Tom hesitated, but then he told Walt about Carlos Marcello’s plan to lure Robert Kennedy to Natchez by murdering Jimmy Revels. Walt’s eyes went wide, and he opened a beer when Tom began describing Brody Royal’s part in the plot.

“But it was all for nothing,” Tom concluded. “When Frank died, Royal or Marcello called off the operation. Ray didn’t think they trusted Snake to handle it professionally.”

Walt nodded, then gave Tom a piercing look. “You’re not telling me everything you know about the Marcello angle, are you? The Kennedy stuff?”

“Maybe another night,” Tom said. “That had nothing to do with me.”

“Well. Did those bastards torture your girl at the machine shop?”

A flush of heat came back into Tom’s face as the killing fever rose again. “Ray told me that when he first approached the machine shop, he heard a woman screaming, then a man screaming for them to stop. I figure that was Viola and Jimmy. Ray took out his pistol and went in. He was ready to kill them if he had to.”

“Which he’d done before.”

Tom nodded. “Plenty of times. Ray was a bad customer, but he didn’t lack guts. He found Viola half naked and blindfolded. He told the Eagles he was taking her out, but that he’d leave the two boys behind. He hadn’t been paid to get them out, see? And he told them that.”

“Smart,” Walt said. “That’s probably the only way he could have got out alive.”

“I’m sure of it. Ray said Viola was shrieking like a madwoman when he dragged her out of there, begging him to go back and get her brother.”

“I imagine she was.”

“Ray called me from a pay phone. Twenty minutes later, we met down an oil field road and he put her in the backseat of my car. I had my black bag, and I sedated the hell out of her. Didn’t have any choice.”

Walt opened a tin of Skoal and tucked a pinch under his bottom lip. “Don’t tell me you took her home to Peggy.”

Tom snorted. “I wasn’t that desperate. Not then, anyway. I couldn’t make up my mind where to hide her, though. I knew the Klan would be combing the city for her, not just the Double Eagles. That meant cops and deputies in those days. I needed somewhere they’d never think of looking. And this was the middle of the night, for Christ’s sake. Then it hit me.”

“Where?”

“Nellie Jackson’s place.”

Walt’s eyes narrowed. “The whorehouse?”

Tom nodded.