Lewis Perdue - Perfect killer

To this day, I fight panic when cinching up a necktie.

Not long after I turned onto 49E in Yazoo City, the four lanes narrowed to two, then plunged from the textured land of kudzu-covered hills to the table-flat elevations of a hundred merging flood plains of the Delta.

Train tracks heavy with long snakes of hoppers, boxcars, flatbeds, and log carriers paralleled the curvy, tree-lined two-lane with no shoulders and barely wide enough for two pickups to pass without taking off the side mirrors. The highway and tracks flirted with the base of the hills until we got to Eden, where 49E ricocheted north-northeast, off toward the heart of the Delta. My new trajectory ran atop a steep berm, which would usually keep the road surface above the waters of creeks and rivers that escaped their banks every winter and spring. Beyond lay cotton in various stages of development.

Water stood in many of the fields, testament to a period of unusually high rainfall this year. The rice and catfish farmers had no trouble, but I saw this would be a horrible year otherwise if the fields didn't dry out. In the higher, drier fields, cotton grew thighhigh and colorful with flowers. As a child, I had marveled how cotton blossoms opened white one day closed up that night, and reopened the next day all deep reddish pink for the next day or so until they dropped off.

Everywhere I looked, the landscape was the same: fields of developing cotton punctuated by rows of trees marking streams, sloughs, and oxbow lakes that could not be cleared for crops. Ironically, in the distance, I saw the dust pointing to vehicles in the higher spots, places where the brutally hot sun baked the surface dry and left the standing water around it a warm, perfect incubator for mosquito larvae.

One of Mama's favorite stories she told so often was how, during her early childhood in the late teens and 1920s, Mr. Durham, who owned one of the two drugstores in town, would mix quinine with Coca-Cola and chocolate syrup as a "spring tonic" for her and the other children in town as a prophylactic against mosquito-borne disease. The best attempts at mosquito abatement must not have been very successful, because by the time I was a kid, I remember getting vaccination shots for yellow fever, a better behaved but still nasty hemorrhagic cousin of Ebola.

The first time Highway 49E straightened out, a pickup filled my rearview mirror, then accelerated past me and quickly disappeared around the next curve, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the gathering thunderheads to the northeast reaching for the stratosphere even though it was not quite noon. More storms, more rain, more misery.

When the highway broke free of the trees, I was struck by how the thunderheads resembled great angry Confederate privateers with storm-bellied sails and armed with lightning, tornadoes, and hail. I remembered hikes in the woods when the storms would announce themselves first with the distant low rumble of thunder that said, "Head home." Then came a blast of cool air like opening God's own icebox, hurtling me into a dead run for home. I'd sprint to escape the march of heavy rain, which sounded like a giant pushing through the leaves and brush. I ran faster and faster, especially when the interval between the lightning and thunder came like my racing heartbeat.

Sometimes I beat the rain, sometimes not. One time when lightning took out a dead tree less than fifty yards away, I almost urinated in my pants. When I was about sixteen, I huddled in a gully as a tornado passed overhead and sounded like every B-52 in the world charging down the runway toward takeoff with a full load and every engine straining. I'm fine if I never hear that again.

With the past ringing in my head, I spotted a small settlement ahead scattered on both sides of the highway with a water tower, a gas station, and a store with a driveway of loose beige gravel. I slowed as my truck passed old black men in blue overalls sitting still on the sagging porches of gray, weather-bleached shacks with rusty tin roofs. Three graybrown pigs rooted along the road shoulder. In the distance, a dust contrail plumed across a field, pointing at the pickup that had passed me.

Once past the settlement, I drove like a drunk dodging dead possums, dogs, skunks, raccoons-passing more red meat in the highway than you'd find at the Piggly Wiggly's butcher case. Even with the air-conditioning on recirculate, I could tell some of the animals had been fermenting in the hot sun for days.

I was making good time up 49E, chasing heat mirages that looked like fleeing desert ponds in the road ahead and thinking about how Talmadge was most likely the key to this whole mess, when my cell phone rang. I hoped it was Jasmine, but when I looked at the caller ID, I recognized it as Rex's. I turned the CD's volume down.

"Hey, man," I said.

"Hey y'own damn self, asshole. What's the big idea of coming to my town and not stopping by? What am I going to tell Anita?"

As tense as I felt, I couldn't help but smile. They had to be the oddest couple. Rex's wife, Anita, originally from India, was an accomplished physician from a royal family that still lived in the old country. Rex was a genius with ready hands, one of the smartest people I had ever met, who managed to hide his intelligence behind a rough physical style that, outwardly at least, favored fists over philosophy.

"Tell her I'm buying y'all a big fancy dinner when I get back to Jackson."

"That'll be a start." Rex laughed.

Static filled an awkward silence.

"So what can I do for you?" Rex said finally

"Well, for one thing, I have just gone through the strangest seventy-two hours of my life and it's made me think I badly need a man of your, uh, talents."

"You need some drywall installed?" Rex laughed. In the background other people yelled amid the whine of screw guns. When Rex spoke again, his voice was low, serious, and all business. "Let me step outside."

Newly paved asphalt hissed beneath my pickup's tires. The sun baked my face through the windshield as I passed a cotton gin with a dozen rusty, wire-sided trailers beside it with lint tangled in the mesh.

"Talk to me," Rex said finally "Don't leave anything out."

So I started with the attack on my boat and made my way past the shock at Chris Nellis's house in Topanga Canyon to LAX with Jasmine.

"I've got all her stuff in the back," I concluded as I neared Tchula, one of those grinding third-world poverty pockets in the Delta.

"I'm headed to Greenwood to meet Jasmine at her office."

"Watch your back there, my man."

"How so?"

"The Mississippi Justice center sits right in the crosshairs of the Snowden-Jones housing project; that whole area's a drive-by shooting gallery."

"How'd you know that?"

"You don't think I've got turnips for brains, do you? Of course I know where the office is. It was one of the first places I scoped out after the shooting at your mama's funeral. And Snowden-Jones is infamous; it's always in the news. Makes Oakland look like Beverly Hills."

"I should have figured-"

"Yep, you should have. Did you think the shooting at the cemetery was a fluke?"

"The cops think so."

Rex snorted. "Of course they do! Those poor bastards have their hands full. A bunch of country boys and they've got more crack and drug murders per capita than the pros in the big city. They have to think that because they haven't got time to think of anything else."

"But you have, right?"

"That's right, pod-nah."

I slowed for a light as I got into Tchula proper.

"And?" I prompted him as the light turned and I followed traffic through the main part of town.

"Well, for one thing, all the people who usually know everything about everything don't know jack about nuthin' here."

"Well, that's helpful," I said as I hit the brakes. Immediately in front of me, a battered midsixties land yacht painted in twelve shades of rust and primer came to a sudden stop right in the middle of Highway 49 as the four occupants spotted a young black man walking along the shoulder they wanted to chat with. The pedestrian's face went wide with fear until he recognized the Pontiac's occupants as friends and not driveby assailants. I steered around the Pontiac.