“Good God. What are you doing here?”
It was Lloyd Burgard.
Lloyd the crazy person, in his suit and tie and precise haircut. “Shut up,” he commanded.
Then he shoved her so hard into the alleyway that she dropped her cup and slammed against the far wall.
“I can’t wait…wait any longer,” he insisted. “You have to show me.”
Chastity scraped her hands against the bricks. She twisted her ankle on those damn shoes. Her legs were suddenly sticky with the dropped Hurricane.
She straightened, thinking fast. She’d had too many surprises in too few days, and way too much alcohol in the last few hours. She was reeling with it.
“Show you what, Lloyd?” she asked, backing up against the wall. Trying hard to make eye contact.
But his eyes were in the shadows. He was standing there at the edge of the alley, silhouetted by the neon, and she could hear the rasp of his breathing. She caught a gleam of something wet at the corner of his mouth.
Her very own angel of judgment. And he’d finally come for her. She sure couldn’t think of any other reason Lloyd Burgard should have appeared on Bourbon Street at midnight.
At this particular midnight.
“You know, your sister Lillian is looking for you,” she said, trying hard to control her voice, to seem nonthreatening and friendly.
Lloyd wasn’t buying it. “Don’t you understand?” he demanded, crowding her against the next building. “You escaped your punishment. How did you do it?”
The alley smelled like piss. Like rotted food and stagnant water and rum. Chastity was no more than ten feet from people, but nobody turned her way. She had to get out of that alley.
“How did I do what?” she asked.
“Escape the angels of death.”
For just the briefest moment, Chastity’s attention faltered. Wouldn’t it be really funny, she thought, if he weren’t crazy? If he really were the angel of judgment, and death was after her?
She shook it off, though. She knew, in a split second, that things had just changed again. That Lloyd was telling her something wrapped and coded in his own language.
“What angels, Lloyd?”
He waved a hand at her, and his voice was sharp with impatience. “They pulled you out of the cab. I saw it myself, and I said, ‘Thank you, Lord, because I don’t have the strength to carry out the will of the saints.’ But you’re here. Why are you here?”
“You saw the angels of death pull me out of a cab? Where, at the clinic?”
“Where you sold your children into bondage. I followed you, even when you went back. But they didn’t return. They didn’t—”
“What angels, James? What did they look like?”
As she talked, Chastity inched her way closer to the street. Lloyd, caught in his delusion, didn’t notice.
He blinked at her. “They did not introduce themselves,” he said, intense and sincere. “The saints have said I am not worthy.”
Great.
“Can you tell me what they looked like?”
“The dark angel, or the light?”
“Dark how, Lloyd?”
“Divine in his darkness. Deadly. Dying, dangerous dark…”
She was losing him. She tried inching toward escape and prayed James would get his pants on in time.
“Where did they take her, Lloyd? The angels.”
“Into the car. Into the silver car.”
Susan Reeves’s Lexus was silver.
“She had no choice,” he said. “I knew that. The Lord had finally visited his wrath on her and they took her away, right in front of their eyes.”
“Whose eyes?” Chastity asked. She’d almost made it. Two more steps and she could at least stumble over a drunk. “The clinic? Was it at the Arlen Clinic?”
He blinked again and frowned. “Of course not. At New Life.”
Chastity stopped moving. “New Life? My sister never went to New Life.”
“Oh, lying tongue! How can you say that? I know. I saw you!”
New Life? Chastity struggled to pull that information up. It was one of the clinics, she remembered that. It was…
“But I have you, and they can’t torment me anymore!”
Chastity reacted just a second too late. She should have known what to expect. She’d dealt with enough paranoid schizes in her life. She should have kept her eyes on his hands.
“Lloyd…”
She was raising her own hands when she saw the knife. It glinted purple and green in the neon, just like her beads, and it moved faster than she. She screamed at the top of her lungs.
She got her arm up over her chest. The knife caught her across the wrist. She tried like hell to slither away, but Lloyd grabbed her other arm, and crazies were the strongest people on earth.
She screamed again. She pulled at the hand that held her and damn near dislocated her shoulder.
Nobody heard her. It was Bourbon Street.
Chastity saw the knife coming again and twisted away. It caught her dead against the scapula. She felt it scrape along her shoulder blade before Lloyd pulled it back for another try.
She screamed again. He stabbed again. A rib. She yanked. He pushed. She went down, right into the puddles of piss in Kareena’s leather skirt. Her head smacked against the bricks like a pumpkin.
Lloyd was haloed in neon like a saint, and Chastity couldn’t move.
“Vengeance is mine—”
Suddenly, there behind him, Chastity saw a mountain. A skyscraper. She saw the shadow of it silhouetted in the light, but she couldn’t quite focus. The noise was coming and going in her ears, and she thought maybe the words she heard were jumbled.
“Here, give me that!”
The mountain grabbed the knife as if it were a toy, and literally lifted Lloyd off the ground. Then he moved, just enough for Chastity to finally see his face.
Eddie Dupre.
Chastity had been looking for Eddie Dupre for four days, and now he shows up?
With Lloyd still in his grasp, Eddie turned on her, his bald head shining purple. “Just go home,” he snarled down at her. “Won’t you just go home?”
“You followed me?” she thought she said.
“I followed him.” He shook Lloyd like a rat. “He’s been threatening my babies. But you need to get out of here before something even worse happens to you.”
Something worse than lying in piss on Bourbon Street with three knife wounds and a head injury?
Chastity started to laugh again, but she couldn’t enjoy it, because suddenly it hurt. And then Lloyd got enough purchase to rear back and kick her right in the head.
Chastity didn’t worry about the piss anymore.
Fifteen
“Can I please rinse off?” Chastity asked again.
She was in the Charity ER, sitting in a cubicle like a rube who’d been rolled for her lunch money. She was sore and stitched and still reeling from that last kick to her head. And everybody was grinning at her as if she were the latest in reality shows.
“I smell like piss and maraschino cherries,” she whined, thinking how mad Kareena was going to be when she saw what had become of her leather. “It is not my favorite cologne.”
“You’re lucky you don’t smell like dirt and flowers,” James said, from where he was holding up the wall with Detective Gilchrist.
An old wall. A well-worn place, Charity ER, that looked like a rabbit warren and sounded like a rock concert. It was a zoo in here tonight, with prisoners and victims and the general detritus of humanity cluttering up a maze of narrow, wandering hallways.
And Chastity Byrnes, who should have known better.
Any other time she would have loved her visit. There was such a stew of life here. One of the nurses wore pearls with her Grapesicle scrubs, and there was a Day-Glo rosary hanging like a stethoscope over an oxygen outlet. The wheelchairs were made of wood, and the hallways were so narrow they could barely fit.
The noise was worse than Bo
urbon Street, but this was a symphony Chastity relished. A street scene she loved. The sights were familiar; the smells were comforting, even if they were blood and ambulance exhaust and Betadine. It was probably stupid, but for the first time since she’d come down here, she felt at home.
Wearing a patient gown and piss.
Well, and the Mardi Gras beads she’d bought. The nurses had made it a point to drape those back over her, as if they didn’t make her look like an even bigger idiot.
“So Lloyd Burgard followed you to Bourbon Street to stab you?” Detective Gilchrist asked again from where he was bent over his cop notebook and pen. His suit was rumpled again, and he looked tired.
“He said he’s been following me for days,” Chastity said. “He’s a bit confused. He thinks I’m my sister.”
They’d been through this already. Chastity had told the detective everything Lloyd had told her. She’d emphasized the fact that it was possible Lloyd had seen her sister’s abduction. The fact that Lloyd was at that moment restrained and shrieking about professional football and judgment day did not encourage Gilchrist to trust Lloyd’s observational powers.
“He might actually have seen something,” Chastity said again.
Gilchrist shook his head. “I’ll talk to him when he’s medicated. And even if he does talk, who says what he saw was real? Or that he didn’t kidnap your sister himself?”
Chastity tried to shake her head, and then thought better of it when the room spun even faster. “No, I don’t think so. He spoke as a witness, not as a participant. Considering how complex his delusion is, I think he would have been perfectly willing to claim responsibility if he’d really taken Faith.”
“He also says the New Orleans Saints have been sending him messages through his toaster.”
Absolutely true. But not something Chastity wanted to hear right now. She wanted Gilchrist to believe her. To take this off her hands and give her an easy answer. She wanted all this over before it could spin into something immeasurably worse.
Chaos really did threaten, and she didn’t know how to stop it.
“You really don’t want to press charges?” Gilchrist asked.
“Not if he’s committed. I promised his sister.”
“That was before he tried to make you a kebob,” James reminded her from where he still leaned by that plastic Day-Glo rosary. He was in jeans now. They were stained along with his latest black T-shirt from where he’d helped Eddie restrain Lloyd.
“He needs to be treated, James. What about Eddie Dupre?” she asked Gilchrist. “Did you talk to him?”
“Yeah. He said he’d been following the suspect. Said he thought Mr. Burgard had been trying to break into his lab to steal babies, and just wanted to catch him at something illegal so he could be put safely away before he did any harm.”
Chastity scowled. “Doesn’t that behavior register on your weirdness meter, Detective?”
Gilchrist shrugged. “Just a bit obsessed himself, is our Eddie. Says nobody at the clinic takes him seriously about the safety of the…uh, babies.”
“He’s also a friend of my sister’s.”
“I know. We’ve already talked to him about that.”
Chastity came as close to snapping to attention as she could. “You have? What has he said? He won’t talk to me.”
“That she wasn’t at his party, and that he never saw the ring on the dead body.”
It betrayed how battered and sore Chastity was that it took her a second to pick up on that. “Dead body?”
Gilchrist actually looked surprised. Chastity had a feeling he hadn’t meant to tell her that. His jowly face darkened.
“That unidentified woman in the bayou,” he finally admitted. “With the ring. There was a report that she was seen in his alley. Dressed as a nun. During his hurricane party.”
Chastity kept blinking, as if that would clear things up. “A nun?”
“It was a costume party,” James offered, fighting a grin.
Chastity glared. “How do you know?”
His grin grew. “You kidding? That party is famous. I would have tried to get in if I hadn’t been busy with a convention.”
Chastity huffed at him, then turned back to the uncomfortable detective. “What happened after they noticed her?”
Gilchrist shrugged. “By the time the investigating officer responded, she was…uh, gone. Showed up later in the swamp.”
Chastity blinked again. “They discovered a nun wearing an emerald the size of a Fig Newton and then just lost her again?”
James chuckled. “You sound surprised. Doesn’t stuff like this happen in St. Louis?”
Chastity glared at him. She wasn’t sure that it was the head injury that was making her dizzy anymore. “Have you checked out Willow Tolliver, Detective?”
“Nothin’ more than the original missing persons report. A warehouse where the homeless squatted burned around the time she disappeared, but it was empty. Word is, she went home to Biloxi.”
“I know. But she had friends at Jackson Square. Tante Edie. Couldn’t you ask her to see if she can make an ID?”
Gilchrist shook his head. “Nothin’ to see. Not enough face, no tattoos, birthmarks…”
Chastity sighed. “And she was in the water awhile. Yeah.”
“Well,” Gilchrist said, flipping the notebook closed. “I’ll let you know if anything else comes up.”
Chastity all but sputtered. “Comes up? Detective, since we first met, another woman from that clinic is dead, and I’ve just been attacked.”
“And we have the guy who did it. As for that woman at the cemetery, I talked to the investigating officers from the Fifth. Nobody in the neighborhood saw anything unusual. No other cars driving up, no extra people. It means it was probably just a local robbery, like they think. The rest”—he shrugged, still looking faintly uncomfortable—“it’s probably a coincidence, ma’am. I’ll let ’em know about Lloyd Burgard, though, just in case.”
It wasn’t a coincidence. Chastity didn’t know how she knew that. Hell, right now she didn’t know how her name was spelled. But she felt it, right in her chest. Everybody was working far too hard to ignore a perfectly recognizable pattern. Chastity just wished she knew what the pattern was.
“You’ll share this information with Detective Dulane from Jefferson Parish?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you’re going to talk to someone at the Arlen Clinic? And New Life Center? Lloyd says he saw Faith taken outside New Life.”
“You were wearing my clothes!” a new voice intervened.
Chastity suddenly felt immeasurably worse. Detective Gilchrist, obviously waiting for a diversion, slid out of that cubicle like a cat burglar.
“Well?” Kareena demanded, hands on denim-and-sequin-clad hips.
Chastity couldn’t even manage a smile. “I thought you were doing the horizontal hoedown with somebody named Earl.”
“I would have if I hadn’t gotten about eight nine-one-ones on my beeper. Everybody but the mayor wanted Kareena to know you was here. And in my clothes!” Kareena was all set to stalk right up to her, when she wrinkled her nose. “You piss yourself in my good clothes, girl?”
“No. I fell out on Bourbon Street.”
That seemed to be all Kareena needed to hear to laugh. “A woman shouldn’t wear fuck-me pumps, she not trained in ’em.”
“I’m just out of practice is all.”
“You could have asked me, ya know.”
Chastity couldn’t face her friend. How could she explain what had happened when she’d seen the picture of that gray-haired man in her brother-in-law’s hand that afternoon? How fast a perfectly controlled person could decompensate and end up doing the ho patrol down on Bourbon.
“You weren’t there,” Chastity said. “I’m sorry.”
“You will be, my clothes smell as bad as you do. You a mess, girl. And you stank.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“They keepin’ you?”<
br />
“Not if I have to walk out of here in my bare feet.”
“You’ll have to do that anyway,” James told her. “You broke Kareena’s shoes.”
Kareena just shook her head like a nanny. “You damn lucky, what Kareena hears. He had three good tries at you, girl.”
Chastity started to shake again. Every time she closed her eyes, she could see the flash of purple and green along that knife blade. She could hear the odd grunting sound Lloyd had made as he’d lunged. And she could smell the stench of sewer that still clung to her. Heck, her life had been just a bouquet of pleasant stimuli since she’d been down here.
“So, who you gonna investigate next?” Kareena asked. “You know, after the room stop spinnin’ and all.”
Chastity closed her eyes. “Nobody,” she said, wishing with all her heart it were true. “I think I’m gonna investigate nobody.”
For the next three days, that was just what she did. She lay curled up in fetal position on her bed in Kareena’s house trying to pretend that that last day hadn’t happened at all. She left assurances of her health with Max, and greetings for Moshika and Lilly on Moshika’s answering machine. Then she ignored her own phone when it rang. She brewed coffee and sat at the kitchen table watching Hurricane Bob inch his way toward Florida and learning more than she ever wanted to about surface pressure and the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Intensity Scale.
The scale Chastity knew was Fujita. Tornadoes. She could measure them like an Olympic judge and knew just how to react. She knew that no matter how bad, the threat would be there and gone so fast that she wouldn’t have to live for endless days being taunted by the building storm as warnings increased and the news promised destruction and loss.
Tornadoes swept through like rage. Hurricanes, it seemed, were bent on much more calculated destruction. They courted, then threatened, then stalked. A more malevolent entity entirely, Chastity decided. And Bob, who shouldn’t have been there at all this early, was stalking her.
Chastity felt the slow, certain approach of all that wind and water, right there in her chest where all dread lived, and for once she couldn’t seem to care. It helped that she could add Vicodin to her round of medications. Sometimes, she decided, listening to the rain once again spatter at her window, it was just a good thing to be a bit hazy. Sometimes it was better if you could just hide away from what was coming.
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