by Jenna Ryan
Kate worked her butt into a dip in the cushion. “Coffins and alien monsters. That’s my mind settled right down. Can we turn the space heater on?”
“Already did. Start the movie.”
Kate made it through the first twenty minutes, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get Nolan out of her head or quiet the jagged nerves still jumping inside her.
Hazzard had been bound, gagged and patched up just enough to survive the trip to town. Ditto Nesty. And despite having a lump on his head as well as a bullet hole in his left leg that hadn’t been half as serious as Nolan had implied, Firko was good to go. Nolan himself was awake, aware and far too pissed off to let Hazzard twitch a wrong muscle, much less escape. So why did the knots in her stomach still feel as tightly cinched as ever?
She stood to pace, leaving Duffy to watch a man’s head blow apart. She thought the answer might reside in her encounter with Hazzard. Something beyond the obvious near-death experience was nagging at her. No idea what, but something.
He’d told her he hadn’t put a calling card in her pocket the night he’d bombed the apartment building, an admission that made sense but also confused her, because whoever the perpetrator was, he’d gotten close enough to harm her, if indeed harming her had been the goal. A disturbing prospect? Yes. The root of her current unease? She didn’t think so. What then?
With time ticking, Hazzard had insinuated himself into Anna Perradine’s life. Fortunately for him, the gamble had paid off. Leshad didn’t strike Kate as a patient man. Not patient, not tolerant and certainly not forgiving.
The hit man had screwed up royally the night Phoebe Lessard had magicked herself out of St. Mark’s. Not only had he missed killing Phoebe, but he’d also let Kate see him. What he’d deemed an “oops” had put a major crimp in a plan already gone bad. His job, he’d said, had been to finish Phoebe off. Afterward, he’d intended to cab it to the airport where they would board their respective flights and…
She halted mid-memory. Board their respective flights? “Respective” as in separate flights for Hazzard and the man she’d seen with him?
“Jimmy!” she exclaimed softly. “He said Jimmy.”
“Something on your mind?” Duffy asked from the sofa.
“What? No. Maybe.” Kate thought back. “I saw two people the night Phoebe vanished. I assumed one of them was legit and that Hazzard was passing himself off as an orderly. But what if the second man wasn’t legit? Actually, now that I go back over it, I’m pretty sure he couldn’t have been. Hazzard mentioned someone named Jimmy more than once. He also talked about an affiliation. He told me Jimmy would be doing a happy dance tonight in New Orleans.”
Pausing the movie, Duffy turned to stare. “I understood most of that, Kate, and I have to say the gist is giving me a bad feeling. But Hazzard told you Jimmy was in New Orleans, right? That’s a long way from northern California.”
She probed her memory for more. “It is, yes, but only if Jimmy really is in New Orleans.” Pivoting, she drilled her fingers into her temples. “I’m on the edge of something big here, Duffy.”
“Relax.” Standing, he set his hands on her shoulders and began to knead in rhythmic strokes. “Lose the tension. Where does your mind want to go?”
“To the hospital. And weirdly to your Pullman. I’m seeing a television screen, a mug of tea and my med school professor.”
“Your professor wasn’t on TV, Kate, I’m sure of that.”
“The med school connection has to do with that southern wannabe senator, C. J. Best.” She drew her fingers slowly away from her temples. “He was swamping crates for the state food bank.”
“You think senatorial hopeful C. J. Best might be Jimmy?”
“No.” Swinging around, Kate grabbed his arms. She squeezed them to keep the memory from clouding. “There was a man with him, Duffy, always right near him. He looked straight at the camera both times I saw Best campaigning. He—the man with Best—had curly red hair and puffy features like an alcoholic. Damn!”
“Why damn?” Duffy demanded when her eyes slid past him. “Please tell me he’s not standing in the doorway behind me with a machete.”
“Nothing that dramatic, but the more I think about it, the more I’m sure he was at the hospital with Hazzard. I got fixated on the resemblance between C. J. Best and my old med school professor. So fixated it never occurred to me that the twinges of recognition I was feeling might be coming from Best’s red-haired aide. I put them down to Best and my professor. But it could have been the aide I was remembering. Subliminally, but still. Duffy, what if C. J. Best’s political aide is Jimmy?”
“A political aide who’s supposed to be in New Orleans,” Duffy said firmly.
“I’m a trauma surgeon who’s supposed to be working the night shift at St. Mark’s,” Kate reminded him. “But I’m not. I’m here, with you. And Nolan and Firko aren’t. This is bad.” Her brows came together. “Is this bad? It feels bad.”
“How a situation feels and how it truly is can vary widely.” Duffy kept his tone calm and flattened his palms between them. “Inhale optimism, exhale fear. Are you sure, Kate, absolutely sure that you saw Hazzard at St. Mark’s with a red-haired man?”
“Yes. And I’m ninety percent sure that man was C. J. Best’s aide.”
“You could be superimposing one face over another.”
A feeling of urgency churned in her stomach. “Even if I am, Hazzard still talked about someone named Jimmy who might or might not be in New Orleans as we speak.”
The older man regarded her steadily in the dim vestry light. “Can you shoot a revolver?”
Ice coated Kate’s skin. “I can squeeze a trigger. No idea where the bullet might wind up.”
“Don’t aim at your foot,” he advised. “And while you’re at it, hope like hell we’re jumping at shadows.”
“As opposed to Leshadows,” she muttered.
In spite of her mounting terror, Kate refused to turn every tiny creak and groan she heard into a stalking killer. Better to recall that Hazzard had also mentioned seeing an ugly doll several times, as if he were being haunted by the thing. Viewed from that perspective, who knew how real “Jimmy” might turn out to be?
Except… She’d seen Hazzard with someone the night Phoebe Lessard had gone missing.
“Wait a minute.” Behind her, Duffy pulled out and started tapping his smartphone. “Gotta be here,” he said. “Come through for me, sweetheart.” He upped the volume. “My revolver’s in that slipper bag next to the sofa, Kate. Find the bag, point the thin end up and reassure me that the lights we left burning in this room aren’t currently flickering.”
“They’re flickering a little.” Kate retrieved the bag. “But according to Nolan, the wiring’s upward of sixty years old.”
“Remind me to have it updated when—bingo! Got it.” He pushed the phone to her nose. “C. J. Best and company.”
Kate eased his hand away so she could see. Which would have been easier to do if the lights she hadn’t noticed flickering until Duffy had drawn her attention to them would settle down to a steady glow.
Aware of the amplified moan of walls and joists, Kate scanned the campaign photo of C.J. and his team. And damn it, she spotted him instantly. The man with red hair and puffy features.
“Is the photo tagged?” she asked.
“Yup. Fourth man from Best’s right is—Robert Wise.”
A shiver rippled through her as she read over his shoulder. “No, it isn’t, Duffy. The fourth man from Best’s right is red-haired James Quinn.”
“And ‘Jimmy’ is only a hop, skip and a nickname away from James.” Duffy lowered his phone very slowly. “You might want to remove the gun from that bag, Kate. It’s possible we’ll be needing it.”
It was far more than possible, Kate realized. Her fingers had done little more than brush the cold metal when one of the doors gave a long, low creak. A second later, both the church and the rectory went dark.
* * *
&nbs
p; “You think it’ll end now that I’m behind bars,” Hazzard warned from his jail cell. “But I promise you, these rusty rods won’t stop Leshad or even Jimmy if he’s pissed enough.”
Although he was tempted to walk away and leave the entire mess in the hands of the slowpoke deputy out front, Nolan paused to listen. Hazzard had been babbling about a doll for the better part of two hours. Now, suddenly, he’d switched to Leshad and some nebulous third party named Jimmy.
“You screw up, you die,” the prisoner went on. He swiped at a bead of sweat on his upper lip. “You should have let me bleed to death back at the church. Maybe Leshad would’ve left me to rot in peace. This way, if that fucking doll’s face doesn’t turn me into a basket case, Leshad’ll send one of his big guns to kill me bit by agonizing bit.”
While Firko squatted on a low bench outside Nesty’s cell and let his depleted blood cells multiply, Nolan studied Hazzard’s pale face. “Who’s Jimmy?”
Hazzard barked out a laugh. “Who the hell cares? Unless he’s here.” His eyes narrowed in mistrust. “He’s not here, is he?” He searched the shadows before backing off with a gusty whoosh of breath. “Shit, I suppose I should be grateful the damn doll’s not here.” He gave the wall beside him a punch that had to hurt. “I swear Leshad got one of his lackeys to slip me some kind of freaking hallucinogenic drug. Knock the hotshot for a loop, keep him in line.”
“Have you met Leshad?” Nolan asked him.
Another short bark of laughter. “Oh, yeah, we’re old pals.” Hazzard lunged at the bars. “No one meets Leshad, and that’s a fact. No one sees him. For all I know, you could be him. Or the beard over there in the corner.”
“What about Jimmy? Where does he fit into this?”
“What this? There’s no ‘this.’ I’m a dead man, that’s all there is.”
“You could cut a deal with Crucible.”
“Uh-huh, like I’d live long enough to do that.”
His patience spent, Nolan reached a hand through the bars and snagged Hazzard by the throat. “Who’s Jimmy?”
Hazzard made a squawking sound. In the corner, Firko smiled and began to whistle.
“Can’t breathe,” Hazzard gasped.
“Don’t care,” Nolan returned. “Who?”
“He’s my boss. I work for him.”
Nolan loosened his grip when Hazzard’s features went blotchy. “You work for Jimmy and Leshad.”
“I work for Jimmy through Leshad. Via Leshad… Will you shut the hell up?” Hazzard shouted at Firko. He made a gurgling sound when Nolan’s fingers tightened again. “Whatever it is you want, I can’t give it to you. I get my instructions. I go where I’m told. I do my job. I leave. I get paid. I wait for another call.”
“That simple, huh?”
Hazzard choked out a breath. “Put it together, Nolan. You’re a smart guy. I’ve said all I plan to say on the laser-thin off chance I can make it out of here with my life. Just know this. Sometimes shit piles overlap.” Hazzard’s gaze slid sideways and took with it, Nolan suspected, his mind. “Could be he planted a computer chip in my head. I’ve heard about things like that. One wrong thought, instant punishment. In my case, ugly doll face, designed to drive me insane. Rumor is Leshad’s deep into the voodoo hoodoo, and man, I’ve traveled from the Louisiana Bayou to Haiti and back a few times myself. We’re talking spooky stuff.”
He was talking bull as far as Nolan was concerned. And starting to babble again about a doll he insisted had been popping up everywhere he went.
“Return ticket to la-la land?” Firko asked from the corner.
“Sounds like.” Nolan released the man and watched him sink onto a bare cot. “There’s something under it, though. He’s not that far gone.” Pushing past the pain in his skull, he pulled out his cell and speed-dialed Duffy’s number. He got his friend’s voicemail before it rang.
“Shit.” He took off for the door.
“What?” Firko demanded.
“Duffy’s phone went straight to message,” Nolan called back. “I told him we used to do that overseas when there was trouble. No ring, autoreply, something bad’s going down.”
And if it was going down bad for Duffy, he reflected as he ran, God only knew how badly it was going down for Kate.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Visions of Jack the Ripper with curly red hair and features bloated from too much white lightning rolled through Kate’s head. Knifepoints of terror scraped along her nerves, and every part of her shuddered at the thought of what might be lurking in the shadows. Straight-arming Duffy’s gun, she prayed no woodland creature planned to cross her path.
“There’s a flashlight in the cupboard near the altar,” Duffy whispered. “One good thing about the dark. We can’t see whoever’s lurking, but he can’t see us either.” He patted her arm. “I’ll tiptoe over and get it. You listen for unnatural creaks.”
And do what if she heard one? Shoot in the general direction of anything that sounded dangerous?
Help from Tallulah would be nice about now. Unfortunately, Tallulah was dead, and no other minds reached out to her.
Kate felt the weight of the night on her skin, the chill of it in her bones. The joists ahead shifted and the floorboards to her left gave a long, low groan.
Had Duffy gone in that direction? The church was almost pitch black, and she’d turned at least twice now, so she couldn’t be sure where either of them were.
Clamping down on her fear, she let a full minute pass before she said tentatively, “Duffy?”
Her heart tripped when he didn’t answer. And it all but stopped when a thud, barely audible over her inner screaming tension, reached her.
“Duffy?”
A hand slapped across her mouth. A knife blade pressed against her throat. “Make a sound and you’re dead where you stand,” a man’s voice growled in her ear.
She didn’t miss the smell of bourbon or the heavy slur that marked the threat. She certainly didn’t doubt the sharpness of the knife. “You must be Jimmy,” she managed to choke out. “Hazzard told me about you.”
“Hazzard’s a screw-up, and don’t think for one minute the top dog doesn’t know it.”
Kate tried to ignore the blade slicing into her skin. “I saw you with Hazzard at St. Mark’s. I’d say you screwed up just as badly as he did.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you’d say, lady. At my most frantic, I wouldn’t have blown an entire apartment building sky high. Noises like that attract unwanted attention.”
“Where’s Duffy?”
“Aw, well now, isn’t that just the sweetest thing.” Wrenching her around, he let her feel his girth. “Answer is, I didn’t kill the old codger, and I’ve got no particular quarrel with the doctor you’re bonking. Unless Hazzard’s been blabbing off to him. Then we’ll have an issue.”
Kate’s chin jerked up. “The only thing Hazzard’s been blabbing off about is a doll he thinks is haunting him.”
“Billy.”
“Who?”
“That’s the doll’s name. It belonged to Madeleine Lessard, witch mother to a whore daughter named Phoebe. I did some poking after I landed in San Francisco. Seems one of Hazzard’s late coworkers claimed to have seen the very same doll. Ugly, wooden puppet face. Popped up wherever, whenever. Me, I say whatever to both of them. Doll can’t hurt a man even if a witch did own it once.”
“It might be able to if the witch who owned it imbued it with some kind of power.”
Jimmy gave a snort of wet laughter as he swung her back around. “You’ve been watching too many zombie movies, lady.”
“Voodoo,” she corrected and fought an urge to gag when he breathed on her. “It’s all about voodoo in Louisiana, isn’t it?”
“Only if you believe,” he retorted, but she caught a flicker of uncertainty in his dismissal. “Between black magic and Leshad, I know where my beliefs lie, and they don’t involve swampland voodoo.”
He was sweating. She smelled the ripe odor of nerves on him
. She also felt the knife slip a little when he shifted his grip.
The lessening of pressure was just enough for Kate to grab his forearm, spin and shove the heel of her hand into his face.
She knew by his reaction and the sparkling pain radiating up her arm that she’d broken his nose. The knife clattered, Jimmy howled and Kate yanked free.
And tripped over something behind her.
A weak groan from below told her it was Duffy. Desperate, she felt for his shoulders, located them and, grasping his arms, endeavored to drag him away from the shrieking aide.
Jimmy called her every foul name in the book. Then he stopped swearing and started firing bullets in her direction.
Knowing he would follow her, Kate dropped Duffy’s arms and ran for what she hoped was the front door. She collided with an old pew and stumbled into the one beside it before locating the center aisle.
A hailstorm of bullets peppered the air. If any of them hit, she was too terrified to notice. Thankfully, her eyes had adjusted so she could see the outline of the arched entryway. Running low the last few steps, she groped for the latch.
She had her fingers on the brass lock then suddenly, she didn’t. The knob flew from her hands, and her momentum propelled her forward.
A light shining in the graveyard blinded her. She regained her balance, did an awkward 180 and saw Jimmy, his puffy face covered with blood, burst through the barrier of threshold shadows.
A single bullet rang out. Jimmy halted. His face registered shock. He took three staggering steps, blinked once and toppled onto the wooden porch.
Several seconds passed before Kate was able to kick-start her brain. She needed several more to fully understand what had taken place.
Jimmy didn’t move. Only the fog did, coiling around him like a ghostly python. Behind her, Nolan wrapped an arm around her shoulders and yanked her back into him. Catching hold of his wrist, she stared at the fallen man while a welter of emotions swept through her.