Venom: A Thriller in Paradise (The Thriller in Paradise Series Book 3)

by Swigart, Rob

  On the coast highway they turned south. Traffic was light, but there were enough cars to maintain a semblance of cover, though the feeling of hopelessness grew with each passing mile. He didn’t know where Phénix was leading him, but it was going to be someplace they could confront one another alone. He reached down and touched the plastic gun. The bullets were the best Federal 115-grain JHP 9mm Parabellum available. He had purchased them quite openly at a sporting goods shop in Honolulu before catching his flight to Kauai. The popgun might be effective with decent ammunition at close quarters, but he had no illusions about it. Phénix was not only a professional, he was also a lunatic, and that was a dangerous combination.

  Signs appeared warning that the road was closed a few miles ahead because of the Hoopuloa lava flow Phénix did not slow down. Traffic thinned, leaving only the two cars, a few hundred meters apart, moving south on the highway. Smoke spread across the horizon. Phénix turned hard to the left. His car skidded sideways and bounded up a dirt track toward the mountain, paralleling the flow of lava from the current eruption of Kilauea.

  The dirt track turned to corrugated lava, and Phénix slowed to navigate the shattered surface. Smoke blew low over the sloping field. The lava was hardened here, black and tortured, but it radiated heat onto the bottom of the car. Duvalois could feel it through the soles of his shoes.

  They passed the trunk of a tree sticking out of the black rock. It was charred black, two twisted branches reaching out as the car roared past.

  Duvalois steered with one hand and pulled the gun out of his belt with the other, laying it on the passenger seat. If he got a clear shot, he would take the chance. It would be dangerous to get too close to Phénix.

  He wished he were back in Tahiti, where he could carry a real weapon.

  This operation was outside the rules. He had no right or authority to kill someone on American soil. He knew that. He would have to make it clean and undiscovered and leave the country immediately. He would have to take this plastic toy apart and scatter the parts in his luggage again to get through airport security. He would have to act like a criminal, a terrorist.

  This made him no different from Phénix. A rogue.

  He shook his head and pushed back the lank gray hair falling across his eyes. The car bounced and lurched over the twisted surface that had now given up all pretense of being a road. Three hundred meters up the slope, the other car slowed to a stop, and Phénix got out. Smoke rolled across the slope, moving up hill. Phénix disappeared into it, and Duvalois cursed softly in French. He had lost his chance at a clear shot.

  He stopped beside the other car. The smoke came from burning trees to the south. He could see from here the red glow of the lava, the flames. It was a scene from hell. The air choked him.

  He took the gun, almost lost in his large hand, and puffed up the slope. Phénix was waiting somewhere in the smoke and flames and broken ground.

  For a moment he considered going back to the car, driving down to the highway, and returning to the airport at Kona. He could fly back to Kauai, collect his luggage, and return to Tahiti. He could say he had lost Phénix, couldn’t find him, he was the American’s problem now. Phénix no longer worked for the French government. Let someone else take care of it.

  But it was not a job, not any more. It had become personal. Phénix was taunting him up there. He heard his voice calling through the smoke.

  “Du… val… ois!” the voice called, bits and pieces of the sound lost in the background roar. The roar of molten rock, flowing downhill with the slow deliberate majesty of a glacier, was implacable and overwhelming. “Du… val… ois!”

  “Phénix!” Duvalois shouted back. He cut to his left and scrambled over the heated stone, cursing under his breath. He was old, out of shape, soft. He had only his years of experience, his intelligence, his cunning.

  Phénix was in shape, younger, insane. He was waiting.

  Duvalois wanted to circle around, gain high ground, look for a break in the constant flow of smoke laid down like a screen by the gentle trade winds. The smoke lay close to the ground, only five or six meters above the pillows and cracks and tilted plates of cooled rock, but too high to get above.

  Duvalois was gasping when he found what he was looking for, a hummock of rounded cooled lava. He clambered up the side and squatted on top, his gun braced in his hands. Already he could feel his eyes tearing, the burning in them more painful by the minute. He blinked and stared, but there were no breaks in the smoke streaming around him.

  “Duvalois.” The voice was to his right, a little behind. How the hell had he gotten this high? How did he find him?

  “You want to know how I can find you,” Phénix said. His voice was pleasant, conversational. They might have been waiting for a bus. Duvalois said nothing. He aimed his weapon in the direction of the voice. “Of course you do, but I can find you easily, Alain. Easily, as if I can see you, as if the smoke and noise are not here… Did you see what the lava does to the trees, Alain?”

  Duvalois did not answer. The voice had moved a little, perhaps closer, perhaps a bit more to the right. He didn’t know, not precisely, but felt a small leap of hope. He was high; he had the field of fire. Phénix would move into his killing zone, and Duvalois would have him.

  “Magma turned the trees to charcoal, Alain, like burning men, their arms out, crying for mercy, crying for death. You want to be like that, a burning man, don’t you, Alain?”

  There was a silence, and Duvalois waited. Phénix could not taunt him, could not provoke him into making a mistake. He would try, though. It was always that way.

  “I knew you’d find me at the Kahuna School,” the voice went on. It was moving again, away this time. “I left you a trail, my old friend, easy to follow. I knew you’d follow. I’m going to give you a chance.”

  Alain put his gun down on the hot stone and pulled his notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket. He took the silver ballpoint pen, the one Queneau had given him for Christmas back in 1981, and wrote in the notebook. He wrote blindly, his eyes streaming.

  The voice moved closer again, then away. “I’m a magician, Alain; I have special powers, but I am going to give you a chance to catch me. See, I move away. You can follow. Come along, follow me, Alain. I got Queneau, and I can get you. I wanted you all along, too, my friend. You are my friend, aren’t you? My friend, my brother, my double.”

  “No.”

  “And the American, Koenig, the biologist, he is also my brother.” The voice was relentless, bodiless; it went on and on. Duvalois ached to kill that voice, to stop it forever. “I sent my four pretty little puppets after him, did you know? Of course not, you were gone, weren’t you, already on your way here after me? But I told them they must dispose of the American biologist, he was a threat to France. They love that patriotic merde, my lovely image. They eat that shit with their croissants and coffee. So the American should be dead by now, another sacrifice to that greedy god Oro.”

  The voice grew fainter. Duvalois laid down his notebook so he could take up his gun again. Phoenix didn’t know where he was! He really didn’t know. Alain said that to himself, and he almost believed it as he climbed down from the rounded pillow of frozen stone and dodged behind the off side.

  “Queneau was a mistake, Phénix,” he shouted suddenly, moving after the voice, into the smoke, toward the fire.

  Laughter came back at him, out of the darkness and the red flame. Duvalois crouched down and aimed. He pulled the trigger, and felt the recoil, but the sound of the shot went unheard in all the roar and destruction. He shouted again. “You should not have had the woman kill Queneau. That was a mistake, Phénix.”

  The laughter was far away, itself almost lost in the sounds of burning. “Oh, yes,” the voice of the Phénix agreed. “We all knew about your friendship with Queneau, my brother. Alain Duvalois, the protégé. The agent with a heart. And now it is personal, with you? You want revenge for this necessary sacrifice?” Somewhere nearby a tree exploded, a
nd the roar of the flowing lava swelled, louder and louder. In the distance, where liquid stone met water, explosions were continuous, water superheated to steam, rock turned from liquid to solid and split from the heat. The world was on fire. It was the end of everything.

  Duvalois plunged into the thickest smoke. He could not see. He tripped and fell and climbed to his feet again.

  “Queneau was weak, Alain.” The mocking voice had moved again, off to his left now, up hill, very close to the intolerable heat oozing down the side of the mountain toward the sea. Duvalois squeezed off two more shots, filled with hopelessness. The voice went on. “There is no way out. He knew my mother. You see, he knew her, yes, in that way. Disgusting, it was. So he had to die. We spoke of it, he and I, in Uturoa, in the week before that ship left, and then I knew he had to die. He might have told someone about me, he knew who I was, what I was doing. He might have told you or the Americans. It was for Oro, you know who Oro was, Alain? The god of war and death and sacrifice. Queneau had to be the sacrifice. His soul to heaven, his body to the birds. It was so easy. As it will be with you.”

  “What are you talking about? What are you saying?”

  “Queneau was my mother’s lover, Alain. You didn’t know, you fool, my twin. The Saint of All the Causes, my mother. They said she slept with Sartre once, and now she sleeps with Queneau, eh? Two old wrecks, fucking like dogs. Funny, isn’t it? So very amusing.” The voice was rising, moving parallel to him as he spoke, but rising, more shrill.

  Alain coughed, gagging on the smoke. He could feel the heat ahead of him, growing as he moved into it, but the chill he felt was greater. The voice was there, dancing ahead of him, up the tormented hillside.

  He threw away his gun. He would not need a gun. He stumbled on into the smoke and fire. He was the burning man, and he carried a sword of flame. Up ahead was the demon who called himself Phénix.

  TWENTY-THREE

  DR. SHIH

  “I believed the world I lived in was safe,” Chazz Koenig said.

  Patria sat beside his bed and held his hand. The hand was large and capable and could not be harmed. “Safe.” She repeated the word.

  “Safe,” he agreed. “But you didn’t answer the phone. Taxeira said you were staying at the condo in Kapaa and not at our house, and I knew it wasn’t a safe world. I wasn’t paying attention. I lost zanshin, my focus. I was walking in paradise, and four French soldiers jumped me, and I lost the fight. The world is not safe.”

  “No,” she agreed. They sat in silence. The hospital breathed around them as hospitals do, soft soles on waxed floors and antiseptic and fear. The room was small and private and warm. A soft breeze swelled the thin curtains at the window. The room must be safe as the world outside was not.

  She said. “You can go home.”

  He agreed, “And you?”

  “I saw him, the man. He was everywhere I looked, everywhere I went. Not really, of course, but it seemed that way. In the street, in the Pay ‘N Save, in the park. Kimiko and I found the woman, and I saw him again. It was getting dark, I had the baby. I knew she’d been murdered, like the other one. I saw her arm, her hand, lying on the dirt, and I knew. I can’t really explain it. I was pushing the stroller up the trail, across the parking lot, and he was there, watching. It was dusk, getting dark. I worried about Kimiko, but she was fine, sitting by the river when I got back with Sergeant Handel. Afterwards I called Sammy, and he said go to Kapaa, to the condo. The county owns it; he can’t follow there. He didn’t ask; he didn’t question. He just said go.”

  “Then?”

  “Then I got scared. So I went. We went. We’ve been there since. I haven’t seen him, but he’s here on the island, somewhere. He’s waiting for something. He isn’t finished, you know.”

  “It was dusk?”

  “Don’t question it, Chazz. He was there. I felt him. I’m not easily frightened. This man frightens me. He isn’t… human. He lives in darkness.”

  There was a darkness in the room too. “The man who killed the two women was also the one on the Ocean Mother?”

  “Same person, Chazz. Don’t you doubt it.” Her hand held his. Her fingers were thin and dark and very strong. His hands were large and powerful, but he felt the pressure as a reassuring pain.

  “I think you’re right,” he said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. His hospital gown fluttered. The floor was cold.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Yes,” he answered, not looking at her. “Duvalois is here, too.”

  “Who?”

  “A French… agent, I guess he is. I think he’s after the man, though I don’t know why. Perhaps to warn him, to get him away from here. Or to kill him. I don’t know.” He stood up and did not look at her.

  She pretended not to notice, reached out to touch his bare side. “It looks awful. Yellow and black. Where it isn’t white with bandage.”

  “Yellow and black. The Hornets. My old high school colors.” He laughed and then winced a little. The ribs were cracked, but he could walk. She sat in the hard plastic chair and watched him dress. His body was large, his waist spreading a little, but she knew it was solid.

  “Naked, you don’t look like a biologist,” she said.

  “Does anyone?” He smiled at her.

  She touched the swathes of bandage around his ribs and the exposed scrapes painted with a noxious green disinfectant. “Not like this, I guess,” she said softly. “Oh, Chazz.”

  He watched himself button his shirt in the mirror over the sink. His eye was swollen, but he could see through it. “I love you,” he said to the image, and she didn’t know at first whether he was talking to her or to himself. Then he looked at her reflection behind him, and she knew he meant her.

  “I’ve been coming here every day, Chazz. I sit with her.”

  She meant Tracy Ann, who sat by the window in her own room, staring.

  “Good of you,” he said.

  “No. I don’t do it to be good. I do it because it’s a mystery. I want to find it out.”

  He fastened his belt and picked up his shoes from the floor of the small closet with a grunt. As he stood he twisted, stretching. Everything was working. “Find out?”

  “She went somewhere, near death. Not all the way. She might not come back. Some people are fascinated by it. They go there, they don’t need to die, but they linger, looking at it, their own death. Death is attractive. Seductive. I think Tracy Ann’s looking at it now. She doesn’t see the room she’s in; she doesn’t see me. Only that dark warmth, that safety. Mother Death.”

  “I thought you were a scientist.” He said it without irony. He did think that, that Patria was a scientist.

  “Yes. The human spirit. It is in there, in all of us. In Orli. You can see it in children. I didn’t know that before. Hard to study, hard to weigh, but when it’s gone you can see that too.”

  “And Tracy Ann…?”

  “She’s going, Chazz. Dying. Every day she’s a little farther away. Her parents came here, then they left. They couldn’t take it.” She stood up and held him. “You okay?”

  He made a soft sound, deep in his throat. The door opened and the small, inquisitive face of the county medical examiner peered around the edge. “How are we?” Dr. Shih asked. Her body followed her face into the room. “Are we well?” Cobb Takamura came in right behind her.

  “We are,” Chazz admitted. “And how are we?”

  “Don’t be smart, Dr. Koenig,” Dr. Shih chided. Her pockets winked with stainless instruments, forceps and scissors and the cup of her stethoscope. “Doctors always talk like that, but you aren’t a doctor of the right sort.”

  “No, I suppose not. I’m going home.”

  “Well, of course you are. Fit, you are. Cracked ribs. Contusions, abrasions, possible concussion. Of course you’re going home. You are the all-American fighting male. So go on home, and good luck to you. Anyway, I’m not your doctor. I came to tell your wife Tracy Ann is the same, no change.”

>   “There was a woman in Raïatéa looked like that,” Chazz said. “Stared at the wall, wouldn’t talk.”

  “Same cause,” Takamura said softly. “Made into a zombie.”

  “Nonsense,” Dr. Shih snorted as Patria opened the door. “Ain’t no such, sir. And you a policeman!”

  “A toxin, Dr. Shih. Tetrodotoxin, I believe it’s called.”

  “Oh, well. That’s different, of course. Nothing we can do, though, except wait. Time will tell.”

  A disturbance at the end of the hall caught their attention. Two orderlies wheeled a gurney onto the ward. Their patient was thrashing wildly, foam flecking the corners of his mouth. A strange animal wail came from him, a sound so far from anything that could be human it seemed as if it might be coming from the PA system instead, some electronic malfunction. A doctor hurried along behind them. They stopped at the nurse’s station. The doctor gave orders to the nurse, who hurried away, returning almost immediately with a hypodermic.

  The sound continued, subsiding very gradually after she injected the man.

  “What happened to him?” Cobb asked.

  “What? Oh, Lieutenant Takamura.” The doctor shook his hand. “He’s been here two or three days. Poisoned, we suppose. It’s not clear. Looks like he got into something he shouldn’t have, though. I ordered morphine. Seems to have helped.”

  Dr. Shih peered at the patient’s face, the sheen of perspiration. “Interesting,” she murmured, pulling back an eyelid. White sclera reflected the greenish ceiling fluorescents in stippled bands.

  He lolled on the gurney now, eyes closed. Under the lids, the pupils jerked back and forth as if he were deep in REM sleep. From his expression, his dreams were not good. He looked as if he had joined the same world as Tracy Ann. His short dark hair was spiky with sweat.

  “Who is he?” Takamura gazed down at the patient. His own eyes were hooded.