The Lazarus Heart (19 page)

Frank only nods, doesn't turn to see who's spoken.

"Who got here first?" he asks, swallowing hard, struggles against the nauseous acid rising into his throat. It's only a matter of time until he loses, but at least he can say he fought the good fight, and maybe Wallace will cut him a little slack for the effort.

"Me and my partner. We didn't touch nothin'," the cop says. "Of course, with all this goddamn rain, I'm not sure that's gonna matter a whole hell of a lot."

"Who made the call?" Frank asks, biting down hard on his lower lip, a little pain against his rolling stomach.

"Right there," the cop replies, pointing beyond the fountain to an old man in an expensive-looking raincoat and green galoshes. He's sitting on a metal park bench holding a shivering Chihuahua on a leash. The dog is also wearing a raincoat, banana-yellow plastic The pair are completely surrounded by cops with umbrellas, huddled protectively above the old man and his little dog.

"He called 911 about half an hour ago."

Frank holds up one hand to silence the officer and takes a step closer to the fountain.

"They ain't paying me enough for this bullshit," Wallace says somewhere behind him, but Frank can't look away from the water stained the color of cherry Kool-Aid. It's almost like one of those 3-D puzzles, a senseless collage of reds and blacks and whites, and if he could just look at it the right way it might resolve itself into something human, something that might have once been human. A blue-gray loop of bowel, a mat of black hair like a patch of some strange algae, teasing bits that almost make sense of the whole.

"There's some Hefty bags over there," the cop says, and nods toward the gnarled oak on the other side of the fountain. "They've still got some blood and stuff on them, so I'm thinkin' the killer must have used them to haul all this mess here and dump it in the fountain."

Someone tugs at Frank's sleeve. He jumps a little, but it's just Wallace, one hand still covering his mouth and nose, only glancing at the fountain.

"Let's step back a minute, okay, Frank? Give yourself a break. You're starting to look kinda green..."

He pushes Wallace's hand away. Only one more step to the edge of the fountain and he's looking directly down into the stew of rainwater and meat, bone and gristle, organs and muscle hacked apart like butcher's scraps. The wind gusts hard enough that for a second Frank thinks it will lift him like a stray newspaper and toss him high to snag in the branches of the craggy trees or carry him far above the city, far away from the atrocity spread out before him. But when the wind dies down again he's still there.

"Jesus, Frank.
Please
..." Wallace moans. Frank blinks, wipes the polluted rainwater

from his eyes. That's when he sees the writing scrawled along the top edge of the fountain, the clumsy leaning letters in something black and greasy, something the storm can't wash away. Words a foot wide, so that he has to walk around the fountain to read it all. Wallace trails close behind him, cursing Frank and the goddamn weather and the sick son of a bitch who would chop someone up and leave them floating in a city park.

"Poe," Frank says. At last he can look away, as if he's passed some sort of test. He stares up through the swaying limbs into the storm clouds rushing overhead.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Wallace gags on the last word and has to turn away.

"'On the morrow
he
will leave me, '" Frank begins, repeating what he's read in the oil-black graffiti, reciting now from grade school memories. "It's from Poe. You know, 'The Raven? By Edgar Allan Poe? 'On the morrow
he
will leave me as my Hopes have flown before. '"

"Whatever..." Wallace starts and stops, swallows before he can finish. "Whatever you say, Franklin." Then he steps away from the fountain, steps back across the barrier of tape, and vomits into the grass. Frank doesn't move, doesn't take his eyes off the clouds. In a moment he realizes that his head has stopped hurting.

In the kitchen of his big house by the river the man who is Jordan today finishes his breakfast of canned corned beef hash and canned creamed corn as he listens to the radio. The old portable Sony on the counter is the only radio in his house, and he's carefully wrapped all of it except the bent rabbit ears in three layers of aluminum foil, has drawn the appropriate symbols on the foil in red and black Magic Marker so he's absolutely certain there's no danger of errant signals or amplified cosmic rays or subliminal telepathic waves getting through to him from the Outside. He always

keeps it tuned to WWOZ 90. 7 because jazz is the only music he likes, the only music he's relatively certain is free of Their influence.

But now he's listening to the news, mostly reports on the tropical storm that's about to be upgraded to a hurricane. Hurricane Michael. He thinks how appropriate that will be, vengeful heaven sweeping across the Gulf of Mexico toward the seething Babylon of New Orleans. If he really believed in God or gods, he might think of the

storm as a divine reinforcement sent to counter the black bird-thing from his dreams and visions. But he is not a religious man, so the metaphor and its abstract comfort will have to suffice.

Jordan scoops up another forkful of the sweet yellow corn and listens as the soothing male voice reports the discovery of a body in Audubon Park just after dawn. No details. No whisper of the time and skill he expended on the boy, but Jordan has come to expect that sort of carelessness. They're afraid to tell the truth, afraid to scare the masses living always between the rock of Their occupation and the hard place of his resistance.

"Sources indicate that the body was badly mutilated, but New Orleans police have declined to confirm or deny this information at the present. They have also refused to comment on whether or not there may be a connection between this crime and the Bourbon Street Ripper slayings."

That gets a cautious, guarded smile from Jordan, a self-satisfied smile that makes him feel a bit ashamed.
Someone's noticed,
he thinks.
They can try to cover it up, but someone
always
notices.

"In possibly related news," the report says, "the body of Detective James Unger of the Sixth Ward's homicide division was found this morning in his home in Metairie, dead from a single gunshot wound to the head. Sources close to the police department report that Detective Unger may have taken his own life in the wake of his partner's suicide five days ago, though the possibility of foul play has not been ruled out. Both detectives were responsible for the arrest of Jared Poe, who was convicted of the brutal murders that became known as the Bourbon Street Ripper slayings.

"In sports today, the Saints lose their first preseason game-"

Jordan gets up and switches off the radio. He stands by the kitchen counter listening to his heart thudding in his chest, and his head feels light and heavy at the same time. What wrinkle in the game is this? Both the detectives dead, the detectives who had so expertly and unwittingly diverted any suspicion from Jordan, who fell for the clues he left behind in the Ursulines Street apartment. They were dutiful foot soldiers in his war. They got Jared Poe off the street.

They got the fucking pervert killed,
Jordan thinks.
That's what they did.

He knows he should have seen this coming. Dirty little reprisals for his recent actions, and surely something to do with the visions of the black, wicked thing above the city. The thing that is so close now he can feel it watching his every move.

Payback for Jared Poe's death, Their prized evangelist lost to Them, and
someone
has to suffer.

"Fuck," Jordan whispers, his voice unsteady, and he looks down at his hands. They've gone the color of cottage cheese and developed a tremor, but he isn't sure whether he's afraid or just excited that his campaign has drawn such powerful forces out into the open. Perhaps it is even pride that They could fear him so much. That he has hurt Them so badly and They have not attempted to take Their pound of flesh from him, have struck out instead against innocent and ignorant pawns. Men unknowingly in his service, soldiers taking the heat, buying him a little more time.

In the end it will all come down to timing. He knows that. Jordan turns away from the radio and begins clearing the table.

By eleven o'clock Tropical Storm Michael has graduated to Hurricane Michael and the television and radio stations have begun talking about evacuation procedures, breaking into soap operas and talk shows to track the storm's steady westward swath across the Gulf. Satellite pictures of a great white spiral with an ocean-blue cyclops eye, a vast organism of cloud and wind and lashing rain, rushing past Mississippi toward the Louisiana delta, the swamps and the wide, dirty river, all the bayou towns with flooded streets and downed telephone lines. Even the dark ancient powers nestled between rotting cypress stumps and moldering Vieux Carre rooftops take notice of this force and steel themselves against its arrival.

seven

The world's coming undone,
Frank Gray thinks. The thought frightens him so badly that he tries to pretend it's just something he heard someone say once, nothing
he's
responsible for. But that's not the way it feels to him, standing beside his partner in Detective James Unger's kitchen with the storm whipping back and forth beyond the all-too-insubstantial walls of the Metairie house.

In the last twenty-four hours the world has somehow begun to unravel away around Frank like an old sweater, a few loose threads neglected too long and now the whole thing's coming apart at the fucking seams. Something that started with the kid in the bar maybe, the bathroom blow job gone crazy, the first step on a crooked trail that has somehow led him here.

"We should get going," Wallace says. Frank turns to look at him. Wallace looks sick, scared, fed up with this long day of blood and wind that's only half over. "Our asses got no business even bein' way out here."

That was true enough. But when the news about Unger came in from dispatch Frank had to see for himself, to hell with jurisdiction. He knew how important Jim Unger's testimony had been in convicting the man the NOPD sent up for the Bourbon Street killings. And now here's Unger, lying on the floor of his own kitchen with his brains splattered like tapioca all over the linoleum.

"What the hell's going on here, Wally?" Frank asks, but Wallace just sighs and stares out the shattered bay windows. The kitchen is drenched from the blowing rain.

"Jesus, Frank, it's not our case. It's not our goddamn problem what it means." "Maybe not," Frank says.

"Ain't no fuckin' maybe about it, Frank. This is
not
our turf and Unger is
not
our case."

Frank stares back down at the body sprawled on the floor, still half seated in a chair tipped over backward so that its bare knees are aimed at the ceiling, the butt of the revolver protruding from what's left of its mouth.

"We got enough trouble of our own to worry about with that bullshit back at the fountain."

"Just think about it a second, Wally-"

But Wallace has him firmly by the arm and he's already leading Frank out of the house, past the annoyed-looking Jefferson Parish cops and the ambulance in the driveway, back to their car, parked by the curb.

"You didn't even
like
that son of a bitch, Frank," Wallace says as he opens his door. Frank's still standing in the rain, staring back at the house, trying to put the pieces together in his head. Trying to find a resolution for the basic contradictions and apparent coincidences bouncing around in his skull. Finally Wallace tells him to just get in the goddamn car, so he opens the passenger door and slides in as the Ford coughs noisily to life.

"So you gonna tell me what that was all about?" Wallace asks, pulling away from the dead man's house. The wipers come on, swiping like skeletal wings from one side of the windshield to the other, but they're practically useless in the downpour.

"I'm not sure," Frank says.

"Come on, Frank. Don't make me beg. My ass is cold and wet and I'm not in the mood for it today."

The entire world, unraveling like an old sweater,
Frank thinks again. Never mind the care, the paranoid calculation, that he's put into keeping it all together for so long.

"Do you think Jared Poe was the Ripper?" he asks as Wallace stops for a red light. "Do I. . . " Wallace begins. Then the light changes, a vivid blur of emerald green

through the rain. They cross the intersection carefully, heading back toward I-10 and the city.

"Oh, I see," Wallace says, wiping condensation from the windshield with one hand. "You think Jim Unger poppin' hisself has something to do with this morning."

Frank wants a cigarette but he knows that Wallace is trying to quit and so he doesn't reach for the half-empty pack of Luckies in his shirt pocket.

"First," he says, "Poe goes to prison and the killings don't stop. I mean, yeah, okay, they stop for what? A few weeks or a month?"

"You ever heard of a copycat killer, Frank?"

"That's what I thought too. But that shit about the poetry they found with Benjamin DuBois's body, that never showed up in the press, Wally."

"You've lost me, Franklin," Wallace says as the Ford glides up the entrance ramp onto the interstate. "Man, I cannot see
shit
out here."

"There was a copy of 'The Raven' by Edgar Allan Poe found with DuBois's body.

Some lines were marked . .."

"You're sayin' that shit written on the fountain was from the same poem." "Yeah," Frank replies. "It was."

"And you want to know how the copycat knows about the poem from the DuBois case."

Frank fishes the Luckies from his pocket and punches the car's cigarette lighter. "I'm sorry, man," he says, but Wallace shakes his head.

"It's been what, a week since Poe was killed up at Angola, right?" Frank says, taking a cigarette from the pack and putting the rest back in his pocket.

"Yeah," Wallace answers, cracking his window. The air rushing in makes a loud, unpleasant sound, and they both flinch at the icy drops of rain sucked into the car. "That's about right."