air conditioner. I just drive with the windows down and let the hot wind tear through my hair like the fingers of a grave robber.
I never actually thought it would come to this. Incredible as it seems, I somehow convinced myself that the Fates had been on vacation during the nights I rolled around that bed with Erin, or at least that they’d been watching someone else. Perhaps my vanity convinced me that the good things I’d done in my life had somehow built up a credit account from which karmic bills could be subtracted without my making any out-of-pocket payments. But I was wrong. The due date has arrived, and the bank doesn’t want an installment, but the balance paid in full.
For a moment I wonder if Miles is still free and safe, but I don’t spend more than a few seconds on him. The events of the last few days now seem remote, like some tragic newscast watched years ago. A thousand thoughts spin through my brain, and each has but one object: Drewe. Will she be home when I get there? No. I’ll have at least an hour to prepare, maybe longer if the delivery is a really bad one. But what’s the point of preparation? If she were there when I got home, I could blurt out the truth in the first thirty seconds, before doubt and fear turned me into a gutless jellyfish.
Swinging around the final turn toward our house, I see no surveillance cars. I guess Baxter isn’t as concerned with me as he used to be. But as I slow for the driveway, I spy a boxy Ford parked under the shade of our weeping willow. Baby-shit brown with a tall antenna. For an instant I think
I turn slowly into the drive, coast forward, and stop practically grille to grille with the Ford. There are two men inside. As I stare, its front doors open and both men get out. The driver is a big red-faced man in his late thirties, stuffed like a sausage into his polyester suit. The other man is older and darker. Something about him seems familiar. Then he smiles crookedly at me, and I recognize Detective Michael Mayeux of the New Orleans police.
“Harper Cole?” says the red-faced stranger, moving toward me with alarming speed.
“Yes?”
“I’m Detective Jim Overstreet of the Jackson Police Department. You’re under arrest for obstruction of justice and harboring a federal fugitive.”
While I stare at Mayeux in shock, Overstreet cuffs my hands in front of me and pulls me to the side of the brown car.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you….”
Mayeux refuses to look at me as he climbs back into the passenger seat. One of Overstreet’s big hands cups the crown of my head and pushes me down into the back.
“… Do you understand these rights as they have been explained to you?”
“Wait a minute! What the hell’s going on here?”
Overstreet leans down so that his sunburned face fills the window. “Do you understand the rights I just read you,
Looking to Mayeux for help, all I see is the darkly freckled back of his neck through scarred wire mesh.
“I understand.”
Overstreet slams the door.
CHAPTER 37
I feel the passage of time like lifeblood draining away. Mayeux acts like I’m not even in the backseat. He and Overstreet make small talk now and again, but not about me. My being locked in the back of this car means only one thing: a power shift has occurred between the FBI and the police. I want information, but I don’t have the stamina to keep banging away at Mayeux’s sphinx act. I keep seeing Erin sitting in her dark house, waiting for Patrick to get home so she can finally blast away his obsessive suspicions with one terrible life-size truth.
How long before these idiots let me use a phone? Can I just pay my bail and go? No. Bail has to be set before it can be paid. That means an arraignment. Can I get one this late in the afternoon? Do they have night court in Jackson? The thought that I might have to spend the night in a cell waiting to go before a judge makes me lightheaded. What if I don’t get home tonight? Will Drewe call Erin looking for me? Will Erin think I broke under the stress and just took off? Would she really take it upon herself to tell Drewe the truth?
“Can I please ask you a question?” I ask Mayeux for the tenth time.
In a mush-mouth drawl dripping irony, Detective Overstreet says, “Sounds like he might be developing the proper attitude, Mike.”
“What’s on your mind?” asks Mayeux, still facing forward.
“If you don’t tell me what you want, I can’t give it to you.”
“Told you he was smart,” says Mayeux.
Overstreet chuckles.
“That’s how he got so rich,” Mayeux goes on. “Everything’s a business deal with this guy.”
I remain silent, and the resulting vacuum lasts a couple of miles.
“Left a few messages on your machine,” Mayeux says finally. “You never called back.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Look, things were really crazy then. You know what was going on. Besides, your messages didn’t sound that urgent.”
“Didn’t sound urgent enough for him,” Mayeux says, exaggerating his Cajun accent.
Mayeux laughs. “Things feel pretty urgent now, though?”
I take a deep breath and try to keep my voice steady. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. You don’t have to do this.”
“I don’t? Okay, let’s see. Where’s Miles Turner?”
“I don’t know.”
“See?” Mayeux says to Overstreet. “I had a feeling it was going to be this way.”
“Jesus, Detective, this is a really bad time for me. I’ve got to take care of something important.”
“Bad time,” Overstreet says. “Shoulda called his secretary.”
“I don’t
The silence that follows this outburst is more threatening than any words. Overstreet clearly does not like his arrestees using profanity. As the Ford thunders eastward along the two-lane blacktop, I lean back and let my eyes rove across the endless fields. Here and there, red or green cotton pickers trundle through the white ocean like great metal insects. The steely clouds I saw this morning have not been scattered like all the rest in this parched summer. They have gathered steadily, like a ghostly Confederate army amassing itself from the tattered remnants of a thousand skirmishes, a fluid gray mass slowly being reinforced from unknown regions.
“Let’s try again,” suggests Mayeux. “Where’s Miles Turner?”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to remember in your cell.”
“This is crazy, Detective.”
He nods at the windshield. “I’ve been thinking that for several days now.”
Another image of Erin flashes through my mind. She faces Drewe across a brightly lit room, both women screaming, both in tears. To hell with Mayeux and his head games. It’s time to pull out the stops. “Detective Overstreet?”
The Mississippi cop grunts behind the wheel. “Yeah?”
“I get a phone call, right?”
“Eventually.”
“Well, for your sake it better be sooner than later. Because I don’t think the person I’m going to call is going to like a Louisiana cop coming up here and arresting the son-in-law of one of his asshole buddies.”
Very slowly, like a hog looking around for the source of a mildly interesting noise, Overstreet heaves himself around in his seat. His forearm looks as thick as my thigh. “Who you think you gon’ call, boy?”
I try not to look past him to see whether we’re going off the road. “The governor of the State of Mississippi.
