As he trolled the boat between the great cypresses, searching for familiar landmarks, Sonny recalled how fired up they’d been after capturing Revels and his big bodyguard, Luther Davis, who was Jimmy’s drummer and a former army infantryman. But then death had taken Frank from them, as surely and randomly as it had taken friends in the islands during the war, and Snake had gone batshit crazy. Left to his own devices, he’d have crucified Jimmy Revels on a telephone pole in the center of Natchez, then waited for the big shots to fly in for the protests and the funeral, like ducks to a decoy. But before he could, Brody Royal had sent word that the Eagles were to abort the operation. Royal wanted Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis dropped into a hole so deep that no one would ever find them, and Sonny knew why. The millionaire didn’t trust Snake to carry out the operation without landing all of them in prison.
The chaos that followed Royal’s decision had resulted in days of brutal torture that shook Sonny to the core. Sleep deprived and high on drugs, Snake had tried to take out his grief on the prisoners in his power. Worse, he’d ordered the kidnapping of Revels’s sister Viola, on the pretext that she’d seen their faces when they’d gang-raped her to bring her brother out of hiding. If Sonny could have bailed on that operation, he would have, but by then he was so deep in, there was no way out—only through. That meant forty-eight hours of hell in a machine shop so far out in the woods that no one could hear the screams. When deliverance arrived for Viola like divine intervention, Sonny had said a silent prayer of thanks. But Snake’s rage had only escalated, making Sonny fear he would disregard the stand-down order and doom them all.
That was the moment he’d decided to follow Brody Royal’s order in spite of Snake’s ascension to Frank’s post as commander of the Double Eagles. Because an order from Brody Royal might actually be an order from Carlos Marcello, and nobody who disobeyed Carlos survived to tell the tale. When Snake finally crashed—three hours after his brother’s funeral—he lay snoring in a chair only feet from his chained and bleeding captives. At that point, Sonny had dragged Glenn Morehouse outside and told him they needed to follow Royal’s orders before Snake got them both killed. Morehouse hadn’t had the nerve to risk Snake’s wrath, but Sonny didn’t let that stop him. Since Luther Davis looked likely to die of his wounds anyway, Sonny had cut Jimmy Revels loose, carried him out to his pickup, and driven him to the edge of the Lusahatcha Swamp, where so many other bodies had been dumped over the years.
Revels had stopped talking a couple of hours ago. The only words he’d spoken during the afternoon were to ask about his sister and Luther Davis. Sonny didn’t know where Viola was, but he prayed that Luther was at the bottom of the Jericho Hole in Concordia Parish, where Sonny had ordered Morehouse to dump him.
Sonny opened the outboard’s throttle a little and nosed the boat through a deeper channel in the cypress trees. They were thirty miles south of Natchez and twenty west of Woodville, deep into Lusahatcha County. This swamp lay mostly on land owned by the Double Eagles’ hunting club, but partly on federal land, too—a national forest. Sonny’s destination was a stand of virgin cypress that looked like something on the cover of an Edgar Rice Burroughs paperback. At the heart of this swamp, some cypress trunks were fifteen feet in diameter. Sonny and Frank had once tried to stretch a fifty-foot rope around the trunk of the one called the Bone Tree, and they’d come up three feet short. Frank claimed some of those trees were a thousand years old.
“Shit,” Sonny muttered, watching the orange sun flare against the purple sky as it sank below the horizon. He was going to have to use a flashlight to get back to civilization. “We shoulda been there by now.”
He put down his pistol and picked up a map Snake had drawn for him on a much earlier occasion. As he studied it, Sonny kept glancing over its edge to make sure Jimmy Revels stayed still. The kid’s T-shirt was rusty with dried blood and stained black with grease, his left arm wrapped in bloody gauze. In the fading light, Sonny could no longer tell if his eyes were open or closed.
Stinging sweat dripped into Sonny’s eyes, and he squinted through it at the map. I gotta be almost there, he thought. Then, as though transported by his thought, he realized he was. The normal cypresses had given way to grassy islands, humped mounds of earth crowned by gargantuan trees. The cypress knees alone were larger than the trunks of most trees. Sonny saw paths worn through the grass on some tussocks, probably by hungry deer, exhausted from swimming. Deer were damn good swimmers, though not many people knew it.