“So, you made some kind of deal with Buckman today?” Paul says, not taking his eyes from the road. “To keep quiet?”
“How’d you know that?”
“Claude called me this afternoon to ask whether I thought you’d honor an agreement like that. I told him you would.”
“Did he tell you the terms?”
“Not specifics. I didn’t much care at the time. What did you ask for in exchange for keeping quiet?”
I don’t see any way to avoid answering. “The moon.”
“And the club agreed?”
“Except for two points, yeah.”
“What two points?”
For a guy who just experienced one of the most harrowing traumas of his life, Paul seems damned curious all of a sudden. “Do you know about their China deal? The Senate thing?”
“I figured it out on my own. They had a little celebration one night, and I stopped in. Damn, they were proud of themselves. Sell out your country and pop the cork on the Veuve Clicquot. A half hour didn’t pass before they were bragging about it.”
“Except for the matter of treason, it’s a hell of an accomplishment. I told them Avery Sumner has to resign. Give up his Senate seat.”
“Huh. No wonder they had a problem with that. What was the other sticking point?”
“I said whoever killed Buck Ferris has to stand trial or plead guilty to murder. I assume that’s Beau Holland. One way or another, I want him in Parchman.”
Paul glances over at me again, his skepticism plain. “Beau’s an asshole, but they’ll never let him stand trial. Or plead out. He knows way too much to risk letting him talk.”
“I gathered that. Buckman offered to have him killed instead.”
Paul chuckles. “Claude’s a hard old bastard. Why didn’t you let him do that?”
“I want justice for Buck, not another murder.”
Paul shakes his head like a sergeant dealing with a naïve recruit. “Eye for an eye’s about as fair as it gets in this world, Goose.”
“Yeah? Well. That’s where you and I part ways.”
“Maybe. Yet here we are with a corpse in the truck bed. You never stopped being a Boy Scout, did you?”
“A Boy Scout wouldn’t have made the deal I made today.”
He doesn’t comment further. Soon our headlights are the only man-made illumination within our range of vision. The moon hangs on our left, slightly larger than it was when Jet hit Max with the hammer last night.
“Do you intend to hold up your end?” Paul asks. “Or are you just playing those guys for suckers?”
As I look over at him, anxiety crawls up my spine like a beetle under my shirt. “How would I play them? And why?”
“I figure you might want another Pulitzer to announce your re-entry to the D.C. media world.”
I sigh heavily. “I don’t even know that I’m going back to Washington.”
“What would keep you here?” he asks, his voice tighter than before. “Jet?”
There it is. The unspoken question. “No,” I say deliberately. “The newspaper. The Watchman.”
“Really?” Paul looks surprised at first, then skeptical. But after a few seconds he says, “A lot changes when our fathers die, I guess. I can see that.”
“What about you? You gonna take Max’s seat in the Poker Club?”
He shrugs. “Hard to say. I think it’s going to get tougher for rich white guys to rule these towns in the world of Twitter and cell phone cameras. Even small towns.”
“Maybe. I think their biggest problem may be the black community. They really got behind the coroner this week. They might decide to run a real candidate for mayor this year. Tell the Poker Club to keep their money and try to take over the Board of Aldermen.”
Paul grunts. “That’d be a hell of a show.”
In the silence that follows this exchange, I lean against my door and close my eyes. But Paul isn’t through. Before ELP finishes “Lucky Man,” he says, “So did you give it to them yet? The cache, I mean.”
“No,” I answer, still leaning against the door. “I can’t really give it to them. It’s mostly digital. They just have to accept that I’ll keep it isolated.”
Paul nods. “But there’s a hard copy somewhere?”
Shit. “There’s a couple of hard drives somewhere, I think.” To push him away from this subject, I ask him something that’s stumped me from the beginning. “I can’t figure out who sent me those pictures of Dave Cowart and Beau Holland with Buck.”
“Really.”
“I wondered if it might be you. It had to be somebody in the club. Somebody with access to game cameras at the mill site.”
Paul doesn’t turn to me as he answers. “I’m no fan of Holland, but it wasn’t me.”
“Any ideas?”
“Wyatt Cash would be my guess.”
“Why’s that?”
“First, because the cameras were his. Second, he hates Holland. Beau screwed his ex-wife before she was his ex.”
“Didn’t you tell me there’s a club rule against that?”
“Yeah, but that’s not the kind of thing you want to bitch about to your friends. I think Wyatt waited for his chance, then hammered Beau hard.”
“Wouldn’t that be a huge risk for Cash? With the club, I mean?”
Paul lifts a hand off the wheel as if to say, Not so bad that I wouldn’t take it. “Those cameras transmit data over the cellular network. In theory, they’re hackable. Plus, some other people saw those shots. Nobody could pin the leak on Wyatt for sure.”
I settle back against the door.
“But you’ve had them all along, right?” Paul asks. “The hard drives.”
I sit up in my seat, the obvious question in my eyes. “I never had the cache, Paul. I only know who your mom gave it to—that’s all. And it took me all week to figure that out.”
His eyes glint in the dark. “Who was it?”
I don’t answer.
He smiles strangely. “You’re not gonna tell me who my mama trusted with our family secrets?”
“I made a promise, man.”
“You haven’t been big on honoring those lately. That must mean it was Jet. Does she have the cache?”
“Hell, no. The drives are in a safe-deposit box. That’s all I can tell you. They can’t be gotten to until Monday at the earliest.”
After a few seconds, he nods and turns his attention back to the dark road. “Well, that’s good.”
And with that he falls silent.
My slow-building anxiety has shifted into fear. I don’t think Paul was asking those questions for himself. And if he wasn’t . . . then I may be mistaken about what we’re doing on this lightless road. Am I here to help him bury his father? Or am I riding to the edge of my own grave? Does Paul plan to shoot me in the back and roll me in on top of Max before driving back to Jet and his son? If that’s his plan, Boar Island suddenly makes a lot more sense. An island owned and protected by the Poker Club might be the safest place to commit one more murder and hide the evidence. Hell, they process deer carcasses out here all the time—