rump with the familiarity of a lover. The blonde does not complain or make any move to stop him. She doesn’t even look embarrassed.
“You’d best get going, sonny,” he says. “Crystal’s gonna take the edge off the nausea for me.”
The girl half turns to me, a resentful gleam in her eye. The top three buttons of her work shirt are unbuttoned, revealing the clasp of a black bra beneath. She’s at least twenty years Presley’s junior—probably thirty—and for some reason this offends me. My Puritan morals, I suppose, I’m not one to deny a dying man what pleasure he can get, but something about this arrangement seems wrong. The woman doesn’t strike me as a hooker, but Presley is paying her in some way. Probably not much, either. When you’re poor, a little money looks like a lot. Or maybe he’s not paying her. Maybe she’s here because she wants to be here—or needs to be. That bothers me even more.
“I didn’t know nurses could administer chemotherapy at home.”
Presley laughs darkly. “This is my Mexican cocktail. They UPS it up here from Tijuana. My New Orleans cancer doc says it’ll kill me, but I’ve outlived that bastard’s prediction by a year already.”
Bootleg chemotherapy. Is that what’s keeping him alive? Or is it just brute redneck stubbornness?
“They cut out my damn prostate,” he mutters, “but I made ’em leave the nerves in. I can still go like a Brahma bull.”
The blonde sits on the floor at his feet, waiting for me to leave.
“Just remember something, Ray. You’ve got all you’re going to get from this particular well.”
“Nice doing business with you, son. Let me give you a piece of advice before you go.”
“What’s that?”
“Leave Del Payton in the ground. You start messing with business that old—especially nigger-business—it makes a lot of people nervous.”
“I figured that out already.”
“You’re a smart boy, ain’t you?”
The blonde checks Presley’s IV line for bubbles, then leans back against his legs.
I walk to the door, but something makes me turn. “Let me ask you something, Ray. How did Judge Marston get involved in Payton’s murder?”
Presley goes as still as a snake poised to strike, his eyes locked on mine. “Maybe you ain’t so smart after all.”
“There’s a lot of guys on death row who think different.”
I shut the door, leaving him to his bootleg chemo and his blonde. My stomach is fluttering like the wings of a hummingbird, but the Smith & Wesson is a hard bulge in my left front pocket. I have the gun. I have the gun. Seventy-five thousand dollars is a small price to pay to have a spike removed from your heart.
As soon as I hit the highway, I dial my father’s office and wait for him to come to the phone.
“Dr. Cage,” he says finally.
“It’s me.”
“What happened?”
“I have the package.”
A long exhalation. An expression of relief I can only guess at. He’s been waiting with the same anxiety his patients suffer through when awaiting a call from him about test results. “Jesus,” he breathes. “Son, you don’t know—”
“Forget it, Dad. It’s all over. We’ll talk tonight, okay?”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it. It’s a new world. I’ll see you tonight.”
I punch off and zoom south toward Natchez, profoundly aware of the gun in my pocket. I feel like a character from Poe, the symbol of guilt attached to my body and screaming for atonement. But there’s no danger. Ray Presley is happy with his seventy-five grand. He isn’t calling anybody about that gun. Not today, anyway. With every mile I put between myself and his trailer, the burden of my father’s anxiety falls away, and my mind returns to its own selfish concerns.
Ike Ransom awakened a sleeping giant within me. The giant is anger. Anger so profound, complex, and deeply buried that I have never fully plumbed it. I have, in fact, spent years not thinking about it, which required that a constant portion of my life energy be devoted to denial. Yet the anger was always there, pulsing quietly beneath my surface life, affecting my judgment, my decisions, my very concept of justice and morality. For years I thought it was based on Leo Marston’s attack on my father, but this was self-delusion. My anguish was not for my father’s pain but for my own. The most devastating result of Marston’s merciless legal persecution of my father was the end of any possibility that Olivia Marston and I would have a future together. And that altered my life in ways beyond measuring. Ultimately, it weakened my character, like a crack in the steel of a bridge. Because always, at the periphery of my existence, the unwalked road of my life with Livy stretched tangentially to infinity, to be reflected upon only in sadness, frustration, and regret. Last night Ike Ransom offered me a chance I never thought I would get: a chance to settle up with Leo Marston for all he did to me and my family. To put paid to two decades of resentment and confusion.
The sheer power of my desire to destroy the man disturbs me. As a prosecutor I tried to divorce myself from the concept of revenge. Justice, not punishment, was my ideal. I didn’t always succeed, but I tried. This is different. I have no idea how Leo Marston could be involved in Payton’s murder, but he is a complex man of vast appetites, and he has rarely been thwarted in his desires. I can easily envision a situation in which he let his temper get the best of him. Great wealth does not confer immunity to violent impulses.
I lift the cell phone and punch in the number of my Houston office, which occupies nine hundred square feet of our house. At least it did until I instructed my assistant to store my furniture and sell the place.
“Penn Cage’s office,” says Cilla Daniels.
Relief floods through me. “I’m glad to know I still have one.”
She laughs. “I let the movers take everything but the office furniture and equipment.”
“Good instinct. Leave it all set up for now.” I swing the Maxima into the left lane and goose it around a pulpwood truck.
“What about the Hanratty execution?” Cilla asks. “Mrs. Givens called this morning. She’s decided to witness the execution without her husband, and she wants you there.”
“Any last-minute filings? Likely stays?”
“The usual desperation tactics, but they won’t stop it this time. And George W. Bush isn’t about to grant a pardon. Midnight tomorrow night, Hanratty gets the needle.”
“Damn. Tell Mrs. Givens … tell her I don’t know yet whether I can make it.”
“Please try, Penn. That woman needs
