“I’m sorry to hear that. I know you’ll have a lot to do.” Caitlin got to her feet and headed for the door.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going, missy?”

“Back to work,” she said, wondering how long it had been since she heard that archaic term.

“Hold it right there. You’ve haven’t answered one damn question I asked, and now people are dying across the river. What the hell is your boyfriend up to over there?”

Caitlin turned back to the red-faced sheriff. “Helping Sheriff Dennis do his duty. At least on that side of the river, they have a sheriff who knows his duty. Not one who wastes his time playing games with the law.”

“I’m not playing any damn game.”

She walked back to his desk and spoke with cold conviction. “Bullshit. You and Shad Johnson are using the law to settle your personal scores. Penn thrashed Shad in court and an election, and Tom helped your first wife get away from your beatings. You and Shad want to punish them for that.” Caitlin nodded for emphasis. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

Byrd blinked like a man confronting some animal he’d never seen before. Then his expression hardened and he got to his feet. “You have no idea how much trouble you’re biting off.”

“I know you’re a big man in this county. You’ve got an army of deputies, your own private crime lab, your jail. And I’m just a newspaper publisher. Nothing to be afraid of, right? But you forgot one thing. Yours is an elected position. The voters put you behind that desk, and they can snatch you right back out of here. My father owns twenty-seven newspapers across the southeast. And I—”

Caitlin jerked back as Byrd came around the desk, his bloodshot eyes blazing. “You sassy bitch. I don’t care how much money your old man’s got. I run this county, and you’re about to find that out.”

“You’re right about one thing,” she said evenly. “I can be a bitch. And up till now, I haven’t taken much interest in you. But that’s about to change. There’s a reporter who works for one of our papers in Alabama—a twenty-five-year-old black girl named Keisha Harvin. Last night, Keisha told her boss she was taking her vacation, then drove all night to get here so that she could work on the Double Eagle case. I trained that girl, Sheriff, and she is hungry.”

Byrd snorted in apparent derision, so Caitlin gave him the rest of it. “I’m going to feed you to Keisha Harvin, Sheriff. She’s going to crawl so far up your butt you’ll feel like you had a weeklong colonoscopy. Then I’m going to post the results of her investigation for everyone to see. The next time you go to a meeting of the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association, your oldest buddy won’t walk within twenty feet of you. Any plans you have for reelection will be as dead as that deputy across the river. Am I making myself clear? Or do you want to harass me some more?”

Sheriff Byrd aimed his finger at her like a pistol and spoke softly, but with implacable malice. “Listen to me, hon. Sometime in the next few hours, I’m going to hear one of two things: either Tom Cage was shot, or he’s on his way to my jail. You’d better hope it’s the first one. Because if he winds up in my jail, you’re going to come back here and beg me to go easy on him. Then you’ll find out how things really work in this county.”

Byrd’s mention of Tom’s plight had shaken her, but Caitlin pressed down her fears. “Oh, I think everybody knows that already. And they’re sick of it.”

Byrd’s face went purple, but he made no move to arrest her when she turned and reached for the doorknob.

“You’ll be back,” he said with certainty. “And you’ll be begging.”

Caitlin opened the door and went out, her heart in her throat.

TOM AWAKENED WITH A desperate need to urinate, but when he opened his eyes, he had no idea where he was, or how to find a bathroom. Only when he saw a large framed portrait of Doris Avery did he remember that he was inside Quentin’s house, sleeping on the sofa. The heavy curtains had been drawn, but daylight leaked through at the edges. Tom tried to raise his arm to look at his watch, but pain knifed from his shoulder to his fingertips. He groaned and dropped his arm. He didn’t think he could get to his feet, much less make it to the bathroom.

After the pain receded, he looked toward his legs. Someone had laid a quilt over him during the night—Doris, he was sure—and a glass of water stood on the coffee table within reach of his right hand. Three pill bottles stood beside the water glass. As carefully as he could, Tom extended his right hand and pulled the water glass across the open space and leaned it against his hip. Then he pulled the pill bottles near. One held Cipro, and he swallowed one of the big white pills. Another held Vicodin, which he’d prescribed for Quentin one month earlier, according to the label. The third bottle held nitro tablets, but only three, which would not last him long under his present stress load. Tom chewed up a Vicodin despite the bitter taste, then swallowed the fragments. Then he picked up the water glass and drank steadily until it was empty.

Looking once around the large living room, he slid the glass under the quilt and unzipped his fly. After several surgeries, Tom was an old hand at using a urinal, and a tall glass was close enough. After he’d finished, he set the glass on the floor and fell back on the sofa, his back and shoulder seething with pain.

As he stared at the vaulted ceiling, he remembered he was supposed to text Walt a message that he’d reached safety, and also pass on his location. A coded message, he recalled. The problem was, he was supposed to get a new burn phone before he sent it. Given the two alternatives—taking a chance that someone had discovered the numbers of their burn phones, or Walt wondering if the hit man in Tom’s backseat had killed him—Tom decided to split the difference.

Without pencil or paper ready to hand, he closed his eyes and thought of the simplest message he could send that would allay Walt’s fears. He finally settled on “Safe. Loc to follow aft new fon.” Once he had that, he popped the flimsy back off his cell phone and removed the SIM card, then switched on the phone. While it tried in vain to make contact with a nearby tower, he began to key in the message. One letter at a time, he converted each to its alphabetical number, then, as Walt had instructed, multiplied those numbers by the number of soldiers who had died in the ambulance outside Chosin, which was seven. Shutting his mind against the memories of that night, Tom did the math in his head, then entered the digits on the tiny keypad, putting a hyphen between each one. After the message was entered, he reinserted the SIM card and waited for the phone to acquire a tower. As soon as it did, he pressed SEND. When the LCD read “Message Sent,” he killed the phone again, then removed the battery and dropped the pieces on the floor beside the couch.

These actions had utterly expended his energy. He felt light-headed enough that he worried about his blood sugar, but he hadn’t the equipment to check it. He thought about calling out for Quentin, who was diabetic, but Quentin and Doris were probably still asleep. For a few seconds Tom saw an image of the would-be killer he’d abandoned in the dark cotton field last night: the anger in the man’s features, the childlike desolation in his eyes. Had that man reached Forrest Knox yet? Had he even tried? Or had he feared the punishment for failure so much that he’d simply run for his life?

“Time will tell,” Tom muttered. Then he slid back on the couch and slipped into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER 20

THE CONCORDIA HOSPITAL emergency room is a Babel of frightened wives, wailing children, and deputies so furious they’re ready to kill someone—anyone who might have played a part in the warehouse explosion. In the wake of that lethal blast, the most the hospital staff could do was try to stabilize the injured deputies and evacuate them to the nearest urban hospitals via helicopter. Walker Dennis has been circulating among the families of his men, doing what he can to instill calm, but it’s a tough job with one deputy dead and at least one other barely clinging to life. I can’t help but think of last night, when an unknown sniper killed Henry Sexton’s girlfriend just down the hall from this ER and came close to killing Henry himself. Walker is standing in the door of one of the treatment rooms, comforting the sons of one of his less seriously injured men. I’m trying to decide how long I should hang around when Special Agent John Kaiser marches through the main ER doors, scans the area, then homes in on me.