SONNY THORNFIELD THOUGHT he’d been afraid during the afternoon, but that had been nothing compared to now. This was like the war all over again. The plan that put a bullet into Henry Sexton’s brain had been pure genius; nobody would argue that. It was the aftermath that had Sonny worried. He and Snake were flying five thousand feet over the Atchafalaya Swamp in a darkened Cessna Caravan with two half-drunk boys in the backseats: Jake Whitten and Charley Wise, the two surviving punks who’d bungled Brody Royal’s first hit on Sexton. Sonny had been told that his job was to help Snake kill the boys and dump them in the swamp, but he feared that the real purpose of this mission was to leave him in the same dark hole.

Until he’d heard about this flight, Sonny had felt pretty sure that Forrest still trusted him, despite his being kidnapped by Tom Cage and that Ranger bastard. But then—on Forrest’s orders—Snake had carried him to Claude Devereux’s office to videotape a statement about what happened, which was then notarized and duplicated on the spot. With that video statement in Devereux’s safe, Forrest could still order Sonny’s death whenever he liked. Sonny looked out at the stars and thought about the successful hit on Sexton. Surely Forrest would give him partial credit for that?

Forty minutes ago, he and Snake had dropped out of the clouds over an empty Concordia Parish cotton field, then descended toward a line of chemical glow sticks. Snake had set the floatplane down on a narrow stretch of water owned by a friend of Billy Knox, then taxied to a stop near the shore, where a Chevrolet parked at water’s edge switched on its headlights. Charley and Jake had brought this car to meet the plane, with Snake’s raccoon trap in the trunk.

Snake took the trap out of the trunk, shot the terrified coon, then climbed into the Chevy and headed for Mercy Hospital. Twenty minutes later, he dumped the dead coon beneath Henry’s window, then set up his rifle on a spot he’d marked that morning with a tent stake, just thirty yards from the window. Using a modified photographic tripod as a bench rest (just as he had when practicing the shot through the windows of an abandoned house near Jonesville), he executed Henry Sexton with a perfect head shot, then took out his girlfriend, just in case she’d seen something.