coming out of the kid’s mouth, and suddenly he was back in the Mekong, middle of a firefight, holding on tight to his troops, tears running down his face, so many of his good friends and best asshole buddies blown all to shit by Charlie’s AK-47s and land mines and RPGs, all of them talking about they mamas at the end.
He looked down at the kid and saw him die.
“You was fast, son,” Stokely said to him, still stroking his head. “You the only person on this earth ever to outrun old Stoke, and, man, that’s truly saying something. You was a brave kid, I could see it in your eyes just in the short time I met you. You going to a better place now. You be all right.”
Stoke heard noises below him and looked up to see three commandos in black coming up over a small rise, gunsights already on him.
“Stop!” he screamed. “Stop right there! Land mines all over the goddamned place!”
They did what he said and one of them called up to him. “We heard the explosion. What’s his status?”
“His status?” Stoke called back. “His status is over.”
After they’d taken the kid away, Stokely led a team of the Brits up to the place where he thought he’d seen the muzzle flash. Stoke was out in front, picking his way over the tripwires and calling out their locations when he came across the tree with the cable hanging down.
There was a loop in the bottom of the thick wire cable and, higher up on the stainless steel cable, a small electrical-type box with a black button and a red button.
Stoke, not worried about prints because he was still wearing his wedding gloves, grabbed hold of the cable, stuck one foot in the loop and pressed the button on top, the black one. It was like being in an elevator without the elevator. He was instantly flying up through the trees, at least fifty to sixty feet in less than five seconds. When he got near to the top, he saw the big electric motor mounted on the tree trunk with four heavy bolts. Electric? Up in a tree? Had to be battery powered.
But the motorized cable wasn’t the amazing thing.
The amazing thing was the shooter had left his gun in the tree.
It was right there, stuck in the crotch at the top of the tree. Stoke had removed his blood-soaked gloves and now used the wedding program to try and remove the weapon without messing up any prints. Wouldn’t budge. He hit the butt sharply with his hand and the thing didn’t move an inch. No wonder the guy had left it up here. Need a goddamn crowbar to get it out, way he’d managed to wedge it in there.
Stoke instantly recognized the kind of sniper rifle it was, even though he hadn’t seen one since the seventies. It was a Russian-made Dragunov SVD. A Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova to be exact. Amazing. How many times you go to a crime scene a find the perp’s left his goddamn weapon stuck right there in your face?
One thing was for damn sure, evidence or no evidence.
Guy who murdered Vicky and the English kid, he was long gone.
Chapter Three
River Road, Louisiana
AFTER THE FUNERAL, ALEX SAID GOOD-BYE TO VICKY’S father, got into his hired car, and drove down the River Road, following the Mississippi south towards New Orleans. The sun was a big blood-red orange hanging out the open window on his right, except for the times when the road dropped down behind the levee.
His mother had grown up on this river; her early life had been shaped by it, and Alex had heard stories about the river from her until she was murdered the day after his seventh birthday. One day he’d found her tattered copy of Huckleberry Finn where it had slipped behind his bookcase. She always said it was the truest book about the river ever written, and maybe the truest, best book ever written about anything. She was reading it to him every night in those last days they had together. Huck and Tom and Nigger Jim were every bit as real for Alex as any of the boys at his school, and certainly a lot more interesting way for a boy to learn about life.
Listen to me. Alex Hawke, she’d said one day when he’d come home all scratched and bloody, having brought home a foundling cat, a boy carrying a cat home by the tail is learning something he can learn no other way.
He was ten or eleven years old when he finally read the book for himself. The story of Huck Finn filled in a lot of the holes created when his mother’s own life story ended so abruptly. His father was English and so was he, but he’d had an American mother and the book had helped the boy feel a connection to his mother, to see her America, feel it the way she did, even though it was a story from a time long ago. He was thinking about his mother now, Hawke realized, because thinking about anyone else was unbearable. His idea was to try and find the house where she’d grown up, find her childhood room on the top floor, and look out her window at the river.
See what she’d seen with his own eyes.
The real estate agent in Baton Rouge had told him the house was still standing. The Louisiana Historical Society protected it, although some developer was trying very hard to change that. According to the agent, the house, called Twelvetrees, was Italianate style, completed in 1859 by a Mr. John Randolph of Virginia. It was now owned by a family named Longstreet, but had stood unused and unoccupied for decades.
Alex had been driving for some time before he saw the flashing blue lights coming up fast in his rearview mirror and realized he was going well over a hundred and ten miles an hour. Fast, but well below escape velocity. You can’t outrun this one anyway, Alex, not this time, he told himself. Not ever. He slowed down and pulled off the side of the road, waiting for the police to pull up behind him, run his plate through the computer, approach him with their hands on their hip holsters, ask him what the hell the big hurry was, Mister.
The blue lights went screaming by him, siren wailing. The vehicle with the flashers wasn’t a police car, it was an EMS van and it raced past him and disappeared around a bend in the road. Five minutes later he saw the ambulances and the fire engine and the fiery accident itself up on the side of the levee. He knew instantly it was bad and averted his eyes, kept them on the road ahead, sped up again. He punched some buttons on the radio, looking for Louis Armstrong.
He finally caught Satchmo singing “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?” It helped a little bit. Laissez les bon temps rouler. That’s what his mother had always said, her favorite expression. Let the good times roll. Bloody hell. You couldn’t cry anymore so you had to laugh. After half an hour or so, he saw a Louisiana Historical Site sign. ‘Twelvetrees Plantation.’ He turned into the drive. Satchmo was singing “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.”
He could see the house standing at the end of the long allee of oak trees. The oaks formed a solid canopy above him, turning the entire drive into a green tunnel. The sun was low enough in the west now, hovering just above the levee, to flood the entire length of the drive with rusty light. As he got closer, he began to sense the enormity of the old house.
He parked the car under a big oak and got out. His shirt was drenched with sweat and clung to his back. The heat and humidity were part of the place. The mosquitoes and the music, the bugs and the blues. And the moss, he thought, taking a fistful from a low branch and turning the matted greyish-green filaments in his hand. Tentacles of moss dripped from all the branches of all the oaks around him. It was pretty, but there was something decadent about it as well, something that sent a graveyard chill up his spine.
Spanish moss, Hawke said to himself, suddenly remembering the name. He walked out from under the low- hanging branches and looked up at what was left of the house where his mother had been born. He was glad he’d come. It occurred to him that he’d needed to do this for a long, long time.
Make a connection.
It was a stunningly handsome work of architecture. Four graceful stories rising up above the trees, each one with a veranda, massive Corinthian columns now shrouded in the heavy green vines which had almost overtaken the entire house. He climbed the steps leading to the front entrance and paused when he reached the top. He saw the doors were missing, and twisting vines had worked their way through the open portal and into the interior of the house.
There were some faded beer cans and old newspapers littering the steps and the sagging floorboards of the front portico. It was irrational, he knew—he wasn’t the proprietor after all—but all this refuse made him not just sad, but angry. The trash and debris were just a natural accumulation, the commonplace detritus of years of human
