by Greg Herren
There was a crash, and everything went dark.
Chapter Eleven
The Hanged Man
Self-surrender to higher wisdom
I returned to awareness wrapped in a warm, comforting fog.
Drifting, as always.
Love. Peace. Harmony.
It had been a while since the Goddess chose to speak with me. Usually, this happens when I lose consciousness in some way. I’ve chosen to never wonder if She arranges things so that I will go into this state so She can speak with me when She wants.
She doesn’t like being questioned. I’ve found that out the hard way.
Floating downward, I can see the blue-black night sky above me, stars winking into existence as I stare at that velvety darkness. Not too hot, not too cold, everything perfect, everything just right as I float downward. My body shifts in the air, the air seems to change, which means I am close to the ground. My feet settle on earth. Not dry, not soggy with wet, but dark dirt, the kind that will grow anything. I smell honeysuckle, jasmine, rose, and lilac. I can hear voices murmuring somewhere out there in the velvet darkness, words that are just sounds no matter how hard I try to listen, to shape them into the familiarity of words. The warm gentle breeze wraps itself around me, and I see her, taking shape, materializing, becoming real a few feet in front of where I am standing. This time she is taking the form of Artemis, the huntress; Selene, the twin of Apollo, goddess of the night and the moon to his glory as god of the sun. She has a quiver on her back, a leather strap over her right shoulder. Her tunic is white, shimmering, baring shapely legs and tied tightly at the waist. Her right breast is exposed, the fabric of the tunic tied at her left shoulder. I cannot make out her face—I can never see her face—but her hair is lustrous silver, hanging in plaits down her back and wrapped like a crown around the top of her head.
Artemis. Selene. Diana. The huntress. Why this form?
I search my mind and my memories for what I know of this form of the Divine Feminine. She was a virgin. She protects virgins and mothers in childbirth. The stag was sacred to her. She was protector of forests and hills.
Why? Why this form?
“You and those you love are in great danger,” She said, the sound of her voice music in my ears. “You must be brave.”
“Is Taylor going to be all right?”
She quivered, and her body began to glow a brilliant white. “Taylor will survive this test, as he will survive many other tests. But there are lies—so many lies, so many deceits. You must be strong, you must be brave, you must be fearless in order to sift the truth from the lies.”
“As long as Taylor will be all right, I can face anything.”
“Can you?” She began to fade away in front of me, those final words echoing in my ears as everything began to get lighter, brighter, as the sun seemed to suddenly rise as she faded. “Can you?”
I opened my eyes, aware of the blaring of a car horn.
I winced.
I’m not sure how long I was unconscious, how long I was with the Goddess, but the airbag was almost finished deflating. I blinked a few times, still trying to process what had just happened. My ears were ringing, my eyes watering, and my chest was aching. My head hurt, and there was still gray around the edges of my vision. I started coughing, and stars danced in front of my eyes. There was a chemical taste in the back of my throat, and it tasted horrible, awful, disgusting. I hacked again, trying to cough up whatever it was I’d somehow swallowed—something from the airbag, I suspected—but there was nothing to come up and that scratchy feeling, like you get from bad coke you buy in a club at four in the morning, was still there. As my vision began clearing slowly and I could start focusing my mind again, I saw that my car was sitting in the middle of Prytania Street, well over the broken white line, facing toward St. Charles.
The impact of the accident had not only spun the car a quarter turn but had moved it. That was kind of scary.
How fast was he going? How hard did he hit me? I managed to think through that terrible ringing in my ears. I could see, through a windshield now road-mapped with cracks, that the front hood was not only crumpled but had come open. There was steam coming out from the engine. I blinked a few more times, shook my aching head a little bit, and tried taking inventory of myself. I could move my arms, and my legs seems to be okay, too. As I shifted and moved a little bit in the driver’s seat, I realized I was covered in sparkling little diamonds of greenish glass from the shattered window on the passenger side of the car. I started brushing the fragments off my body. I reached up and looked at my reflection in the rearview mirror, turning it so I could get a good look.
No cuts, nothing bleeding, no cuts or abrasions on my face…at least none I could see.
The miracle of the airbag, no doubt, had protected my face.
And out of the corner of my eye, I could see serious damage to the passenger side door. I winced as I turned my head—my neck was sore—and sure enough, that must have been where the other driver’s car had hit mine. The door was buckled inward, and all that was left of the window were some jagged edges jutting up from inside the door.
Someone was pounding on my window. With the airbag deflated I could see the dummy lights on the dashboard were all lit up. The engine was stalled, and I couldn’t hear what the woman was saying over the ringing in my ears. I pressed the button to roll the window down but of course nothing happened.
I carefully unbuckled my seat belt with shaking hands and opened the car door.
“No, no, don’t get up!” I could barely hear her over the ringing. There was also pressure in my eardrums, like I was on a plane descending toward the runway. I held my nose and tried to blow through it. Both eardrums popped and cleared, and I could hear what she was saying better. “You might be injured—you never know! You could have whiplash or have hurt your back. Stay there until the paramedics come. Can you tell if anything is broken?”
“I think I’m fine.” My voice sounded hollow and far away. “My head—”
“I called 9-1-1,” she said.
I turned my head—slowly, because my neck did hurt, bad—and got a good look at her. She was possibly somewhere in her forties, but it was hard to tell exactly because her face had been pulled tighter than a snare drum. She was also wearing a lot of very carefully applied makeup. Her reddish-gold hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, which smoothed out her forehead and made her blue eyes appear to bug out a bit. (Some people called that kind of tight ponytail an “Uptown face-lift.”) She was wearing a Saints jersey and black yoga pants. She was fairly small—maybe five one, five two, and if she weighed more than one hundred pounds, it was due to her significantly augmented breasts.
“I used to be a nurse,” she went on. “You really shouldn’t move until the paramedics get here.” She looked up as a car passed us on the right. “I mean, seriously, you could fuck yourself up big time.”
I turned and looked out where the passenger window used to be. I could see the other car—dark, black, two-door, vaguely sedan-ish. Its hood was also crumpled up, the windshield cracked, steam coming out of its radiator, other fluids leaking out under the engine. “Is the other driver okay?”
She shook her head. “He’s gone.”
I gasped in horror. “Oh no!”
“Not dead, gone.” She waved down Sixth Street, toward the river. “I was coming home from the gym—my house is over there,” she gestured to the other side of Prytania, “and I had just pulled into my driveway when I saw him coming up the street really fast and I saw you coming up Prytania and I realized he wasn’t going to stop…if anything, he sped up.” She stopped, inhaled for a moment, and went on, “And I saw the whole thing.” She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself as she remembered. “I called 9-1-1 immediately and came running. He got out of his car and took off running back that way. I yelled for him to stop, but you weren’t moving and I figured I needed to check on you to make sure you’re okay but I filmed him.” She held up her phon
e. “Video, film, whatever you call it now. I recorded him. I don’t know if the police can identify him, but I mean, why would he run?”
I gaped at her. The ringing in my ears was getting softer, I could hear better, but my eardrums still felt like they needed to be popped, like there was too much pressure in there again somehow. I popped them again and they felt better.
I could hear sirens approaching now. If what she said was true—and why would she lie—it sounded like someone had deliberately hit me.
Why?
It didn’t make sense, unless it was some kind of insurance scam my mind was too scrambled to figure out. An ambulance, lights flashing and siren blaring, braked in front of my car. The back door opened and a pair of EMTs—a man and a woman—popped out and came running to where I was still sitting.
A penlight beamed into my eyes, while one of them—the man—started firing questions at me. Can you see? Is anything broken? How’s your hearing? Can you turn your head?
A blood pressure cuff went onto my left arm, while the woman took my pulse. “I’m fine, I think,” I said, but my voice sounded hollow and far away, which meant my ears were still messed up.
A uniformed cop took the lady in yoga pants aside and started asking her questions and nodding at her answers, scribbling down notes. The EMTs helped me to my feet, checked my arms and legs, and then helped me over to the ambulance, securing my neck first in one of those collar things you always see on television shows about whiplash scam lawsuits. I kept answering questions as they hooked me up to machines.
“Deep breaths,” the woman urged me, as she listened to my lungs through a stethoscope.
“I’m fine, really,” I kept insisting.
“We should take you in, get some x-rays,” the man said, checking my eyes again. “You could have a concussion, and whiplash isn’t always apparent right away.”
“My neck is sore,” I agreed, turning my head from side to side, wincing. It hurt, but I could do it. “I don’t want to go to the hospital. I just want to go home.”
She looked dubious. “You really should—”
“I’m just sore,” I insisted. “And I don’t live alone. If anything goes wrong after I get home, I’ll go to an emergency room immediately.”
It took me a few more minutes, but they finally agreed to let me go—as long as I signed something absolving them of responsibility if something should actually be wrong with me from the accident.
Ah, our litigious society.
“Here are your keys.” A uniform was standing in front of me. I looked up into the cop’s face. “We’ve pushed your car over to the side of the road. It’s not drivable. If you’re not going to the emergency room, is there anyone you can call to give you a ride home?”
I looked over at where my car was sitting. I hadn’t even had it for a full year yet. I was going to have to deal with the insurance company. My heart sank. I didn’t have the slightest idea of what to do in this situation. It was going to have to be towed. But where?
“We can give you a lift.”
I looked up to see Venus and Blaine standing next to the uniform, their faces expressionless. Any port in a storm, I thought. “Sure, okay. Thanks, I appreciate it.”
I signed a release form from the EMTs and got a copy of the accident report from the cop in charge of the scene. He warned me I was going to have to get the car towed away at some point. I nodded and followed Venus and Blaine over to Venus’s black SUV. I got into the back seat. The pressure was starting to build up in my ears again and I could still hear that faint ringing. My chest ached and I still had that chemical taste in my mouth. I coughed a few times, spat up something into a tissue.
“You know your car is totaled, right?” Blaine said, looking over the seat at me in the back.
“Yeah, they told me.” I leaned my head against the cold window. “It’s not even a year old. I guess the insurance company will know what to do with it, right?”
“Yes,” Venus replied. “They’re going to want to look at it, of course, but call them when you get home and let them know. They’ll walk you through it. Have you never had an accident before?”
“Not in a car I owned.”
“Why would someone want to kill you, Scotty?” Blaine asked, his eyes still on the road, his tone still conversational.
“What?” I couldn’t have heard that correctly. “No one is trying to kill me. At least not that I know of. What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Scotty, tell me the truth. What’s really going on?” Blaine went on, glancing back at me in the rearview mirror. “That car deliberately hit you, Scotty.”
I didn’t know how to answer that, but my stomach started churning. “No, it was an accident.”
“So, what are you up to? What are you doing that would make someone want to kill you?”
“Nothing.” My mind was spinning. “I mean, you know about the Eric Brewer/Grande Dames murders.” I closed my eyes and thought, Colin and the Russian. The headache was worsening. “Seriously. No one wants to kill me. It was an accident, that’s all. Why are you trying to scare me?”
Venus looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Scotty, that car never braked. There’s a stop sign at the corner, and there are no skid marks, nothing to indicate the car even tried to stop. If anything, it accelerated. The witness confirms it.” She shook her head. “And the driver ran away. You don’t need to worry about having the car towed,” she went on. “Just have your insurance company contact me. Your car—both cars—are being taken in custody of the police, to be examined. You’re sure you’re not into something that would make someone want to kill you?” She swallowed. “There’s nothing going on with Colin?”
Colin.
My car was being taken into police custody, to be examined.
There was a dead body in the hatch less than twenty-four hours ago.
But they wouldn’t be looking for anything like that, would they?
Unless someone tipped them off about that agent Colin killed?
This was just getting worse and worse.
“You know, I don’t think so, I can’t think of anything.” I closed my eyes and tried to keep my breathing normal. Focus, focus, focus. “My mind is kind of scrambled, and I’m still in a shock, I think? But I’ll let you know if I think of anything. What’s going on with Taylor and the Eric Brewer murder? Have you figured out anything about Chloe Valence’s murder?”
“You know we can’t talk about an open investigation,” Blaine replied.
“Did Remy’s alibi check out?”
Venus looked at me in the rearview mirror again when she stopped at the light at Jackson Avenue. “How did you know about Remy’s alibi?” She narrowed her eyes. “Scotty, you and Frank are not getting involved in this, are you? How many times have I told you not to get involved in a police investigation? Are you ever going to listen?”
“It’s Taylor, Venus.” I looked out the window. “How can we not?”
“How is he doing?” Blaine asked.
“Not good.” I took a deep breath. “But you know, he’ll get through this. Life doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle. It’s how you handle it that matters.”
“I’m really sorry that happened to him, I want you to know that,” Blaine went on. “We both are.”
“At least he wasn’t sexually assaulted.” I caught myself, choking off a sob. “It seems weird to be grateful to a murderer, but…”
“Yeah,” Blaine replied.
We rode the rest of the way in silence.
“We’ll let you know when we release the car,” Venus called as I climbed down out of the back of her SUV to the curb.
“Thanks.” I shut the door, waving as they drove off. My legs were a lot wobblier than I would have liked. I somehow made it to the gate, got it unlocked, and walked down the entryway, one hand lightly against the wall in case my wobbly legs gave out. I probably should have called Frank to help me, but I didn’t want to freak him out. He was already going to f
reak out when I told him about the car, and added to all this stuff with Taylor—yeah, he didn’t need to be worried about me on top of everything else. I used the rail to help myself up the stairs and have never been happier to get to my apartment.
I could hear voices from the living room.
I glanced at my watch. It was almost four; Loren McKeithen must have arrived.
Why hadn’t Frank called me? I pulled my phone out of my pocket and found the answer. My phone was broken. The screen was shattered, and no matter how many times I pressed the home button it just stayed black.
Damn it.
“Oh my God.” Frank stood up when I walked into the living room, his face draining of color. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I made my way to an easy chair, plopped down, and closed my eyes for a minute. “Car accident. We can talk about it later. Thanks for coming, Loren.”
Loren looked at Frank and back to me, concerned. “We can do this another time—”
“Seriously, I’m fine. Where’s Taylor?”
“Upstairs.” Frank looked up. “Loren wants us to look into the murder, you know, help find things to—”
“The police aren’t taking Taylor seriously as a suspect,” Loren said, gesturing with his hands. “If anything, he’s a victim who was very lucky. But the police investigation isn’t closed yet, either. We don’t know what they are going to find, or what the district attorney’s office is going to want to do. I’m sure the city and the mayor are going to want this case closed fast.” He shook his head. “I mean, if show business people are going to be getting murdered here…” He shrugged. “They’re trying to bring all that Hollywood South stuff back, you know, and this doesn’t make New Orleans look good to production companies and networks.” He stood up. “See what you can find—particularly focus on a pattern of behavior. As I said, I’m not worried about Taylor being charged, but it’s always best to be prepared.” He shook my hand, and Frank walked him down to the gate.