“Come on.” They made their way back to the car and the strobing lights in the distance. The rain was pelting down around them now, soaking them.
Kim stopped, seeing a spiritual entity flit across her line of vision. She instinctively shouted, “Jessica! Jess! Damn her... damn her for taking so much on herself! Matisak's not just her problem; he's my problem, your problem, Alex, every decent policeman's problem!”
But Jessica was gone, skirting about the tombstones, a mere phantom, not wanting to be found. It was an illusion, and Kim knew it.
Alex took Kim into his outstretched arms to reassure her, but he was wondering just how long the two women had known each other. It was his understanding they'd only met since taking on the Queen of Hearts case, and since one was a scientist and the other a psychic empath, it made quite an impression on him when Kim had called claiming that Jessica Coran had confided her plans to her; it made another strong impression on him now to feel this woman's heart-wrenching sobs, to realize she was so openly weeping over Jessica's disappearance, and that she still called herself a cop.
Sincebaugh's natural curiosity had been aroused by their confidences, and Kim's recent remark, including herself in as a cop, but now wasn't the time to press for information.
Kim looked again off into the distant grounds of the sprawling cemetery, and there saw the rows upon rows of crosses, which in the fog and flashing lightning strikes and the whirling strobe light atop Alex's car looked aflame; in fact, the crosses seemed to rise and fall as if breathing, and they appeared to be moving in tandem to the strobe lights.
Little wonder she was having trouble pinpointing the Queen of Hearts killer; her psychic impressions had been distorted by the enormous duel between Matthew Matisak and Jessica Coran. She'd all along been picking up signals which belonged to the other case, and those symbols of crosses afire, marching like trees—Macbeth's enemies in disguise—began to bleed when pierced with arrows of light. All of it had come from Jessica's psyche. Jessica was a Macbeth now, an obsessed, tragic figure, and her only way out was to fell the one tree that marched at her.
“Alex, I have a confession to make.”
Sincebaugh looked into her eyes, his hands firmly pressing into her flesh. “Really, and you want me to act as father confessor?”
“These images.” She pointed at the shadow and light display across the tombs and crosses.
“Yeah, kinda eerie, but what about them?”
“They're the rosary images I've been getting right along, but they've got nothing whatever to do with the Queen of Hearts killer after all.”
“Then what are they? What do they mean?”
“They mean I've been a fool, and Jess is in danger because of me.” He shook his head and tugged at her to go with him to the car, get out of the rain. “It's not your fault she's come out here on this vendetta alone. You can't blame yourself, Kim.”
“We've got to help her. We've got to find her.”
“We will... we will,” he firmly lied, as unsure as he was wet.
“Something to do with green... a large green beast...“Come on ... back to the car... We'll locate her somehow.”
They returned to the dryness of the car, and once inside, the scavenger hunt was initiated when Alex got on the radio and put out an all-points bulletin to locate Dr. Coran.
“How? How're we going to find her?” Kim pleaded.
“Use some of that psychic power of yours. Meanwhile, I'm going to locate a phone book.”
29
And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.
—Revelation 20:7
Jessica had brought two guns, one in a shoulder holster, a Browning automatic, and a .38 police special strapped to her ankle. She tried to bolster her courage, lifting the automatic once again from its home, gritting her teeth and voicing a curse. “Come on, you bastard, just dare to show yourself...come on... come on...”
She'd located the dilapidated old warehouse teetering along a stretch of the wharf buffeted by the Mississippi River. The wind had blown up into a fury in the past few hours as if in collaboration with Matisak, but she knew better: The car radio in the cab had been blaring out warnings to residents all along the coast, warnings about a tropical disturbance that had become a hurricane; crossing the midsection of Florida, Hurricane Lois had recoiled for a second go at the U.S. mainland, experts predicting that it would likely hit in the vicinity of New Orleans.
. All available personnel were on alert and people were boarding up windows and stocking supplies. Landfall could be as early as dawn tomorrow if Lois so deemed it. But gale-force winds had already arrived ahead of her, some gusting up to sixty and seventy miles per hour, and some taking out telephone and electrical lines to parts of the city, including this area.
The warehouse was nothing more than a large Quonset hut—of World War II vintage, she guessed. The place was surrounded by black, sooty red-brick buildings, also ware-houses, all of which appeared a century old, and any one of which might fill in for a bleak Dickens backdrop or one of Hawthorne's ominous customs houses. The place was as dank, dismal and dark as the cemetery from which she'd just come.
An excellent shot on the firing range and proven in the field, Jessica only worried about the dense fog permeating the entire area and impairing her vision. If her theory regarding exactly how Ed Sand had met his end had any validity, the instant Matisak showed himself she must react, for he'd be sending a shardlike dart at her to immobilize her. He wouldn't use any fast-acting poison, just something with a paralyzing effect, to gain complete control. He didn't want her to die easily or quickly, so she must be vigilant and prepared to react instantaneously to the slightest sound or sight of him.
She recalled Kim's warning about an attack coming from up overhead. She readied her gun and moved ever closer toward the large overhanging sign with the tattered, faded shape of an enormous alligator staring back at her through the mist and fog.
She was soon standing at a side door left standing open, an invitation to enter a gaping, black maw. She reached into her purse for the flashlight she'd brought along with her and, taking a deep breath, entered. The place inside was strung with ropes and pulleys overhead, with a myriad of mechanical devices at every turn. Matisak liked to use ropes, chains, cords to tie his victims up and dangle them upside down, to bring all the blood rushing to the head, where he then released the pressure by relieving his victim of that blood.
She must be careful. She must give Matisak the false sense of security that would give her an edge, give him the impression he had the upper hand, as if she were walking into his trap. But at the same time, she must also be prepared for anything.
She'd purposely not wanted to use the flashlight, only if absolutely necessary, as the beam would signal her exact location. But there was no help for it. The place was pitch black. The beam picked up an occasional shape, creating greater and bigger shadows that danced at every turn.
She then realized that the warehouse was enormous. Stretching into what seemed infinity were rows and rows of paraphernalia from the fourteen or so parades and the Mardi Gras presented each year for the sake of a good time in the Big Easy. It was by far one of the largest such storage houses for the dolls and balloons and life-size figures, a veritable garden for Alice to fall into Wonderland.
“Appropriate to Matisak's witticisms,” she said aloud to the caricatures staring back at her. They ranged from Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner to enormous, complex dragons amid castles and costumes of knights, knaves, jesters, beggar-men, princes and princesses. She found staring back at her Indians in buckskin, aliens in metal, monstrous creations from Star Wars figures to Babylon 5 creatures with two and three heads. All of the costumes, porcelain figures and wire-mesh animals and papier-mache creations—any one of which might be Matisak—hung suspended in air overhead, while beautiful and elaborate floats littered the enormous corners of the hut, each float filled with its own assortment of gaily colored fi
gures, both human and animal as well as fantastic. What's more, all their marble eyes, onyx and amber and blue, seemed to be watching her every move.
There were literally thousands of disguises the madman might take here, so caution had been thrown to the howling winds just outside the Quonset hut the very moment she'd entered this bizarre still life which had become Matisak's lair and her lure.
She uselessly pulled down on the huge arm that would trip on the light switch, but she found what she'd expected—the power had been conveniently denied her. Only her flashlight beam could pick along from one gargoyle's menacing eyes to the eerie grin of a clown to the sinister talons of a bird of prey, until the colorful phantasmagoria of this silent and individual screening of the Mardi Gras all became as one.
She could see no additional electrical box, and was unable to bring up the lights. Through the thick, enveloping darkness she moved, ever cautious of her prey. Instinctively, she kept her weapon raised and ready to fire; at the same time, she tried to recall what the psychic sleuth, Dr. Desinor, had told her to watch for, a falling sky. She might well have meant Hurricane Lois on its approach, making mincemeat of the sky and the world.
Still, she superstitiously clung to the notion that Kim Desinor might well have seen something other than a hurricane-force wind blowing about in her vision, and for this reason, Jessica kept her eyes on the overhead struts and beams and an artificial sky filled with ornamentals and caricatures and likenesses. A hundred clown faces stared back out of the darkness, faces meant to amuse and create laughter and lightheartedness during the debacle of Mardi Gras, but here, like this, they only engendered a sense of cold terror, their smiles turned to grimaces, their eyes as large and watchful as moons.
Amid them, Matisak lurked.
“Show yourself, you cowardly demon! I've done as you asked! I'm here, now, alone... so come ahead.” Fuck with me, she silently seethed, her Scorpio ire up. She thought of her next birthday, November 17, 1996, a time when she was to revisit Hawaii and Jim Parry, a time when the whales came into the big harbor on Maui to breed there. She wondered if she'd ever see the spectacle.
Again her eyes scanned innumerable dummies and displays, costumes and Mardi Gras figures and figurines, most of which were dangling from the ceiling. Her flash lit on figure after figure, all of which grinned evilly back but all of which were lifeless, the eyes without depth or meaning. All except one, which she recognized as a mother recognizes her child in a crowd, knowing that this single body was real.
All in an instant her mind took in the simple and strange facts: The dangling man wore expensive Italian shoes—out of place here like something in a Dali painting—slick, pinstriped Brooks Brothers three-piece suit, the yuppie-thick suspenders, a Rolex on the arm. The light beam next revealed a thin-legged torso with deathly pale white hands. The beam could not find the face as it seemed buried in the darkness overhead.
Was it just as a prop to seduce her attention, to decoy her here to the very spot where he wanted her to stand? At the same time, her instincts screamed, “It's him,” and this made her fire, pumping several slugs into the body dangling overhead, her mind spinning with Kim's warning that the sky would fall in on her, and it did.
When her gunshots rang out, an ear-wrenching cacophony of sound screeched through the warehouse as the mechanical pulley device holding all the Mardi Gras figures and the dead man overhead began to carousel around the room. The moment it started up, the lifeless body gave up its head, the ugly, dismembered thing nearly hitting Jessica as it tumbled to the concrete floor with the sound of a ripe melon.
She instantly recognized the grimacing face as that of Deputy Mayor Fouintenac, killed in exactly the same manner as Ed Sand.
Jessica gasped and twirled away, the array of color and netting and fabric swishing by her eyes in dizzying succession. Matisak might have taken her at any given point, but he was showing extreme patience—toying with her—or was it out of caution that he'd not shown himself?
She instantly wheeled, her body, arm, hand and gun doing a 360-degree turn. Only after she was satisfied that he was not near did Jessica move the flashlight beam to the deadman's chest, seeing the sparkle of a half-hidden badge against the lifeless body, rising and dipping, as it came around on the carousel again. She instantly realized that Matisak had killed her last bodyguard, this one no doubt also taking orders from Meade.
Her flash next caught sight of a large upside-down garlanded banner of silver and blue, with words she made out as “HEAVEN'S DELIGHT'' printed across it, obviously a sponsor for one of the floats, perhaps a local restaurant or nightclub or ice cream parlor. And as she neared the banner, she saw the cause of the words: a swirling of moons, stars, planets all caught up in a huge bayou netting to create the illusion, once righted, of heavenly orbs floating above a nightscape of New Orleans.
Before she heard the clap of the metallic release that sent the float's netting hurling toward her, Jessica dove as far to her right as possible, catapulting herself into a row of standing dummies, sending them cascading in domino fashion as the heavens overhead came crashing down within inches of her, the netting dragging along her ankles, clawing at her. She'd avoided the heavy net filled with stars which was released to trap her. But outside, the wind was ripping over the warehouse so powerfully that she imagined the roof being taken apart piece by piece. She could hear both the howling and the tearing sounds as the vicious winds slammed into the enormous Quonset hut.
She'd lost her flashlight, and seeing that it lay under the netting, in Matisak's trap, she took perverse pleasure in waiting now for him to step out of the darkness to claim his prize. He might well think that she, along with the light, was beneath the net he had released over her.
She had slithered animal-like into a dark corner between a stack of colored doors leaning one against another and a pyramid of fallen mannequins. Now grateful for the cover of darkness, she waited to spring her own trap. A single indication of him, and she meant to fire.
But suppose someone else, hearing the clatter, stepped from the shadows? She silently cautioned herself, recalling how earlier she'd almost killed the hobo and how she had placed three slugs into Leon Fouintenac's lifeless corpse.
In the middle of her recall, all hell broke loose. Another enormous grating noise like an elephant suddenly gone on a rampage was followed by more sinister, lurching figures overhead on yet a second metal track. The ghostly, suspended Mardi Gras people began their dead and levitated parade, the lifeless forms of animals both imaginary and real in conception, of clowns and nebbishes, gnomes and giants, began, all to the sound of carousel music, to fly peacefully by, all suspended on great wires, hooks and pulleys, alternately bobbing upward and downward. It was an enormous contraption, this second and larger, circular-shaped pulley device, reminding her of the sort of mechanical arm used in a Laundromat to locate the proper ticketed clothing item.
Obviously Matisak was enjoying his new role as puppet-master, and clearly he thoroughly knew the building, its infrastructure and its inner workings, all to her disadvantage. He was manning the controls, and now the Mardi Gras was spinning slowly overhead, in a controlled maneuver designed to unnerve her, and it was working... had the desired effect ... created a nightmare of images passing by what little light came in from the street lamps at the windows, some twelve feet overhead. Matisak churned up the speed, and so too the atrocious racket accompanying it. Images passed by her in a blur of blinding color and tawdry tassels, a Grateful Dead circus of clowns awakened from long sleep. She watched carefully from her crouched position, her gun pointed and ready, the madness of the moment creeping slowly into her brain, dripping an acidic, bitter hatred for her prey. She was sick to death of his endless mind games.
She could stand the noise and the chaos no longer.
She began to fire indiscriminately at the now-ugly, satanic figures which flirted past her, in and out of the light. She fired nonstop, emptying the clip to her Browning automatic, which she'd felt wo
uld be more easily controlled and deadlier than her .38, still in place at her ankle.
She now reached for a new clip, and as she did so, the mannequins continued their wild dance along the struts and metal hooks which held them, an occasional large hook, empty of any contents, flashing its metal smile and claw as it whizzed by. The pace of the march of this madman's Mardi Gras had increased in steady increments, so Matisak obviously had the controls near at hand—or was it on some sort of automatic timer?
If she could only find the control box, then she would find him, she reasoned.
As she fought to place in the second clip, however, the wind from outside shattered several of the huge windows above, sending down a rain of glass, tiles and spray. She instinctively reacted, covering herself with a tarp, listening to the raining shards of glass thud against the protecting envelope she'd created for herself, knowing that she would otherwise have been struck and badly injured.
When it was over, she slowly extricated herself from the tarp and heavy debris, rain still pattering down on the canvas.
When she clawed her way out, she stood stark still; she saw an eye was trained on her, that he was looking directly at her. She could see the single eye even if he, in the shadows, thought she could not. It was a silver-blue iris, only half open as if meaning to wink closed at any moment. She wanted to close her own eyes, wish it away, afraid to accept it as his human eye. Must be one of the dummies... But staring into it, she realized that this eye in the dark beamed a cold, alien intelligence back at her, mirroring her own dark iris now filling with the tears of vengeance and malice she'd carried for so long with her.
She moved in slow motion to position the gun to fire into the eye of evil across from her. She fired, shattering only a mirror, and he suddenly swept at her on an overhanging cable. He was so suddenly upon her, blocking out what little light the fallen flashlight had afforded her, that he became her sky and his powerful legs kicked her square in the midsection, knocking the air from her and sending her cascading into some cardboard boxes. As her body arched over the pile of boxes, she lost control of the clip, her gun useless without it—and he, the Devil, was hovering and coming nearer.
Pure Instinct (Instinct thriller series) Page 39