across the backseat of the truck, barely breathing, Tom had bound his hands with an old ski rope he’d found in Drew’s garage, then tied his hands to the gun rack so that Grimsby couldn’t attack him if he revived during the ride. Tom hadn’t intended to kill the other man, but his options had been limited, and the pair had surely meant to execute him beside the lake—an emotionless murder for hire. If Grimsby died (or lived out his days in a coma) as a result of the insulin overdose Tom had given him, so be it.
Tom’s real dilemma was what to do next. If he pointed the truck toward civilization, he would come to a roadblock sooner rather than later, and there he would be shot while “resisting arrest.” To avoid this, he’d driven the truck into the low-lying backcountry between Ferriday, Rayville, and Tallulah, endless cotton fields so thinly populated that they felt deserted, but Tom knew better. He had been born in the southwestern part of Louisiana, and he’d gone to undergraduate school at NLU in Natchitoches, where he’d met his wife. But Peggy Cage, née McCrae, was from an eastern Louisiana farm only ten miles from where he was now. The nearest conglomeration of people to her father’s homestead was a tiny crossroads village called Dunston, which lay about forty miles north of Ferriday. This familiarity gave Tom the only sense of security he’d felt in a long time: Peggy had relatives in this area, and Tom had treated them and most of their neighbors for medical emergencies while visiting over the years. He knew he could rely on the loyalty of clannish country folks.
He needed to get rid of the truck as fast as he could. Grimsby and his partner had almost certainly notified their boss that they’d cornered him at Drew’s lake house, and that meant Forrest Knox would have an APB out for their truck in no time. Tom felt confident that his wife’s brother would help him ditch the truck, but that meant putting another family at risk, and Tom had already gotten people killed by doing that.
Peggy would tell me to do it, he thought.
The real question was what to do if he did manage to get safely to ground somewhere. This nightmare had begun when he was charged with Viola’s murder, but the death of the state trooper had complicated matters exponentially. Jumping bail on the first charge only made him look more guilty, and further reduced his options. Walt’s plan had been to seek help from the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police (who, like Walt, was a former Texas Ranger) in getting the APB on Tom and Walt withdrawn. But something had obviously gone wrong. Tom had expected Walt back long before the two hit men found him, yet he’d heard nothing.
That left two options. He could try to turn himself in to some arm of law enforcement—preferably the FBI, if he could reach them—and hope to survive the encounter. Or he could do exactly what he’d advised Penn not to do—deal with the devil direct, and try to remove his family from harm’s way by any means necessary. Given that he was likely surrounded on all sides by Louisiana’s state and local cops, the chance of safely delivering himself into the arms of federal agents was small. Simply using his personal cell phone was likely to bring a state police helicopter down on his head within five minutes, and the last burn phone Walt had left him might well be compromised by now. They had used it too many times already.
The ring of the very phone Tom was thinking about stunned him, and his shoulder began to pound, telling him his blood pressure had spiked at the sound. He stared at the phone for two more rings, then answered.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” said a voice that made him sag against the truck’s door. “Are you okay?”
“I thought you were dead.” Tom craned his neck around to try to see if the hit man had woken up.
“I didn’t want to put you at risk by calling you. Even now we shouldn’t spend more than a minute on the phone.”
“Did you have any luck with Colonel Mackiever?”
“No. And don’t say his name again. He got delayed, but he’s on his way up here now.”
“Up here” meant Baton Rouge.
“FK has already moved against him,” Walt said.
Forrest Knox, Tom thought.
“I don’t know the details,” Walt continued, “but it sounds like they’re trying