Forty minutes ago, he and Snake had dropped out of the clouds over an empty Concordia Parish cotton field, then descended toward a line of chemical glow sticks. Snake had set the floatplane down on a narrow stretch of water owned by a friend of Billy Knox, then taxied to a stop near the shore, where a Chevrolet parked at water’s edge switched on its headlights. Charley and Jake had brought this car to meet the plane, with Snake’s raccoon trap in the trunk.
Snake took the trap out of the trunk, shot the terrified coon, then climbed into the Chevy and headed for Mercy Hospital. Twenty minutes later, he dumped the dead coon beneath Henry’s window, then set up his rifle on a spot he’d marked that morning with a tent stake, just thirty yards from the window. Using a modified photographic tripod as a bench rest (just as he had when practicing the shot through the windows of an abandoned house near Jonesville), he executed Henry Sexton with a perfect head shot, then took out his girlfriend, just in case she’d seen something.
Sixty seconds after killing the reporter, Snake was back in the Chevy and headed for the Cessna, where Sonny and the boys waited. Slick as snot on a doorknob. No flight plan, no airport, not even a dirt strip. Just an airplane floating on a patch of water in some empty fields. Charley and Jake had no idea they were going to take the return flight to Toledo Bend, but they didn’t argue much, especially after Snake pulled his pistol. They left their keys in the Chevy as instructed, then handed over their cell phones to Snake and climbed into the rear of the plane.
Sixty seconds after the Cessna lifted off, a four-wheeled ATV carrying two former Double Eagles emerged from the trees. It stopped beside the Chevy long enough for one man to dismount and get behind the wheel. After driving out to the highway, he wouldn’t stop until he reached Memphis, Tennessee, where he’d dump the Chevy in an abandoned salvage yard, then ride the bus back to Natchez. After the four-wheeler disappeared, it was as though none of the vehicles had ever been there.
But they had, Sonny reflected. And now Henry Sexton is dead.
Snake had ordered him to keep the boys calm while he flew them toward their deaths. That was easier said than done. You could smell the fear coming through the boys’ skins, a sour sweat that permeated the Caravan’s cabin. But they’d tried to put on brave faces and pretend this was all part of some grand plan to protect them, rather than the opposite. Sonny knew exactly how they felt.
Twenty minutes into the flight, he’d given each of them a bottle of Budweiser laced with Versed, a short-acting benzodiazepine often given to children to sedate them for medical procedures. Sonny and Snake were drinking Schaefer (supposedly to be sure they got the nondoctored beers, but Sonny kept thinking his tasted funny, and tried to drink as little as possible). Long before the plane reached the black glassy sheet of the Atchafalaya Swamp, the two boys fell unconscious. The longer Sonny remained conscious, the better he began to feel.
He tensed again when Snake checked his GPS unit, then began descending rapidly toward the swamp. There was a big stretch of open water about twenty-five miles east of Lafayette, Louisiana. A mile north of Des Glaise, it ran north-to-south and was not accessible by road. True Cajun country. Snake had a lot of years under his belt flying as a crop duster, skimming beneath power lines and dodging trees. But it took all the guts and skill he had to set the Caravan down in that swamp without lights.
When the plane finally settled heavily into the water, Sonny climbed down onto a rocking pontoon and shone a spotlight in front of the plane while Snake taxied toward a wall of cypresses in the distance. It took them four minutes to reach the trees. Once there, Snake steered the plane into a long channel and taxied for another minute. Then he cut the engine.
Sonny’s heart banged like an antique pump in his chest. There was so much adrenaline flushing through him that he felt like he’d been doing coke for two hours. He quickly realized that he couldn’t manhandle the boys out of the plane on his own. After bitching for most of a minute, Snake got out of his seat and helped Sonny muscle the boys through the door and down into the water. Neither boy stirred when they were dropped in, though the water had to be freezing.
When Sonny turned to get back into the plane, Snake told him they couldn’t chance either kid waking up in time to swim to shore or climb into a cypress and save himself. He told Sonny to hold each kid’s head under the water for at least three minutes. It wasn’t drowning the boys that freaked Sonny out—though he’d never cared for killing—it was turning his back on Snake to do it. But in the end he didn’t have a choice. Snake had the only gun.