up with him before he's ready for us.'
'But what if…?'
'No ifs, Cowart. The squad cars will keep him away until we get there. And then he's mine.' He glared at them. 'No one else's. I finish this. Understand?'
They were quiet a moment, and then Cowart went to his bureau and found an airline schedule stuck in a corner of his small suitcase.
'There's a noon flight to Atlanta. Nothing down to Mobile until late afternoon. But we can fly to Birmingham and drive from there. Should get to Pachoula by day's end.'
Tanny Brown nodded. He glanced over at Shaeffer, who mumbled an approval.
'Day's end,' the policeman said quietly.
26. The Briar Patch
They crossed the Alabama border into Escambia County, moving fast as the Gulf evening crowded them toward night. The southern sky had lost its eggshell-blue vibrancy, replaced by a dirty gray-brown threat of bad weather streaking the horizon. An unsettled hot wind gusted about them, sucking and pulling with occasional bursts at the car windows, stripping away the residual cold and damp they felt from the Northeast. They cut past dust-streaked farms and stands of tall pine trees, whose towering, erect bearing reminded Cowart of spectators rising in a stadium at the moment of tension. Their speed underwrote the doubts they all felt. They all felt an urgency, a need to rush ahead, uncertainty shadowing their path. The countryside hurtled past them; there hardly seemed enough space to breathe on the narrow roadway. Cowart grabbed at the armrest when they bore down on an ancient school bus, painted a gleaming snow white, bouncing and jiggling slowly down the one-lane road. Tanny Brown had to push hard on the brake to keep from slamming into the back end. Cowart looked up and saw, hand-lettered on the back of the bus over the emergency-exit door, in a flowing, joyously enthusiastic bright red script, the words: STILL TIME TO WELCOME YOUR SAVIOR!
And, below that, in slightly smaller but equally florid, writing: NEW REDEMPTION BAPTIST CHURCH, PACHOULA, FLA.
And finally, on the bumper, an exhortation in large, bubbling letters: FOLLOW ME TO JESUS!
Cowart rolled down his window and could just make out the thunderous voices of the church choir bursting beyond the heat, above the grinding and groaning of the bus engine. He strained his hearing but couldn't make out the words of the hymn they were singing, though elusive strands of music poked at him.
Tanny Brown jabbed the steering wheel of the rental car, punching the gas pedal simultaneously. With a quick thrust, they maneuvered past the bus. Cowart stared up and saw dozens of black people, swaying and clapping to both the rocky ride and the energy of the singing. The sound of their voices was swept away by speed and distance.
They continued through the growing darkness. The weakening light seemed to blur the straight edges of the houses and barns, made the twisting road they traveled less distinct, almost infirm.
'Jesus works overtime in this county,' Brown said. 'Gathering in the souls.'
Brown had driven silently, unable to shake a memory that had crashed unbidden into his thoughts. A wartime moment, horrible yet ordinary: he'd been in country seven months, and his platoon had been crossing an open area; it was near the end of the day, they were close to camp, they were hot, filthy, tired, and probably thinking more of what was waiting for them, which was food, rest, and another uncomfortable, breathless night, than paying attention, which made them immensely vulnerable. So, in retrospect, it shouldn't have come as a great surprise when the air had been sliced by the single sound of a sniper's weapon, and one of the men, the man walking the point, had dropped with a suddenness that Brown thought was as if some irritated god had reached down and tripped the unsuspecting man capriciously.
The man had called out, high-pitched with fear and pain, Help me! Please.
Tanny Brown hadn't moved. He had known the sniper was waiting in concealment for someone to go to the wounded man. He had known what would happen if he went. So he had remained frozen, hugging the earth, thinking, I want to live, too. He had stayed that way until the platoon leader had called in an artillery strike on the line of trees where the sniper hid. Then, after the forest had been smashed and splintered with a dozen high-explosive rounds, he'd gone to the wounded man.
He was a white boy from California and had been in the platoon only a week. Brown had hovered above him, staring at the man's ravaged, hopeless chest, trying to remember his name.
He had been his last wounded man. And he had died.
A week later, Tanny had rotated home, his tour of duty cut short as it was for many medics. Back to Florida State University, the criminal justice training program, and finally a spot on the force. He hadn't been the first black to join the Escambia County Sheriff's Office, but it had been tacitly understood that he would be the first to amount to anything. He'd had much going for him: Local boy. Football star. War hero. State- college diploma. Old attitudes eroding like rocks turned to sand by the constant pounding of the surf.
He felt a tinge of guilt. He realized he'd often heard the memory cries of wounded men, but they had always been the cries of men he'd saved. They were easy voices to recall, he thought. They remind you that you were doing something right in the midst of all that wrong. This was the first time he'd thought of that last man's cry.
Did Bruce Wilcox cry for help? he wondered. I left him, too.
He realized that he would have to tell Wilcox's family. Luckily, there was no wife, no steady girlfriend. He remembered a sister, married to a career naval officer stationed in San Diego. Wilcox's mother was dead, he knew, and his father lived, alone in a retirement home. There were dozens of old-age homes in Escambia County; it was a veritable growth industry. He recalled his few meetings with Wilcox's father: a rigid, harsh old man. He hates the world already. This will simply add to it. Abrupt fury creased his thoughts: What do I say? That I lost him? That I put him on a stakeout with an inexperienced detective from Monroe County and he vanished? Presumed dead? Missing in action? It's not like he was swallowed up by some jungle.
But he realized it was.
He flicked on the car's headlights. They immediately caught the small, red pinprick eyes of an opossum, poised by the side of the road, seemingly intent on challenging the car's wheels. He held the wheel steady, watching the animal, which, at the last moment, twitched and dove back into a ditch and safety.
In that moment he wished that he, too, could dive for cover.
No chance, he told himself.
Not long after, he pulled the car into the parking lot of the Admiral Benbow Inn on the outskirts of Pachoula and deposited Cowart and Shaeffer on the sidewalk, where their faces were lit by a gleaming white sign bright enough to catch the attention of drivers heading up the interstate. 'I'll be back,' he said cryptically.
'What're you going to do?'
'Arrange backup. You don't think we should go get him alone, do you?'
Cowart thought about what Brown had said up in Newark. It had not occurred to him that they might seek assistance. 'I guess not.'
Shaeffer interrupted. 'What time?'
'Early. I'll pick you up before dawn. Say, five-fifteen.'
'And then?'
'We'll go out to his grandmother's place. I think that's where he'll be. Maybe we'll catch him asleep. Get lucky.'
'If not?' she asked. 'Suppose he's not there. Then what?'
'Then we start looking harder. But I think that's exactly where he'll be.'
She nodded. It seemed simple and impossible at the same time.
'Where're you going now?' Cowart asked again.
