by Julie Smith
Who else to call? There was one person, but it might not be a good idea. A person who disapproved of Toes’s activities and felt threatened by them. Yet also a person who had a big fat stake in keeping them quiet. But she couldn’t call the Baron. Could she?
She damned well had to. She had to do anything she could.
The cops again? Sure. Anything. And she had the license plate. She tried a different tack this time— terrified motorist.
“Nine-one-one? I just saw a man with a gun pointed at a little girl— a teenager. Omigod, I’m losing the car— yeah, he’s in a car. Yes. Yes, I have got the plate number.” Pretty suspicious given the rest of the message, but what did she care? “Algiers Point. Near those woods— you know? Omigod, I just heard shots. Hurry, Officer. Hurry! It’s a black Lincoln Navigator.”
It probably sounded phony as hell, like some angry wife with a grudge, but she knew they couldn’t ignore it.
She couldn’t stop her fingers, they moved on their own, dialing up Baronial Records, and then her mouth got out of control. “The Baron, please. Tell him it’s the Baroness de Pontalba and if he wants to save his brother’s sorry fucking life, he better get on the phone now.”
Excuse my French, Eddie.
The Baron came on the line. “Baroness, what the hell’s going on?”
“Your crazy-assed brother just kidnapped a teenage girl and my partner’s son. I’m in a car right behind them.” (That was close enough.) “We’re in Algiers Point.”
“You on drugs, Your Grace?”
“You killed the mama, didn’t you? Listen, I know the whole story. How Rhonda Bergeron made a stink and ended up dead. Then so did Cassandra’s mama. The detective she hired’s in a coma. If he dies, that’s three.”
“You are the craziest chick I ever met in my life.”
So why didn’t he hang up? “He’s got two more in his car, and I’m on their tail. If he takes us all out, that’ll make six. It’s not going to fly, Baron. You can’t save your brother. I’m giving you an opportunity to save yourself. Take it.”
She could see the Lincoln SUV now; it was parked by the side of the road. She was sweating. The Baron said, “What do you want?”
“Call him. Call him now. Page him. You must have some kind of emergency code.” She could hear the panic in her own voice.
“Why should I?”
“What?” She was struggling to see if they were still in the car.
“Why should I call him?”
“Because I have a recording of you admitting you sent Bingo and Pig to take out the mother.”
“Sheeit! Ya got no such thing.”
“Walk around to the front of your desk and feel under the lip. Go ahead, do it. Remember when you turned toward the window and gave me a look at your fine black ass? Know what I put there? Go see. Feel it?”
She thought she heard him swear under his breath. “That’s a little transmitter I put there. I put one in your brother’s office as well. I’ve got a recording of the conversation you had when I left your office. You stop him, I give it to you. He touches that kid, and the rest of your life you’re doing the midnight show at Angola.”
“Give me your number.”
She rattled it off. “Baron, there’s one more thing. I’m armed. I’d as soon kill your brother as swat a fly. In fact, I’d love to. You don’t want to make me mad.”
He laughed, and for a moment she thought she’d overdone it. Probably she sounded like some fifties TV detective. But he said, “That’d be the best thing for everybody, now wouldn’t it?”
He hung up, leaving her shaking her head to clear it. It had to be a pose. He’d hired killers to protect the man, he wasn’t about to throw him to the lions— or rather, the lioness. She liked the sound of that.
She dialed 911 again, and with appropriate histrionics, gave the dispatcher her location.
Her cell phone rang as soon as she hung up. The Baron said, “I can’t get him. Where are you?”
“Why?”
“I’m coming. I’m in the car.”
He could of course send a fleet of thugs to whack her. Better come clean, she thought. “Baron. The cops are on the way.”
“The fuck! My brother’s crazy, you understand? I’m coming.”
The fuck! she thought. He had a point. She told him her location.
And then she put a clip in the automatic and another in her pocket. She got out of the car, and started toward the SUV, wishing for a bulletproof vest, a motorcycle helmet, suit of armor, anything at all. “Toes?” she hollered. “Toes, I’ve got a message from your brother.”
There was no answer. She had a bad feeling no one was in the car, and it proved out.
That meant Toes was in the nasty, swampy woods with Cassandra and Tony. She’d have to be crazy to go in there. Nevertheless, she was going to. She took off her hat and her red cape and started walking, glad she had on boots.
She moved timidly, taking very small steps in the hope they’d be quieter. She had no idea which direction to choose, and she paused frequently to listen. Finally, she thought she heard a male voice. And another noise, some kind of repetitive thumping. She headed toward it, ever so slowly and quietly.
She saw them before she could figure out what was going on— all three of them, alive. One of the men was sitting on the ground, and so was Cassandra. The other was bending over and straightening up, the same action over and over again. At this distance, she couldn’t see color, and if the three had been strangers, sex might have been questionable.
Moving closer, it was a nightmare tableau. The man on the ground was Toes, the action was digging— he was forcing Tony, probably at gunpoint, to dig his own grave.
Yes, the gun was there. Talba felt for her own. She had no idea what its range was, but decided not to go any closer. If the situation changed, she could at least fire warning shots.
The boots that were even now saving her from snake and mosquito bites were too noisy to try any kind of surprise attack. The only thing she could think to do was wait, and there was nothing she hated more.
The change, when it came, surprised her as much as Toes. It was a shout, impossibly loud, right in her ear (or so it seemed). “Toes Toledano!”
Goddammit, don’t! she thought. Shut the fuck up. He’s going to go crazy and shoot them both.
Instead, he rose and broke into a big silly grin, ready to high-five the newcomer. “Hey, T!” he hollered, and Talba whirled to see the Baron behind her, megaphone in hand.
He said, “Give it up, brother. It’s over.”
“Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout? What’s that shit you talkin’?”
“It ain’t no good, Toes. Give it up. The bitch called the cops.”
“I didn’t do nothin’. I was just gon’ give the bitch some tickets.” (Presumably not the same bitch who called the cops.) “Asshole comes along, says he’s a cop— what I’m s’posed to do? Huh? Answer me that?”
“Hey, brother. The bitch called the cops. The Baroness.”
“The poetry bitch?” There were probably plenty of bitches in Toes’s life. “Where she now?”
“Her car’s here.”
And Talba suddenly realized neither one of them had seen her. She heard sirens.
It was over. It was as good as over.
And yet… and yet…as long as they couldn’t see her…
It occurred to her she could walk in a circle and come up behind Toes. It would be tricky— her purple outfit wasn’t exactly invisible. And it would be dangerous— if the cops started shooting, she’d be right in their line of fire. On the other hand, wasn’t this what backup was? Being there just in case?
It was a terrible idea. A perfectly awful idea. But curiously, she didn’t feel the fear. She felt calm and detached. This was probably the other adrenaline response, the one that didn’t result in a turtle imitation. It may never happen again, she thought. I may as well enjoy it. She started moving.
She was so intent on her own stealth she didn’t notice that the pla
ce was overrun almost before she had a chance to notice. Quietly, cops fanned out in a semicircle around Toes. And there weren’t only cops. Television crews were right behind them— dangerously close, she thought, cameras like great metal pets on their shoulders. How the hell had they gotten into it?
Talba stopped and watched. The cops were apparently in the act of trying to arrest the Baron, or at least get him the hell out of there, and Toes was going crazy. “You let him go! Let my brother go! Swear to God if you don’t let him go, gon’ kill this motherfucker!” He jumped Tony, pulled him into a death hug, and stuck the gun in his ear. Cassandra whimpered. Talba was close enough to see that the girl’s hands were tied behind her. She couldn’t see her feet.
She continued moving. What if she came up behind Toes and shot him in the back? She didn’t rule it out.
At this point, she certainly didn’t.
Some cop told Toes to take it easy, and backed away from the Baron, who talked quietly with him a few minutes. After some amount of palaver, they both nodded and the Baron again picked up his megaphone. “Let him go, bro’. S’pose you kill him— what happens then? Then they kill you. And our mama never stop cryin’.”
“You don’t own me, T. I’m my own man, goddammit! You don’t own me!” He sounded like Pamela’s father yelling about his daughter. What was it the sound of? What did it mean?
Furious.
Well, sure.
Powerless and desperate.
What could she do with that? Desperate for what?
Pamela’s father needed his daughter back; Toes needed what he said he had— to be his own man. To feel free of his brother.
She was somewhat to his left now, still a long way from his rear flank. But this was her shot. She saw the one thing she could do.
She rolled down the sleeves on her Indian-style top and measured. Both covered her hands, and the right one almost covered the gun. An inch or two stuck out, but maybe he wouldn’t notice. She stepped into the clearing where he could see her; she was close, no more than fifty feet from him. She held her hands at her sides.
A roar went up from the cops. “What the fuck! Get that woman out of there! Goddammit!”
As if they could do anything about her.
She said, “I didn’t call the cops. He did.” She jerked her head toward the Baron. “I tried to talk him out of it”
“Fuck you, T!” He shoved Tony to the ground and pointed the gun at his brother.
Talba fired.
Chapter 26
She had no idea the shot would be so loud. She stood there in shock, half-deaf, and men were pointing guns, shouting. “Drop the gun!”
“Drop it!”
“Put your hands on top of your head!”
It didn’t occur to her they were talking to her until she heard Tony calling her name. “Talba! Drop it, or they’ll shoot you!”
She’d forgotten she was holding a gun. It was like part of her now aching arm, but she felt her fingers release it, saw it fall to the ground. “Cassandra?” she said, and the girl answered. For a second, a second fragment, really, a blink, she had that sick feeling again, that about-to-faint feeling, and once again, she heard her name: “Talba!”
When she opened her eyes, a cop was standing over her, taking her pulse, putting something under her feet. The noise was unbearable— people shouting, sirens blaring, newscasters mouthing their spiels. Nasty harsh lights shone in her eyes, from the televison cameras. She closed them again.
It was big-time turtle-time. She stayed like that, in a near coma, for nearly the whole time it took the ambulance to get there and whiz back to Charity, coming out of it only once. When they got her on a stretcher and put her in it, when she caught on that that was what they were really doing, she said, “Am I shot?”
And someone answered, “No, you’re okay. You’ll be fine.”
She wanted Tony with her in the ambulance, but she couldn’t poke her head far enough out of her shell to mention it.
They had an awful time with her in the emergency room, couldn’t seem to bring her around. She knew because she was partly awake; what she was doing was perhaps a form of playing possum, she wasn’t sure, honestly didn’t know if she could come fully back if she wanted to. What she did know was she didn’t want to.
She had learned things in that sorry swamp. It wasn’t even a swamp, just a wet piece of woods, a pathetic, ugly place, and she’d learned pathetic, ugly things there. She had seen her whole life pass before her in the moment she shot Toes. Or enough of it to know the rest was a sham.
When she felt the kick from the gun, she knew. She knew she’d felt it before. When Toes fell, when she saw the blood, the unstoppable scarlet fluid flowing out of him, flowing toward her in a thick, sticky ribbon, she knew she’d seen it before. She understood why the flashbacks were so terrifying. If the stream of blood touched her, she would die. She’d felt it today in Algiers, and she felt it that other time, God knew where it was, just that it was. She’d felt the same inconceivable terror when she shot her father.
* * *
Eddie’s dream was too loud, too chaotic; he’d as soon be awake for all the rest he was getting. His son Anthony was in it, looking handsome, heavier, more grown-up— more manly, truth be told— than he had a decade ago. Audrey and Angela were there as well, Angie wearing that eternal black of hers, looking pinched and pale. Something about her was way off. Her confidence was gone. Fear was coming out of her pores like sweat. She seemed small and dried-up and not herself at all.
The other person there was his new assistant, Talba Wallis, and she was worse off than Angie. Her rich brown skin seemed to have turned gray. She looked like an animal someone had beaten. She was telling some crazy story about a police shootout, except that, in the weird way dreams twist things, she was telling it as if she’d been there, had actually done the shooting.
Anthony was trying to calm her. “Far be it from me to tell a lady she didn’t save a gentleman’s ass, but you probably missed him by a mile. The cops shot too, you know— -it stands to reason a trained marksman’s the one who actually hit the mark.”
She seemed meek and subdued, like she was halfway somewhere else. Like she’d just lost a relative. Except that the person they were talking about wasn’t a relative. Whoever it was had apparently been holding Anthony prisoner and Ms. Wallis was claiming to have rescued him, only she didn’t seem real proud of it.
“How’d you get there?” she said. “What in hell happened?” She sounded agitated and furious, more or less her usual state. He wondered if Ms. Wallis was ever going to settle down.
“The thing was,” he said, “I saw the car before I ever saw the kid. That big old Lincoln Navigator you told me about. It just stood to reason and sure enough, a black dude was driving, looked kind of like a toad.
“Looked like a toad, but he was acting more like a hawk. Just lurking there in that big old black car. Then the kid comes out. I knew her right away from her picture. She’d be cute if she ever smiled, you know that? And she gets in the car with someone else— with some other kids, I mean. I guess it was the carpool person. And he follows. The Lincoln follows. Man, my heart was thumping!”
Ms. Wallis said, “You should have called me on the cell phone.”
“Yeah, well, I tried.”
“Mine was on,” she said. “Did you have the wrong number or something?”
“It was my dad’s phone, remember? I guess he forgot to charge it up. I tried to plug it in but— I don’t know— it was hard enough trying to follow all those cars… I couldn’t seem to do two things at once. And then things started happening so fast I had to keep moving.
“The carpool mom took her home, and she got out and ran in. Then Toes pulls up in the driveway, and rings the doorbell. By the time I could get the car parked and get out, he was banging on the door and saying he had to talk to her. I came up behind him and he turned around and…”
He seemed to be groping for words, but Ms. Wallis wouldn’t cut
him any slack. “Well? And what?” Pushy as ever.
“I did something kind of stupid. I said I was a cop. And the guy tried to kill me!” Anthony was outraged. Eddie didn’t really know his son these days, but if he had to guess, he wouldn’t expect him to be too worldly-wise. Sounded like he’d have been right.
It seemed the guy had jumped him or something, and then the person inside, a kid, panicked and opened the door. And that was it— the Toad had a lot more experience and a lot more meanness in him than either Anthony or the kid. He pulled a gun on ‘em, bundled ‘em into his car, and made Anthony drive somewhere else. And that would have been all they wrote if it hadn’t been for Ms. Wallis— or so her story went.
Goddam! What a bunch of crazy fools he had in his life. It wasn’t a good dream to begin with, but it suddenly got out of control.
Angie shrieked, “What the hell was that?”
Audrey sounded like some hysteric at a funeral: “Eddie! Oh, my Eddie, my Eddie. My Eddie!”
Anthony just said, “Dad!” in wonderment.
Jesus! Crazy fools was right. They were calling doctors and nurses. Now that he thought of it, this place was a hospital. He knew by the smell.
The medical personnel were acting hysterical. They were doing things with instruments and firing staccato questions at the rest of them. “You sure he spoke?”
“Well, some of us heard it.”
Ms. Wallis said, “I didn’t.” Right. Way too busy listening to the sound of her own voice.
“What did he say?”
“It sounded like ‘racy bush.’”
“No, boost.”
“Foos. Like water racing. Racy foos.”
“Foolish, maybe.”
“Racy foolish?”
He hadn’t said a damn thing. This was ridiculous, and not only that the crazy fools were talking too loud. He took the pillow and put it over his head. And still they wouldn’t shut up.
“Hey, look, he’s trying to move his hands. Like a dog dreaming about running— look at his wrists.”
* * *
Talba called her mother as soon as she came back to herself, but it was too late. Miz Clara had already been besieged with calls from reporters and, hysterical, had called the police and been referred to Detective Skip Langdon. She’d just put down the phone when Talba herself called. By that time she not only knew her daughter was fine but had also realized that she was enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame. Further, that this was something she could piggyback onto. In the midst of their conversation, Miz Clara had to excuse herself because the evening news shows were coming on. Talba would have laughed if she’d felt up to it.
