I crouched, leaped up, and released the buckle as if I were making an outside jump shot. It went over the rung and swung there. I undid my leather belt and used the knife to slice a hole about three inches from the end of the strap. I fitted my belt buckle through the hole and then passed the leather through the buckle and drew it all tight.
My belt added thirty-six inches to the overall length of the strap, and I was able to jiggle and then snag the loose piece hanging off the seat-belt buckle. I tied a loop in that part of the webbing and passed my belt and the rest of the improvised rope through it. When I pulled on the slack, my lifeline was anchored tight to the rung.
I tested it, holding tight to the webbing and lifting my feet off the ground. There were tut-tut-tut noises as the knots tightened, but they held.
Understanding that in my weakened, exhausted condition, I was probably going to have one shot at this, I stood there for several moments listening to the swamp waking up from the storm, the thumping of frogs, and the first whine of insects.
I figured the slime on my socks would work against me, so I stripped them off and stood more firmly on the ground. Then I put the Maglite back in my pocket. There was no way I could hold it in my mouth during a climb. I was going to have to do this by Braille. Not necessarily a bad thing. The darkness would make me concentrate all the more.
I held the strap with my right hand, lowered my head, thought of my family, and then got the bottom of my left foot against the stanchion and reached high overhead, finding the strap again with my left hand. It was going to tear up my hands. I could already feel it.
But I grabbed hold as tight as I could and then exploded into a blind, frenzied scramble of bare feet up the wall, hand over hand up the rope, past my belt buckle and on. My left hand slipped on the fourth grab. The seat-belt webbing ripped a bloody groove, and I almost let go.
But Mulch’s face appeared in my mind and triggered a rampage within me. My right hand stabbed up, slapped steel, but I couldn’t hold on. I grabbed the strap again, took one breath, and then furiously threw my bloody left hand up and caught the rung.
Once upon a time, I might have had the upper-body strength to crawl up the ladder from there with little or no problem. But now it took a rage-fueled, all-out effort to get to the second and then the third rung before my right knee found the bottom one. I hung there like a two-hundred-and-fifteen-pound moth, panting and doing my best to forget the popping sound my shoulder had made and ignore the pain as the rebar dug into my patella.
When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I reached up, wincing at a crunching noise in my right shoulder, and got my bare feet onto the lower rung. The adrenaline rush left me weaker than I could have imagined, and I spent several more minutes clinging to the side of the stanchion, waiting until my strength returned.
A truck passed on the highway above me. I felt the vibration of it ripple down through the cement and that was enough to get me climbing again. When I reached the guardrail and got over it, I almost cried.
Another truck was coming from the west, and a car behind it. I grabbed the Maglite, turned it on, and began waving it at the approaching headlights.
I must have been a sight. My clothes were torn and muddy. My hair was muddy. So was my face. And I was barefoot, wild-eyed, and bleeding from my hands. So in retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me that the truck didn’t stop.
The car that followed didn’t stop either.
Nor did the next three vehicles that passed me.
I stood there dazed and frustrated as all those taillights receded east. I’d lost nearly forty minutes to the crash.
Overhead, the clouds broke and scudded across the sky, revealing the moon and stars. I stared up into them, my bloody hands hanging, and begged God for help, for someone to stop before it was too late.
For ten, maybe fifteen minutes, there was only the darkness. No trucks and no cars passed on either side of the interstate. Then a set of headlights appeared, low and wide, from the west, back toward Lafayette.
A few seconds later, the roar of the big block engine came to me and I realized the car wasn’t just speeding. It was hurtling toward me, going a hundred miles an hour, maybe more.
CHAPTER
84
I STOOD IN THE near lane and slashed my light twice but then thought it unlikely the driver was going to slow, let alone stop, for some swamp creature, so I retreated to the guardrail and stood there. The headlights swept over me, and the car, an old Pontiac GTO with a chrome blower sticking out of the hood, roared past me. I didn’t bother to look after it until I heard the engine die off into a fluttering chug.
A solid six hundred yards beyond me, the car’s brake lights beamed. The reverse lights came on, and the car came swerving back my way. A truck went by, blew its horn, and veered into the passing lane, but the GTO kept coming.
The muscle car stopped beside me, rumbling and vibrating. The passenger window rolled down and I peered inside and saw a good old boy in his thirties with a blond buzz cut, wearing a white V-neck T-shirt over a tattooed and steroidal body.
A woman’s frail voice said, “You look like you’re having a bad day, pilgrim.”
I noticed her then, sitting in the backseat, a tiny, older woman huddled under a blanket and wearing sunglasses. Her face was horribly scarred from some long ago trauma.
“You want us to call an ambulance? The cops?” the driver asked.
“I am a cop,” I said. “My name is Alex Cross, I’m a detective with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police, and I have to get to New Orleans. It’s a matter of life and death.”
“See, Lester?” the woman said. “I told you.”
“I don’t care about your notions right now, Ma,” Lester replied, looking over his shoulder. “He’s not getting in here with all that mud on him. We’ll call someone.”
“Nonsense,” she snapped. “Life and death.”
“It’s gonna take me a week to clean my Goat.” Lester groaned.
“Then it takes a week,” she said. “Here, have him sit on this.”
She handed him the blanket. Lester scowled but spread it over the leather bucket seat. Apologizing and trying not to smear mud on anything, I climbed in, held out my hand, and said, “My family is at stake. I can’t thank you enough for stopping.”
Lester looked at the blood and dirt on my hand and sniffed. “That was Ma’s notion, not mine. I barely saw you.”
I shut the door and was trying to put on the seat belt when he punched the gas. The Goat bellowed out the mouth of its chrome blower. The back end of the muscle car sank, and the front rose almost like a boat’s does when it’s accelerating.
But this was no ordinary boat. Lester’s car was “souped up to the max,” as he put it. More than four hundred horsepower pinned me to the seat as he banged through gears and took us up to ninety miles an hour.
The suspension wasn’t like what you’d find in a modern sports car. There was play in it, and we seemed to drift slightly left and then right down the interstate, with Lester lightly counter-steering back and forth. The swaying increased when he took us up past a hundred miles an hour.
“You’re gonna get pulled over or flip this car,” I said.
“Nah,” Lester said. “We do this all the time. Three to four a.m. is the last hour of the shift for the state police; hardly any troopers on the road. And the scanner says most of them are at some murder scene north of Jennings. Far as me flipping us? The Goat and I are one, pilgrim. We’ve never once come close to a wreck.”
“Lester is gifted behind the wheel, Detective,” his mother said. “What’s your name again?”
Though a part of me was desperate to keep looking out the windshield as we hurtled toward New Orleans, I twisted in my seat to see the shadow of Lester’s disfigured mother. It was only then that I saw the white cane across her lap and realized she was blind.
I told her my name, and got hers. Minerva Frost and her son were from Galveston. Lester was taking her to work.
>
Before I could ask what kind of work she did, she asked about my family, and I saw no reason to withhold any of it. I gave her a thumbnail sketch of what had happened and where I was going and why.
Lester seemed impressed. “I heard something about this on the news the other night. Lord Almighty, that’s tough.”
I suppose I expected some kind of sympathetic response from Minerva Frost, but she stayed silent.
Her son, however, was glancing over at me, and then in the rearview mirror, getting agitated. Lester finally said, “Ma, you have to work today, you know. You promised.”
Minerva Frost stayed silent.
“Ma, there are people with appointments. People counting on you.”
Still, his mother remained silent, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
“Ma,” Lester said. “Did you hear what I—”
“I’m not deaf, Lester,” she replied at last. “And work will have to wait.”
“Am I missing something here?” I asked, confused.
“You need us, I think, Mr. Cross,” Minerva Frost replied.
“No. I’ll be fine. Just get me to New Orleans.”
“You have a car, Detective Cross? Shoes?”
That surprised me. How did she know I didn’t have shoes on?
“No shoes, but I’ll get them,” I said. “Really, there’s no need for you to miss work on my account, Mrs. Frost.”
“I disagree,” she said sharply. “And that is that.”
“Fuck,” Lester said under his breath.
“What was that, son?” his mother demanded.
“Truck ahead, Ma,” Lester said, and changed lanes to blow by an eighteen-wheeler as if it were standing still.
“What do you do for work, Mrs. Frost?” I asked.
“Never you mind about that,” she said. “Glad to help.”
“What, are you ashamed or something?” Lester asked his mother.
“No, I am not,” Minerva Frost retorted. “Just don’t know where Mr. Cross stands, and I don’t want to make it an issue.”
“Make what an issue?” I said, twisting around in my seat again and wincing at the soreness that went from the tips of my fingers to my arms and up into my shoulders.
She didn’t reply, and I looked at Lester, who eased off the gas, causing rumbling backfire, before he said, “She’s my mom and all, Detective Cross, and you may believe in this kind of thing or not, but that little old lady behind you has got the gift, man, like for real.”
CHAPTER
85
MINERVA FROST GOT HER gift the summer after her ninth birthday, eighteen months after she was splashed with battery acid and lost her eyesight in a terrible accident in the automotive repair shop her father ran in Galveston.
“She started seeing things, hearing things,” Lester said, downshifting as we approached Baton Rouge. “We call ’em her notions.”
Over the years I’d heard of police working with psychics, of course, and I’d heard of some of them having success, but I’d never worked with one personally.
I said, “Is that right, Mrs. Frost?”
“Kind of,” she said softly. “I just spent so much time alone that year. I mean, what child wanted to be friends with someone who looked like this? And in that loneliness, I just started to hear voices and see things in my mind. I used to brush them off as my imagination going crazy because of the blindness, but then some of the things I saw seemed to come true.”
Mrs. Frost claimed that she hadn’t told anyone about the voices or the visions for nearly twenty years. But then the economy went bust in the late seventies, and her parents needed money, so she had gone to New Orleans and set herself up as “Madame Minerva, Palm Reader.”
“She don’t read palms, by the way,” Lester said. “Just makes it look that way. People like it, for some reason, and they pay a lot of money to see her. One long day a month in the Big Easy, and the rest of them folks on the phone, and we got all we need.”
My skepticism must have shown, because Lester said, “Hey, man, her gift is real. Like I said, I barely saw you standing there, but she did, and she told me you were in trouble and to stop.”
“That true?” I asked her. “You saw me?”
“An image of someone in need,” Minerva Frost said.
“How did you see me?” I asked.
“You mean the mechanics of it? The physics of it? I don’t rightly know, pilgrim. It’s like I’ve got this antenna, you could say, and every once in a while I’ll hear or see things, like they’re beamed in from outer space or something, and there you were, barefoot and covered in filth. I could tell you were a desperate man in need of help.”
Now, I have a PhD in psychology from Johns Hopkins and my life’s work has made me skeptical about everything I’m told. But I didn’t want to question Minerva Frost. For too many reasons to count, I wanted to believe her.
“You see or hear anything about my family?” I asked. “Or Marcus Sunday?”
“I do not,” she said sadly. “But if and when I do, you will most assuredly be the first to know.”
We spoke little during the rest of the white-knuckle ride Lester Frost took us on from Baton Rouge to the western outskirts of New Orleans. At 4:22 a.m., we pulled off the I-10 and into a twenty-four-hour Phillips 66 truck stop.
“Do me a favor, and I’ll pay for your gas,” I told Lester, who looked suspicious.
“What favor?”
I handed him my cell phone and two twenties. “I can’t go in there looking like this, but I bought this phone at one of these truck stops, and I remember they sell a backup battery that you stick in the charge port. Can you get it for me?”
Lester looked ready to refuse, but his mother said, “Course he will.”
Scowling, Lester started the gas pump and then stomped off toward the truck-stop store. A few minutes later, he exited carrying the backup battery. It wasn’t fully charged as advertised, but to my relief, it started the phone, and I was able to call up Craigslist New Orleans on the browser. As Sunday had instructed me, in the Casual Encounters section, women looking for men, I posted under the headline “Waiting for Sunday.”
My message read, I’m here, Mulch. Your move.
I sat there while Lester topped off the tank and cleaned the windshield of bugs and leaves. It was still pitch-dark outside. Not even a hint of dawn.
“There now,” Minerva Frost said out of the blue.
I kid you not, a split second later, before I could even look over at her, my phone buzzed with a text.
I thought you’d given up, it read. Come alone. Or I end the game, and you lose absolutely everything.
Following that was an address on Esteban Street, in Arabi, just south of New Orleans on the east bank of the Mississippi River.
Lester Frost climbed in, said, “Give this to my mom?”
I took the coffee. Her hand came up but went far wide of the cup when I reached over the backseat with it. I had to guide her fingers to it. Her skin was as soft as a baby’s bottom, and for reasons I can’t explain, I felt calmer for touching it.
Lester reacted sourly when I gave him the address.
“Most of that area’s toast ’cause of Katrina,” he said, starting up the GTO, which rumbled so loud he had to almost shout at me. “Fifteen feet of water rolled through there when the levee broke. They found corpses in the attics. Place is haunted. I bet we get to that address and all we see is a cement pad, or sea grass, or at best a skeleton of a house.”
In the backseat, Madame Minerva said, “Arabi is a place for ghosts, Detective Cross, but the man you’re after, he’s waiting for you near there. And your family is close by, rocking in cradles.”
CHAPTER
86
THE ROCKING ROUSED NANA MAMA from a deep, dark, and puzzling place.
At first, Cross’s grandmother felt only that she was shifting side to side, as if she were floating in water, and nothing more. For a very long time, she didn’t know who or what she was.
But then she heard the pump and flush of her heartbeat in her temples, and something more high-pitched and infrequent. She smelled something sharp and medicinal. She tried to open her eyes to find the source of that tinny noise and that antiseptic odor but couldn’t.
True consciousness came maddeningly slowly, one step forward and two steps back. Her mind wavered there in a pulsing zone of gradually building sensations—touch, mouth dryness, and that smell—and then retreated to that deep, dark, and puzzling place.
Was it death?
That was her first real thought: Is it death?
Am I dying? Am I dead?
But what was death?
It took forever before she could define the word. When she did, other things came back to her. She was Regina Hope. She was Nana Mama. And she was very old. She was lying on her back. She was sore everywhere, and she was rocking ever so slightly side to side and up and down.
What’s causing that rocking? Nana Mama thought before the darkness took her once more.
CHAPTER
87
AT A QUARTER TO FIVE that morning, Tess Aaliyah watched the coroner seal the corpse of Acadia Le Duc’s mother inside a black bag and then remove it from the house. She flashed on the image of her own mother being taken from her deathbed, and she wondered what would be worse, to die a lingering death from cancer or to feel the life cut out of you all at once.
Blinding fatigue hit Aaliyah then, and she asked one of the deputies still on the scene, a fresh-faced kid named Earl Muntz, if she could get a lift into town.
“Absolutely,” Deputy Muntz said. “But I have to do something quick first, won’t take but five minutes. Is that okay, or can I find you someone who’ll get you there sooner?”
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