Delusion

by Peter Abrahams

  And Norah? She was standing there with this look on her face, like he was a monster. He grabbed her, dragged her out to the car. That was when the Rick came in handy. Pirate ripped out the D and A strings, used them to bind Norah’s hands and feet. She struggled a bit, tried screaming again, this time screaming something about Joe Don. He tore a strip off his soaking shirt and put a stop to that, then threw her over his shoulder. This was all taking too much time. He had to face the fact that Norah was nothing but a burden to him now.

  The gates at the Bastien compound on Lake Versailles hung open. The rain had stopped a few minutes before, but as Timmy drove through, there was a boom of thunder, deep and rolling, followed by a sizzling sound from the sky, and rain came pounding down. Nell saw two cars in front of Duke’s house: a cruiser with the chief’s star on the side, and the Miata. Timmy parked beside them. Nell jumped out, was soaked to the skin in an instant.

  “Maybe you should stay in—” Timmy began.

  The front door was wide open. Nell ran in. Duke lay on the floor, face bloody, jaw at a strange angle. The new girlfriend—the name wouldn’t come—knelt beside him, rocking back and forth, a bloody towel in her hands.

  “The ambulance is coming,” she said. “The ambulance is coming.”

  “What happened?” said Timmy. “Where’s the chief?”

  “And Norah?” Nell said. “Was she with Alvin DuPree?”

  “The ambulance is coming.”

  Nell raised her voice. “Answer me,” she said. “Was she with DuPree? A man with a patch?”

  “Oh, God,” said the girlfriend. She looked terrified.

  Duke stirred, looked right at Nell. His lips moved and he spoke one toothless word, his voice so weak she almost missed it. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Shh,” said the girlfriend, “shh. The ambulance is coming.”

  Nell ran outside, headed for Kirk’s house at the end of the driveway. Timmy caught up. He’d lost his hat. His hair was plastered down flat; he looked like a little kid. “Maybe it would be better if you—”

  She cut him off. “Have you got your gun?”

  “Of course.”

  They ran. A lightning bolt streaked across the sky, from one horizon to the other. Then came thunder, so loud it deafened her. Nell’s hearing didn’t recover till they’d reached the house. She heard running water everywhere.

  They stepped up to Kirk’s wraparound porch. Timmy knocked on the door. It opened. Clay stood in the doorway, a gun in his hand. Kirk was beside him, wearing shorts and flip-flops. He had a thick bloodstained bandage wound around one of his thighs and his hands were cuffed in front of him with zip-strips. Clay lowered the gun.

  “Officer,” he said, speaking to Timmy but watching Nell, his voice not his own, more like a machine talking, “Mr. Bastien is under arrest for the murder of Lee Ann Bonner. I read him his rights.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve called in backup.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mr. Bastien has a bullet in his leg that we need to match with Ms. Bonner’s revolver,” Clay said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where’s Norah?” Nell said.

  “Norah?”

  “For God’s sake—DuPree might have her.”

  Clay stopped meeting her gaze. He looked sick.

  “And is that the only murder you’re arresting him for?” Nell looked right at Kirk. “What about Johnny? And Nappy Ferris?” Kirk’s face showed nothing.

  “Timmy,” Clay said. “Draw your weapon and guard him. I need a moment with my wife.” By the time he got to that last word, the mechanical edge in his voice was gone. Sirens sounded, cutting through the noise of the storm. Clay took Nell’s hand, drew her down the hall.

  “Before you say a word,” she said, “I know everything.” Even how actually destroying the tape must have been unbearable for him, a step too far, leading to the Dumpster, Bobby Rice’s locker, the long wait for Bernardine and exposure. “With the exception of why,” Nell added, withdrawing her hand.

  Clay closed his eyes, actually shuddered, the vein in his neck throbbing.

  “Did Duke pay you off?” she said. “Was that it?”

  He shook his head.

  “He just simply asked you? You framed DuPree out of friendship?”

  Clay nodded. He opened his eyes, looked deep into hers, a look totally honest, as far as she could tell. “You mean everything to me,” he said. “Does it ruin our life together? No possible recovery?”

  Kirk had tried to bury her, out on the reef. Did Clay have any suspicion of that, even the slightest? He was the one who’d brought in the broken anchor. Nell took a step back. “I don’t know,” she said. He winced, as though struck by some inner pain. “And this isn’t the time. Norah’s out there somewhere.”

  Clay’s face turned businesslike; Nell could feel the effort that took. “I’ll find her,” he said. “I promise.”

  “Just do it,” Nell said.

  He nodded, showing no emotion at all, like an obedient soldier. They went back to the door. Timmy faced Kirk, gun pointed at his chest.

  “That’s not necessary,” Clay said. “Lock him in the back of your patrol car. Then we search the grounds.” Timmy lowered the gun. Nell could see patrol cars driving up, high-intensity lights already moving near the gatehouse. “He won’t get far on foot,” Clay said. “And if he does have Norah, keeping her safe is his only play.”

  That made sense, but Nell felt no better.

  They walked out on the porch, Timmy beside Kirk, Clay and Nell behind. Lightning flashed again but less intense, and the thunder that followed seemed farther away. A premonition came to Nell: that somehow everything was going to be all right. The next moment she heard a strange rush of air, like a breeze that had gained force blowing through the wraparound porch, and Alvin DuPree came bursting out of the shadows.

  “Clay!” Nell said.

  But not fast enough. DuPree had a metal bar of some kind in his hand. He brought it down with crushing force on the back of Kirk’s head. Kirk was still slumping to the floor when Timmy’s gun went off. DuPree grabbed his chest, toppled over—the metal bar pinwheeling away—rolled down the stairs and came to rest on his back, blood spreading on his shirt, lots and lots.

  Clay leaped down to the ground, gun in one hand, held it at DuPree’s head. “Cuffs, Timmy.”

  Timmy ran down the steps, pulling a zip-strip from his pocket.

  “Hands out front,” Clay said.

  DuPree put his hands out front, or one of them; with the other, his right, he seemed to be adjusting his eye patch. What was he…? Nell remembered: My power lives in this secret place.

  “Clay!”

  DuPree’s right hand was moving, very fast, darting toward Clay’s neck and that prominent, throbbing vein. Nell dove. She saw a tiny flash of steel. Then came a slicing pain down her left side, from just under her armpit all the way to her waist. She knocked Clay over, landed on wet grass, her wound on fire.

  Timmy gazed down at her. “Oh my God,” he said. He glanced around wildly, then pointed his gun at DuPree’s head and pulled the trigger.

  Clay knelt beside her. “Are you okay?”

  “I think so.”

  His eyes were very dark. “That was wrong,” he said. “You shouldn’t have saved me.”

  Police and rescue came, by the dozen. They found Norah down at the boathouse, bound and gagged and with a possible concussion, but alive. They took Nell and Norah to the hospital. The best plastic surgeon in town came and stitched Nell up. The best radiologist took pictures of Norah’s head. Two hours later, they were back home on Sandhill Way.

  They sat at the kitchen table: Nell, Norah, Clay. He made a full confession, admitting everything Nell already knew.

  “And what happened on the reef?” she said.

  “I didn’t realize,” he said. “There was no reason for him to do it.”

  Nell believed him: the reason—sharing her plan to use hypnosis with Kirk—she
’d concealed.

  “Why didn’t they just build the gates properly in the first place?” Norah said.

  A smile, faint and quick, crossed Clay’s face: the smile of a proud dad with a bright kid. “Duke never knew anything about Johnny Blanton. Kirk kept it to himself. He decided there was no way they could afford to do it right. They’d be ruined.”

  Silence fell. Nell still loved him with her heart, but not with her head. “I think you’d better leave,” she said.

  Joe Don lay in a coma. Norah visited every day. Nell started going with her. Each time, she would get the strange sensation that she could feel the love between the two of them, like something in the air. She liked being around that feeling.

  Norah told Nell that Joe Don had written a song for her, “Norah’s Song.” He’d laid down a simple track at a studio in Baton Rouge, just voice and rhythm guitar. Nell liked it. They took the CD to the hospital the next day.

  “Listen to this, Joe Don,” Norah said.

  He lay on the bed as always, motionless, intubated, eyes closed, head wrapped in bandages. Norah turned on the machine.

  Saw your face

  Down the hall

  Nothin’ else

  Matters at all.

  Joe Don made a soft sound, like a purr. One eye opened. It fastened on Norah. He smiled.

  Clay resigned from the force. No charges were brought. Duke, his face repaired as well as it could be, gave him the deed to Little Parrot Cay; everything he owned was threatened by lawsuits anyway. Clay moved down there and turned the place into a small resort for divers and fishermen.

  A few tracks from Joe Don’s album leaked onto the Internet, caused a little buzz. Only a month or so after getting out of the hospital, he landed a gig at the Station Inn in Nashville. Norah went back to Vanderbilt in the fall. The three of them—Nell, Norah, Joe Don—had a nice Thanksgiving in Belle Ville. Nell made the corn bread from Clay’s grandmother’s recipe.

  That might have been a mistake, because around that time she started missing him terribly. Maybe nothing would have come of it, if he hadn’t called. But he did call.

  “I loved that essay,” he said.

  “What essay?”

  “Norah’s essay on Garibaldi. I hadn’t even heard of him, believe it or not.”

  “She sent it to you?”

  “I read it out loud to the guests.”

  Nell could picture it. Picturing it gave her pleasure.

  “Saw a big turtle this morning,” Clay said. “Loggerhead. Must’ve weighed a hundred and fifty pounds.”

  She could picture that, too.

  “You’d have liked it,” Clay said.

  Nell ended up booking a flight. Even though there’d been no divorce, she’d stopped wearing her wedding ring. On the day of the trip, she didn’t put it on, or even bring it. She boarded the plane with no expectations.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my editor, David Highfill, my agent, Molly Friedrich, and my wife, Diana.

  About the Author

  PETER ABRAHAMS is the author of seventeen crime novels including Nerve Damage, End of Story, which was chosen as one of Publishers Weekly’s “Top 100 Books of 2006,” and the Edgar Award–nominated Lights Out. In addition, he’s written the Echo Falls mystery series for young adults, the first of which, Down the Rabbit Hole, was also nominated for an Edgar Award and won the Agatha. He lives on Cape Cod. To learn more about him, visit www.peterabrahams.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Also by Peter Abrahams

  Nerve Damage

  End of Story

  Oblivion

  Their Wildest Dreams

  The Tutor

  Last of the Dixie Heroes

  Crying Wolf

  A Perfect Crime

  The Fan

  Lights Out

  Revolution #9

  Pressure Drop

  Hard Rain

  Red Message

  Tongues of Fire

  The Fury of Rachel Monette

  FOR YOUNGER READERS

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  Behind the Curtain

  Into the Dark

  Credits

  Jacket design by Eric Fuentecilla

  Jacket photograph by John Ross/Untitled

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DELUSION. Copyright © 2008 by Pas de Deux. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2008 ISBN: 9780061862809

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