Pithy Nolan had twice driven her electric wheelchair into the room, but Tom had been asleep both times. The matron’s breathing sounded even more labored than Tom’s, but her oxygen mask seemed to give her some relief. If Walt was honest with himself, the old lady gave him the creeps. She seemed almost incorporeal, masked and wrapped in her voluminous blanket, yet her love for Tom could not be questioned.

Xerxes remained outside the door like a sentry, ready to run whatever errand Walt might command. Walt had already sent his father, Darius, to Walmart to buy four more TracFones. No matter what course of action he and Tom took now, they were going to need secure lines of communication to get out of this mess alive.

It was one of these phones he used to call Griffith Mackiever when he checked his old burn phone and saw that the embattled superintendent of state police had tried to reach him only minutes earlier.

“What’s the situation?” Walt asked when Mackiever answered.

“We’ll get to that,” Mackiever said. “Did you check the GPS coordinates on Forrest’s car around the time the Masters girl was killed?”

“Why?”

“I figure he was within eight miles of that Bone Tree when she was shot.”

“That’s about right, I’d guess.”

“I’d like to prove Forrest killed her, but we also have a videotape of Ms. Masters leaving the Crossroads Café with a black kid.”

“I’ll go you one better. I saw Ozan drive away from the swamp in that kid’s truck. And I found blood on the ground at the edge of the water.”

“What? Christ, Walt. I could do something with that.”

“A statement from a fugitive cop killer? Wake up, son. You’d be a lot better off using that Katrina video I gave you.”

“I’m working on it. I haven’t had any luck reaching my former friends in state government. I think my only choice now is the feds.”

“I agree. What’s happening at the Bone Tree now? Who’s got control of the scene?”

“It was shaping up to be a jurisdictional dispute, but then the FBI went in there like the goddamned Marines and cordoned off about twenty acres. A U.S. attorney issued some kind of special directive under the Patriot Act, and they ran the goddamn Lusahatcha County sheriff right out of there. The senior agent is Agent John Kaiser out of the New Orleans field office.”

“That’s who you want to see, Mack. He and Penn Cage know each other. Do you know where Penn is now?”

“They flew him back to Natchez in the Lusahatcha County air unit. He and his family are under twenty-four-hour FBI protection at his residence.”

Walt sighed in relief. “Okay, good.” Walt hesitated as Tom stirred in the bed, but he didn’t awaken. “Are you going to go see Kaiser now?”

“That’s my plan. I wish to God I didn’t have to bust open this Katrina sniping mess in order to do it. But I guess that’s the only way to take Forrest down.”

“There’s always my derringer.”

“Don’t even mention that.” Mackiever was silent for a few seconds. “I tell you, Walt, when I think about what happened this afternoon—those Eagles killing Sonny Thornfield right in that jail, while it was under FBI control—I wonder if even the feds can stop Forrest. It’s like he’s three steps ahead of us all, no matter what we do.”

“No,” Walt said. “He’s scrambling just like the rest of us. Worse, he’s got dissension in his ranks.”

“How do you know that?”

“Trust me. Him and his uncle, Snake, don’t exactly see eye to eye. Sooner or later, one of them’s going to have to go.”

“Not soon enough for me. I’m gonna talk straight to you, Walt. I’ve got a bad feeling about those Knoxes. They remind me of a couple of crews back in Texas, in the old days. I don’t think even the FBI scares them much. And I think that rather than let themselves be taken, they’ll try to take down everybody. I think a lot of people could die.”

“What are you saying, Mack?” Walt asked, but he already knew.

He and the LSP chief had been Texas Rangers in an era when they’d gone after certain outlaws with the tacit understanding that they were not to return with a prisoner. And to Walt’s ear, Mackiever’s voice had echoed into the present from that time.

“It’s not 1955 anymore, Griff. Not even 1965.”

“You could have fooled me, these past coupla days.”

Walt listened to the phone hissing in his ear. Mackiever wasn’t speaking hypothetically. He saw a malignant cancer eating his department from within, and he wanted a fellow Ranger to rip it out by the roots.

“I’ve got a wife now,” Walt said.

“I know. I’ve got no right to ask anything of you. But the situation is fluid, and I just want you to know that . . . if anything were to happen to Knox, I can promise you’d have an angel on your shoulder in the aftermath. I’d move heaven and earth to protect you. You and Dr. Cage both.”

“I hear you. And my advice is, take everything you’ve got to Special Agent Kaiser.”

Mackiever was silent for several seconds. Then he said, “I’ll do that, Cap’n. Just don’t forget what I said.”

The connection went dead.

Walt stared at Tom for a long time after he set the phone down. Then he reached over to the bedside table and opened a box of Tom’s precious cigars. Xerxes had retrieved them earlier when he’d gotten the drugs from Tom’s clinic. Walt knew that lighting one would be bad for his friend’s lungs, but he needed to settle his nerves. He also knew Tom would thank him for the vicarious pleasure he would experience upon waking. Biting off the end of a Partagas, Walt picked up the lighter Xerxes had brought in and lit the cigar, savoring the flavor of one of the few luxuries Tom Cage allowed himself each day.

Tom stirred, but thanks to a hefty dose of oxycodone, he did not awaken.

Walt smoked thoughtfully, watching the man he’d fought with like a brother through the killing snows of Korea. In the deep shadows, he turned his mind away from the war and thumbed back through the years he’d spent chasing desperate men across Texas, first on a horse, then in motor vehicles of various types. He recalled times that he’d followed the rules, and other times when he’d thrown the book away and simply done what was necessary. He wasn’t proud of those occasions but he wasn’t ashamed, either. While Tom slept fitfully, Walt wondered whether John Kaiser and the FBI could take on Forrest Knox—who personified the endemic corruption of an entire state—and win. Even if they did, how many more people would become casualties in that war? Caitlin Masters’s death had already come close to destroying Tom. As the cigar slowly burned down, Walt pondered Colonel Mackiever’s final words, and what it might cost him personally to relieve the world of the burden of Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest Knox.

CHAPTER 78

CLAUDE DEVEREUX HAD waited nearly two hours before the FBI agreed to admit him to the visiting room in the Concordia Parish jail. In the end it took not constitutional arguments, but threats to go public with the Bureau’s use of the Patriot Act to supersede the Bill of Rights to gain him access to his clients. An agent confiscated Claude’s cell phone at the door of the visiting room, then patted him down for weapons, but as Forrest had anticipated, they left the cigarette pack in his briefcase alone.

Claude had worried that an FBI agent would stay in the visiting room with them, but after searching it thoroughly, the agent posted himself outside the door. As Claude waited for Snake, he cursed himself for trying to see his daughter and grandkids before fleeing the country. Forrest had put out a statewide APB, and they’d caught him easily. Had he run north to Memphis—through Mississippi—they never would have found him.