City of the Dead

by Eileen Dreyer

  “You’re getting way too comfortable smashing through things,” he informed her.

  “Think of it this way,” Chastity said with a nervous chuckle, “the police won’t have any trouble finding us now.”

  Then they turned onto Faith’s street, and Chastity thought maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe she hadn’t run out of luck. She didn’t see any car in the street.

  But Max was there. She realized it as she coasted past the house to see that the garage door was half up. The power must have gone out just as he’d parked. Both cars were tucked away in the garage, right where the police could find them.

  If the police ever got there.

  If anybody had ever managed to call Obie Gaudet.

  At least Faith wasn’t there.

  Chastity was just about to turn the car around and wait for Faith out by the subdivision entrance, when the storm paused, just for a second. Just long enough for Chastity to hear the gunshot.

  And the scream.

  Twenty-Six

  Chastity’s first instinct was to throw open the cab door and run for the house. But she knew it wouldn’t do any good. She still didn’t have a weapon. She had James bleeding all over the passenger seat. And she had no idea what was going on inside that house. She couldn’t even see the front door from where they sat, just beyond the garage at the bottom of the downhill slope.

  “Chastity…”

  She couldn’t take her eyes off the cars in that garage. Max had said he’d stashed shovels in those cars.

  Those cars were one doorway away from the inside of the house, and Max still didn’t know she was coming.

  “Anybody comes, James, flag ’em down,” Chastity said, as if he really would be able to.

  Throwing open the cab door, she sprinted through the rain for the garage. She was drenched by the time she got there, the rain running in small streams down the street and pooling by the curbs. She didn’t notice. She only had eyes for those cars.

  Skidding to a sloppy halt at the garage door, she dropped into more water and squirmed beneath the half-open door. At least the floor was clean. Hell, the entire garage was clean, with nothing more than a lawn mower and an extra bag of grass seed tucked into a corner to show it was used.

  Max could have made it easier for her, Chastity thought as she surveyed empty walls and small drawers filled with nothing but nails and screws. Not even a hammer.

  She shook her head. Another stage he’d set. The suburban husband, who really didn’t live here.

  So it was to be the shovel in the trunk after all. Chastity approached the BMW, prepared to get complicated, only to find that the doctor had finally made a mistake.

  God bless men who thought they were superior. He’d left the damn car door unlocked. Chastity was just about to reach in and find the trunk release, when she heard voices on the other side of the door into the house. She stopped, her heart stuttering all over again, terrified that the door was about to open.

  It didn’t.

  Edging closer, just for a moment, Chastity listened hard for a woman’s voice. For Faith’s voice. For the proof that she wasn’t already too late.

  There.

  The words were sharp, high-pitched. Desperate. But they were Faith’s. Chastity didn’t waste another moment. She returned to her search so that she could, please God, stop Max before he hurt Faith.

  He wouldn’t hurt her in his own house, where he’d leave evidence, even if he was going to flee. He’d spent too much time eliminating evidence to get sloppy now. He’d have to come into the garage so he could force Faith into a car.

  Well, Chastity would be waiting.

  With a shovel.

  Taking a tight breath and wiping her hands on her slacks again, Chastity returned to the BMW. It took her mere moments to find the trunk release. Her hands were shaking, and she was wheezing again, something she thought she’d never done in her life, but she heard that click and knew that Max was about to meet the surprise of his life.

  She crept around to the trunk and lifted it, and almost swore out loud.

  Luggage.

  Shit. Of course. Max had been tailing everybody in the black car. He wouldn’t have left any evidence in his own. He’d much rather prepare that for his trip to the country that didn’t extradite.

  Chastity had thought that once she got past all that water, her heart would settle down. She’d stop sweating. Her stomach would right itself. Instead she felt as if she’d been thrown blindfolded onto a roller coaster. She was a veteran of stress, of surprises, of danger. But her body had been in fight-or-flight mode for at least six hours, and she was just wearing out from it.

  And then there was the pesky problem of her murderous brother-in-law, who probably had at least one gun, if not two pistols and a shotgun, in that house.

  She kept searching anyway. There wasn’t anything else she could do. Keeping an ear out for any activity on the other side of the door into the house, Chastity crept over to the Cadillac.

  Max had obviously finished his preparations. The cover had been taken off and carefully folded away. The car itself was not only unlocked, the trunk was already popped. And inside, just as Max had promised, lay a shovel, some rope, a cinder block, and a folded-up body bag. The complete Lacey Peterson Disposal Kit.

  Chastity ignored the rest. She hefted the shovel in her hands and headed for the door into the house.

  She’d just reached it when she heard the slam of another door.

  The front door.

  “Help!”

  Faith.

  Chastity spun on her heel and made for the garage door.

  “Get back here, you stupid bitch! You’re not going anywhere!”

  Faith raced across the lawn like a track star, screaming. Max evidently had no desire to leave the front porch.

  “Are you kidding?” he taunted. “Nobody’s here anymore. Nobody’s going to—”

  There was a sudden total silence and the sound of shoes skidding across the grass.

  “Son of a bitch!” Max growled. “Where did you come from?”

  The element of surprise was obviously gone.

  Chastity crouched to peek under the door and saw Faith hurdle toward the cab.

  “Let me in!” she screamed.

  She was bleeding from the scalp, and the rain plastered her clothes against her. She was shaking and swearing and tugging on the driver’s-side door. And ten feet away, Max was standing there with a .45 in his hand, looking at the cab in stunned disbelief.

  Well, that wasn’t going to last long.

  At least, Chastity thought, he hadn’t seen her yet. She might still be able to surprise him. Sneak up behind him and whack him up the side of the head with her shovel, and then whack him again. Then whack her father, because she knew he had to be here, too. This nightmare simply wouldn’t be complete without him.

  Chastity bent low to keep Max in sight. She lifted the shovel clear of the ground so it wouldn’t make any noise. Holding her breath, she waited as he walked down the lawn, his attention on the cab. He didn’t even see that there was someone not ten feet away peeking out from beneath the garage door.

  She didn’t move until his back was to her. Then, with another quick peek to the porch to make sure her father wouldn’t appear and check her forward momentum, she slithered out under the door.

  “What do you think you’re going to do, Faith?” Max jeered as he stalked his wife. “Escape?”

  Faith had finally yanked the cab door open. James was still sitting slumped in the passenger seat, his eyes half open. Max slowed, bent over to peer inside. At his wife. In the driver’s seat.

  “Where is she?” he yelled, straightening.

  He’d obviously realized that Chastity was missing.

  Ten feet behind him, Chastity had just gained her feet. Straightening, she hefted the shovel in both hands. Inside the cab, Faith yelled something. She’d obviously just realized that there was no ignition key. One of the few moments in life when it paid to have li
ved on the streets, Chastity figured. Faith would never be able to boost that cab.

  Well, at least they had some kind of protection in there. Chastity had none. And Max was finally getting the idea that he wasn’t the only one on that driveway. Sniffing, as if catching her scent in the air, he began to turn.

  Chastity didn’t wait for him. She only had ten feet to cross. She had a shovel in her hands. She shifted it so she could start her windup. Eyeing the side of his head as if it were a major league baseball, she started to run.

  Max swung the gun around at her just as she started her backswing.

  “You are the most annoying—”

  Chastity felt the thud before she heard the report. Then the clang, simultaneously, as the shovel damn near flew from her hand.

  He’d hit the shovel and it had ricocheted and hit her.

  How stupid, she thought. Her left arm. He’d shot her left arm, so she’d be a matched set with James.

  It just about stopped her.

  Not quite, though. She wasn’t hurting yet. She knew she would, so she had to act now. She had to stop him before he killed her.

  Max was sighting again. Chastity could see James struggling to get the door to the cab open, as if he could help. She could hear Faith shrieking, as if that would help even more.

  She couldn’t think of that, though. Max was pointing the gun again and he was smiling. That smile a man got when he knew a woman wasn’t going to stop him.

  Chastity hated that smile.

  Max figured she couldn’t win. After all, he had a gun. She had a shovel and one good arm. He was going to take his time and kill her long before she could do anything to prevent it.

  But then, he only knew how Faith reacted to things. He really didn’t know Chastity. He didn’t know that she’d just driven a car right over the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.

  He did when she swung.

  Screw her bleeding arm. Screw the rain that pelted down on them, and the wind that whined along the chimneys, and the thunder that rolled up and down the river only a few miles away. Chastity swung for the fences. And Max, tightening his finger on the trigger, thought he had time.

  Chastity heard a bone crunch when she slammed that shovel against his right hand. The gun flew free, skidding across the driveway toward the garage. Max howled, both in pain and outrage. He lunged for her.

  Chastity planted her feet and shoved the point of the shovel into his chest like a lance. He howled again. He fell back, just enough. Chastity hoped like hell she’d broken at least a couple of ribs, if not his sternum.

  She swung the shovel again, and she swung it with everything she had. She slammed it against the side of that square-jawed, gray-haired head so hard that Max not only fell, he rolled right off the lawn and lay still in the street a good fifteen feet away.

  “Oh, good,” James said from where he was half falling out of the cab. “I don’t have to save you after all.”

  Soaked and shaking and suddenly hurting like hell, Chastity laughed. “Faith!” she yelled. “Get back inside and call nine-one-one.”

  “I…can’t!” Faith wailed, still curled up on the front seat of the cab.

  Chastity dropped the shovel in exchange for the .45 that was still lying by the garage door. She almost passed out from the pain, but the weight of the gun was reassuring. She picked it up.

  “He’s not going to hurt you, Faith,” Chastity promised. “I have the gun. He can’t beat a gun.”

  “Have you ever actually shot anybody?” James asked, eyes closed, elbows on knees.

  “It’s a forty-five, James. I only have to be in the general vicinity. C’mon, Faith! I have to watch Max. You have to call for help!”

  Chastity didn’t want to admit that she was only barely still on her feet. She couldn’t imagine how James had lasted this long if he felt any part of as hurting as she did. And she was bleeding. It dripped off her hand onto the driveway and washed away in the rain.

  But she balanced that .45 in her right hand and lifted it until it pointed right at Max’s unconscious head.

  “Faith, come on!” she yelled again.

  Faith was whimpering. Chastity could see that her face was bruised and her head bleeding from several places. She was shaking. But she finally pulled herself from the safety of the car and splashed through the water toward the house.

  “You think you should check and see if he’s still alive?” James asked, looking back at the crumpled form of Chastity’s brother-in-law.

  “I’m not getting that close.”

  She didn’t need to. She had a gun, and Max didn’t. She had Faith going to get the police. She’d made it through the water whole. She felt the success of it begin to swell in her throat. She watched Faith trudge up the lawn, and she thought, finally, it’s over. She’d made it.

  She was just about to say that to James, when she was forcefully reminded that she wasn’t finished after all.

  “Is he dead?” a new voice demanded.

  Chastity spun toward the front door, and her stomach hit the ground. Her throat closed up all over again, and she suddenly felt five years old. Small and shivery and afraid.

  She had a .45 in her hand, and she felt helpless.

  Her father was standing there, just out of the rain on the porch, and Chastity was frozen in place.

  In the end, Max had been easy. It was her father who was hard.

  “Chastity?”

  She realized when she heard James’s voice that she was pointing the gun directly at her father.

  “Chastity, you don’t want to shoot him.”

  Chastity started at that. No, of course she didn’t. She just wanted to protect herself. For once in her sorry excuse for a life, she wanted to make sure he didn’t touch her.

  He was standing there on the porch in his white shirt and black pants, his same old square-jawed, handsome self. Innocuous. He’d always been innocuous, so that it even took a jury five days of deliberation to convict him of destroying his children. And even then some of the jurors had looked uncertain.

  But then, Chastity had long since realized that the most terrible evils wore a familiar face.

  It was his hands, though, that most terrified her. Those broad-fingered, manicured hands that had splayed out over her face and pushed her down. Held her as he’d laughed until the water rushed into her nose and mouth and choked her, until she’d closed her eyes and her mouth and prayed for an escape that never came.

  If she shot anything, it would be his left hand.

  Faith ran right by him, patting him on the shoulder as she did so, and Chastity fought a fresh wave of betrayal.

  “Chastity?”

  Her father was watching her now, his eyes wide and disbelieving, his hands up a little, as if warding her off. As if protecting himself from her, when she was the one who was helpless.

  “Chastity,” James said behind her, “somebody must have gotten hold of the police.”

  Chastity didn’t turn to him. But she heard. Sirens. Swooping close. Coming to save her, finally. Coming to put an end to the whole fiasco.

  She’d thought she was finished, and now she wasn’t so sure.

  Because her father still stood there.

  “I tried to help you,” he said, his voice almost a whine. “I tried to save you.”

  Just beyond him, Faith stopped and turned. “You did not.”

  “Chastity,” he amended. “I tried to help Chastity. I couldn’t just let him leave her out there.”

  “But you could let him pummel me like a punching bag?” Faith shrilled.

  He didn’t meet her gaze. “I’ve tried my best.”

  Which was, oddly, when his power shattered. Chastity was standing there pointing a gun at him, terrified of him, wanting so hard to run from him, when he said that.

  When he lifted his hands like a supplicant and whined.

  That was when she realized just how pathetic her father was.

  Here she’d been running from him her whole life, this mo
nster who was too big to ever escape, and he was the one who was the failure. He wasn’t just innocuous. He was ineffectual. A coward and a loser. He preyed on children because he didn’t have the courage to face adults.

  He would never be different. But she’d crossed the Pontchartrain Causeway.

  Chastity was just making up her mind to drop her gun, when Faith screamed.

  “Chastity!” James yelled behind her.

  Chastity heard it at the same time. She spun and fired and hit Max just as he reared up for her. He staggered, a hand lifting to his side as it blossomed red.

  “You know,” Chastity said almost conversationally, “you just don’t want to piss me off right now.”

  “You shot him!” Faith screeched, running back down the lawn.

  Max scowled, as if he couldn’t believe Chastity had actually won. “Stupid…bitch…”

  Then he fell right back where he’d been before.

  “Yeah,” Chastity answered, “but right now, the stupid bitch is in charge.”

  Faith stopped within a couple of feet of Chastity, her hands fluttering about as if she could somehow do something.

  “Leave him there,” Chastity said, turning back to her father and leveling that gun once again.

  Savoring the flinch in his features.

  It was nice to finally feel as if she had the upper hand, she realized. Maybe James wasn’t so far off the mark. Maybe she did want to kill her father. Or maybe she just wanted to geld him.

  She thought about that for a few minutes as they all stood there facing her father and waiting for the police cruisers to swing through what was left of the wrought iron gates a block away. She heard tires screeching and car doors slamming and weapons cocking. Somebody even racked a shotgun.

  “Ms. Byrnes?” that familiar gravelly voice asked. “That you with that gun?”

  The police were here. Obie Gaudet had come to play.

  “So, somebody did get hold of you, Sergeant,” she said, still facing her father, whose hands were now up as if she were robbing him of his wallet.

  “They sure did. We’ve been tracking you across the city like Bonnie Parker, Ms. Byrnes.”