Twisted (14 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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When Grove returned to the Jeep with the booze, Kaminsky was on the cell phone.
“And what is the point of impact?” he was saying, looking a little tense now, stroking his scraggly beard. “Yes, the eye, and the P-O-I, tell me
exactly
where it is being forecast.” He listened and shook his head. “This is not a good thing ... and you are certain about this, you are confident about the category rating?” More listening. “What does FEMA say? Have they evacuated?” Listening, head shaking. “This is not a pleasant situation, Joyce.” A sigh. “Thank you, Joyce.”
He clicked the cell phone off with an exasperated flourish, snubbing out his cheroot.
Grove looked at him. “What?”
“Joyce Melvoin, an old dear friend of mine at the National Weather Service.” He looked at Grove. “Your lady friend is down in New Orleans at this present moment in time, is that not correct?”
Grove said she was, and he was planning on joining her as soon as he could get down there.
“I am not so sure that is a good idea, my friend.”
“Why not?”
“Because an angry bitch from the Caribbean Sea by the name of Fiona is on her way.”
Grove asked the Russian to explain. Kaminsky told Grove all about Hurricane Fiona, and the high probability that she would decimate the city of New Orleans by the following morning.
Grove listened intently, and when the Russian was done, Grove handed the man the bottle of Kettle-One. “I appreciate all your help, Kay, I really do.”
Kaminsky looked at the fifth of vodka nestled in his big gnarled hands. “What is this?”
Grove looked at him. “You said the eye is forecast to reach the city sometime around midnight tonight, is that right?”
“That is correct.”
Grove nodded. “Then that's where I gotta go.”
Kaminsky frowned. “On the ground you are talking about.”
“That's right. And I want to thank you, Kay. For everything.”
“In the eye of Fiona you think you are going to catch this crazy bastard.”
Just for an instant Grove flashed back to those blackbirds caught in that horrible vast cage of clouds ... and the pale, ruined, painted face of Moses De Lourde in his coffin ... and the bone-white dust devil of his recurring dream. “I told you, Kay, that's where he does his business, in the eye. That's where I've gotta go.” Grove gestured to the south, toward the far end of the parking lot. “There's a bus stop right down there. I can catch a Greyhound to Raleigh, then catch a commuter down to Tallahassee or Atlanta. Get into New Orleans through the back door.”
Kaminsky looked at the vodka. “I thought I had heard it all, Grove.” He opened the vodka, took a lusty sip, grimaced at the wonderful burn, then rolled his window down and tossed the bottle out. It shattered on the rainy pavement. “I truly thought I had heard it all.”
“Kay—”
The Russian burned his gaze into Grove. “If you think you are going to waltz right into the worst storm in North America since the nineteenth century without someone with some hurricane expertise, you are not only crazy, Grove, but you are arrogant beyond belief.”
“Kay, I—”
“Going down there and getting yourself killed like that ... giving me all that guilt!” he grumbled as he turned the key, firing up the Jeep. “You would enjoy that, would you not, Grove!”
“Kay—”
“Buckle that seat belt, asshole.” He slammed the Jeep into reverse, then tore out of there in a flurry of exhaust and a cloud of mist.
Grove could not suppress his smile. “Kay ... thanks. That's all. Just ... thanks.”
The Russian was shaking his head as he got back on the highway. “You better call that girlfriend of yours, and tell her to get her head down. That is ... if she has not already evacuated.”
Grove pulled out his phone and quickly dialed Maura's cell number.
11
Maura was driving the rental car down a deserted, windswept St. Charles Avenue, balancing a cup of coffee and a sheet of MapQuest directions on her lap, when the cell phone chirped. She picked it up, thumbed it on, and propped it against her ear. “Ulysses? That you?”
Through the earpiece came a reassuring baritone: “Hey, kiddo.”
“Thank God. I was worried you got blown out to sea.”
“Still alive and kicking ... where are you?”
“I'm in the Garden District. I had to get out of that apartment. I was getting cabin fever.” There was no humor in her voice. She glanced at her watch. It was nearly 8:00 a.m., and yet the city was practically deserted. She gazed out the window at the gray, misty morning. “I guess I just couldn't stand to be alone in there anymore.”
“I don't blame you, kiddo.” Grove's voice softened. “Did you spend the night there?”
“Yeah ... and I saw the video.”
“What video?”
Maura sighed. “The one that De Lourde made last year, in the cabin.”
There was a pause. “Oh... .”
“God, Ulysses.”
“I told him to burn that thing.”
“I've never seen anything like it,” she said, her hands white-knuckle taut on the steering wheel. “I don't know what to say, I just—”
“You don't have to say anything,” Grove's voice broke in. “It happened, it's over now. I don't remember much of it.”
“I had no idea.”
“Maura, listen ... should you be out and about right now? I understand it's getting pretty dicey down there.”
“I thought I'd go see if this kid Michael Doerr was still in town. Remember the kid from the funeral?”
Grove told her he remembered a skinny, shy kid in a tuxedo shirt.
“That's him. And get this. The Herzog girl told me an interesting little fact about this kid. Evidently he and Moses were more than student and teacher.”
Another pause. “No kidding. Moses never mentioned it.”
“Anyway ... the Herzog girl gave me his address. I thought I'd ask young Mr. Doerr about the Yucatan fiasco. If he hasn't already evacuated.”
“Just be careful, don't get caught in the storm. They're saying this is going to be a bad one, they're saying it's not only worse than Cassandra, but it's going to rival Katrina.”
Maura shook her head, gazing with a faint little shudder out the rain-streaked windshield at the bedraggled storefronts and boarded Victorian homes. She could not conceive of a storm the magnitude of Katrina once again assaulting this poor, battered town. It would be like plunging a knife into a barely healed wound.
Before Katrina, St. Charles Avenue was an old, graceful, sprawling divided boulevard with streetcar lines running down its median, flanked by endless rows of live oaks looming over its center like the ancient spirits of Confederate sentries. On any given day, the stately plantation homes that once lined the street would give the neighborhood an air of old southern charm. But not now. Not in this crippled, post-Katrina New Orleans. Now, in the darkening sky, and the ominous cacophony of sirens and Gulf Coast winds, St. Charles exhibited a haunted, sinister quality. Many of the homes were simply gone, their cordoned sites like flooded craters in some wasted landscape of the dead. The ones that still stood wore masks of warped plywood and moldy particleboard, some of the turrets and wings still gashed open or torn away like great broken dollhouses. The trees looked diseased and denuded. Trash tumbled and skittered across the walks. Streetlights cycled ceaselessly, silently, impotently, directing nobody. Every few moments a raincoat-clad person would dart across a storefront or the mouth of an alley, clutching some essential belonging, hurrying to get out of town before this latest dragon arrived.
Maura sighed. “Yeah, I heard something about a storm coming. Are you driving down?”
“Yeah, should be there by early evening, if we can slip through the e-vac cordons.”
“Ulysses—”
“My friend Ivan is being foolhardy enough to drive me down there. He's forgotten more about storms than either of us will ever know, and we'll need his expertise if—”
“Ulysses, what are you cooking up in that big brain of yours?”
“What do you mean?”
“C'mon ... you said you wanted me to help. Okay, I'm helping, but you gotta be honest with me.”
“Of course.”
“You're waiting for the eye to come, aren't you? That's what you're really hoping for.”
After a long pause, Grove's voice returned, dropping an octave, becoming deathly serious. He explained how he had found a symbol at the scene up in North Carolina, a symbol drawn in blood by the killer, a symbol that matched a magical talisman commonly used in exorcisms. “It was used in
my
ceremony, Maura,” he said after an awkward pause. “The one last year, the one at Geisel's cabin in Virginia. The same exact symbol.”
For a moment, Maura could not speak. The symbol on the floor of that video ... the pentagram within a hexagram. “Oh my God,” she finally uttered. “You're kidding me, you're talking about the one on the floor?”
“Yep.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Static on the other end. “—Maura?—”
“I'm here, I'm still here,” she said, but she felt like slamming on the brakes, turning around, and getting the hell out of there. “I'm just trying to process all this... .”
It was as though she were losing her grip on reality, little by little, like a person clinging to an icy precipice. Never mind that creepy home video ... or her nightmare-ridden sleep. She had been flashing back to her confrontation with the Sun City Killer, more and more often,
during the light of day
. Little things would trigger a memory: slapping a mosquito, seeing a droplet of blood on her arm; glimpsing the ragged, rawboned expression on a homeless person's face; hearing the wind humming through high-tension wires. But despite all this she could not tear herself away from this rotting, sinking ship of a city. As long as there was something left unresolved, undone, something nagging at her—she would stick around in the face of insurmountable odds. Maybe she thought she could still change Grove.
Sure, Maura, and the rich will start paying more taxes, and politicians will start telling the truth, and monkeys will fly out of your ass.
“I understand what you're saying, kiddo,” Grove's voice buzzed in her ear. “And I don't expect you to wait around for us all day. You ought to get your butt out of there as soon as you can.”
“Shut up,” Maura said with a softness in her voice that surprised even her. “I just said I'm trying to get a handle on all this, I'm not talking about—” All at once Maura saw the littered grounds of Audubon Park looming on her left, the water-stained amphitheater of southern pines and cottonwoods lining the corner of Exposition Boulevard. Across the street rose the massive wrought-iron entrance to Tulane's south campus. Beyond the ivy-clogged archway lay the genteel white columns—now permanently tattooed by mossy flood stains—that bordered the quad. The campus was completely deserted and obscured by veils of mist. “Whoops, there it is,” Maura said into her cell.
“There
what
is?”
“My turn.”
She reached the corner of Calhoun and St. Charles, turned right on Calhoun, then started up the eastern edge of campus. On her left lay acres of massive old redbrick classroom buildings, many of them still boarded or shrouded with flood plastic, looking ghostly in the silver rain. The school had a decadent Old South feel about it, like a vast crumbling plantation taken over by zombies. “I'll call you back, Ulysses,” Maura said into the phone, “give you a progress report.”
“Good luck,” said the voice, and then with a
click!
the call was disconnected.
 
 
The street names in this town had always amused Maura like those of no other city. Some were named for Confederate war heroes, others for obscure Napoleonic victories such as Prytania, Constantinople, or Baronne. Many were unpronounceable to the uninitiated—Tchoupitoulas, Polymnia, Terpsichore. But each one was part of that steaming stew pot of languages and influences that reflected the city's lurid history, as well as its refusal to die.
Michael Doerr lived in a modest little corner of this fermenting cauldron known among Tulane intelligentsia as the “student ghetto”—the six-square-block neighborhood just north of the university that lay completely submerged by floodwaters for more than six months back in late '05 and early '06. Small brick bungalows and shotgun houses sat on narrow cobblestone streets here like the fallen domninoes of old Greek ruins. Ancient, crooked oak trees rose up like syphilitic fingers over wind-damaged tile rooftops.
Maura pulled the rental car onto Freret Street, then slowly drove down the narrow road of cracked herringbone bricks, looking for an address.
The bungalows had a sameness here, an endless row of run-down, charmless, flood-damaged dwellings. Yards cluttered with cast-off furniture, tires, gutter flashing, and shredded shingles. Michael Doerr's place was the last bungalow on the block, a modest one-story box of weathered, eggplant-colored brick nestled in a fringe of newly planted hydrangeas. There was a certain warmth to the house that belied the shabbiness of the rest of the block. An antique hobbyhorse sat on the porch, an old metal milk can filled with cattails and dried flowers next to the door. Freshly painted shutters bordered the windows. All of it very neat, very colorful, very cute. A marked contrast to the storm-trodden neighbors.
This place does not belong to a straight man
, Maura thought wryly as she approached.
She parked in front, and regarded the bungalow for a moment through the blur of slapping wiper blades, trying to assess if anyone was home.
In the rain it was hard to tell. There was no driveway, so looking for a vehicle was out of the question. There seemed to be no lights on inside, behind the windows, although
that
was also difficult to assess since most of the blinds were closed. But Maura got an immediate vibe off the house that somehow encouraged her, and she had another thought:
The owner of this place is not only gay but also a gentle soul. It's in the way the little doodads are displayed, the welcoming feel of the place.
Maura also had a feeling that
said owner
could tell her a lot more about what had happened in the Yucatan.
She turned the vehicle off and sat there another moment, trying to figure out what to do. Time was a factor here. Thunder rumbled again in the distance, followed by another chorus of civil defense sirens. Maura weighed her options. She could leave a note, but it probably wouldn't be found for days. The young man was probably miles away, waiting out the storm. She could maybe find his number and leave a message. She looked at her watch. Hurricane Fiona would be arriving in fourteen hours.
“Aw, screw it,” she muttered, zipping up her raincoat and opening her door.
She got out and hustled up the tidy little stone walk. The rain had picked up to a steady downpour now, the wet morning air smelling of salt and rust. Maura shivered as she hopped up onto the cement porch. She stood under the small overhang, wiping moisture from her face and stomping mud from her Doc Martens. She found a doorbell and rang it.
No answer.
To the right of the front door was a portrait window behind which hardwood venetian blinds hung drawn. Maura noticed a slender gap along the left side of the blinds through which a slice of the living room was visible. She glanced over her shoulder—an instinctive gesture—to see if anyone was watching, across the street or up the block, eavesdropping on her.
As if
, she thought.
She looked in the window.
Once again it was hard to see much of anything in the rainy light, the place was so dark, but she
did
see an antique pine armoire, an Eames chair canted against a hutch, a few Early American quilts on the wall, each of them stained. A braided rug next to a brick hearth. Just as she had suspected, the place exuded a stubborn charm amidst the decay.
Something moved in the shadows.
Maura's heart jumped in her chest. She jerked away from the window as though she'd been burned, and for some reason she glanced again over her shoulder, as though she were doing something naughty. She looked back at the window, and then, almost as abruptly as the shape had darted across the bungalow's rear archway, it revealed itself in a shaft of daylight near the back door.
The massive calico cat was playing with a small stuffed toy, a little gray mouse, tattered from rough use. The cat batted the toy across the front window and back into the shadows, and Maura let out a long breathy sigh of relief. Then she saw the cat cross the rear of the house, then suddenly vanish through a little rubber pet hatch installed in the bottom of the screen door.

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