by Erik Carter
Luanne began to understand what her husband had in mind. “Dylan, no. He’s my little boy.”
“Lean down.”
Luanne bent over. She began to cry. She tried not to, but that just made her cry harder.
Dylan craned his neck around her and called out to Caleb. “Now pay attention, sissy boy. You’re gonna learn a thing or two from your baby brother.” He settled back in his seat and got his face right up next to Tyler’s. “Now you’re gonna slap Momma. I’m gonna let you do it this time.”
Tyler chuckled, hid his face in his hands, embarrassed.
“Now reach back.”
Tyler pulled his little arm back.
“No, waaaaay back.”
“Dylan, no. Please.”
His face face looked up at her. A slight redness to his skin. Hate buried in his eyes. “Shut up, bitch.” He turned back to Tyler. “You have to hit her hard. You want what’s best for your momma, don’t ya? Good. Hard. Like the way you hit that pillow of yours sometimes. Grr!”
Tyler imitated him. “Grr!”
Dylan laughed. “Atta boy. Now … go!”
Tyler slapped her. A small spot of pain on her cheek. Her face snapped to the side.
Her boy had hit her.
Dylan had used him against her. Humiliation. Disrespect. Degradation.
She stood up, grabbed her cheek, cried openly. “Oh, Dylan. How could you? He’s my boy.”
She turned and ran away, sobbing.
His voice came from behind her. “Boohoo! That’s right. Poor baby. Boohoo, bitch!”
She ran into the bathroom. The thin door thudded shut as she closed it behind her. She turned to the mirror but didn’t look into it. Her face was in her hands. Sobs. Chest heaving, hurting. Her cheeks felt wet, hot against her hands. Tears moistened the spaces between her fingers.
From the other end of the trailer, Dylan’s taunts continued. “Boohoo, bitch! Boohoo!”
She thought about Tyler. His face. Her boy. He was getting big. Heavy. She still picked him up occasionally, but she didn’t carry him anymore. He was getting too big for that. She missed carrying him. It wasn’t that long ago that she’d carried him inside her. Life in her stomach. Life that she’d loved before it had even come to be.
And Dylan had used that against her.
“Poor baby! Poor little crybaby bitch!”
She took a deep breath. Stop crying. Another deep breath. Her body still quivered, but the crying was over. Slowly she pulled her face out of her hands. Looked up. And saw herself in the mirror.
The verbal assault from the other end of the trailer had ended. There was relative silence. Just the muffled sound of the television.
Her eyes were bloodshot. Mascara stained the her lower eyelids, lines of it running down her cheeks, which were wet with tears. Her body shook. Another deep breath.
This had happened because of two words. Because she’d been too cool. Too exposed to the outside world. The lowdown.
Luanne thought of the times Dylan had slapped her. They were beyond count. She could take it. But this was different. He’d involved her boy. Her child. And that hurt worse than any of the times he’d put hands on her.
Usually, they’d only been slaps. Shoves. Squeezes to the arms that left bruises. But there were a few times …
Her attention moved away from the face staring back at her as her eyes moved down the mirror to her blouse. It was a faux-silk polyester. Green. Large collar. Button-up. A bit of her chest was visible, just below the throat.
Her fingers moved to the cloth, pulled it to the side, revealing her right collarbone. There was a scar there. He’d done more than slap her that night, and the skin had split. She’d thought that the bone broke too, but luckily it had not. The scar had healed wide. No stitches. Dylan hadn’t let her go to the doctor. They used butterfly bandages to pull the edges of the wound together.
She continued pulling her shirt aside.
Her shoulder showed itself. Another scar there. They’d been on the trailer’s porch. He’d hit her so many times and so hard that she fell over, whacking her shoulder against the metal railing. She had crawled away from him, on her stomach, down the steps and onto the drive. He’d grabbed her ankles. Pulled her back. Laughing. Rocks had dug into her stomach, arms.
Her hand pulled away, and the blouse fell back over her shoulder. There were more scars to find. Some were on her ribs. From an incident behind the barn. She began to unbutton the blouse.
And stopped.
Her arms wrapped around herself. And she looked herself in the eye again.
The arms squeezed in tight, comforting, reassuring, and her hands caressed her torso, finding all the areas, all the memories of times when things had gotten their worst. Healing coursed through her fingertips.
She didn’t want to believe that every man was like this, and a memory of her life before Dylan reminded her that they weren’t. Alec Corber. Luanne was a faithful woman, and she felt guilty every time she thought about Alec. But she only thought about him after the times Dylan had truly given her a beating. Or, in this case, when he’d given her an emotional beating by using her child against her.
She let the thoughts enter.
Alec. His hands, so different than Dylan’s. Strong like Dylan’s but a strength that felt good when they touched her. Hands that moved so gently over her body the two times they had been naked together. Hands. On her face. Brushing the hair from her eyes. Dylan would pull her hair, not look at her. Alec would gaze right back. His brown eyes. Lips so gentle. Saying kind things. Dylan would say swear words, squeeze her nipples until she cried out for him to stop. Alec’s hands. Coarse, callused. He was a mechanic. Hands that never hurt her. Coarse. And strong. On her thighs. Up her thighs. Holding her arms down gently. Her hair had gotten in her eyes again. He brushed it away. Locked eyes with her. Told her she was beautiful.
Alec’s hands.
Her own hands were still wrapped around her sides, and she could almost believe they were Alec’s as they moved along her torso.
Then she heard the television. She was back. In the trailer.
She thought again of the phrase that had caused this. Two words. The lowdown.
There was another meaning for the word lowdown. It meant mean. And that’s what Dylan was. A lowdown, mean, evil man. Maybe she hadn’t noticed when he gave her the scar on her collarbone or when he left the other scar on her shoulder. But when he used one of her boys as a tool of cruelty against her … now she knew for sure.
And she wasn’t going to have it.
Not for her and sure as hell not for her boys.
Dylan was lowdown and rotten. And not just with her. Not just at home. He was up to something—with his list of strange locations with creepy drawings and meetings with people like Mick Henderson.
Luanne was going figure out what Dylan was doing.
Chapter 21
Jesse walked through the darkened cemetery of above-ground, crumbling crypts. He held a flashlight. Its light bounced off the tombs, revealing macabre designs and long-forgotten dates, casting eerie shadows.
He stopped and examined one of the tombs. At the top was a moon decoration carved into the stone. It was a full moon. A circle with smaller circles within. Wrong. He moved on.
According to the information he’d gotten from the Grizzly, this was the correct row. Now he just had to find the right tomb. He saw another moon shape and stopped. It was a crescent moon, thin, with little star designs down its length. And unlike the last moon he’d examined—which protruded from the stone in a large, central position—this one was chiseled into the stone, and it was inconspicuous, only a couple inches across, hidden away in the upper-right corner.
Jesse smiled. This was it. Now, even if he had made a colossal mistake with the Madame Gertrude situation, Dylan would be ecstatic that Jesse had found the final symbol. Jesse breathed a sigh of relief. This would set everything right.
But he wouldn’t tell Dylan that he’d joined forces with the Grizzly. N
ot yet. Not until he found out more about the cops.
He took out a notebook and wrote down the names, dates, and inscriptions on the tomb then did a quick sketch of the symbol. He looked to the end of the row and counted the number of tombs, wrote it down, then counted the number of rows and jotted that down as well. He turned off the flashlight and stuffed it in his pocket along with the notebook. He turned to leave.
The cemetery was dark. A lot of people would pay good money to be in his shoes right now—strolling in one of the famous Saint Louis Cemeteries at night. He’d had to climb the wall to get in. The gates were locked at night. He walked up the main gravel road that went through the center of the cemetery, heading back toward the wall.
Two figures emerged from the tombs. They approached. Jesse stopped
Blacks. Both male. Destitute clothing. Both of them large. One of them incredibly tall.
“Cemetery’s closed,” the tall one said. “Didn’t you hear?”
The second one was fatter with a mustache and a nasally voice. “Gate’s locked. How’d you get in?”
Jesse hated to give them the validation of a response, but he knew he was in a precarious situation. He summoned his abilities again. Time to transform. To radiate simpleness. Purity.
“Aw, jeez. I get caught for everything,” he said with smile, looking away guiltily. “I didn’t get a chance to visit earlier, and it’s my last night in town. So I hopped the wall.”
“Yeah? Well, you hopped right into our home, man. We live here,” the tall one said.
“And don’t much care for intruders neither,” his partner said and pulled back his jacket, revealing a revolver.
Jesse looked at the gun and paused for just a moment—before springing into action.
He’d been well trained in martial arts. When he first started, he’d hated the idea of studying Eastern philosophical nonsense. All the funny letters on the walls and the backwards customs. Bowing and all that. But he knew that they were the most efficient and well received forms of hand-to-hand combat. So in his quest to prepare himself for the war he knew was coming, he had studied karate, jiujitsu, and tae kwon do. And he knew ways of disarming a man.
He spun on the fat one, who had drawn his gun, and lunged toward him, grabbing the arm with the gun. He twisted. The gun fired into the ground, spraying gravel on them before it dropped from his hand. Jesse lowered himself and used the man’s bodyweight to flip him over his shoulder. He landed on his back in the gravel.
Arms grabbed Jesse from behind. The taller one. Jesse was in a full nelson. He rammed his his head back into the man’s face and used the moment while the man was stunned to pull himself out of his grasp. He ducked under the man’s shoulder, pulling his hand with him as he went. He now had the man’s arm twisted behind his back. With one swift motion, he flung the man over his extended leg, sending him into one of the nearby tombs. His skull cracked against the stone. Skin split. Blood gushed out. He collapsed into a motionless lump. He’d hit hard. Broken neck, most likely.
Jesse didn’t hesitate. The gun. Where was it?
To the side. A few feet away. Moonlight glistened off the barrel.
Jesse grabbed it, pointed it down at the other man on the ground a few feet away from him. The fat one. The man put his hands up, looking absurd as he did so, bloodied and lying in the gravel.
A look came across the man’s face, a look of realization that overpowered his fear. “Jesse James?”
Jesse grinned. Took aim. Right at the man’s chest. His heart.
A noise behind him. A short burst from a police siren. Blue lights bounced off the tombs.
He turned. A cop car was on the other side of the gate. A figure stepped out.
Jesse fired the gun into the man on the ground then sprinted away into the darkened maze of tombs.
Chapter 22
“The Knights of the Golden Circle,” Allie said. “That’s the name of the secret society who uses these markings.” She handed Dale a book.
Percy leaned over Dale’s shoulder and looked at the cover.
An Authentic Exposition of the K.G.C., Knights of the Golden Circle
It had the old book smell and looked ancient and delicate in Dale’s hands. As Dale flipped open the cover, Percy saw a bizarre title page full of lavish fonts, creepy skeletal drawings, and an image of a group of men in matching clothing, standing in a circle around a lone man under a domed structure with a sun behind it.
Weird.
They were in the office that the NOPD had provided them for the duration of the assignment as a central hub for their task force. This was at the District 1 Station, which was on Rampart Street, the dividing line between Districts 1 and 8, the French Quarter. Since nearly all their activity had taken place in these two districts, it was a perfect location.
The room was about twelve feet squared, no exterior windows. There was a single door and a window that faced the main office space. They had been keeping the bent metal blinds shut. There was a desk to the right—sturdy, metal, painted green. The table in the center was surrounded by four chairs. The linoleum was dirty. The walls needed painting. The lighting was fluorescent. On the back wall was a large cork board, the surface of which was covered with papers and dominated by two large maps: one of New Orleans and one of the Gulf South region, each dotted with pins.
Dale and Percy sat on one side of the table. Allie was on the other. In the center of the table were the bags of Jesse James’ drugs, and to the sides were large piles of books and stacks of photocopied papers—the results of Marty Rhode’s impromptu research session at the Library of Congress in D.C. Some of the materials, like the book Dale held in his hand, were originals, but much of it had to be copied. There were boxes along the walls filled with yet more materials. Rhodes had been thorough.
Dale flipped through the book … and a slight smile came to his face. Dale was always grinning about something. Smartasses were like that. Percy had spent so much time around him that he could decipher all those little looks. This one had narrowed eyes and a tinge of holier-than-thou-ness. It was a skeptical grin. Dale thought the book was bullshit.
And as he looked at the pages while Dale flipped through them, Percy could sympathize with those sentiments. He picked up a few words here and there—things about handshakes and rituals. And there were images, too: symbols, numbers, and the like.
Percy knew that Dale had seen a lot of hocus-pocus conspiracy theories in his time with the BEI, but he had to keep Dale from getting too carried away with his cynicism. Even if there was no truth to the Knights of the Golden Circle, this didn’t change the fact that it looked like the people they were chasing did believe in the group and were emulating it.
Dale closed the book, rapped a knuckle on the cover, and pointed at Percy. “Told you Arty Marty would come through.”
“And I told you we needed to bring in Allie,” Percy said, giving her a reverential nod.
She smiled at him.
Dale opened the book again and examined one of the drawings more closely. “So, Allie, what … is this?”
“The KGC,” Allie said. “A secret society during the Civil War. Plans of partial world domination. They originally wanted to create a slaveholding empire from the American South, through Mexico, and all the way into the northern part of South America. A golden circle.”
“During the Civil War?” Dale said. “This book’s publication date is 1861. That’s the year the war began.”
Allie nodded. “That’s what I mean when I say that their original goal was to create the golden slaveholding circle. When the states divided, the KGC changed their mission and affiliated themselves with the Confederacy. They were the South’s secret society. Meetings in barns. Initiation ceremonies. Symbols and handshakes. Very clandestine. They were all over, infiltrating the North.”
“Wait a minute,” Dale said with another one of his grins. “Now I remember why those symbols on the bags look familiar. You told me about the KGC when we dated. You and Ronan
were looking into them. Isn’t this the group that’s supposed to have buried gold all over the country? Something about symbols, too, if I remember right. Symbols in cemeteries that were supposed to lead to the gold—all these crazy coots with metal detectors and treasure maps out looking for it.”
Allie gave him a glare that would wilt a houseplant. Percy had spent considerable time with Allie during his first assignment with Dale, so he knew her well enough to tell when she was genuinely perturbed. And Allie was pissed.
“My father and I were not ‘crazy coots with metal detectors,’” she said. “We were legitimate treasure hunters. I know you never respected what he did, but he took it very seriously.”
Sometimes you just had to shake your head at Dale. For as smart as the guy was, his people skills were infantile, and he could be completely oblivious to the damage that that his big mouth inflicted on others. Percy was sure that Dale hadn’t meant to insult the memory of Allie’s deceased father, and by the kindly tone of his response, it was clear that he was trying to immediately backpedal. “I heard about Ronan. I’m so sorry, Allie. He was a good man.”
“You sure didn’t seem to think so at the time. You said the work he did should’ve been left to archaeologists.”
“And I still believe that. But that doesn’t change the fact that he was a great man.”
She took in a long breath, let it out, and nodded. “Thank you.”
There was a tap at the door. Dale stood and opened it. It was Detective Snyder, his sleeves rolled up, tie loosened.
“She’s here now,” he said and motioned back toward the main office. “I want you to see this first, though.” He handed Dale a piece of paper. “We just got a call. Anonymous source. They gave us this info.”
Percy stepped over to them.
“What in the world?” Dale said. He handed the paper to Percy.
It was a scribbled list of locations on a small sheet of paper with an NOPD logo at the top: