Unwritten Laws 01(333)

“Royal!” yells the voice from the gun room, now sounding strangely familiar. “We know you have Mayor Cage and Caitlin Masters down here! Send them out!”

I know that voice, but the speech seems impaired … yet even that sounds familiar. “Oh, no,” I say under my breath. Henry? Impossible—

“The FBI’s on their way!” yells the voice.

Hope dies within me. In Caitlin, too, I can tell. If John Kaiser were coming for us, Henry Sexton would still be back in his hospital bed.

Brody looks back at Regan with a smile, then gives him a thumbs-up. Ever the astute gambler, he’s already guessed the truth: a SWAT assault would have unfolded very differently from this. I’m almost ready to shout a warning regardless of the consequences, but Caitlin beats me to it.

“Stay back, Henry! It’s an ambush!”

Before her last word fades, someone kicks open the firing-range door.

No one comes through.

As we stare at the empty doorway, a black object skitters through it and slides across the floor. Royal and Regan throw up their arms, expecting a grenade, but it’s only a walkie-talkie.

A tinny version of Henry Sexton’s voice emerges from the black radio. “You’re surrounded, Royal. Send out your hostages.”

While Royal and Regan stare at the walkie-talkie, a black man darts through the door, a pistol held in front of him as he scans the room for targets.

Brody takes one step and lays his gun against the back of the man’s head. “Drop it,” he says. “Drop it now, or I pull the trigger.”

Left with no choice, the man drops his gun.

He’s obviously no SWAT operator. Dressed in work boots, jeans, and a dark jacket, he looks like a stranger to me. A sixty-five-year-old stranger. Then I see the gothic D on his black baseball cap, and a sadness unlike anything I’ve ever known suffuses me. Henry has done the one thing that could worsen our situation—and make our defeat more complete. He’s brought “Gates Brown” straight into the arms of Brody Royal.

As I turn toward Caitlin, Henry steps through the basement door in a raincoat, a shotgun held before him, its barrel aimed at Royal’s head. Henry’s head is bandaged, and a huge bloodstain soaks his shoulder and sleeve, but he looks ready and willing to pull the trigger.

“Wait!” Brody cries, total submission embodied in the word.

Henry shakes his head and answers in a mournful voice: “I’m tired of waiting.” And then he fires.

The deadest click in the world echoes through the tunnel.

Brody reels backward as though hit, then rebounds and cracks his pistol across Henry’s face. The black man starts to go for Brody, but spies Regan covering him with the flamethrower from his left. Henry wobbles on his feet, then falls to the concrete like dead weight and doesn’t move. I jump to the end of my chain, but it’s pointless. Brody and the stranger are at least fifteen yards away from me, and Regan is even farther.

Brody kicks the black man’s gun across the floor to Regan, who aims the jet pipe at the stranger and barks, “Who the fuck are you?”

“You heard the man,” says Brody, covering the newcomer with his pistol.

“Nobody,” says the stranger. “I ain’t nobody.”

Brody knocks the baseball cap off the man’s head, exposing nappy white hair. “Henry?” Brody says with obvious curiosity. “Who’s your pet nigger?”

Henry doesn’t stir. Brody steps hard on the reporter’s shoulder wound, but a muffled groan is the only response.

“Give me your wallet, boy,” Brody says, jerking his pistol.

The stranger stares sullenly into Brody’s eyes, but he obeys.

Royal snatches the outstretched wallet, extracts a driver’s license, and reads aloud from it: “Marshall Johnston, Junior. Detroit, Michigan. Michigan?”

Randall Regan shrugs.

Brody pulls out his cell phone and dials a number. “Claude Devereux knows every family in this parish, black or white.”

One minute later, Royal’s lawyer fulfills his client’s faith. Marshall Johnston Jr. belongs to a black family from Wisner, a one-horse cotton town about fifteen miles away. According to Claude Devereux, folks called the son “Sleepy.”

“Well, well,” Brody says to Johnston. “You’re the friend of that Wilson boy, aren’t you? The one who raped my daughter.”

“Pooky never raped nobody,” says Sleepy Johnston. “Your little girl chased him first. That’s what got them together in the first place.”

A strange tremor goes through Brody. He walks slowly around Johnston. “You know what’s pathetic, boy? You ran away from Louisiana after your friend died. You did whatever you did up north all these years—some factory job, I imagine—but you never really got away. All that time you were circling right back home, like a rabbit to the hunter.”