The White Road

It reads: DIG HERE

And they will dig. A judge will be sought and an exhumation order signed, for Be

And where the coffin had rested for so long they will find a thin sprinkling of earth, and as they move it carefully away bones will be revealed: first the ribs, then the skull, its jawbone shattered, the cranium itself broken, cracks radiating from the ragged holes gouged in it by the blows that killed her.

It is all that is left of a girl on the verge of becoming a woman.

It is all that is left of Addy, the mother of Atys Jones.

And her son will die without ever knowing the final resting place of the woman who brought him into this world.

IV

When [the angels] descend, they put on the garment of the world. If they did not put on a garment befitting this world they could not endure in this world and the world could not endure them.

– THE Z OHAR

17

IT WAS ALMOST SUNRISE.

Cyrus Nairn crouched naked in the dark womb of the hollow. Soon, he would have to leave this place. They would come looking for him, suspecting immediately some form of vendetta against the guard Anson and turning their attention toward those who had most recently been released from Thomaston. Cyrus would be sorry to go. He had spent so long dreaming of being back here, surrounded by the smell of damp earth, root ends caressing his bare back and shoulders. Still, there would be other rewards. He had been promised so much. In return, sacrifices were to be expected.

From outside there came the calling of the first birds, the gentle lapping of the water upon the banks, the buzzing of the last night insects as they fled the approaching light, but Cyrus was deaf to the sounds of life beyond the hole. Instead he remained motionless, conscious only of the noises coming from the loose earth under his feet, both watching and feeling the slight shifting as Aileen Anson struggled beneath the dirt and, finally, grew still.

I was woken up by the telephone ringing in my room. It was 8:15 A.M.

“Charlie Parker?” said a male voice that I didn’t recognize.

“Yeah. Who is this?”

“You got a breakfast appointment in ten minutes. You don’t want to keep Mr. Wyman waiting.” He hung up.

Mr. Wyman.

Willie Wyman.

The boss of the Dixie Mafia’s Charleston branch wanted to have breakfast with me.

This was not a good way to start the day.

The Dixie Mafia had existed, in one form or another, since Prohibition, a conglomeration of loosely associated criminals with bases in most of the big Southern cities but particularly Atlanta, Georgia, and Biloxi, Mississippi. They recruited one another for out-of-state jobs: an arson attack in Mississippi might be the work of a firefly from Georgia, or a hit in South Carolina could be farmed out to a contract killer from Maryland. The Dixies were pretty unsophisticated, dealing in drugs, gambling, murder, extortion, robbery, arson. The closest they ever got to white-collar crime was robbing a laundry, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t a force to be reckoned with. In September 1987, the Dixie Mafia had murdered a judge, Vincent Sherry, and his wife, Margaret, at their home in Biloxi. It was never made clear why Sherry and his wife had been shot-there were allegations that Vincent Sherry had been involved in criminal operations through the law offices of Halat and Sherry, and Sherry’s law partner, Peter Halat, was later convicted on charges of racketeering and murder co

In 1983 Paul Mazzell, the then boss of the Charleston branch, was convicted with Eddie Merriman of the murder of Ricky Lee Seagreaves, who had robbed one of Mazzell’s drug deals. Since then, Willie Wyman had been the king in Charleston. He was five-four in height and weighed about one hundred pounds in wet clothes, but he was mean and cu

Willie had short, very dark hair, deeply ta

“We don’t need to frisk you, do we?”

“I’m not armed.”

“Good. I don’t think the people at Charleston Place would appreciate their breakfast tables being all shot up. You want to order? It’s on you.” He gri

I ordered coffee, juice, and toast from the waitress. Willie finished devouring his food and wiped his mouth on a napkin.

“Now,” he said, “to business. I hear you kicked Andy Dalitz’s nuts so far up his tubes that he can scratch them by sticking his fingers in his mouth.”

He waited for a reply. Under the circumstances, it seemed wise to oblige.

“ LapLand ’s your place?” I said.

“One of them. Look, I know Andy Dalitz is a moron. Hell, I’ve wanted to kick him in the nuts for as long as I’ve known him, but the guys got three fucking Adam’s apples now because of you. Maybe he had it coming, I don’t know. All I’m saying is that if you want to visit one of our clubs, then you should ask, and ask nice. Kicking the manager so hard that he can taste his balls in his mouth is not asking nice.

“And I got to tell you: if you’d done that in public, in front of customers or the girls, then we’d be having a very different conversation now. Because if you make Andy look bad then you make me look bad, and the next thing you know I have guys thinking maybe my time has come and I should make way for somebody new. Then I have two choices: I either convince them that they’re wrong, and then I got to find somewhere to put them and we waste a day driving around with them stinking up the trunk until we find a place, or else I’m the one stinking up the trunk and, between you and me, that’s not go

My coffee, OJ, and toast arrived. I poured the coffee and offered Willie the option of a fresh refill. He accepted, and thanked me. He was nothing if not polite.

“We’re clear,” I assured him.

“I know all about you,” he said. “You could screw up Paradise. The only reason you’re still alive is that even God doesn’t want you near Him. I hear you’re working with Elliot Norton on the Jones case. Is there something I need to know here, because that case stinks like my kid’s diapers? Andy told me you wanted to speak to the half-breed, Tereus.”

“Is that what he is?”

“The fuck am I, his cousin?” He relented a little. “His people came from Kentucky way back, is all I know. Who knows who they were fucking out there? There are people in those mountains who are maybe half fucking goat because their daddies got an itch at a bad time. Even the blacks don’t want nothing to do with Tereus or his kind. Lesson over. Give me something.”