“Not well.”

“Do you think you got every phone?”

“Yep.” Sheriff Dennis winked, then backed out of the parking space. “My brother-in-law walked behind the ranks with a scanner while I was giving my speech. I’m pretty sure the two who had extra phones are having extramarital affairs, but I’ll double-check it later. For today I’ve paired them with reliable partners.” He stopped and put the powerful cruiser in Drive. “Fasten your seat belt, Mayor. This is gonna be a hell of a morning.”

During the next hour, I listened to Walker direct a parishwide assault on the Knox family’s meth operation. His tactical teams rousted users and dealers out of their beds, busted cookers in the midst of their work, and searched a half-dozen probable storage sites for illegal chemicals. By 5:55, twenty-seven people had been arrested without a shot fired. Walker handled the whole operation with absolute professionalism, save for one detail: he’d failed to get wiretap warrants on any member of the Knox family prior to the raids. Had he done that, he probably would have gathered enough evidence in the first hours to put Snake, Billy, and Forrest Knox in Angola Penitentiary for twenty years apiece. But the sheriff explained his oversight pragmatically. The judge who’d granted the search warrants (and kept his mouth shut about them) hated the Knoxes enough to help Walker take a shot at their meth operation, but not enough to sign wiretap warrants on the Knoxes on the basis of rumor alone. Apart from arousing the ire of the state supreme court, that might make him a target of violent retaliation.

After a team of female deputies ferried the prisoners back to the station in vans to begin processing them, Walker told me we were about to lead a tactical team out to the western edge of the parish, where he had a man keeping watch on a suspected Knox drug warehouse. And that’s how I found myself riding shotgun in this rattling car as it threatens to lift off the pavement on every sweeping turn.

“There it is,” Walker says, pointing through the windshield.

All I see is a white metal storage building about the size of a small gymnasium standing at the edge of a fallow field. Walker keys his radio and says, “This is Whiskey Delta. Give me a sitrep.”

His radio crackles, and then a male voice says, “I see you. I’m in the ditch to your left. Nobody’s gone in or out since I’ve been here.”

“Did you see any lights before dawn?”

“Negative. I think it’s empty.”

The SWAT van pulls up beside us, and Walker signals for its driver to get out. Seconds later, a tactical team wearing full body armor and black face screens stands lined up beside the car. As Walker gets out and walks around to address them, I crank down my window a couple of inches.

“No sense wasting time,” the sheriff says. “There’s an overhead door on the far side, plus one regular door. Three of you cover that side while the breaching team blows the front. Eyes front, Deputy!”

One of the men wearing the black masks was staring at me. He snaps his head back toward Sheriff Dennis.

“We think this building’s empty,” Walker says, “but we never assume anything. You go in there like you expect a Russian Spetsnaz unit waiting.”

“Yes, sir,” says one of the deputies.

“Go.”

As the deputies fan out around the building, Walker gets back behind the wheel and says, “Did you just send a text message?”

“I’m just keeping Caitlin up to date. We want all the coverage we can get on these busts. I only wish we had Henry with us.”

Dennis nods, still watching his men. “He’s looking down on us right now, brother.”

I wish I believed that, but rather than express my doubt, I give Walker a smile. At this point I don’t want him thinking of me as anything but a solid partner. We sit in silence for about a minute, and then a voice crackles over the radio, “We’re in position.”

Walker looks at me, and I nod, my pulse quickening.

“Door team go,” says Walker.

Two men carrying 10-gauge shotguns step up to the front door of the warehouse and lay the muzzles of their weapons against its hinges at a downward angle.

“Those Remingtons are loaded with Hatton rounds,” Walker says to me. “Turn to dust as soon as they penetrate the door.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Breach,” Walker says into his radio.

Even with the doors of the cruiser closed, the shotgun blasts buffet the air in my lungs. The four men behind the shotgun team crash through the door yelling loud enough for us to hear it in the car.

“What you got, Alpha?” Walker asks in a wire-taut voice.

His radio crackles twice, but I can’t make out the response.

“This is Whiskey Delta,” Walker repeats, “what have you found?”

“Sir, we’ve got a pile of fifty-five-gallon drums here. Could be precursor chemicals, or just plain old herbicide. We’re gonna need some lab rats for this.”

“I’m coming in.”

As Walker grabs his door handle, a shock wave that dwarfs the one generated by the shotguns rocks the car. A gaping hole has opened in the near end of the metal building, orange flame and black smoke jetting from it like the breath of a dragon.

“Booby-trapped,” I mutter. “Just like a pot field. There could be a secondary device—”

“Get out of there!” Walker shouts into his radio. “Move, move, move!”

“We’ve got two men down, Sheriff!”

“Get out NOW!”

The second explosion isn’t as powerful as the first, but it produces twice the smoke and flame. Incendiary bomb.

“Goddamn it!” Walker shouts, pounding the steering wheel.

He scrambles from the cruiser and starts running toward the warehouse. As I leap from the car and sprint after him, I pray that the men inside somehow escaped the brunt of both blasts. But the calculating part of me knows this tragedy will bring about one change that can only help my father. After this, the Double Eagle group and the Knox family will no longer be able to operate in the shadows, not even with their political protection. As my father learned yesterday, when you kill a cop, you cross into a zone where neither aid nor mercy can be expected. Though they probably never intended it, the Double Eagles have joined the war.

CHAPTER 19

FORREST KNOX OPENED his eyes in the dark. The susurrant sound of his wife’s breathing reassured him that nothing was wrong, at least not in the bedroom. The faint blue LCD screen on his encrypted mobile phone had awakened him. He shook his head to clear his thoughts. For the last thirty-six hours he’d been popping “Whoa” and “Go” pills, as he had in Vietnam. Speed to stay alert, benzos to knock himself out. Lifting the phone from his bedside table, he got out of bed and walked to the door. His wife, long accustomed to the routine of a trooper’s life, did not even stir.

“Knox,” he said quietly.

“It’s me,” said Alphonse Ozan. “We got more problems. Big problems.”

“Did Sheriff Dennis turn up something unexpected in the ashes of Royal’s house?”

“No. They didn’t even go there.”

“What?” Forrest moved down the hallway toward the kitchen.

“Dennis played us, boss. This morning he lined up every deputy he’s got and took away their cell phones. Then he handed out tactical plans for a parishwide bust of every known or suspected meth cooker, dealer, mule, and storehouse.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Yep.”

“Did he bust any Eagles?” Forrest asked, thankful that Snake and Sonny, at least, were out of the state.

“Doesn’t look like it. None of the front shops got searched, either. But they busted all the lower-level people.”

Forrest’s usually steady nerves had begun to fray. He was fighting an urge to punch the refrigerator door. “Find out every location and person that Dennis hit, then do a liability assessment of who and what they knew. You’ll probably have to talk to Snake and Sonny to do it, so be careful in your communications.”