by Brian Hodge
Eel walked another couple blocks until he came across the sort of place he was looking for: a bar, dark and seedy and out of the way. A little too much local color, it would never cater to standard tourist trade, with the kind of unwashed patrons who had deliberately poor memories. He would blend here as well as anyplace.
From a pay phone in back, he first called Lewis at home, for a pickup, then rang out at Twin Oaks. Frowned at the Caucasian female voice that answered with nothing more than a guarded hello.
“Who’s this?” He was used to a Haitian accent.
“That’s a rude question,” she said. “You got three seconds to convince me I should talk to you before I’m hanging—”
“Kathleen?” he said. “Mrs. Forrest?” And why was Nathan’s wife doing phone duty, anyway? “This is Terrance Fletcher.”
“Where in the hell is my husband?”
“He’s safe, I left him not long ago.”
“That’s no answer!” she shouted into his ear. “Now where in hell is Nathan, and why won’t these people give me any explanation as to what the fuck is going on?”
Eel shut his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his nose. Some lifestyles simply did not mesh with domestic bliss. “I can’t talk right now, in any detail. You can appreciate that, can’t you?”
“I’ll tell you what I don’t appreciate!” She really was sizzling now. “I got pulled out of my home last night right before it became a war zone, they tell me there’s nothing left, and since before dawn I’m stuck out here trying to deal with every reporter who can dial a phone, and the only reason I’m doing that much is so at least somebody in the family is on record as denying all the bullshit that’s flying around. Can you appreciate that?”
One had to sympathize. For his second marriage, Nathan had wedded a woman fourteen years his junior, and a Yankee at that. The last thing Eel could picture her doing was lapsing into the same sort of tragically numbed apathy that characterized Evelyn Mullavey. No, Kathleen Forrest would fight for what was hers.
Eel got her calmed down, told her he would be out as soon as he could, and had her put on the guy Nathan had assigned to drive her to Twin Oaks last night. Hogarth, he could shed some light.
“What’s going on there, what’s the situation?” Eel asked him.
“It’s media fucking central, man. I called in some more guys, got ’em down at the main gates turning away news vans, and if they’re not driving up, then they’re calling. You know how many times I heard the phrase ‘gangland war’ so far?”
“Have you talked to any of our people here in town since last night? No specifics, don’t trust the phone.”
“Yeah.” Hogarth’s voice darkened. “I went out, found a pay phone an hour ago. It’s bad, it’s looking bad, you hear me?”
Eel bit off a groan before it escaped him. This was spinning beyond any sort of control or damage containment.
“What the hell was this about last night, anyway?” Hogarth sounded as if Kathleen’s frantic worldview were catching. “Makes no sense, you caught any radio or TV this morning?”
“No.”
“They ID’d this guy, name of Moreno. He crashed his car out on the Airport Highway after he left the restaurant, he toasted himself. Out of Miami, ran a security agency. I heard one station say they got a report he was ex-CIA, definitely ex–Special Forces.” Hogarth’s voice, higher and higher. “The fuck’s going on, man? This guy sound like a mercenary to you, or what?”
Eel sighed. This was no good at all. “You and I have nothing more to talk about right now, do we have an understanding? I’ll be out as soon as I can. Answer me one thing, though.”
“Yeah, sure, what?”
“Where’s Andrew today, did he go in to his offices?”
“No, he’s here. He’s … hiding.”
Eel slammed the phone into its cradle, got a dirty look from some tattooed creep behind the bar. Eel returned it with such fevered venom the guy looked away. Flaming cramps began to seize his belly, and Eel lurched into the bathroom and braced himself before the sink.
Reflection in cracked mirror, speckled with a thousand dried waterspots, and the stink of urine old and new. Really quite the picture of success and enlightenment. He watched himself go pawing through pockets until he found his bottle of Maalox. He drank his fill, watched himself sweat.
Perhaps his days in New Orleans had finally run out, better by choice than permanent exile by bullet or blade. He had few ties here to serve as shackles, and survival did outweigh obligation—
Wait. Wait. Getting ahead of himself, here. He was taking the word of a single lieutenant for the entire picture. Better to wait and see just what details were filled in.
Eel splashed his face with cold water, wet his hair and fingered it back from his forehead. Checked the load of his pistol. In the bar, he waited out of view from the street until he saw his ride, then hustled into the backseat and told Lewis where to take him. He coveted sleep like a jealous love.
“Who’ve you talked to, anybody?”
“Nobody much since I left the warehouse last night,” Lewis said. “Went home. Got a call from Hogarth, around ten last night, maybe? I tried to keep the line open in case you’d need to get through.”
The blind driving the blind. Well, he was apt to stay that way until his shoulder was taken care of.
Their private emergency room was the home of a disgraced doctor with whom they had an ongoing arrangement. He’d lost his medical license a few years ago after developing a taste for injectable morphine, and being caught appropriating it from his hospital’s pharmacy. They made sure Dr. Lyle Partridge remained well supplied; he in turn remained on twenty-four-hour call.
He lived in a quiet neighborhood north of Elysian Fields, in a crackerbox style of cottage known as a shotgun, all the rooms in a row, off one central hall. So named in the old days because one could fire a gun the length of the house without shooting through a single partition.
One room Partridge called his study, and with four or five minutes’ notice he could whip it into a passable outpatient center.
Eel listened to the bang and clatter of metal trays and instruments, and looked at the TV playing in one dim corner of the front room. Soap operas. This guy spent his afternoon watching soap operas. He flipped around the channels in search of local news, and everything was conspiring against him today, all he could find was financial reports.
“Anybody else been here to see you?” Eel called out.
“Oh no. No. No, no, no. You’re the only one.” Nervous voice. Well, why not, their stratum of this city had been at relative peace ever since the good doctor’s fall. If indeed there was war, this would be his first.
Casualty tally: Since last night they’d lost at least six of their best and brightest. Stockton and Rigaut out by the lake, four more at the restaurant. And if challengers among the underbelly had gotten greedy at the sight of blood, drawn by an outsider, there could be more.
Partridge called him back, and with help, Eel stripped away his red shirt and undershirt, then got onto the padded examining table. Partridge had pushed his furniture out of the way, pulled the shades; books faced them from all sides, lining every wall. A two-hundred-watt lamp glared into Eel’s face, and beneath its light, the weeping perforation in his shoulder looked ugly indeed. After a preliminary inspection, Partridge ran an x-ray.
“Use your phone while you work?” Eel asked, and Partridge shrugged, why not. He called Lewis back to fetch the receiver of a cordless unit, dialed the NOPD headquarters, Detective Division. He lay back on the table on hold while Partridge swabbed a wide area with cool disinfectant, and then poked the tenderized pink meat with a needle, shooting him with local anesthetic.
Eel got Henry Brouchard on the line, he of the botched attempt to nab Justin Gray at the hotel. Brouchard took his number, told him he would call back from a safer phone.
Eel lay back to wait, the doctor leaning over him. Always something ghoulish about this pose, like the beginni
ng of ritual slaughter. He saw a mad gleam of dutiful transcendence in the doctor’s eyes, everything will be fine, trust me, a clinical smile and flyaway wisps of hair going gray and brittle. Dull pressure deep in Eel’s shoulder, no pain, just an insistent probing. He could hear it, too, a thin raspy scrape transmitted to his inner ear by the conductive power of bone. He dared not look, see how far the metal forceps were sunk into his wound.
Partridge pulled the bulk of the slug free with a bright, triumphant smile, held the bloody thing aloft, like a prized trinket. It was skewed into surreal shape through contact with bone and gristle; it occurred to Eel that these were probably as individual as fingerprints, no two ever the same outside the body.
“Want this one?” Partridge said. “For luck?”
“No,” a hoarse whisper. “I don’t believe in luck.”
The doctor dropped it into a stainless steel specimen tray with a sharp clang, then went back for the fragments.
Henry Brouchard called back by the time Partridge started in on the wound with a curved suturing needle. Brouchard was in a position to know what was happening across the city, and spun a dismal tale that confirmed Eel’s worst fears. It put him in mind of survival on distant plains, Africa, a majestic buffalo brought down by a pride of lions. Once down, more and more sets of jaws clamping on to tear away another piece. African metaphor, now why, at this moment? Oh, he knew. Haiti had only been a way station at which one of the world’s most ancient religions had been given a reconfiguration from other cultures. How he had longed in the back of his mind to trace his adopted spiritual heritage back even further. Someday, he had thought.
“You guys are getting carved up and you don’t even know it,” Brouchard told him. “Michael Daudet and his boys across in Algiers — it’s gotta be them, they got the most to gain — they didn’t waste a minute once they heard you got hit last night. Not one fucking minute.”
The bell began to toll: Two underbosses who ran a big chunk of Nathan’s back room gambling interests had been hit in the middle of the night. There were rumors of a prostitution takeover. Another underboss who flexed enormous muscle on the loansharking front had been found floating in one of the canals this morning. One of Nathan’s warehouses had been torched, but a lousy job, almost as if the firebug had wanted the authorities to find the stockpile of hijacked merchandise within.
And for every death, you had to assume that a lot of guys who’d survived the night were now seriously rethinking where their loyalties should lie.
He could identify with the feeling.
But it made sense, this frenzy in the night. You terrorize people enough over the years, once they spot a weakness, it’s open season, in no half-measures.
Brouchard terminated the conversation, and Eel was left holding a dead receiver. He was about to call Lewis back in to take it away when he heard footsteps behind him. The tug of stitches in his shoulder ceased, and Partridge set the needle down with black suturing thread still trailing from Eel’s skin. The doctor took a step away from the table.
Something touching Eel’s hair, at the side of his head, and he heard the click of a gun hammer. He tensed, ready for the bullet, and when it did not come, he slowly rolled his head to the right. Looked into a sizable muzzle, and the hand holding it.
“Hey, Eel. Where y’at?” The Cajun accent was cheerful and confident. “Heard you took a bullet last night.”
Turncoats at every level. He wondered who had told them to anticipate his visit here.
Eel looked higher, into a face from across the river, as it smiled down upon him with no little satisfaction. How long had he been waiting for this moment?
“Got time to talk? Take a little ride?” asked this messenger of Michael Daudet’s. “You don’t, hey, cher, I understand.”
At which point Smith & Wesson would no doubt finish the conversation. Eel sighed.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not.”
Eel arrived at Twin Oaks considerably later than he’d anticipated, but that he was making the trip at all was a minor miracle. The workings of guardian loa, perhaps. Then again, maybe there was such a thing as dumb luck after all.
He made the drive alone, Lewis missing in action ever since Doc Partridge’s. A silent casualty or, more likely, Daudet had turned his allegiance overnight, that proverbial offer he couldn’t refuse. No doubt Lewis’s last desire would be to get back in the same car together.
Eel’s arrival at the manned gate caused a stir among a few diehard media leeches who’d yet to give up hope, and they converged upon his car. He ignored them, and when the guards saw who he was, they let him pass.
He rolled through the dim tunnel of oak branches, possibly for the final time, and never had the dangling Spanish moss looked more like rot.
He was careful in leaving the car, left arm in a sling and next to useless. He’d managed a clean change of clothes before coming here. The anesthetic had worn away and the stitched wound throbbed to a slow beat. A bottle of Percodans rode in his pocket next to the Maalox, but he’d yet to pop one. A clear head was an imperative this late afternoon.
Twin Oaks, mausoleum of the rich and philanthropic. He was let in, and had yet to spend a full minute speaking with the soldier at the door before he was set upon by Kathleen Forrest.
“Is Nathan with you?” She was striding down the hallway runner, permed mop of hair in tangles, and she obviously hadn’t slept. “He’s not, is he. You son of a bitch, am I going to get a straight answer out of you now, finally?”
His shoulder seemed to pound with every rise and fall of her voice. He’s fine, he’s safe, Eel tried to tell her, he’ll be in touch when he can—
And it wasn’t good enough, he was only a messenger boy in her eyes, and she didn’t mind telling him so; like he needed this at the moment? He stopped her by placing a shushing finger to his lips, glancing one way, then another. Conspirators, this is not for everyone’s ears, and he motioned her halfway down the grand hall and into the dining room.
Eel reached beneath his jacket and produced his pistol. Slipped the tip of the barrel past her lips and followed none too gently as she backed against the wall.
“Can you taste that?” he asked.
Kathleen Forrest blinked and mumbled an awkward “Yes.”
“It’s been fired very recently and hasn’t been cleaned, and I’d imagine it tastes very strong. Doesn’t it?” His voice so reasonable, at odds with blue eyes that looked as if nothing would give him greater pleasure than pulling the trigger. “Doesn’t it?”
Again, she agreed, and he had her breathe in, deeply now, once more, let her get the full flavor. With every breath her eyes grew a little wider.
He smiled. “Nathan’s fine, he’s safe, he’s healthy. In fact, at the moment he’s in far better shape than you are, and that’s all I can say, by his orders. Now, if I don’t have you to deal with, I can go about serving this family’s best interests a lot more efficiently.” He put the pistol away and tapped her cheekbone with one cool fingertip. “Do we have an understanding?”
It appeared they did, and he left her frozen against the dining room wall. He went stalking through the house while both the Haitian staff and his own men cleared from his path as if he were a wrathful monarch. Eel found Hogarth, who by virtue of having arrived here first had assumed command, and went nowhere without a shotgun. A quick rundown of events proved the day had gone pretty much as Eel had imagined, with a deluge of attention from media and the law. The police had paid a visit, looking for Nathan, questioning about possible whereabouts; Eel supposed influence peddlers could offer only so much slack.
Compared to spending the day here, the knife and forceps back at Doc Partridge’s began to look better and better.
What freedom now, though, to know he could turn his back on all of this, that he was going through these motions mainly for the sake of appearance. He couldn’t start arousing suspicion, not now.
He found out who was where, and began his final visits.
&n
bsp; The master bedroom, second floor. He rapped at the locked door, lightly, and told Evelyn Mullavey who it was.
She was slow in answering, the door slow in opening, and he shut it behind him. Stood inside the doorway of a room lit by dying sunlight, where he had spent more times than he could count sparring about dreams with the lady of the manor. Too many such encounters, or too few, he couldn’t decide.
“You’re hurt,” she said, and didn’t sound surprised.
“And you’re packing,” he said.
Suitcases lay open on the beds, sat filled and waiting on the floor. Closets and drawers hung open to plunder. She owned a lot of nothing, and looked to be taking it all.
Their embraces by this door had always seemed awkward even when both his arms functioned, so he let it slide. Besides, Evelyn looked as off limits as a minefield, creases sharp in her slacks, hair pulled back, screamingly tight, and arms folded across her breasts with a willful determination. Everything about her shrieked Don’t touch me, and he obliged.
“Does Andrew know?” he asked.
Her cockeyed grin was a lancet. “I’m sure he’ll notice sooner or later.”
Eel smiled — genuinely, not the death’s head he had affected for Kathleen — and it quickly turned to soft laughter. He knew, finally, that she indeed had a threshold somewhere within. Good. Good. Knowledge denied him had always been a source of frustration.
“Where to?”
Evelyn cleared her throat, some small emotional roadblock. “Atlanta. You know how much I love Atlanta.”
“It’s not just until this blows over. Is it?”
Some of the tautness went out of her forehead. “No, Terrance, it isn’t.”
“Before long I can offer you a considerably more distant alternative.” He felt a thrill even in giving voice to intention. “If you’re interested.”
“How distant?”
“Africa, I think.”
Evelyn’s gaze softened, some transient confusion perhaps, and she gazed toward the floor. When she looked up he knew the answer, had known it even before he’d made the offer.