Twisted (18 page)

Read Twisted Online

Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
6.27Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
A shape lunged at her from behind the fridge, a massive arm swinging up at her face.
“
Hhhhumphhh!”
Maura's gasp bleated out of her on impact, her legs buckling, and she went down hard on her tailbone, elbows cracking on the floor of the vestibule inside the back door. It felt as though she had run into an iron bridge span. She writhed on the floor for a moment, trying to scoot backward on her ass, the back screen door so close, within inches,
inches!
But now the monstrous shadow loomed over her.
Lightning arced across the back windows, illuminating the creature standing there, and Maura only had a single moment to look up into his face, only one terrible instant to behold the Holy Ghost in all his grand guignol glory, before his hand came down and pressed the chemical-soaked cotton over Maura's mouth while she coughed and convulsed ...
. . . and then the world went dark and cold and silent like the deep calm before a storm.
15
Street signs shook and hummed. Sheets of rain billowed on gale-force winds, snapping high-tension wires over the French Quarter in showers of sparks. Ghostly wisps of Spanish moss, uprooted from their parasitic hosts like freed spirits, soared and tossed through the dense air.
By six o'clock, the last glimmers of daylight had been swallowed up by the black storm, and St. Charles Avenue boiled with overflowing culvert grates and robotic yellow lights flashing every half block from Esplanade Avenue to the Huey P. Long Bridge. Up north, along the Pontchartrain Expressway, the thoroughfare already looked like a war zone, replete with overturned, abandoned cars and errant timbers that had blown across the lanes every few hundred feet. Most of the citizens had fled the area, and anybody crazy enough to still be hanging around either worked in emergency services or had a death wish.
The outer bands of Hurricane Fiona were about eighty miles offshore, a little over two hours until impact.
“Stay to the right, stay to the right!” Grove craned his neck to see through the virtual gray-out ahead of them as Kaminsky steered the Jeep through the treacherous obstacle course of Louisiana Interstate 10. “There it is!” Grove shouted above the moaning winds, pointing at the Canal Street exit, which had materialized in the rain a hundred yards away.
They took Canal Street south toward the churning cauldron of the Mississippi. The wide street was deserted and littered with wreckage. Neither man said much as the Jeep charged past boarded strip clubs, flooded parking lots, and dark, barred store windows. They had conquered many impediments in order to beat Fiona to New Orleans, but now they realized that the worst was still ahead of them. Bypassing roadblocks, tap-dancing for state troopers, driving through torrential rains and deadly winds amounted to nothing compared to what they were about to face. They were entering ground zero.
The Quarter felt to Grove like a vast ghost ship. All the deserted, narrow cobblestone alleys sluicing crazily with black water, all the desolate iron-laced balconies obscured by shrouds of rain. The Jeep's high beams sliced through the walls of mist like the twin prows of a ship and, at length, fell on the boarded facade of the Toulouse Luthier Sheet Music Emporium at the corner of Dumaine and Bourbon.
“Pull around back, park in the alley.” Grove was already buttoning his raincoat, turning up his collar, and he had to holler just to be heard above the rain. The back of his mind was full of troubling connections sparking like surges of voltage in his brain, the visions of dust devils mingling with that familiar star-within-a-star configured in blood and tissue in the grass outside Ulmer's Folly, and the half-glimpsed images of blackbirds or crows soaring madly to escape the eye wall. But mostly Grove was thinking about Maura County, and hoping against all odds that she was here, safe and dry and waiting for them at De Lourde's apartment.
Kaminsky found a place to park, and then they got out and went up the back stairs to the rear gallery door. Grove still had the key that the professor had given him a year earlier during Grove's first visit. He unlocked the door and they went inside.
No Maura.
Exasperation and a sense of helplessness immediately clouded Grove's thoughts. He figured that Maura was probably still over at this kid Doerr's place in the Garden District. But
where
in the Garden District? And why was she still there? Grove began to pace while the Russian found the bathroom and relieved himself. Lightning zapped outside the drawn shades like a shadow play, and that's when Grove thought of something.
He went over to the computer.
The screen flickered to life and displayed the customary desktop icons—the little hard disk, the trash can, the scattered folders and various program aliases. The background was classic De Lourde—a grainy, garish scene from
The Wizard of Oz
, the one with Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, all standing arm in arm, about to jaunt off down the yellow brick road.
This definitely ain't Kansas anymore, old friend
, Grove thought in a brief instant of sorrow.
Grove double-clicked the America On-Line icon—the little concentric O and triangle—and waited for the Web browser to boot up. The browser ran off an old archaic dial-up modern, and the tones and blips and squawks seemed interminable to Grove's ears right now. Grove used PCs exclusively, and always felt slightly maladroit using someone else's Mac, like an American trying to drive on British streets.
At last the Web desktop appeared across the borders of the screen, the multicolored function bar flickering across the top edge, displaying the little mailbox, the globe, the telephone, the calendar, all the little Internet icons. Grove jerked the mouse back and forth, searching for the History button. Although he had used the Mac at Quantico many times, he couldn't remember which part of the Apple desktop provided a summary of recently visited sites.
“What is it you are attempting to do?” Kaminsky's basso profundo voice came from behind Grove, and it made the profiler jump slightly.
“Just trying to find a trail, some bread crumbs left behind.”
“Get out of the way.”
The Russian pushed Grove aside and leaned over the keyboard, smelling of cigars and garlic. His big gnarled fingernails clicked on the keys, manhandling the little plastic mouse. Finally he located the pull-down menu that displayed the recently visited Web addresses. “Is this what you are looking for?”
Grove told him to click the MapQuest site.
The route to Michael Doerr's place materialized on the screen in meandering veins of red.
 
 
The first thing that registered in her sleepy, anesthetized ears was the sound of metallic clicking, like somebody taking apart a pair of skates. She felt no panic, no dread, no awareness of danger, only that slightly dreamy, dissociated feeling of not quite being awake. It was not unlike being in the dentist's chair after oral surgery, and coming back to consciousness in layers. She sensed the cool chemical odor of novocaine, and realized she was covered in gooseflesh, and something was cutting into her wrists, and there was singing, off-key singing, like an elderly woman with senile dementia trying to sing an aria from some forgotten Italian opera, and it was coming from somewhere nearby, but also from far away, maybe from speakers embedded in the ceiling.
Maybe this
was
a dentist's office, and maybe the vague sense of dislocation and terror that began tugging at Maura's thoughts was just a bad dream experienced while one of her root canals was filled, and now she was going to wake back up and everything was going to be okay, and she would soon be joking with her amiable, balding dentist, Dr. Bottman, and would be rinsing and spitting in the little swirling porcelain bowl.
Unfortunately this fleeting scenario of hope swirled away like saliva down a drain as Maura began to register where she was, and what was cutting into her wrists, and who was standing across the kitchen from her.
She feigned unconsciousness for another few moments, letting her head loll back against the tabletop, peering through her squinted, half-closed eyes, trying to gather her thoughts, trying to figure out what to do. Her wrists were rope-bound and tethered to the table's legs. Evidently the power had surged back on, judging by the yellow glow of the bare bulb hanging above her. Less than six feet away stood Michael Doerr, his face downturned, his breathing coming in low, rasping wheezes as he busily threaded a nylon rope through a metal ring.
To say that Doerr had drastically changed would have been an understatement. He no longer wore the collegiate sweatshirt and cargo shorts, but now stood head to toe in filthy black rags and muslin, as if he'd been mummified and then dipped in india ink. A black, pointed cowl draped his head, obscuring his face with ominous shadows. The garb resembled the wardrobe of some kind of religious order or cult. But it was the
face
that truly woke Maura from her narcotic daze. Partially hidden in shadows, Doerr's face had creased and hardened like a brown gourd with the air sucked out of it. His eyes, once soft and full of innocence, had narrowed to the point of looking positively canine. His brows had furrowed and arched into expressions of tormented rage, and his mouth had curled back with the ferocious stupidity of a junkyard dog. The only remnant of his original personality was the little sterling silver stud in his nose.
Maura shut her eyes, and she tried her best to continue faking her nonresponsiveness, waiting for the right moment to move. But now her heart was banging with the volume of a kettledrum as the thing that was once Michael Doerr came over to her. He stood over her, breathing thickly. He smelled feral. There was a muffled clank as Doerr laid a bundle of instruments on the table next to her. Maura was certain that Doerr would notice the goose bumps rashing down her legs and her forearms. Surely he must hear the slamming of her heart. Through her closed eyelids, through her lashes, she dared to peer down at the tabletop next to her.
Her scalp prickled.
The sacrificial blades lay in a neat row on the black cloth like jewels on display. One of them was a petrified black spiral horn from some wild goat or deer, another was a nasty-looking rusted iron spike, another was a huge thorn—six inches long, at least—from some primordial vine or plant, shellacked and honed to a razor point. Maura could not identify the other objects, but by this point she was not thinking straight anyway, the sedative still dragging at her like gauze over her face. But ... she would not be a victim, goddamnit, she would not.
The monster was whispering very rapidly now, speaking in ancient, dead tongues: “
Si-su-meeru-ee-nu-na-tukum-pa-surru-voventuru—”
Then he picked up a delicate, stainless steel scalpel flaked with dried blood. The blade loomed in Maura's peripheral vision. Then the cold edge of the scalpel brushed the bridge of her nose, on its way to her eye socket. The madman was leaning down close enough now for Maura to smell his rotting breath.
“No!”
She cried out and made her move then—feeble as it was, and without much strategic forethought—yanking her right wrist violently against the ropes. The entire table hopped slightly, the right legs banging on the floor, the sudden movement tossing the bundle of instruments into the air.
Doerr jerked backward, momentarily startled, as metallic blades and animal horns skipped off the edge and clattered to the floor all around him. Maura's heart was jackhammering now as she kept yanking, again and again—“
No, no, no, no!”
—stretching the ropes, harder each time, yanking and yanking, and letting out little grunts of effort on each yank as her brain revved out of control, and her lungs heaved for air. Finally she ran out of strength.
A brief and terrible pause ensued as Doerr stood four and half feet away, breathing heavily, looking down at the fallen blades like a sleepwalker.
At last, he carefully knelt, plucked one of the razors from the floor, and rose back to his feet.
 
 
They had been making good progress until they reached Napoleon Avenue. Grove saw the wreckage first. “Hold it, Kay! Hold it! Hold it!” he called out over the storm.
Visibility had worsened noticeably over the last few minutes. The rain was coming down so hard now it was difficult to see a half block in any direction. Kaminsky stomped on the brakes, and the Jeep fishtailed to a stop in a half foot of fast-moving water. The sixty-mile-an-hour winds immediately enveloped the Jeep in white noise.
“Let's try a side street,” Grove urged, glancing over his shoulder at the wall of mist billowing off the tops of plantation homes like silver blankets, undulating in the sky, and then whipping down across the deserted Garden District. It was as dark as pitch now, and St. Charles Avenue was almost completely flooded. All along the streetcar line, the live oaks leaned now at distressing angles. Gutters coursed with rapids. Victorian gas lamps jittered and shook, sending nervous light across the roadway. At the intersection of Napoleon and St. Charles, an abandoned streetcar had floated out across the apron and capsized onto its side, blocking the westbound lanes.
Kaminsky flipped on the tungsten searchlight that hung near his side window, grasping the directional handle mounted inside his door. He swept the beam across the street. The dense rain slanted through the shaft of light, swirling in the yellow beam like luminous motes. To the north, General Pershing Boulevard was a tangle of overturned sawhorses and caution lights, the wreckage stuck on top of a drainage grate like a giant child's bath toys left in a draining tub.
To the south, the boulevard looked fairly clear, rapidly flooding, but clear. Kaminsky threw the Jeep into reverse. The rear end lurched backward through standing water. Then he shoved it into drive, and he quickly maneuvered back across the slippery streetcar line.
“Now try taking a right on Loyola.” Grove had the Map-Quest printout folded lengthwise in his hands, and it was starting to dampen and wrinkle from all the nervous gripping.
He was starting to wonder why he was endangering himself and Kaminsky just to go see this grad student cronie of the professor's, and make sure Maura was okay. Maura could get all the information they needed. As a matter of fact, she had probably already gotten it and was back at the professor's apartment right now.

Other books

Protect and Defend by Richard North Patterson
Happy Is The Bride by Caroline Clemmons
The Stud Book by Monica Drake
Honour This Day by Alexander Kent
The Hunting by Sam Hawksmoor
The Magician by Sol Stein
Closed Doors by O'Donnell, Lisa