But I knew better.
Toussaint appeared and filled my mind with pictures of Jade, her porcelain skin rotting, and slipping off the bone. Pictures of Rico, hating me more with every tear he shed. Pictures of me, flat-eyed, shuffling aimlessly, and living off human flesh. The stink of the horde filled my nose; their frenzied moans whirred in my ears.
I tore myself from the dream, if it really was a dream, drenched in sweat. Then, I hopped in the shower and washed the apocalyptic visions from my brain. Putting on fresh clothes, I reminded myself that those depraved dreams served a purpose: they kept me on edge. And if I was lucky, that might keep me alive.
Babs’ keycard rattled in the door. She let herself in and walked toward the beam of light that shone from the open bathroom. She glanced in the mirror and watched me slip the obsidian necklace and Mama’s gris-gris bag around my neck, then leaned against the doorframe, and stared at my reflection.
“Ms. Nighthawk, I know you don’t value my services, but the truth is, I’m very good at what I do. And I want to help. Trust me. Compartmentalizing your past with Toussaint will allow you to control your emotions during your meeting. Better control means better decisions. Another weapon for your arsenal, no?”
She made a good point, but trust isn’t really my thing. I peered into the mirror and gave her a taut smile. “Thanks. I’ll remember that.”
She stared at my reflection. “I’ll be staying here with Vinny tonight. Take care out there. Who knows? When you get back, I might even turn the thermostat down to seventy-two.”
“Sixty-eight.”
“Don’t push it.” Babs turned on her heel and left the room for her babysitting detail with Vinny. I tucked Mama’s protective gris-gris bag inside my shirt alongside my obsidian necklace, slipped on my shoulder holster, and snapped Hawk inside. Then I slid Baby in place at my ankle, and made sure my Ka-Bar knife was tucked safely in its sheath.
Taking one last glance in the mirror, I chanted the mantra that had carried me through my darkest moments. “I’m Allie Nighthawk, the best of the badass zombie hunters.” For some reason, the words rang hollow, so I fired a special thought through space and time. A warning shot, of sorts. “God help you, Toussaint Le Clerc. This time, I’ll take you down, or die trying.”
I parked our government issued SUV on North Rampart Street, not far from Congo Square. Ferris and Rico were stationed in a surveillance van less than a block away. It was 11:30 p.m.—a half-hour early. I had time on my hands, time to think.
That’s usually when things go south for me.
It had been years since I’d last seen Toussaint. How strong had his powers grown? Would I be strong enough to take him down? Did the fire in my gut burn hot enough? Could his eyes, those silky, sea-green eyes still sway me?
So much for thinking and introspection. I’m more about doing anyway.
I switched gears and started running the most likely scenarios through my brain, but even that wasn’t giving me the warm fuzzies. I knew this man, the way his mind worked. His twisted thoughts and supernatural powers introduced unknowns to the equation. I was trying to predict the unpredictable. Time to turn off my thoughts and slide into autopilot.
I placed the surveillance bud in my ear and gave it a gentle push, lodging it deep inside the canal, out of sight. Then I slipped the transmitter around my neck, flicked the power button to ‘on,’ and tucked it beneath my T-shirt.
“Sacrificial lamb, check one,” I mumbled.
Ferris’s voice whirred in my ear. “Affirmative, Drama Queen. Big Brother, out.”
Supernatural powers notwithstanding, the presence of two-way communication made me feel less vulnerable. But only a little. Self-reliance was my motto, so I mentally checked off my weapons: the ever-vigilant Hawk, perfectly balanced in his shoulder holster; Baby, my backup piece, perched alongside my ankle; and last but not least, my trusty Ka-Bar knife, tucked safely in its sheath. Feeling their weight, and their familiar contours against my body, gave me a sense of security, even if the odds of me actually getting to use them were slim to none. Given our history, Toussaint would expect me to be carrying. No way was he going to let me walk into this garden party locked and loaded. My stainless-steel security blankets would surely be confiscated, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
“Sacrificial lamb, on the move,” I muttered, as I climbed out of the SUV and headed for Congo Square inside Louis Armstrong Park. The park’s visiting hours ended at seven. I’d never been there in the dead of night. As I strolled through the deserted park, lost in my thoughts, my boots echoing off the white concrete pavers, I thought I heard a different echo. Softer. Distant. Almost melodic. The echo of people. No…revenants…from long ago, laughing, dancing, drumming, and singing. An icy finger touched Little Allie’s spine, causing us both to shiver. The past lived on in this place. Some of it good. Some of it bad. Some of it worse.
The breeze wafted a voice to my ear. “The spirits rejoice tonight, no?”
I spun, heart in my throat, and stared into the emerald eyes of my past. After all these years, after everything we’d put each other through, everything we’d done to each other, Toussaint still took my breath away.
His brazen eyes embraced me from head to toe. “I am so happy that you are here, Ti Kras Zwazo.”
Little Bird. Toussaint had christened me that on the day I’d arrived at Mama’s, all those years ago. I forced myself to avoid his gaze and to remember why I’d come. “It’s not like you gave me a choice. Where’s Jade?”
“Safe. For now.”
I spread my arms wide. “You wanted me. Here I am. Give her back. Now.”
“Not so fast, sha.” He nodded at two of his goons, who instantly started toward me.
“Call them off,” I snarled. “Or I’ll kill them.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. They are only here to ensure an equal playing field for our little soiree. As you can see, I am unarmed. It’s only fair that you are, too.”
I did a slow burn as Toussaint’s minions patted me down and took my weapons away.
“You know,” I said, raising my hands in the air. “If you took Jade to spite me, you’re way off base. I don’t even like her.”
Toussaint laughed. “Oh, but your partner does. Or is he…more…than your partner? Your thoughts are so muddled, Little Bird. Do you even know? Besides, Jade may only be a gnat buzzing about your face, but to me, she and her exposé are thorns in the lion’s paw.”
“Jade?” Her name flew from my mouth like an angry bee. “Jade couldn’t find her ass with a flashlight and barbecue tongs. She and her half-assed exposé are the last things you need to worry about.”
Ah, ah, ah, the brain bitch warned. Remember: compartmentalize.
Toussaint shrugged. “What would you propose I do with her? Give her back?”
“Why not? You don’t want her anyway.”
“Ah, but you do.” Toussaint put his arms behind his back and began to pace. “So, tell me, why would I do as you ask? Why would I give my wife’s murderer anything she asked for?”
“I didn’t kill your wife. She was sick; I put her down. There’s a difference.”
“I was healing her, and you took her away from me. You’ll pay for that until the day you die. And then some.”
It’d been three years since Toussaint exacted the most monstrous form of revenge he could for a crime I didn’t commit. Three years since my world crashed down around me. The ache in my heart nearly brought me to my knees. I was done compartmentalizing.
“You sick bastard. You rose my father from the dead for no reason other than to make me put him down. What more could you possibly want?”
“A life for a life, Little Bird…your life.”
A band of biters shambled out of the shadows. I did a 360, squinting into the darkness beneath the faded light of the crescent moon. Toussaint’s goons and my weapons were nowhere in sight. When I whirled back around, Toussaint had gone too.
Four rotters
advanced, moaning, groaning, and snapping their teeth, closing the distance between us with every shuffling step. And me, without so much as a butter knife to make my stand.
God help me if the freaking transmitter crapped out. “Yo. Big Brother. Sacrificial Lamb here. A little help?”
I backed up a few paces and squared myself to take on the horde. One of them was a corpsicle—the nastiest of the undead, turned biter more than sixty days back. He was easy to spot, twenty feet behind the others, stinking like sunbaked zushi, and moving at the speed of tree sap. Two were twitching like electrified monkeys, bearing down on me like their hair was on fire. They were freshies—turned zombie within the last seven days. A half-step slower than the twitcher twins, but even more deadly, was a garden-variety flesh-eater that had turned somewhere between eight and sixty days back. Its teeth, the stuff of nightmares, chattered faster than a wind-up toy.
The twins reached me first. A frontal assault would be risky with a high probability of incurring a bite wound, so I resorted to the slam, bam, and wham method I teach in my zombie 101 class. I let them rush me, then sidestepped, and stationed myself behind them. Reaching out, I wrapped my hands around the forehead of the closest biter and used spinal leverage to slam it backward to the ground. Then I drove the heel of my industrial-strength, zombie-stomping boot through its forehead and into its brain. Booyah, baby. One down. I rolled sideways to get into position for the second twitcher, but a gunshot popped from behind. The twitcher’s head exploded like a brain-pulp piñata.
As I scrambled out of the line of fire, the flesh-eater opened its jaws and dove at my thigh. Rico squeezed his trigger and brought the biter down with a 9 mil, single shot lobotomy. Ferris fired a round though the eyeball of the last of the rotters, the corpsicle that had shuffled to within a few feet of me. I ducked, but not soon enough. Its head exploded like an over-ripe watermelon, bathing me in zushi.
Jesus. Would it be too much to ask for a day without flesh bombs?
Ferris ordered his backup team to conduct a search. They found my confiscated weapons laying in some bushes and brought them back to me, but they didn’t find Toussaint. He was long gone. Rico stood, arms akimbo, silently staring into the night, his heart dangling from his sleeve. He would have given his life to get Jade back. Much to my surprise, I would have too.
I walked up alongside him and touched his elbow. “I’m sorry we didn’t get her back. But we will. And that crack I made about not liking her…”
Rico waited for me to finish, but I couldn’t. My hypocrisy only goes so far. We both knew what would have come out next would have been a lie.
“He’s not going to kill her, you know. And he’s not going to turn her. She’s his bargaining chip.”
Unable to look at me, Rico nodded and pulled away. Having no reason to stay, he turned his back, walked to the van, then started the engine and drove off, leaving Ferris behind. The search team came up empty, as I knew they would. The show was over for the night. It was time to pack up the tents, so we could come back tomorrow and start the game all over again.
One by one, the government-issued vehicles pulled away until only Ferris and I remained. He pulled me into his arms and kissed me, holding me so long, I thought he might never let go.
“This is hard for me,” he whispered. “Seeing you in danger. Knowing how much that crazy bastard hates you. What really happened with his wife—and your father?”
Hell, that whole damn conversation was a matter of record, now. Boudreaux would be all over it. I’d have to explain everything, but not tonight. I begged off, asking Ferris to let me sleep on it, to give me time to wrap my head around it. Maybe sharing the story—saying it out loud—would help me work through the shit storm of guilt and anger those years had left behind.
No sooner had we climbed into the SUV than Little Allie bitch-slapped my brain for daring to think I needed help. She scolded me, saying that Psycho Babs and her happy crap mumbo-jumbo were rubbing off on me.
Was she right?
All I knew, as I drove away from Congo Square, was that part of my prophetic dream had come to pass: I’d failed at getting Jade back, and now Rico hated me with the soul-sucking intensity of a black hole.
That hurt worse than I ever could have imagined.
21
Nowhere to Run
It was a little after 3 a.m. by the time Ferris and I made it back to the hotel. We kissed goodnight and parted reluctantly, plodding to our separate rooms. Such a waste. Apparently, nothing gets the heart pumping like a zombie death match.
Who knew?
Back in my room, I uttered a silent thanks that Babs had left the bathroom light on, so I could find my bed. She’d also cranked the thermostat down to seventy degrees, a surprising and bizarrely touching compromise. In return, I decided not to tell her that although I tried, I couldn’t get the brain bitch on board with the whole ‘compartmentalization’ thing. We were making progress, and that was the important thing.
Ah, what the hell, I thought, nudging the thermostat down to sixty-eight. Baby steps, right?
I turned off the bathroom light and hopped into bed, praying for sleep, but between being wired for sound and Toussaint haunting my dreams, sleep seemed unlikely. The digital clock on the nightstand struck four. Then five. Sometime later, I drifted off, only to be jolted awake at 7:00 a.m. by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—Babs’ cell phone alarm. I mumbled that I’d meet them in the coffee shop at nine and threw the covers over my head. Babs left, and the door latched behind her.
Just one more hour, God. Please?
That extra bit of sleep and a hot shower made a new person out of me. I hummed, sipping a K-Cup of generic coffee, and watched the news as I got dressed. Serene, with my mind cranking on all cylinders, I felt focused and ready to take on the day. Halfway to the door, my phone rang, and the proverbial turd in the punch bowl bobbed to the surface.
Nonnie advised that we had two problems, both of which had been long in coming. One was totally Nonnie’s fault. The other was a simple mistake, a tragic oversight, not even remotely my fault. At least, that’s my interpretation, and I’m sticking with it.
“Headbutt, he pees through fence onto Winstel’s wisteria.”
“Don’t you remember? You trained him to do that so he’d stop peeing on your bushes.”
“But now, wisteria is brown. Winstels very unhappy.”
“Just handle it. Get creative. Plant something on our side of the fence in front of that flowering crap.”
“Then your bush be brown.”
“See? Problem solved. Next?”
Paper crinkled through the phone line. “You got letter from Hamilton County Treasurer’s Office. Oh,” she moaned. “Is very bad.”
“You opened my mail?”
“It say you owe three years back property tax.” Nonnie whistled. “Twelve thousand, eight hundred and fifty dollars, Miss Allie.”
“What? There must be some mistake.”
The brain bitch giggled.
“I don’t owe them money.”
Then it hit me. My father had been gone for three years. Had I ever paid property tax?
“You sure you no owe them?” Nonnie asked.
“Absolutely.” Hell, I didn’t have a clue. I’m in and out so much. Mail piles up. Shit gets lost. Please. I’m too busy saving the world from the freaking horde to keep track of such minutiae.
Determined to top my mound of misfortune with whipped cream and a cherry, Nonnie read on. “If you no pay, they put lien on house. Miss Allie.” Her voice quivered. “They can foreclose. I have monies. I loan—”
“No. No loans.”
“But your father’s house—”
“Just put the letter on the table. I’ll deal with it when I get back.”
“When?”
“As soon as I can. We’ll figure something out.”
I said goodbye to Nonnie, asked her to kiss the twins, and told her to warn Headbutt that his ass was mine when I got home. I waited unt
il she disconnected and then sank to the bed. Twelve thousand, eight hundred and fifty. It might as well have been twelve million. I was so broke, even moths avoided my wallet.
Well, fuck The Hamilton County Treasurer’s office, I thought. And fuck the horse they rode in on, too. I had bigger problems to deal with, like saving Jade’s life and bringing down Toussaint. I climbed to my feet, pulled up my big girl panties, and shot life the double bird salute. Sometimes, all you can do is embrace the suckage and power through. And that’s usually when you don’t have any fucks left to give.
“No breakfast?” Ferris asked, as I skirted the buffet table and slid into the booth beside him. Thoughts of financial ruin had soured my stomach and my mood. I wouldn’t be discussing that new found problem with Ferris. He’d hear enough of my secrets as the day wore on. He didn’t need to know them all.
Rico hadn’t even glanced up to acknowledge my arrival. He sat unsmiling, staring at his half-eaten eggs with red puffy eyes, eyes that were tinged with desperation. He looked…lost. A wave of guilt washed over me. The only way to fix this mess was to get Jade back, and I’d do that even if it killed me. Until then, Rico would have to swallow his anger and trust me, or at least trust the process.
Ferris decided to poke the bear. “De Palma, did you make that call to Horton? Is Stanton coming?”
Rico slid out of the booth, signaling breakfast had ended. “He’s supposed to be at the meeting this morning.”
We filed out of the restaurant and reclaimed our self-assigned seats in the SUV. Babs’ nose gravitated back to her scientific journal. Ferris pulled out of the parking lot, keeping his thoughts to himself. Rico stared out the window, daring anyone to engage him. And Vinny filled the excruciating silence with Vinny-isms on women and the art of living large. By the time we arrived at the FBI office for our 9:30 meeting with Boudreaux, I was more convinced than ever that Leo had found his way back from the other side. Frankly, that was a nicer picture of him than the one that had been squatting in my head: Leo sitting cross-legged on some cloud, scratching his head, wondering why he’d entrusted his son’s life to such an inept group of asshats.
Corpse Whisperer Sworn Page 14
