Unwritten Laws 01(11)
When Sonny looked back at his old friend, Frank was watching him with knowing intensity. In that moment of shared intimacy, Sonny realized that Frank Knox had more than knowledge of this kind of operation: he was a veteran of them.
“You got any ideas, Sonny?” asked Frank. “About local targets?”
Flattered to be asked his opinion, Sonny gave the question some serious thought. “We need somebody King or Kennedy knows personally. I’m sure Reverend King knows Charles Evers. King went to Medgar Evers’s funeral in Jackson. And Bobby Kennedy attended Medgar’s memorial service at Arlington. I saw something about it on the TV.”
“Charles Evers is a pimp and a bootlegger,” Frank said. “He was running whores back in the army, in the Philippines. Would King or Kennedy really come down here for a pimp’s funeral?”
“They might,” Sonny thought aloud. “Charles claims he’s picking up where his brother left off with the civil rights work. He’s the new field secretary of the NAACP, even though the old guard didn’t want him. And Charles is a lot more street savvy than his brother was. He might actually get some things done.”
Frank nodded slowly. “I’ll keep my eye on him, then. Who else?”
“Locally, there’s George Metcalfe, like Glenn said, but the regular Knights will be watching him. I would have thought Albert Norris would get some attention. Everybody loved Albert.”
“Not with those Jewboys missing in Neshoba County,” Frank said. “A Ferriday, Louisiana, music store owner don’t rate compared to white martyrs from New York.” Frank forked the tenderloin off the grill and dropped it onto a platter. “Don’t worry about it. Time’s on our side. When the moment comes, we’ll know which goat to tie to the tree.” He pointed down the shallow slope of the sandbar. “Look at Snake! He’s grinning like a barrel of possum heads!”
Snake Knox was marching up toward them, the drunken young waitress locked under his right arm like a prisoner. His left hand held a walkie-talkie with a shining silver aerial. Sonny looked past him, down to the Chevy. There seemed to be someone sitting motionless behind the wheel.
“Who’s that in the car?” Sonny asked anxiously, afraid of what Snake might be planning.
“Just an old safety dummy I got from a guy at the tire plant,” Snake answered, joining them beside the grill. “You boys ready for a show?”
“Hell, yeah,” said Frank, rubbing out his sand drawing with his boot as he finished his beer.
Snake Knox turned toward the women sitting far back under the trees. Not one had given him the time of day since Friday—not even his mother—as all were friends of his ex-wife. But Snake waved anyway and hollered, “Keep your eyes on that Chevy, ladies!” Then he turned and yelled for the kids on the riverbank to give the car a good thirty yards of clearance. When Sonny’s wife realized what must be about to happen, she started running toward the children, but by then Snake had held up the walkie-talkie and pressed a button.
A blinding yellow flash lit the interior of the car for a millionth of a second, whiting out an oval disk in Sonny’s field of vision. Then the kids were cheering and running toward the car, with Frank and Snake close behind. Back under the cottonwoods, a woman gave a piercing rebel yell. Turning, Sonny saw Glenn’s sister Wilma standing in a bikini, pumping her fist high in the air. The other women looked indifferent to the commotion by the water. Sonny trotted down to the knot of people while Morehouse huffed and puffed along behind him.
The acrid stink of high explosive hurled Sonny back to the war, but the Chevy didn’t look like anything much had happened to it. The dummy was still sitting behind the wheel, though it had fallen forward like a drunk who’d passed out after pulling into his driveway. Then Snake yanked open the door with a screech of metal, and Sonny saw the result of his work.
The dummy’s torso had been cleanly severed at the waist. Whatever kind of charge Snake had rigged under the dash, it had sliced the dummy in half as cleanly as a guillotine. Sonny had known men to survive a conventional car bomb, but no man could survive a wound like that.
Frank whistled in admiration, and Snake preened like a cat. Sonny’s wife gave Snake a piece of her mind for pulling tricks like that with kids around, but Snake ignored her, and she stalked off in furious silence. The kids had hoped for more destruction and soon lost interest. They begged for more bottle rockets, which they’d expended on Friday night, but Frank scattered them with a curse.
While Snake occupied himself with bomb damage assessment, Sonny stared openly at the waitress. She was trash compared to the star of his primary fantasy—the Negro nurse of Dr. Tom Cage, Triton Battery’s company doctor. Viola Turner was the most beautiful woman Sonny had seen in years; Frank himself had made several comments about her over the past months. Like his preacher father, Frank never let skin color stop him from taking whatever woman he fancied, and Sonny’s chest tightened with jealousy and resentment every time he mentioned Viola. Sonny remembered climbing onto the scale at Dr. Cage’s office to be weighed; he’d looked down and seen the perfect curve of two coffee-colored breasts disappearing under the white uniform—