The Darkest Night

by Rick Reed

  In his grief he’d buried himself in work and Scotch and the violent world that his anger always seemed to draw to him. When Katie had had enough of his dangerous behavior and his total devotion to his job, she’d asked for the divorce. He remembered at the time he was glad. He’d wanted to push her away and he had.

  But, like Katie had told him when they got back together, “The past is the past. We can’t change it. We can move forward and try not to make the same mistakes.” He had to keep telling himself that he deserved that kind of love.

  From inside the house he heard Liddell raising his voice in an imitation of Landry and Landry saying, “I don’t talk like that.”

  Katie said, “You come home in one piece, Jack Murphy. I’m counting on you. And bring Liddell home. I know you’re dying to tell him Marcie’s news, but I think she would kill you.”

  He promised to keep mum.

  “I need you. Come home soon.”

  “I love you, Katie. I always have. Always will.”

  “Just be safe,” she said.

  “I’m always safe,” Jack said.

  “And don’t get yourself arrested.”

  “I won’t. Don’t worry.”

  He was just putting the phone away when Liddell came out and sat by him.

  “Can I use your phone to call home?”

  “Marcie is staying with Katie until we get home,” Jack said. Before he handed the phone over he said, “I hate to bring this up, but we need to have an idea of a time frame to finish this. You know we can’t stay here forever. I’ll stay as long as you do. That’s a promise. But we have to face the fact that we’re alone on this. We don’t have any resources. We need to shit or get off the pot, Bigfoot.”

  Clouds covered the sky, and the moon was a pale orb. Jack sat and stared into the darkness, feeling frustration and sympathy and fear of what they may find even if they were successful at getting into the plantation house.

  Liddell drew a .45 Smith & Wesson semiautomatic from his waistband. “Present from Landry. Let’s do it.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Liddell drove down Highway 1 and turned on the plantation road. A heavy fog blanketed the road and trees and fields, but he’d been here many times as a teenager. He found the creek that ran through the Laveau property. The creek was shallow enough that he could have driven closer to the mansion, but that was before the sugarcane production had been restored. As it was, he was lucky to find a spot big enough where he could hide the Crown Vic. The fog helped.

  Before they left Landry’s house, Jack borrowed rubber boots and work clothes that had seen better days. His Glock was in a holster on his belt in the small of his back. He had two extra magazines of ammo in his back pocket. Liddell was armed similarly. They had considered taking a riot shotgun from Landry’s collection of weapons, but decided that it was too cumbersome for a recon mission. And that was what this was supposed to be. After all, Sheriff Guidry had asked them not to shoot anyone.

  Liddell had disabled the overhead light. They got out, quietly closed the car doors, and moved along the creek. The ground was covered in a heavy blanket of fog, and the creek seemed to appear and disappear as they walked.

  “I hope we don’t run into shotgun-toting guards,” Jack said.

  “There won’t be guards in the cane, not this time of night.”

  “How deep is this creek?” Jack asked.

  “If we have to make a run for it, it won’t matter,” Liddell said. “This way.” Liddell led him away from the creek bed and into the sugarcane. The cane was as tall as Jack, and rows were spaced four or five feet apart. After several hundred yards, they turned south, where they discovered the plants had withered and dried. Liddell stopped them and pointed ahead. Two hundred yards in the distance, Jack could see a glow above the cane field, and the shape of the mansion rose out of the miasma.

  “We can get closer,” Liddell whispered and hunched over.

  He and Jack worked their way to the edge of the cane field and squatted. They could see most of the mansion from where they were, and there were dim lights on in some of the rooms on the second and third floors.

  The mansion was monstrous. Jack thought it was almost as big as the Nottoway, but not as fancy. Jack could hear voices and laughter near the house. The voices were accented, sounded Jamaican or from one of the islands. He listened. Men’s voices. But he couldn’t make out any words, and it didn’t help that they were talking over each other and laughing was mixed in. The moon was still hidden in clouds, and the ground was shrouded with thick fog, so he couldn’t see anyone or anything moving. A shadow passed in front of a window. On the ground, where he’d heard the men, a cigarette flared to life and burned a bright orange, and was gone. He tried to discern how many voices, and could make out four distinct voices and at least one smoker who was standing away from the rest and hadn’t spoken a word.

  “There are at least five men,” he whispered to Liddell.

  “Make that seven.” Liddell pointed toward the back of the house, and Jack saw two shapes outlined by a back porch light. The two by the back porch had rifles or long guns slung over their shoulders. Both of them were smoking also.

  The driveway that they would have come in by under normal circumstances disappeared into live oaks whose branches stretched an impossible length. What Jack could see of the gravel drive led from the trees and into a circular drive with a fountain in front of the mansion. A narrower gravel road branched off the circular drive and continued along the side of the mansion and passed in front of a concrete structure that resembled a tornado shelter or a fallout shelter.

  Two steel doors were set into the concrete, and one of the steel doors was open. A dim light came from the opening and backlit another armed man.

  Jack nudged Liddell and pointed to the open door. “That’s eight.”

  An enclosed walkway with a tin roof had been built to the left of the shelter, connecting it with the mansion. A few armed men leaned against the walkway near the back of the mansion.

  Liddell duck-walked back a few paces, tugging at Jack’s arm. They knelt in the dirt between the rows of plants, and Liddell said, “There’s too many, pod’na. Even for you. If they weren’t all armed with shotguns, I’d say let’s see what they got. But they can lay down a lot of lead with those guns.”

  “Something must be going on inside that place. Why else would they need that much firepower, and at this time of night? Law-abiding citizens are in bed or passed-out drunk by now,” Jack said.

  A light came on in front of the mansion, revealing two more men at the corner and leaning against the wall. Both had long guns.

  “That’s ten,” Jack said.

  “Not counting whoever turned the light on inside. That makes at least eleven.”

  “You take the ones outside, and I’ll take the one inside that knows how to flip the light switch,” Jack whispered.

  “What if there’s more inside?” Liddell asked.

  Jack leaned close to his ear and whispered. “Okay. You take all of them, and I’ll cover you from here.”

  Liddell mouthed the words, “Bite me.”

  A crunching sound that tires make on gravel came from the trees to their left. Jack and Liddell moved farther back into the cane and got lower to the ground. They watched as a charcoal Dodge Challenger drove past and disappeared behind the concrete shelter.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Liddell said in a low voice. “That’s Troup. Or it’s someone driving Barbie’s car.”

  Liddell rose from his seat and Jack pulled him back down.

  “Don’t go getting ideas, Bigfoot.” Jack cautioned. “If that’s Troup, he makes an even dozen. We don’t know how many more bozos are around here.” He wished they had brought assault rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers, and Iron Man.

  Jack could hear the ding-ding-ding of a chime announcing the opening of a car door coming from the direction he thought the car might have stopped. One of the guys beside the mansion walked around back.<
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  “Must’ve gone in through the back,” Jack said.

  “It was Bobby,” Liddell said. “That’s his car.”

  Jack thought so too, but he didn’t want to get Liddell worked up. They were there for surveillance, not to get into a gunfight. His knees were beginning to complain of the stress of staying crouched for so long a time, and he could feel a burn running up the back of his thighs and settling in his butt cheeks. He wished he’d brought a lawn chair.

  One of the men in the driveway flipped his cigarette into the gravel and barked orders at the others. Three men walked down the gravel drive toward the front gate. The rest headed toward the back of the mansion. The light in the shelter went out, and the door was pulled shut with a bang. Whoever these guys were waiting for had arrived, and they were locking up for the night.

  “I’d like to see what’s down there,” Jack said.

  “I’d like to see who Troup’s meeting. No wonder he tried to scare us off. No one else around here will stand up to him. He may be the reason the Chief didn’t want other policemen hanging around out here.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” Jack said and sprinted toward the gravel drive. He came back with the smoldering cigarette butt.

  “We need a diversion,” Jack explained. “I want to see what they’re hiding down there. It looks like we can get in that walkway and go to the mansion from the shelter.” He reached down and pulled a plant out of the ground. “Does this stuff burn?”

  The plant felt brittle, dried out, dead. In fact, most of the plants they’d passed through were dead.

  “If we start a fire we don’t know where it will spread, pod’na. You sure you want to do this?”

  “You heard the Sheriff,” Jack said. “We can’t get a warrant, and no one else is going to even try. That leaves us with two ways to get inside. Shoot it out with a dozen armed men, or we can lure them out and keep them busy putting a fire out. This stuff is all dead anyway. We’d be doing them a favor.”

  Liddell pulled up an armload of the plants, and they carried them away from the mansion and piled them up. Jack held the cigarette under a brown leaf, and when it caught he held it to a stalk and blew on it until the embers glowed. He turned the stalk until it was on fire. He pushed this down into the pile of sugarcane plants. The fire dampened and smoked but got its second wind and caught.

  Jack and Liddell had made it to the side of the shelter when one of the steel doors slammed open and two men emerged, facing toward the fire. Jack feared the men would see the smoke and put the fire out too soon, so he pulled the Glock and turned it around to use the butt like a club.

  Red and orange flames shot thirty feet in the air like an angry fist, and the surrounding plants spread the blaze like a daisy chain. The men yelled, “Fire! Fire!” and ran for the back of the house.

  Jack and Liddell headed down the steps and heard alarmed voices outside. They reached the bottom of the concrete steps and were in a hallway with steel doors on their right. The hallway ended at a T that branched to the left and right. All the doors were padlocked. “This isn’t a storm shelter,” Jack said in a whisper.

  “More like a bunker,” Liddell suggested.

  They stepped into the hallway and lights came on. “Motion sensors,” Jack said, thinking that was both good and bad. Good because they had forgotten to bring flashlights. Bad because it telegraphed their movements to anyone who was around the corner.

  Jack’s rubber boots squeaked with every step. He slid them off and sat them against a wall. “Hopefully, if someone sees them, they’ll think they belong down here.”

  He went back up the steps in his socks and watched the chaos outside. There were at least twenty or more men out there running around with hoses and blankets trying to douse the fire. He pulled the door shut and joined Liddell at the T-intersection. He peeked to the left and right. It was dark, but he could just make out doors on each side in both directions. He wasn’t sure how long the motion sensors were set to, but no lights meant no one had come through the hall recently. He didn’t see any light coming from the ends of those hallways and hoped that meant they were unoccupied as well. He kept his .45 in his hand just in case.

  The turned to the left, and as they went the lights came on. Jack saw padlocks on all the doors. If he’d been able to get a warrant he’d be cutting the locks off right now, but they didn’t have one and he couldn’t risk the noise of shooting the lock.

  “I wonder how big this place is?” Liddell whispered.

  “Big enough that we ought to leave a trail of bread crumbs,” Jack answered.

  They stopped at the end of the hall. Straight ahead was a wooden door with an electronic keypad dead bolt. The right side led to another hall that turned to the left. They bypassed the locked door and went to the end of that hall where it turned right. Jack peeked around the corner and said, “Clear.” They went to the right, and as the lights came on, Jack could see doors on both sides of this hallway. Not all were padlocked. Jack held up a hand, and said, “Do you smell that?”

  Liddell sniffed the air. “Something. I don’t know what.”

  “Cordite,” Jack said. “It’s not very strong, but I smell it.” Gunshots had been fired in that part of the hallway and not too long ago.

  “It’s a damn maze down here,” Liddell said. “Why would you go to the bother of building this elaborate underground bunker if you weren’t up to no good? It’s not deep enough to withstand a bomb blast. Are they survivalists? Militia?”

  “That would explain a lot of things,” Jack said. “So the plantation is a front. Cotton said something big was going on. Would a Voodoo cult go to this much trouble?”

  “I can’t see that being the case, pod’na. And Troup is involved somehow with three murders. It’s got to be more than Voodoo,” Liddell said. “I’ve met some Voodoo practitioners, and they were pretty harmless. Maybe we’ve run across a Branch Davidian compound like in Waco, Texas.”

  “Let’s see what’s behind doors number one, two, and three,” Jack said.

  Jack held his Glock tight to his body. He put his ear against the door before opening it.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Marie Laveau was in her element. The ritual began exactly at midnight on the night of a full moon. Papa had somehow found Haitian drums and believers to play them. The beat was steady and hypnotizing.

  The air was filled with mixed smells of incense and sweat and other more unpleasant odors. A dozen believers had come to watch the initiation rites for three of the girls Marie had taught. The three initiates were swaying with eyes closed as if in a trance, while the rest danced to the steady beat of Haitian drums beseeching the Divine Horsemen to imbue the initiates with their power and knowledge. The drums were the real deal; handmade from cottonwood, hollowed out, and painted with the symbols for various Loas, their tops covered with stretched animal hide. The most skilled drummer played the Segon—the largest of the drums—with one hand creating the beat, and with the other hand he struck a half-bell made of hammered iron with a stick for rhythm.

  Marie Laveau, the Mamba, the Voodoo Queen, stood in the middle of this spiritual chaos known as the Kanzo, or initiation ceremony, and led the chant. Her hair was covered with the traditional white skullcap with long dark hair spilling over her exposed shoulders. She hitched a white gown up with her hands, exposing tanned legs and bare feet as she spun and undulated to the music.

  A behemoth of a man sat in a high-back chair on one side of an altar decorated with candles, hand-carved wooden masks depicting various Loa, statues, silver trinkets, tridents, a gris-gris, weavings and wall hangings, and incense. The man’s features could have been chiseled from coal. White ringlets of hair flowed from underneath a plantation hat made of straw; a band circled the crown and was adorned with symbols of the seven loas—the divine horsemen of Haitian Voodoo. A hand the size of a skillet rested on the silver cap of a cane.

  Papa Legba sat unmoving, staring into nothing. The only sign he was still in this worl
d was the occasional blink of pale yellow catlike eyes. One would have to be ignorant or foolhardy to glance in his direction, for Papa Legba was blessed by the Loa to act as the gateway between this reality and the spiritual world. He alone had the power to take a person into the underworld. He could cure them of an illness, or he could bring back their hollowed-out husk to do his bidding.

  The drum beat and chanting built to a crescendo and came to an abrupt halt, the cue for the handful of initiates to form a half circle and kneel in front of Marie Laveau. Their eyes lowered, arms hanging loosely at their sides. This was the second of three rituals required to bring them into the Vodoun—the Voodoo family—and make them the sèvitè, or “servants of the spirits.”

  The ceremony ended, and Marie Laveau pressed objects taken from her pockets into eager hands as the congregation filed past her and on to Papa Legba where they kissed his ring before filing out. Their faces wore the secret hope that they had been—or would be—blessed. Marie knew enough about all of them that she provided them with the amulet matching their desire, or for those who were not ready to believe, she pressed a piece of candy in their hand to entice them to return. Among those at the ceremony were seven girls Papa had selected as the next group of initiates. Six of them would be chosen to complete their recruitment.

  When the church was empty, Papa Legba opened a door beside the altar. He held it for Marie and followed her into her private office. Papa removed the stole and ceremonial robe and hung them in a large wardrobe next to Marie’s ceremonial trappings. In a deep voice befitting his size he said, “Whew! I was burning up out there.” He unbuttoned his shirt and flapped the sides. “It must be a hundred degrees.”

  Marie crossed the room and turned down the thermostat. “It’s nice in here, but the air-conditioning doesn’t seem to want to keep up with the heat.”

  The door to the office opened and Luke, Papa’s second in command, stuck his head in the room.

  “He’s here,” Luke said and shut the door.