Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  Headlights flooded the road behind him.

  He’d left his truck idling behind him, the passenger door open, and Ry dove for it just as the whole world exploded into a whirl of noise, bullets splintering the wooden planks of the loading ramp and ricocheting off the metal railing. He sprawled across the front seat, covering his head with his arms as more bullets shattered the back windshield and slammed into the tailgate, shredding the metal into confetti.

  The gunfire seemed to last forever, but suddenly there was a lull. He raised his head just enough to get a look out the side-view mirror. He saw that the behemoth black Hummer was blocking the loading ramp, and that really wasn’t good at all. They had him trapped—metal railings four feet high on both sides of him, the Hummer behind him, and the empty ferry dock in front of him. And beyond the ferry dock, only black night and blacker water.

  More gunfire rocked the truck. He thought of her shooting Dom, and he wanted to take her out right now with his bare hands, but he was outnumbered three to one and they had Uzis and his dying wasn’t going solve anything.

  He had to save his own ass first, then he’d kill her.

  Crouched behind the steering wheel, he saw two men come out from behind the Hummer, firing their automatics. The whine and ping and thud of bullets were all around him. Save his ass, hell. Who was he kidding? The chances of making it out of this alive were zilch, and that really pissed him off because not only did he not want to die, he didn’t want to give the bastards the satisfaction of killing him.

  He fastened the seat belt with one hand, while he threw the gearshift into reverse with the other, floored it, and prayed. The truck roared backward so fast the steering wheel bucked. He twisted half-around to look out the shattered back windshield and aimed the truck right for the Hummer. He grinned like the very devil as he got closer and saw the men jump out of the way, their faces white in the Hummer’s headlights. He didn’t see the woman. Maybe she was still inside, behind the wheel.

  Six feet until impact … four …two …

  Now.

  In the last instant before his truck was going to crash into the Hummer, Ry slammed the gearshift into first instead. The back tires spun on the wet wood, throwing out sparks and smoke, and then, at last, he felt the tires get traction and the truck shot forward. The railings flew by in a blur. The end of the loading ramp loomed ahead, black and empty, closer, closer …

  Oh, shit, maybe this really wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  The truck shot off the end of the ramp and out over the water. For one breathless instant it felt as if he were flying.

  He plunged down so fast he barely had time to suck in air before the truck smacked the water, so hard his teeth rattled. Water poured through the shattered windows. Down, down. How deep was it here? It was pitch-black, so black he felt blind.

  Then he felt another jolt, softer this time, as the truck hit the silty bottom.

  He pushed up against the steering wheel, but he was wedged in. He nearly lost it then, until he realized the seat belt was holding him down. He felt for the belt’s lock and pressed, but it wouldn’t open, and he stopped himself just in time from yanking on it and maybe making it worse.

  Okay, okay, don’t panic. Your chest feels a little tight, but that’s all in your head. You know you’ve still got plenty of time left before you run out of air.

  When he and Dom were kids, they used to compete with each other to see who could hold his breath underwater the longest. His brother had always won. The most Ry had ever lasted was about three minutes, enough time if he could get out of the damn seat belt. But the lock wasn’t budging.

  He grabbed the knife he’d strapped to his ankle and began madly sawing, until finally it busted open, and he was free.

  He punched his feet through what was left of the back window and pulled himself out of the truck. His arm snagged on something metal, and he felt a flash of hot pain. The darkness was absolute. He felt his way along the truck bed, the tailgate, back bumper, a tire.

  Then he realized he was actually seeing the tire and he looked up. He could see the shine of the Hummer’s bright lights cutting through the water, and trails of bullets, looking like flickering silver snakes.

  He felt along the tire’s rim until he found the air valve, then tore at the pocket of his priest’s coat to get at his burglar picks. He was starting to feel light-headed, clumsy, his chest seriously hurting now.

  He fumbled with the picks, trying to feel for the slimmest one, and they slipped through his fingers. The picks hit his knee, but by some miracle he caught them before they fell into the silt and reeds. Maybe it was Dom, the spirit of Dom, looking out for him, because he ought to have died ten times over by now.

  One more time, though, Dom. Just a little more help down here, because I’m out of air.

  White lights flashed in front of his eyes and his ears rang as he fought desperately to keep his mouth from opening to gulp at oxygen that wasn’t there. One more time, Dom, one more …

  At last, at last he found the tire’s air valve. He popped off the cap, poked the burglar’s pick into the valve, pushing in the seal. He closed his mouth over the valve and breathed in the sweet, wonderful air.

  He closed his eyes for a moment in blessed relief, then covered the valve with his thumb so that bubbles wouldn’t rise to the surface and looked up. They were still there, Hummer lights still shining on the water, but they’d stopped wasting bullets. Soon, he prayed, she’d believe he was dead, but she wouldn’t leave even then. She would wait a long while just to be sure, and she would have her two guys watch the shoreline to make sure he didn’t swim for it, and then she would wait some more, and he hated her for that.

  Yeah, well, he would make her pay for all of it someday, but right now he needed her and the people she worked for to think he was dead. He needed time and the freedom from being hunted so he could find Katya Orlova and the film and get at the truth behind what his father had done. First, though, he needed to get over to Bolivar so he could read what Dom had left in Lafitte’s treasure chest, and he hoped to God he was right about that, that Dom had managed to write it all down and hide it away before they’d killed him.

  Ry took another breath of the oily, compressed air. He wondered how long he would be able to breathe the stuff before doing serious damage to his lungs.

  He breathed again and looked up. The headlights were still there, damn the bitch all to hell.

  He breathed and waited. Five minutes, ten. Breathed and waited, and waited some more, and still the headlights were there, shining on the water. Suddenly his stomach cramped, so hard he almost opened his mouth and swallowed water. He hadn’t, though. He’d kept it together, and the cramping was probably nothing to worry about, just nausea from the oil in the air he was breathing. Just nausea from the oil.

  He looked up.

  Still there.

  11

  Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts

  Sixteen hours later

  SHE STOOD naked before him.

  The setting sun shone through the bedroom’s enormous plate-glass window, burning his eyes and making her red hair look on fire. All he could hear was the surf breaking on the beach below them, and his own harsh breathing.

  “Suck it off me,” she said, and she cupped her breasts in her hands, lifting them. He saw that her nipples were smeared with something dark red and crusty, and he couldn’t stop himself from shuddering.

  “Oh, dear God …”

  “Dear God?” she said, laughing. “God’s never stopped you before. Is it because of whose blood it is this time? But you knew he was a priest when you told me to kill him, and I blew him away, lover boy. Blew him away right there in his church, and with the Lord Jesus and all his angels looking down.”

  He shook his head, but he couldn’t stop himself from lifting those perfect, bloodied breasts in his two big hands. She was insane, truly mad, and so what did that make him? Because she excited him almost beyond bearing.

 
She sighed and leaned into him, seemed to melt right into him. “Do you want to hear how he begged for his life?”

  “Later. Right now you’re the one I want to see down on your knees.”

  He let go of her breasts to grab roughly at his belt with one hand and her head with the other, snagging his fingers in all that luscious red hair, as he pushed her down onto the floor in front of him.

  LATER, SHE SAID to him, “The other one, the priest’s brother? He was a lot harder to kill. For a while there it was like we were playing Whac-A-Mole through the streets of Galveston, you know? He just wouldn’t go down.”

  Miles Taylor—billionaire, financial speculator, philanthropist, and political activist—was pouring one of the world’s most expensive single malts, a sixty-year-old Macallan, into a pair of Waterford crystal tumblers. And it wasn’t so much her choice of postcoital conversation as the way she’d said it, with the same tone of voice she might use to order a pastrami sandwich, that made him stop what he was doing and turn to look at her.

  Yasmine Poole sat in one of the room’s floral, white wicker chairs—a hideous thing his second wife, Laurette, had picked out back in the day and which he’d always hated. Too froufrou he’d told her at the time, but she hadn’t really given a shit about his opinion on bedroom chairs or anything else for that matter, which was why he’d eventually divorced her ass.

  Yasmine, though, was a whole different kind of woman. He couldn’t figure her out. Couldn’t figure them out, their relationship, or whatever people called long-term and exclusively mutual sex these days. An undercurrent was between them, an intimacy that was nearly unbearable at times, raw and dark. She’d told him once that he indulged in her the need to kill. “You are my pusher,” she’d said, “for the dark drug I need to feed my soul.”

  Lately, though, he was beginning to wonder which of them was really the junkie. Because every time he looked at her, the way he was looking at her now, he was lost in her.

  He saw that she’d pulled her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck and was dressed again in the ivory silk Armani suit she’d had on when she’d flown over from the mainland an hour ago. She was reading something off a laptop she had balanced on one knee, and that little crease was between her eyes that she got when she was concentrating. But her mouth was the mouth of a whore, red and wet and swollen.

  “You’re wearing that moony, doofus look again, Miles,” she said, without looking up. “If you’re not careful, people are gonna say you’re in love.”

  Miles Taylor could actually feel himself blushing, and it annoyed the hell out of him because he was sure no one had ever succeeded in making him blush before in his life. “I was just thinking how not more than a half an hour ago I was sucking blood off your naked tits, and now you’re sitting over there looking so proper and professional. Like a model for a Brooks Brothers catalog.”

  “I’m a personal assistant to the president of a multibillion-dollar corporation. This is how I always look when I’m not killing for you, or fucking you. And you were so smiling at me, Miles. Lovingly. I could feel it like a warm breath on my skin. I keep telling you we’re soul mates. You need to accept that and deal.”

  “Bullcrap.”

  Even if he did believe there was such a thing as soul mates, he would never give her that power over him by admitting to it, and the last thing he wanted to do was “deal.”

  What in hell did that expression even mean, anyway?

  Miles Taylor ruled a financial empire worth over $15 billion, more than the gross national product of some third-world countries, and with all the mesmerizing power such an obscene amount of money entailed. He had one child still living, a daughter; five grandchildren, all girls; two ex-wives, both bitches; and he couldn’t so much as sneeze without a half dozen ass-kissing toadies springing up to hand him a hankie.

  And not a single one of those people mattered to him.

  All his life he’d had this aching hole in him that he just couldn’t seem to fill. It was like that disease where you’re hungry all the time, and you eat and eat, but all the calories and nutrition just go right through you. He could’ve paid some psychiatrist four hundred bucks an hour to tell him it was all Mommy and Daddy’s fault, and the guy would probably be right. But who gave a shit?

  All he knew was that ever since Yasmine Poole had come into his life, he didn’t feel so empty anymore. And that scared the living hell out of him sometimes, because she was, to put it crudely, crazier than a shithouse rat.

  “I’ll tell you what it is, Yaz,” he said. “You’re in love with my money and I’m just a horny old goat, and that’s either ridiculous or obscene, because when a man’s cock’s got some eighty years on it, even a tight pussy and a little blue miracle pill can only compensate for so much reality.”

  She raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow, although she still didn’t look up from whatever she was reading on her laptop. “Notice how all I have to do is drop the word love into the conversation, and your mind leaps right to my pussy without even passing go. Yet people call me the gold digger.”

  He laughed as he went to her, carrying a glass in each hand and trying to hide from her the little hitch in his stride, because if she noticed it, she’d be back on his case again about seeing a doctor and getting it replaced. He’d blown the knee out twice, once years ago on a track field in college, then later on a ski slope in Aspen, and it throbbed nearly all the time now. A low, dull ache. He’d taken two heavy-duty pain pills earlier, but they were wearing off, and he didn’t want to take more because he hated what the drugs did to his brain, how they made his thoughts wander.

  He set her drink down on the glass-topped wicker table beside her and took a healthy swig of his own. At $38,000 a bottle you wouldn’t think it would burn his gullet going down, but it wasn’t the Macallan’s fault, he knew. It was the damn acid reflux. Christ, he hated getting old.

  “The other O’Malley boy,” he said. “The one you said was so hard to kill. Are you sure he really is dead? Because, baby, if that film ever sees the light of day …”

  He waved a hand to encompass the whole nightmare scenario. His reputation destroyed, his power shattered, not to mention the possibility of spending the last of his golden years sharing a cell with a sodomizing, drug-crazed biker called Bubba. All these years, all the millions he’d spent on influencing both the marketplace and the ballot box, positioning himself so that he was for all intents and purposes running the party from the inside, and they were finally back to winning elections again, controlling Congress, and starting to change the country for the better…. All of that would be down the toilet if the film got out.

  “Tell me we’ve got this under control, Yaz. Tell me you know for sure that he’s dead, because first he gets away from a whole frigging commando squad down there in D.C., and then he pops up in Galveston—”

  “He drowned, Miles.” She made a glug, glug, glug sound, bugged out her eyes, and let her tongue flop out the side of her mouth. “We hung around on that dock for almost an hour after his car drove into the water, and there was no way he could’ve climbed back out without us seeing him, so unless he grew gills, he’s dead. Along with his brother and his old man.”

  “Yeah. Dead like his old man.” Miles shook his head. “That fucking Mike O’Malley. He’s been like a knife pointed at my throat all these years, and I didn’t dare get rid of him because of that damn film. Now he finally goes and dies of a nice, natural heart attack, and it looks like I’m home free. That with him dead and gone, all I got to do is clean up any possible loose ends by whacking his boys, just in case he told them something, you know? And if I can’t turn up the film, then it can just go on rotting wherever the hell it’s been all this time, some safety-deposit box or lawyer’s safe, whatever.”

  He stopped to draw breath, glancing over at her, and he saw that she was looking up at him, her hands folded in her lap, as if waiting patiently for his rant to wind down. “Only now,” he said, “you tell me the prick never had
the film in the first place. Or rather that he had it a week at the most, before his woman took off with it. This Katya Orlova person. Hell, up until this deathbed confession of his, I didn’t know such a woman even existed. Fucking O’Malley. All these years, I could’ve had him killed at any time and it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  Yasmine breathed out a soft sigh and stood up, closing her laptop. “Well, he’s dead now. And his kiddies are dead. And I’ve already got people out looking for Katya Orlova. If she’s anywhere alive on this earth, we’ll find her and make her dead, too. After she gives us the film, of course.”

  “Yeah, okay, okay. Good.”

  The woman, Katya Orlova—she could be long dead by now, too, Miles thought. And even if she was still alive, she would have to be a withered old crone, all bent over and helpless, maybe even on her merry way to dementia. They were all of them so damn old now.

  Miles belched, then tried to rub away the pain in his chest with his fist. He downed another swig of whiskey. It didn’t help either.

  Yasmine came to him. The material of her suit was soft and clingy, and it moved over her hips like a man’s hands. Her eyes were dark and deep and luminous.

  “You’ve still got some of his blood on you,” he said, his voice rough.

  “What? Where?”

  “Here.” He cupped his hand around her neck, pulling her to him. “Behind your ear. Jesus, Yaz, what did you do? Dab it on after you killed him like it was some kind of fucking perfume?”

  She was batshit crazy all right, but then he’d known that about her, lived with it and relished it, for seven years now. From the first day he’d hired her.

  BEFORE YASMINE POOLE’S résumé came across his desk, Miles Taylor was going through personal assistants at the rate of one a year. He was an exacting—okay, you might even go so far as to say a tyrannical—boss, and it seemed as if no matter how impressive the PAs all looked to him on paper, they turned out to be idiots whose delicate self-esteems got bruised if he so much as looked at them crossways. And he really didn’t have the time or patience for that kind of shit.