The Storm

by Blake Banner

  By six thirty, it was pitch black and the house formed an eerie, luminous spectacle in the midst of a field of darkness. I watched the four men rise from their seats and descend to the glowing dining room. They ate and drank wine against the dancing light of the flames, toasting often. They were celebrating something, that much was clear.

  By half past eight, they were having more cognac and I was contemplating throwing in the towel and going back to the hotel for a late dinner, when they got up from the table and started making their way down. I watched them through one luminous cube after another until the spotlights came on outside. At that point, I swore profusely and started to run.

  I made it to the Zombie and pulled out of the woods in time to see their headlamps moving north along Route 68, away from me and toward Jackson. I left my lights off and accelerated after them. As I have mentioned before, the Zombie is totally silent and will do 0-60 in less than two seconds. Its top speed is as yet uncharted territory, but I figure it will do 200 MPH without breaking a sweat. It didn’t take long for me to place myself within a hundred and fifty yards of them. Then I slowed and tailed them.

  After five miles, we came to the junction with Route 10 and they turned left, as though to enter Jackson. As I took the corner, I put my headlamps on. They crossed the town along Charter Street. It was still and silent, each house bathed in a dead glow of streetlight. We came out the other side and they kept going for another five miles until we came to a bend in the road where there was the glow of a bar or a club. Here they pulled off into a parking lot and I cruised slowly past.

  It was a club, set back from the road among the trees. A large neon sign outside spelled out The Full Moon in yellow script. Above it was a golden disc, and below, two blue squiggles suggested the sea. I drove on for a quarter of a mile, did a U-turn and came back. When I pulled in to the lot, I saw the Caddy was gone. They were obviously planning on making a night of it. I left the Zombie in the darkest corner I could find and went inside.

  It was full, and the air had the close warmth of too many bodies crammed together in a confined space. There was a clamor of voices straining to be heard over each other, and over the sound of the band. The band was a trumpet, a bass, and a piano, picked up through mics and amplified. The overall effect was that you could not hear either the talk or the music. I shouldered my way through to the bar, scanning the tables for Carmichael and his pals. They weren’t there.

  I leaned on the counter next to an empty stool and ordered a double Irish. While he was pouring it, I asked him, “You got any private bars, members only…?”

  He glanced at me and shook his head. I turned and looked around. At the back, past the stage where the band was playing, I could see a couple of doors. One of them led to the toilets, the other said ‘Private’. Two got you twenty that Carmichael and his pals had not gone to the can.

  “Buy a girl a drink?”

  She was short and cute, with Afro-Caribbean hair that had gone out of fashion when red and black posters of Che were still all the thing. She had black hair, black eyes, black chocolate skin and very white teeth, and she had appeared on the stool next to me. She was wearing blue satin shorts and no bra under her T-shirt. The overall effect was good.

  I smiled. “If you’ll let me.”

  “Well, sure. I’ll have a rum and Coke.”

  She leaned forward as she said it and I could see her pupils were like two vast black holes. She laughed as though I’d said something funny. I called over the barman and ordered her drink. While he was mixing it, she tried to focus on my face.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m whoever you want me to be.”

  She laughed again. “That’s my line. The guys come here looking for a party. I’m the party girl! And when they ask me who I am, I say what you said, ‘I’m whoever you want me to be.’ My name is Trixy.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No. But I ain’t gonna tell you my name now, am I?”

  “I guess not. So where do you party, Trixy?”

  She crooked her finger at me and I leaned close. I felt her lips and her warm breath on my ear. “Through the door by the can, and up the stairs.” She sat back with a look of mock wonder on her face. “There’s a whole ’nother club up there. Private!”

  “And what goes on up there?”

  “Parties, poker, roulette. You name it, baby! It’s wild.”

  I grinned. “And how would a guy from out of town become a member of this private club?”

  She gave a sexy little whoop and leaned against me, laughing. “You pays your money, and they let you in. It ain’t cheap. But if you get in, you gotta take me.” She leaned close to my ear. “They got the best blow up there. Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “You got money?”

  “More than you can imagine.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Hey, we can get some stuff from Ive. You wanna come back? We can party at home?”

  I looked across the crowded room at the door marked ‘Private’. They’d be up there till the small hours, celebrating their deal. I was tired and hungry. I smiled down at Trixy. She looked warm and sweet. I could use warm and sweet right then, but I could use a steak and a beer more.

  “How much?”

  “Hundred bucks if you get some coke!”

  She said it like it was the deal of the century, and maybe she was right. She craned her neck to look around the room. “He’s always here, man. We’ll get some stuff from him and go to my place.”

  I took two bills from my wallet and put them in her hand. Cute as she was, I felt suddenly tired and I knew I wasn’t going anywhere that night. I bent over and kissed her cheek. “Maybe some other night.”

  I stepped out of the club and a wall of warmth hit me. The sound of frogs was loud on the air. I went and sat on the hood of my car and lit a Camel, blowing smoke up at the clouds, stained orange by the Full Moon. I could still hear the trumpet wailing from inside.

  I looked at my watch. It wasn’t nine yet. I thought about Simone, in her large, empty house. I had memorized her number from the police file. I reached in my pocket, took out my cell and stared at the screen. If I asked her to dine with me, I knew she’d say yes, and I knew she’d stay the night. If I went to her house, I knew she’d let me in.

  I hesitated a moment too long, then put it back in my pocket, climbed in my car, and drove silently into the night, back toward Burgundy.

  Nine

  It was an eight and a half mile drive back to Burgundy, because the road took a big detour south through St. Francisville before heading north again. As I passed Simone’s gate, I slowed and looked in. There was a dim glow seeping from her windows, touching the lawn and the trees. I sighed, softly thumped the wheel and accelerated on toward town.

  But as I approached the exit for Dauphin Street, on a sudden impulse, instead of turning right into the town, I kept going north until I came to Tunica Road. There I took the left fork over the bridge into the forest, where I had been running that morning. The dark was impenetrable, and even the powerful beams from my headlamps struggled to push back the dense gloom. I crossed the bridge over Sara Bayou and came to Solitude Road on the left. I turned into it and crawled south with the window open, scanning the dense, black wall of trees on the far side of the blacktop.

  Then I saw it, a gap in the blackness, where the orange ceiling of cloud shone through, and there, like a stencil against the flame-colored sky, the spiked arch of the iron gate.

  I pulled across the road and parked. I killed the engine and the lights and climbed out. The gate was padlocked. I pulled my flashlight from my pocket and played the beam over the gate and the walls. There was no sign of an alarm system. I took a hold of the iron bars, pulled myself up, and vaulted over. I hit the ground silently and remained motionless for a count of one hundred and twenty, listening for dogs. There was nothing, so I ran the five hundred yards down the drive, staying close to the dense gloom under the trees.

  The bui
lding was Creole, like Simone’s, but much smaller. It was on one floor, with five steps climbing to a raised veranda that encircled the house. The windows were dark, like eyes closed in sleep, or death. My breathing was heavy from the run. The air was dense and clammy. There was no breeze, no whisper in the branches, only an absolute stillness and a silence that even the sigh of the bayou, not fifty yards away, and the incessant sawing of the frogs could not penetrate. It was a silence that seemed almost to scream from the dark house.

  I climbed the steps and tried the door. As I had expected, it was locked. The windows and the back door gave the same result. I always carry a Fairbairn & Sykes commando knife in my boot, and a small Swiss Army knife in my pocket. A couple of minutes with the smaller blade had the front door open and I slipped inside. I tried the light switch and five lamps around the room came on. I wasn’t worried about the light being seen. The house was completely surrounded by dense forest.

  The room was large and ran from the front of the house to the back. Over by the right wall, there was an upholstered bamboo sofa and two chairs nested around a rough-hewn coffee table. A number of other small tables stood here and there against the wall, supporting table lamps of curious design and color. The floors were wood and strewn with rugs that looked African or Caribbean in design. Overhead, a ceiling fan had started to revolve when I switched on the lamps. On my left, I could see a sideboard and on it a collection of bottles, gin, martini, whiskey, and an old-fashioned soda bottle. A couple of long, low bookcases held a wide range of books, from glossy hardbacks on the great masters, to well-thumbed dime thrillers.

  The walls were wooden too, and hung with watercolors that, as Simone had said, were not great, but were good enough to hang. There were also four Voodoo masks on the walls.

  The room was bisected by a couple of thick wooden columns, and beyond them, under a second ceiling fan, was a long dining table with six chairs. Beyond that, against the far wall, was a tall artist’s easel. On it there was a large canvas.

  I crossed the floor to the table, pulled my Camels from my pocket and lit one. I stood looking for a long while at the painting. It was done in oils, with thick, aggressive brush strokes. The style was not original, late impressionist, impasto, Gauguin and Van Gogh meet Bonnard, but without their genius. Even so, it was good. Beside the easel, there was a wooden tea trolley, but instead of a tea pot and cups, it held a palette, a collection of brushes and tubes of paint, and bottles and dirty jars of turpentine. The smell was strong and oddly erotic.

  The painting was of a black woman, nude. She was lying on a bed among tangled sheets with her left arm above her head and her right across her belly. It was honest and unashamed. Whoever had painted it had captured her, the exquisite figure and the features of her face, with the seductive hint of excess: the exaggerated hips, the over-full breasts, the generous lips.

  There was only one bedroom, over on the right. The door was ajar. I moved to it and pushed it all the way open. The light from the dining room leaned in at a crooked angle and lay across the bed. It was the same bed that was in the painting, only Simone wasn’t lying in it, and the sheets were not twisted and tangled. It was neatly made, with fresh, fluffed-up pillows and a new, clean duvet.

  I snapped on the light. It came from two lamps on the bedside tables. I let my eyes travel over the room. There was an ashtray on the bedside table on my left, caught in the pool of amber glow from the lamp. It had two butts in it. I went over and examined them. One was a Sobranie Black Russian, the other was a Marlboro. Next to the ashtray there was a ring, left by a glass. It was about tumbler sized.

  I went around to the other side and found what I expected, another ring, only smaller. This one would be the base of a wine glass, maybe champagne. There was an en suite bathroom and I stepped inside and switched on the light. One tooth mug, one toothbrush, and all the toiletries you would expect from a rich, privileged woman in her late thirties.

  It wasn’t dirty, but it wasn’t especially clean, either. I got on my knees and leaned over the bath to peer into the plughole. There was the usual matting of hair gathered around the holes. I opened out my Swiss Army knife again and carefully scraped out the fluff and dropped it in the palm of my hand. Then I sat on the floor and sifted through it. Most of it was light, thin blonde hair. There was no doubt in my mind that that belonged to Sarah. But there was other hair too, short, strong, black, and tightly curled.

  Across the dining room, directly opposite the bedroom, was the kitchen. It was large and open. I rummaged in a couple of drawers and found some freezer bags and popped the hair into one, sealed it and put it in my pocket.

  On the draining board, I found a whiskey tumbler and a white wine glass. A picture of Sarah’s last night in this house was beginning to take shape. It was a shape I didn’t like.

  I went back to the living room, poured myself a whiskey, sat on the sofa, and lit another cigarette. I sat smoking and drinking, trying to find an alternative explanation for everything I had seen. I couldn’t, every scenario I played out in my mind ran up against the same obstacle. Finally, I crushed out the cigarette and went back into the bedroom. I got down on my hands and knees and examined the rush mat on which the bed was standing. It wasn’t clean. It was pristine. I stood, grabbed a hold of the heavy, wooden bed, and heaved it to one side.

  I felt a rush of anger well up inside me. Where the legs of the bed had been standing, there were no indentations, no marks, nothing. The mat was brand new. I ripped away the bedclothes and hurled them on the floor. The mattress, like the mat, was new. I grabbed the bed frame and lifted it savagely, tipping it on its side, knocking over the bedside table and sending the lamp crashing to the floor. I got on my hands and knees and scoured the mat. Then I ripped up the mat and scoured the floor. It was luck, but I knew there was a chance and it paid off.

  If you fire a .38 at somebody’s belly, on a mattress, the chances of the slug exiting at the back are slim, you’d need to be at the right distance. A human belly is dense and strong. But the chances of it penetrating the mattress after the belly are almost negligible. And that told me that there was a chance, a slim chance, but a chance nonetheless, that when they changed the mattress and the bedding, one of the slugs might have dropped to the floor. And there it was, under the left side bedside table, up against the skirting board. It was a .38.

  Somebody had been shot in that bed, at close quarters. The mattress and the bedding had been changed, as had the rug under the bed. It had been done in a rush, maybe even in a panic, because they had brought a brand new mat, a new mattress and new bedding, but they hadn’t bothered to clean the rest of the bedroom, or the house; they had cleared away the glasses and washed them, but not the ashtray, and they hadn’t hung around long enough to take the glasses out of the draining board. Whoever it was did not want to be seen at this house. Did not want to be associated with Sarah Carmichael and her studio.

  Somewhere, there was a blood-stained mattress and a blood-stained rug, maybe there was a body with it. Maybe not. I picked up the slug and dropped it into another bag, and then into my pocket, then went to the dining room and opened the back door. The air on the veranda was humid and warm. The sound of the bayou and the frogs assaulted me. There were no prizes for guessing where the mattress and the rug were. By now they were on their way to the Gulf of Mexico.

  Why?

  I had answered some of the questions I had asked myself at the Carmichaels’ house, but those answers had just raised more questions, harder ones to answer. Like, if he had taken the trouble to drag the mattress and the rug down to the bayou, why the hell had he not thrown in the .38 with it? Was it the same .38? Had he kept it for a second victim, for Sarah? I thought about the blood-stained mattress. I thought about the other blood-stained mattress at the Carmichael mansion.

  And then the answer was there before me, clear and obvious.

  Carmichael was at the Full Moon. James would be in his cottage.

  I didn’t bother putting the be
d back or hiding any signs of my presence. I left and made my way back through the oppressive darkness, up the driveway that wound through the dense woodlands, climbed over the gate, and leaned on the roof of my car. I looked up at the scorched, orange clouds, sagging low over Burgundy. I had made a career out of killing for ten long years. Bat Hays and I had worked together as professional killers, soldiers and assassins, and sooner or later, both of us would have to account for what we had done, for how we had lived, and killed. Did it matter? Did it matter how you killed, or who you killed? Was killing evil in itself, irrespective of who the victim was? Was killing a sadistic monster just as bad as killing a woman, an angel, like Sarah Carmichael?

  Were Bat Hays and I evil men? Was I struggling to find justice, because in my heart I knew that I was evil? In trying to redeem Bat, was I really trying to redeem myself? Was that why I was living in hell?

  I climbed into the Zombie and went and did what I knew I had to do.

  Ten

  It was almost ten by the time I got back to the hotel. Hirschfield was still in the dining room with a bottle of Rotem & Mounir on the table. He was smoking a long, black cigarette and hailed me with a fat, happy smile on his face as I came in.

  As I sat, he showed me the cigarette and said, “I convinced the manager that I would sue him for a breach of my human rights and make a class action of it, but assured him that if he was fined for allowing me to smoke, I would pay the fine and testify in his favor.”

  “You’re a good man.”

  “Besides, I have it on good authority that only Jackson and the sheriff remain in Burgundy, everybody else has fled north. I am waiting for suckling pig. Will you join me?”