Greg Iles - The Quiet Game

“I couldn’t do it, though. Part of me just wanted to pay, I guess. Father Tom says you got to. But I can’t go to Parchman Farm. I done sent too many brothers there myself. I can’t die in them cotton fields up there.”

“You won’t have to, Ike. CNN will be covering that trial tomorrow. You get on the stand and tell the story you just told me, you’ll have Johnnie Cochran down here begging to defend you. What you did was wrong, but you’re the least guilty of the three by far. I think Stone believed that too. You know what the right thing is. That’s why you came to me in the first place.”

He lets his gun fall again, then half turns from me and murmurs in the dark. “I started out all right. But I turned off somewhere. That day my shoulder got hurt, everything started going down.”

He holsters his pistol and walks past me, toward the wide door, and looks out at the luminous clouds scudding over the river. Beyond him I can see a few stars, infinitely small on this first cool night. He turns back to face me, but since he’s silhouetted in the door, I cannot see his features.

“I’ll do it,” he says. “Father Tom gonna think I’m the best man he ever knew. But he gonna be the only one. Every black man, woman, and child in this country gonna curse my name.”

He half turns again, and a dim shaft of light illuminates his face. In eight years as a prosecutor, I never saw a man look so lost.

Ike opens his mouth to say something, then flings an arm out as though to grab me, but he can’t because he’s flying backward, snatched like a puppet on a string. Before he hits the floor, a peal of thunder booms through the warehouse.

“Ike!”

He doesn’t answer. He’s lying facedown on the dirty floor, blood pumping from a fist-sized hole where his left shoulder blade used to be.

I run to Ike, then drop to the cement floor as a second shot booms through the building. A third punches through the front and rear windshields of the Maxima, which is parked two feet to my left, and the concussion of the gun echoes around the old structure for three or four seconds.

The shooter is inside the building.

Inside, and probably at the front, shooting across the open floor. But he must not have a night-vision scope. He shot Ike as the deputy framed himself against the lighter background of the open loading door. Now that we’re flat on the floor, his shots are far off the mark. Ike’s face is less than six inches from mine, his eyes wide and glassy, like those of a wounded deer.

“Ike,” I whisper. “Can you hear me?”

His eyelids blink once, slowly, but he doesn’t speak. The man is dying before my eyes.

I need a gun.

Kelly’s Browning is in the glove box of the Maxima, but I’m not about to try to reach it. If I rise off the ground, I will silhouette myself against the open door, just as Ike did. If I had walked to that door first, I would be dying now.

“Ike, I need your gun.”

As I reach down to his holster, something cracks through the air less than a foot above us, and the report that follows seems trivial compared to that supersonic passage of metal. Fighting down panic, I try to wrest the Sig-Sauer from Ike’s holster, but it won’t budge. He must have snapped the strap when he holstered it. Unsnapping it by touch, I yank out the Sig and take the safety off. As I aim it across Ike’s back, a bullet crashes into his body, knocking us both a foot across the cold floor.

He doesn’t make a sound.

Then, like a rising wind, a wail of inhuman agony escapes his throat. I shove my arm across his waist and fire three quick rounds into the darkness at the front of the building. Something sharp pricks the skin of my forearm.

Bone splinters.

The last shot smashed Ike’s pelvis. He screams again, the sound sickeningly reminiscent of those Sarah made when the narcotics began to lose their race to keep up with the pain of her bone lesions.

Who is shooting at us? An anonymous sniper, like the one who shot at me on the levee that night? The one Kelly killed? With a strange rush of clarity I realize that the levee sniper wasn’t shooting only at me, as I’d thought at the time. What did Ike say that night? How you know he was shooting at you? Ike had known from the beginning that he carried knowledge people would kill him for. As I cower behind his body, a voice calls out from the other end of the building.

“Give it up! The nigger’s dead!”

Before I can process these words, another truncated wail bursts from Ike’s lungs. “Brrrraaaaaaah!”

My instinct is to run for the door, run until my legs buckle beneath me. But that would be suicide. The moment I rise, I’ll make myself a target. I could probably crawl out… but Ike isn’t dead yet. I can’t leave him. My next thought, born from rage, is to stand up and charge the darkness that shields the sniper, emptying Ike’s automatic as I run.

With a defiant yell, I fire off two more rounds, then jump to my feet and grab Ike’s legs. Two shots boom through the building as I drag him facedown and screaming behind his cruiser, but the bullets crack past without finding flesh or bone.

Kneeling beside him, I break the most fundamental rule of first-aid by turning him over onto his back. At this point it can’t matter much. His eyes are still open. His jaw is moving, but no sounds come from his throat. I lean over his mouth.

“Brrr-” he groans.

I take one of his hands in mine and squeeze the cold flesh. “Ike? What are you saying?”

“Press me.”

He must think I can stop the bleeding. “Where? Your shoulder?”

“Pressleee…”

Press lee? The nigger’s dead-

Son of a bitch. No sniper hired by John Portman would talk that way. He wouldn’t talk at all. The man at the other end of this building is Raymond Aucoin Presley. The trial is tomorrow, and Presley has no intention of being indicted for murder. That’s why he wasn’t at his trailer when I called earlier. He’s been following Ike around, laying for a shot.

“Ray!” I yell at the top of my voice. “Stop shooting! I need to talk to you!”

Both windshields of Ike’s cruiser star into chaos as safety glass rattles across the floor.

“What you got to say I want to hear?” comes the voice I recognize so easily now. “You want it in the head or the heart?”

I will live or die by my actions in the next minute. “Listen to me, Ray! You want to hear this!”

“I want to hear you choke on your own blood!”

Every hair on my body is standing erect. Presley isn’t nearly as far away as he was a moment ago. He’s moving up for a kill shot. Crawling to the left side of the cruiser, I fire two quick rounds into the dark, then dart back to avoid return fire aimed at my muzzle flash.

“Not even close, boy.”

The tire beside my head explodes into ragged strips of rubber as Presley’s next shot reverberates through the building. When the echo dies, I call: “You want to know who sent you to Parchman, Ray? I think you’ll be surprised.”

He fires again, smashing up a divot of cement beside Ike’s head.

“Parchman, Ray! Didn’t you ever wonder who ratted you out?”

Silence. Then: “Talk fast, boy, I’m getting close!”

He is close. It takes every bit of nerve I possess to hold my ground. “It was Marston, Ray! Leo sent you up! Stone solved the murder, but Hoover didn’t want Leo going down for it. Leo’s old man had too much political clout. Hoover cut a deal to protect him, but he said you had to go down for shooting at Stone and Portman on the highway. It was Leo who gave you up!”

“That’s bullshit!” For the first time the voice has come from more or less the same place.

“Stone said Marston didn’t even hesitate! He fed the state police details of your drug business so they could catch you in the act. That’s why Stone was at the bust!”