empty rush of the wind, whispering the lesson so many have learned before me: You can’t go home again.

My watch reads 12:30 a.m. Thirty minutes past the appointed hour, and there’s still no sign of Tim Jessup among the shoulder-high stones between me and Cemetery Road. With a silent farewell to my wife, I turn and slip between the monuments, working my way back up toward Jewish Hill, our rendezvous point. My feet make no sound in the dewy, manicured grass. The names chiseled on these stones I’ve known all my life. They are the town’s history, and mine: Friedler and Jacobs and Dreyfus up on Jewish Hill, whose stones read Bohemia, Bavaria, Alsace; the Knoxes and Henrys and Thornhills in the Protestant sections; and finally the Donnellys and Binellis and O’Banyons back on Catholic Hill. Most of the corpses in this place had white skin when they were alive, but as in life, the truth here is found at the margins. In the areas marked ‘Colored Ground’ on the cemetery map lie the trusted servants and favored slaves who lived at the margins of the white world and earned a patch of hallowed earth in death. Most of these were interred without a marker. You have to go farther down the road, to the national cemetery, to find the graves of truly free black people, many of them soldiers who lie among the twenty-eight hundred unknown Union dead.

Yet this cemetery breathes an older history. Some people buried here were born in the mid-1700s, and if they were resurrected tomorrow, parts of the town would not look much different to them. Infants who died of yellow fever lie beside Spanish dons and forgotten generals, all moldering beneath crying angels and marble saints, while the gnarled oak branches spread ever wider above them, draped with cinematic beards of Spanish moss. Natchez is the oldest city on the Mississippi River, older even than New Orleans, and when you see the dark, tilted gravestones disappearing into the edges of the forest, you know it.

I last came here to view a million dollars in damage wreaked by drunk vandals on the irreplaceable wrought iron and statuary that make this cemetery unique. Now all four gates are chained shut at dusk. Tim Jessup knows that; it’s one reason he chose this trysting place. When Jessup first called, I thought he was proposing the cemetery for his convenience; he works on one of the riverboat casinos at the foot of the bluff–the Magnolia Queen, moored almost directly below Jewish Hill–and midnight marks the end of his shift. But Tim insisted that the cemetery’s isolation was a necessity, for me as much as for him. Swore, in fact, that I could trust neither my own police department nor any official of the city government. He also made me promise not to call his cell phone or his home for any reason. Part of me considers his claims ridiculous, but a warier clump of brain cells knows from experience that corruption can run deep.

I was a lawyer in another life–a prosecutor. I started out wanting to be Atticus Finch and ended up sending sixteen people to death row. Looking back, I’m not sure how that happened. One day, I simply woke up and realized that I had not been divinely ordained to punish the guilty. So I resigned my position with the Houston district attorney’s office and went home to my joyous wife and daughter. Uncertain what to do with my newfound surplus of time (and facing an acute shortage of funds), I began writing about my courtroom experiences and, like a few other lawyers slipstreaming in the wake of John Grisham, found myself selling enough books to place my name on the bestseller lists. We bought a bigger house and moved Annie to an elite prep school. An unfamiliar sense of self-satisfaction began to creep into my life, a feeling that I was one of the chosen, destined for success in whatever field I chose. I had an enviable career, a wonderful family, a few good friends, lots of faithful readers. I was young enough and arrogant enough to believe that I deserved all this, and foolish enough to think it would last.

Then my wife died.

Four months after my father diagnosed Sarah with cancer, we buried her. The shock of losing her almost broke me, and it shattered my four-year-old daughter. In desperation I fled Houston, taking Annie back to the small Mississippi town where I’d been raised, back to the loving arms of my parents. There—here–before I could begin working my way back to earth, I found myself drawn into a thirty-year-old murder case, one that ultimately saved my life and ended four others. That was seven years ago. Annie’s eleven now, and almost the reincarnation of her mother. She’s sleeping at home while a babysitter waits in my living room, and remembering this I decide that Tim Jessup gets exactly five more minutes of my time. If he can’t make his own midnight meeting, he can damn well come to City Hall during business hours, like everybody else.

My heart labors from climbing the nearly vertical face of Jewish Hill, but each breath brings the magical scent of sweet olive, still blooming in mid-October. Under the sweet olive simmers a roux of thicker smells: kudzu and damp humus and something dead in the trees–maybe a gut-shot deer that evaded its shortsighted poacher. When I reach the edge of the table of earth that is Jewish Hill, the land and sky fall away before me with breathtaking suddenness.

The drop to the river is two hundred feet here, down a kudzu-strangled bluff of windblown loess–rich soil made from rock ground fine by glaciers–the foundation of our city. From this height you can look west over endless flatland with almost intoxicating pride, and I think that feeling is what made so many nations try to claim this land. France, Spain, England, the Confederacy: all tried to hold this earth, and all failed as surely as the Natchez Indians before them. A sagging wire bench still stands beneath an American flag at the western rim of the hill, awaiting mourners, lovers, and all the rest who come here; it looks like the best place to spend Tim’s last four minutes.

As I sit, a pair of headlights moves up Cemetery Road like a ship beating against the wind, tacking back and forth across the lane that winds along the edge of the bluff. I stand, but the headlights do not slow, and soon a nondescript pickup truck rattles past the shotgun shacks across the road and vanishes around the next bend, headed toward the Devil’s Punchbowl, a deep defile out in the county where Natchez Trace outlaws once dumped the corpses of their victims.

‘That’s it, Timmy,’ I say aloud. ‘Time’s up.’

The wind off the river has finally found its way into my jacket. I’m cold, tired, and ready to go to bed. The next three days will be the busiest of my year as mayor, beginning with a news conference and a helicopter flight in the morning. But after those three days are up…I’m going to make some profound changes in my life.

Rising from the bench, I walk to my right, toward a gentler slope of the hill, where my old Saab waits beyond the cemetery wall. As I bend to slide down the hill, an urgent whisper breaks the silence of the night: ‘Hey. Dude? Are you up here?’

A shadow is advancing along the rim of Jewish Hill from the interior of the graveyard. From my vantage point, I can see all four entrances to the cemetery, but I’ve seen no headlights and heard no engine. Yet here is Tim Jessup, materializing like one of the ghosts so many people believe haunt this ancient hill. I know it’s Tim because he used to be a junkie, and he still moves like one, with a herky-jerky progress during which his head perpetually jiggers around as though he’s watching for police while his thin legs carry him forward in the hope of finding his next fix.

Jessup claims to be clean now, thanks largely to his new wife, Julia, who was three years behind us in high school. Julia Stanton married the high school quarterback at nineteen and took five years of punishment before forfeiting that particular game. When I heard she was marrying Jessup, I figured she wanted a perfect record of losses. But the word around town is that she’s worked wonders with Tim. She got him a job and has kept him at it for over a year, dealing blackjack on the casino boats, most recently the Magnolia Queen.

‘Penn!’ Jessup finally calls out loud. ‘It’s me, man. Come out!’

The gauntness of his face is unmistakable in the moonlight. Though he and I are the same age–born exactly one month apart–he looks ten years older. His skin has the leathery texture of a man who’s worked too many years under the Mississippi sun. Passing him on the street under that sun, I’ve seen more disturbing signs. His graying mustache is streaked yellow from cigarette smoke, and his skin and eyes have the jaundiced cast of those of a man whose liver hasn’t many years left in it.

What bound Jessup and me tightly as boys was that we were both doctors’ sons. We each understood the weight of that special burden, the way preachers’ sons know that emotional topography. Having a physician as a father brings benefits and burdens, but for eldest sons it brings a universal expectation that someday you’ll follow in your father’s footsteps. In the end both Tim and I failed to fulfill this, but in very different ways. Seeing him closer now, turning haplessly in the dark, it’s hard to imagine that we started our lives in almost the same place. That’s probably the root of my guilt: For though Tim Jessup made a lifetime of bad decisions–in full knowledge of the risks–the one that set them all in train could have been, and in fact was, made by many of us. Only luck carried the rest of us through.

With a sigh of resignation, I step from behind the gravestone and call toward the river, ‘Tim? Hey, Tim. It’s Penn.’

Jessup whips his head around, and his right-hand darts toward his pocket. For a panicked second I fear he’s going to pull a pistol, but then he recognizes me, and his eyes widen with relief.

‘Man!’ he says with a grin. ‘At first I thought you’d chickened out. I mean, shit.’

As he shakes my hand, I marvel that at forty-five Jessup still sounds like a strung-out hippie. ‘You’re the one who’s late, aren’t you?’

He nods more times than necessary, a man who’ll do anything to keep from being still. How does this guy deal blackjack all night?

‘I couldn’t rush off the boat,’ he explains. ‘I think they’re watching me. I mean, they’re always watching us. Everybody. But I think maybe they suspect something.’

I want to ask whom he’s talking about, but I assume he’ll get to that. ‘I didn’t see your car. Where’d you come from?’

A cagey smile splits the weathered face. ‘I got ways, man. You got to be careful dealing with this class of people. Predators, I kid you not. They sense a threat, they react—bam!’ Tim claps his hands together. ‘Pure instinct. Like sharks in the water.’ He glances back toward town. ‘In fact, we ought to get behind some cover now.’ He gestures toward the three-foot-high masonry walls that enclose a nearby family plot. ‘Just like high school, man. Remember smoking grass behind these walls? Sitting down so the cops couldn’t see the glow of the roach?’

I never got high with Tim during high school, but I see no reason to break whatever flow keeps him calm and talking. The sooner he tells me what he came to say, the sooner I can get out of here.

He vaults the wall with surprising agility, and I step over it after him, recalling with a chill the one memory of this place that I associate with Tim. Late one Halloween night a half dozen boys tossed our banana bikes over the wall and rode wildly through the narrow lanes, laughing hysterically until a pack of wild dogs chased us up into the oak trees near the third gate. Does Tim remember that?

With a last anxious look up Cemetery Road, he sits on the damp ground and leans against the mossy bricks in a corner where two walls meet. I sit against the adjacent wall, facing him at a right angle, my running shoes almost touching his weathered Sperrys. Only now do I realize that he must have changed clothes after work. The dealer’s uniform he usually wears on duty has been replaced by black jeans and a gray T-shirt.

‘Couldn’t come out here dressed for work,’ he says, as though reading my mind. What he actually read, I realize, was my appraising glance. Clearly, all the drugs he’s ingested over the years haven’t yet ruined what always was a sharp mind.

I decide to dispense with small talk. ‘You said some pretty scary things on the phone. Scary enough to bring me out here at this hour.’

He nods, digging in his pocket for something that turns out to be a bent cigarette. ‘Can’t risk lighting it,’ he says, putting it between his lips, ‘but it’s good to know I got it for the ride home.’ He grins once more before putting on a serious face. ‘So, what had you heard before I called?’

I don’t want to repeat anything Tim hasn’t already heard or seen himself. ‘Vague rumors. Celebrities flying in to gamble, in and out fast. Pro athletes, rappers, like that. People who wouldn’t normally come here.’

‘You hear about the dogfighting?’

My hope that the rumors are false is sinking fast. ‘I’ve heard there’s some of that going on. But it was hard to credit. I mean, I can see some rednecks down in the bottoms doing it, or out in the parishes across the river, but not high rollers and celebrities.’

Tim sucks in his bottom lip. ‘What else?’

This time I don’t answer. I’ve heard other rumors–that prostitution and hard drugs are flourishing around the gambling trade, for example–but these plagues have been with us always. ‘Look, I don’t want to speculate about things I don’t know to be true.’

‘You sound like a fucking politician, man.’

I suppose that’s what I’ve become, but I feel more like an attorney sifting the truth from an unreliable client’s story. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what you know? Then I’ll tell you how that fits with what I’ve heard.’

Looking more anxious by the second, Jessup gives in to his nicotine urge at last. He produces a Bic lighter, which he flicks into flame and touches to the end of the cigarette, drawing air through the paper tube like someone sucking on a three-foot bong. He holds in the smoke for an alarming amount of time, then speaks as he exhales. ‘You hear I got a kid now? A son.’

‘Yeah, I saw him with Julia at the Piggly Wiggly a couple of weeks ago. He’s a great-looking boy.’

Tim’s smile lights up his face. ‘Just like his mom, man. She’s still a beauty, isn’t she?’

‘She is,’ I concur, speaking the truth. ‘So…what are we doing here, Timmy?’

He still doesn’t reply. He takes another long drag, cupping the cigarette like a joint. As I watch him, I realize that his hands are shaking, and not from the cold. His whole body has begun to shiver, and for the first time I worry that he’s started using again.

‘Tim?’

‘It’s not what you think, bro. I’ve just been carrying this stuff around in my head for a while, and sometimes I get the shakes.’

He’s crying, I realize with amazement. He’s wiping tears from his eyes. I squeeze his knee to comfort him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers. ‘We’re a long way from Mill Pond Road, aren’t we?’

Mill Pond Road is the street I grew up on. ‘We sure are. Are you okay?’

He stubs out his cigarette on a gravestone and leans forward, his eyes burning with passion I thought long gone from him. ‘If I tell you more, there’s no going back. You understand? I tell you what I know, you won’t be able to sleep. I know you. You’ll be like a pit bull yourself. You won’t let it go.’

‘Isn’t that why you asked me here?’

Jessup shrugs, his head and hands jittery again. ‘I’m just telling you, Penn. You want to walk away, do it now. Climb over that wall and slide back down to your car. That’s what a smart man would do.’

I settle against the cold bricks and consider what I’ve heard. This is one of the ways fate comes for you. It can swoop darkly from a cloudless sky like my wife’s cancer; or it can lie waiting in your path, obvious to any eyes willing to see it. But sometimes it’s simply a fork in the road, and rare is the day that a friend stands beside it, offering you the safer path. It’s the oldest human choice: comfortable ignorance or knowledge bought with pain? I can almost hear Tim at his blackjack table on the Magnolia Queen: ‘Hit or stay, sir?’ If only I had a real choice. But because I helped bring the Queen to Natchez, I don’t.

‘Let’s hear it, Timmy. I don’t have all night.’

Jessup closes his eyes and crosses himself. ‘Praise God,’ he breathes. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if you’d walked away. I’m way out on a limb here, man. And I’m totally alone.’

I give him a forced smile. ‘Let’s hope my added weight doesn’t break it off.’

He takes a long look at me, then shifts his weight to raise one hip and slides something from his back pocket. It looks like a couple of playing cards. He holds them out, palm down, the cards mostly concealed beneath his fingers.

‘Pick a card?’ I ask.

‘They’re not cards. They’re pictures. They’re kind of blurry. Shot with a cell phone.’

With a sigh of resignation I reach out and take them from his hand. I’ve viewed thousands of crime-scene photos in microscopic detail, so I don’t expect to be shocked by whatever Tim Jessup has brought in his back pocket. But when he flicks his lighter into flame and holds it over the first photo, a wasplike buzzing begins in my head, and my stomach does a slow roll.

‘I know,’ he says quietly. ‘Keep going. It gets worse.’

2

Linda Church lies beneath the man who pays her wages and tries to hide the fear behind her eyes. As he drives into her, his eyes burning, his forehead dripping sweat, she imagines she’s a stone figure in a cathedral, with opaque eyes that reveal nothing. Linda reads fantasy novels during her off hours, and sometimes she imagines she’s a character in a book, a noblewoman forced by a cruel twist of fate to do things she never thought she would. Things like that happened to heroines all the time. All her life (or since she was four years old and played the princess in her nursery-school play) Linda has searched for a real prince, for a gentle man who could lead her out of the thorny maze that’s been her life ever since the other kind of man had his way with her. When she first met the man using her now, she believed that magical moment had finally come. Only a year shy of thirty (and with her looks still holding despite some rough treatment), Linda had finally been placed by fate in the path of a prince. He looked like a film actor, carried himself like a soldier, and best of all actually talked like a prince in the movies her grandmother used to watch. Like Cary Grant or Laurence Olivier or…somebody.

But not even Cary Grant was Cary Grant. He was named Archie Leach or something, and though he was probably an okay guy, he wasn’t who you thought he was, and that was the truth of life right there. Nothing was what you thought it was, because no one was who they pretended to be. Everybody wanted something, and men mostly wanted the same thing. If her prince had turned into a frog, she would at least have had the comfort of familiarity. But this story was different; this false prince had morphed into a serpent with needle-sharp fangs and sacs of poison loaded behind them. Linda now knew she was only one of twenty or thirty women he’d slept with on the Magnolia Queen, and was probably still screwing, no matter what he claimed. With good-paying work so hard to find, who could afford to say no to him?

‘What’s your problem tonight?’ he grunted, still going at her without letup. ‘Squeeze your pissflaps, woman, and give the lad something to work with.’

She hates his voice most of all, because the beautiful way he speaks in public is just another cloak he wears to hide what lies beneath his skin, and behind those measuring eyes. He really is like a character in one of her books, but not a hero. He’s a shape-shifter, a demon who knows that the surest way into the souls of normal people is to appear to be exactly what they most want, to make them believe he sees them exactly as they wish to be seen. That was how he’d snared Linda. He’d made her believe her most secret fantasies about herself, just long enough to make her willingly give herself, and then…the mask had come off.

The horror of that night is graven on her soul like scar tissue. In the span of a few minutes, she saw what she’d allowed inside her, and something in her withered away forever. It happened in this very room, a cavernlike hold in the bowels of the Magnolia Queen, one of the only two rooms on the casino boat without security cameras. Linda works upstairs in the bar called The Devil’s Punchbowl, but the women on the Queen call this off-limits room the real Devil’s Punchbowl. For it’s here that the demon inside her conducts all business that cannot stand the light of day. Here he brings card counters and other troublemakers, to strap them into the chair bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. Here he brings the women who endure what Linda suffered that night after the mask came off….

After he’d gone, while she put herself together as best she could, she’d told herself she would quit the boat. But when it came to it, she hadn’t had the nerve. Partly it was the money, of course, and the insurance benefits. But it was also the mind’s ability to lie to itself. A familiar voice began telling her that she was mistaken, that she’d misinterpreted some of the things he’d done, that she had in fact asked for those things, if not verbally then by her actions. But each new visit brought further confirmation of her warning instincts, and the fear in her had grown. She wanted desperately to stop, to flee the Queen and the city, yet she didn’t. This demon seemed to have–no, he had—some strange power over her, so much that she was afraid to mention her predicament to anyone else. In rational moments, this made her furious. Surely she had an open-and-shut case for sexual harassment. Of course, he might argue that the relationship was consensual. She’s given him enthusiastic sex in several places on the boat, and except for his office and this room, every inch of the casino is covered by surveillance cameras–even the bathrooms, no matter what the law says.

She’s thought about asking some other girls to go to a lawyer with her, but that would be riskier than laying all her money down on one of the table games upstairs. Linda only knows about the other girls because she’s heard a couple of the trashier ones talking about how they did a group thing with him and a big player from Hong Kong. Knowing that the man inside her now has been inside those other women makes her shudder, yet she doesn’t cry out or try to throw him off. Why? A heroine in one of her novels would do just that: find a hatpin or a dagger and stab him in the back during his ‘moment of greatest passion.’ But real life isn’t like that. In real life that moment comes and goes, and when he rolls off of you, you feel like your soul has been ripped out by its bloody roots, leaving only a husk of what you were before.

That was the state she’d been in when her true prince walked into her life. He wasn’t riding a white charger or wearing a doublet or a wizard’s robe; he was wearing a blackjack dealer’s uniform, and watching her with an empathy that cut right through her hardened defenses. His eyes were the opposite of those burning above her now: soft and kind and infinitely understanding. And somehow, she’d known, he had seen her torment before speaking to her. He didn’t know the nature of it; that would have killed him, literally, for he would have tried to stop what was going on, and he is no match for the shape-shifter. He’s too good for the job he has–too good for her, really–but he doesn’t think so. He loves her.

The problem is that he’s married. And to a good woman. Linda despises herself for wanting the husband of another woman. But what can you do if you truly love someone? How can you banish a feeling that is stronger than the darkness that’s eating you from the inside out?

‘You’re making a bloody bags of it,’ the demon growls in contempt. ‘Do ye want me to change at Baker Street?’

Linda shrinks in fear, moves her hips faster. She’s picked up enough slang to feel nausea at the innocuous-sounding euphemism. Her extra effort seems to allay his anger; at least there’s no more coded talk of turning her over.

She shuts her eyes and prays that the demon moving inside her won’t discover her secret prince, or what he’s doing at this very moment to put the world in balance again, like the heroes in her novels–not until it’s one delicious second too late. For if the demon or his henchmen discover that, Timothy will die–horribly. Worse, they will surely make him talk before the end.

That’s one of their specialties.

3

‘Penn?’ Tim says softly, touching my knee. ‘Are you okay?’

I’m bent over three blurry photographs in my lap, trying to absorb what’s printed on the rectangles of cheap typing paper, with only the wavering flame of a cigarette lighter to illuminate them. It takes a while to truly see images like these. As an assistant district attorney, I found that murder victims–no matter how brutally beaten or mutilated–did not affect me quite so deeply as images of those who had survived terrible crimes. The mind has a prewired mechanism for distancing itself from the dead, surely a survival advantage in our species. But we have no effective filter for blocking out the suffering of living humans–none besides turning away, either physically or through denial (not if we’re ‘raised right,’ as Ruby Flowers, one of the women who ‘raised’ me would have said).

The first picture shows the face of a dog that looks as though it was hit by a truck and dragged a hundred yards over broken glass. Yet despite its horrific wounds, the animal is somehow standing under its own power, and staring into the camera with its one remaining eye. Wincing with revulsion, I slide the photo to the bottom of the group and find myself looking at a blond girl–not a woman, but a girl–carrying a tray filled with mugs of beer. It takes a moment to register that the girl, who’s no older than fifteen, wears no top. A vacant smile animates her lips, but her eyes are eerily blank, the look of a psych patient on Thorazine.

When I slide this photo aside, my breath catches in my throat. What might be the same girl (I can’t be sure) lies on a wooden floor while a much older man has intercourse with her. The most disturbing thing about this photo is that it was shot from behind and between a group of men watching the act. They’re only visible from knee to shoulder–three wear slacks and polo shirts, while a fourth wears a business suit–but all have beer mugs in their hands.

‘Did you take these pictures?’ I ask, unable to hide my disgust.

‘No—Damn!’ Tim jerks the hand holding the cigarette lighter, and the guttering light goes out. ‘You seen enough?’

‘Too much. Who took these?’

‘A guy I know. Let’s leave it at that for now.’

‘Does he know you have them?’

‘No. And he’d be in serious shit if anybody knew he’d taken them.’

I lay the pictures beside Tim’s leg, then close my eyes and rub my temples to try to stop an incipient headache. ‘Who’s the girl?’

‘Don’t know. I really don’t. They bring in different ones.’

‘She didn’t look more than fifteen.’

‘If that.’

‘Those pictures were taken around here?’

‘At a hunting camp a few miles away. They run people to the dogfights on their VIP boat. Change the venues each time.’

Now that the lighter is out, my night vision is returning. Tim’s haggard face is wan in the moonlight. I expel a rush of air. ‘God, I wish I hadn’t seen those.’

He doesn’t respond.

‘And the dog?’

‘The loser of a fight. Just before his owner killed him.’

‘Christ. Is that the worst of it?’

Tim sighs like a man stripped of precious illusions. ‘Depends on your sensibilities, I guess.’

‘And you’re saying this is being–what, promoted?–by the Magnolia Queen?’

Tim nods but does not speak.

‘Why?’

‘To pull the whales down south.’

‘Whales?’

‘High rollers. Big-money players. Arab playboys, Asian trust-fund babies. Drug lords, pro athletes, rappers. It’s a circus, man. And what brings ’em from the farthest away is the dogfighting. Blood sport.’ Tim shakes his head. ‘It’s enough to make you puke.’

‘Is it working? To pull them in?’

‘Yeah, it’s working. And not just spectators. It’s the competition. Bring your killer dog and fight against the best. We had a jet fly in from Macao last week. A Chinese billionaire’s son brought his own dog in to fight. A Bully Kutta. Ever hear of those? Bastard weighed more than I do. The dog, I mean.’

I try to imagine a dog that outweighs Tim Jessup. ‘Through the Natchez airport?’

‘Hell, no. There’s other strips around here that can take a private jet.’

‘Not many.’

‘The point is, this is a major operation. They’d kill me without a second’s hesitation for talking to you. I’d be dog bait, and that’s a truly terrible way to die.’

Something in Tim’s voice when he says ‘dog bait’ touches a nerve in me. It’s fear, I realize. He’s watching me closely, trying to read my reaction.

‘Why do I feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop?’

Jessup hesitates like a diver just before the plunge. Then he clucks his tongue and says, ‘They’re ripping off the city, Penn.’

This sudden shift in focus disorients me. I settle back against the bricks and watch the wings of an angel twenty yards away. The dew has started to settle; the air around me seems a fine spray that requires wearying effort to pull into my lungs–maybe thick enough for a stone angel to take flight. The low, churning rumble of a push boat on the river far below tells me that sound travels farther than I thought tonight, so I lower my voice when I ask, ‘Who’s ripping off the city?’

Tim hugs himself, rocking slowly back and forth. ‘The people I work for. Golden Parachute Gaming, or whatever you want to call them.’

‘The parent company of the Magnolia Queen is ripping off the city? How could they do that?’

‘By shorting you on the taxes, dude. How else?’

Jessup is referring to the portion of gross receipts that the casino boat pays the city for its concession. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘Oh, right. What was I thinking? I just came out here for old times’ sake.’

‘Tim, how could they short us on taxes without the state gaming commission finding out about it?’

‘That’s two separate questions. One, how could they underpay their taxes? Two, does the gaming commission know about it?’

His cold dissection of what would be a nightmare scenario for me and for the town is getting on my nerves. ‘Do you know the answers?’

‘Question one is easy. Computers. Teenagers have hacked into freaking NORAD, man. Do you really think the network of a casino company can’t be manipulated? Especially by the people who own the network?’

‘And question two?’

‘That’s tougher. The gaming commission is a law unto itself, and I don’t know enough about how it operates to know what’s possible. There are three men on it. How many would have to be bent to provide cover for the operation? I don’t know.’

I’m still shaking my head. ‘The auditing system we use was evolved over decades in Las Vegas. No one can beat it.’

Jessup chuckles with raw cynicism. ‘They say you can’t beat a lie detector, either. Tell you what,’ he says gamely, and in his eyes I see the energy of a man who only comes into his own during the middle of the night. ‘Let’s assume for a second that the gaming commission is clean and go back to question one. There’s no way to distort the take from discrete parts of the casino operation, because everything’s so tightly regulated, like you said. The company’s own security system makes it impossible. Every square inch of the boat is videotaped around the clock with PTZ cameras and wired for sound. The cameras are robotically controlled–from Vegas, not Natchez. A buddy let me into the security center one night, and I saw Pete Elliot fingering his brother’s wife in the corner of the restaurant.’

‘I don’t need to know that crap.’

‘I’m just saying—’

‘I get it. What’s your point?’

‘The only way for the company to rip off the city is to understate the gross. You guys see a big enough number, you figure your cut and don’t look any deeper. Right?’

‘To an extent. The gaming commission looks deeper, though. How much money are we talking about?’

Jessup flicks his lighter and examines his burned thumb, then squints at the flame as though pondering an advanced calculus problem. ‘Not that much, in terms of the monthly gross of a casino boat. But that’s like saying a thousand years isn’t much time in geological terms. We’re talking serious bread for an ordinary human being.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I say. ‘There’s a flaw in your premise. A fatal flaw.’

‘What?’

‘There’s no upside for the casino company. However much they rip us off by, their gain is minuscule compared with the risk. They’re practically minting money down there. Why risk killing the golden goose to steal a couple of extra million a year? Or even a month?’

Jessup smiles sagely. ‘ Now you’re thinking, dude. Doesn’t make sense, does it?’

‘Not to me.’

‘Me, neither.’ He lights another cigarette and sucks on it like a submerged man breathing through a reed. ‘Until you realize it’s not the corporate parent doing the ripping, but a single guy.’

‘One guy? That’s impossible. Casino companies never give an individual that kind of power.’

Tim expels a raft of smoke. ‘Who said they gave it to him?’

‘No way, Timmy. The casinos do everything in their power to avoid that situation.’

‘Everything in their power. And they’re good. But they’re not God.’ He grins with secret pleasure, as though he’s smoking pot and not tobacco. ‘The company makes certain assumptions about people and situations, and that makes them vulnerable.’

I run my hand along my jaw. The fine stubble there tells me it’s getting late. ‘Obviously you have a suspect. Who is it?’

Tim’s smugness vanishes. ‘You don’t want to know that yet. Seriously. For tonight he’s “Mr X,” okay? He Who Must Not Be Named. What matters is that he’s been with the company long enough to put something like this together.’

I know a fair amount about the Golden Parachute Gaming Corporation. But rather than scare Tim off by speculating over which executive might be the one, I’d rather take what he’s willing to give me. For now. ‘Let me get this straight: Mr X is also behind the dogfighting and the girls?’

‘Hell, yeah. The side action’s what brings the whales down here, which in turn makes the Queen all the more profitable, while making Mr X some serious jack on the side.’

I sigh deeply, sickened by the thought that I, who reluctantly courted Golden Parachute and helped bring the Magnolia Queen to town, may also have helped to infect my town with this virus. But rather than blame myself, I turn my frustration on Tim. ‘You picked a hell of a week to come forward. This is balloon-race weekend. We’ve got eighty-seven hot-air balloons coming to town, and fifteen thousand tourists. I’ve got a CEO expecting the royal treatment, which I’ll have to give him to try to pull his new recycling plant here.’

Tim nods. ‘Read about it in the newspaper. Sorry.’

‘Seriously, Tim. I don’t see how you expect me to help you without knowing Mr X’s identity. I can’t do anything without that.’

Tim goes back to his submerged-man routine with the cigarette. In its intermittent glow, I watch his eyes, and what I see there frightens me. The dominant emotion is fear, but mixed with that is something that looks and feels like hatred.

‘What’s your idea of help?’ he says softly.

‘What do you mean?’

His eyes tick upward and lock onto mine. ‘You worked for a big-city DA. You know what I mean.’

‘I saw the pictures,’ I say gently. ‘I know this is bad. That’s why we have to let the authorities handle it.’

‘Authorities?’ He almost spits the word. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said on the phone? You can’t trust anybody around here with this.’

‘My own police department? Do you really believe that?’

Tim looks astounded by my ignorance. ‘They’re not yours. Those cops were on the job before you got into office, and they’ll be there when you’re gone. Same for the sheriff and his boys. To them, you’re just a political tourist. Passing through.’

His casual damnation of local law enforcement disturbs me. ‘I trust a lot of those men. We grew up with most of them, or their fathers.’

‘I’m not saying the cops are crooks. I’m saying they’re human. They’re looking out for themselves and their families, and they like to have a little fun on the side, same as the next guy. How many guys you know wouldn’t look the other way to get a beer-drinking snapshot with a star NFL running back? I’ve been to a couple of these barn burners, okay? I know who I’ve seen there.’

Like the full import of a cancer diagnosis, the ramifications of what Jessup is telling me are slowly sinking in. ‘You’ve personally witnessed Mr X at these dogfights? You’ve seen him encouraging underage prostitution?’

Jessup snorts in contempt. ‘Are you serious? You want to arrest Mr X for promoting dogfighting? On my word? The bastard could get a dozen upstanding citizens to swear he was on the Queen any day or night we name.’

‘Dogfighting is a felony in Mississippi,’ I say evenly. ‘Just watching one is a felony. The maximum sentence is ten years. And with multiple counts? That’s hard time.’

This seems to get Tim’s attention. But even as I point out the facts, I silently concede that Jessup has a point about his being a problematic witness. ‘Obviously, nailing them for defrauding the city would be the lethal hit. Golden Parachute would lose its gaming license, and that would shut down five casinos in one pop. The IRS would eat them alive. The partners would lose hundreds of millions of dollars.’

‘Now you’re talking,’ Tim says bitterly.

‘So how do you propose we handle this? Do you have any documentary evidence, other than the pictures I saw?’

He licks his lips like a nervous poker player. ‘I’m not saying I got nothing, but I need more. I’ve got a plan. I’ve been working on it for a month.’

A sense of foreboding takes hold deep in my chest. Everything he’s told me up to now has been leading to this. ‘Tim, I won’t help you risk your life. I do have experience with this kind of operation, and I’ve seen more than one informer wind up with his throat cut.’

Jessup has the faraway look of a martyr walking into the flames. Without warning he seizes my wrist with a startlingly powerful grip. ‘This is our town, man. That still means something to me. I’m not going to sit still while these carpetbagger motherfuckers ruin everything our ancestors worked to build—’

‘Shhh,’ I hiss, feeling blood coming into my cheeks. ‘I hear you, okay? I understand your anger. But it’s not worth your life. It’s not even worth taking a beating. People in this town were gambling, selling slaves, raping Indian women, and cutting each other’s throats before Paul Revere sold his first silver candlestick.’

Tim’s eyes are glistening. ‘That was centuries ago. What the hell’s wrong with you, Penn? We’re talking about innocent lives. Underage girls and defenseless animals.’ He lowers his voice at last, but the urgency does not leave it. ‘Every week Mr X sends out four pickup trucks with cages in the back, a hundred miles in every direction. When those trucks come back, the cages are filled with house pets–cocker spaniels, poodles, dalmatians, cats. The trainers throw ’em into a hole with starving pit bulls to teach the dogs how to kill, or tie ’em to a jenny to make the dogs run. Then they feed them to the dogs when it’s all over. Every one of those animals gets torn to shreds.’

Even as the shiver goes through me, I recall that a neighbor who lives three houses down from me lost her seven-year-old cocker spaniel last month. She let the dog out to do its business, and it never came back.

‘I didn’t ask for this,’ Tim says stubbornly. ‘But I’m in a position to do something about it. Me, okay? What kind of man would I be if I just turned away and let it go on?’

His question pierces me like a blade driven deep into my conscience. ‘Timmy…shit. What would you say if I told you that the only reason I’m still mayor of this town is that I haven’t figured out how to tell my father I’m quitting?’

Jessup blinks like a stunned child trying to work out something beyond its grasp. ‘I’d say you’re bullshitting me. But…’ A profound change comes over his features. ‘You’re not, are you?’

I slowly shake my head.

‘But why? Are you sick or something?’

He asks this because our last mayor resigned after being diagnosed with lung cancer. ‘Not exactly. Soul sick, maybe.’

Tim looks at me in disbelief. ‘ Soul sick? Are you kidding? I’m soul sick too! Man, you stood up all over this town and told people you were going to change things. You made people believe it. And now you want to quit? The Eagle Scout wants to quit? Why? Because it’s tougher than you thought? Did somebody hurt your feelings or something?’

I start to explain, but before I can get a sentence out, Jessup cuts in, ‘Wait a minute. They came to you with money or something, right? No…they threatened you, didn’t they?’

‘No, no, no.’

‘Bullshit.’ Tim’s eyes flash. ‘They got their claws into you somehow, and all you know to do is run—’

‘Tim!’ I grab his leg and squeeze hard enough to bruise. ‘Shut up and listen for a second!’

His chest is heaving from the excitement of his anger.

I lean close enough so that he can see my eyes. ‘Nobody from any casino has come to me with anything. Not bribes or threats. I wanted to be mayor so I could fix the school system in this town, which has been screwed since 1968. It’s been our Achilles’ heel for nearly forty years. But I see now that I can’t fix it. I don’t have the power. And my child is suffering because of it. It’s that simple, Timmy. Until tonight, all this stuff you’ve told me was just whispers in the wind.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I can’t get those goddamn pictures out of my head.’

He smiles sadly. ‘I told you. I warned you.’

‘Yeah. You did.’

He rubs his face with both hands, so hard that his mustache makes scratching sounds. ‘So, what now? Am I on my own here or what?’

‘You are unless you tell me who Mr X is.’

Jessup’s eyes go blank as marbles.

‘Come on. I know law enforcement people who aren’t local. Serious people. Give me his name, and I’ll get a real investigation started. We’ll nail his hide to the barn door. I’ve dealt with guys like this before. You know I have. I sent them to death row.’

With slow deliberation, Tim stubs his cigarette out on the mossy bricks behind him. ‘I know. That’s why I came to you. But you have to understand what you’re up against, Penn. This guy I’m talking about has got real juice. Just because someone’s in Houston or Washington doesn’t mean they’re clean on this.’

‘Tim, I took on the head of the FBI. And I won.’

Jessup doesn’t look convinced. ‘That was different. A guy like that has to play by the rules. That’s like Gandhi beating the British in India. Don’t kid yourself. You go after Mr X, you’re swimming into the shallow end of Lake St John, hoping to kill an alligator before one kills you.’

This image hits me with primitive force. I’ve cruised the shallow end of the local lake from the safety of a ski boat at night, and there’s no sight quite like the dozens of red eyes hovering just above water level among the twisted cypress trunks. The first thrash of an armored tail in the water triggers a blast of uniquely mammalian fear that makes you pray the boat’s drain plug is screwed in tight.

‘I hear you, okay? But I think you’re a little spooked. The guy is human, right?’

Jessup tugs at his mustache like the strung-out junkie he used to be. ‘You don’t know, man…you don’t know. This guy is smooth as silk on the outside, but he’s got scales on the inside. When the dogs are tearing each other to pieces, or some girl is screaming in the back of a trailer, his eyes turn from ice to fire right in front of you.’

‘Tim—’ I lean forward and grasp his wrist. ‘I don’t understand what you want from me. If you won’t go to the professionals, how do you propose to stop this psycho? What’s your plan?’

A strange light comes into Jessup’s eyes. ‘There’s only one way to take down an operation like this, and you know it.’

‘How’s that?’

‘From the inside.’

Jesus. Tim has been watching too many cop shows. ‘Let me get this straight. The guy you just described as Satan incarnate, you want to wear a wire on?’

Jessup barks out a derisive laugh. ‘Fuck no! These guys carry scanners into the john with them.’

‘Then what?’

He shakes his head with childlike stubbornness. ‘You don’t need to know. But God put me in this position for a reason.’

When informants start talking about God, my alarm bells go off.

‘Tim—’

‘Hey, I’m not asking you to believe like I do. I’m just asking you to be ready to accept what I bring you and do the right thing.’

I feel obligated to try to dissuade him further, but beneath my desire to protect a childhood friend lies a professionally cynical awareness of the truth. In cases like this, often the only way to convict the people at the top is to have a witness on the inside, directly observing the criminal activity. And who else but a martyr would take that job?

‘What are you planning to bring me?’

‘Evidence. A stake to drive through Mr X’s heart, and a knife to cut off the company’s head. Just say you’re with me, Penn. Tell me you won’t quit. Not until we take these bastards down.’

Against all my better judgment, I reach out and squeeze Tim’s proffered hand. ‘Okay. You just watch your back. And your front. Informers usually get caught because they make a stupid mistake. You’ve come a long way. Don’t go getting hurt now.’

Tim looks me full in the face, his eyes almost serene. ‘Hey, I have to be careful. I’ve got a son now, remember?’ As if suddenly remembering something, he seizes my wrist with his other hand, like a pastor imploring me to accept Jesus as my savior. ‘If something does happen, though, don’t blame yourself, okay? The way I see it, I’ve got no choice.’

Your wife and son wouldn’t see it that way, I say silently, but I nod acknowledgment.

Now we sit silently, awkwardly, like two men who’ve cleared the air on some uncomfortable issue and have nothing left to say. Small talk is pointless, yet how else can we part? Cut our palms and take a blood oath, like Tom and Huck?

‘You still dating that lady who runs the bookstore?’ Tim asks with forced casualness.

‘Libby?’ I guess word hasn’t spread to Jessup’s social circle yet. ‘We ended it about a week ago. Why?’

‘I’ve seen her son down on the Queen a few times in the past couple of weeks. Looked high as a kite to me. Must have a fake ID.’

After all I’ve heard tonight, this news falls on me like the last brick of a backbreaking load. I’ve spent too much time and political capital getting my ex-girlfriend’s nineteen-year-old son out of trouble with the law. He’s basically a good kid, but if he’s broken his promise to stay clean, the future holds serious unpleasantness for us both.

Tim looks worried. ‘Was I right to tell you?’

‘Are you sure he was high?’

Suddenly Tim hops to his knees, tense as a startled deer, holding up his hand for silence. As he zeros his gaze somewhere past the wall between us and the river, I realize what has disturbed him: the sound of a car coming up Cemetery Road. We listen to the rising pitch of the engine, waiting for it to crest and fall…but it doesn’t. There’s a grinding squeal of brakes, then silence.

‘Stopped.’ Tim hisses. ‘Right below us.’

‘Take it easy,’ I whisper, surprised by my thumping heart. ‘It’s probably just a police cruiser checking out my car.’

Tim has his feet under him now. Almost faster than I can decipher his movements, he grabs the photos from the ground, shoves them into the corner of the plot, and sets them ablaze with his lighter. ‘Cover the light with your body,’ he says.

As I move to obey, he crab-walks over two graves and lifts his eyes above the rim of the far wall. The photographs have already curled into glowing ashes.

‘Can you see anything?’ I ask.

‘Not yet. We’re too deep in.’

‘Let me go take a look.’

‘ No way. Stay here.’

Exasperated by his paranoia, I get to my feet and step over the wall. Before I’ve covered twenty feet I hear the tinny squawk of a police radio. This brings me immediate relief, but Tim is probably close to bolting. With a surprising rush of anxiety, I trot to the bench beneath the flagpole and peer over the edge of Jewish Hill.

An idling squad car sits behind my Saab. There’s a cop inside it, talking on his radio. He’s undoubtedly running a 10-28 on my license plate. In seconds he’ll know that the car in front of him belongs to the mayor of the city, if he didn’t already know. As I watch, the uniform gets out of his car and switches on a powerful flashlight. He sweeps the beam along the cemetery wall, then probes the hedge just below Jewish Hill. Our officers carry SureFires, and this one is powerful enough to transfix the Turning Angel in its ghostly ballet of vigilance over the dead.

Given a choice between waiting for the cop to leave and walking down to face him, I choose the latter. For one thing, he might not leave; he might call a tow truck instead. For another, I am the mayor, and it’s nobody’s business what I’m doing up here in the middle of the night. I might well be having a dark night of the soul and visiting my wife’s grave.

As the white beam leaves the Turning Angel and arcs up toward me, I jog back to the walled plot that sheltered Tim and me. My old friend has vanished as silently as he appeared. The odor of burnt paper still rides the air, and two tiny embers glow orange in the corner of the plot–all that remains of the evidence in a case I have no idea how to begin working. After all, I’m no longer a prosecutor. I’m only the mayor. And no one knows better than I how little power I truly have.

4

Julia Jessup watches her seven-month-old son sleep in the crib her sister-in-law sent from San Diego. Julia envies her little boy, that he can sleep so soundly while his father is away. A perfect shining bubble of saliva expands from his cherub’s lips as he exhales, then pops on the inspiration. Julia almost smiles, but she can’t quite manage it. Somewhere between her belly and her heart a great fear is working, like a worm eating at her insides. Tim has promised that everything will be all right, that he will return safely from wherever he went, but her fear did not believe him.

Julia has come so far to reach this place, this little haven from the hardness of the world. A hundred years ago, she married her high school boyfriend, the quarterback of St Stephen’s Prep. The school’s golden boy got her pregnant at nineteen, married her a week later, and gave her herpes two weeks before the baby came. Julia discovered this when the baby contracted the virus during delivery and died in agony eight days later. It was hard to hold on to her romantic illusions after that. But she’d tried.

She suffered through the barhopping with his moronic friends and the vacuous sluts they hung out with, his long absences in the woods during deer season, paintball tournaments during the workweek, sweating in a mosquito-clouded bass boat while he fished. But in the end, she’d had to face that she’d bound herself to a boy, not a man, and that any future with him meant sharing him with every trash monkey who caught his eye, and catching whatever STDs she didn’t have yet.

The first years after she divorced him were leaner than she’d known life could be. Julia had come from a good family, but when the oil business crashed in the eighties, her father couldn’t find another way to make a living and ended his erratic job search with a bullet in the head. After her divorce, she was pretty much on her own. She waited tables, worked a cash register, parked cars at parties, and sold makeup to women who paid more for facial creams in a week than Julia paid for a month’s rent. She steered clear of men for the most part, and watched her friends who hadn’t left Natchez screw up in just about every way possible where the opposite sex was concerned. When Julia needed companionship, she chose older men–married ones who had no illusions about where things were headed–and bided her time.

Then she’d met Tim Jessup, or remet him. She’d known him in school, of course, but they’d never dated, since he was three years ahead of her. Back then he’d been one of the cocky ones who thought that the good life lay waiting ahead of him like a red carpet spread by fate. But soon after high school, he’d learned different. Julia hadn’t thought of Tim much after that, not until she took a job serving hors d’oeuvres on the casino boat one night. Tim had watched her from his blackjack table, then waited for her to finish her work. They went for breakfast at the Waffle House, talked about the good old days at St Stephen’s, then, surprisingly, opened up about the not-so-good days that had filled most of their lives since. By the end of that night, Julia had known Tim might be the man she’d been waiting for. There was only one catch. He had a drug problem.

She could see it in his eyes, the itchy anxiety that worsened until he made a trip to the bathroom and returned with a look of serenity. But then he’d disarmed her by admitting it, that first night too. They’d seen a lot of each other after that, and within a month Julia had made a deal with herself. If she could get Tim clean–really clean–then she would take a chance on him. And to her surprise, she had succeeded. Nothing in her life had been tougher, but she’d set her whole being on seeing him through to sobriety, and she’d done it.

The results were miraculous. Tim quit working the boat his druggie friends patronized, hired on with the new outfit, and began working every shift the Magnolia Queen would give him. He’d even talked his father into giving him a loan for a small house, and in his off hours began fixing it up himself, sawing and hammering like a born carpenter, not a privileged surgeon’s son. Julia watched HGTV every chance she got, ripped up the stained carpet of the previous owners, and refinished the hardwood underneath. Installed the bathroom tiles too. Her pregnancy was something they kept to themselves, a treasure they hugged together in the cocoon of their changing house, until they’d gone so far down the road to normalcy that people wouldn’t roll their eyes when she revealed it. By the time she began to show, the change in perception had begun. Even Tim’s father had warmed to her, in his own way. Some days, in the early mornings, or late at night, she would see his silver Mercedes glide past on the lane outside, and she’d know he was checking his son’s progress. When the baby finally came, perfect and round and without flaw because Julia had taken acyclovir for the last month, every pill at the exact moment she was supposed to, the transformation was complete. She could hardly believe this was her life, that by sheer force of will and faith in herself and her husband she could bring goodness out of fear and regret. But she had done it.

If only Tim’s evolution had stopped there….

As her husband slowly regained the bearings he’d lost during his early twenties, he’d begun to experience a kind of emotional fallout. His memory, which had blocked out so much during his lost years, began to fill in the gaps, and waves of guilt and regret would assail him. Tim rediscovered God, which might have been all right had he not acted like a religious convert, more zealous than those born into the faith. He saw choices starkly, as either right or wrong, and despite his own past he judged those who didn’t measure up to his idea of ethical responsibility. It wasn’t a moral prissiness–he didn’t condemn people for the common human lapses–but he began to obsess about the big things in life. Politics. Organized religion. The diamond brokers in Sierra Leone, the starving children in the Sudan, the good Muslims in Iraq. The uneducated blacks right here in Mississippi.

And then it happened. Exactly what, Julia didn’t know. But it was something at work. Tim had witnessed something terrible, or overheard something, and from that night forward he’d been a man possessed. With each passing week he’d grown more withdrawn, more irritable, to the point that she feared he’d begun using again. But it wasn’t that. Tim had apparently discovered something that so outraged him he felt compelled to right the wrong himself. And that terrified her. Tim wasn’t the kind of man to take on that kind of trouble. He was smart, and he was good-hearted, but he wasn’t hard inside, the way her first husband had been. Tim had illusions about people; he wanted them to be better than they were, and you couldn’t fight evil men if you thought that way. You couldn’t win, anyway. Julia had lived enough life to know that.

The only thing that had given her any comfort was Tim telling her that Penn Cage would be helping him. Julia had known Penn in high school too. She’d even kissed him once, beside a car one night at a senior party that she and a friend had sneaked off to. Penn Cage wasn’t like Tim. He wasn’t timid or uncertain; he made decisions and stuck with them, and life had worked out for him. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t suffered; he’d lost his wife to cancer; but everybody paid for the things they got, some way or other. You had to pay just for being alive.

And that, Julia guessed, was what Tim was trying to do. He wanted to make up for all the years he had wasted, for all the things he could have accomplished and had not. It wasn’t for her, she knew, and this both relieved and wounded her. She’d done all she could to prove to Tim that he owed her nothing–nothing except all the time he could give to her and the baby. But that wasn’t enough for him. Tim’s obsession was rooted in his relationship with his father. He felt he had betrayed his father as well as himself, and something was driving him to prove that he was in fact the man his father had dreamed he might one day become.

Julia hopes Tim wasn’t lying about Penn, that he didn’t simply tell her whatever he thought would quiet her while he went off to God-knew-where to earn the right to feel good about himself again. And so she waits, and watches her baby, and prays that someone will take the cross from her husband’s back and carry it for him. For in the inmost chamber of her heart Julia is certain that if Tim goes on alone, he will die before finding the salvation he seeks.

5

I should probably drive straight home from the cemetery, but as Tim predicted, I cannot free my mind from the terrible images in his photographs. Instead, I drive up Linton Avenue, turn on Madison Street, and cruise past the newspaper building, where my old lover once worked as publisher. While Caitlin Masters lived in Natchez, everything she could uncover and verify about the city was printed in the paper. Now, despite the fact that her father still owns the Examiner, much of the investigative fire seems to have gone out of the staff. If Caitlin were still here, I suspect, the rumors that Tim fleshed out tonight would already be halfway to the front page.

I turn on State Street and negotiate a series of right angles on the city’s notorious one-way streets, checking for a tail as I make my way to City Hall. The cop at the cemetery proved easy enough to handle, but I’m not sure he bought my explanation of visiting my wife’s grave. He kept glancing over my shoulder as though he expected a half-dressed woman to appear from among the gravestones beyond the cemetery wall. Of course, he might also have been searching for Tim Jessup, and that’s why I’m keeping my eyes on my rearview mirror as I drive. I’d like to know just how interested the police are in my movements.

Unlike most Mississippi towns, Natchez has no central square dominated by a courthouse or a Confederate soldier on a pillar. The lifeblood of this city has always been the river, and the stately old commercial blocks platted in 1790 march away from it as though with regret, toward onetime plantations now mostly subdivided into residential neighborhoods. City Hall faces Pearl Street and abuts the county courthouse at the rear. The courthouse is the larger of the two buildings, but people often see them as a single structure, since only a narrow alley separates them.

Parking before the cream-colored stone of City Hall, I walk beneath hundred-year-old oaks to the main entrance. The building is usually locked by 5:00 p.m., but the chandelier in the foyer blazes like the ballroom of the Titanic, and I use its light to find the proper key on my ring. A couple of years before I was elected mayor, the previous board of selectmen awarded me a key to the city. This token of recognition didn’t mean much at the time–it was the kind of honor you might dream about as a kid watching a Disney movie–but tonight, unlocking City Hall with the actual key to the building, I feel the crushing weight of my responsibility to the people who elected me.

Upstairs, in my office, I kneel before my safe and open its combination lock. The few sensitive documents I deal with as mayor reside in this safe, among them my file on the Golden Parachute Gaming Corporation, the Los Angeles-based company that owns the Magnolia Queen. Feeling strangely furtive, I slip the thick file inside my button-down shirt before I walk downstairs and lock the door. With the file still tucked against my belly, I drive the ten blocks required to reach my home on Washington Street three blocks away, my eyes alert for police cars.

When I moved back to town, I had the morbid luck to arrive shortly before the patriarch of an old Natchez family died, which resulted in their family home coming up for sale after a century of benign neglect. I bought it the same day, and I’ve never regretted it. An elegant, two-story Federal town house of red brick, it stands at the center of one of the most beautiful enclaves of the city. Town houses of various styles and pedigrees stand along both sides of the street like impeccably dressed ladies and gentlemen from another era, gradually giving way to the Episcopal Church, the Temple B’nai Israel, Glen Auburn–a four-story French Second Empire mansion–and Magnolia Hall, a massive Greek Revival mansion and the headquarters of one of the once-powerful local garden clubs. The town houses aren’t antebellum for the most part, but rather the dwellings of the merchants, lawyers, and physicians who prospered in Natchez in the Victorian era. The entire downtown length of Washington Street is lined with fuchsia-blooming crape myrtle trees, which are tended by ladies obsessively dedicated to their survival.

As I park and exit my car, a faint but steady glow from the second floor of the house across the street catches my eye. My stomach gives a little flip and I pause, trying to recall whether I’ve seen that light in the past few weeks. The question has some importance, for the house still belongs to Caitlin, though she hasn’t lived in it for eighteen months, preferring to spend most of her time in Charlotte, North Carolina, where her father’s newspaper chain is based. But the house remains furnished, and she does not rent it out. Caitlin and I parted on good enough terms that I still possess a key, in theory so that should any kind of emergency befall the house, I could help the proper people to deal with it.

The reality is that for six of the past seven years, Caitlin and I lived as a couple. Her owning a house across the street from mine helped maintain the fiction that we were not ‘living in sin,’ which people still say here, and only half-jokingly. Caitlin often spent the night when Annie was in the house, but Caitlin’s an early riser, and she was usually at work by the time Annie got up to get ready for school. As I remember those mornings now, something catches in my chest. It’s been too long since I felt that relaxed intimacy, and I know my daughter misses it.

For most of the time we were together, Caitlin and I planned to marry. We took it for granted in the beginning, when we still believed that fate had brought us together. We met during the civil rights case that seized control of my life after I returned here, and before the resulting trial ended, we’d discovered that though we were ten years apart in age and quite different on the surface, we were joined as inseparably as siblings beneath the skin. The only tension in our relationship developed later, when living and working in a small Southern town no longer felt charming to Caitlin, but rather like a prison. She was born and raised for the big canvas (her coverage of our case earned her a Pulitzer at twenty-eight), and while Natchez sometimes explodes into lethal drama, for the most part it remains a quiet river town, trapped in an eddy of time and history, changing almost imperceptibly when it changes at all.

My decision to run for mayor threw our differences into stark relief and ultimately made the relationship untenable. Caitlin came to Natchez as a flaming, Ivy League liberal with no experience of living in the South, but after five years here, she’d developed ideas more racist than those of many ‘good ol’ boys’ I’d grown up with, and she was ready to get out. Our sharpest points of contention were (a) whether the city was worth saving, and (b) if so, was I the person to save it? Caitlin claimed that people get the government they deserve, and that Natchez didn’t deserve me. She did, in her view, and added the argument that Annie deserved a culturally richer childhood than she would have here. In short, Caitlin wanted me to leave my past behind. But true Southerners don’t think that way. I was willing to risk being turned into a pillar of salt, if by so doing I could help renew the city and the land that had borne me. More than this, I believed that living closely with my parents would provide my daughter an emotional bedrock that no amount of cultural diversity would ever replace. In the end, I followed my conscience and my heritage, ensuring that my future marriage became the first casualty of my mayoral campaign. Caitlin cried–as much for Annie as for us–then wished me well and went back to North Carolina, to the New South of glass office towers, boutique restaurants, and the Research Triangle. I stayed in the land of kudzu and Doric columns and bottleneck guitars–one short ride away from James Dickey’s Land of Nine-Fingered People.

There’s no denying the light glowing softly through the curtain in the upper room across the way. But if Caitlin has returned to Natchez, she’s most likely come back in some connection with the Balloon Festival. Still, something else might have influenced her unexpected appearance, and it’s worth considering. Ten days ago I ended my relationship with Libby Jensen, after seeing her for nearly a year. Was ten days sufficient time for that news to reach North Carolina? Of course. One e-mail from a gossipy Examiner employee would have done it, and a text message would be even faster. If Caitlin has returned, her timing is certainly suggestive.

The casino file has grown damp under my shirt by the time I climb the porch and reach for my front door. Before my hand touches the knob, the door squeaks open, startling me, and the tenth-grade honor student who babysits Annie speaks uncertainly through the crack.

‘Mr Cage? Is everything okay?’

Because of my experiences with Mia Burke, the senior who used to sit for Annie, I no longer allow babysitters to use my first name. ‘Everything’s fine, Carla. What about here?’

She pulls back the door, revealing her blue-and-white jumper and eyes red from sleep or studying. ‘Yeah. I was kind of scared, though. I heard the car stop, but then you didn’t come in…’

I smile reassuringly and follow her inside, keeping the file pressed inside my shirt with my left hand while I dig for my wallet with my right. Having no idea how long I’ve been gone, I pull a couple of twenties and a ten from my billfold and give Carla permission to go with a wave.

‘Annie did all her homework,’ she says, slinging a heavy backpack over her slight shoulder. ‘Paper’s written.’

‘Did she do a good job?’

‘Honestly?’ Carla laughs. ‘That girl knows words I don’t know. I’d say she’s about one year behind me, gradewise.’

‘I feel the same way sometimes. Thanks again. What about this weekend?’

Carla’s smile vanishes. ‘Um…maybe some late at night, if you need me. But I’m going to be at the balloon races most of the time. They have some decent bands this year.’

‘Okay. Any time you can spare, I’ll pay you extra. This weekend is crazy for me.’

She smiles in a way that doesn’t give me much hope.

After closing the door behind Carla, I pour a tall iced tea from the pitcher in the kitchen fridge, carry it to the leather wing chair in my library, and spread the file open on the ottoman.

Golden Parachute Gaming Corporation pitched itself to the city as the Southwest Airlines of the casino industry. Capitalized by a small, feisty group of partners led by a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, the company evolved a strategy of moving into secondary gaming markets and undercutting the competition’s prices in every way possible, while simultaneously providing personable and personalized service, even to its less moneyed patrons. They run a phenomenally efficient operation, but what’s opened many stubborn doors for them is their practice of forming development partnerships with the communities they move into, building parks, ball fields, community centers, and even investing in the development of industrial parks in some cities. Small town officials eat this up, and Natchez was no exception.

More than anything, though, Golden Parachute’s success in penetrating our market came down to timing. They applied for their gaming license in the aftermath of Toyota’s disastrous decision to build a new plant in Tupelo versus Natchez. Citizens were bitter about the lost jobs and ready to climb into bed with someone else–almost anybody else–on the rebound. Golden Parachute already had successful casinos up and running in Tunica County, near Memphis, and Vicksburg, just sixty miles north of Natchez. With that track record, they had no trouble getting local heavyweights to lobby the state gaming commission to grant a fourth license for Natchez.

Bringing another casino boat to town had not been one of my goals when I ran for mayor. (In truth, none of the floating casinos are navigable vessels; they are barges built to look like paddle wheelers from the era of Mark Twain, but at five times historical scale.) My platform was reforming education and revitalizing local industry. But after considerable persuasion by the board of selectmen, I agreed to help close the casino deal. My reasons were complex: exhaustion in wake of the Toyota failure; a savior complex running on adrenaline after the depletion of my initial inspiration; disillusionment with my colleagues in government and with many of the citizens I was supposed to be serving. I was also frustrated that the board of selectmen were often divided along racial lines: four black votes and four white, with me the deciding factor. I voted my conscience every time, but few people saw it that way, and with every vote, I lost more allies on one side or the other. The only thing the board could agree on was any proposition that could bring money or jobs to their constituencies. And so…Golden Parachute found a receptive audience for its sales pitch.

The problem, as it so often is with casinos, was site approval. Golden Parachute wanted to moor the Magnolia Queen on riverfront property donated to the city by a prominent Natchez family–the Pierces–by means of a complicated trust. One stipulation of that trust was that Pierce’s Landing never be developed as a casino or shopping mall while the matriarch of the family remained alive. Inconveniently for the selectmen, Mrs Pierce had lived to the ripe old age of ninety-eight, and she was still, as the saying goes, as sharp as a tack. That tack lay directly in the path of the inflated giant that was the Golden Parachute deal.

My first instinct was to try to persuade the company to find another property, but the company wouldn’t budge. Golden Parachute wanted the Pierce land, which was not only the last suitable river property within the city limits, but also the finest, barring the Silver Street spot taken by Lady Luck, the first riverboat casino in the state. Predictably, Golden Parachute began making noises about scrapping its plan to come to Natchez, and just as predictably the selectmen went into panic mode. I heard whispers about the new eminent-domain law, which allowed the government to seize private land for commercial development. I viewed this as one of the most anti-American laws ever put on the books, but my fellow officials did not share my feelings. Only Selectman Paul Labry stood with me in resisting this Stalinist move. Desperate to prevent the use of this tactic, Labry and I quietly went into action.

First we met with one of the Pierce heirs, who’d graduated several years ahead of me at St Stephen’s. He got us a copy of the actual document governing the trust, which few people had seen, outside the preservationists who’d helped to write it, and the former mayor, who’d died of lung cancer shortly after leaving office. To my surprise, I discovered that Mrs Pierce possessed the authority to unilaterally revoke the clause preventing casino development. Disturbed by the board’s increasing clamor to seize the land in question, I requested an audience with the grand old dame of Pierce’s Landing.

I met the distinguished lady in a conference room at Twelve Oaks Gardens, an assisted-living facility on the outskirts of town. As the granddaughter of an officer who had served under General J. E. B. Stuart at Gettysburg, Mrs Pierce presided over an entire wing of the facility like a dowager empress. Her children had offered to take her in, but they had all settled in other states, and Mrs Pierce preferred to remain in the city she’d lived in all her life, and to ‘be around people’ rather than to live in her mansion with round-the-clock nurses (or ‘watchers,’ as she called them, as in ‘They’re here to watch me have my final heart attack.’) Mrs Pierce granted me the audience because my father had treated her for more than thirty years, and because, she told me, she had enjoyed several of my novels on tape. At ninety-eight, she confessed with some embarrassment, her eyes were not what they had once been.

For the best part of an hour, I made the case for allowing a casino riverboat to be moored to her ancestral land. Early in our conversation, I discovered that Mrs Pierce was neither a religious zealot nor a hidebound moralist. She confided that her father had hated gambling in all its forms, not least because his brother had lost a fine home and several hundred acres of farmland during a drunken poker game. She also mentioned that forty years earlier she’d become aware of quite a bit of ‘unpleasantness’ going on across the river, all related to gambling. One of her maids had actually been accosted on the road by men who’d believed she was a prostitute. After realizing the basis of her objections, I pointed out that legalized casino gambling was far different from the illicit juke-joint operations she remembered. Gambling was now a legitimate industry of strictly regulated corporations that had brought prosperity to our struggling state. In making this argument, the numbers were all on my side.

Legalized casino gambling lifted Mississippi’s Tunica County–once the poorest in the United States–from wretched poverty to wealth in fifteen years. A rural county serviced by open sewer ditches in 1991, Tunica has doubled its per capita income while going from two thousand total jobs to over seventeen thousand. They’ve invested $40 million in school improvements, poured millions into police and fire protection, built a sports arena, doubled the size of their library, and invested over $100 million in their road system. Statewide, the verdict on gambling is beyond question. Since 1992, the casino industry has come to provide nearly 5 percent of the state’s total tax revenue.

Despite Mrs Pierce’s suspicion that ‘vice is vice, whatever cloak it wears,’ I knew I was making headway when she told me that she’d always chastised her friends who had blindly resisted change and felt they had hobbled the city’s efforts to keep pace with the rest of the country. I knew I was almost home when she said softly that she’d never imagined she would gaze down the hill that led to her ‘home place’ and see a neon casino sign. I promised her that if that was her final objection, she never would. The city would submit all of Golden Parachute’s signage plans to her for approval. My mouth fell open when the old belle said she wouldn’t carp about the sign if the company would devote one-half of 1 percent of its revenues from the Magnolia Queen to helping the city’s underprivileged children. (Mrs Pierce actually said ‘colored,’ but her heart was in the right place.) In the end the company agreed to one-quarter of 1 percent, but that has amounted to $162,000 this year.

Two days after our meeting, Mrs Pierce revoked the restrictive clause, and the Golden Parachute casino deal went forward. This made me a hero to the board of selectmen, but I felt like a heel. What I feel tonight is immeasurably worse. Mrs Pierce died one month after revoking that clause, and if even half of Tim’s allegations are true, it’s a mercy that she did. The town at large never learned that it was I who opened the final gate to Golden Parachute, but that does not lessen my guilt. Tonight I feel more like I lifted our hoopskirt and pulled down our petticoats.

Nevertheless, dogfighting, drug use, and prostitution went on here before the Magnolia Queen arrived, just as they do in every city in America. The thesis that Golden Parachute is defrauding the city of millions of dollars in taxes is an accusation of a different order. This kind of crime, while not as disturbing on the surface as the others, is more harmful in the end, because it impacts every man, woman, and child in the city. If this allegation is true, then food is being stolen from the mouths of the children Mrs Pierce wanted to help.

Yet this is the part of Tim’s tale that I find impossible to believe. I don’t know enough about computers to judge the feasibility of distorting the casino’s gross receipts, but even if such fraud were possible, the central question remains: Why would Golden Parachute risk it? Especially now.

Forty-six days ago, Hurricane Katrina roared over the floating gold mines that were the casinos at Biloxi and Gulfport and left behind something resembling Omaha Beach on D-day. A single storm wiped out a $100-million-a-month industry. But 150 miles to the northwest, in Natchez, the Magnolia Queen and her sister casinos simply battened down their hatches and rode out the winds and rain. The city sustained severe damage, and some areas were without power for more than a week, but the Magnolia Queen was running on her generators the day after the hurricane. And no sooner had some refugees gotten settled into the shelters at the local churches and school gymnasiums than they found time and means to get down to the river and gamble away what little money they’d brought with them (or had been given by the churches). That image brings a sick feeling to the pit of my stomach, but more than that, it tells me that the partners of Golden Parachute Gaming would have to be insane to risk their gaming license to pick up a few extra million when God is going to dump ten times that amount into their coffers over the next year.

Moreover, until tonight, the company has given me no reason to regret bringing them to town. They’ve paid their taxes promptly and followed through on the community investments they promised. I enjoy cordial relations with their general manager, an Englishman named Sands who works the city with the professional charm one would expect from a manager in Las Vegas, not Mississippi. The only part of Golden Parachute that’s ever rubbed me the wrong way is their chief of security, a coarse Irishman named Seamus Quinn, who looks and talks like an overdressed thug from the London underworld. But Sands vouched for Quinn’s credentials, and I decided my problem with the security man was more a matter of style than anything, like my problem with some cops. The bottom line is that I’ve watched Golden Parachute operate without incident in every market they serve. So I find myself at a loss when trying to reconcile Tim Jessup’s allegations with what I know of the company.

My eyes are blurring with fatigue near the end of the file, but I blink myself awake when I find a note I wrote in the margin of one document over a year ago. In red ink, on a copy of Golden Parachute’s original application for its gaming license, I see the words Voting trust. % voting power reflect actual ownership? Something Tim said tonight makes this note resonate within me, and suddenly my only serious suspicion about the original Golden Parachute deal returns to me.

By law, anyone who plans to own more than 5 percent of a casino in Mississippi must submit to a comprehensive investigation of his past. This is no simple background check; no aspect of the prospective owner’s life is off-limits, and the subject must pay for the investigation himself. The gaming commission maintains a full staff of investigators for this purpose, and they will not hesitate to fly to the Philippines to subpoena the contents of a safe-deposit box if they deem it necessary to determine the ‘suitability’ of an applicant. In fact, most rejections of gaming applications have been based on the ‘unsuitability’ of investors.

During the Golden Parachute deal, I learned from talking to an old law school classmate that there is a way around this statute. Lawyers can establish a ‘voting trust,’ which may own all or part of a casino. Behind such a trust lies a group of investors with a private understanding of who owns what percent of the company, but on paper 95 percent of the voting power is held by the one partner who has nothing to fear from a background investigation. The other partners are named in the application, but since on paper they own only the remaining 5 percent between them, they are not subject to similar scrutiny. A neat system. But what happens, I asked my friend, if the squeaky-clean front partner decides to actually start using his voting power to make the decisions? My friend laughed and said that because most of the ‘five percent partners’ tend to have names that end with vowels, this rarely happens. When it does, the front partner usually winds up inside a fifty-five-gallon drum in a convenient body of water.

Golden Parachute Gaming is owned by a voting trust called Golden Flower LLC. Flipping to the back of the application, I see that it was signed only by the front partner–the L.A. entertainment lawyer–and not the ‘five percenters.’ What stuck in my mind tonight was Tim’s comment about a Chinese billionaire’s son flying in from Macao to fight his dog in Mississippi. Why, I wondered, would a billionaire come so far to do something he could easily do in Macao? Was he simply seeking new competition? After all, for a man with a private jet, distance means little. But I’m almost sure I remember that two of the five percent partners in Golden Parachute were Chinese. By the time I learned this, the deal was so far along that I gave it little thought. I simply made this note in the margin and moved on, caught up in the next day’s business. No one wanted to rock the boat by then, not even, apparently, the gaming commission. But tonight, I realize, I need an answer to the question I wrote in this margin so long ago.

Who really owns Golden Parachute?

With a last swallow of diluted tea, I close the file and slip it behind my collection of Patrick O’Brian novels on the third shelf. As I walk upstairs, my thoughts and feelings about what I heard in the cemetery start to separate, like solids precipitating from a solution. On one hand, I don’t doubt that Tim witnessed the horrors he described. On the other, if someone shook me awake at 4:00 a.m. and asked whether I was sure that Jessup hadn’t started snorting coke again–or heroin or crystal meth or whatever he was doing before Julia Stanton got him straightened out–I would be hard-pressed to say I was. Most people who know us both would assume the worst about Tim. I don’t, but it wouldn’t be hard to convince myself that he’s dreamed up a conspiracy in which he can play the hero to belatedly make up for the real-life drama in which he played the villain.

During his first year at Ole Miss, Tim agreed to host two prospective freshmen from St Stephen’s Prep, our alma mater, during a football weekend. Like a lot of other students, he made several highspeed trips to the county line to procure cold beer, which was not legally available in Oxford, Mississippi (and still isn’t). During his third beer run, Tim drove his Trans Am eighty-eight feet off the highway and into a pecan tree standing at the edge of a cotton field. Tim and one of the high school boys were wearing their seat belts; the third boy was not. The impact ejected him from the backseat through the front windshield and into the branches of the tree, where with any luck he died instantly. Because of the alcohol found at the scene, both sets of parents sued Jessup’s father, and Tim served a year in jail for manslaughter. Pleading the case down from vehicular homicide probably cost Dr Jessup all the goodwill he’d built up in twenty years of practicing medicine, not to mention the cash that must have changed hands under the table. But despite the light sentence, things were never really the same for Tim after that. As his life slipped further and further off track, people blamed drugs, weakness of character, even his father, but in my gut I always knew it was the wreck that had ruined him.

Now, with his new wife’s help, Tim seems to have clawed his way back to a decent life. But a casino boat is probably a tough place for a guy with his past to stay clean. Stop, says a voice in my head. Stop blaming the messenger. Just because you don’t want to hear what he said doesn’t mean it’s not true. Remember the pictures.

A mangled dog. A half-naked teenager serving beer. A middle-aged man screwing the young girl on a board floor while four other men drink and watch. I saw those three images for only seconds, but I’ll never forget them. When I close my eyes and recall them in detail, I feel nauseated. And that nausea is the reason I promised Tim that I’d help him.

As I walk down the hall to check on my daughter, a different sensation chills me. Fear. Raw fear. After twelve years in the Houston DA’s office, it’s a familiar feeling. As I told Tim, I’ve run investigations using confidential informants, and more than one ended badly for the person wearing the wire. Highly trained FBI agents trip up under the pressure of living double lives, and even the best undercover agents can be burned by a random event. The reality of tonight’s meeting with Tim cannot be pushed aside: by encouraging him to proceed with his plan, I could be sending an impassioned amateur to his death.

I pause beside Annie’s door and peek through the crack. A pale green night-light limns her form, bunched beneath the covers. That she can sleep alone in her own room brings me an abiding sense of peace. After Sarah died, Annie not only had to sleep in my bed, but also had to be in direct physical contact with me. If her hand fell from my arm or hip, she’d jerk awake with night terrors. The peace she now enjoys is a testament to the soundness of my decision to bring her back here. Living near my father and mother brought Annie the gift once enjoyed by all societies that revered the extended family: a profound sense of security. That decision cost me my future with Caitlin, but Annie’s recovery has given me the strength to deal with that loss. And yet…tonight a nagging voice echoes endlessly beneath my conscious thoughts: We’ve stayed too long…

After I undress and brush my teeth, I walk to my bedroom window and gaze across sixty feet of space to the second floor of Caitlin’s house. Is she there? Did she fall asleep with the light on? Or is she down at the Examiner offices, badgering the editor about the layout of tomorrow’s paper? This thought brings a smile, but then I realize Caitlin could just as easily be dancing at one of the bars on Main Street, or exercising her gift for irony at the expense of some pompous, nouveau-riche redneck who threw a balloon-race party. I feel a compulsion to walk down and check her garage for a rental car. Has eighteen months of separation from her turned me into a stalker? The reality is that she could pull up to her house right now with a man and disappear inside for a night of recreational sex behind that familiar curtain.

Christ. As selfish as it sounds, this image has a more violent effect on my adrenal glands than the photos I viewed in the cemetery. If I’m this jealous, can I possibly be over her? One thing is sure: I’ll be damned–truly damned–if I stand here mooning at her light like a latter-day Gatsby, until the very scene I fear transpires before me. Caitlin left me because I believed the path to my future lay through the past. So what the hell is she doing back here, where the past is never past?

As I drift toward sleep, the images from Tim’s cell phone snapshots rise again, but they seem remote, like evidence dropped on my desk by cops I dealt with in Houston. Can young girls be raped and dogs be slaughtered within sight of the town I love so dearly? In the foggy frontier between sleep and wakefulness the idea seems farfetched, yet one burden of my legal experience is the knowledge that savage crimes occur in the most benign settings, that screams go unheard, that pleas for mercy are ignored, even relished.

When thoughts like these trouble my passage into sleep, I use a trick taught me by a sixties-era rock musician I saved from going to jail in Houston. Whenever drug withdrawal sent him into paroxysms of pain and need, whenever the demons came for him, he would picture a virgin field of ice, blue-white and impossibly clean, so remote that no footprint had ever marred its surface. He would focus on that scene until he felt himself inside it, and sometimes peace would come. To my surprise, I found this sometimes works for me as well. But tonight, as I carefully construct my Zen-like sanctuary, I cannot keep the demons out. Dark shapes move beneath the ice like predators prowling a vast sea, ever alert for the shadows of prey on the white sheet above.

Tonight I’m on the ice, I realize, one more shadow to be hunted. A penumbra the size of a small car flashes beneath me, and I run. Though I lie supine in bed, my heart thumps in my chest, and the blood rushes through my veins. Far ahead, I see a blue mark on the ice. A hole. Beside it Tim Jessup stands shirtless and blue from the cold. As I crunch toward him, he removes his pants and looks down into the hole. I shout for him to wait, but he doesn’t hear. He sits down, dangles his legs in the water, then, with a gentle shove like a boy edging himself off a roof, drops through the blue-black opening. I start to scream, but a new vision stops me. Stark against the horizon, a wolf stands watching me. His fur is bone white, and his eyes gleam with unsettling intelligence. I try to stop running, but I slide forward, hopelessly out of control. As I come to rest, the wolf begins to move, walking at first, then loping toward me with single-minded purpose. His eyes transfix me, and as I try to force my legs to backpedal, I hear Tim’s hysterical voice crying, ‘You don’t know, man! You don’t know….’

6

Julia sits at her kitchen table, staring at a Ziploc sandwich bag filled with speckled pills and white powder. She found it an hour ago, when the running toilet got on her nerves badly enough to make her remove the tank cover. The baggie was sealed inside a small Tupperware container weighted with a handful of bolts. The edge of the Tupperware lid was keeping the toilet flapper from sealing. Tim had been clean for so long that the first moments after lifting the container out of the tank filled Julia with confusion. But after removing the lid, she’d felt her universe imploding as surely as if a black hole had swept into it.

She’d set the baggie on the kitchen table and simply stared at it for a while, shivering with anger and her sense of betrayal. But mostly she felt fear, because she hadn’t seen any sign that Tim was using again. To stop her hands from shaking, she got out her crocheting needle and tried to crochet the way her grandmother had taught her, but her mind was unable to direct her fingers. So she waited, her gaze moving from the dope on the table to the clock on the stove, an endless motion of eyes that offered no solace.

Julia tenses now, listening for sound from the baby’s room. It’s 3:45 a.m., almost time for a feeding. She has preternatural hearing when it comes to her baby; Tim is constantly amazed by the things she picks up. It’s like she’s bound to the child by an invisible thread, a silken strand like a spider’s web, and if little Timmy moves, it pulls something down in Julia’s belly. She knows what that something is.

When you lose a child and God grants you another, you take no chances. She feels the same way about Tim, but on that score there isn’t a lot she can do. Someone has to stay with the baby. She’s been worried recently, but not about drugs–not for a long time. It infuriates her to think that she was afraid for Tim tonight. Before she found that baggie, she’d believed he was doing something about whatever he’d seen at work, and trying to protect her by not telling her details. But he’d been almost three hours late even then. She feels so stupid that she wants to tear out her hair or whip herself.

As if Penn Cage would stay out this late with Tim! Penn is home in bed with Libby Jensen, or somebody like her. Someone smart who can still laugh with innocence in her eyes, someone who has her shit together. Julia wonders briefly why Penn left Libby. Maybe Libby doesn’t have her shit quite as together as she seems to. Maybe she doesn’t really understand what’s important in life. Or maybe Penn just grew bored with her, the way men do.

Julia hadn’t thought Tim was bored with her, but there’s the dope, right there on the table. What else could it mean? That he can’t cope? With what ? With happiness? With a loving wife and a beautiful son? This thought terrifies her. Julia once thought Tim was smarter than she, and he is, in book smartness. But what good is that when the issue is survival, as it has been for them? Julia’s common sense and fortitude have gotten them through some tough times. To sit facing the prospect of reliving the hell she thought long behind them is almost more than she can bear. She has gone from fury to terror and back a thousand times. The pills make her wonder about other women. A woman might push Tim back to using, if she was an addict, a woman from the boat, maybe—

An unfamiliar scraping sound brings Julia to full alertness, the yarn stretched taut between her fingers and the hook. That noise didn’t come from the baby’s room–she’s sure of that. It sounded like someone raising the window in the guest room at the back of the house.

She swallows hard, then goes to the cabinet above the stove and takes down the pistol Tim stole from his father’s safe back when he was using. He’d tried to give it back later, but his father told him to keep it. The gun is heavy and black, but Julia grips it firmly in her flexed fist and tiptoes to the back of the house.

Terror hits her, gluing her bare feet to the floor. She can hear shoes moving behind the door. They creak as the intruder shifts his weight. Could it be the police? No–they would crash through the door. It might be another junkie, coming to steal Tim’s stash. When the window slides back down, Julia tightens her finger on the trigger and almost fires through the door.

She’s on the verge of bolting for the baby’s crib when she realizes that the intruder must be Tim, because there’s no light on in the guest room, yet the person inside is moving with assurance. She slides back three steps and aims the pistol at the door. If it opens and anyone but Tim appears, she will fire. She hears a muttered curse, and then the door opens.

Tim jerks as though he’s been hit with a cattle prod when he sees the gun pointed at his face. Then suddenly he is apologizing, begging her to forgive him. She’s so angry that she wants to shoot him, but her relief is even stronger.

‘Where were you?’ she cries in a squelched scream. ‘It’s four in the morning!’

‘Hey, hey,’ he says soothingly, throwing some balled-up clothes onto the floor. ‘It’s going to be all right now.’

‘Bullshit!’ she hisses. ‘I almost shot you! You fucking liar! Liar liar LIAR!’

Tim’s forehead wrinkles with puzzlement. ‘What are you talking about? I’ve been with Penn, honey. You don’t want to know more than that.’

Julia wipes her eyes with a quivering hand and looks at him the way she used to when she had to manage every moment of his life to keep him from sliding back into the abyss. She means to ask about the drugs, but what she says is ‘Just with Penn?’

Something in the quick blinking of his eyes tells her that whatever follows is going to be a lie. As she turns away, the fine cracks that have accumulated in her trust over the past weeks give way, and the true fragility of her existence is revealed. She stifles a wail, then goes to the kitchen cupboard and takes out a bottle of Isomil to heat on the stove.

She now knows that what she told herself after leaving her first husband was a lie. If a man ever cheats on me again, I’ll leave him in a second. So easy to say, but with a baby in the nursery things get a lot more complicated.

‘Julia?’ Tim says awkwardly.

If he tries to approach her, she will move away to avoid smelling another woman on him. ‘There’s something for you on the table,’ she says coldly.

‘Huh?’

‘The table!’ She watches the gas flame glow at the edge of the pot.

‘Oh, God,’ Tim breathes. ‘Julia—’

‘Mm-hm?’

‘It’s not what you think.’

‘It’s not? That’s not dope on the table? That’s not Vicodin and cocaine?’

‘No. I mean…it is, yeah. You know it is.’

‘Let me guess. It’s not yours, right? You’re just holding it for somebody.’

Hearing the floor creak, she holds up a hand to ward him off. He stops.

‘Baby, I know what you think, but that stuff is part of what Penn and I are doing.’

Even Julia is surprised by the harshness of her laughter. ‘Oh, right. I understand now. You and the mayor are using a bag of dope to save the city.’

There’s a brief silence. Then Tim says, ‘Actually that’s about it. Penn doesn’t know about that part of it, but it’s the only way. That’s all I can really tell you now. Anything else would be dangerous. In a few days, though, I should be able to explain it to you.’

‘If you’re not in jail, you mean?’

Tim sighs in what sounds like exhaustion. ‘I just wish you’d believe me. Haven’t I earned that yet?’

Julia grips the pot handle with her shaking hands. Part of her wants to throw the hot water on him, to scald him for lying to her. But part of her wants to believe. Tim sounded like he was telling the truth about the drugs, and she truly hasn’t seen any signs of his being high. But he’s lying about something–that she knows.

‘Julia?’

‘You’re home now,’ she snaps, her eyes locked onto the milk bottle warming in the pot of water. ‘Whatever you’re doing, get it done, so we can get back to living.’

Tim keeps his distance. ‘Okay.’

‘All right,’ she says, cutting off further discussion. ‘Go get Timmy, please. You know what time it is. He’s going to start crying any second.’

The kitchen is so small she can feel Tim nodding in the shadows. ‘Okay,’ he mumbles in surrender.

Julia opens the bottle and touches some hot milk to the inside of her wrist. She knows what’s important.

7

I come awake swatting at my bedside table like a man battling a horsefly. According to the alarm clock, I got four hours of sleep. It’s all I can do to walk blindly into the shower and stand under scalding spray until my synapses seem to be firing normally. After making sure Annie is awake, I dress a little sharper than usual, since I have to spend at least two hours giving Hans Necker, the visiting CEO, a tour of sites for his recycling plant. Annie gives me a thumbs-up when I walk into the kitchen, a rare seal of approval for my day’s outfit. She’s eating cereal and some garlic cheese grits my mother made yesterday. I finish off the cheese grits, drink the cup of coffee Annie has made me, and follow her out to the car, so exhausted that I forget to glance into Caitlin’s driveway for a car.

Annie is uncharacteristically quiet during the ride to St Stephen’s, but as we near the turn for the school, I discover why.

‘I dreamed about Caitlin last night,’ she says softly.

‘Did you?’ I wonder whether my daughter could have seen or heard something across the street that told her Caitlin might be in town.

Annie nods with slow deliberation. As I watch her from the corner of my eye, it strikes me that the topless teenager serving beer in Tim’s photograph was probably only four years older than my daughter. This realization is freighted with such horror that I have to clear my throat and look away. Annie knows nothing of such things yet, or at least I hope she doesn’t. Right now one of her deepest concerns is the women in my life.

‘Have you ever dreamed about Caitlin before?’ I ask.

‘Yes. Not for a long time, though.’

‘What was last night’s dream about?’

Annie keeps her eyes forward. ‘I don’t want to say.’

Strange. ‘Why not? Was it scary?’

‘Not at first. But then it was, kind of.’

Recalling my own nightmare of the ice field and the wolf, I turn into the school’s driveway and pull up to the door of the middle school building. ‘Sometimes things are less scary if you talk about them.’

Annie looks at me with her mother’s eyes. ‘I just want to think about it for a while.’

Her enigmatic expression tells me she’s already beyond my understanding. ‘You know what’s best for you, I guess.’

She gets out and shoulders her backpack like a younger version of her babysitter, but as she walks through the big doors, I see her mother in every sway of her body. It’s moments like these–the most commonplace events–that hit me hardest, reminding me that widower is more than an archaic word. As my eleven-year-old disappears into the halls of the same school I attended at her age, I wish fervently that the woman who supplied the other half of Annie’s DNA could have lived to see who she’s becoming.

‘Baby girl,’ I whisper to the breath-fogged window, ‘Mama sees you.’

In this affirmation lies a hope that I’ve never quite been able to sustain, yet still I continue to affirm it. I don’t believe Sarah sits in heaven looking benevolently down upon our daughter; but I do believe she survives within Annie–in her face, her voice, in her quick perception and even temperament. In my years with Caitlin, seeing these avatars of my wife in my daughter brought pleasure, not pain. But now, alone again, I find that each memory carries a sharp edge on its trailing side. Whatever brings you comfort can also bring you pain.

I turn onto Highway 61 and force my thoughts to the business of the city, which takes more effort than I would have believed possible two years ago.

Whoever said, ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ must have served as mayor of a small town. If there were ever a case of being punished with one’s dream, being elected mayor of Natchez is it. The mayor of a city like Houston has a certain amount of insulation from his electorate, which he can justify in the name of security. But when you’re mayor of a small town, every mother’s son believes your time is his, no matter where you are or what you might be doing. A call from a Fortune 500 company might be followed by an irate visit from a man whose neighbor’s goats keep eating his rosebushes. If you keep your sense of humor, you can tolerate these situations with equanimity, but I’ve been having difficulty maintaining mine for some time now.

Today it’s neither goats nor roses, but a Minnesota millionaire with a bold–or possibly crazy–scheme to recycle waste from all the cities along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Hans Necker plans to gather aluminum, plastic, and paper refuse, compress it at collection points, then float the resulting cubes downstream on barges to a recycling facility at Greenville or Natchez or Baton Rouge–wherever he ultimately decides to locate his plant. One thing is sure: Katrina just scratched New Orleans off his short list. We have three potential sites for such a facility in Natchez, all close to one another. Despite this, Necker has chartered a helicopter to view them, as well as the city and its environs. Even the thought of spending hours bobbing and pitching over the city in a chopper gives me a mild case of airsickness, but what choice do I have? Hans Necker wants a sky tour from the mayor, so a sky tour he will get.

Halfway to the airport, Paul Labry, one of the few selectman I consider a friend, texts me that Necker is running late. The CEO has already spent more time in Greenville than he’d expected to, and the selectmen are drawing all sorts of negative conclusions from this. I can’t get too stirred up about it. Compared to what I’d have to deal with if Tim Jessup were to uncover proof of his allegations, losing a possible recycling plant seems like small potatoes.

With the jarring synchronicity I experience so often in life, my cell phone vibrates against my thigh. I take it out, expecting another update from Labry, but I find a text message from a number I don’t know. I don’t even recognize the area code. When I click READ, the words make my mouth go dry.

Xing the Rubicon. Stay close to ur fon & n range of a tower. Don’t respond 2 this msg! Mrs Haley.

‘Shit,’ I whisper. Mrs Haley taught Tim Jessup and me Latin in the eighth grade. Crossing the Rubicon? What the hell is Tim playing at? I figured he’d wait at least a few days to try whatever it is he’s been planning. Doesn’t he understand how important this weekend is to the city? ‘Shit,’ I say again, unable to get my mind around the idea that Jessup could be committing any number of felonies at this moment, endangering both himself and the future of the casino industry in Mississippi.

‘Tim, you crazy son of a bitch,’ I mutter, and start to reply to his message with a warning. But before I hit SEND, caution wins out over anxiety, and I shove the phone deep into my pocket.

Locking my car, I march out onto the tarmac where a few single-engine planes wait in lonely silence. There isn’t much to see at the airport. Natchez hasn’t had steady commercial service since the 1970s, when the oil business was booming and the DC-3s of Southern Airways flew in and out every day. I remember being led aboard one of the sturdy old planes by a pretty stewardess when my parents took my sister and me to London as children. I’ve always believed that trip generated my sister Jenny’s love of Britain, a love that eventually pulled her away from us for good. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the buffeting wind from the big propellers as they revved up to carry us to the Pan Am 747 waiting in New Orleans. Two slices of Americana gone forever.

I need that prop wash this afternoon. Last night’s wind died this morning, and the sun blazes white over the runways, roasting me as I check the northern sky for Hans Necker’s Gulfstream IV. The lack of wind was good for the Balloon Festival’s ‘media flight’ this morning, but it sucks for a man wearing a long-sleeved button-down, even Egyptian cotton. The humidity in south Mississippi could drown a desert dweller if he breathed too fast.

After shedding another pint of sweat, I finally spy a silver glint in the sky far upriver. As Necker’s jet descends toward me, I hear the whup-whup-whup of a helicopter approaching from the south. The Gulfstream circles and executes its approach from the southeast, landing as gracefully as the first duck of winter on a dawn-still pond. As the jet taxies up to the small terminal, a blue Bell helicopter descends toward the tarmac twenty yards away from me. Then the aft door of the Gulfstream opens and the steps unfold to the ground with a hydraulic hum.

Hans Necker emerges alone, a stocky, red-faced man of about sixty with a grip of iron. ‘Penn, Penn! Face-to-face at last,’ he says, walking exuberantly while we shake hands. ‘Sorry to be late, but we made up most of the time in flight.’

I greet Necker with as much enthusiasm as I can muster while he guides me past the tail of his jet and toward the settling chopper. Straight to business, then. Suits me. The sooner we go up, the sooner we get back.

The moment the chopper’s skids touch down, Necker yanks open the side door, pushes me into the vibrating craft, and climbs in next to me. The pilot points at two headsets lying on the seat. I slip one on, then grip the handle to my left in anticipation of takeoff.

‘Take her up, Major!’ Necker shouts in my crackling headset.

The chopper rises like a leaf on a gust of wind. Then its nose dips and we start forward, rapidly gathering speed as we climb into the blue-white sky.

‘Penn,’ Necker says over the intercom link, ‘our pilot’s Danny McDavitt. Flew in Vietnam.’

‘Good to meet you,’ I tell the back of the graying head in front of me.

‘You too,’ says a voice of utter calm.

I recognize McDavitt’s name from an incident about six months ago involving a helicopter crash-landing in the river. There was some talk about the pilot and a local doctor’s wife, but there’s so much talk like that all the time that I only pay attention if it involves me or the city. The idea of a crash awakens a swarm of butterflies in my stomach, but in the sixty seconds it takes us to sight the Mississippi River to the west, Danny McDavitt convinces me that he’s an extension of the machine carrying us, or that the machine is an extension of his will. Either way, I’m happy, because this chopper flight is the first I’ve ever endured without my stomach going south on me.

‘How did the media flight go this morning?’ Necker asks, his face pressed against the glass beside him.

‘Great!’ I reply too loudly. ‘Weather looks good for most of the weekend. Except maybe Sunday.’

‘Good, good.’

‘How was your visit to Greenville?’

‘Fine. Got some good people up there, and they really want the plant. I still like this place, though,’ Necker says almost wistfully. ‘It’s got a romance to it that the other cities don’t have–apart from New Orleans, and there’s no possibility of making that work now.’

I figured as much, but it’s a relief to hear it confirmed.

‘I did an overflight three days after the levees broke,’ he says, looking down at a string of barges on a bend in the river below. ‘Hauled some relief supplies down to Biloxi. Christ, it looked like the End of Days down there. There were still people stranded on the interstate. I couldn’t believe it.’

I shake my head but make no comment. The enormity of the havoc wreaked by Katrina is beyond words. We do what we can, then start again the next day. ‘You want to view the industrial-park sites first? Or look at the city?’

‘Let’s head straight down to the old Triton Battery site. I’m pressed for time today. Okay with you, Major?’

‘It’s your nickel,’ McDavitt replies.

On any other day, Necker’s haste might worry me, but today I’ll take any excuse to get time alone with my thoughts. As we drone southward, following the vast river, the city unfolds beneath us like an Imax film, the classic city on a hill, one of only three on the eastern side of the Mississippi from Cairo to New Orleans. From two thousand feet, you can see the nineteenth-century scale of Natchez, the church steeples still taller than all but two commercial buildings; yet we’re still low enough to take in the Gone With the Wind aura of the grand mansions set amid the verdant forests of the old plantations. A year ago I could rattle off our claims to fame with poetic enthusiasm: how Natchez in 1840 had more millionaires per capita than any city in America; how we survived the Civil War with our property intact, if not our pride; and how, after the white gold of cotton failed, the black gold of oil replaced it. But experience has drained my enthusiasm, and my ambivalence is difficult to mask.

Still…a more picturesque American town could not be found anywhere. For sheer beauty Natchez is unmatched along the length of the river; with its commanding site above the river Mississippi it surpasses even New Orleans, and one would have to travel to Charleston or Savannah to find comparable architecture. But gazing down from this helicopter, I no longer see the city I knew during the first eighteen years of my life, nor even the town I found when I returned seven years ago. Now I see Natchez through the mayor’s eyes, and what I see is a town crippled by a mistake made thirty years ago, when the majority of whites pulled out of the public school system in response to forced integration. A city whose public schools are 90 percent filled with the descendants of slaves, and whose four private schools struggle to provide a superior but redundant education to mostly white students, leavened by a few lucky African-Americans (the children of affluent professionals or dedicated middle-class parents–or those kids recruited to play football) plus the majority of Asians and Indians in the county, who avoid the public school system if they can. Changing this state of affairs was my primary reason for running for mayor, for until it is changed, we’re unlikely to attract any new industry larger than Hans Necker’s as-yet-unborn recycling plant. But thus far I have failed in my quest–publicly and miserably.

Necker asks a lot of questions as we fly, and I answer without going into detail. Every road, field, park, school, and creek below holds indelible memories for me, but how do you explain that to a stranger? Necker seems like the kind of guy who’d like to hear that sort of thing, but the truth is, I’m simply not in the mood to sell. That’s one good thing about casino companies: you don’t have to sell them. They come to the table ready to deal. And like the plain girl dreading prom month, we can’t afford to be too picky about whom we say yes to. We got our prison the same way. (It might look like a college athletic dorm, but the razor wire doesn’t let you forget its true purpose.)

After flaring near the earth beside the river south of town, Major McDavitt sets the chopper down on the partially scorched cement where the gatehouse of the Triton Battery plant once stood. For me this is an uncomfortable visit, because I set the fire that destroyed the shuttered hulk that remains of the factory.

‘You okay?’ Necker asks with a smile.

‘Not bad, actually. Thanks to Major McDavitt.’

The pilot holds up a gloved hand in acknowledgment.

‘Take a walk with us, Danny,’ Necker says.

McDavitt removes his headset.

‘I always use military pilots,’ Necker explains, climbing out of the chopper. ‘Combat pilots when I can get them. They don’t lose their cool when things go awry, which always happens, sooner or later.’

I follow the CEO down to the cracked concrete, bending at the waist until I clear the spinning rotors. McDavitt gets out and walks a couple of strides to our left, like a wingman on patrol. He looks about fifty, with the close-cropped hair and symmetrical build of a Gemini-era astronaut.

‘Lots of history around this town,’ Necker says, walking toward the burned-out battery plant. ‘Not all of it ancient.’

I feel Major McDavitt come alert beside us.

‘For example,’ Necker goes on, ‘this plant here was used by a drug dealer as a hideout until somebody in present company took care of business.’

Danny McDavitt gives me a sidelong glance.

‘And we’re not too far,’ Necker continues, ‘from where somebody ditched a chopper under suspicious circumstances.’ The CEO beams with pleasure at the hitch in McDavitt’s step. ‘I just want you boys to know I do my homework. I’ve checked you both out, and I figure whatever you did, you had good reasons. I check out everybody I plan to do business with, and I’d like to do some business in this town.’

I stop, and they stop with me. Necker has to look up at me, since I’m three inches taller, but I’m the one at a disadvantage.

‘I’m going to be straight with you, Penn,’ he says. ‘I want to bring my plant here. I want to buy that old factory there and recycle all the debris to show the town I mean business. There’s one obstacle in the way, though. This has been a union town since 1945. I used to be a big supporter of unions–belonged to one myself when I worked as a meat packer. But they got out of hand, and you see the result.’ He waves his hand at the abandoned battery plant.

It’s a little more complex than that, I think, but this doesn’t seem the time to argue U.S. trade policy.

‘Mississippi has a right-to-work law, and I plan to use that. But bottom line, I need to know one thing.’ A stubby red forefinger shoots up. ‘When push comes to shove on something–and it always does–am I gonna have your support? Are you going to be in office a year from now, when I need you? If I’m going to bring my plant down here, I need to know you’re going to be the man in charge. I can’t afford some yokel, and I can’t afford the other thing.’

Major McDavitt cuts his eyes at me. The other thing?

‘Don’t get the wrong idea,’ Necker says quickly. ‘I don’t care what color a man is, so long as he can tell red ink from black. But race politics gets in the way of business, and with your fifty-fifty split, I can foresee some problems. I figure you’re my best shot at solving those problems.’

‘You’re saying that if I answer yes to your question, you’ll bring your recycling plant here?’

‘That’s the deal, Mr Mayor.’

‘What makes you think I won’t be here in a year?’

Necker flashes a knowing smile. ‘For one thing, this is a detour from your main career. For another, I’ve heard you might not be too happy in the job.’

‘I won’t lie to you. It’s been wearing me down pretty fast. It’s tough to get everybody swinging on the same gate, as they say around here.’

Necker nods. ‘Politics in a nutshell. But my research also says you’re no quitter, and you’re as good as your word.’

Yesterday I might have confessed that I might not be here next October. But given my involvement with Tim, I’m not sure how to reply. ‘Can you give me a few days to answer you?’

‘How does two weeks sound?’

‘I’ll take it.’

Necker grins and starts to say something else, but his cell phone begins blaring what sounds like a college fight song. He holds up his hand, checks the screen, then with a grunt of apology marches away to take the call, leaving me staring out over the mile-broad Mississippi with Danny McDavitt. A mild breeze blows off the reddish brown water, and the pilot squints into it like a man measuring wind speed by watching waves.

‘What do you think about Necker?’ I ask, casually checking my cell phone for further messages. There are none.

‘Kinda pushy,’ McDavitt says after a considerable silence. ‘But they’re all like that.’

‘You fly a lot of CEOs?’

The pilot’s lips widen slightly in what might be a smile. ‘Not these days. I flew charters in Nashville after I got out of the air force. Don’t ask. At least this guy knows he puts his pants on same as the next guy.’

I look back toward the Triton Battery plant and see Necker speaking animatedly into his phone. ‘You think he’ll do what he says? You think he’ll bring his plant here?’

McDavitt spits on the rocks at the edge of the parking lot. ‘Yep.’ Then he turns toward me, and his blue-gray eyes catch mine with surprising force. ‘Question is, will you be here when he needs you?’

While I ask myself the same question, Necker suddenly appears beside me. ‘I’m afraid we’ve got to head back right away. I’ve got to make an unexpected stop on my way to Chicago.’

‘Chicago?’ This is the first I’ve heard about Chicago.

Necker leads us quickly back to the helicopter. ‘I thought you knew. I promised my granddaughter I’d watch her first dance recital. And now I have to make a stop in Paducah on the way.’

The selectmen will panic if Necker isn’t in town for the festival. ‘Are you coming back for the balloon race?’

The CEO grins. ‘Are you kidding? I can’t wait to see your face when the canopy starts flapping and the lines start creaking at three thousand feet. I’ll be back by dawn tomorrow.’ Necker turns to McDavitt. ‘Let’s get airborne, Major. And don’t waste any time getting back.’

McDavitt nods and climbs into the cockpit. As I clamber in behind him, I feel my cell phone vibrate on my hip. With Necker beside me, I almost ignore the message, assuming it must be Paul Labry asking how my sales pitch is going. But then I remember Tim’s text and decide to check it. This text is from the same number as before. Tilting the phone slightly away from Necker, I read, Tonight, bro. Same place, same time. Don’t respond 2 this message. No contact at all. And bring a gun, jic. Peace.

As I reread the message, the free-floating anxiety that has haunted me since last night suddenly coalesces into a leaden feeling of dread, as close to a premonition of disaster as anything I’ve felt before.

‘Everything copacetic?’ Necker asks from what seems a great distance.

‘Fine,’ I rasp, still staring at the message. ‘Just my daughter texting me from school.’

I grab for my seat as the chopper bucks into the air.

‘Easy, now,’ Necker says soothingly. ‘Sit back and enjoy it. Boy, what I’d give to still have my little girl at home. It goes by so damn fast, you miss most of it. It’s only later that you realize it. That you were in the presence of a miracle. You know?’

I nod dully. Bring a gun? Jic? Just in case? In case of what? I’d give anything to take back the encouragement I gave Tim to pursue evidence against Mr X and his employers. Yet somewhere beneath my panic surges the hope that Jessup, even after thirty years of drug abuse and aimlessness, has somehow proved able to do what he promised to do.

‘Don’t you miss a minute of it,’ Necker advises. ‘But, hell, what am I telling you? You had the sense to get out of the city and bring your kid to a place like this. A place where people are who they say they are, and you don’t have to worry about all the sick crap that goes on out there in the world.’

I flick my phone shut and force myself to nod again.

‘A goddamn sanctuary,’ Necker pronounces. ‘That’s what it is. Am I right?’

‘Absolutely.’

I guess I’m not above a little selling after all.

8

The hours after receiving Tim’s text message are an emotional seesaw for me; panic alternates with wild hope that Jessup has somehow obtained evidence of fraud and gotten safely away with it. This hope is a tacit admission that Tim’s allegations are neither exaggerations nor paranoid fantasies. The maddening thing is that I’ll have to wait until midnight to talk to him. I assume his choice of hour means that he intends to stay on board the Magnolia Queen until the end of his shift. Why doesn’t he simply walk off the boat, I wonder, and race up to my office at City Hall? My endless analysis of this question puts me into such a state that Rose, my secretary, asks repeatedly whether I’m all right and even convinces me to lie down for an hour on a cot in the civil defense director’s office. Lying by the director’s red phone, I find it almost impossible not to call Tim, but somehow I manage it. If he’s willing to risk his life, the least I can do is take his precautions seriously.

The afternoon passes slowly, with Rose doing her best to handle the calls from the various committees and charities using the Balloon Festival to generate support or contributions, and Paul Labry fielding complaints from merchants and residents involving zoning and noise violations. Like the other selectmen, Labry has a full-time job, but he always makes an extra effort to help me during crunch times.

From the volume of calls and the traffic outside City Hall, one thing is certain: Even if Jessup is right and Natchez is festering with corruption beneath its elegant facade, the ‘Balloon Glow’–tonight’s official opening ceremony of the Great Mississippi River Balloon Festival–will go on.

I manage to get out of City Hall by six and collect Annie from my parents’ house, where she usually spends her after-school time. I can tell she’s excited as we drive toward the bluff, and she blushes as the police wave us through the big orange barricades at Fort Rosalie. Annie’s at the age where anything that makes her stand out from her friends mortifies her, but I sense that she’s enjoying the VIP treatment.

The sun has already set below the bluff, and the truncated roars of flaming gas jets sound from beyond the great mansion whose grounds provide the setting for the town’s biggest festival. Annie gasps as we round the corner of Rosalie, and I feel my heart quicken. The term balloon glow perfectly describes this night ritual; from a distance the balloons glow like giant multicolored lanterns against the black backdrop of sky. But up close, among the inflated canopies swaying in the wind, the experience is much more intense. When the pilots do ‘burns’ for the spectators, you can feel the heat from thirty feet away. Yellow and blue flares light the night like bonfires, awing children and adults alike. The tethered balloons tug against the ropes binding them to the earth, and kids who grab the edges of the baskets feel themselves lifted bodily from the ground. The ceremony is a perfect prologue for tomorrow’s opening race, when the balloons will leap from the dewy morning grass and fill the skies over the city, pulling every attentive soul upward with them.

‘I’m glad ya’ll decided to go ahead with it,’ Annie says, grabbing my arm as we hurry to join the people streaming among the balloons. ‘This will help the refugee kids forget about the hurricane.’

She tugs me toward the nearest balloon, and I use her momentary inattention to check my cell phone for further text messages. I don’t know if I’m hoping Tim will cancel the meeting or move it forward. All I know for sure is that I want the truth about Golden Parachute. But there’s no message.

I spend the first forty-five minutes with Annie, looking at everything she instructs me to and buttonholing pilots so she can ask them all kinds of questions about the flight parameters of hot-air balloons. I get buttonholed myself a few times, by citizens with questions or complaints about their pet interest, but Annie has become adept at extricating me from such conversations. TV crews roam the grounds of Rosalie with their cameras: one from Baton Rouge, ninety miles to the south; another from Jackson, a hundred miles to the north. I promise a producer from the Baton Rouge station that I’ll give her five minutes at the gate of Rosalie, where they’re interviewing pilots and Katrina refugees. I plan to take Annie with me, but two minutes after I make the promise, we walk right into Libby Jensen, and something goes tight in my chest.

‘Libby! Libby!’ Annie cries, running forward and giving her a hug. ‘Aren’t the balloons awesome?’

‘Yes, they are,’ Libby agrees, smiling cautiously at me above Annie’s head.

Libby is a Natchez native who went to law school in Texas, married a partner at her Dallas firm, had a child by him, then divorced him after discovering that he’d kept a series of mistresses during the first decade of their marriage. She liked practicing law about as much as she liked being cheated on, so she brought her son back home and used her settlement to open a bookstore. Her charisma and sharp business sense have made the shop a success, and several author friends of mine stop to sign books there when making the literary pilgrimage from Oxford to New Orleans. After Caitlin left town, Libby and I found that our friendship quickly evolved into something that eased the loneliness we both felt, and that mutual comfort carried us through most of a year. But her son, Soren, has some serious anger issues–not to mention a drug problem–and Libby and I disagreed about how best to handle that. In the end, that disagreement drove us apart.

Tonight is the first time we’ve found ourselves together since ending our relationship, and I’ve worried it would be awkward. But Libby’s soft brown eyes shine as she hugs Annie, and in them I see an acknowledgment that the sadness she feels is in part her own choice.

‘Where’s Soren?’ Annie asks, reminding me that Tim said he’d seen Libby’s son down on the Magnolia Queen, looking high as a kite.

Libby rolls her eyes to disguise the anxiety that’s her constant companion. ‘Oh, running around with his friends, complaining about the bands they booked this year. Where are you guys headed?’

‘Daddy has an interview,’ Annie says, obviously not enthused by the idea of standing by while I play talking head.

‘Well, you can just come with me while he acts like a big shot for the cameras.’ Libby gives me a wink. ‘I just saw some of your friends diving into the Space Walk.’

‘Can I, Dad?’

I question Libby with a raised eyebrow, and she nods that she meant the invitation sincerely.

‘Okay. I’ll catch up in a half hour or so. We’re not staying long, though. I have some work to do tonight, and I want to be rested for that balloon flight tomorrow.’

‘I’d like to see that,’ Libby says, chuckling like a wiseass.

‘I’m making him take a barf bag,’ Annie tells her. ‘Seriously.’

I wave them off and head back toward Rosalie, wondering where Tim Jessup is at this moment. Dealing blackjack on the boat docked below the cemetery? Or hiding out in some hotel room with stolen evidence, chain-smoking cigarettes while he waits for midnight to come? There are no hotel rooms available, I answer myself. Implicit in my worry about Tim is a fear of violence, and it strikes me that violence has always been a part of the ground beneath my feet. Fort Rosalie, the original French garrison in Natchez, was built in 1716. In 1729 the enraged Natchez Indians massacred every French soldier in the fort to punish them for ill treatment–for which French reinforcements slaughtered every native man, woman, and child they could find the following year. Rosalie went on to become General Grant’s headquarters during one night of the Civil War, but by then it had presided over untold numbers of robberies, rapes, and murders in the Under-the-Hill district that lay in its shadow. Is it possible, I wonder, that in some dark clearing across the river men are gathering to watch starving animals tear each other to pieces while half-naked girls serve them drinks?

As I round the east corner of Rosalie’s fence, a tungsten video light splits the dark, and several brown heads begin bobbing in its glare. If the gas jets of the balloons look like lanterns, the video light is a white-hot star illuminating a blond woman with a handheld mike standing before Rosalie’s gate. She’s interviewing some children who apparently fled here from the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. Two TV trucks are parked nearby, and more than a dozen journalists call questions to the kids from the shadows behind the light.

As I near the spotlight’s halo, the producer I spoke to earlier waves me over and tells me what she wants: the basic Chamber of Commerce routine. When the kids finish, I take their place before the gate and squint against the glare while my pupils adapt.

On TV I tend to come across more like a district attorney than a mayor, and this has been a double-edged sword. Despite my diminished enthusiasm for the job, after two years in office I can give the city’s PR line on autopilot. This year’s Balloon Festival, however, has more meaning than usual. With the city’s hotels and shelters filled to bursting with suffering families, many locals believed we should cancel the races out of respect for the hurricane refugees, and also to keep from straining the city’s overtaxed resources. But the Balloon Festival is a twenty-year tradition, and I, along with several community leaders, championed the idea that the work required to bring off the races under extraordinary circumstances would prove a unifying force for the community. As I explain this to the brightly blank eyes of the TV reporter, she acts as though my words amaze her, but I know she’s thinking about her next question, or her eye makeup, or where she can get a sugared funnel cake like the one a refugee kid is eating. I try to wrap up my pitch with some enthusiasm for the citizens who’ll see the report from home.

‘Critics argued that with the hotels filled, the balloon pilots would have nowhere to stay,’ I say, ‘but dozens of families have generously opened their homes so that the festival could go forward. We’ve had more volunteers for the support crews than we’ve ever had before. After feeling the outpouring of energy up on the bluff tonight, I believe events are going to bear out our optimism. The best thing you can do in the aftermath of tragedy is to focus on the present, because that way lies the future. Thank you.’

I move to step out of the light, but suddenly a cool, calm female voice with no accent reaches out of the dark and stops me.

‘Mr Mayor, some refugees have claimed that they’re not receiving the relief checks that the federal government promised them. Could you comment on this for our readers?’

Caitlin. She is here.

I shield my eyes from the glare. ‘What paper are you with?’ I ask innocently.

‘The Natchez Examiner,’ Caitlin answers with the faintest trace of irony. ‘Caitlin Masters.’

‘Well, Ms Masters, welcome back to Natchez. As for the relief checks, they’re a federal matter and consequently not within my purview. Could someone kill that light, please?’

‘What about the contention of two of your selectmen?’ Caitlin continues, a fine barb of challenge in her voice. ‘They say there’s been a great deal of fraudulent application for relief by refugees, with some people going through the check line three and four times with one Social Security number.’

To my surprise, the spotlight goes dark, but I can’t pick Caitlin’s face from the red afterimage floating before my eyes. ‘As I said, those relief checks are being issued by the federal government; therefore, fraud in obtaining them falls under federal jurisdiction. I suggest you speak to the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security.’

‘I intend to.’

‘Good luck. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Enjoy the festival.’

The knot of reporters breaks up quickly, leaving Caitlin and me with two techs packing equipment. My eyes having recovered, I see immediately that she looks as good as she ever did, unique among the women I meet in my daily life. Caitlin’s bone-white skin, her waterfall of jet black hair, and her startling green eyes combine to radiate an almost disconcerting sense of self-possession. This woman is smart, you sense on meeting her, probably too smart for her own good, or anybody else’s.

‘You want to walk?’ she asks.

‘Sure.’

She gives me an easy smile and starts away from Rosalie, walking across the head of Silver Street, the hill road that leads down to one of our casino boats, then toward the bluff proper. Caitlin leads me along the fence, on the asphalt path laid by the Corps of Engineers when they reinforced the bluff. Eighteen inches beyond the fence, the land drops like a cliff to the banks of the river below.

‘You never were much of a walker,’ I comment, ‘unless you were headed somewhere specific.’

She laughs softly. ‘Maybe I’ve changed.’

I murmur in surprise.

‘So…how’s it going?’ she asks, her words banal but her tone something else altogether.

When you practically live with someone for six years, you come to know their rhythms the way you know your own. Their way of talking, the way they breathe, sleep, and walk. Changes in those things communicate messages if you pay attention, but as I walk beside my old lover–old in the sense of long experience together–I find that our separation has dulled my perception of her secret language. That is if she means anything beyond her literal words. Maybe in this case a walk is just a walk.

‘It’s been hard,’ I say quietly. It’s tough to admit you were wrong about something, and even harder to admit someone else was right. ‘Harder than I thought it would be.’

‘People don’t like change,’ she says. ‘I see it every day, wherever I go.’

‘You said you’ve changed.’

Her green eyes flicker. ‘I said maybe.’

The small park we’ve entered was the main venue for festivals when I was a child, the white gazebo atop the bluff a gathering place for painters and musicians and even ham-radio operators, who came because the ground was the highest for miles around. At the gazebo steps, I let her ascend first, watching the clean line of her shoulders, the graceful curve of her back. God, I’ve missed her. She walks to the rail and looks out into the night sky over the river.

‘It smells the same,’ she says.

‘Good or bad?’

‘Both.’

Across the river, lines of headlights move east and west on the main highway crossing the hard-shell Baptist country of Louisiana. Twelve miles into that darkness, Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart were raised under the flaming shadows of God and Satan, while around them sharecroppers toiled in the cotton and sang their pain to the uncaring fields.

‘People think they’re in the South when they’re in the Carolinas,’ she says. ‘And they are, I guess. But this place is still the South, you know? It’s unassimilated.’

I murmur assent, but I still don’t engage in conversation, preferring to study her from an oblique angle. This is the closest I have been to Caitlin in months. In a crowd of Mississippi women she stands out like a European tourist. In our moist, subtropical climate, the milk-fed, round-cheeked faces of the belles usually last until thirty-five, like a prolonged adolescence. This beauty seems a gift at first, but when it goes, the rearguard action begins, a protracted battle against age and gravity that leaves many with the look of wilted matrons masquerading as prom queens. Plastic surgery only makes the masks more startling in the end. Caitlin’s face is all planes and angles, a face of architectural precision, almost masculine but not quite, thanks to feline eyes that shine like emeralds in the dark. Her every movement seems purposeful, and if she has nowhere to go, she stands like a soldier at rest. She never drifts. And remembering this, I realize that this walk is not just a walk.

‘What brought you back here?’ I ask softly.

She hugs herself against the wind shooting up the face of the bluff. ‘Katrina.’

This answer is certainly sufficient, but it seems too easy. ‘You’re covering the aftermath?’

‘I’m taking it in. Trying to process it. I’ve heard a lot of disturbing things about what happened down there. The Danziger Bridge shooting, wide-open rules of engagement. The administration’s response on the humanitarian side, or lack of one. Talk about too little, too late.’

There’s nothing original in this view. And I’m not much interested in a privileged publisher taking a luxury tour through the dark side of our national character. This reminds me of Caitlin as I first met her, a Northern dilettante who preached liberalism but who had no experience of the world outside a college classroom or a newspaper owned by one of her father’s friends.

‘Disturbing things happen everywhere,’ I say, ‘all the time. In Natchez, in Charlotte, wherever. You can find a window into hell a mile from wherever you are, if you really want to.’

She inclines her head, almost as though in prayer.

I didn’t mean to sound so cynical, but I have little patience with selective outrage. ‘You could just as easily be doing a story on how the white Baptist churches are sheltering black refugees, but that won’t sell as many papers as a white-cops-shoot-black-civilians story, will it?’

‘You always kept me honest, didn’t you?’

‘And you, me.’

She turns from the rail, and her green eyes throw back reflections of the streetlamps behind me on Broadway. A thumping bass beat booms from the tavern across the street, then a blast of calliope music blares dissonant counterpoint from below the bluff.

‘Wow,’ Caitlin exclaims. ‘The boats must really be crazy tonight.’

With a start, I realize that for a few peaceful minutes I haven’t thought of Tim Jessup. ‘I really should get back to Annie,’ I say, suddenly anxious about the depth of my need to be near Caitlin. ‘I’ve got a really long day tomorrow.’

‘No doubt. I heard you’re on the morning flight,’ she says with a knowing smile. ‘Is that true?’

‘No way out of it, I’m afraid. I’m schmoozing a CEO who could bring a new plant here.’

‘I heard. You think you may swing that, Mayor?’

‘No comment.’

She laughs dutifully, but her eyes are troubled. ‘I can’t read you like I used to.’

‘I know how you feel.’ Despite my anxiety, I realize that the dread I felt earlier has been replaced by an exhilarating feeling of lightness under my sternum, as though I’ve ingested a few particles of cocaine along with Caitlin’s words. An electric arc shoots through me as she takes my hand to lead me down the steps.

‘Is Annie with your mother?’ she asks. The path along the bluff is filling up with people preparing to watch the fireworks display across the river in Vidalia. ‘I haven’t seen your parents in so long. I feel bad.’

‘They still talk about you. Dad especially.’ I don’t want her to ask any more about Annie. I don’t feel she has the right to, really.

‘You know, Charlotte’s not what I thought either,’ she says.

‘No?’

‘It’s a lot smaller than I expected. Boston too. I’m starting to think that no matter where you go, it’s basically a small town. The newspaper business is a small town. L.A.’s a small town. Paris is a small town.’

‘Maybe those places only look small from the window of a limo. When you have the phone number of everybody who matters.’

She doesn’t respond to this, but after a moment she lets my hand fall. As we near the festival gate, she stops and gazes at me without the guard of irony up. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Who matters?’

‘Yep.’

Her eyes hold mine steadily as the crowd swirls around us. ‘What’s your answer?’

‘That’s easy. Annie.’

‘Touché. You’re right, of course.’ She looks back toward the carnival lights beside Rosalie, brushes the black veil of hair away from her face. ‘This feels strange. So familiar, and yet…I don’t know. You don’t seem quite yourself.’ She tilts her head and tries to penetrate the time that hovers between us like an invisible shield. ‘Is it just me? Or is something really wrong?’

‘What are you doing here, Caitlin?’

Her eyes narrow. ‘I told you. Working a story.’

‘A New Orleans story?’

She glances away for the briefest of moments. ‘There might be a Natchez angle.’

Before I can ask about this, a male voice cries her name twice in quick succession. ‘ There you are!’ says the newcomer, a handsome man of thirty-five who disengages from the chaos with some difficulty. He has a bohemian look–bohemian chic might be more accurate–and he clasps Caitlin’s right hand in both of his. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you. I ended up down at the stage, talking to some gospel singers. They’re fantastic!’

Caitlin casually extricates her hand and introduces me as the mayor of Natchez. The bohemian’s name is Jan something.

‘Jan’s doing a documentary on the Danziger Bridge incident.’

‘Bridge massacre,’ Jan corrects, as though quoting the title of the film.

On the Danziger lift bridge in New Orleans, four white cops responding to an ‘officer down’ call received sniper fire from a group of black men, returned fire, and killed two of them. The black group later contended that they had been unarmed. As with so much of what happened in the first days of Katrina’s flood, no one has yet been able to ascertain what really transpired. ‘I’m sure they’ll eat that up in Park City,’ I say with a brittle Chamber of Commerce smile.

Jan draws back in momentary confusion, and Caitlin looks startled. I usually cover my emotions better than this, but tonight I just don’t give a damn.

‘You guys have fun. I need to find my daughter.’

And with that I’m away from them. I couldn’t have stood much more, and that knowledge frightens me. Yet as I walk through the festival gate, making for the flashing neon above the rides grouped on the bluff, it’s not heartache that preoccupies me, but some of Caitlin’s last words: working a story…. There might be a Natchez angle.

As improbable as it seems, I wonder if she’s somehow picked up the rumors of dogfighting, prostitution, and illicit drugs surrounding the Magnolia Queen. A word from one of her local reporters would be enough to pique her interest, and every facet of that story would engage her. If Caitlin does have reporters working that story, she might well elide it from any conversation with me. At one time we told each other everything. But as our relationship wore on, we found that the professions of lawyer and journalist–even novelist and journalist–gave us separate agendas where privileged information was concerned, and that led to conflict.

Thirty yards ahead, I glimpse the familiar rounded line of Libby’s shoulders, and a blade of guilt pierces me. Though we’ve officially ended our intimate relationship, it would hurt her to learn that a few moments with Caitlin affected me so deeply. As I near Libby, Annie and a friend cannonball through the exit of the Space Walk and roll squealing onto the ground beside her. Only now do I remember that I need someone to stay with Annie while I’m out on tonight’s midnight rendezvous. There’s little chance of getting a high school sitter this late on a balloon-race Friday; I’ll have to ask my mother to spend the night at my house.

‘You’ve been gone awhile,’ Libby says with a shadow of suspicion.

‘They had a lot of questions about Katrina,’ I say in an offhand voice.

‘We want to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl!’ Annie and her friend scream in unison.

I’m hesitant to be alone with Libby, but she nods quickly and they set off for the Tilt-A-Whirl at a run.

‘I saw an old flame of yours earlier,’ Libby says, her eyes boring into mine with uncomfortable intensity. ‘Was she there for the interview?’

‘One of a dozen or so.’

Libby sucks her lips between her teeth and looks pointedly off into the crowd.

‘Have you seen Soren yet?’ I ask.

‘No. I guess Caitlin heard we broke up.’

‘She didn’t mention it.’

Libby tries to suppress a tight smile of judgment or envy. ‘She wouldn’t.’

‘Did Annie see her?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Libby…we knew there were going to be some awkward times, but—’

‘Don’t,’ she says quickly. ‘You don’t have to apologize. It’s not even unexpected. I’m just surprised to see her this fast. But I guess I shouldn’t be. Caitlin’s been a quick study all her life.’

I stifle a sigh and turn toward the Tilt-A-Whirl, where Annie and her friend spin through the air, trailing green and fuchsia light.

When I look back again, Libby is gone. Then I catch sight of her moving through the crowd toward the Tilt-A-Whirl. I follow, but time my arrival to coincide with Annie’s disembarking from the ride.

‘Should we look for Soren?’ I ask halfheartedly.

‘Sure,’ Annie says. ‘I haven’t seen him yet.’

Libby forces a smile and pats her in the small of the back. ‘Oh, he’s with his older friends. You guys go have some fun. I need to get back and let the dogs out.’

This patent lie brings another rush of guilt, but there’s nothing to be done other than to let things take their course.

Libby bends, hugs Annie, then gives my wrist a quick squeeze and musters an almost genuine smile. With an awkward wave she turns and joins the flow of the crowd.

Annie stares solemnly after her diminishing figure, as though watching the departure of a family member she might never see again. After Libby disappears, Annie turns and looks up with wide eyes. ‘Daddy, I saw Caitlin here.’

A strange numbness fills me, slowing my responses. ‘Really? Where did you see her?’

‘She was talking to a man with a camera. She was far away, but I know it was her.’

I’m not sure how to respond, but I don’t like to lie to my daughter. ‘I saw her too, baby.’

Annie’s eyes widen still more. ‘Did you talk to her?’

‘She interviewed me a few minutes ago, with some other reporters.’

Annie nods slowly, taking this in. ‘I miss Libby, Dad.’

‘I do too.’

When no explanation follows, she says, ‘Did ya’ll break up?’

God, she’s perceptive. ‘What makes you ask that?’

‘I don’t know. Did you?’

I take Annie’s hand, then kneel and look into her eyes. ‘We did. I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about it first.’

She looks back at the place where Libby vanished, but all that remains is a crowd of laughing revelers.

‘She’s really sad,’ Annie says, looking back at me with damp eyes. ‘I am too. I knew something was different.’

‘I’m sad too, baby.’

‘I think she’s scared about Soren. Do you think so?’

‘I think Soren has some problems. Lots of teenagers do. But that’s for Soren and Libby to work out.’

Annie wipes a tear from her eye.

‘Come on,’ I say, leading her down the long row of brightly lit carnival booths, a sanitized version of the sleazy carnies that used to camp on the edge of town when I was a boy. The barkers shout their come-ons, but their hoarse voices scarcely penetrate the confusion surrounding my little girl. And yet, as sad as she is, I know that the grief Annie feels over the loss of Libby as a potential mother figure is tempered by hope that Caitlin has reappeared for a very different reason than covering a news story. If it weren’t for my fear for Tim Jessup, I might be unable to think about anything else myself.

When the first rocket detonates over Louisiana, filling the sky over the river with sizzling arcs of blue and white light, it takes a couple of seconds for the report of the explosion to reach us. When it does, every muscle in my abdomen clenches, as though steeling against a bullet. This, I realize, is sympathetic fear. My daughter’s hand is in mine, love is near, life is good. But somewhere not far away, Tim Jessup is risking all he has to right what he believes is an unendurable wrong. Please be careful, I intone in a private prayer. Don’t try to be a hero. My father never spoke much about his service in Korea, but one thing he did share has been borne out by my own experience: Heroism is sacrifice.

Most of the heroes I’ve known are dead.

9

It took all my willpower not to call or text Tim once my mother got Annie to bed. That was at ten thirty. The following hour passed like a car stuck in low gear, and I fought the urge to swallow a couple of shots of vodka to help me endure the wait. When it finally came time to leave, my mother saw me off without any question about my destination. She probably assumed I was seeing a woman, and I did not disabuse her of the notion. The only difficulty I had getting out was sneaking a pistol past her. In the end I opted to slip my short-barreled .357 Magnum into my briefcase and carry it right by her to the car.

Now I’m cruising down Washington Street with a half hour to kill before my meeting with Tim. I’m only a couple of miles from the cemetery–as the crow flies–so I have some time to ponder why he thinks I need a weapon when we meet.

Or so I think until my cell phone rings. The caller isn’t Tim, as I expected, but Libby Jensen. She’s so upset that at first I can’t make out what she’s saying. For a moment I labor under the mistaken impression that she’s upset about our relationship, but then it registers–as it should have in the beginning–that she’s calling about Soren.

‘They arrested him!’ she sobs. ‘They say he has to spend the night in jail. They think he was driving the car.’

‘Whoa, whoa, slow down. What happened?’

‘There was a wreck,’ Libby says, her voice still riding the rapids of hysteria. ‘I’m not sure what happened. Soren was in a car that hit another car. The police say he was driving, but Soren says he wasn’t.’ Libby’s voice drops to a frantic whisper. ‘Penn, he’s so drunk I don’t know whether to believe him or not. At least I hope he’s drunk. They might have found some drugs. They won’t tell me. I’m so scared. You know what Mackey said the last time he got in trouble.’

On the occasion to which Libby is referring, Soren was busted with Lorcet Plus and Adderall. On my advice Libby hired Austin Mackey, a onetime classmate and the former district attorney, to represent him. At Mackey’s suggestion–and against all my better judgment–I used my influence with the present district attorney, Shadrach Johnson, to try to ensure that Soren’s case never went to trial. Mackey turned out to be right. After I promised my old political nemesis enough favors, the drug arrest was removed from Soren’s record altogether. If Libby wasn’t in love with me by that point in our relationship, the final transformation was completed that day. I can date my ultimate decision that things would not work out between us to that day as well.

‘Have you left yet?’ Libby asks, the pitch of her voice rising. ‘Where are you? Are you on your way?’

‘Have they booked him?’ I ask, glancing at my watch. Twenty-two minutes till midnight. ‘Have they charged him?’

‘I don’t know! I can’t even think. What will they do to him?’

What they probably should have done last time, I reply silently. Mackey’s final advice to Libby and Soren was that the boy never get within a hundred yards of an illegal drug while he was in Adams County, because the next time he was caught, Shad Johnson would throw the book at him. That day has come, and I feel Libby grasping at me like a drowning woman. But even if I could somehow blunt Shad’s vindictiveness, I can’t go on enabling Soren to ruin his life, and his mother’s with it.

‘Libby, you’ve got to calm down,’ I say in a steady voice. ‘You can’t help Soren if you can’t hold it together.’

‘Tell me you’re on your way,’ she says with single-minded urgency. ‘They’re going to take him to the cell in a minute!’

Damn. I close my eyes briefly as my car drifts across Franklin Street and heads into the Victorian part of town. ‘Libby, I want you to listen to me. I will come down there and try to help, but you can’t—’

She gives a plaintive moan that sounds like the preface to an emotional plea, but then without warning the sound shatters into a shrill scream of terror.

‘What is it?’ I yell. ‘What happened?’

There’s a rattle that sounds like Libby’s cell phone skating across a tile floor. I hear confused shouts, several slaps, then a shriek followed by a bellow of rage and anguish. The phone rattles again, and then I hear sobbing. Libby has the phone. After twenty seconds of gulping air, she begs me in a torrent of words to come to the station. I wait until she runs out of air, then ask again what happened.

‘They’re beating him up! They maced him.’

I try to picture this scene, but I can’t see the Natchez police beating a nineteen-year-old kid without some physical provocation. ‘Did Soren do something first?’

‘He hit one of the cops,’ she whispers. ‘They were dragging him back to the cell, really being rough, and he lashed out at somebody. It was just a reflex! Penn, help me. Please! I’m so scared they’re going to do something terrible to him, or put him back there with somebody horrible. If you ever cared for me at all, please, come now.’

A minute ago, I would have said nothing could keep me from meeting Tim at the stroke of midnight, but guilt is a powerful motivator. With a silent Goddamn it, I wrench the wheel right on Madison Street and speed northward to the police station.

It’s thirteen minutes after twelve when I finally squeal out of the police station parking lot, my hands shaking with anger and fear. Libby is shouting after me, but not as loudly as her son is screaming mindless profanity in the drunk tank. The police found half a pound of grass in the trunk of the car Soren was driving, but I’m almost positive he was high on crystal meth. Soren is essentially a gentle kid, not prone to violence, but when he drinks or ingests any drug but marijuana, his anger at his father surfaces, and he gets unpredictable.

A passenger in the car that he T-boned had to be evacuated by helicopter from St Catherine’s Hospital to University Medical Center in Jackson. Worse than that–for Soren, at least–was the poke he took at the cop who was trying to drag him from the booking area to the cellblock. That blow placed Soren Jensen on the wrong side of a stark line for the Natchez Police Department. The cop required three stitches for the blow to his cheek, and Soren went to the cell with a faceful of pepper spray; but this is merely prologue for what will happen when Shad Johnson gets hold of the case.

All this minutiae drains quickly away as I race westward toward the cemetery. Even if a patrol car doesn’t stop me for speeding, I’ll be nearly half an hour late for my rendezvous with Tim.

Flying up Cemetery Road, past the prepossessing silhouette of Weymouth Hall, I realize why Tim chose Jewish Hill for our meetings. The cemetery’s front lower level, which houses the Turning Angel, is bathed in a yellow-orange glow from the sodium streetlights on Cemetery Road. But because of its height, the tabletop of Jewish Hill remains shrouded in darkness.

Is Tim still here? I see no car parked along the cemetery wall, but then I saw none last night either. I still don’t know how Tim approached me from the back of the cemetery, since the only entrances I know about face Cemetery Road. But an old dopehead like Jessup probably knows a lot of things I don’t about the deserted areas of the city.

An hour ago I planned to park more secretively than I did last night, but there’s no time for that now. I stop at the foot of Jewish Hill, take my pistol from my briefcase, shove it into my waistband, and leave the car. A quick push takes me through the hedge behind the wall, and then I’m climbing the steep face of the hill, toward the wire bench and the flagpole.

As feared, I find no one waiting at the top. No one was waiting for me last night either, but tonight feels different somehow. There’s a different silence among the stones. The air doesn’t seem quite still, as though it’s recently been stirred, and the insects are silent. That could be the result of someone approaching, but my instinct says no. I feel a dreadful certainty that Tim has already been here and gone. Turning my back to the river and the moon, I walk deeper into the marble necropolis, scanning the darkness for signs of movement.

Out of the pulse beat of my blood comes a deep, subsurface rumble, almost too low for my ears to detect. It seems to vibrate up from the very ground. Thirty seconds later, I realize I’m hearing the engine of a push boat driving a great string of barges upriver, its massive cylinders propelling an unimaginable weight against the current. Turning, I see the red and green lights on the bow of the foremost barge, a third of a mile forward of the push boat’s stern. The pitch of the engine changes as the boat moves northward, then out of its steady drone a higher hum rises. A blue halogen wash fills the near sky, dimming the bow light on the barge, and I realize a vehicle is passing below me on Cemetery Road. It’s coming from out in the county, from the direction of the Devil’s Punchbowl, heading toward town.

I’m too deep inside the cemetery to see the vehicle. On impulse, I run back along the top of Jewish Hill, but too late. All I see are vertical taillights winking through the leaves of the ancient oaks in the low-lying part of the cemetery where Sarah is buried. The taillights look as if they belong to a truck or an SUV, not Tim’s Sentra.

My watch reads 12:37. The pistol feels awkward in my waistband but not completely unfamiliar. As a prosecutor of major felony cases in Houston, I was sometimes forced to carry a weapon for extended periods. Even after retiring from that position and taking up writing, certain circumstances have required me to carry a gun for protection, and on several occasions I’ve been forced to use it, sometimes with fatal results.

I feel an almost unbearable compulsion to call Tim’s cell phone, but I resist it. Tim might simply be later than I am. Certainly, more things could have delayed him, or so I’d guess. After jogging in place for half a minute to relieve my anxiety, I sit on a low grave wall that commands a good view of Cemetery Road. With my mother watching Annie, I can afford to give Tim an hour of my time. I only wish I had a cup of coffee to keep me warm and alert. I’d like to lay my cell phone on the wall beside me, but I’m afraid its light will betray my position if anyone is watching.

My body has just begun to gear down when the Razr in my pocket vibrates, bringing me to my feet. I dig the phone from my pocket and cup it to my chest like a man trying to light a cigarette in a strong wind. I didn’t expect to recognize the number, and I don’t, but it has a Mississippi area code and a Natchez prefix.

‘Hello?’ I say in a stilted tone.

‘Is this Penn Cage?’ asks a voice both familiar and unfamiliar.

My heart rises into my throat, and for some reason I glance at my watch. Nine minutes have passed since I saw the taillights on Cemetery Road. ‘Who is this?’

‘Don Logan, chief of police. Is this the mayor?’

A dozen reasons the chief might be calling me after midnight come to mind, none of them good. The most likely is something to do with Soren Jensen–the last thing I want to talk about right now.

‘Yeah, Don, this is Penn. Don’t tell me the kid’s done something else.’

There’s a brief silence, then Logan speaks with the gravity I heard too often from homicide cops in Houston. ‘No, it’s not that. I’m down by Silver Street on the bluff–well, underneath it really–forty feet underneath it. I’m in that drainage ditch that runs along the foot of the retaining wall.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I reply, my throat tightening.

‘We’ve got a situation down here, Penn. Bad.’

‘Okay.’ I look desperately around the cemetery for a sight of Tim.

‘We got what looks to me like a homicide. Or a suicide, I’m not sure which yet. Guy went over the fence and hit the cement’–Logan says ‘ see-ment’–‘and I was wondering if you might come down here and look at the scene.’

This request is unusual, but I have a lot of experience with homicide cases. Maybe the chief wants my opinion on some evidence. ‘What do you think I can do for you, Don?’

‘Couple of things, I figure. I don’t really want to say on a cell phone. But you knew the victim.’

As the chief finishes speaking, the last threads of Tim’s destiny are pulled into place. ‘Who is it?’

This time the silence lasts awhile. I suspect the chief wants to ask me if I already know. ‘Initials are T.J. That ring any bells for you?’

Logan probably mistakes the silent seconds I require to endure this blow as my trying to figure out whose initials those are. Only now do the squawks of police radios cut through the staticky silence of Logan waiting. ‘I’m too tired for guessing games, Don. Let me just get down there and see for myself.’

‘How long will it take you? We’ve got quite a crowd gathering here.’

‘Have you got Silver Street blocked off?’

‘Hell, I can’t block Silver Street. The casino would go crazy. I’ve got the runoff gutter where the victim landed blocked. But all the rubberneckers have to do is lean over the fence for front-row seats. Bowie’s Tavern was busting at the seams with tourists when this happened.’

‘Get a goddamn tent over the body!’

‘I’m working on it, but we’ve lent all our stuff out to the Katrina shelters.’

‘Well, grab something from the carnival up at Rosalie. Just take it.’

‘Good idea. I’d disperse this crowd, but some of them are witnesses. I have the people who were on the balcony at Bowie’s—’

‘Detain anybody who might have seen any part of what happened, whether it seems important to your men or not. And don’t let anyone contaminate that crime scene.’

‘You sound awful sure it’s a murder all of a sudden.’

‘Suicide’s a crime too. Common law, anyway. Is Jewel Washington there?’ Jewel is the county coroner.

‘She just got here.’

‘Good.’ The potential for collateral damage suddenly strikes me. ‘Has anybody told–Have you informed the next of kin?’

‘Not yet. I was kind of thinking you might want to do that.’ When I don’t reply, Logan says, ‘You figured out those initials yet?’

‘I’ve got a bad feeling that I might have. If I’m right, then I agree with you. I’d better do the telling.’

‘Works for me.’

‘Don’t let your men mention his name on the radio.’

‘It may be too late for that. Plus, we got sheriff’s deputies wandering around, and I’ve got no authority over them.’

For the thousandth time I curse the territorial problems caused by overlapping jurisdictions. ‘It’s your crime scene, Don. Don’t let anybody tell you different. And get that tent up over his body. Everybody on that bluff has a cell phone, and somebody’s going to recognize him.’

‘I doubt it. He’s facedown right now, and he’s busted up pretty bad.’

Jesus. ‘I’ll be there in three minutes, and I won’t be driving the speed limit. Let your cruisers know.’

‘Hell, all my guys are down here. Floor it, brother.’

10

The scene atop the bluff where Silver Street joins Broadway looks like Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras. More than two hundred people are milling over the broad expanse of grass and pavement between the fence where Caitlin and I walked a few hours ago and the tavern across Broadway. The buzz of recent tragedy is in the air, and as I shoulder through the crowd, I see that about a third of the people are carrying styrofoam go-cups or beer bottles.

I spent most of the ride from the cemetery trying to decide whether to phone Julia Jessup with news of her husband’s death. No one should get that kind of blow by telephone, but it will be worse if someone else calls her first, someone reveling in the thrill of passing on the ultimate gossip. With so many people near the crime scene, there’s a real danger this could happen before I can get to Julia’s home, but still I wait. I need to see Tim’s body before I talk to his wife. I know what kind of questions survivors ask, and the one at the top of the list is always ‘Did he suffer?’

Silver Street sweeps down at a precipitous arc from Broadway on the bluff to historic Natchez Under-the-Hill and the Mississippi River. I can’t imagine how the horses handled it in the 1840s, when they had to haul freight up from the landing and the slave market. When I was a boy, we used to ride skateboards down this street, taking our lives in our hands every time we descended the half-mile-long hill. Then, as now, there was no stopping place on the narrow road. But tonight, about thirty yards down the hill, the police have placed an aluminum extension ladder against the guardrail to provide restricted access to the concrete drainage ditch that follows the base of the colossal retaining wall built to stabilize the bluffs. This wall runs more than a mile from end to end and is held in place by steel anchors that reach a hundred feet back into the bluff. At some places the wall towers a hundred feet from top to bottom, but here it averages about forty, as Chief Logan estimated on the phone.

Two uniformed cops stand at the head of the ladder. They’re obviously expecting me, because one trots forward and escorts me to the ladder while the other marches up the hill to ward off an inquisitive drunk who has followed me. Mounting the ladder, I climb carefully down into a well of darkness, but at the bottom I see a hazy glow coming from beyond a bend in the wall. The air is thick with the scent of kudzu and backwater, but even with more light I could not see the river. A wall of treetops stands between me and the water, reminding me that I’m walking on an earthen ledge, a shallow step-down only halfway to the bottom of the bluff.

When I round the bend in the wall, two more uniforms confront me, but after shining a SureFire in my face, they wave me through. Thirty yards beyond them, a bubble of artificial light whites out the night. Men in uniforms and street clothes move deliberately through that light, and even from this distance I see the rumpled mess they are orbiting. I feel a rush of vertigo that could have been caused by the ladder climb, but I know better. A man I knew from the age of four is dead, and I am about to look into his empty eyes. I pause to gather myself, then walk forward.

As I get closer, Chief Logan notices me and breaks away from the others. Logan is thin and fit and looks more like an engineer than a cop. Tonight he’s wearing street clothes and carrying a small flashlight, which he aims just in front of his feet. A wise man. I’d hate to know how many venomous snakes are within a hundred feet of me right now.

‘That was quick.’ Logan gives my hand a quick but firm shake. ‘I didn’t want to say any more on the phone, but you’d better steel yourself. It’s bad.’

‘I’ve seen a lot of homicide victims,’ I say with more bravado than I feel. The truth is, I’ve seen a lot more crime-scene photos of victims than victims themselves, though I have seen my share of violent death. But when it’s someone you know, it’s different. Once the insulating barrier of professional detachment is breached, there’s no telling what emotions will come pouring out.

‘Did he have his wallet on him?’ I ask, moving closer to the scene. ‘Is that how you knew who he was?’

‘No sign of his wallet. A patrolmen recognized him. I doubted it at first, the face was so messed up by the fall, but my man seemed sure. Says he played blackjack at Jessup’s table some.’

I’m close enough now to see the dark blood pooled under Tim’s upper body. Turning away from the carnage, I look Logan in the eyes. ‘What made you call me?’

The chief stares straight back at me. ‘Jessup had a cell phone in his back pocket. He landed on his face and hands, so the phone was still working. I took a look at the call log, and the last call he placed before he died was to your cell phone.’

This revelation leaves me speechless. I haven’t spoken to Tim in the past twenty-four hours. But if he called my cell phone, it should have rung. I was standing on one of the highest points in the city.

‘I didn’t get any call from Jessup tonight.’

Logan chews on this for a few seconds. ‘He actually called you four times. Or tried to, anyway. Three times about twelve minutes before he died, and then once in the seconds right before he went over the fence. That’s the best I can figure anyway. Did you have your cell phone on?’

‘Yes.’

Logan doesn’t ask to see my phone. He doesn’t have to. He can easily check my records, and I’m sure he will. To save him the trouble, I call up the log on my Razr. It shows no incoming calls from Jessup. I move to Logan’s side so he can see this information.

‘Were you in a dead spot or something?’ he asks.

‘No.’

‘Huh. I can’t figure it, then. When was the last time you talked to him before today?’

‘I don’t remember,’ I say in an offhand voice. ‘You know how it is. I’ve seen him to say hello in the street, but no real conversation.’

Logan nods, but his eyes are watchful.

‘I’d like to look at his body now, Chief. Do you mind?’ I ask permission because I must. Logan’s allowing this would be purely a courtesy. To help him decide, I add, ‘I want to get to his house and tell his wife as quickly as possible.’

‘Don’t you want to know how it happened?’ Logan asks. ‘How he went over, I mean?’

I can’t believe I haven’t asked this yet, but then the reason comes to me: I’m a lot more concerned about what Tim might have been carrying when he went over the fence than the circumstances that caused him to do so. ‘I’d prefer to see his body first. Could you clear those people out of there, Chief?’

‘Everybody but the coroner. She doesn’t answer to me.’

The truth is, the coroner is one of the few people whose presence I can tolerate in this situation. Jewel Washington is a nurse who ran for office after being laid off from one of the two hospitals in the city. An MD isn’t a requirement to be a coroner in Mississippi, but Jewel is a knowledgeable and conscientious nurse, and she does a better job with the dead than was sometimes done in the past.

As I step into the pool of light, I see that Chief Logan didn’t exaggerate. Tim’s body sustained massive trauma as a result of the fall. The impact broke both his forearms and split his skull above the eyebrows. The one eye I can see is wide and cloudy, the eye of a dead fish on a pier. In my mind I hear my father’s voice telling me about René Le Fort, the French army physician who created the system for classifying facial fractures by throwing cadavers off the roof of an army hospital. Though Tim is almost unrecognizable, it’s not his shattered face that holds my attention. It’s his chest and arms. His shirt is shredded and covered with blood, and his broken forearms look almost as though they were mauled by a wild animal. His chest and neck also show puncture wounds and tears. Unless he fell forty feet into a pile of nails and broken glass, I don’t see how he could have got those injuries.

‘I turned him over,’ Jewel Washington says from the darkness behind me. ‘Soon as I did, I wished I hadn’t. You ever seen anything like that?’

The coroner’s voice seems to come from far away, as though we are hikers separated in a twisted canyon. I’ve seen worse than this, I reply silently, but not on someone I knew well. ‘You mean his arms?’

‘Yeah, his arms. He didn’t get those wounds in no fall.’

I bend over Tim, squinting down at the torn flesh. ‘Could animals have gotten to him before anyone else did?’

‘I guess it’s possible. Histamine tests will tell us that. But you ask me, that stuff happened antemortem.’

‘Christ,’ I whisper.

‘Christ, indeed. This world done gone crazy, I believe.’

Jewel speaks with the weary resignation of a middle-aged black woman who has sacrificed a lot to send her two sons to junior college. Because she has worked closely with my father in the past, I know I can rely on her to give me all the help in her power.

I stand and give her a hug from the side. ‘Did the fall kill him?’

‘Can’t say. Not yet, anyway. He’s got some kind of wounds on his leg that smell like cooked pork to me. Got to be burns, but I don’t know how he’d get those.’ Jewel’s bloodshot eyes hold mine. ‘Do you?’

I shake my head, trying to repress images of Tim being tortured for information, yet wondering what his torturers did to tear him up so badly.

‘We won’t know about this one until they do the autopsy up in Jackson,’ Jewel observes.

‘Well, let’s make sure they do it in a hurry.’ I turn back to the coroner and give her a small glimpse of my outrage. ‘Don’t miss a lick on this one, Jewel. Push for every test you can get. Toxicology, everything.’

‘I plan to.’ She grunts noncommittally. ‘Let’s just hope the DA is on board for it.’

I expel a lungful of air at the thought of Shad Johnson being in charge of Tim’s case. ‘I’m going to inform the victim’s wife.’

‘Lord,’ Jewel says softly. ‘That’s one visit I’m glad I don’t have to make.’

‘If anybody asks you tonight, he died instantly. Okay?’

She nods slowly. ‘I can live with that until tomorrow. I hope it’s the truth too.’

I lean closer and look into her dark eyes, holding her gaze. ‘Has anybody searched the body?’

‘Not since I been here. But you know they did before I got here.’ Shouts reverberate along the wall from atop the bluff, and I see drunken spectators peering down at Tim and us.

‘We ought to charge admission,’ Jewel says bitterly. Seeing my quivering chin, she squeezes my arm above the elbow and says, ‘Tent’s on the way.’

Her small gesture of compassion cracks the armor plating I buckled over my emotions back at the foot of the ladder. Deep within me, a caustic soup of guilt and rage boils upward, searching for an outlet. Jewel squeezes my arm harder.

‘Easy now.’

‘We grew up together,’ I whisper by way of explanation.

Jewel nods in sympathy. ‘I imagine this boy had a tough time growing up. I used to work with his daddy some. Never liked Dr Jessup. Cold as an old-time scalpel.’

Jewel has cut right to the heart of Tim’s family. The corpse lying on the ground was alive for forty-five years, but the soul that occupied it until tonight never managed to escape boyhood.

‘Stay in touch?’ I ask.

Jewel gives me a sad smile of encouragement. ‘You know I will.’

I turn and walk back to the dim perimeter of the light, where Chief Logan stands talking to a man in the shadows. As I near the pair, I realize that the newcomer is Shadrach Johnson, Natchez’s district attorney, the man I defeated for mayor two years ago. The scars from our campaigns still sting, but our troubled history predates that election by five years.

‘Well, look who we’ve got here,’ Shad says with mocking reverence. ‘You’re out mighty late considering all the mayoral duties you’ve got this weekend.’

Shad was born in Natchez but moved to Chicago while he was still a boy. He attended college there on scholarship and worked as a big-firm lawyer until he was forty, when he returned to Natchez to run for mayor. His Southern accent waxes and wanes with his moods and motives. As usual, he’s dressed to the nines, wearing an expensive suit and tie on a weekend when most people are dressed like fans at a Jimmy Buffett concert.

‘Why don’t we skip the bullshit tonight?’ I ask. ‘Tim Jessup was a friend.’

‘My condolences,’ Shad says without empathy. ‘Seems like an odd friendship to me, the mayor of the city and a no-count blackjack dealer.’

I take a deep breath and focus on Logan. ‘Could I speak to you alone, Chief?’

Logan starts to step away, but Shad catches hold of his arm. ‘Not so fast, Chief. You need to finish my briefing here, and that might take a while.’

‘I just need a minute,’ I add with as much civility as I can muster.

‘Well, Mr Mayor,’ Shad says with relish, ‘you’re just going to have to wait. I know you’re not accustomed to waiting, but I am the chief law enforcement officer of Adams County.’

I pointedly ignore Shad, keeping my eyes on Logan. ‘Did you find anything else on Jessup besides his cell phone?’

The chief shakes his head.

‘If somebody stole his wallet, it seems like they’d take his phone too.’

‘Seems like,’ Logan agrees.

‘Could I see his phone?’

‘You know that’s a police matter,’ Shad interjects. ‘You expecting them to find something special?’

The anger I felt beside Tim’s body is reaching critical mass, and the DA is too convenient a target. I need to get away from him as fast as possible.

‘No, but I’m going to inform the widow in a few minutes. I’d like to be able to answer her questions and pass along any personal effects. Knowing the circumstances of his death would help.’

Logan’s alert gaze is on me again, but he says nothing further. He glances at Shad, who gives a slight nod.

‘There were twentysome-odd people up on the balcony at Bowie’s,’ the chief says. ‘Plus a couple over there in the gazebo, making out. There were probably some other people on the bluff too, but we haven’t got them separated from the mob yet. Thank God, the big doors of the bar were closed to enforce their cover charge.’

‘What did the wits see?’

‘Different things, of course. Or different versions of the same thing. After listening to everybody, the best I can figure is this. A tan or light-colored SUV, probably a Lincoln Navigator, came down Broadway from the direction of the Callon building. Nobody was paying much attention at that point. Then about a hundred feet past the gazebo, the SUV skidded to a stop. It squealed loud enough to make people turn. The guy on the gazebo saw Jessup running from Broadway toward the fence. He must have jumped out of the SUV. Then a second guy jumped out of the backseat and started to chase him. The second guy stopped in the grass. Jessup was screaming for help by then. The guy on the bandstand called 911, but we couldn’t get here fast enough to do anything.’

Logan pauses as if expecting me to question his department’s response time, but I motion for him to continue.

‘By this time people on the balcony were looking in that direction, but there are a few trees up there, so they couldn’t see a lot. It looked like the guy chasing Jessup disappeared under the trees. He must have been getting closer because Jessup climbed over the fence and started running along the ledge toward Silver Street. Nobody’s sure whether the second guy ran up to the fence or not. Half the witnesses figured Jessup and the other guy were just drunks horsing around.’

‘But the guy in the gazebo called 911.’

‘His wife made him do it,’ Logan explains. ‘Anyhow, for whatever reason, Jessup stopped on the ledge. He was twisting around like he was fighting an invisible man–that’s what the guy in the gazebo said–and then he went over the edge. That’s it. For now anyway.’

I look up to the ledge forty feet above and try to imagine Tim desperate enough to make that leap voluntarily. If the man chasing him had been torturing him, Tim might have leapt from the ledge in the hope that he could clear the drainage ditch and hit the limbs of the trees beyond it. But the odds of death would still be high. The logical thing would have been to run back toward the tavern, or even down the ledge along Silver Street. Cars travel that hill at all hours, and he might have flagged someone down.

‘Did anybody see the plates on the vehicle?’

Logan shakes his head. ‘The SUV got out of here in a hurry. Nobody’s even sure it had Mississippi plates.’

‘Damn. What do you make of all that?’ I ask, more to observe Logan’s reaction than to learn anything valuable.

‘Could be a lot of things. Jessup was a known drug abuser.’

‘He’s been clean for a year.’

Shad Johnson, quiet up to now, snorts in derision. ‘Jessup rear-ended a friend of mine a couple months back, and my friend swears he was fucked-up at the time.’

Tim was high two months ago? ‘Did the police do a blood test?’

Shad shakes his head. ‘Wasn’t that much damage. And Jessup wasn’t worth suing. He didn’t have anything but debts.’

Logan winces. He doesn’t like being caught between us.

‘This could have resulted from any kind of dispute,’ the DA speculates. ‘Argument over a woman. Jessup’s dealer taking the price of dope out of his ass. I expect we’ll know by Monday or Tuesday.’

‘Have you done a grid search around the body?’ I ask Logan.

‘Best we could. We didn’t find anything within throwing distance, but there’s a lot of damn kudzu and trees down there. If he threw something full force from the top of the bluff, it’ll take daylight to find it.’ Logan stops speaking, but his engineer’s eyes ask me what I think Tim might have been carrying. ‘If he threw something with some weight, he might have thrown it all the way to the river.’

‘Dope doesn’t weigh that much,’ Shad says. ‘Not throwing size, anyway. You’ll find his stash in the morning, if the rats and coons don’t eat it first.’

‘What are you doing at this crime scene?’ I ask pointedly. ‘You usually stay away from the dirty work.’

Shad’s lips broaden into a smile; he enjoys a fight. ‘I was at a party a few blocks away. I’m only answering you as a courtesy, of course. You’re not the DA, Penn Cage. No, sir. This investigation is in my hands, and I’ll decide what gets done and when.’

‘You’re in charge, all right. Just remember that with power comes responsibility. You’ll be held to the highest standard, make no mistake about that.’ I turn to Logan. ‘Let’s put a rush on that autopsy, Chief.’

‘There he goes again,’ says Shad, ‘giving orders like he’s the district attorney.’

Instead of taking the bait, I turn and stride back toward the ladder. As soon as Shad leaves my field of vision, he leaves my mind. My anger remains unquenched, perhaps even unplumbed, but its urgency recedes as I climb back up to Silver Street and make my way through the chattering crowd toward my car. Several acquaintances call out, but I brusquely wave them off. A cold heaviness is seeping outward from my heart. I’d rather clean and embalm Tim’s mutilated body than tell Julia Stanton that the father of her baby is dead. But some duties cannot be shirked. If Julia asks why Tim died, I wonder if I’ll have the courage to tell her the truth? That her husband almost certainly perished because I was late to our meeting.

11

Tim Jessup’s wife and son live in Montebello subdivision, a cluster of small clapboard homes built in the 1940s to house the employees of the International Paper Company. For most of their history, these structures sheltered generations of working white families, but in the past ten years, quite a few have been taken over by African-American families. Despite the age of the houses and the inexpensive materials with which they were built, most are well kept up, with fresh paint and well-tended lawns. What sticks in your mind when you drive through during the day is the abundance of kids, dogs, bicycles, flowers, lawn ornaments, and glitter-painted bass boats parked on the grass beside the driveways. Tim and Julia bought one of the more run-down houses when she got pregnant, then spent eight months fixing it up for the baby. Montebello is a long way down from the tony subdivision where Jessup grew up, but after he turned thirty, Tim stopped caring about things like that. His father never did. After my return to Natchez, I learned it was better not to mention Tim when I ran into Dr Jessup. Whenever I did, all I saw in the old surgeon’s eyes was shame and bitterness.

I turn off Highway 61 at the Parkway Baptist Church and take the frontage road down into Montebello. A warren of curving, tree-shaded streets divides the neighborhood into asymmetrical sections, and it’s easy to get lost down here if you haven’t visited in a while. After one wrong turn, I find Maplewood and swing around a broad curve through the parked cars and pickups that line both sides of the street.

In less than a minute I will shatter the life of Julia Stanton Jessup, and I’m suddenly aware that my outrage over Tim’s death is an order of magnitude smaller than what she will experience after the initial shock wears off. The explosion might even be immediate. Julia is no shrinking violet. She began life in a coddled existence, but fate soon had its way with her family, and she did not pull through without becoming tough. I still remember kissing her once at a senior party, when she was in the ninth grade. We’ve never spoken of it since, but the image of her as she was then remains with me, a beautiful girl just coming into womanhood, and unlike Tim she retained the glow of her youth through the hard years. I suspect that tonight’s shock may take that from her at last.

The instant Julia’s house comes into sight, I know something’s wrong. The front door stands wide-open, but there’s no car in the driveway and no one in sight. The doorway appears as a rectangle of faint yellow light coming from deep within the house, though deep is not exactly accurate in terms of a house that small. I reach under my seat for the pistol Tim told me to bring to the cemetery meeting. The cold metal is my only comfort as I leave the relative safety of my car and walk through the shallow yard toward the house. I should call Logan for police backup, but Tim’s words from last night keep sounding in my head: You can’t trust anybody. Not even the police.

The neighborhood is relatively quiet. I hear the thrum of a few air-conditioning units, still laboring hard in mid-October. A couple of TV soundtracks drift through the air, coming from the houses that have opened their windows to the damp, cooling night. I press my back to the wall outside Jessup’s door, then crash through in a crouch, the way a Houston police detective taught me. The last thing I thought I’d be doing tonight was clearing a house, but at this juncture, there’s no point in analyzing my instincts.

As I move from room to room, it becomes obvious that the house has been thoroughly searched. Every drawer and cabinet has been opened, the books pulled from the shelves and rifled, and the mattresses slit to pieces. Even the baby’s mattress was yanked from the crib and slit open.

The house has only six rooms, all clustered around a central bathroom. I call out Julia’s name, half-hoping she might be hiding somewhere. But I’ll be happier if she’s not. I hope she’s miles away from this place, safely hidden or running for her life. For the state of this house tells me one thing: Whatever evidence of crime Tim was looking for today, he found it. And that discovery cost him his life. The only questions remaining are what did he find, and where is it now?

I lean out the back door, but all I see in the backyard is a plastic playhouse bought from Wal-Mart, looking forlorn and abandoned. I’m raising my cell phone to call Chief Logan when it buzzes in my hand. I jump as though shocked by a wall socket, and this makes me realize how tense I was while I searched the house. The number has a Natchez prefix, a cellular one.

‘Penn Cage,’ I answer, wondering who might be calling me after 1:00 a.m.

The first sound I hear is something between sobbing and choking, and I know before the first coherent word that Julia Jessup already knows that her husband is dead. She is so hysterically anguished that speech is almost physiologically impossible. Yet still she tries.

‘Ih–ih–ih—’ The vocalization catches repeatedly in her throat, like an engine trying to start in cold weather. And after a couple of gulps and stutters, the full sentence emerges. ‘Is Tim dead?’

‘Julia—’

‘Huh–he-he told me not to kuh-kuh-call you. Unless something hah-happened. But Nancy Barrett called me from Bowie’s. She said…Tim feh-fell. Off the bluff. I don’t understand. Tell me the truth, Penn. Tell me right this minute!’

More than anything I want to ask where Julia is, but there’s no way I’m going to do that over a cell phone. Whoever killed Tim may be searching for his wife at this moment, believing she’s in possession of whatever evidence Tim found.

‘It’s true,’ I say as gently as I can, walking quickly back to my car. ‘I’m sorry, Julia, but Tim died tonight.’

A scream worthy of a Douglas Sirk melodrama greets this news, then the words pour out in a senseless flood. ‘ OhmiGodohmiGodoh–oh–oh—I knew it! I knew something was going to happen. He knew it too. Goddamn it!’ Another wail. ‘Oh my God. After everything I’ve done to get him clean…. No. No, no, no. It’s not–no, I can’t go there. What am I supposed to do, Penn? Tell me that! How am I supposed to raise this baby?’

‘Are you with somebody, Julia?’

‘ With somebody? I’m at—’

‘Stop! Don’t tell me where you are. Just tell me if you’re with somebody.’

Even before she answers, I realize I need to get Julia off the phone. Anyone with direction-finding equipment or good hacking skills could triangulate her position. She’s sobbing again, so I speak with as much firmness as I can. ‘Julia, are you with someone? Answer me.’

‘Yes,’ she whispers.

‘Listen to me now. If you’re in a building–a house or a hotel or whatever–I want you to lock the doors. Keep your cell phone with you, but switch it off. Then switch it back on again exactly thirty minutes from now.’

‘What? Why thirty minutes?’

‘Because I’m going to call you back and give you some instructions. I have to make some arrangements first. Don’t forget to switch off your phone. The people who–who hurt Tim–can use that phone to track you down.’

‘Oh, God. Oh…I knew it. I told him not to do anything.’

‘Julia! Don’t say anything else. Don’t trust anyone Tim didn’t mention specifically. And don’t come home. Don’t even think about it. I’m there now, and the place has been torn to pieces.’ I glance at my watch as Julia whimpers incomprehensibly. ‘I’ll call you back at one thirty-five. I’m hanging up now.’

It’s hard to do, but I press END and run for my car. My hand is on the doorknob when two police cars roar around the bend of Maplewood and screech to a stop behind me. A blue-white spotlight hits my face and a harsh voice speaks over the car’s PA system.

‘Stop right there! Put your hands up and step away from the vehicle!’

I feel no fear at this order, only anger and impatience. And curiosity. I haven’t had time to call the chief and tell him that Jessup’s house was broken into. It might make sense that Logan would send someone to make sure I’d informed the widow–or even to search Jessup’s house–but to see a brace of squad cars wheeling around Maplewood as though responding to a home invasion is more than a little surprising. Yet all I can think about as two cops approach is how I’m going to get Julia to safety.

‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’ barks the first cop.

‘I’m Mayor Penn Cage. I came here to inform Julia Jessup that her husband was killed tonight. Chief Logan can confirm that, and you’d better call him right now. I don’t have all night to stand out here talking.’

The cop on my left looks closer at me, then taps his partner on the upper arm. ‘It’s okay. He’s the mayor.’

‘You sure?’ asks the second guy.

‘What the fuck, am I sure? My dad went to school with the guy, dude.’

On another night I would ask the young cop who his father is, but not this time. ‘Guys, I’ve got to go. Somebody took that house apart. You need to lock it down. Don’t let anybody inside.’

‘The wife’s not here?’ asks the young cop.

I answer him while climbing in to my car. ‘Still trying to find her. I’ll update the chief later.’

I jerk the Saab into gear and head back to Highway 61. I can be at my house on Washington Street in less than five minutes, and I need a plan of action by the time I get there. Julia could come apart in less time than that, and a wrong move on her part could be fatal. But my options are almost nonexistent. All the resources I would normally use in this kind of situation have been placed out of bounds by Tim’s warnings. Last night I wasn’t sure his caution was warranted, but after seeing the condition of his body and the state of his house, I have no intention of risking the lives of his wife and son on assumptions.

I’ve called on other, private resources in extraordinary situations, but none are ready to hand tonight. The man I trust most to help me in a crisis is in Afghanistan, working for a security contractor based in Houston. His company may have some operators Stateside who could help protect Julia, but none would be any closer than Houston–seven hours away by car.

Most people who felt they couldn’t trust local law enforcement would probably call the FBI, but that option presents problems for me. Seven years ago I forced the resignation of the Bureau’s director, when I proved that he’d been involved in the cover-up of a civil rights murder in Natchez in 1968. That won me few admirers in the Bureau (open ones, anyway) and made me a liability to the field agents I’d befriended during my successful career as an assistant district attorney in Houston.

‘Damn it!’ I shout, pounding the wheel in frustration. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

It’s like screaming inside a bell jar, but at least my outburst gives vent to the rage and frustration that have been building since I saw Tim’s body. Closing my right hand into a fist, I pound the passenger seat until my wrist aches. When the national park at Melrose Plantation flashes by, I realize I’m driving eighty–forty miles an hour over the speed limit.

Settle down, I tell myself, remembering my father, who becomes calmer the more dire the medical emergency. When everything is at risk, good judgment, not haste, makes the difference between life and death. Panic is the enemy….

My decision to run every stop sign on Washington Street is perfectly rational. They are four-way stops, and unless someone else is doing the same thing I am at exactly the same place and time, I have enough visual clearance to safely jump the intersections.

I park on the street, exit my car, and move toward the house in continuous motion, my mind in flux. Taking the porch steps at a near run, I notice that the cast-iron lamp hanging above me is out. Mom must have inadvertently switched it off. That isn’t like her, but I don’t have time to worry about personal inconsistencies tonight. I’m slipping my key into the lock when a man’s voice speaks from the shadows to my right.

‘That’ll do, Mr Cage. Stand easy where you are. No need to disturb the women.’

I fight the urge to whirl toward the sound. I’ve tried too many cases where people were shot because they saw the face of someone who didn’t want to be remembered. Yet from the voice alone, I’m almost certain that the man in the shadows is Seamus Quinn, the security chief on the Magnolia Queen. I’ve never heard an Irish accent like Quinn’s outside the movies, and even then only in Irish-made films.

‘What do you want me to do?’ I ask.

‘I want you to listen. It’s all right to turn. I want you to see.’

By now my eyes have adapted to the darkness, so when I turn, I see enough to register how wrong I was: The face staring at me out of the shadows belongs not to Seamus Quinn, but to his boss, Jonathan Sands.

Wait, I think, the voice is all wrong. Gone is the refined English accent of the Magnolia Queen’s general manager, replaced by a coarse, working-class Irish accent identical to that possessed by Quinn. Then it hits me: I’m looking at Sands, but it was Quinn who spoke. The Irishman must be standing behind his boss, down in the flower bed. I glance past Sands, but all I register is something low and pale in the blackness behind him, like a crouching animal.

Sands moves his hand slightly, which pulls my eyes back to him, and then I see his gun, a small but efficient-looking automatic held at waist level.

‘Easy now, darlin’,’ he says. ‘I only brought this wee pipe so I don’t have to lay hands on you.’

With a start I realize it was Sands who spoke the first time. He’s simply speaking with Seamus Quinn’s voice rather than the cultured English accent he doles out for public consumption. I only know about British accents because my sister, Jenny, lives in England. She went to Britain as a visiting professor of literature at Trinity College, dated a Dubliner for several years, then married an Englishman and settled in Bath. For this reason, what would sound like a British accent to most other Southerners sounds like Belfast to me, and it tells me I know a lot less about Jonathan Sands than I thought I did. Tonight he sounds like a cross between Bono and the lead singer of the Pogues.

‘You’re not English,’ I murmur, trying to get my mind around it. ‘You’re Irish.’

‘As Paddy’s goat, Your Honor,’ he says, chuckling softly. ‘But let’s keep that between us, eh?’

While Sands’s eyes flicker with private mirth, the evil that Tim hinted at fills my soul like a squid’s ink. I know without doubt that everything my dead friend suspected must be true.

‘What do you want?’

‘Your undivided attention. Do I have that, Mr Cage?’

‘Obviously.’

‘Before we talk, I’ll ask you to hand over that weapon you’ve got in your pocket. Two fingers only.’

Sands materialized so suddenly on my porch that I actually forgot I was carrying a gun. But his ability to spot my concealed pistol in the dark tells me that trying to use it against him would be the last thing I’d do on earth. As directed, I carefully draw the Smith & Wesson and pass it to him, butt first.

With the sure movements of a man accustomed to handling firearms, he slips the gun into his waistband at the small of his back, then gives me a courteous nod. ‘Fair play to you, Mr Mayor. I’m going to pay you the compliment of speaking frankly, because this town is full of cute hoors, but you’re not one of them. A friend of yours died tonight, and died hard. He died because he stepped over the line into other men’s business. Timmy Jessup thought he was the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. When the flood rose and rolled over him, he sucked in his breath and kept his finger where it was. Pity, really, because he was all alone. Everyone else in this culchie town is swimming in the flood–sunbathing beside it, windsurfing on it. Because it’s a flood of money, Mr Mayor, not water. And if you try to put your finger in the hole Jessup left…Well. What matters now is that he’s dead, and nothing can bring him back.’

As the initial shock of being surprised on my own doorstep begins to fade, my outrage boils over. ‘You sorry son of a bitch. Are you telling me you killed—’

Sands silences me with an upraised hand. ‘Quiet now, mate. You’re in more danger than you know.’

12

My mouth has gone dry. It’s not the screamers who scare me; it’s the men who don’t let emotion get in the way of what they want. They’re the ones who’ll kill without hesitation. ‘I’m listening.’

‘Grand. Because this is all the talking I’m going to do. After this, I act, immediately and irrevocably. Understood?’

I nod.

Sands puts his hands behind his back and looks down like an officer contemplating a job in progress. A born soldier was my immediate impression of the man when I met him, for his bearing seems altogether military, though somewhat more fluid than that of the regular officers I’ve known. Sands has little skin fat; his face looks like a skull overlaid with the optimum amount of muscle, and little else. He’s losing his hair in front, but his baldness gives no impression of weakness; rather, the heavy brow and blue-gray machine gunner’s eyes give one the feeling that hair was simply an inconvenience better dispensed with. He stands right at six feet, but his trim waist and thickly muscled shoulders give one a much more aggressive perception of his height.

‘I have a problem, Mr Cage,’ he says. ‘I’m here because I want you to solve it for me.’

‘What’s your problem?’

‘Your friend Jessup stole something from his place of employment.’

I blink slowly, a man trying to find an appropriate response.

‘You don’t look surprised enough to suit me, Mr Mayor. Not nearly.’

‘Tim wasn’t exactly a Boy Scout,’ I say as calmly as I can. ‘What did he steal? Money? Drugs?’

The Irishman gives me a tight smile. ‘You know better than that.’

‘What I know about Tim Jessup is that he was a fuckup. And I don’t know what any of this has to do with me.’

Sands takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. ‘I have a decision to make tonight, Mr Mayor. A decision about you. And you’re not helping yourself. Your family either.’

At the word family, something squirms in my belly.

‘The question,’ Sands enunciates softly, ‘is can I trust you? For example, you may already know what Jessup stole from my boat. Do you know that, Mr Cage? Don’t lie. If you lie, I’ll know it.’

By God, I just about believe you. ‘I have no idea.’

The blue eyes don’t waver; this man has spent a lifetime calculating odds. ‘Don’t you now?’

I shake my head deliberately.

After what seems a full minute, Sands says, ‘Would you bet your daughter’s life on that answer?’

An image of Seamus Quinn holding Annie prisoner upstairs fills my mind, and terror compresses my heart. I grab for the door handle, but before I can turn it, something white explodes out of the flower bed, and iron jaws clamp around my wrist, pinning it motionless in the air. I try to jerk away, but the jaws tighten, numbing my fingers as surely as a nerve block.

A white dog more than half my size stands like an apparition between Sands and me, its eyes cold and blue above the wolfish mouth locked around my arm. Hot saliva runs down my tingling fingers, yet I can’t quite accept the evidence of my eyes. No sound preceded this attack, not a growl or a bark or a word of command–only a quick swish of foliage from behind Sands.

‘Easy now,’ he says either to me or to the dog, maybe to both of us. ‘Your daughter’s just fine, Mr Cage. For the moment, at least. She’s sleeping soundly, with your sainted mother beside her in the scratcher. But if you step through that door before we come to an accommodation, that could change very quickly.’

I try to back away from the door, but the dog’s forelegs are braced like white-painted fence posts, its jaw locked like a steel wrench. After a few moments, Sands makes a clicking sound with his tongue. The dog releases my arm, then walks to his master’s side and sits at attention like an obedient soldier. I stare at the animal as I rub the circulation back into my hand. I’ve never seen its like before, not even a similar breed; an oversize pit bull might be its closest cousin, but this dog has a wrinkled face that throws me. White from nose to tail, he has cropped ears and a thickly muscled chest to match his master’s. The animal has an unearthly silence about him, as though spectral and not a thing of blood and flesh, but I can still feel the imprints of his teeth in my muscles; I’ll have blood bruises in the morning.

‘You’re not a stupid man,’ Sands says, rubbing the dog’s head affectionately. ‘Don’t start playing at it now. I make it my business to know who I’m dealing with. I know you put a lot of hard men in prison back in Texas. Rapists. Robbers. Murderers. Aryan fanatics. Got some of them executed too. I also know you’ve taken on men from your own side of the table. That FBI bastard, for example. I only mention this because you need to understand something. Despite your grand experience, you’ve never come across a man like me.’ A smug smile. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard that one before, eh? The innocent man on death row. The whore with a heart of gold. But every now and then you come across a bloke who knows what he’s on about.’ Sands smiles to himself. ‘That would be me. And this is how you know.’

He utters a low whistle, and suddenly the dog is upon me again, rearing on his hind legs and pinning me to my front door with his forepaws. His mass and strength are astounding, and the hot breath in my face triggers a primitive, almost subhuman fear. The dog still hasn’t made a sound, but it’s all I can do not to piss down my leg.

‘Starting this minute,’ Sands says, looking at this watch, ‘you have twenty-four hours to find the property your friend stole and return it to me. Use any resource at your disposal, but don’t mention me or my company to anyone. If you do, I’ll know it, and a penalty will be exacted. If you talk to the police or the sheriff’s department, I’ll know. If you contact the FBI, I’ll find out faster than you’d believe possible. If you talk to the state gaming commission, you’re fucked. You call the governor, a senator, or your old friend the district attorney of Houston, I’ll know that too. And if I find out you’ve done any of these things…I’ll kill the little girl sleeping upstairs.’

Sands moves up beside his dog and drags the cold barrel of his gun along my stubbled jaw. ‘And I won’t use a gun. I’ll use this.’

A needle point of steel pierces the skin just below my navel, sending a shock of fear through my intestines.

‘I’m very good with a knife,’ Sands says softly. ‘And I’d take my time about it. Understand? Now’–he presses the gun into a hollow beside my trachea, and the knifepoint digs a little deeper–‘ after your daughter’s dead, you might bring me into a court and try to punish me. But you’ve dealt with enough victims’ families to know how useless that is. If you executed me five seconds after I killed her, it wouldn’t bring her back, would it?’

Out of the numbness that has enveloped me like a fog, I shake my head.

As Sands presses his right ear almost against my lips, the knifepoint vanishes; then I feel it burrowing into the skin between two ribs on my left side. ‘I didn’t hear you, Your Honor.’

‘I understand.’

‘Course you do,’ Sands says almost musically. ‘But that quick mind of yours is already working, trying to squirm out of the trap. Hide the girl, yeah? You’d have to hide your mum and dad too. And of course your sister in Bath, and her husband, and the two brats. I have a lot of mates in England who owe me that kind of favor. Then there’s yer one who owns the local bookstore, and her langer of a son. And let’s not forget the lady newspaper publisher, fresh back from the big city. A mouthy cunt, I’ll wager, but the prettiest piece of them all. So, let’s put an end to that nonsense. Either you get me back what your friend stole, or you pay the price. There’s no third choice.’

My hands have begun to shake, but whether from fear or rage I don’t know. ‘You still haven’t told me what he stole.’

‘And I don’t intend to, do I? That’s your job.’

‘How can I find something when I don’t know what it is?’

The knife pierces skin again. I tense, and Sands’s eyes flash. ‘Give me your best guess.’

‘Documents?’ I grunt. ‘Data?’

‘Brilliant. It’s a disc, right? A DVD. Started out as one, anyway. The data could have been copied onto something else by now. USB drive, digital tape, hard drive, even a fucking iPod. What the data is, I won’t tell you, but you’ll know it when you see it.’

‘How?’

‘It’s encrypted.’

The knifepoint withdraws a fraction of an inch. ‘Are you a betting man, Mr Cage?’

‘No.’

‘Good. That’s a sign of intelligence. I don’t gamble either. Because the house always wins. People can’t seem to remember that. But I’m trusting you will.’

The knife again. I wince and try not to cry out.

‘I know this is a lot to take in,’ Sands says. ‘You lost a mate tonight, and that’s never easy. But the truth is, you cut yourself loose from Jessup a long time ago. And rightly so. The man was a header. Christ, he got weepy whenever he talked about how you two were lads together, watching the moon shots on the telly.’

The revelation that this meant so much to Tim almost brings tears to my eyes. I steel myself and keep my eyes on Sands’s face to avoid looking into the dog’s eyes.

‘Listen to me now,’ he says. ‘Let the rupies investigate Jessup’s death. Do everything you planned to do before Jessup died. Show the visiting CEO the town, give interviews, fly around in the balloons. But while you’re having your craic, you find time to find my property. If I find it first, I’ll let you know. Remember, I’ll be watching. And listening.’ In a blur, he raises the knife and pricks the soft skin beneath my left eye. ‘Don’t play games with me, mate. Remember the first rule: The house always wins. And I’m the house.’

Sands bends and slips his pistol into an ankle holster, then takes my gun from the small of his back, removes the clip, ejects the remaining round from the chamber, and hands the pistol to me. As he slides the clip into my front pants pocket, his dog pushes off my chest, retrieves the ejected bullet from the flower bed, and drops the brass into his master’s hand. Sands rubs the dog between its cropped ears, then drops the loose round into my pants pocket.

‘One last thing.’ Sands kneels at the edge of the porch, reaches down into the shadows behind him, and brings up a black leather briefcase.

‘What’s that?’

‘A quarter million dollars.’

‘Why is it here?’

‘Why, it’s the money you asked for.’ Sands gives me a theatrical hug, then says sotto voce, ‘For the cameras, mate.’ Then loudly again: ‘Like you said, you have the biggest job in town, and that’s why we pay you the big bucks.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘Just smile and say thank you,’ he whispers. ‘So your daughter keeps breathing.’

Given no choice, I accept it. ‘Thank you,’ I mutter. What else can I do? Seamus Quinn could be upstairs with a knife, waiting for a signal from Sands.

Jonathan Sands pats my arm and walks down the steps as lightly as Fred Astaire, and again I sense the fluid efficiency of his motions. He waves airily.

‘I wish you the pleasure of the evening. And I look forward to hearing from you.’

Only now do I realize that his upper-crust English accent has returned. The working-class Irish has vanished like a vapor trail, like it was never there at all.

As I stare after him, he stops and calls, ‘Oh, if you’re worried about the grieving widow, rest easy. If I wanted her out of the picture, she’d be room temperature already. The lad too.’

My face must betray something, because he adds, ‘Sure, I heard every word you said to her tonight. I know she doesn’t have my property, so ring her up and tell her to get a good night’s sleep. In fact, if you find the disc before morning, I’ll toss in a few quid for the widows and orphans’ fund.’ He smiles at the thought, then gives me a parting shot in his native accent. ‘Have a grand night altogether, now.’

With that, Jonathan Sands strolls off down Washington Street, the massive dog walking at his heel like a royal escort. When Sands pauses to study the smooth trunks of the crape myrtles in the pink glow of the streetlamps, the dog stops and sits beside him. As I watch, a long, black car glides soundlessly up to him, gathers up him and his dog, and rolls quickly out of sight, making for the river.

As I stare at the blackness where the taillights faded, I realize that I’m shaking uncontrollably. I can hardly grip my key to get it out of the lock.

I’m no stranger to threats. I’ve confronted dangerous men in my life, some of them psychopaths. A few vowed to avenge themselves upon me for criminal convictions or for the executions of relatives. I once shot a man dead to prevent him from killing my daughter in retribution. But never have I experienced the paralyzing terror I felt while listening to the clear and passionless voice of Jonathan Sands.

God, what Tim must have suffered before he died.

With shaking hands I take out my cell phone and call Julia Jessup. I’m three minutes late, but she answers, sounding like she’s close to hyperventilating. I don’t know what Sands’s promise to leave Tim’s widow alone is worth, but I must protect my own family now. After instructing Julia to seek refuge with Tim’s parents, I carry Sands’s briefcase inside, lock the door behind me, and race up the stairs to Annie’s door. In the night light’s glow, I see her tucked into the bow of my mother’s larger form beneath the covers. Relief washes over me, but fear quickly burns through it. As I watch my sleeping daughter, a disturbing certainty rises from the chaos in my mind. Tim was right about ‘Mr X.’ Jonathan Sands is not like anyone I’ve ever faced before. I’ve dealt with the man for nearly a year and not once suspected his true nature. But there’s no time for self-recrimination now. Or for doubt. Sands may have convinced himself that I’ll be like the others he’s bought off or threatened into cooperating with him, but in twenty-four hours he’ll know different. Before I can act, though, I must get my daughter to safety.

Hurrying down the stairs, I lock Sands’s briefcase–which is indeed full of cash–in the safe in my study, mentally ticking off the obvious obstacles: The house will be watched. My phones will be tapped–cellular and landlines. The house may be bugged or even covered by video cameras, considering that Sands was waiting for me when I got home. He could be checking my e-mail, text messages, and any other form of digital communication. So…what options remain?

For some people, mortal danger brings paralyzing confusion. For me–after the first minute of panic–it brings clarity. So it’s with utter certainty that I pick up my kitchen telephone and dial my father’s home number. The phone rings three times, and then a mildly groggy baritone voice answers, ‘Dr Cage.’

Even before I speak, something in me arcs out over the wires, instinctively reaching for the protection of blood kin. ‘Dad, it’s Penn.’

From three miles away, I feel him come alert in the dark. ‘What’s the matter? Is Annie all right? Is it Peggy?’

I let some anxiety bleed into my voice. ‘Annie and Mom are fine, but something’s wrong with me. My heart’s racing. I think I’m having a panic attack.’

‘Tachycardia? Is it a stress reaction?’

‘No, it just started a couple of minutes ago. I’m a little short of breath, and my pulse is about a hundred and ten. I feel like I may throw up. I guess maybe I’m worried about taking that balloon ride in the morning.’

There’s a brief silence. ‘We’d better go down to my office and get an EKG on you.’

‘No, no, I think it’s just anxiety. I had to fly in a goddamn helicopter today. I think I just need some Valium or something.’

‘A helicopter? Hmm. Maybe you’re right. Do you have any Ativan there?’

‘No. Do you think you could bring me something? I’d come there, but I don’t want to drive while this is going on.’

I hear him grunt as he heaves himself out of bed. ‘I’ll pull on some clothes and get my bag. I want to listen to your chest.’

I press my palm so hard against my forehead that my arm shakes. ‘Thanks, Dad. I appreciate it. The front door is unlocked. Just walk in. I’ll be in my bathroom.’

‘Okay.’

I should hang up, but I can’t help adding, ‘Try to hurry, okay?’

‘I’m on my way.’

13

Linda Church hugs the toilet in the ladies’ room of The Devil’s Punchbowl Bar and Grille, shuddering as she retches into the bowl. She’s supposed to be seating patrons, but she can no longer carry out the basic functions of employment. Two minutes ago she received a text message from Tim, but the message made no sense. She wipes her mouth with toilet tissue, then flips open her phone and reads the letters again, being careful to hide it from the hidden camera above.

Thiefwww kllmmommy. Sqrttoo.

The message came from a number she doesn’t recognize, not even the area code, but this is the strongest proof that Tim sent it. He’s told her that one of his security tactics is to use the phones of strangers when their attention is elsewhere. He’s even stolen cell phones for this purpose. But this message has taken her to the edge of panic. Kllmmommy? Sqrttoo? It almost sounds like an order to kill Julia and the baby.

‘No,’ she whispers, as the possibility that this message might have been meant for someone else sinks into her bones. ‘Not possible. He loves that baby. He loves Julia.’

Linda hears footsteps enter the restroom. She grabs the handle and flushes for cover, and cold spray hits her face.

‘Linda?’ asks a worried voice. ‘It’s Ashley. Are you okay? Janice said you really look like shit.’

‘I’m okay, Ash. Stomach flu, I think. I’ll be right out.’

‘Yuck. I’ll tell Janice.’

‘Thanks.’

Linda frantically plays back the sequence of events that brought her here. Four hours ago, Tim walked past the door of The Devil’s Punchbowl whistling ‘Walking on the Moon,’ by the Police. The song was a coded signal, arranged last night after Tim met with Penn Cage. If Tim had whistled ‘Every Breath You Take,’ it would have meant, ‘Get out now. Don’t wait for anything.’ ‘Walking on the Moon’ meant Linda should work until the end of her shift, then throw her cell phone in the river, get into her car, and drive three hours to New Orleans, to her aunt’s house. Tim would call her in transit using a pay-as-you-go cell phone he’d bought at Wal-Mart, and she would answer with the same type of phone. Hers was in her car now, under the front seat.

‘Walking on the Moon’ was supposed to signal that everything was going according to plan, but the moment Linda recognized the tune, her insides had started to roil with apprehension. She’d forced herself to keep doing her job, even though she had to remain on the boat an hour after Tim’s shift ended. She’d almost snapped at midnight and simply run down the exit ramp as he left the boat, but that would have busted them for sure.

‘I shouldn’t even be here,’ she says almost silently, ever conscious of the hidden microphones. The Devil’s Punchbowl usually closes at 11:00 p.m., but Sands has ordered all the food service to run on extended hours during the Balloon Festival.

The door bangs open again, and Ashley calls, ‘Darnell just came by and asked why you weren’t on duty. She’s on the warpath. You’d better get back out there if you can walk.’

Sue Darnell was the personnel manager, a cast-iron bitch from Dallas. ‘Almost done. I’m just fixing my face.’

‘Down there? I’m looking at your heels, girl.’

‘I’m coming, Ash! I got vomit on my blouse.’

‘It’s your funeral, honey.’

Don’t even think that, Linda says silently. With a handful of tissue she wipes clammy sweat from her face and forehead, then gets to her feet and checks her uniform for any signs of vomit. She was lucky.

The ladies’ room opens into Slot Group Seven, a jangling circus of noise filled with smoke and drunk gamblers. The extraction fans don’t work for shit up here. Linda smooths her skirt against her thighs and tries to walk with something like grace as she moves through the suckers and back toward the Punchbowl.

She’s thirty feet away when she realizes something is wrong. Ashley and Janice are standing by the cash registers, talking to each other without any regard for three patrons waiting to be seated. Ashley’s mouth forms a perfect O, then Janice nods and begins chattering. When Ashley catches sight of Linda, she motions her over with a quick wave.

‘What is it?’ Linda asks, fighting the urge to bolt for the main-deck gangplank.

‘Janice just got a text from her ex-husband. He’s up at Bowie’s. He said some guy fell off the bluff up by Silver Street. He was goofing on the other side of the fence or something, and he fell. He’s dead. Some people are saying he jumped.’

Linda blinks, trying to absorb this, but a low ringing has begun in her ears.

‘Drunk, probably,’ Janice says. ‘Jimmy’s drunk, anyway. You couldn’t get me on the other side of that fence even if I was toasted. There’s only about a foot of concrete, and then nothing.’

‘A whole lot of nothing,’ Ashley agrees. ‘I wonder who it was.’

‘A tourist, I bet,’ says Janice. ‘Somebody here for the race. Wait.’ Janice takes a cell phone from her pocket and checks a message. ‘Now Jimmy says somebody threw the guy off the bluff. Jesus.’

Linda is looking at Janice, but what she sees is Tim flying through the air, head over heels, spinning through the dark—

‘Linda?’ says Ashley, her voice tinged with real concern. ‘Are you going to puke again?’

Janice grabs the trash can from behind the register, but Linda ignores it and walks back toward the ladies’ room. The girls say something behind her, but she doesn’t catch the meaning. She passes the door of the restroom and walks to the thick glass door that leads to the observation deck. The October wind hits her face-on, and she’s glad for the chill. Looking upriver, she sees the lights of the houses on Clifton Avenue, then Weymouth Hall. Somewhere up there, Tim is supposed to be meeting Penn Cage tonight. She doesn’t let her mind go any further than that. Tim is there, she says silently. Right now, he’s handing over whatever he got tonight. With this article of faith set in her heart, she slips her personal cell phone from her pocket and flicks it through the rail, toward the river three decks below. She doesn’t hear the splash, but she sees a spurt of silver rise in the moonlight as the phone goes under. She knows her body was between her hand and the surveillance camera when she threw the phone, because she’s rehearsed this move a dozen times in her mind, just as Tim instructed.

‘Keep moving,’ she mouths to herself, walking to the companion-way used by the service staff to get to the main deck. ‘Don’t stop long enough to let fear paralyze you.’

She’s quoting Tim now, like a heroine echoing her mentor in her mind. She slips through the gift shop, then past the foot of the escalators. This is the hardest part of her journey. Every atom of instinct is screaming for her to march down the big aisle between the slots, through the main entrance, and right across the broad exit ramp–but she can’t.

She doesn’t have her car keys.

For one wild moment she considers leaving anyway, breaking into a sprint and racing out to freedom. But if she did that, she’d be cutting herself off from Tim. The TracFone from Wal-Mart is under her car seat, and that’s her only sure link to him now. To reach it, she has to have her keys.

Why didn’t you tell me to keep my ignition key in my pocket? she asks Tim silently. Why didn’t I think of it? For the first time a blade of raw terror slices through her, cold and true. If Tim didn’t think of this contingency, what else did he forget?

Linda grits her teeth and forces herself to breeze past the center aisle without looking at the exit. Point of no return, she thinks, spying the service door that leads belowdecks to the restricted area of the boat. Operations, Security, the physical plant of the barge.

She has to show her badge to the security officer at the top of the stairs. He gives it a bored look, then lets her walk down the steps. She can feel his eyes on her backside as she reaches the lower deck.

The smell changes in the lower holds. It’s like entering the service elevator in a hotel by mistake. The illusion of cleanliness and luxury falls away, leaving the sticky floor of reality. The air down here reeks of bad cafeteria food and other things she can’t quite recognize. Employee resentment…paranoia. Linda quails at the idea of going near the security control area, but she has no choice. The lockers and changing room are aft of the security suite.

Because everyone is still on shift, she’s alone on the lower deck. If the security guys poke their heads out, she’ll tell them she’s puking nonstop and has to get to the emergency room.

A long corridor runs past the door of the security suite, then the off-limits room they call the Devil’s Punchbowl. She makes the length of the passageway on a single held-in breath. Halfway home now. Through the hatch that leads to the changing rooms, past the clock where she punches in, around the corner…and there. The employee lockers.

Linda licks her lips, takes a breath, then dials the combination on her locker. The lock clicks. In her mind she sees the yellow Dooney & Bourke purse she bought at Dillard’s in New Orleans, a birthday splurge. And inside the purse, her car keys.

She opens the door and reaches into the locker, but her purse is gone. Withdrawing her hand, she leans back so that more light can get into the space. It’s a mistake, she thinks, feeling the way she does when she somehow loses the milk carton in the refrigerator.

Lying where she left her purse is the black TracFone Tim bought her at Wal-Mart–the phone she last saw before shoving it under the front seat of her Corolla.

‘You fucking slag,’ growls a male voice filled with rage. Seamus Quinn. ‘Do you have any idea what you’re in for?’

Linda closes her eyes and grips the cold metal edge of the locker door. Without it, she would have fainted to the deck.

Quinn starts to speak again, but the air in the room changes suddenly, and his words become a mute exhalation. Linda hears rapid, shallow breathing that sets her nerves thrumming.

‘Close the locker, Linda,’ says Jonathan Sands. ‘We’re a bit pressed for time.’

Tim is dead, says a voice inside her, the voice that has known it all along. Hot tears slide down her cheeks as she closes the locker door.

‘That’s it, darlin’,’ says Sands. ‘Now turn around.’

Linda wipes her face on her sleeve and turns slowly. Quinn is leaning against the wall behind her, his shoulder wedged against a flyer that reads NEED HELP MANAGING YOUR 401(K)? Sands stands in the corridor that leads past the security suite, arms folded across his chest, dressed as perfectly as if he were attending a wedding or a funeral in fifteen minutes. His hyperobservant eyes glide over her face and clothing, missing nothing. Beside him sits the huge white dog that sometimes accompanies him on the boat. Sands told her the dog was bred in Pakistan, for fighting and for war. She has never heard the dog make a sound.

Poor Tim, she thinks in a rush of despair that almost drops her to the floor.

‘Can’t trust a fucking cunt,’ Quinn mutters. ‘All the same.’

Linda’s heart flutters like a panicked bird trying to beat its way up through her throat. Move, she tells herself. Run—

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Sands says. ‘There’s nowhere to go.’

The wild urge to flight twists inside her.

‘Come to me,’ Sands says, beckoning her toward the hallway. ‘We need to ask you some questions about Timothy.’

The last ember of hope dies in her soul.

They know.

14

The second my father walks into my bathroom with his black bag, I put my finger to my lips and shove a piece of paper into his hands. On it are printed the words:

I’m not sick. Annie is in danger. We all are. House may be bugged. Act like I’m having a panic attack. Follow my lead. We’re going to type messages on the computer on the counter. I’ll turn on the bath taps to cover the noise of the keyboard.

Dad looks up after reading for only two seconds, but I shake my head and point at the paper, and he goes back to reading. My father is seventy-three years old, and he’s practiced medicine in Natchez for more than forty of those years. He’s the same height I am–an inch over six feet–but the arthritis that’s slowly curling his hands into claws has bowed his spine so that I am taller now. His hair and beard have gone white, his skin is cracked and spotted from psoriasis, and he has to take insulin shots every day, yet the primary impression he radiates is one of strength. Thirty years past triple-bypass surgery, he’s sicker than most of his patients, but they think of him as I do: an oak tree twisted by age and battered by storms, but still indomitable at the core. He licks his lips, looks up slowly from the paper, and says, ‘Is your heart still racing?’

‘I think it’s worse. And the nausea’s worse. I vomited twice after I called you.’

‘Wonderful.’ Dad glances toward the bathroom counter. Between the two sinks are the articles I assembled while I waited for him: my keys; a black Nike warm-up suit and running shoes; Annie’s MacBook computer, booted up with Microsoft Word on the screen; a Springfield XD nine-millimeter pistol, and a short-barreled .357 Magnum. ‘I brought you some Ativan,’ he says, ‘but I want to listen to your chest first.’

‘Do you mind if I get in the bathtub? I want to clean myself up.’

‘That’s fine. Just get your shirt off.’

I nod and turn on the cold-water tap, then strip off my clothes and pull on the warm-up suit. Dad moves in front of the computer as I pull on the top and pecks out the words What the hell is going on?

He steps aside for me to type my response, and we begin a sort of waltz in place, during which I explain our dilemma. He always typed much slower than I, but it’s worse now because of his hands; it hurts to watch him struggle to strike the keys.

Tim Jessup was murdered tonight. It has to do with his work at one of the casinos. The man behind his death just threatened to kill Annie. The motive is too complex to explain like this. They threatened Mom’s life, and yours too. Even Jenny, and she’s on the other side of the Atlantic.

Who are these people?

People I misread very badly.

They really killed Jack Jessup’s boy?

I left his body under the bluff an hour ago. I think they tortured him.

Christ. Do the police know?

Yes, but I’m not sure I can trust them. One word in the wrong ear, and these people take or kill Annie. They have a lot to lose.

What about FBI?

First priority is getting Annie and Mom to safety. We’ve learned that the hard way, haven’t we?

Dad nods slowly, and I know his memories mirror my own: I see the house that he and my mother lived in for thirty years going up in flames, and the maid who raised me and my sister in agony on a table in the emergency room.

‘Take a deep breath,’ Dad says in his medical voice, as though he’s listening to my heart with his stethoscope. ‘Again…okay…again.’

There’s only one real option, I type. I’m going to call Daniel Kelly’s firm in Houston. Blackhawk. With any luck they’ll be able to send a team our way almost immediately. They’ll take Mom and Annie somewhere safe–to an actual safe house, just like the movies.

Dad’s face goes through subtle changes of expression as he absorbs all this, but in a short while he nods and types again.

All right. What about Kelly himself?

He’s in Afghanistan.

Where do the girls go? Houston?

I’m not sure. But wherever it is, you should go with them.

His contemptuous expression tells me his answer to this, but he types:

Kelly’s people will take better care of them than I could, and I have three patients dying right now. One in hospice and two in the hospital. I’m not going anywhere. You haven’t called Kelly’s people yet?

I have to leave the house for that. Was waiting for you.

Where are you going?

Not far. I should be back within 15 minutes, but don’t panic unless I’m gone an hour.

He digests this, then types:

What if somebody tries to break in while you’re gone? Is that what the guns are for?

I pick up the big revolver and slip it into his arthritic hands.

Can you still fire a pistol?

He eyes his crooked fingers doubtfully.

If they bust in here, I guess we’ll see. It can’t be any harder than giving a goddamn prostate exam. You don’t have a shotgun, do you?

Sorry. Wish I did.

He shrugs philosophically.

If someone does come, shoot before you talk. I’ll come running, and I should get here fast enough to be of help.

Dad sucks his teeth for a few seconds, and I know he’s thinking of options. With a grunt he bends and types: There are a couple of guys I could call to help out. Old patients. Ex-cops.

Not this time. The bad guys might believe I panicked and called you for some Ativan, but if anybody else shows up, we’re asking for trouble. We have to do this the old-fashioned way.

Dad shakes his head and types: Like Matt Dillon and Festus spending the night at the Dodge City jail, by God.

That’s about the size of it. I figure you’re more Doc Adams than Festus.

I’m older than Milburn Stone ever got on that show, I’m afraid.

I smile, then type: I still trust you with Annie’s life.

Something hard and implacable comes into my father’s eyes as he reads the words, and I know that the first person who tries to break into my house will take a lethal bullet from a man who knows exactly where to aim.

I’m going now, I type. Hope for 10 minutes, but give me an hour.

‘You’re heartbeat’s slowing a little,’ Dad says. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Better. I think I just want to sit here in the tub awhile.’

He nods understanding. ‘I’ll just go watch some TV in the den. If the nausea doesn’t ease up, give a yell, and I’ll give you a shot of Vistaril.’

‘Thanks, Dad. Jesus, this really scared me.’

‘Don’t thank me. You’re not out of the woods yet.’

I start to walk past him, but he grips my arm with startling force, pulls me back to the MacBook, and types: What if you don’t come back?

He’s right to ask. If I leave this house, no matter how stealthy I try to be, I might be signing my death warrant.

If I don’t come back, I’m dead or taken. Call 911 and start screaming there’s a home invasion in progress. Then call every cop you ever treated and put a ring of steel around this house. I start to leave, but then I add, And raise Annie like you know I would. Like you raised me.

He stares at the screen for a long time, and I see his jaw muscles flexing. Then he shakes his head and types: Go fetch the cavalry, Matthew. I’ll hold the fort.

I use the rear basement window to leave my house. The lower halves of those windows sit in a narrow concrete moat that surrounds the house, and I am thankful for it tonight. I see no one as I sneak out of my backyard, but as I prepare to slip across Washington Street two blocks from my house, a cigarette flares at the corner of my block, illuminating the pale moon of a beardless face. Knowing the watcher will be night-blind for a few moments, I dart across the road and into the foliage of a neighbor’s yard.

My destination is Caitlin’s guesthouse, a renovated servants’ quarters that can be opened with the same key that opens her front door. I move carefully between my neighbors’ homes, using my knowledge of pets and gardens to steer clear of problems. When I reach Caitlin’s backyard, I experience a moment of panic, thinking she returned while I was making my way here, but what I thought was her car is simply three garbage cans lined up for collection.

A rush of mildewed air hits me when I open the guesthouse door. Leaving the lights off, I move carefully across the dark den, toward the glowing red light in the kitchenette. With all hope suspended, I lift the cordless phone and press the ON button. A steady dial tone comes to me like a lifeline thrown into a black ocean.

Taking my cell phone from my pocket, I check its memory for the number of Kelly’s employer in Houston, then enter it into the cordless landline. The phone rings twice, then a cool female voice answers, ‘Blackhawk Risk Management.’ She’s wide-awake at two thirty in the morning, and this gives me some confidence.

‘This is Penn Cage calling. I was given this number by Daniel Kelly. He’s a personal friend.’

‘Yes, thank you. Did Mr Kelly give you a code word?’

I close my eyes in silent thanks to Kelly. ‘It’s been some time, but he once told me to say Spartacus if I had an emergency and couldn’t reach him.’

‘Thank you, transferring you now. Please remain on the line.’

There’s no hold music, only a hiss cut short by a squawk. A male voice says, ‘Call me Bill, Mr Cage. Dan Kelly is on assignment at this time. What is the nature of your emergency?’

‘It’s life or death. I wouldn’t call otherwise.’

Bill seems unfazed by this; he continues speaking with the practiced calm of a fighter pilot. ‘Are you in danger now?’

‘Yes, but I can talk.’

‘How can we help?’

‘I’m in Natchez, Mississippi. Five fifty Washington Street, a residence. My family has been threatened by men who committed murder tonight. I’m not sure I can trust the police. I need someone to take my mother and daughter to a safe location. Can you do that?’

The pause is brief. ‘We can do that. We have some operators arriving for Stateside rotation, and we can send a team. What’s the time frame?’

‘How soon can they be here?’

‘Seven hours by road. Our company planes are committed at this time. If danger is imminent, I can charter a jet, but cost may become a factor to you at that point.’

I think quickly. If Jonathan Sands has somehow overheard this call, he can retaliate even before a jet gets here. Annie’s safety lies in my getting back to my house unseen and playing out my bluff. ‘Cost is no object, but seven hours will work fine.’

‘You’ll have a team at your front door in seven hours or less. Have the packages ready.’

‘I will.’

‘Should we expect opposition?’

‘I think the opposition will be too surprised to act quickly. But your men should be ready just in case.’

‘Understood. Mr Cage, while we were talking, I messaged Dan Kelly via secure digital link. His reply says that if you can remain at your present number, he will call you within thirty minutes.’

I stand and pace the floor of the guesthouse in the dark. ‘I can do that. But under no circumstances should Kelly try to call my cell phone or home phones. Those are compromised. It’s this line or nothing.’

‘Understood. We’ll see you in seven hours. Six, if we can manage it. Stay well.’

I feel a rush of relief so powerful that my face goes hot. ‘Thank you.’

Waiting in the dark with my hand on the phone, I sense the fragility of those who matter most to me, as though they’re barely clinging to the planet as it spins through its orbit: my mother and daughter sleeping across the street with only my aging father to protect them; my sister in England, going through her day without even a hint that she could be in danger; Julia Jessup hiding in or near the city, or running for her life with a fatherless child to protect. Swirling around them are people whose paths I can neither control nor predict: the men watching my house, who may realize I’m gone and call their master; Caitlin, who might return at any moment and discover me; Sands himself, who might decide he can’t trust me after all and consign me and mine to Tim Jessup’s fate.

The half hour I must wait for Kelly’s call is measured in clenching heartbeats, rapid-fire eyeblinks, startle reflexes, sudden bowel constrictions, and drops of sweat. When I don’t see the ghostly white dog peering at me through the guesthouse window, I see images of my friend’s brutalized body, or his wife and young son hiding in terror and grief. Strangest of all is my memory of last night’s dream of Tim on the ice sheet, and the white wolf watching me. How did I dream of an animal I’d never seen before? Or have I seen that white dog around town somewhere, perhaps even with Sands, and stored the memory in some reptilian neurons, where they waited to be triggered by Tim’s twisted tale?

When the phone rings, I jerk it to my ear so fast the chirp fades almost before it’s begun.

‘Hello? Hello!’

There’s only silence at first. Then Kelly’s voice comes into the receiver as though it’s being transmitted from a distant spacecraft. ‘What’s happening, man? Somebody threatened Annie?’

‘Jesus, Kelly, it’s great to hear your voice. We’re in trouble here. They threatened Annie, my parents, my sister, everybody. They already killed a friend of mine tonight. A guy I went to school with.’

‘Slow down. Are you safe where you are?’

‘Yeah, but I don’t have much time. Are you still in Afghanistan?’

‘Yeah. The mountains. Look, talk to me. Who’s your problem?’

‘The main guy is Irish. He runs one of the casinos here. He pretends to be English, but that’s just a front. He goes by the name of Jonathan Sands. I have no idea who he really is. Paramilitary type, but hiding it in a suit.’

‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ Kelly says reflectively. ‘Ex-IRA, maybe?’

‘He definitely knows how to handle weapons.’

‘What the hell have you got into?’

‘I’m not sure. But I didn’t take it seriously enough at first, and a friend died because of it. According to him, I can’t use conventional law enforcement. Sands has got a lot of people on his payroll.’

There’s a long silence. Then Kelly says, ‘It could take forty-eight hours.’

‘What could?’

‘Me getting there. The company will get Annie and your mother sorted out, but it could take me two days to get back to the States.’

‘Dan…are you sure?’

‘Hey, it’s only money.’

‘You know I’ll—’

‘Shut the fuck up, okay? Before you embarrass both of us. And try to keep breathing for the next forty-eight hours.’

‘I’ll do my best. Look, you can’t call me, okay?’

‘Understood. The Blackhawk team is going to bring you a secure telephone. A satellite phone. You’ll have to decide when it’s safe to use it. Update the company when you can. Just keep using Spartacus as your code. They’re also going to bring a gear bag. That’s for me. I’ll have them stash it somewhere in town, and you can pick it up if you’re not being tailed.’

‘Okay. Daniel—’

‘Hold up. If you get in a really tight spot after the team leaves and before I get there, there’s couple of guys in your area I trust. They’re from Athens Point, down the river.’

‘Who are they?’

‘One’s a young guy, ex-marine. Carl Sims. Met him at the range there. He’s a black guy, a sniper. I don’t care what you’re mixed up in, use my name, you can trust him.’

‘Okay. Who else?’

‘There’s a guy used to fly for the sheriff down there at Athens Point. Ex-air force. Name’s McDavitt. He’s the real deal. If you need to get somewhere fast, or get away fast, he’s your man.’

A jolt of synchronicity makes my scalp tingle. ‘I met McDavitt today. No shit. Some corporate big shot hired him to fly us around the city.’

Kelly laughs softly. ‘You see? Things don’t look as bad as you thought. Now, you get back to Annie. We’ll take care of things on our end. See you in a couple of days. I’m out.’

I wait until I hear the click, then slowly hang up.

The circuitous trek back to my house doesn’t seem to take nearly as long this time; I feel Daniel Kelly sitting on my shoulder like one of Odin’s crows. The watcher on the corner is still in place, but I move across Washington as though cloaked in darkness. Just as I slip through the hedges into my backyard, I see a man walking across the parking lot of the bank behind my house. I silently double my pace, drop into the moat beside the basement window, and slide into the relative safety of my home.

My father is standing watch at the top of the stairs. He looks old in the shaft of light falling from my bedroom door, like a monk meditating over a gun he found by chance.

‘Don’t shoot,’ I hiss from the bottom of the staircase.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Dad whispers with relief. ‘I was about a minute from calling 911.’

‘I’m feeling a little better now,’ I say loudly, hurrying up the stairs.

‘I think that was worse than Korea,’ Dad whispers, standing slowly and rubbing his lower back. ‘Except for the frostbite. I took two nitro pills while you were gone. Let’s get to that damned computer so we can talk.’

He follows me into my bathroom, and I bend quickly over Annie’s MacBook.

Kelly called me himself from Afghanistan. I had to wait a half hour, but it was worth it. Blackhawk dispatched a team as soon as I told them we were in danger. They’ll probably come in an armored SUV. I imagine they’ve already left Houston. They’ll be here in less than seven hours.

Dad nods thankfully, then pecks out two words: And Kelly?

Kelly’s coming himself. 48 hours minimum before he gets here though.

Good. So. What do we do now?

Wait for the cavalry. We should probably stop using the computer. There are lasers that can read keystrokes by the vibrations of window glass. This is sci-fi stuff we’re up against.

As Dad shakes his head slowly, I type: We’d better stay upstairs. We can pull shifts. One of us by Annie’s bedroom door while the other catches a catnap in my bed.

You think I can sleep a wink after what you told me tonight? Drag a couch out here and we’ll play cards until dawn.

Cards? You don’t play cards!

A smile that’s almost a grimace makes my father’s eyes squint.

Haven’t since Korea. Bores the hell out of me.

But tonight?

The enemy’s out there. Tonight we play cards.

15

Linda doesn’t know whether she’s paralyzed by fear or whether she’s entered a place beyond fear. Her mind has given way to grief or shock, or some mixture of both. They have taken her deep within the bowels of the barge that supports the faux riverboat above her head, to the long hold with black foam on its walls, like the foam in a recording studio. It’s dim, but it doesn’t stink of mildew as some areas of the lower deck do. This hold smells like a new car. It’s here that Sands brings Linda and his other mistresses when he wants sex during business hours. A sofa bed in the corner faces two large LCD screens that display an ever-changing feed from the security cameras upstairs. On those screens Sands can monitor all areas of the casino, even during sex. This room has other uses too. Here they bring the troublemakers and scam artists who aren’t lucky enough to be handed over to the police. For these occasions, a single chair stands in the center of the hold, and beside it a shiny cart like a printer trolley. But the square device on the cart is not a printer. It’s smaller, with thin wires coming off it, like the EKG machine at a doctor’s office. It’s that machine that makes the staff refer to this hold as the real ‘Devil’s Punchbowl.’

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