Blind Shuffle

by Austin Williams

  “Dad,” Marceline said quietly. “He must be going of his mind.”

  “He’s the one who told me you’ve been missing.”

  “God. Is he OK?”

  “He will be, soon as he sees you’re OK.”

  “What about Joseph? Where is he now?”

  “Secured, for the moment. Look, I know this is a hell of a lot to deal with, but let’s get out of here and have a nervous breakdown later. Agreed?”

  Another silence. When she spoke again her voice was firm.

  “Agreed.”

  Rusty heard her stand and walk across the room. He sat up from the bed and did what he’d been dreading for the past few minutes. He opened his eyes and blinked hard a few times, then looked around in a series of directions. Left to right, up and down.

  “Any better?” Marceline asked quietly.

  “No.”

  He stood.

  “But we’re still getting out of here.”

  33.

  Monday saw stars, but the impact of the gun’s metal butt didn’t knock her out. The pain ballooning across her cheekbone was sharp enough to keep her upright. She wobbled slightly, then a hand roughly grabbed her arm before she could fall.

  Abellard twisted her around and yanked the arm up behind her back in a crushing grip. It hurt more than the gun. Monday cried out and tried to claw at his face with her other hand.

  Abellard wrenched the arm higher and she stopped fighting.

  “OK, OK. Jesus, that hurts!”

  “I know you,” he uttered in her ear, barely a whisper. “I seen you before.”

  “Let go. I’ll tell you—”

  “You work with her, at the ward. Ain’t that right? Answer me, bitch!”

  “Yes, OK. I’m a nurse at Bon Coeur. I’m a friend of Marceline’s. I’m trying to help her.”

  “You’re in this with Diamond. Driving the fuckin’ getaway car, that it?”

  “I’m just trying to help. I’m worried about her.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Fuck you if you don’t believe me. You’re the reason she’s—”

  Abellard yanked the arm high enough to tear ligaments. Another half inch and he’d dislocate it entirely from her shoulder. He silenced Monday’s screams by pressing the .38’s muzzle up against her eye. She clamped her mouth shut and stopped resisting.

  “We call this the chickenwing. Hurts like a mother, don’t it?”

  Monday’s chin fell to her chest, as much from disgusted resignation as physical stress. She’d let him get her and now Rusty and Marceline faced an added threat on top of whatever was going on inside the house.

  “Where’s Diamond?”

  “I don’t know,” she said through gritted teeth. “I thought you’d done something to him.”

  “This is how it’s gonna go. You and me, we’re going inside. Open your mouth or make one fuckin’ move, you’re the first one to die. We’re gonna find them, both of ’em. Then I’m cleanin’ all this shit up for good.”

  Even in the midst of despair, Monday wanted to talk reason into this brute. To explain that they shared a common concern. She wanted Abellard to understand she was truly Marceline’s friend. That she’d only come out here in hopes of restoring her to safety.

  Monday wanted to communicate all this, but it was impossible. Abellard was already forcing her toward the front door. Her only option was to confuse him.

  If she could redirect his fury onto herself, even momentarily, it might buy Rusty some critical time to finish doing whatever he was doing in there. It might make all the difference.

  With that resolve, she spat into his face. Hoping to anger him enough to create even a brief distraction, disrupt his momentum for just an instant.

  Abellard didn’t take the bait. He backhanded her hard enough to split her lip, then pushed her hard against the brick wall next to the front door.

  “Stop fucking around,” he said, using his gun hand to slam the brass knocker.

  They stood there for a moment, hearing nothing but their own breaths and the surrounding hum of a million nocturnal insects.

  Abellard went to work on the knocker again. The sound of heels clacking against a parquet floor resounded from within.

  “You’re my Kevlar vest, understand? Whatever I say to do, you do it. I don’t say nothing, make like a fuckin’ statue till I do. Understand?”

  Monday didn’t respond, eyes dully focused on the door. Her mind was spinning with possibilities of who might appear on the other side, and what might result. Could she entertain even a nanosecond’s hope that Rusty would be the one who answered the door? If so, what would happen next?

  “I asked you a question,” Abellard hissed, jerking her arm a few degrees north. “Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” she said in a husky voice.

  “Better hope so.”

  They heard the sound of a latch turning. The door opened two inches, held by a chain. Pierre’s swarthy face filled the crack.

  “Mr. Abellard. This is—”

  The revolver’s barrel found a spot in the gap between the door and the frame, pointed upward at Pierre’s chin.

  “Don’t even think about slamming that door. These rounds are 125-grain, and they can all travel through wood.”

  34.

  Rusty’s fingertips touched cool metal. He was standing by the chamber door, performing a tactile examination of the hinges. They felt sturdy and well maintained, free of rust. No way to move the door from where it met the jamb.

  He shuffled over to the right and pushed on that side, finding less than an inch of wiggle room between the door and the wall. Just enough space to work his fingers through the gap and reach the padlock on the outside. The hasp it hung on was thick and securely drilled into the wall.

  “I think trying to leave by force is a bad idea. Even if I manage to kick this open, it’ll create too much noise.”

  “Let’s take the risk and worry about it once we’re outside.”

  “If it comes to that,” he agreed. “You said you’ve tried the lock already?”

  “Only about a hundred times.”

  “Combination or keyed?”

  “Please,” Marceline said, sounding offended. “You think a lousy combo lock would hold me this long?”

  “Right. Should’ve known better than to ask.”

  That was true enough. Rusty retained a very clear recollection of Marceline’s natural gift for the art of lock-picking. He’d seen it illustrated countless times during their formative years, when she worked as Prosper’s onstage assistant while he acquired nuggets of rarified knowledge at an agonizingly slow pace under the older man’s tutelage.

  Back then, they used to communicate through a form of friendly competition. It became a kind of flirting. Who could master a certain illusion the fastest, and then teach it to the other with a teasing sense of superiority?

  Prosper had shown some reluctance in instructing his young charge in even the basics of lock-picking until the moral gravity of the art was made clear. The only locks he was ever to spring open were those used in illusions performed of the corner of Royal and Dumaine. The first time Prosper caught Rusty using his newfound skills to enter someplace he wasn’t invited would signal the termination of his apprenticeship.

  With those rules established, Rusty had avidly taken up the study of opening all manner of locks. He got good at it quickly, but mastery only came with constant practice. For Marceline, it was a matter of effortless touch. She could coax pins and tumblers into movement through the force of sheer will, it sometimes seemed to a lovestruck young Rusty Diamond.

  “This isn’t promising,” he muttered, reaching through the gap to measure the padlock’s make and size. “Feels like a Master. Something from the ProSeries, I’d guess.”

  “Come on,” Marceline said, mildly amused despite herself. “I’m sure you can do better than that.”

  Rusty continued his sightless inspection, fingers moving assuredly.

&nbs
p; “Two-inch brass body to prevent corrosion, good idea with the humidity around here. And, let’s see…a two and a half-inch shackle. Hardened boron alloy. Nine millimeters thick, if I had to wager.”

  “Now you’re just showing off.”

  “Hardly,” Rusty said, rubbing his hands briskly against his jeans to remove any sweat. “Showing off would be getting the damn thing open.”

  He leaned in close and went to work. For several minutes, it was nothing short of infuriating. His fingers felt as deprived of their sensory perception as his eyes, fumbling over the lock like the appendages of some drunken oaf. Skinning his knuckles repeatedly against the sharp corners of the gate’s bars, he barely registered the pain. All he could feel was the clumsy uselessness of his hands, which incensed him.

  “Damn it!” he roared after the fourth failed effort.

  “Calm down and try this.”

  Rusty felt her place a thin, almost weightless strip of aluminum in his palm.

  “I found it pretty worthless,” she said. “But maybe you’ll have better luck.”

  “You made a shim?”

  “Bad one,” she shrugged.

  “How?”

  “I asked for a Coke a few days ago when Mr. Hood brought my morning meal. No chance I’d get a bottle, but I figured a can might not be out of the question. Bingo. Next time he came up, I threw a fit. Said my water broke and I was going into labor.”

  Rusty was surprised to hear her laugh softly.

  “Man, I made a scene. Knocking over the furniture, screaming blue murder. I don’t think he bought it, but he forgot all about the can when he came back for the tray after I calmed down.”

  “That’s the crafty girl I remember,” Rusty said, pinching the aluminum shim between two fingers.

  The shim slid easily into the gap where the shackle inserted into the lock’s body. Rusty forced himself to go slowly, not wanting to bend the flimsy aluminum. He dug the tip in deeper, progressing by millimeters.

  For a startled moment, he thought he had it. Then he felt the shim fold under the pressure.

  “Fuck. It’s too weak.”

  “Told you,” she sighed. “Ready to try force?”

  “Not quite,” Rusty said, reaching down to pull off his left boot. He held it upright, heel toward the ceiling, and caught the folded wooden knife in his other hand as it fell free.

  “Remember this old bugaboo?”

  “You’ve got the Marrow Seeker?” Marceline asked, audibly incredulous. “Why the hell have you been holding out?”

  “Didn’t want to risk breaking off the tip. We might need it for other purposes than turning tumblers.”

  “Give me that,” Marceline said, grabbing the knife. “You can’t break Terrebonne teak, and you know it.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  “Pshh. If we don’t bust this lock, we won’t have any other purposes to worry about.”

  Rusty couldn’t argue with that logic. He stepped away from the door, leaving her free access to work.

  For the next minute Rusty stood motionless, listening to a series of small ticks and clacks as Marceline did her thing. She worked the tip of the Marrow Seeker’s teak blade into the shackle’s insertion point. She kept at it with a prodigy’s touch, feeling the lock’s inner pieces adjust by miniscule degrees.

  “Goddamnit, Marcie. I can’t believe it’s been—”

  “Quiet. Let me concentrate.”

  The shackle sprang free with a resonant snap. Rusty smiled at the sound.

  “Haven’t lost your touch, I see.”

  “Oh, you see, do you?” Marceline said, pressing the folded knife back in his hand.

  “Poor choice of words. Don’t rub it in.”

  Marceline pushed gingerly against the door, opening it by inches to prevent any betraying creaks.

  “Looks like a landing here,” she whispered. “Some stairs going down on the right.”

  “What else? You see any other way out?”

  “It’s dark down at the other end. I think there’s a bannister.”

  “Let’s check it out. They brought me up these stairs, might still be watching them.”

  Ten paces took them to the far end of the landing. A rickety bannister followed a second stairway down to the back of the carriage house. This whole side of the building had not received any of the refurbishment evident in the area around Marceline’s chamber. A small rectangle of moonlight burned through a hole in the roof. The steps were slick with moss and lichen. No electric lamps offered guidance.

  Marceline proceeded slowly down the staircase, aided only by another patch of moonglow coming from an open doorway at ground level. She held Rusty’s hand tightly, warning him where one entire step had rotted away.

  Finally, they reached bottom. There was only one door in sight, effectively limiting their options. Rusty figured if they got outside they could circle around until they arrived at the section of grounds where the old stone well was located. From there, even without vision, he’d have his bearings.

  They were just stepping out the carriage house’s moldering back door when they heard the sound. Part cry, part gurgle. It came from Rusty’s immediate left.

  Marceline froze.

  “That was a person,” she whispered.

  “Where’d it come from?”

  “Shh. There’s a door to the left of where you’re standing. Little window cut into it, like the one holding me.”

  A muffled, strangled sound came again. Unquestionably the sound of something in pain.

  “Maybe it’s someone who needs help,” she said, releasing Rusty’s hand.

  “Can’t worry about that now,” he replied. He reached out, failing to make contact with her. “Marcie, for Christ’s sake!”

  “I’m right here,” she answered, her voice coming from a few feet away.

  She pulled open the barred Judas window and peered through. On the other side lay a chamber roughly the size of the one where she’d spent the past five days. This one was much darker, stone walls pressing in with the grim austerity of a prison cell.

  A bare 80-watt bulb hung from a cable. Marceline’s eyes were drawn to a dim thrashing on the floor. What she saw stole her breath. Even in the sepulchral light, she knew who she was looking at. The face was too horribly familiar to escape recognition.

  Claude Sherman lay sprawled across a filthy pallet, his body strained into a highly unnatural position. Both wrists were chained to the wall above his lolling head. A ball gag filled his mouth, held in place by a Bungee cord wrapped around his head. He rolled and twitched, legs kicking feebly, on the edge of consciousness.

  She’d seen this man dozens of times—most often at the casino, sometimes at Joseph Abellard’s house in Vacherie, where Sherman had shown an unfailing knack for interrupting peaceful moments of the kind she used to share with Abellard before things turned sour. The last time she saw Claude Sherman, he was wearing a custodian’s uniform at Bon Coeur.

  Marceline gasped as she got a clearer look into the chamber. All the hair had been shorn from the right side of Sherman’s head, exposing the pale flesh beneath. That entire half of his cropped skull was caked in blood, the ear dangling limply.

  The uncut nails of Sherman’s right hand were speckled red. Marceline realized with a fresh shudder the damage to his ear hadn’t been inflicted by some sadistic torturer. Claude Sherman had attempted to claw it away himself, his reach constricted by the chains. His eyes darted upward, spotting her face framed in the Judas window. A moan fought to break free of the gag but came out only as a suffocated release of oxygen. He struggled to sit upright, eyes beseechingly fixed on hers. The chains went taut and he collapsed on the stained pallet.

  Marceline couldn’t know it, but Sherman had spent the last thirty-odd hours trying—first desperately, then with something far beyond simple desperation—to dislodge the insect that even now bristled and burrowed deep inside his Eustachian tube. The same mature half-inch earwig Anne Guillory had teased into
his ear with the aid of a straw while he lay drugged by the curare-dosed tea.

  Had he been conscious and unfettered in the early minutes after it crawled inside, Claude could have removed the bug as easily as knocking out water after a swim. But the curare rendered him insensible for over three hours. By the time he came to in this filthy chamber, hands shackled, the earwig had burrowed in far too deeply.

  It would never remove itself, thanks to its genetic defect lovingly demonstrated to him in the conservatory. Guillory had found her last useful purpose for Claude Sherman, testing the impact of the old wives’ tale when applied to a living subject.

  VECTOR never had a chance to deploy such a tactic on a high-profile target in the name of nature—and the earwig was never considered a viable weapon even in the developmental stage—so Claude would have to suffice. How long until madness took hold, until the allure of death’s release overrode the survival instinct? Time would tell.

  Marceline pushed the Judas window shut, overcome with revulsion. She felt Rusty’s hands on her shoulders, shaking her.

  “What the hell’s in there?” he asked, and she realized he’d probably been asking it for some time before she heard the question.

  She exhaled slowly, regaining a sense of equilibrium. Then she grabbed one of his hands and started guiding him through the doorway that led out of the carriage house.

  “I’ll tell you later,” she whispered. “Don’t ask me to tell you right now.”

  35.

  Joseph Abellard backed Pierre Montord across the dimly lit hall, toward the great room. He held the gun waist-high and kept Monday in front of him, clenching her arm tightly. Without turning around, he pushed the front door shut with his foot. It swung on hinges in need of some oil, stopping an inch before closing all the way.

  “Please put the gun down,” Pierre said, hands raised in submission. “There’s no need for it. We’re prepared to go through with the exchange.”

  “Nah, we’re way past that,” Abellard said, feeling marginally more calm than he had outside. The fuzz in his head from the blows he’d been dealt in the Escalade had cleared. Moving freely with a loaded weapon in hand, he started to embrace the fact that he was in control of the situation.