The Heavens Rise

by Christopher Rice

  “I still don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go with me.”

  “Well, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to go at all, given the man manages a trust that belongs to Marshall Ferriot.” She let Ben absorb the impact of this body blow for a few seconds. Then, with a leering smile, she added, “Who knows? Maybe it was the one he was stealing from . . . That’s right. How ’bout you thank me instead of acting like my daddy?”

  “I hear he was a lot taller. Okay. The boat?”

  “Gated community, but the Tchefuncte runs right through it and it’s not gated.”

  “I see . . .”

  “I’m going, Uptown Girl. You can do the driving. But I’m going.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause it might be the last story we work on together for a while.”

  “Oh, Jesus. What did you say to Hilda?”

  “I told her if she didn’t like the way journalism worked, maybe she should get her husband to buy her a store so she could sell shiny things to other white ladies and leave me to do my goddamn job.”

  “You might be able to recover from that one.”

  “Yeah . . . not the part about how I held her personally responsible for all those deaths out in Ascension Parish. That one’s gonna stick, I think.”

  Ben was speechless, suddenly imagining a future at Kingfisher without his mentor, if such a thing was even possible.

  “Come on, Ben. Time’s a wastin’. We don’t want WDSU catchin’ this thing before we do.”

  Ben took the truck out of park and placed his foot on the gas.

  “What was that phone call about?” Marissa asked, once they’d gone a few blocks and the shock of her revelation seemed further away.

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Well, it’s a day for that, isn’t it?”

  “You got that right,” Ben whispered. “Marissa, if they fire you, I’ll—”

  “Don’t. Not yet. We’ll talk about it later. Just drive.”

  A few minutes later, Ben’s phone let out a small chime that told him he had a new email. The message was from Alison Cross, and the attachment was a photograph of her and her missing husband, standing on a windswept beach in the light of dusk. She was a plump, fading beauty with flame-red hair, and he was a foot taller than her, with thick, ink-black eyebrows and a deeply recessed brow that looked poised to swallow his pinprick eyes.

  Ben had seen the man before, in an old photograph the Delongpres used to keep on the living room wall. It had been taken on the night Nikki’s father had proposed to her mother, back when Elysium was just a muddy acreage with two trailers parked a few yards from each other and string lights running through the low-hanging branches, all of it powered by a gas generator. In it, the happy couple and several of their close friends were crowded around a lounge chair as a young Millie Delongpre extended her ring finger toward the camera. Jeffrey Cross has been one of the friends featured in that photo. But that was the extent of his contact with the man—a picture on the wall of a friend’s house, a friend who had been declared legally dead a few years before. And he was too distracted by the strong scent of booze coming off his boss to spend his afternoon wandering down the darkest part of memory lane.

  • • •

  Ben was glad they weren’t the only boat launching from Madisonville that day. It meant the police hadn’t closed off the Tchefuncte farther upriver. As he did his best to obey the no-wake rule posted on buoys that bobbed in the dark green water on either side of the tiny boat, Marissa fussed with her iPhone, cupping one hand over the screen to shield it from the sun while she tapped it with the other. The boat had a tiny tarp that only covered the captain’s chair.

  “Any idea how far into Beau Chêne we have to go?” Ben shouted over the motor.

  “I’m workin’ on it.”

  “Is that a no?”

  “We’re workin’ to beat the clock here. I didn’t exactly have time to pull out my swamp atlas, all right?”

  She had a point, and to her credit, she’d tried ceaselessly on the ride there to get her phone to connect to Google Maps, only to have her signal drop every few minutes or so.

  After just a little while on the water, walls of cypress rose on either side of the river, and it was easy to believe they were in the middle of a vast unending swamp. But the palatial homes of Beau Chêne would rise on the eastern bank in just another few minutes. They had only about another hour before dark and the setting sun laced the rippling green water with elongated tree shadows and great blades of orange.

  “We could go it on our own,” Ben said.

  “Ben—”

  “We could. Seriously. The whole online advertising thing’s a whole ’nother ball game. We’d figure it out . . . eventually.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Okay, now, I’m guessing we get two bends in the river before we hit the Stevens place. So why don’t you—”

  “I’m not staying without you.”

  “Ben. Focus.”

  “I’m not, Marissa. It’ll just be a matter of time before I mouth off to that bitch too. Especially if she fires you—”

  “We got houses up ahead, Ben.”

  She was right. A few yards down the suddenly manicured riverbank, a giant boat dock, big enough to house a spiral water slide, jutted out into the water, and beyond it, sunlight filtered through oak branches onto green lawns and redbrick McMansions. Ben saw no sign of the St. Tammany Sheriff’s Department. Or of any of the residents, for that matter. Maybe the prospect of a wife-killing banker on the loose had them inside behind locked doors.

  “Okay. There’s one bend,” he said.

  “I think we got two more.”

  Ben throttled the motor and the tiny boat picked up speed. “How far from shore is the house?” he asked.

  “Not sure. He’s not listed.”

  “You didn’t ask your source?”

  “I was kinda drunk.”

  “Anastasis.”

  “What?”

  “That’ll be the name of our new website. It’s Greek for resurrection. What do you think?”

  “I hope you got a long list of those.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “You’re not going down with me, Ben. You’re too damn talented, and you don’t owe me that.”

  “I do—”

  “You don’t, Ben!”

  The force of her anger startled both of them silent, and for a minute or two, there was just the whine of the boat’s engine and the river’s water whooshing past the fiberglass hull.

  “No matter what happens with me and Hilda, I’m not leaving your life. Not now, not ever. And you won’t have to chase me from bar to bar to keep me in it, either. I owe you that much ’cause you’re my friend, and you’re a good one. And I promise you, the only time you’ll have to say good-bye to me is when one of us is leaving this great earth. Got it?”

  He was grateful for his sunglasses because they hid tears so sudden and forceful, a few quick blinks were enough to keep them at bay.

  “And Ben?”

  “Yes.”

  “Looks like it was one bend, not two. Sorry.”

  The cops were suddenly everywhere along the bank up ahead, uniformed deputies, walking the perimeter, and as soon as one of them saw the boat approaching, he held up one palm in the universal signal of “Don’t move another damn inch, son.” Ben cursed up a storm under his breath while he yanked back on the throttle until they were almost drifting. The engine sputtered as it the propeller slowed, the deputies clotting together on the bank to meet their approach.

  “Goddammit,” Marissa whispered. “I fucked up. Sorry.”

  “So I guess we have to keep going or else we’ll—”

  Just then the boat’s propeller made a sound like a motorcycle slamming into a brick wall. The jolt was so strong it knocked Marissa forward into the back of the captain’s chair. Ben’s chest hit the wheel as the entire boat rose and fell beneath them; it felt like a whale had pass
ed underneath the thing. But the terrible scream was coming from the propeller blades in back.

  “Kill it! Kill it!”

  Ben followed Marissa’s instructions and in the silence that fell, he heard one of the deputies cry out, “You folks just stay right where you are!”

  “Well, that should be easy,” Marissa called back. “Looks like something just ate our propeller.”

  Ben scooted past her toward the back of the boat. He saw it right away, the bright loops of steel wrapped around the blades like the tentacles of an octopus, and as Ben used both hands to free it, Marissa started backing up, probably because she was stricken by the same thought as Ben. The chain wasn’t some rusted, filthy river-bottom relic they had stirred to the surface by mistake. It looked brand new. And if it was new, that meant—

  The corpse exploded to the surface a few yards away.

  “Ho, mother,” Marissa groaned.

  Ben did his best not to look away. The body bobbed in the green water like a cork: greasy blue lips, brown hair plastered to one side in a style that would have been adorable on a little kid bursting from a swimming pool; but on this bloated, grown man it looked obscene. Two loops of chain crossed the man’s naked, bruised shoulders, and a shiny padlock secured the four loops of chain at the center of his chest.

  “Daniel Stevens?” The question was intended for his boss, but he’d directed it at the corpse floating a few feet away from him. When Marissa didn’t answer him, he turned and saw that all the life seemed to have drained from her eyes, and from her body itself; her arms hung limply at her sides and he couldn’t tell if she was pouting or if she’d lost all feeling in her lower jaw. Shock. It had to be shock.

  “Marissa?”

  She lunged at him, and before he could cry out, she’d shoved him headfirst into the water. He was choking, arms flailing, bumping up against the corpse, pawing at its slick chest as he tried to get his bearings, kicking to get his head above water. Then he felt the chain he’d loosened from the propeller tighten suddenly around his waist. She was dragging him toward the boat, and for a second, he thought she was helping him, that she was about to pull him out of the water. Then the chain tightened suddenly and viciously around his neck. His head slammed into something hard. The chain tightened again. His head was wedged between two of the propeller’s scored, mangled blades. And when he tried to scream Marissa’s name, what came out instead was a frenzied chorus of high-pitched keening sounds that sounded more animal than human.

  And over them, he could hear the sound of Marissa’s footsteps padding across the floor of the boat, heading in the direction of the captain’s chair, the throttle and the ignition.

  • • •

  Lloyd Duchamp came to on the floor of his kitchen. He figured it was the high-pitched screams coming from the river that had roused him. But what had they roused him from? Yes, he’d allowed himself a beer after the police had finished questioning him a few hours before. But that was all. Just one beer. Surely not enough to trigger a full-on-blackout, and that’s exactly what this felt like.

  And it wasn’t like anyone would blame him for knocking back a single Heineken either. It had been a helluva day, what with Danny Stevens going full psycho on everyone. Lloyd was basically a prisoner in his own home until the cops were finished securing the scene, as they’d put it. And in this case, the scene was the bloody murder house next door.

  His house sat right on the bank of the Tchefuncte, and from his kitchen window, he could see a tiny motorboat floating in the river. That’s where the screams were coming from. A couple cops were running along the bank, shouting things across the water to the black woman in the boat. But it looked like she was ignoring them. She certainly wasn’t the one screaming, he could tell that much. And she didn’t look like she cared much who was. Actually, it looked she was getting ready to start up the motor and get the hell out of there, which to be frank, is just what he wanted to do.

  Crazy. This whole place has gone full-on crazy.

  In a single instant, he smelled the gas and heard the sharp crack outside. He turned in time to see the black woman go down, saw the deputy on the bank who’d fired the shot still frozen, gun raised. A sudden, stunned silence washed over the entire scene; all heads had turned toward the river now and its lone floating boat.

  Lloyd Duchamp would have stood at his kitchen window forever watching the scene unfold if it hadn’t been for the gas. The smell was overpowering him now.

  He threw open the cabinet doors under the sink. When the wave of gas hit him, his eyes started to water and he had to blink madly before he saw that the gas line snaking out from behind the oven had been completely unscrewed. It hadn’t popped off or slipped out of joint. It was unscrewed, and that meant someone—

  Then Lloyd Duchamp’s vision seemed to slide sideways, losing resolution as it went, as if his entire world were being wiped away by a giant, invisible hand.

  • • •

  The gunshot turned Ben’s panic into clear, focused action.

  He drove himself straight down under the water. It turned out to be the magic direction. His neck jerked loose from the chain and when he surfaced, he was several feet away from the mangled propeller Marissa has lassoed his head to. An accident. It had to be. An accident. She panicked . . . But there was no sign of her, and that’s when he realized they’d shot her.

  One of the deputies on the bank was beckoning him toward the shore with both hands, and Ben focused on the man’s stoic expression as if it were a goalpost. Impossible. Impossible. The word kept repeating itself in his brain, then, when he tasted rank water, he realized he was rasping it to himself even as he swam. Only now he could feel how deeply the water had gone into his lungs. His neck stung in a dozen different places from where the scored propeller had sliced into flesh as he’d struggled to free himself. But the deputy kept beckoning and Ben kept swimming.

  And then, some strange sense of foreboding stirred inside him, and something behind the deputy caught his eye. At first, Ben thought he was hallucinating the clouds of splintered wood and glass hurtling through the air toward the assemblage of cops a few yards in front of him. Then everything seemed to arrive out of sequence: the belt of orange flames that exploded from the center of the redbrick house just down the riverbank, the uniformed deputies toppling like rag dolls, the explosion’s deafening pop that seemed to come like an afterthought to the blaze of lights and flying debris.

  He forced himself under the water again just as flaming timbers splashed down on all sides of him, praying that when he surfaced again, this deranged, impossible nightmare would suddenly be over.

  20

  * * *

  Can you walk?”

  From the expression on the man’s face, it looked like the sheriff’s deputy crouching down over Ben had screamed these words at the top of the lungs. But to Ben they sounded distant and distorted; he was still partially deafened by the explosion, a whomp so deep and powerful it had rattled his teeth and kicked bile into the back of his throat.

  Before the blast, it had been an orderly crime scene lined with uniformed deputies walking grid patterns. Now it was a war zone of flaming debris and crumpled bodies. The redbrick house a few yards away was geysering flames from its first-floor windows. And the fire had spread to the roof of the house next door, a stone French Regency affair Ben assumed to be the Stevens place. Gas. It had to be, he thought, because now it looked like the fire’s only fuel was the interior of the redbrick house where it had started.

  “Was it the gunshot?” the deputy screamed. “What was it? Did you see?”

  Ben was startled by the question, then by the brief rain of flaming leaves that fell from the burning oak branches overhead. The deputy shoved them both out of the way. And that’s when Ben realized the cop next to him hadn’t witnessed the surfacing corpse, Ben’s near beheading and the shooting.

  The bodies along the bank lay facedown, motionless. Ben blinked a few times and saw that the bright red stains in the
ir khaki uniforms had dimension and depth. They weren’t stains; pieces of the men had been torn away from them by the explosion. One of those deputies had shot Marissa, and all three of them had witnessed the crazy thing she’d done to him with the chain.

  And there was the boat, undamaged, still drifting a few yards from shore, Marissa a dark shadow across the floor next to the captain’s chair.

  No witnesses. None that were conscious anyway. Maybe not even alive.

  “What the hell happened?” the deputy screamed at him.

  “I don’t know!” Ben shouted back, his voice sounding louder inside his own head than the nearby screams and approaching sirens. And the answer was partly true. He didn’t have a damn clue what had started the fire. All he knew was that as soon as Stevens’s body had shot to the surface of the river, his boss, one of his closest friends for eight years, had almost torn his head off. But it was all so quick, so confusing. Maybe she really had been trying to help him . . . Then why did the deputy shoot her? Ben thought, before he could stop himself. If she wasn’t about to kill you, why did the deputy shoot her where she stood?

  He didn’t use the word casually, but this was honest-to-God chaos. The bloody scene all around them, the deranged events that had created it in the blink of an eye. There was no other word for it. He’d interviewed enough soldiers and surgeons to know they were trained to take quick, decisive action in the midst of chaos, but he was not a solider or a surgeon; his training told him to gather evidence, assess each piece, assemble a bigger picture once he’d managed to take a breath and get a pen in hand.

  Had some kind of trip wire been attached to the corpse? Had Marissa somehow realized the explosion was imminent, panicked and gone to start the boat without realizing she was about to tear his head off in the propeller?

  “Why did they shoot her?” the deputy shouted, with a kindergarten teacher’s careful emphasis.

  I’m not leaving your life. Not now, not ever. And you won’t have to chase me from bar to bar to keep me in it, either. She’d said these words to him just minutes before everything had gone to hell. How could she have gone from those words to trying to kill him? How was it possible? It wasn’t possible. That had to be it. It wasn’t.