The Map of Moments (30 page)

Just as Ray had predicted, he was suffused with magic. Max had taken Ecstasy once back in college, and it had felt something like this; it gave the world a sharpness, seeming to heighten his awareness and the clarity of his thoughts. That had been illusion, of course, an effect of the drug. But this … he felt the truth of it, saw clearly the connections that brought together so much of the information he'd already gathered. Mireault. Ray. The Tordu. Seddicus. The wards.

He knew what questions to ask, when the time came.

“Guess we have that in common,” Lamar was saying. “You broke me up pretty good. Wasn't for a little mojo workin’, I wouldn't be up and around. Too bad you don't have any of that going for you, huh, dead man?”

“Too bad,” Max agreed numbly, barely paying attention.

“I think we rattled his brains,” Gerard said.

“See, we're getting off topic,” Lamar said, and his voice had a knife's edge. “I'm guessing the dead man thinks we're even. But Donte's dead. Fucker killed my brother.” He kept
his left arm straight out, pinning the steering wheel in place, and shifted his bulk to try to glance into the backseat. His fat neck wouldn't turn that far.

Still, nobody misunderstood that Lamar's next words were for Max only.

“Just want to be clear, fucker. Soon as Coco's done with you, I'm gonna kill you three, four times, keep you on the edge till I'm too tired to kill you anymore. And when I let you die for good, I'm gonna eat your heart and your liver. And whatever mojo you might've picked up down here's only gonna spice up the meal.”

“Hope you choke on it,” Max said.

Gerard poked him with the pistol barrel. Max winced.

“Careful,” the Tordu gunman said.

“Why? Fat bastard just said he wasn't gonna start killing me until we got to Coco.”

But Lamar had stopped paying attention. They were on a long, dark stretch of highway, but nothing moved in either direction. The night seemed to deepen as the car slowed.

Lamar took a right onto a narrow road, cypress trees forming an arched corridor overhead. The undergrowth infringed upon the road, and branches and leaves brushed the car as it swept past.

“Guess what?” Gerard said. “We're here.”

Max blinked, eyes adjusting to the deeper darkness of the narrow road. The pavement went on for a hundred yards or so and then simply ran out, and they were on hard, rutted earth. Through gaps in the tangle of overgrowth on the right he caught glimpses of black water and swamp grass.

The back of his neck prickled with newborn fear.

The only thing he could think to do was strike back in kind.

“Good. I want to get this over with.”

“You in a hurry to die?” Gerard asked.

“I'm not here to die. I'm here to give Coco a message from Seddicus.”

Fat Boy Lamar flinched, jerked the wheel a little but then righted it, and kept his eyes front. The silent, nameless white woman turned toward Max at last, her hard features pale as alabaster in the dark.

“You lie,” she said.

Max forced himself to smile. Unnerved, she faced front again. He liked that quite a bit.

But then Lamar turned carefully into an overgrown path cut into the brush on the side of the dirt road, and any thought of victory dissipated. It seemed petty to Max now. He'd soaked up magical static, just like Ray had instructed, but he had no idea how to use it. The map couldn't do anything for him, and he had no weapon.

To the right, they passed a large hump of earth that hadn't formed there naturally. He could see stone battlements on top, and then a whole wall of stone, and realized that the crumbling edifice had once been some kind of military fort. It reminded him of the one on Georges Island, out in Boston Harbor, and he guessed Civil War era.

Up ahead was the silhouette of a dark sedan, and beyond that nothing but water. Max did a quick calculation. They'd turned right, which meant south, so whatever inlet this was, it must weave out to the Gulf eventually. Or maybe
not. What little he knew about New Orleans ended miles back. Out here he'd be lost, the highway his only touchstone.

Lamar rolled the Cadillac to a stop and killed the engine. The dashboard lights went dark, and Max could hear them all breathing. They didn't seem in any more of a rush than he was, now that he'd claimed affiliation with Seddicus. But this wasn't a swamp, and the flirty waitress had called Seddicus a swamp demon. The picture grew clearer for Max all the time. He began to understand the shape of things now, for all the good it would do him.

The woman opened her door first and Max followed suit. No reason to dawdle now. No delaying the inevitable.

He'd quite literally reached the end of the road.

The humid air caressed him as he walked toward Coco's dark sedan. That cocktail of fear and magic still roiled inside of him and Max felt jittery, as though he might jump out of his skin. More than once in his younger days he'd done what his friend John Cardiff had called “shrooms,” and one of those times he'd sat for an hour just passing his hand back and forth in front of him, watching the movement blur and elongate like soap bubbles, vivid colors trailing from his fingers.

His whole body felt like that now. The effect upon him was so powerful that he found it astonishing none of the others seemed to notice. The stern woman walked ahead, but Lamar and gun-toting Gerard were behind him. Whatever magic or mojo he'd accumulated was invisible to them.

They marched him up to the sedan and he thought they would stop there, that Coco would be sitting in the car. But they kept going. There was no one behind the wheel. Exhausted but shuddery with manic energy, Max nearly stumbled walking down the grassy incline toward the water. Ahead of him the woman turned right, and he followed, Lamar shambling along behind him. They were single file and Gerard had the gun. With Lamar between them, Max could have made a break for it. But, really, where would he go?

The old Civil War fort rose up on the right, taller and more imposing now that they were right beside it, and to the left the moonlight painted dark water. The river had to be a hundred feet across, and in his imagination alligators cruised its banks.

Max wished he could call his sister one last time. She'd shown him nothing but love and tenderness, tried to look out for him, and he'd repay her now by washing up dead on some marshy shore. His heart ached for her. And for himself. He'd acquired an intimacy with magic and an unwelcome knowledge of some sort of vague afterlife. It might have comforted him once, to know that perhaps he could see Gabrielle again, but his memory of her was tainted by the things he had discovered. And this wasn't how it was meant to be. Ray had given him an impossible hope that he might speak into the past, deliver a message to her and interfere with her fate.

Instead, he'd come to his own end.

They arrived at an angle in the stone wall where the space between fort and water narrowed. Ahead of him, the
woman went around the corner first. Max followed, but a moment later he heard a scuffle behind him and Lamar let out a little cry of fright. Turning, Max saw Gerard gripping Lamar by the arm, tugging him toward the wall of the fort, both of them staring at the edge of the footpath—at the water's edge—with eyes full of terror. Lamar had stumbled, but the two of them behaved as though he'd nearly fallen off a Himalayan precipice.

Gerard noticed Max looking at them and pointed the pistol at him. “Walk.”

Max obeyed, tumblers clicking in his mind as a door opened there. Ahead of him, the silent woman walked carefully, back rigid. She didn't want to be here any more than her companions.

The path widened into a point of land protruding from the shadow of the fort. In the moonlight at the water's edge, a man stood waiting for them, a single silhouette. He cocked his head toward them and his profile confirmed what Max had already known. Coco smiled at him, handsome as ever. With his hair cut so close to his scalp and the carefully groomed goatee, he looked more like a lawyer than a killer, magician, serpent in the garden.

Coco wore expensive-looking trousers and a sheer white sleeveless undershirt. Max could picture the backseat of the man's car, where Coco's shirt would dangle neatly from a hanger. The image in his mind did not seem quite like something imagined; it was more as if he knew without seeing. Whatever work Coco was doing out here, he expected it to be messy or sweaty, or perhaps both.

And the man had been busy. Fat white candles burned
and flickered, set in a circle that would have been romantic in another setting. But Max doubted Coco had romance on his mind. Without a word, he crouched down, hands out, palms hovering over the soil, chanting whispered words that Max did not understand.

Coco picked up a small metal bucket, thrust his right hand into it, and drew out some kind of paste. Slight though the breeze was, it was sufficient to deliver to Max the awful stink from that bucket. Coco cupped a handful of stuff that reeked of piss and rot and burnt things, and, underneath those smells, of spices that ought to have made the odor less wretched but instead convulsed Max's stomach. He breathed through his nose and glanced at the bucket, wondering and yet not wishing to know.

As the silent woman led Max, Lamar, and Gerard to the edge of the circle of candles, Coco reached out with that filthy, disgusting hand and smeared it onto something that Max couldn't see.

Max realized that in the darkness, despite the moonlight, he'd somehow missed the other significant object there at the water's edge. The rock thrust up from the ground like a jagged, broken tooth. It tapered upward, and Max had the feeling it was like an iceberg, and that most of it extended far underground.

As he stared at it, the rock faded a little. Max narrowed his gaze and concentrated. His skin prickled with a frisson of magic, and the stone resolved itself in his vision once more.

Coco chanted his song, the tone rising and falling from whisper to guttural invocation. He reached into the bucket,
cupped another handful of the filth, and smeared it across the face of the rock.

Smooth stone hissed and steamed, and shapes began to reveal themselves beneath the mucousy film. Coco traced the outlines, digging them more deeply, carving into the stone with his finger. Throughout this process, the rest of the Tordu observed in respectful silence, and Max watched in revulsion and fascination. Gerard kept the pistol more or less aimed in his direction, though his attention was on the man they'd all come to see.

Coco dipped his hand in the bucket again, but instead of coating the rock's face, he dropped the muck in a straight line from either side of the stone, marking off the tip of the shore that jutted into the river and creating a kind of boundary.

He crouched again, wiping his filthy hand off in the dirt. Then he paused, studying the work he'd done.

Max was tired of the silence. Tired of waiting.

“Ironic, isn't it?” he said.

Coco froze. The candles fluttered in the slight breeze, but none went out. He turned and looked at Max.

“You care to elaborate?”

Max glanced at the strange, almost hieroglyphic symbols etched in the stone, and then he met Coco's gaze. The man's eyes were wide and inquisitive, dancing with a kind of wild light that might have been a reflection of the candles, or something that came from within.

“The last time you almost lost a ward was also in a hurricane. And here you are, repairing one of them again …”

He trailed off because he saw Coco flinch, eyes narrowing. The light in them went out, and his gaze turned flat and reptilian.

“Well, that's what you're doing, isn't it?”

Gerard cocked the pistol. The silent woman took a step away from Max. Lamar said nothing, but Max could feel the tension in all of them. Coco only stared at him expectantly.

Max shrugged. “I'm betting this isn't the only one that got damaged by Katrina. Just seems ironic to me that you've spent all these years making them, hiding them, and protecting them from your enemies. And pretty successfully at that. But every time, it's Mother Nature who fucks with you.”

Now Coco smiled, but those alligator eyes remained. “Yeah. What do you make of that?”

“I don't know. But maybe there's a message there. Natural versus unnatural, that sort of thing.”

Coco shook his head, laughing softly. “You think you've got it all worked out.”

“More than you know.” Max delivered the line with such calmness and precision that it brought Coco up short. The Tordu man—a leader amongst them—paused and regarded him more closely. Then he shook his head again, but with less confidence this time.

“You don't know shit. Gabrielle told you nothing; that was part of the deal, part of the price. And whatever you think you learned since coming back to this city, you only see what New Orleans wants you to see. That's the way it's always been.”

Coco looked at Lamar. “Give me the map.”

The Fat Man had taken it from Max back in the ruin of the Ninth Ward, and now he tugged it out of his back pocket and handed it over.

Coco opened it in the moonlight, scanning it carefully. “This just some tourist map,” he said, frowning, speaking in a patois that had been absent before, losing his cultured edge. “No juju here. Just shit.”