The Lazarus Heart (23 page)

"Benjamin DuBoisl" the man howls above the wind. He's stooping now, peering in at Harrod through the hole he's made in the windshield. "What does that name
mean
to you, you fucking coward?"

"It means you're a dead son of a bitch," Harrod says. He shoves the revolver through the hole and pulls the trigger and the gun goes off in the man's face.

"Fuck,"
Harrod grunts, wiping blood from his eyes, blinking through a blurry, red haze. The man in the mask is on his knees now, one hand covering his face; blood drips between his fingers, runs across the hood of the car.

"Now,
you goddamn freak," Harrod growls. "Now maybe you'll tell me what the fuck you want."

The man lowers his hand slowly and there's a neat hole in the mask, right between his eyes. Blood flows from the eyeholes of the mask like tears.

"For you to be waiting for me, Harrod," the man says, raising the shotgun again. "For you to
be
there waiting for me when I get back to hell."

The last thing John Henry Harrod sees is the barrel of the Remington 870P sliding in through the hole in the windshield, raindrops glistening on steel. He closes his eyes before the thunder.

Jared lies curled on the hood of the black car, his finger still wrapped tightly around the trigger of the shotgun. He never thought there could be pain like the pain behind his eyes, the hurt filling up his skull. The hit he took inside the cottage was nothing by comparison, an irrelevant, dull ache next to the pain in his head. He moves and the world spins. He is still again.

But the son of a bitch is dead.
This is a small comfort, an aspirin for an amputation. Jared cranes to see the stump of Harrod's neck, a jagged few inches of spine jutting out between dead shoulders and then
nothing,
nothing but the gore dripping from the ceiling of the car. Everything inside the Oldsmobile seems to be covered in a fine crimson mist, a fog of blood and brains and vaporized bone. The only thing he can recognize as human is one ear stuck to the mangled headrest of the driver's seat.

Jared hears the crow before he sees her, the hoarse caw cutting through the whistling wind before she lights in front of him. She stares at him a moment, then stabs the hood of the car once with her ebony dagger beak.

"You have to get out of there," Lucrece says, and the crow pecks the metal again. "He's dead, Lucrece. I killed him," he whispers to the crow. "He's dead."

"That doesn't matter now, Jared," Lucrece replies, her voice urgent, firm, frightened. "There will be cops coming soon. They can't find you there. Get up. Get moving ..."

He closes his eyes. The afterimage left by the pistol is still there, waiting, an orange smudge in the pale dark. Lucrece doesn't say anything more.

When he opens his eyes again, the crow is gone. Her insistent beak has left a small dent in the hood, a flake of paint missing and the gray primer showing through. Jared bites his tongue against the pain and drags himself off the car.

Lucrece is sitting alone at the kitchen table when she hears footsteps somewhere in the apartment. She's been clutching a single black feather for almost two hours now, a feather she found on the bedspread after she came back from the Eye of Horus.

She's still surprised that it worked, that the bridge between the crow and Jared was strong enough, that
she
was strong enough to make an actual telepathic connection. If it even
was
anything as simple as telepathy. All Lucrece is really certain of right now is the terrible vertigo and disarming emptiness that the effort left coiled inside her. That, and her relief at hearing Jared's voice again.

"I'm in here," she calls out, pushing her chair back from the table. There are more footsteps and the flutter of wings, so she tries to stand, has to steady herself against one corner of the table.

Christ, maybe I broke something in my brain,
she thinks, fighting back a sudden wave of nausea. From the bedroom, there's the sound of breaking glass and Jared cursing.

"C'mon, you pussy," she tells herself. This time she manages to make it all the way to the living room doorway before she has to stop and brace herself against a wall to keep from falling on her ass.

"We gotta get you a goddamn cell phone, Jared Poe," she says, and laughs, but it's a hollow, anxious sort of laugh. "I don't think I want to try that particular trick again."

Another ten feet and she's made it all the way into the bedroom. Jared is lying facedown on the canopy bed with the crow standing over him, faithful as a television watchdog. The bird glances up at Lucrece and caws once.

Jesus, so much fucking blood,
she thinks, flashing back on the first time she walked into the room after Benny's death-it's not
that
bad, but it's bad enough. Bad enough to trigger a lingering déjà vu that leaves her feeling even more queasy and disoriented.

"I'm not dead," Jared croaks, the way someone with a really bad hangover whispers, as if he's afraid even his voice will break the world. "I'm still not dead."

"Shhh . . . don't talk, Jared." She tries not to sound as frightened as she is, tries not to look away. But there's a hole in the back of his head that she could put her fist into, a shattered rim of white bone matted with drying blood and hair and clinging bits of gray matter.

Lucrece sits down on the bed beside him. She readies for his hand and he clutches hers, squeezes so hard that it hurts, but she doesn't say anything. She just squeezes back as hard as she can, and the crow looks at her approvingly.

"It's not as bad as it looks," Jared says, tries to laugh and starts coughing instead. "You weren't supposed to go after them," Lucrece says. She only realizes that

she's crying when she tastes a drop of salty water at one corner of her mouth. "The crow is here to protect you, Jared. But she can't, not if you-"

"But they're
dead"
Jared says, interrupting her. Then he rolls slightly to one side so that Lucrece can see the carnival mask still strapped around his face and the place where the bullet went in-a small black hole, no bigger than a dime. The blood vessels in his eyes have hemorrhaged, the scleral whites turned red, and his pupils are huge and dilated. Those terrible, hurting eyes and the mask, but there's nothing left that she can recognize as Jared. Only his voice, and even that seems somehow changed, older and some of the anger drained away, and whatever's left behind is much darker. Much more dangerous.

"And I can't be sorry for that. I don't give a fuck . . .
what
I was supposed to do . . .

I can't be sorry for that."

"You don't have to be sorry, Jared," she says, wishes she weren't crying, wishes he didn't have to see her cry. "But the person who killed Benny is still
out
there, and
that's
why you've come back. Not to get your fool head blown off trying to settle all these old scores with the whole goddamn world."

"The bird hasn't exactly been much help with the main matter," he says, and closes his eyes, and she's glad not to have to look into them, ashamed of her relief but relieved anyway.

"It's not her fault," Lucrece says. "I think there's something
wrong
about the killer.

Something that's getting in the way."

"You said that already," Jared mumbles. "Last night."

"The police found another one this morning. A body in the fountain in Audubon Park. The news didn't have a lot of details, but it's him, Jared. I know it's him."

"I'm not a goddamn detective, Lucrece. I don't know how to track down a serial killer.

I was just a photographer.. ."

"Then you have to find someone who
is
a detective. The cop who's handling this new murder, maybe him . . ."

Jared's grip on her hand relaxes suddenly, unexpectedly, and his eyelids flutter. "Jared? What's happening?"

"Maybe I'm dying," he says, so quietly that she barely catches his voice over the wind howling down Ursulines Street. "Maybe I screwed up, and that's the only chance I get."

The crow caws again and Lucrece moves closer to Jared. She brushes his hair back from his face, and when she begins to remove the mask he flinches, tenses, but doesn't stop her from doing it.

"I'm not going to hurt you, Jared."

Underneath the mask Jared's face is streaked with gore and dirt and there are livid bruises around both his eyes. His nose has been bleeding and there's a crust of dried blood caked around his nostrils.

"I'm going to clean you up a little, that's all." Lucrece looks past Jared to the crow. She can still hear its thoughts. She follows its instructions exactly, moving slowly, and Jared lets her. The cutting on her back tingles, the scars in the shape of a crow, as they did when they were fresh and just beginning to heal.

"We're going to help you, both of us. And you'll find the son of a bitch who killed Benny."

"One way or another," Jared whispers.

"One way or another," Lucrece replies, and drops the ruined mask to the bedroom floor.

eight

The bad scene in Audubon Park was the perfectly shitty start to a perfectly shitty day. It's past three in the afternoon now and the hangover has found Frank again, even though he's already slipped into the bathroom twice for hits off the bottle of Jack Daniels he always keeps tucked safe inside his locker. Otherwise he's just been sitting at his desk since he and Wallace got back from Metairie, pretending to make some sort of progress with the day's paperwork, the report on the murder in Audubon Park and stuff he should have finished days ago. His head feels like an overripe melon, ready to burst from its own weight.

"So you really gonna skip out on the party at the chamber of horrors this evening?" Wallace asks. Frank opens one eye, glares past his typewriter and the clutter of unfinished reports and carbon paper. By comparison, Wallace's desk is an exercise in obsessive neatness, more like some spinster librarian's desk than a cop's. Just the sight of those pathologically neat stacks and the freshly sharpened pencils in a souvenir Saints mug makes Frank want to punch his partner in the face.

"I think you and Tierney can probably handle the fucking autopsy without me," he says. Wallace shrugs.

"Shit, I don't even know what's left to autopsy, Frank. I mean, how's she gonna cut that mess up any more?"

Frank shakes three cherry Maalox tablets from a plastic bottle, four Bayer extra- strength from another, and pops all seven at once, chews them dry.

"That's disgusting, Frank," Wallace says, and starts typing again. Every time a key strikes paper Frank thinks that's the final straw and his head's going to pop.

"Jesus, Wally. Can't that wait?"

"I ain't gettin' behind with all this shit just 'cause you have a hangover, Frank." "You're a damned considerate fuck, Wally," Frank says around the powdery

mouthful of aspirin and antacid. He closes his eyes again and swallows the mess. "Anyway," Wallace says, "if the evac orders come through, nobody'll be doing

anything but wadin' outta here."

That morning the National Hurricane Center had posted a hurricane warning for most of southeastern Louisiana, from the coast as far inland as

Baton Rouge. Michael was due to make landfall sometime between midnight and one A.M., unless they got lucky and the storm decided to kick the shit out of east Texas instead.

"One can always hope," Frank mutters. His mouth feels like he's just eaten a handful of bitter cherry-flavored chalk. He decides it's been long enough since the last drink for him to deserve another.

"I'm gonna go puke," he says, standing up, and Wallace just nods and keeps pecking away on his old Royal manual.

"Thanks for caring."

"Sure thing, Franklin," Wallace says and hits the return lever. The Royal's carriage pings and slams violently to the left.

"One day that piece of shit's gonna take off all your fingers, Wally," he says, and staggers toward the toilet.

The cloying smells of stale piss and bright green deodorant cakes burn Frank's sinuses. For a few precarious moments he thinks maybe he really will puke. He leans against the sink and stares at the face in the mirror. Frank hasn't shaved since the day before, and his skin is the color of raw oysters. There are little beads of sweat on his forehead and upper lip, bags under his eyes that could pass for bruises.

"You're not lookin' so great, Frankie," he says, and turns the hot-water knob. The faucet whistles and then makes an ugly coughing noise before it starts spitting icy, rust- stained water. Frank dips his hands into the sink, splashes his face with the stuff. It smells like mud but it feels good. When he looks back up at the mirror, though, he can't say that he looks any better-just wetter.

"You're a fucking slob," he tells himself
"That's
what you are."

Frank takes the half-pint of bourbon from the inside pocket of his blazer and unscrews the cap. "Cheers," he says, offering a mercy toast to the sick-looking guy in the mirror. That's when he sees the bird perched on top of one of the stalls, watching him. A huge black crow like something from an old Hammer horror film. Frank almost drops the bottle.

"I need to talk to you, Frank Gray." For just a second Frank thinks the bird said that, the long second that it takes him to turn around and see the man in the black latex coat sitting beneath the room's single small window.

The man's wearing a leather hood, open zippers where the eyes and mouth should be, a slit for the nose. Frank thinks he saw something like it in a bondage magazine once.

"Who the fuck are you?" Frank reaches for his gun, stops halfway when the man pulls the shotgun out from under his coat and pumps it once.

"Please," the man says. "I've had enough of that shit today. All I want to do is talk to you. I swear."

"Jesus," Frank whispers, glancing at the door, at least five yards away. There's no way he could make it without getting his head blown off. "Someone else could walk through that door at any second. What are you gonna do then?"

"Deal with it when it happens," the man replies.