Twisted (11 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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About the only thing that struck Grove as exceptional was the span of the Lockheed's wings. They spread at least a hundred feet across the tarmac, and supported four massive turboprops—a pair on each wing—each the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.
Kaminsky parked about twenty feet off the airplane's starboard hindquarter, and the two men climbed out of the Jeep. Wind rustled across the empty tarmac, making an eerie whistling noise. Grove found the lack of activity a little strange. One would think there would be ground crew around, maybe other members of the flight team. But the place was deserted. It did not give Grove a warm feeling.
The rain had picked up now, coming in gray waves, and Kaminsky had to hold his duffel in front of his face as he led Grove across the cracked tarmac and around the gigantic landing gear.
Squinting to see what he was doing, Kaminsky kicked the blocks out from under the wheels with his muddy, black jackboots, then quickly unsnapped the mooring cables one at a time with his huge callused fingers. Cables pinged. Rusty fasteners clattered into puddles. Then Kaminsky led Grove over to the nose. An iron ladder rose up to the cockpit doors, which towered more than twenty feet above the runway. The Russian helped Grove up the cleats, then through the cockpit door.
The sudden muffled silence, the chalky-chemical odors, and the dim light made Grove a little queasy.
“Now, Grove, I am going to need you to sit right there in the middle, in the seat of the flight engineer—quickly now, quickly!” Kaminsky ordered, pointing to a battered upholstered chair mounted to the floor. The walls and ceiling were lined with instrument racks. The air reeked of old leather and something cold and acrid like butane. “Right there you will help me with the stick.”
Grove glanced over his shoulder and gazed down the center of the cabin. It took his breath away—the narrow corridor, the seats long ago removed and replaced by a virtual laboratory's worth of experimental gear. Computers, radio gear, cameras, centrifuges, all manner of meteorological instruments. “Did you say ‘help with the stick'?” Grove marveled as he turned back to his seat, settling in and fastening his shoulder harness.
Kaminsky was digging in his duffel bag, putting a headset on, plugging jacks into the panel, and tapping his curved mouthpiece. “Tower-Huey, this is Three-Delta, do you copy?”
A voice crackled from the console. “Three-D, this is Tower-H, copy that, confirm status.”
“Coming on line, Tower, requesting clearance.”
“Three-Delta, you got clearance on Baker-one-nine,” the radio said. “Better put the spurs to her, Ivan. Skipper's due any minute.”
“There is no worry, Tower,” Kaminsky said and started moving levers. “We are out of town.”
Lightning flickered outside, a sheet of rain whipping along the top of the fuselage, and now lots of things began to happen simultaneously, and Grove tried to take it all in and keep his heart from punching a hole in his sternum. A high-pitched humming noise had started as Kaminsky flipped switches, and something started vibrating low and deep in the floor and Grove realized he was hearing engines igniting. He looked around and noticed odd little things like Hostess Twinkie wrappers on the corrugated iron deck and a small stuffed Garfield toy, its suction cup paws stuck to a portal.
The aircraft began to move.
Backward.
Grove instinctively gripped his armrests while Kaminsky taxied the monster back across the apron, nearly clipping the Jeep Cherokee with the outboard stabilizer. When the plane finally came to rest in the center of the northernmost runway, which was currently deserted, bordered by flashing silver strobes, Kaminsky pulled some more levers. The craft jerked, and Grove held his breath as they started rolling forward toward the gray horizon.
Thunder rumbled as the behemoth gained speed, and Grove felt the massive turbines growling, the vibrations traveling up his bones, the noise so loud now it made his ears pop. Kaminsky was yelling into the headset, but Grove could hear nothing but the cacophony of engines. The g-forces pushed him into his seat as the plane levitated off the runway—
—and just like that they were airborne, arcing up through layers of turbulence. Grove twisted to see down through Garfield's portal, which was now streaked with angry rains. Like a dream, the rolling patchwork of deep green tobacco fields and crisscrossing arteries of rutted roads fell away under the giant craft as it bounced upward and upward. Grove started frantically looking around the cockpit.
“What in the devil's name are you looking for!” Kaminsky yelled over the chorus of engines.
“Oh, I don't know ... maybe parachutes?” Grove's stomach was already in his throat, his gut smoldering. A cold sweat had broken across his brow. He could control his conscious fear for the moment, but his body was another matter.
Kaminsky's booming, incongruous laughter pierced the noise. “Parachutes? Parachutes! Parachutes are useless in a hurricane, my friend.”
“What are you talking about?”
“In hurricane conditions a parachute goes
up
!” More phlegmy laughter from Kaminsky as he gripped the control yoke, his gaze everywhere at once, on the altimeter, on the air-speed indicator, on the trim levers, on the radar monitor, and especially on the narrow windshield that spanned the bulwark, its wiper beating a rhythmic march as the plane climbed. “Unless that is what you
want
to do, which I would not advise in a hurricane if you want to come back down.”
Grove could not force even a smile. “How long is it gonna take us to get there?”
Kaminsky glanced at the GPS screen. “Assuming we can maintain a rate of two hundred knots, we will reach the outer bands in approximately forty-minutes.”
The plane careened through another layer of turbulence, slamming down hard on the unstable slipstream, the rivets complaining and creaking. Grove clutched at the armrests. Wind shears moaned below them, above them.
“Two hundred knots!” Grove was confused. “That sounds slow.”
“Slow is good when you are flying into the eye of a hurricane!” Kaminsky yelled back over the din. “That is why we use prop planes. A jet would come out the other side with its wings torn off.”
“Did you say
into
it?” Grove looked at him. “That was just a figure of speech, right?”
Kaminsky looked over at him. “I am not following.”
“I asked you to fly me
into
the eye, yeah, but I figured you would fly
over
it.”
“
Over
it?” Kaminsky laughed again, both hands on the control yoke now. The planed shuddered, violent turbulence rocking the fuselage. It sounded like an enormous animal in its death throes. “What gave you that idea?” More laughter. “‘Over it,' the man says ...
over
it!”
Grove glanced nervously down past the Garfield toy at the veins of lightning marbling the scorched clouds.
He tightened his harness.
8
“Here, help me with these! Throw 'em in the back! Hurry! Please!”
The emaciated girl with the chartreuse hair and raccoon eyes was lugging a stack of vintage vinyl record albums in her spindly arms as she hurried across the windy street corner toward her battered, rust-pocked panel van. The van was idling, rear door gaping open, parallel-parked under one of the Garden District's few intact pre-Katrina live oaks. On her way around the rear of the van, Sandi Loper-Herzog stumbled on a broken bottle, and the records went flying, pinwheeling in all directions, skidding across the wet cobblestones.
“Oops—let me help you with that.” Maura County went over, knelt down, and hurriedly helped the girl pick the records up, noting the homogenous genre of music in the collection: Bauhaus, The Cure, Black Sabbath, Souxie and the Banshees, The Cure, Dead Can Dance, and some more Cure. These goth types had always slayed Maura; they were almost quaint in their monochromatic worldview. Obsessed with death, always with the Stevie Nix black veils and coal-black lining their eyes, they were practically nerdlike in their fixation with necrophilic romance. But what better place to practice the lifestyle than the festering, ghostly, cryptic sinkhole of New Orleans, the former home of Anne Rice and the spirit of Tennessee Williams?
“I'm sorry if I seem, you know, a little, whattyacal-lit, scattered,” Sandi stammered as she gathered up her beloved albums. “I'm hearing this one might make it up to category four, and I'm just not going to go through another Katrina.”
“I don't blame you,” Maura commiserated, remembering her first encounter with this girl at De Lourde's funeral, and the distinct impression that something had seemed slightly “off” about her, slightly edgy. “I promise you I won't keep you more than a minute or so.”
“What do you want to know?”
“You were with Mose De Lorde's Yucatan expedition, right? Back in '04?”
“Unfortunately yeah.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
The girl in black shoved the albums into the van, then turned and looked at Maura. “A lot of things happened. What do you want to know about it?”
Maura asked about the hurricane that hit the Yucatan while they were down there.
“Pretty near did us in—Miguel and Michael and me—we were right by his side when it hit.”
“By whose side?”
“The professor, De Lourde. Who else?” The goth girl turned and hurried back toward the boarded exterior of her Julia Street row house, and Maura followed along at a skip. A siren pierced the distance. It was starting to spit a little bit, the wind picking up.
“What was the purpose of the trip?” Maura asked.
“The expedition? Who knows?” Sandi circled a stack of moving boxes that flanked the cracked marble archway, a battered ten-speed bike leaning against one side. Maura helped the goth girl lift one of the bigger boxes, then carry it back across the curb toward the van.
“It was partially funded by the grad school, and by the National Endowment for the Humanities,” Sandi Herzog huffed and puffed as she lugged the enormous box across the curb. “Only reason Michael and I went was because they gave us independent study credit. And also because Michael and Moses were, you know, an
item.
”
“No, I didn't know that.”
“Yeah, you know, obviously it wasn't something they wanted to advertise.” She shoved the box into the van. “But God, Moses was like this geriatric Indiana Jones ... I mean, you should have seen it.”
Sandi hustled back toward the doorway.
“What do you mean?” Maura was getting breathless, struggling just to keep up.
“That first day, I thought I was going to pass out. He leads us up the side of this mountain, and there were these dudes from the Bureau of Indigenous Peoples on our ass, and I mean these were serious muchachos, with guns and shit.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I shit you not.”
“What was the problem?”
The girl in black grabbed another box, then headed back across the cobblestones. “The problem was Moses De Lourde. I mean, he would never
tell
anybody
anything
. Always really secretive about what he was looking for. I don't blame those guys down there for being suspicious.”
“Do
you
know what he was looking for?”
She shrugged as she shoved the box on board the van. “Moses was always real coy about his agenda, and he had all these crackpot theories.”
“What kind of theories?”
“I don't know, stuff about the pre-Mayan culture, human sacrifice, hurricanes.”
“Hurricanes?”
“Yeah. Something about rituals and hurricanes but don't ask me to explain it. I was his teaching assistant for three years, and I was always the last one to grasp his stuff.”
“Did he find what he was looking for?”
The girl in black paused for a moment, breathing hard from all the exertion. Something glinted in her eyes then. Not exactly anger, not exactly contempt, and not exactly bitterness. But maybe a trace of all three. “You're from the press, right?”
“Look, Sandi, I'm not—”
“Is this on the record?”
“Absolutely not.”
“But you think the professor was murdered?”
Maura took a deep breath before answering. “I'm helping with an investigation. Unofficially.”
“It's for that FBI dude, right? Ulysses Grant?”
“Grove,” Maura corrected with a smile. “But this is all off the record.”
“Look, I gotta get outta here.” Sandi looked over her shoulder then, as though she were being stalked. It was an acquired tic of many New Orleanians lately. As though an entire region were being stalked by nature. “I
will
tell you this though. The people from Tulane that went down to the Yucatan with De Lourde ... we got more than we bargained for. You understand what I'm saying? I mean, Michael started to think De Lourde had done some hoodoo down there or something, had somehow
summoned
that fucking hurricane. Look, I gotta go. And if I were you, I'd do the same.”
With that, Ms. Sandi Loper-Herzog turned and went to get her bike.
Maura watched, wondering what in God's name she had gotten herself into this time.
 
 
“
Put this in! Put this in
!” Kaminsky's baritone bark penetrated the incredible noise of the vibrating cabin as the Lockheed sliced through the outer bands. The air was popping from the pressure drop.
“Do you hear me, Grove? Put this in now before I lose the stick!”
Grove tried to see what the big Russian bear was holding in his right hand, but the plane was shaking so furiously now, and the storm was so loud, it was almost impossible to see or hear a thing. In fact, as far as Grove was concerned, the whole gonzo journey into Hurricane Eve had been a complete failure so far. Outside the portal he could see nothing but an opaque moving wall of gray. That was it. He should have known. They were flying through storm clouds, for God's sake. What did he
think
he was going to see? Or feel? Or intuit? “
Whattya got there, Kay? I can't see it
!”
The cabin had blurred in Grove's vision, his hands clamping down on his armrests so tightly they were going numb. His teeth cracked as the craft lurched, and the engines kept singing out in terrific falsetto howls. Outside, beyond Garfield the Cat, a wall of solid steel gray enveloped the fuselage.
“
Something to bite down on!
” Kaminsky roared. Thunder banged outside the portals, sounding like somebody firing a twelve-gauge shotgun at the fuselage. The Russian wrestled with the yoke, yanking at the aileron lever, making the plane climb like crazy just to maintain its altitude. “
It is to keep you from biting your tongue when we hit the eye wall!
”
Kaminsky tossed the hard rubber object to Grove, who nearly dropped it.
Grove looked down at the rubber bicycle handlebar grip in his hand, worn down to a gray nub by human teeth. He took a deep breath and stuck it in his mouth. It tasted bitter and gritty like dirty aspirin. Grove braced himself for the piercing of the eye wall, which the Russian had described a few minutes ago as being similar to riding a balsa wood glider over Niagra Falls.
The eye wall is the deadly Minotaur guarding the soft center of a hurricane, the place where the heat exchange reaches its highest velocity. Wind speeds in the eye wall can reach two hundred miles an hour. Rain spins so fast a single drop can cause more damage than a .38-caliber bullet fired in anger. Strangely, Kaminsky never told Grove what was on the
other
side of the eye wall.
The Lockheed convulsed. Kaminsky cursed the plane and jerked the stick, coaxing another horrible aria from the turbines.
Grove clutched at his armrests, his harness digging into his breastbone. He could not breathe properly around the bike handle in his mouth, and he started hyperventilating. For a brief, surreal instant, he imagined what it would feel like for the aircraft to shatter apart as it penetrated the eye wall, vaporizing in midair.
“
A quarter mile now till the eye!
”
A weird sound began rising up outside the plane, in the slipstream of steel gray rushing over its skin, an eldritch whistling noise that signaled the approaching eye wall. Grove's scalp crawled, and the tiny hairs on his arms and neck bristled at the sound. He had never heard anything like it—a wailing locomotive filtered through the longest, narrowest chamber of a great pipe organ. It was a berserk sound, the sound of nature unhinged. The kind of noise that would have driven cavemen deep into their caves.
“
Five hundred yards
!”
The whistling noise rose. Grove's ears popped. Pressure from his waist belt cut into his bladder as the engines shrieked and cried. A ballpoint pen floated up, needles jumping on the indicators. Grove bit into the rubber spike.
“
A hundred yards!
”
The aircraft began to buck and heave and quake, the engines screaming, the dome lights flickering. The shaking got so bad Grove saw double, then triple, and then everything blurred completely like motion-picture film coming off the sprockets. The horrible ululating whistle drowned Kaminsky's frantic pronouncements.
“
Eye wall in five
!”
Grove tried to cry out, but the slab of rubber blocked his voice. It felt as though the floor was about to rip away. Lights flickered off. Grove vomited around the bike handle, thin strings of bile and saliva looping
upward
in the g-forces.
“
Four
!”
Now there was nothing but the dark vibrating blur, and the shrieking death wails of the dragon, and Grove choking on his own bile, spine rigid as an icicle, hands welded like iron talons to the cold leather armrests.
“
Three
!”
Something cracked in the marrow of the plane, the turbines coughing, failing, the monstrous whistling noise giving way to an impossible all-encompassing chorus of screams engulfing the Lockheed.
“
Two
!”
Grove closed his eyes and prayed and prayed as the plane went into furious paroxysms of shaking.
“
Contact
!”
The nose smashed into a brick wall in the air, Grove biting down hard and lurching forward against the confines of his chest straps.
There was a loud bang, and the aircraft seemed to slam down hard into a trough in the air, and then it found purchase and thumped a couple of times, fishtailing, and then the shaking stopped. Just like that. It simply ceased. The plane was flying steadily again, and the sudden calm was almost as violent as the shaking.
Grove blinked and tried to focus on the cockpit, the console, Kaminsky,
something
to help him get his bearings back. The lights had flickered back on, and the Russian was saying something; his mouth was moving, but Grove could not hear a word. His ears were ringing profusely and for one panicky instant he wondered if his eardrums had exploded in the plummeting air pressure. He smelled vomit, his face wet with upchuck. Finally he realized Kaminsky was pointing at something.
The portal!
Grove looked over at the window and saw that Garfield the Cat still clung by his suction cups to the small lens of triple-layer Plexiglas. But the strange part—the most incongruous, freaky thing about that window—was the sunlight. A bright band of daylight shone across the rim, slicing down on an angle, spreading across the corrugated floor.
At first Grove thought he was seeing things. He thought maybe all the ungodly turbulence had rattled his marbles loose and now he was having some kind of oxygen-starved, high-altitude hallucination. He glanced at the windscreen that wrapped across the front, and he saw blue sky.

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