“What you doin’ over here, white man?”
Henry turned slowly and saw the black boy on the banana bike sitting a few feet away. He looked about ten, and wore a New Orleans Saints windbreaker, but his eyes had the sullen defiance of a teenager.
“Just lookin’ around. There used to be a store on this lot. Did you know that? A music store.”
“I need five dollars, man. You got five dollars?”
“What do you need five dollars for?”
“None yo’ business. You got it?”
Henry started to walk back to his Explorer, then took out his wallet and handed the kid a one-dollar bill.
“Shit. Gimme that wallet, too,” the kid said. “I need that wallet.”
Henry put his foot on the running board of the Explorer.
“I said gimme that goddamn wallet!”
Henry turned, half expecting to see a pistol, or at least a knife. But all he saw was the enraged face of a ten-year-old kid who wasn’t going anywhere but jail or an early grave. “You can’t have it,” he said gently. Feeling like Albert must have felt so many times, he said, “Go home to your mama and stay out of trouble.”
“Fuck you, old man! Go home to yo mama!”
“I wish I had time,” Henry said, feeling a stab of guilt. His mother was ill, and probably wouldn’t be with him much longer.
He shut the door and started his engine, his mind filled with memories of Viola Turner, an emaciated woman wearing an oxygen mask, her eyes filled with urgency, righteous anger, and concealed fear. Henry had known that Miss Viola was dying, but somehow her actual death seemed counterintuitive. Impossible, even. She had not been ready to die, he was certain of that. But she was gone now. Another witness silenced.
“But how?” he murmured. “By time? Or human intervention?” He supposed Shadrach Johnson would tell him when he reached Natchez.
Henry switched on his CD player as he drove past the Arcade theater, and the wail of Little Walter’s overdriven harmonica filled the Explorer. After listening for a few seconds, he shook his head and hit the next-track button. Robert Johnson began sawing at rusty old guitar strings with his slide. Today Henry heard only death and sadness in the sound. He hit next again. This time the a capella opening salvo of Kansas’s “Carry On Wayward Son” shattered the oppressive silence. It might be cheesy, but Henry didn’t give a shit. He was old, he was white, and he needed something to stoke the hope that still smoldered in the darkest recess of his heart. One of the beauties of digital technology was that he could replay the crystalline opening harmonies a hundred times if he wanted to, with one touch of a button. No rewinding, no guesswork. He laid his forefinger on the replay button and hit it one millisecond before the band’s instruments kicked in, again and again, all the way to the highway.
“Swan,” he whispered, wishing it was still 1964.
CHAPTER 7
SNAKE KNOX STOOD on the tarmac of Concordia Parish Airport and watched Brody Royal’s Avanti turboprop scream down out of the gray sky. The fastest private plane of its kind in the world, the $5 million Avanti was one of the quietest aircraft you could buy—on the inside—but to anyone watching it take off or land, it sounded like the devil’s fingernails raked over a chalkboard. Touchdown looked a little rough by Snake’s standards, but as a crop duster he would likely have found fault with the technique of anyone short of a Blue Angel.
As the Avanti taxied toward the terminal, Snake saw Brody Royal himself at the controls. The old multimillionaire had lost his license due to some deficit on the flight physical, but since his son-in-law was licensed, Royal simply had the younger man perform the takeoffs, then took over the controls and did the flying himself, even the landings back in Concordia Parish.
An hour earlier, Royal’s maid had informed Snake that the businessman had made yet another trip to New Orleans. Brody Royal had been flying back and forth three or four times per week ever since Hurricane Katrina, and he sure as hell wasn’t delivering relief supplies. There had to be money in it—big money—or Brody wouldn’t be wasting his time or fuel. Snake gazed covetously at the Italian-built jet with the royal blue R on its tail fin and ROYAL OIL emblazoned aft of the seventh window, just above the low-mass wing with its backward-facing pusher props. A machine like that got Snake’s blood going quicker than any woman these days. There were women in every damned honky-tonk in America; there were only one hundred Avantis in the whole world.
When the plane stopped, its front door opened and two men with AR-15s slung over their shoulders came down the steps. The chaos of post-Katrina New Orleans had long since been tamped down, but Royal owned a lot of property in the Lower Ninth Ward, and he apparently figured he needed armed security on whatever business he’d been conducting.