“If the state police try to pull us over,” Walker tells Wells, “ignore them. Don’t stop until we get back to base. You only take orders from me. Ignore the radio, and if they start yelling at you over their PA speaker, pay no mind. We’ll hash out the jurisdictions when we get to the station.”

Moments later, six doors slam, and our small convoy begins racing toward Highway 84 and the Mississippi River. Turning to look back through the rear windshield, I see the pillar of fire still towering over the vast alluvial plain, announcing calamity to the world. If my mother and daughter were to look out of their third-floor window high on the Natchez bluff, they would see it in the distance. As I think of my mother, a double-edged knife of guilt and anger slips between my ribs, and I wonder whether my father is within sight of that roaring flame.

CHAPTER 2

TOM CAGE DROVE through the cold Louisiana night in a stolen pickup truck, his .357 Magnum pressing hard against his right thigh. An unconscious hit man lay on the seat behind him, hands bound together and lashed to a gun rack mounted at the rear of the cab. A corpse lay on the floor between them, a bullet from Tom’s .357 in his belly.

Tom had taken a Valium and some nitroglycerine, but he was still suffering from tachycardia, and no thought he could summon seemed to calm his overburdened heart. Walt Garrity had almost certainly been killed tonight, trying to extricate Tom and himself from the trouble Tom had gotten them into, and now nearly every cop in two states was combing the highways in search of them, believing they’d murdered a Louisiana state trooper, as well as Tom’s former nurse, Viola Turner.

Walt had shot the trooper, all right, but only to stop him from killing Tom in cold blood. Even so, the cold-eyed state policeman had put a bullet through Tom’s shoulder before he died, and while that wound had been treated some hours ago, the pain had now built to an excruciating level. Tom didn’t dare take enough narcotics to dull the agony. Fifty years of medical experience told him that the gunshot wound had pushed him into a state where he could simply collapse behind the wheel and be dead before the pickup truck came to a stop. Only two months ago he’d suffered a severe coronary and barely survived. In the past seventy-two hours, he had endured more stress than even a healthy seventy-three-year-old man could take without caving under the strain.

Tom could scarcely believe that six weeks ago life had seemed relatively quiet. Having recovered from his heart attack, he’d been looking forward to his son’s marriage, which was planned for Christmas Eve. But then Viola Turner had returned to Natchez, trailing the past like a demon in her wake. The cancer that drove Viola back home after four decades in Chicago had reduced the beautiful nurse he’d once loved to a desiccated shadow of herself; despite his nearly fifty years of medical experience, Tom had been profoundly shocked by the sight of her. The grim truth was that Viola had come home to Natchez not to retire, but to die. The first night he saw her, he’d realized he might conceivably be charged with murder in the near future. A merciful act that usually went unreported might well draw the attention of a vindictive sheriff and DA. But not even in his darkest dreams could Tom have imagined that he and Walt would be running for their lives.

The bound man in the backseat moaned. Tom debated whether to stop the truck and sedate the would-be assassin again. The hit man’s name was Grimsby, and he was thirty years younger than Tom. If he regained full consciousness, Tom would have difficulty handling him, even with his hands and feet bound. Tom had only managed to tie the bastard by chemically incapacitating him first. Along with his now-dead partner, Grimsby had cornered Tom at the edge of a nearby lake. And though Tom had been armed, he’d resigned himself to death before the two killers ever appeared. But then—by the simple act of checking his text messages—Tom had learned that Caitlin was pregnant. That knowledge had transformed him from an old man tired of running (and killing) into a patriarch committed to seeing his fourth grandchild—and perhaps his first grandson—born. With chilling deliberation, Tom had shot one of the two arrogant hit men as they faced him, then disarmed Grimsby and forced him to carry his dead partner up to Drew Elliott’s lake house, in which Tom had been hiding.

After retrieving his weekend bag, Tom had filled a syringe with precious insulin and jabbed Grimsby in the back as he loaded his dead partner into the truck. That put the hit man into insulin shock. While he lay sprawled across the backseat of the truck, barely breathing, Tom had bound his hands with an old ski rope he’d found in Drew’s garage, then tied his hands to the gun rack so that Grimsby couldn’t attack him if he revived during the ride. Tom hadn’t intended to kill the other man, but his options had been limited, and the pair had surely meant to execute him beside the lake—an emotionless murder for hire. If Grimsby died (or lived out his days in a coma) as a result of the insulin overdose Tom had given him, so be it.

Tom’s real dilemma was what to do next. If he pointed the truck toward civilization, he would come to a roadblock sooner rather than later, and there he would be shot while “resisting arrest.” To avoid this, he’d driven the truck into the low-lying backcountry between Ferriday, Rayville, and Tallulah, endless cotton fields so thinly populated that they felt deserted, but Tom knew better. He had been born in the southwestern part of Louisiana, and he’d gone to undergraduate school at NLU in Natchitoches, where he’d met his wife. But Peggy Cage, née McCrae, was from an eastern Louisiana farm only ten miles from where he was now. The nearest conglomeration of people to her father’s homestead was a tiny crossroads village called Dunston, which lay about forty miles north of Ferriday. This familiarity gave Tom the only sense of security he’d felt in a long time: Peggy had relatives in this area, and Tom had treated them and most of their neighbors for medical emergencies while visiting over the years. He knew he could rely on the loyalty of clannish country folks.

He needed to get rid of the truck as fast as he could. Grimsby and his partner had almost certainly notified their boss that they’d cornered him at Drew’s lake house, and that meant Forrest Knox would have an APB out for their truck in no time. Tom felt confident that his wife’s brother would help him ditch the truck, but that meant putting another family at risk, and Tom had already gotten people killed by doing that.

Peggy would tell me to do it, he thought.

The real question was what to do if he did manage to get safely to ground somewhere. This nightmare had begun when he was charged with Viola’s murder, but the death of the state trooper had complicated matters exponentially. Jumping bail on the first charge only made him look more guilty, and further reduced his options. Walt’s plan had been to seek help from the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police (who, like Walt, was a former Texas Ranger) in getting the APB on Tom and Walt withdrawn. But something had obviously gone wrong. Tom had expected Walt back long before the two hit men found him, yet he’d heard nothing.

That left two options. He could try to turn himself in to some arm of law enforcement—preferably the FBI, if he could reach them—and hope to survive the encounter. Or he could do exactly what he’d advised Penn not to do—deal with the devil direct, and try to remove his family from harm’s way by any means necessary. Given that he was likely surrounded on all sides by Louisiana’s state and local cops, the chance of safely delivering himself into the arms of federal agents was small. Simply using his personal cell phone was likely to bring a state police helicopter down on his head within five minutes, and the last burn phone Walt had left him might well be compromised by now. They had used it too many times already.