by Brian Hodge
He lost the NOPD cars at the city limits, but a pair of state troopers hung with him, four or five carlengths back and jockeying to close the gap. No question that there would be more down the road, and he had to wonder why, why keep going, he would never lose them now, not this many, he was fucked with no way out.
Why not? Surrender was such an ugly word.
And maybe he’d not done so badly tonight after all. A truce of harmony among any city’s criminal gangs was a tenuous affair, often revoked whenever some exploitable weakness was exposed. And certainly he had done an exposé tonight. Nathan Forrest was on the run, reeling from the destruction of his home and business. The eaters of organized criminal carrion would never ignore this. The Cajuns, the blacks, the Latinos … there would be a feeding frenzy for everything he had. To hold on to any of it, he would have to fight like hell’s own guardian. And regardless of whatever influence he had with select police officials and local and state politicos, none of them could ignore gang warfare. Bad for tourism.
Bad for image.
So let him suffer, and Moreno laughed.
And laughed…
Until he could no longer breathe.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, please be merciful unto me, a sinner, a killer of men — this was the moment he’d dreaded. He could feel it in his heart, his soul, and only lastly did he feel it in the back of his throat, and tongue. The hand of black magic, as white as sun-bleached bone.
He screamed while still able, before his tongue choked it off. Fighting back the tears, this pain like none he had ever felt, an oversize tongue forcing past his lips while searing across its surface with wet blistered cracks, skin splitting under strain, no more air, a meat plug in his throat—
Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe, but no panic, he could beat this. Moreno drew the albino’s bone-handled knife from a pocket. Fumbled in the glove compartment to grab a ballpoint pen, unscrewing it and keeping only the lower half of the plastic tube.
Too much traffic, and red lights and sirens and the deep solid beat of a helicopter overhead … no way could he work over to the shoulder in time for this, he’d soon black out for sure.
Moreno fought the wheel with his left hand, and put the tip of the blade to the hollow of his throat. Such a tender spot. He sliced a vertical incision down from the bottom of his larynx — could not let the pain touch him — then peeled the flaps of skin apart. Probed with one trembling finger for the ridges and rings of the bared trachea. All he needed was to punch a hole through the tissue between two of the rings, fit the plastic tube in the hole, and breathe again. Tracheotomy, if that albino motherfucker wouldn’t let him breathe, be would bypass the problem entirely, he wanted to live, anything to live.
Moreno spun the knife tip like a little drill, felt the rip open wide, wider than he could ever possibly use with such a small tube, and suction sealed the flaps of the incision. He fumbled at his throat with fingers and blade, open, OPEN, one hand just wasn’t enough for this
and the bright urban highway went misty gray as his lungs bucked in his chest
incision in streaming tatters
any more and he was going to cut his own jugular
This was never going to work.
He threw the knife aside when he saw the upcoming concrete pillars, support your local overpass. A sure thing was better than not knowing. Besides, black out at the wheel and he could total the proverbial station wagon and family of six, and so Moreno cut left and gave no more thought to the brakes, and followed the siren song all the way home.
Chapter 29
Ashes
Moreno never came back, throughout this longest of nights, and Justin wondered which was worse: that he didn’t, or that it seemed to surprise none of them who remained.
They had settled into a shell-shocked semblance of activity … the mopping up, the picking up of pieces. Granvier and Napoleon went out back to weight down the bodies of the gunmen, then sink them beneath the lake, a secret for the waves to keep. Fallen weapons were collected, brought inside, and by then, Mama Charity had entertained a brief visit from a parish deputy, investigating a report of gunfire in the area — had she seen or heard anything unusual? Justin listened from the kitchen, admiring her grace under pressure; why, yes, she’d heard them too, in the distance, and engines, loud ones. Kids shooting at road signs, that was her guess.
April he carried to a bedroom upstairs, to pass this sleep of the dead. Her face had already been washed. With a damp cloth he cleaned her thighs and buttocks, where she had wet herself in a moment of loss or terror or surprise. None of which he wanted to imagine, because he’d not been there, and was in fact the reason she was here at all. With her so far beyond reach or reassurance, he feared he might have been among her last thoughts. And that he might have been damned by them.
He pulled a chair with a tall, straight back beside the bed; from here he would sit his vigil. He could imagine nothing else for the coming days, not even fighting for his own survival, and when Mama Charity and Granvier came up to join him for a few minutes he couldn’t decide whether he never wanted to see them again, or never wanted them to leave.
“Justin.” Granvier’s voice, soft, yet firm. “It’s time you think of your safety once more. The djab blanc, he knows where we are. Your bargain with Mullavey, it may no longer hold.”
He closed his eyes, the weariness like a cloak of lead, with sleep so near, and so far beyond him. He leaned back and groaned.
“I’m too tired and I can’t think anymore. And I don’t even care. If you want to part company, I wish you all the luck in the world.” He looked at Mama Charity, the comforting bulk of her. “And if you want me gone, I’ll leave. Otherwise…” He shrugged.
She nodded to him, once, slowly. “You’re welcome to stay, long as you want. Last thing in the world I’d do is chase you out at a time like this.”
“I can pay you,” he said, “for food…”
“You hush.”
And he didn’t even know why he’d said it — the thought of eating anything at all was enough to turn his belly with anguish. He might never be hungry again, might let his body turn upon itself for nourishment. Eat himself alive from the inside.
He took April’s hand in his, raising it inches from the bed where she lay as if awaiting the kiss of a prince to counteract the poison. Such a laugh, she could have done so much better than him. No more deliverers, no more saviors. Theirs was a fairy tale romance writ by the Brothers Grimm.
He fingered her wedding ring. He had put up his inherited car for collateral to buy it, the only thing of value he’d had left.
“What time is it?”
“Coming up on midnight,” said Mama Charity.
He nodded. “Almost Thursday. Almost the twenty-first. Our one-year anniversary.” He lay her hand back by her side, tucked a blanket over it so she might stay warm. “We never had a real wedding. Just a judge thing. It was all we could afford. We didn’t even invite our families.” Smiling, then. “ ‘Who needs that kind of stress,’ she said. It seemed more romantic, anyway. Or that’s what we told ourselves. Maybe … maybe we were just making excuses. Our families were pissed ’cause they didn’t get invited. But I, uh … I liked it that way.”
For what reason these admissions, and why now? He’d always told April to shoot him if he ever got to the point where he spoke just to hear his own voice; perhaps this was it, she would rise from the bed and aim a finger at his head: Bang, shut up.
“Come on downstairs, why don’t you?” said Mama Charity. “You got plenty time left to spend in this room.”
They again gathered around the kitchen table, and Mama put on a pot of coffee. Mugs for four, thick ceramic with some heft, and chips that suggested years of use, gallons of coffee. Justin stared into his, black circle, and this was what it had all been about, one way or another. Veterans of the coffee wars.
“Got a radio?” he asked.
“In the bathroom.” Mama looked almost shy for a moment.
“I like to sing in the shower.”
She went to get it, set it on the kitchen counter, and he asked if she knew of a news station down in New Orleans they could tune in. Curiosity about Moreno had plagued them all, but remained unspoken, as if it were a terminal disease. They knew generalities already, in some heart’s hidden ventricle; that which had seemed inevitable. All they lacked were details.
Which came, eventually, news on the hour. While the name of Ruben Moreno was never given — perhaps wasn’t even known yet — the tale of destruction bore his imprimatur. Even in a city of more than half a million, it could have been none other.
French Quarter restaurant Charbonneau’s devastated, casualties by gunfire, the as-yet-unidentified suspect killed while attempting to elude police in a high-speed chase in the westbound lanes of the Airline Highway. He’d been a busy man.
Up next, sports.
“A fugitive.” Justin was the first to break silent homage. “Hell of a way for him to be remembered.”
Mama Charity touched him on the arm, then Granvier. “Just did meet him tonight, so maybe it’s not my place to say, but he didn’t seem the sort who much cared what folks thought. Except for the ones who’d know better anyway.”
“He was driving the same direction as Twin Oaks,” Napoleon said. “He wasn’t no fugitive at all, mon, he was running to something.”
Never made it, though, and Justin wondered what havoc Moreno might have wreaked upon Mullavey had he gotten the chance. It made for wondrously bitter fantasy. At least he’d gone down fighting; better to burn out than fade away, like some old soldier. Perhaps, in some hall presided over by warrior gods, his arrival was being celebrated. Valhalla, I am coming.
Mama Charity drained the coffeepot, splashing equal amounts in their mugs. “We need more of this?”
Granvier took it from her. “Let me.”
Fresh cups were soon poured, and Justin knew he really should be getting back up to April. The stairs become a road to hell — see where our good intentions have led? He couldn’t do it yet.
“Answer me something,” Granvier said to Napoleon. “Of those Haitians who came to Mullavey, are you the first to have left?”
Napoleon thought it over, then nodded. “I might be. I never once heard of anyone else who tried.” He shrugged. “Where would they go, what would they do?”
“But if they thought they could leave and not suffer for it, and not be deported back home, might they want to?”
That conversation in the car hours before, Moreno’s growing obsession — Justin had forgotten all about it.
“Some may.” Napoleon looked down and smiled. “There would be so many places in this country I would see on the TV, back at Twin Oaks. I’d see them — the Grand Canyon, maybe — and I’d say, hey, mon, I want to be going there.”
Mama Charity nudged Granvier’s arm. “What are you pushing at, you wanting to take all them folks away somewhere else?”
“Ruben thought it could be done, and he cared about it very much. I would like to see it done, if I can.”
“That’s all well and good, in here” — she pressed a hand to her heart — ”but what are you expecting to do with that many people who’ve got not even the first idea what it’s like living in this country, on their own? Probably never even seen their own green cards.”
“Ruben had ideas.” Granvier arched his eyebrows a moment, smiled over the rim of his mug. “There’s an area of Miami called Little Haiti. If they were taken there, they could learn, perhaps. If they have green cards for now, Ruben says they would be honored even if they were discovered to be obtained through bribery. But they need not fear being deported when these expire. The INS will now allow illegal aliens to stay if they can prove they have been here since 1982. As these people have.” He smiled again, and it was sly, wicked, revenge eaten cold. “Mullavey has lost much of his hold over them, they just don’t know it. But they will.”
Mama Charity nodded, rolling her eyes back as she realized who would be carrying the message. Justin thought she got it a few moments before he did.
Napoleon seemed to have understood all along.
“Macandal will be helping me, you know,” he said. “He’s done this before.”
Justin didn’t know the time when he returned to the upstairs bedroom that had become April’s sepulcher, knowing only that it had become his all, his world.
How eerie was this sleep of hers, undisturbed by so much as sigh or snore or twitch of arm. Normally a sound sleeper, April, though in more than a year of sharing the same bed, he had grown fondly accustomed to the subtle rhythm of her slumber, and molded his own around it. Those little sounds and movements through the night that gave such comfort that he wasn’t alone, that she lived and breathed and loved him.
All of which had been stolen, leaving him with little but hope and ragged prayer, and time.
He greeted the dawn from his chair, watching at the window as Thursday gathered momentum. Too tired to stay awake, too infused with worry and caffeine to sleep. He could shuffle across the room to an old dresser, its mirror rising from the back in an ornately carved walnut oval, and stare at his reflection, see the scrimshaw of fine lines around his eyes. On one side, beneath the healing cut and fading bruises left by a pistol swung in anger. These lines, when had they come? They’d not been there six months ago. He looked at them and knew he had been cheated; with age, wasn’t there supposed to come security?
Other lives, coming and going from downstairs. They left him alone at midmorning. Mama Charity took the other two to Gretna so Granvier could clean out their motel rooms and put that phase of persecution behind them. Napoleon drove their rental car away, and took Granvier home so he could retrieve his own wheels.
It was early afternoon when they returned, having stopped at Mama Charity’s shop, and they told him a tale of more apparent carnage. Mama’s sometimes evening clerk, an ex-addict named Jo-Jo, missing in action. No trace of him, but she’d found a peculiar hole in her counter, a fresh nail-hole perhaps, and when she poked a stick of incense into it to gauge its depth, her probe had come out spotted with congealed blood.
Another mystery solved, how last night’s visitors had gotten directions.
Justin slept when he could, odd hours when the light of morning and late afternoon became confused. It was all the same, while he stretched out along April’s side, sometimes talking to her, sometimes not, for fear she could hear him and was getting tired of listening to the same things over and over.
Saturday, the projected day of her awakening. Saturday.
Waiting.
He eventually grew weary of the chair and took to spending his waking hours on the floor with his back to the wall. Armed, he was always armed, with the Taurus that Moreno had given to him, and one of the fallen pistols whose owner was now fish food at the bottom of the lake; often in hand, always in reach. In case retribution came.
But it did not.
And the feeling stole over him, gradually, with the passage of dawns and dusks, that this was no way to end it. All the effort, the sacrifice, the blood and the pain and the wounds within and without … and he had no payoff. Just passing these endless hours, waiting for the woman he loved to awaken, and praying she would be no worse for the experience.
How much simpler it had seemed last year, in Tampa, when he’d known where he stood in the scheme of betrayal and strife, with the certainty of violent crescendo to know he had survived.
And how much less it was, now, to flinch at shadows on the walls and aim a gun at phantoms, awaiting avengers who never came. Who must have had greater problems than he.
How humiliating was this final revelation, that he and April were no longer even a priority.
They had become, finally, what they had accomplished:
Nothing.
Chapter 30
When Empires Fall
Eel came up out of the underground midday Thursday. He had already made one aborted attempt in the predawn hour, ascendin
g from below into the subbasement, then the basement. By the time he warily came up the stairs to ground level, he knew he would get no farther, not while crime unit techs were crawling all over the place … or what remained of it. One veiled peek through the sagging wreckage of a scorched door showed him all he needed to know, the ashen blight of conflagration.
He and Nathan were already fearing the worst. They’d gone below with a decent safety margin before the arrival of last night’s unknown wild card, and obviously the soldiers left behind to deal with him hadn’t been up to the task. Within twenty minutes of their retreat, the entire subterranean vault had been gripped by a rumble carried down through bones of brick and pipe. For all they knew, Charbonneau’s had been hit with an air strike.
Whoever he’d been, certainly he was no more. Hair and finger, flesh and blood and bone, offered to savage gods to curry favor. And if Nathan Forrest had gone into a tirade once the blast quake subsided, blaming Eel for not stopping him soon enough, it was only because he had never truly understood those things Eel so intimately knew: that the working of dark wonders takes time.
Nathan Forrest had been a passive observer of these nether arts, an opportunist who used them to his advantage with no commitment. His gratitude left something to be desired.
Eel’s second attempt at leaving proved successful, the burnt-out shell sifted for bodies and evidence, and cordoned off with crime scene tape by noon. Nathan locked the subbasement trapdoor after him, and Eel was on his own. He crunched through charred debris and slipped along a corridor reeking of smoke and water damage. It led to a private courtyard unseen from the street. Fresh air at last, and mild November sunshine, the genteel comforts of a brick patio and lush greenery. He used a key to get into a building facing St. Peter, and through here slipped back into the world.
He’d borrowed Nathan’s Burberry topcoat to hide the shoulder wound; while it had been cleaned and bandaged, his shirt was still a mess. His arm was stiff, inflamed muscle grating like rusted iron. Have to get it taken care of soon.