Greg Iles - Cemetery Road

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“What do you think happened?”

“Don’t know. Guess I’ll wait to hear from the police.”

Paul snorts. “Like you’ve never done once in your life. Come on, man.”

“I really don’t know. Accident seems unlikely. Floating into that snag would be a stretch. That’s a wide river.”

“Yeah.” Paul lowers his voice. “You think somebody stuck him out there? Wasted him, then tried to hand the cops an accident on a platter?”

“Buck wasn’t going to win a popularity contest during this past week.”

“No shit. I sure hope it was an accident.”

“He didn’t die where they found his truck,” I say, watching Paul from the corner of my eye. “Somebody staged that.”

This intrigues him. “You have proof of that?”

“Call it intuition. But your buddy Beau Holland sure seems on edge about the whole thing.”

“Fuck Beau Holland,” he says with venom. “He ain’t my buddy.”

“Did you say you want to have sex with Beau Holland?” asks a deeper male voice.

Max Matheson claps his son on the back, then laughs heartily. “Hey, Goose, how’s it hanging?”

I nod but say nothing. Back when he coached us as boys, Max would ask this to trigger responses like “Long and loose and full of juice.”

“Heard about Buck,” he says, then takes a pull from what looks like Scotch on the rocks. “Bad luck.”

“Maybe.”

Max’s eyes linger on mine long enough for him to read my emotions. He’s always had that gift, the predator’s lightning perception. “That river can kill you quick. You know that better than anybody.”

“Jesus, Pop,” Paul says. “Shut the fuck up, why don’t you?”

Max clucks his tongue. “All right. Guess I’ll leave you girls to it.”

As he slides away, Wyatt Cash walks up wearing navy chinos and a Prime Shot polo beneath an olive blazer. With his 1970s mustache and bulging muscles, he still looks like a baseball player. The girls in the Prime Shot shirts are watching him with something like reverence. I’m guessing they’ve all ridden on either his jet or his helicopter. Cash hands me a sweating Heineken and smiles.

“Welcome to my humble abode, sir.”

Most people under this tent would prefer me anywhere but here, but Cash is being polite. “Thanks, Wyatt.”

He pats Paul on the shoulder, then moves off in Jet’s direction. As I follow him with my eyes, I see Jet’s left hand wrapped around one of the poles supporting the tent. Not her whole hand, actually. Only three fingers. Three P.M.

Her flagrant flouting of danger makes me dizzy.

When I look back at Paul, he’s watching me with his usual lazy alertness. We stare at each other for several seconds without speaking. It amazes me how deeply I can bury the sin of sleeping with his wife while we’re together. In this moment he’s the guy I played ball with for years, the buddy who saved my life in Iraq. Who am I to him right now?

“Listen,” he says, so softly I have to strain to understand him. “What do you think about that guy?” He nods in Jet’s direction.

“Who? Wyatt?”

“No, dumbass. The paralegal. Josh whoever.”

“Josh Germany? In what capacity?”

Paul raises his eyebrows like, Come on, man. “Him and Jet.”

The rush of adrenaline that flushes through me after these words makes it hard to hold my composure. “You’re kidding, right? The kid’s like, what, twenty-five?”

“Exactly.”

To mask my gut reaction, I look down the tent at Josh Germany. He’s a good-looking guy, blond and fit, but still a boy—not remotely the kind of man that interests Jet. Witness myself, exhibit A. “Dude, there’s no way. What made you ask that?”

Paul doesn’t answer. His eyes are fixed upon his wife.

Wyatt Cash leans over Germany’s shoulder and says something brief, and Jet laughs with obvious enjoyment. “I’d suspect Wyatt before that kid,” I add.

“No way,” says Paul. “It’s a rule.”

“A rule?”

“Poker Club rule. Other members’ women are off-limits. Period.”

“You’re not an official member, are you?”

Paul considers this. “That’s true. But Wyatt knows how bad I’d fuck him up if he crossed that line. The kid, on the other hand, may not realize the risk.”

I need an infusion of morphine. At no time in the three months since I’ve been sleeping with Jet has Paul even hinted at suspicion of infidelity—not to her or to me. In relative terms, this is an earthquake. Then it hits me: Is this why she squeezed my wrist and asked for a meeting at three o’clock?

“For real,” Paul says. “If somebody killed Buck, who do you think it was?”

Thankful for the 180-degree turn, I decide to throw out some bait. “Some people have suggested the Poker Club killed him.”

Paul’s face tells me he doesn’t believe this. “Doesn’t make sense, Goose. Murder creates problems. They’d have bought Buck off, not killed him.”

He’s right. Bribery would be the logical move. And maybe they tried that. “There’s one problem with that theory.”

“You gonna tell me Buck couldn’t be bought?”

I nod.

Paul gives me a tight smile. “I may not be an official Poker Club member, but I’ve learned one thing by being around those guys: everybody has a price.”

“You sound like Arthur Pine.” Pine, a former county attorney, is the Poker Club member who works every angle of every sleazy deal without hindrance of moral scruples.

“Yeah?” says Paul. “What did that vain old prick say?”

“‘We’re all whores, we’re just haggling over the price.’”

Paul shakes his head. “That sounds like Arthur, all right. King of the Whores.”

A shriek of feedback hits the tents, causing everyone to cover their ears. After it fades, Paul says, “Guess they’re about to start this gong show. You gonna hang in the tent with us?”

“Nah. I’m going to move back and try to see the big picture.”

Paul gives me his sarcastic smile. “Good luck with that. And about that other thing … not a word to Jet.”

I look down the tent at the woman still carrying my seed from yesterday. “No problem, man.”

I FIND A GOOD viewing perch atop a flatbed trailer parked well back from the tents. From here I can observe the main players without seeming too interested. After my exchange with Paul, my mind is flooded with thoughts of Jet and our constant dilemma, which exerts emotional pressure every hour of the day. Only by learning to compartmentalize all she represents have I been able to function in this town. But rather than get caught in an infinite loop of what-ifs—which won’t be resolved until our afternoon meeting—I decide to focus on the men most likely to have ordered Buck’s murder.

The eternally feuding county supervisors and city aldermen have broken precedent to come together for this show. Thirteen gold shovels wait in a stand before the Azure Dragon tent, which matches the number of city and county representatives, plus the mayor. But the real power in Bienville doesn’t reside in its supervisors and aldermen, or even in the mayor. The elected officials in this town are hired hands. They’re the ones standing in the sun in their best suits and dresses, but the ruddy-faced men who control them are under the tents, drinking from crystal highball glasses and watching with the disinterested calm of gamblers who already know the outcome of every race. I’ve spoken to a few already. But to truly understand those men, and the power that they wield, one must understand the unique history of the town where I was born.

Bienville, Mississippi, began as a French fort built by young Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, one year after he founded Natchez and one year before he founded New Orleans. Still a year shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, Governor Bienville initially named the fort Langlois after his housekeeper, who had overseen the French “casquette girls”—twenty-three poor virgins removed from convents and orphanages and shipped to Fort Mobile to keep the soldiers there from taking Native American mistresses. Each casquette girl brought all her belongings in a single trunk or “casket,” and while no one knows their ultimate fates, their arrival succeeded in preventing large-scale sexual exploitation of the Indian women at Mobile. Farther north, however, French soldiers did take Indian mistresses, which triggered the Natchez Indian Revolt in 1729 and the terrible French reprisals that followed. Four years later, Sieur de Bienville—by then back in France—was asked to return to La Louisiane and hunt down the Natchez survivors who had taken refuge among the Chickasaw. During this effort, Bienville rebuilt Fort Langlois, which had fallen into disrepair, and used it as a base from which to attack his enemies.