The Lazarus Heart (25 page)

An old black woman-Julianna, who sold his mother tomatoes-said he wasn't right after that. She told his mother there was something bad inside him and that she knew a voodoo man in the bayou who could make him right again. That was the last time his mother bought Julianna's big red tomatoes or green frying tomatoes. But his mother looked at him differently, like she knew that everything the old woman had said was true.

The faggot cop will come,
he thinks.
Not because he really cares who I am, but because he's afraid of what I know and what I might do with that knowledge. The same reason They're all afraid of me. Because I'm the man ...

A red Volkswagen sputters noisily past the pay phone, spraying muddy water from the flooded parking lot all over Joseph Lethe's shoes. He watches it go, stands there expressionless, water soaking right through his socks to his feet. Then he wipes his hands on his raincoat, and, safe in his knowledge and resolve, safe from the black wings spread above the drowning city, he crosses Napoleon Avenue to his car.

Lucrece is sitting on the couch in the living room paging through one of Benny's old
Sandman
comic books. There's nothing else she can do and so she's been sitting here for almost an hour pretending to read her dead brother's comics. But she's having trouble making any sense of the story; something about the King of Dreams and his crazy little sister looking for their lost brother. And there's a raven named Matthew. But she's having trouble following the plot from one issue to the next, her head too full of Jared, too full of waiting. The radio was on earlier but they weren't playing any music, just going on and on about the storm, so she finally turned it off. There's nothing she really needs to know about the hurricane that she can't hear through the plaster-and-stucco walls of the apartment. It's not as if she can run from it, can join the exodus that's already begun from the Quarter. So she'd rather not know the latest facts and figures, thank you very much, wind speed and expected landfall, tidal surge. She puts on a CD instead, Black Tape for a Blue Girl's
Remnants of a Deeper Purity.
The strings and keyboards haven't helped her relax as she hoped they might, but they are a better backdrop for the sound of the storm than the anxious voices on the radio. The music makes her drowsy and she thinks about trying to sleep. It's been almost two days now since she's slept or eaten or bathed.

But Jared's out there somewhere, so there's no way she can sleep. She has to stop herself from trying to send her mind out to find him every five minutes. Her nose has been bleeding off and on, and her head still hurts from the last time.

There's a hard knock at the door. Lucrece jumps, almost cries out. But it's probably just the cops, she thinks, or the Red Cross or someone like that, someone to tell her she has to leave, and she isn't sure how she's going to convince them that she can't. That she has to stay, has to be here for Jared, never mind the goddamn storm.

She lays the comic book on the coffee table and gets up off the couch, smooths the wrinkles from her black dress without thinking. Whoever's out there knocks again, impatient, and Lucrece shouts at the door, "Just a minute."

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.
..

"Jesus, girl. Give that tired old shit a rest, okay?" she mutters to herself, and crosses the room to the door.

It takes Frank almost half an hour to reach the address on Tchoupitoulas Street that Joseph Lethe gave him. The streets are flooding and already there are fatigue- green National Guard trucks and soldiers at roadblocks. His badge gets him through, but the wind buffets his car like a toy. Driving against the storm is like running in a nightmare, racing something huge and terrible that's right behind you and gaining, and your feet weigh at
least
three hundred pounds each. Only in this dream there are fallen trees and downed power lines, stalled cars and accidents, that have to be circumnavigated.

So instead of the fifteen minutes the man on the phone gave him, it takes Frank half an hour. And then there's nothing at the address but a vacant, weedy lot with one withered chinaberry tree separating it from the street. Frank parks against the curb and sits staring out at the tree, cursing the fucking storm and his fucking luck. Then there's a brilliant flash of lightning and he sees something silvery nailed to the trunk of the tree, flapping furiously in the wind.

I was struck
. . .

Frank gets out of the car. The storm drags at him, claws at his clothes and hair with invisible, windy fingers, as if it would rather he not see whatever's stuck to the tree. But it's only a deflated Mylar balloon; it was once shaped like a heart and he can still read FOREVER in big red letters. The balloon has been ripped open, flattened, and there's a plastic sandwich bag stapled to it.

Frank tears the bag free. The Mylar comes off too and is swallowed instantly by the storm. The hurricane tugs hungrily at the plastic bag in his hand as he heads back to the car, already drenched straight through his raincoat.

Inside his car the howling wind is muffled.
Muzzled,
Frank thinks, locking the door.

Inside the sandwich bag there's a folded page torn from a yellow legal pad. Frank removes it, unfolds it, smooths the page flat against the car seat. The paper is wet but the writing on it is in pencil, so that doesn't really matter. And it's only another address and another time, someplace on Millaudon Street on the other side of Audubon Park.

"Shit," he hisses and slaps his hand loudly against the sun-cracked dashboard. He remembers that day years ago in the Iberville projects when Linda Getty nearly bled to death while he shouted "Ten-thirteen!" repeatedly into the handset of his patrol car's radio. He remembers no one answering him, all because Linda was a dyke and they wanted her off the force. What if all of it, the phone call and that weirdo fucker in the crapper,
all
of it, is just a goddamn practical joke? Or worse. What if they
know?

A branch comes off the chinaberry tree and crashes down onto the windshield, leaving a crack three or four inches long in the glass before the wind snatches it away again. Frank turns the key in the ignition, starts the car again, and pulls quickly away from the vacant lot before the storm brings the whole damn tree down on top of him.

You're gettin' paranoid, Frank.

"Maybe so," he says, and makes a wide U-turn on Tchoupitoulas, heading west toward the park. "And maybe not." His voice
sounds
brave, sounds certain, as confident as all the television cops of his childhood. But the fear filling up his belly and the prickling sensation on the back of his neck say otherwise. And a small but strident

voice deep inside is telling him to get the hell out while the getting's good, that there's a fucking
hurricane
coming, for Christ's sake, and it's not like anyone would really blame him if he just let this one go for now.

Unless you want the photographs to go to the media,
the voice on the phone said. Frank doesn't think there
are
any pictures, but he can't be
sure.
He knows that he has no choice after all, that his apprehension is useless because it is irrelevant. That he's going to do whatever Joseph Lethe tells him because he has made secrets of his life, secrets that can maim, and now they're being held against his throat. He squints through the windshield as the useless wipers flail, and follows the unsteady beams of the headlights.

"Please tell me what you want," Lucrece whispers, hating that she sounds so scared. The hand in the latex glove slaps her again, slaps her so hard her mouth is full of blood. She lets it run down her chin rather than swallow it. The taste of her own blood has always made her sick.

"I ask you
the questions," the man says. "That's the
rule."
The man with eyes the color of stone is kneeling over her, checking the knots he's made with the white nylon rope, the knots that bind her wrists and ankles tight. He has a pistol pressed hard against the soft spot just below her breastbone.

"I know who you are," she says. He pauses and looks back at her from beneath the greasy, dangling hair that keeps falling across his face. He brushes his bangs out of the way again, exposing his thin, hatchet-sharp face. He looks excited and expectant, and his hands are shaking.

"You're the sick son of a bitch who killed my brother," Lucrece says.

"I'm so much more than that," the man replies, and a nervous, shy smile creeps slowly across his face. "But you already know that
too,
don't you? I'm sure They've told you everything about me."

"Jared died because of you," she whispers, flinching, expecting the hand again. But the man only smiles a little wider and hides his mouth with the latex-covered fingers of his free hand, as if he's suddenly realized that he's smiling and he doesn't want her to see, doesn't want her to know his excitement or the pleasure he's taking in this scene.

He moves his hand, slowly, and he isn't smiling anymore.

"Did They also tell you that it wasn't supposed to be your brother? Did They tell you it was
supposed
to be you and I sort of fucked things up?"

Lucrece shuts her eyes, not wanting to believe what he's saying, but she knows that he's telling her the truth. So many times she's wished that it could have been her instead of Benny, knows that if it had been her then at least Benny still would have had Jared. And now this crazy man is telling her that was his intention all along.

"But that's what we get second chances for, right,
Lucas?"
he asks her, and the way he says that name it's almost as good as another slap, almost as painful.

"You're already dead," she says. The words feel good coming out of her mouth, crossing her torn and swelling lips. "You have no idea what you've started or where it will end."

The man bends over her. She doesn't open her eyes but she can feel him just inches from her face, can smell his breath like mouthwash and bad teeth.

"Is that what They told you, Lucas DuBois? Did They tell you I was just some psycho serial killer with a hard-on for transsexuals and little boys in women's underwear?"

When she doesn't answer or even open her eyes, he slaps her again, hits her so hard that her ears ring.

"Answer me, you dickless bastard!"

"A dead man," she says, and he hits her.

"No, no,
no!"
He rages above her like the storm, as though all the wild fury of the hurricane has been distilled and poured into this skinny, insane man. She ignores the pain in her head and reaches into him, tries to reach into him the way she reached out to Jared and the crow.

When her mind brushes against his, she screams. There's something coiled deep inside his skull, a serpent made of living fire, a writhing bolt of pure white heat that strikes out at her and sears its way back across her thoughts. Lucrece's body goes taut as a board, seizing, and she bites a ragged slash across her tongue.

"I'm the place where it
all
stops, Lucas! I'm the foil that stands for order against Their chaos. Against
your
chaos, Lucas DuBois."

But now his words flow around and away from her, repelled by the charge from the white-hot crucible of his brain. The memory of a blazing power that can split trees like cordwood and incinerate bone, something more than a memory. Something hotter than a star that snakes its way inside her, between each and every cell in her body, that squeezes itself between her molecules, between the subatomic particles of her, until there's no telling what is Lucrece and what is the thing pouring out of the man's mind.

Her eyelids flutter open. He towers above her, fire and steam pouring from every orifice in his skull. It drips like molten slag from his lips, flows like lava from his ears, and falls sizzling to her skin. There's no pulling back, no breaking her link with this scalding mind. Her back arches and she can hear her vertebrae grinding against one another.

"I am the river," he says, and those fiery eyes are so terribly close now. But the last thought before Lucrece loses consciousness is not of this monster, this man infected by electricity and madness. Her last thought is of Jared, and she makes a tiny hole, a pinprick, in the fire and forces the thought away from herself, boosting it with the borrowed force of the lunatic's rage. Then there is nothing but the sound of static and merciful darkness.

Joseph Lethe backs quickly away from the thing that calls itself Lucrece DuBois, the thing that They've constructed so skillfully of male flesh to mimic a woman's. He's breathless and frightened; there's no denying that he felt it reach inside him, felt its unclean mind pressed squirming against his own before it screamed and began to buck about on the floor and foam at the mouth. It had been reading his very thoughts, his soul.

But there was something there it hadn't expected, something that shielded and protected him from its prying, alien attention. Something that struck back and left it helpless, unconscious, maybe even dead. He grips the stainless-steel butt of the gun tighter and jabs the snubby barrel between the thing's artificial breasts.

"You bit off more than you could chew, didn't you?" he says, gasping out the words. "You're not even
half as
fucking smart as you think you are."

It's gone now, that part of it that laid his mind open like a gray Gulf oyster, but he can still
feel
it. Like some sticky, sugary residue left to ferment inside his head, and he itches in places he knows he can never reach to scratch. Joseph Lethe feels something cold and undeniable that he hasn't felt in a long time, something he is only supposed to inflict, not suffer himself. He feels violated.

So he sheds the name Joseph Lethe and becomes Jordan again, hoping the change will leave him cleaner, but it doesn't. Cautiously Jordan touches the transsexual's throat, presses two reluctant fingers against its throat. There's a pulse, a very weak, erratic pulse, but it's still alive.

"What were you trying to do to me, fucker? You
touched
me," and his finger tightens the slightest bit on the trigger of the pistol. "You've contaminated me." He wants to empty the clip into its poisonous black heart. Maybe then he would feel even. Revenge isn't much, but he knows that he'll never be free of whatever wriggling, inhuman essence it has planted inside him, so maybe revenge will have to do.