by Layton Green
Viktor flipped to the address section in the back of the journal and found a listing for Genevieve Fontaine. “I think it’s a good place to start.”
– 9 –
Darkness seeped into Uptown New Orleans, settling first into the constricted back streets and pockets of vegetation, spreading like a sluggish ocean tide through the main thoroughfares, creeping upwards until it smothered the tops of the oaks.
Genevieve Fontaine, Eckancar High Initiate, had agreed to meet Grey and Viktor after her sister’s jewelry shop closed. Grey thought about death as they drove to meet her.
The paradox of existence, of how it all came to be and how it would all end. Nature’s symbiotic tension between creation and destruction. An entire universe that swelled and contracted, would heave until it burst.
Too abstract, Grey thought, as they passed a rusty iron fence shielding one of the city’s ubiquitous above-ground cemeteries. Too distant.
Human death, then. The long grasping claws of it, the cold and shuddering certainty of it.
Annoyed with his lack of focus, Grey shrugged off his thoughts as the black sedan left Uptown on Tchoupitoulas, following the curve of the river past the Warehouse District. Decatur Street was sealed off for a parade, so they took Chartres Street through the French Quarter. Due to another blockade, the driver let Grey and Viktor out at Jackson Square, and they waded through the legions of tourists, street performers, and occult practitioners commingling beneath the imposing slate spires of St. Louis Cathedral.
Grey had been to New Orleans a few times before. As someone who had trouble finding peace, always on edge, he appreciated the languorous, almost meditative, pace of life. The trickle of a courtyard fountain, the whisper of a breeze through a banana grove, the streetcar rat-a-tatting like a jazz riff. Yet he knew New Orleans had a dark side, even more than most cities, and he felt a stronger danger vibe than on his previous visits. Thugs and gang types scouting the crowd for easy marks. Less police presence. Grey had spent years living in the seedier parts of the world, and New Orleans possessed that same unsettling aura of chaos. The edgy, out-of-control feeling that something was always about to happen, that the social contract had eroded and that violence could erupt at any moment.
Viktor led the way down one of the side streets off Jackson Square. Gas lamps flickering in iron cages illuminated brick facades with contiguous wrought iron balconies. The night was chilly, the moon a ripe banana above.
Halfway down the block, the professor stopped in front of a window showcasing an array of colorful jewelry. A sign above the door read Crystals and Gemstones.
Viktor glanced at a balcony covered in vines and potted plants. “Our address.”
Just below the roofline, another sign hung from a slender pole. Fortunes and Readings.
“I thought she belonged to this Eckancar religion?” Grey said.
“Eckancar does not preclude other beliefs. Think of it more as a pathway to spiritual enlightenment. Or so they say.”
Grey noticed that Viktor’s eyes looked alert, his hands steady. No sign of that peculiar mix of torpidity and mental intensity the absinthe imbued.
Viktor pressed a buzzer beside the door. “Let’s keep an open mind.”
“Working with you is like having your mind pried open by a crowbar,” Grey muttered.
Moments later, a voluptuous, dark-haired woman in her twenties appeared wearing a velour tracksuit and pink sandals. A slightly off-center chin and a stained front tooth marred an otherwise attractive face.
“I’m looking for Genevieve Fontaine,” Viktor said. “We have an appointment.”
“Were you expecting someone older?” she said, with a sly smile. “I’m Genevieve. Come in.”
She led them up a tight staircase and into a living room with an oriental rug and heavy drapes. Brass lanterns hanging about the room provided the lighting, and a squat line of matryoshka dolls peered outward from atop a bookcase. Grey smelled garlic and paprika.
“What type of readings do you give?” Viktor asked. “Palmistry, tarot, chakras?”
She looked bemused. “You have some familiarity with the arts?”
“Some.”
“I specialize in lithomancy,” she said with a shrug, as if not expecting Viktor to know what it was.
“Divination by stone or gem. Do you practice within the Sixteen Stones tradition, or something more venerable?”
Her eyebrows lifted as her thumb caressed a silver teardrop locket nestled in the curve of her breasts. “Are you Roma? Your accent, you know.”
Grey guessed Viktor was setting the stage, letting her know they weren’t easy marks.
“I’m Czech.” Viktor placed a hundred-dollar bill on the table. “I’m also an investigator and a professor of religious phenomenology. My associate and I are looking into a matter of some delicacy for a private client. I’ll pay the full rate for your time if you’re willing to answer a few questions.”
She deftly whisked the bill away. “Sure,” she said, dropping the professional polish and sounding more like a cynical, slightly bored twenty-something. She waved them into chairs around a table covered with black linen. “What do you want to know?”
“Our client is Sebastian Gichaud’s father.”
Her cappuccino eyes flickered beneath a heavy brow.
“I see no benefit in being coy,” Viktor said. “Our client has employed us to help assert that his son has been . . . possessed by . . . the spirit of John Cowell Samuelson. The Halloween Killer.”
This time Genevieve paled.
“I understand John Samuelson once paid you a visit?”
“How—how did you know about that?”
“He noted the appointment in his diary.”
She stared at Viktor as if trying to figure out his angle. “I won’t reveal the details of the reading.”
“I’m unaware of a psychic-client privilege.”
She looked away. “It’s not a court of law I’m worried about.”
Viktor leaned forward. “I know what Samuelson was after. Why come to you instead of another initiate?”
Genevieve’s eyes flashed. “Would you feel different if I were an old crone in a sari, with a glass eye and an accent from the old country? He came to me because I’m clairvoyant. I use the stones to help focus my energies, and because the tourists like them. People don’t like to believe there is true psychic talent in the world—that unnerves them. Who wants to really glimpse the future? No, people want to see sparkly gemstones, hear what they want to hear.” She spread her hands. “So that’s what I give them. But there are different clients, different readings. I don’t know how he found me. But he knew who I am.”
“I don’t understand the relationship with Eckancar,” Viktor said. “Is it just a hobby?”
“What is clairvoyance?” she shot back.
Viktor spread his hands. “The alleged ability to perceive events in the future, or outside the bounds of conventional reality.” She gave an impudent lift of her eyebrows, and after a moment he said, “You combine the two. Use the tenets of Eckancar to focus and improve your abilities.”
“Clairvoyance, reincarnation, soul travel—is it not different sides of the same coin? The concept that the soul is separate from the body? I can tell from your posture that you’re open to such beliefs.”
“So are quantum physicists,” Viktor said wryly.
She flicked a wrist. “The practices developed by Eckancar initiates are the best way I’ve found to channel my ability.”
“So Samuelson came to you looking for answers on soul transference?”
“I told him what I’ll tell you: separation of the identity from the body—what we call soul travel—is a very different thing from soul transference.”
Viktor leaned forward, his eyes gleaming. “How different?”
“Different enough that I don’t know if soul transference is possible. Even if it is, it’s something I want no part of. Certain lines should not be crossed.”
&n
bsp; “What did you give Samuelson? He wouldn’t have wanted to be disappointed.”
Grey saw a shiver of fear pass across her visage, quickly snuffed. Grey gave little, if any, credence to the topic of conversation, but Genevieve’s matter-of-fact air and barely disguised fear left him feeling uneasy. She, at least, believed in the stuff.
When she continued to balk, Viktor slid two more hundred-dollar bills on the table. Swallowing as if her mouth was dry, she pocketed the bills, then took a pack of Nicorette out of her purse and popped one in her mouth. “This didn’t come from me.”
“Of course not.”
“There are rumors about a woman. A Hoodoo woman. That she knows things about this.”
“About soul transference?”
“About possession. It’s not the same thing, but it’s close.”
“You told Samuelson this, too?” Viktor asked.
“I led him through a dream session where I pretended to get her name, and then, yeah, I gave it to him.”
“A dream session?”
“An Eckancar spiritual exercise. I faked a fainting spell after so he would go away. I was scared. You’ve never met him, have you?”
Viktor’s eyes flicked towards Grey, quick and subtle. “No,” he said.
She shivered as she crossed her arms. “I’ve never felt an anahata like that. There was no life. It was like . . . a stillborn child. He came to me after the first murder, you know. Before they caught him.” She seemed to disappear into her chair. “He could have killed me.”
“Why didn’t he?” Viktor said bluntly. “After he got what he wanted?”
She chewed harder on her gum. “I guess Death didn’t tell him to.”
“Did he ever mention Sebastian Gichaud?”
“No.”
“Did you discuss anything else?”
“He came for only one thing.”
Viktor gave a slow nod. “I see.”
“Would you like to try a reading? Maybe it would help.”
Before Viktor could respond, Genevieve placed three crystals on the table. She gazed at the stones, then up at Viktor. “Your aura is strong and passionate, as nuanced as I’ve ever seen. You’re a seeker, aren’t you?”
Grey found it unnerving that Genevieve used the same word Sebastian had used to describe Viktor.
“I don’t need a reading,” Viktor said evenly.
She turned to Grey, searching his face as if seeing him for the first time. “You’re troubled by competing energies,” she said gently. “I can help, if you like. Try to calm them.”
Grey masked his discomfort at the accuracy of her comment. Viktor gave her a thin smile. “One last thing,” he said, taking out another hundred. “What’s the name of the Hoodoo woman?”
Genevieve cursed softly in a language unfamiliar to Grey as she snatched the bill. “This really didn’t come from me.”
“Never,” Viktor murmured.
“Auntie Bayou. She works out of her home, behind the barbecue shack near Jackson and Annunciation.”
– 10 –
Grey and Viktor stepped outside to the bedlam of a Halloween parade passing through Jackson Square. Revelers packed the streets in front of the slow-moving floats, hands waving frantically to receive a benediction of plastic cups, glowing skeleton medallions, voodoo dolls, and other throws the costumed riders tossed imperiously into the crowd.
“This city takes its Halloween seriously,” Grey said, eying the procession of gargantuan floats with names such as Organ Grinder and Banshee Brides of Dracula.
“It has an occult presence unlike any other.”
“You mean all the cemeteries and voodoo shops?” Grey asked, sensing Viktor had meant more than just the parade.
Viktor swept a hand through the air. “The architecture, the symbols, the stew of syncretic beliefs. It infests the very air. Did you realize New Orleans was allegedly built on an Indian burial ground?”
“Are you getting all mystical on me, Professor?”
Viktor gave a hint of a smile.
A troop of zombie pirates cantered by on horseback, followed by a dragon float bearing a horde of Victorian witches and warlocks. Viktor said, “Are you aware of the origins of Halloween?”
“Just that it was a pagan holiday.”
“The ancients believed that on All Hallows’ Eve the boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds was more thin, and that spirits roamed the earth, looking for bodies to possess.”
“Sebastian visited John Samuelson in prison on Halloween night.” Grey wrinkled his nose, hit by a whiff of spilled booze and vomit. “You think they might have performed some kind of ritual? In the prison?”
“Yes.”
“And you think John Samuelson convinced Sebastian—or Sebastian convinced himself—that it worked?”
Viktor’s expression turned grim. “I do.”
“If that’s true, and there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of convincing a jury of that, we’ll need some proof.”
Viktor gave a curt nod in reply. They left the square as a troupe of baton-twirling skeletons paraded past St. Louis Cathedral, gyrating to bass-heavy speakers mounted on an old bus.
Their car was waiting on the next street over, and they slid into the backseat. Viktor asked the driver to take them to their hotel.
The driver squeezed through the crowd, leaving the French Quarter on the opposite end from which they had arrived. Grey assumed the driver planned to swing around to Uptown on Rampart and avoid the parade traffic. When the driver hit Esplanade, however, he turned right on St. Claude instead of continuing on to Rampart.
Grey didn’t know the city that well; maybe the driver knew a shortcut. Grey looked at Viktor, but the professor was off in his own world.
“You’re sure this is the way?” Grey called out.
Instead of replying, the driver turned onto a narrow street full of boarded-up warehouses and homes that looked abandoned. Just as Grey took a closer look at the back of the driver’s head and realized his black hair was a shade longer than it should be and the stud earring in his left ear was missing, headlights swung out of an alley and onto the street ahead of them. A beat later, another pair of headlights appeared in the rearview.
Their car slowed. The driver leaned forward as if reaching underneath the seat, and Grey didn’t wait. He grabbed a fistful of the driver’s hair and yanked back as hard as he could, causing the driver’s head to jerk up. Grey contorted his body to lean into the front seat, and with his hand still gripping the driver’s hair, Grey drove the ridge of his free hand straight into the man’s throat.
The driver gagged and clutched his trachea. Grey elbowed him in the face for good measure, leaned over and opened the driver’s door, and shoved him out.
The two vehicles—a Suzuki Sidekick and a low-slung pickup truck—had stopped sideways in the road, twenty yards ahead of and behind the black sedan. Assailants in white ski masks with stitched black mouths jumped out of the vehicles, handguns raised.
“Get down and call 911!” Grey shouted at Viktor.
Whatever was going down would happen too quickly for the cops to help at first, but if Grey could survive the initial assault, they might have a chance.
As he slid into the driver’s seat and grabbed the wheel, Grey noticed a metallic gleam on the floorboard. He reached down and picked up a Beretta nine-millimeter. In this situation, the second-most dangerous weapon at his disposal.
The first was the car.
Grey did not doubt the intent of their assailants, but they shouldn’t have gotten out of their vehicles. Unless they had a rocket launcher, they had made the wrong play.
Lowering in his seat, Grey whipped the black sedan around to face the Suzuki, gunning straight for it. The claustrophobic street left no room for Grey to drive around it and escape, but that wasn’t his plan.
Three assailants took aim from beside the little import. Shots rang out. One plunked into the windshield of the black sedan, two more into the rear dash.
“Stay down until I come back!” Grey shouted to Viktor, then dove out of the driver’s door just before impact, to avoid the airbag.
The black sedan crunched into the Suzuki, demolishing its side. Smoke poured out of the sedan’s engine. Grey hit the pavement with his shoulder, tucking to protect his vitals, letting himself roll to disperse kinetic energy. Adrenaline dulled the pain of the landing, lasered his vision onto the three assailants who had scrambled to avoid the collision.
Grey shot one in the chest before they realized he was coming. He got another in the shoulder as the man was diving away. The third, a thinly built figure with long purple hair, most likely a woman, got off a shot that barely missed Grey. She jumped behind the wreckage of the Suzuki.
Grey followed. He had no choice. His back was exposed to the two gunmen in the pickup.
Firing to cover his advance, Grey dropped to his stomach just before he rounded the Suzuki. In the darkness, he was relieved to see the purple-haired assailant’s booted feet escaping down the street.
Instead of taking the shot, Grey rolled behind the Suzuki, jumped up, and saw their bogus driver writhing on the ground, still holding his throat. There was no sign of the man Grey had shot in the shoulder.
The second group of assailants, the ones in the pickup truck, had wised up and gotten back into their vehicle. Grey swore. Now they had the advantage. The acrid stench of gunpowder filled the air, and Grey took aim as the truck barreled forward.
– 11 –
Grey knew the front of a pickup truck—or any car—was not a soft target. He might get lucky with a hood shot and cause the engine to misfire, but a nine-millimeter wasn’t going through a windshield, and tires were almost impossible to hit from that angle. Especially in the dark. He also had to worry about Viktor—the assailants might decide to hold Grey off while they shot or kidnapped the professor.
Well, Grey thought grimly, that can’t happen.
Sirens pierced the night. Grey felt a wave of relief, tempered by the knowledge that the sirens were too far away to stop the next assault. The pickup kept coming, accelerating faster than Grey would have thought possible. It must be souped.