King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle)

by Joseph Nassise

  I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring him with us. Assaulting a cop was one thing. I didn’t need to add kidnapping to my list of felonies, thank you very much.

  “Hold on to her,” I told Dmitri and waited for his grunt of acknowledgment.

  When I got it, I started the car and threw it into drive, stomping on the accelerator. The tires spun in the dirt and gravel, and then we shot forward, bouncing up over the edge of the asphalt and out onto the highway.

  As soon as we were underway, I killed the headlights. I could see better with them off, so I took full advantage of that fact now, racing away from the scene down the deserted road.

  The Charger responded as if it had been made for this kind of adventure, the engine purring with the increased rpms and the wheels hugging every curve of the blacktop. As I drove I frantically tried to figure out my next move.

  Denise seemed to be doing okay; her breathing was steady, and when I put my fingers against her throat I found that her heart rate was fairly normal. A few quick glances told me she wasn’t bleeding anywhere, which was a relief. As near as I could tell she’d come through the experience without injury, at least physically. She was still unconscious, and I had no idea when she was going to come out of it, but for now maybe that was for the best. Her body had been through a significant shock and had apparently shut down to protect her from what she’d been through. Some decent rest was probably the best thing for her.

  With my fears allayed in that regard, I could turn my attention to our next step. We were in trouble; that was certainly clear. Once Hendricks woke up, he was sure to report what had happened. That would bring every cop in the surrounding area down on our heads.

  It would also make him look like a bungling idiot.

  That thought drew me up short. Hendricks seemed to get off on that power and authority shtick; the thing with the flashlight was a perfect example. Reporting that he’d been overwhelmed in the midst of a routine traffic stop would be humiliating. Having to explain how I’d managed to get out of the car and knock him unconscious when he was armed and I wasn’t would be even worse.

  So maybe he wouldn’t report it at all.

  No, I thought. He’d report it, he just wouldn’t tell the truth. He’d make up some bullshit story, something that would not only allow him to keep his image as a tough guy but that might even enhance it a bit. The incident would go from a routine traffic stop to a confrontation with criminals intent on plugging him full of bullet holes.

  Which would make us not just fugitives, but armed and dangerous ones to boot.

  Just what we needed.

  I tried to remember if he’d just glanced at the license and registration papers or if he had read them carefully. If it was the former, he wouldn’t have much to go on. The license was a fake and wouldn’t help him at all, except to indicate that I had something to hide, and that had become obvious by the way I’d reacted during the traffic stop. No, it was the car’s registration papers I was worried about. If he’d gotten a good look at them, the police would know the Charger was registered to Denise. That would be enough to drag her into this mess on a level she hadn’t had to deal with previously, and she’d be labeled a fugitive just like me.

  This trip had started out poorly and was quickly going from bad to worse. Given that we were still some five hundred miles away from New Orleans, that didn’t bode well for what we could expect when we reached our destination.

  7

  HUNT

  I stuck to the highway at first, wanting to put as much distance between us and Officer Hendricks as physically possible. We couldn’t outrun the police radios but we could make it more difficult for the cops to find us by widening the search area. Getting as far south as quickly as I could was the best way of achieving that.

  The next fifty miles were tense, to say the least. I kept waiting for lights to flash in my rearview mirror and for a voice over a loudspeaker to tell me to pull over. Or, even worse, to see a helicopter floating over our heads while trying to force us off the road. Thankfully, none of that happened.

  By the time I hit the state line and crossed into Georgia, I was starting to breathe a bit easier. We’d left one jurisdiction behind and moved into another, which meant any pursuit would have to go through an entirely new set of channels. If they hadn’t tied the three of us to the events in Boston back in the fall, we were probably home free at this point.

  “I think it’s time we got off the highway,” Dmitri said, and I agreed. I took the next exit and kept to the back roads, steadily working my way southwest as I kept my eye out for a place to hunker down for the rest of the night. It didn’t take long: about ten minutes after leaving the highway behind, I came upon the Happy Acre Motel. The sign out front said VACANCY and there were a dozen or more vehicles in the parking lot.

  I parked away from the office on the far side of the motel lot, since I didn’t want the clerk looking out the window and seeing me get out of the Charger. Having a blind man behind the wheel unnerved people, I’d discovered.

  Go figure.

  Denise had slept like the dead through the ride, without twitching or groaning even once. Nor did she stir when I shut off the engine. Now that I had a chance to think about it, I realized it was kind of creepy, actually, and I took a minute to be sure she was still breathing. Thankfully, she was.

  Dmitri started to get out of the car in order to get us a room, but I stopped him.

  “Let me do it,” I told him.

  “You’re blind, Hunt. The clerk’s gonna remember that.”

  “Yeah, that’s the point. No one is looking for a blind guy. And besides, that’s all they see, my blindness. They don’t notice any of the other details. But if you go in there, she’ll remember you pretty easily. It’s not like you blend in all that well, ya know?”

  It was true. There weren’t that many men his size on the road to begin with, and if Hendricks had gotten a decent look at him it wouldn’t be hard to put two and two together.

  “Besides,” I told him, “if Denise starts thrashing around again, I’m not strong enough to hold her.”

  He knew I was right and reluctantly agreed.

  “Yell if you get into trouble,” he told me and I nodded in agreement.

  I got out of the car and waited for Dmitri to pass me my cane from the floor of the rear seat. Now came the hard part. Getting a room without making the clerk too suspicious. If a BOLO, or “be on the lookout,” had been issued with our descriptions, walking into that lobby could spell trouble. Of course, that was still preferable to sleeping in the car, especially after the day we’d had, so I decided on the lesser of two evils and headed for the front door, a story already forming in my head as my cane tapped the asphalt in front of me.

  The lights coming from the lobby windows messed up my sight, and by the time I opened the front door I was once again drowning in a sea of white. A little bell sounded as I came in and a voice spoke from somewhere in the back room.

  “Be right with you.”

  I marched up to the counter, pulled some cash from my pocket, and laid it on the counter under one hand where it would clearly be seen.

  “Good evening, sir, how can I … Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were blind.”

  What do you say to something like that? “Gee, I didn’t either?” Or maybe, “Bully for you?” I mean, seriously, that’s got to be one of the most useless statements in a situation like this and yet I hear it all the time. I just didn’t get it.

  I decided the best course of action was to ignore it. “I’d like a room with two double beds, please. And one away from the street, as I’d like to sleep in late.”

  “Of course. No problem at all.”

  She was nervous; I could hear it in her voice. I was hoping that would mean that she wouldn’t ask too many questions. I could hear her clacking away on her keyboard as she looked for a room that met my specifications.

  “Ah, here we go. I can put you in room 27, which is around the other side
of the building, away from the street. Would that be all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “Very good. All I need is some photo ID and a major credit card, and I…”

  I cut her off. “I left my wallet in the truck that gave me a ride. I’ve got cash, that’s all. Is that going to be a problem?”

  I put a bit of irritation in that last sentence, as if all I ever got was a hassle from people like her. The angry handicapped guy wasn’t the only card in my deck, but right now it seemed like the one that was going to produce the results I wanted as quickly as possible.

  As expected, she got flustered at my tone and backpedaled. “Ah, no. No problem at all. I’ll just make a note on the record.”

  She busied herself with getting some paperwork together—I could hear it rustling between us—and then she set it down on the counter in front of me.

  “If you would just sign…”

  Her voice trailed off again.

  I didn’t say anything, just stared in her direction from behind my sunglasses, waiting to see what she would do. If she left the form where it was, I’d simply sign it with a false signature, but my preference was to not have to sign anything at all.

  She swallowed. “Ah … I don’t think we really need a signature. That’s fine.”

  The paperwork disappeared.

  Score one for me. No one wanted to inconvenience the blind guy, it seemed.

  She handed me my key, told me that a couple of local places delivered if I was hungry, and let me know that checkout time was noon the next day. I thanked her and left before she changed her mind about that paperwork.

  I returned to the car, gave my eyes a minute to adjust, and then drove around the motel and parked directly in front of our room. I was pleased to see that the lights in the adjacent rooms were off. For the moment we were alone and unobserved.

  We didn’t waste any time. I got out and unlocked the door to our room, while Dmitri carried Denise in from the car. Laying her on one of the beds, he slipped off her shoes while I got her out of her coat. After that it was simply a matter of pulling the covers up to keep her from getting a chill.

  I stared down at her for a long moment, wondering what was to come, and then decided that the question was far too big to deal with at this time of night. Instead, I took a hot shower, washing the dirt out of my hair and picking small rocks and bits of debris out of the cuts on the knuckles of my right hand, cuts I’d apparently gotten in my tussle with Officer Hendricks. Though necessary, the cleaning started them bleeding all over again, so I wrapped a washcloth around my hand and knotted it in place with my teeth.

  It wasn’t the best of bandages, but it would do for now.

  Finally feeling more like myself again, I changed into a clean set of clothes and then switched places with Dmitri while he went to take a shower of his own.

  When he came out he took the empty bed while I stretched out next to Denise. Then we all tried to get some sleep.

  Somewhere around three in the morning, I woke up to the sound of Denise calling my name, her voice full of fear and desperation.

  “I’m here. Right here,” I said gently, reaching out with my right hand to reassure her.

  To my surprise, she moved in close, putting her head on my shoulder and her arm across my chest, clinging to me tightly.

  For a moment, I didn’t know what to do.

  Then I let my arm slip around her shoulder and hugged her back. Her hair tickled my nostrils and the scent of jasmine and coffee, that unique scent that I associated only with her, filled my nose.

  It would have been pretty damn close to perfect if she hadn’t spoken up again, her voice thick with sleep.

  “He’s coming, Hunt. He’s coming for both of us.”

  I had no idea who she was talking about.

  “Who’s coming, Denise?” I asked her gently.

  She mumbled something under her breath.

  “Say that again. I didn’t hear you.”

  But her breathing slowed and then deepened, and I realized that she’d fallen asleep again without hearing my question.

  I spent much of the rest of the night lying there with my eyes open in the darkness, thinking about her answer. No matter how many times I heard it in my head, it always sounded the same.

  “Death,” she’d said.

  Death was coming for us.

  8

  HUNT

  We rose before dawn, wanting to make an early start of it. I watched from the motel room window as Dmitri prowled through the parking lot with a pocket knife. Thankfully very few customers had gotten underway at that hour and there were still several cars in the parking lot. Choosing one of the cars at random, he used the knife to take off the license plate and put our plate back on the car in its place.

  Last night’s encounter had been too close for comfort. As far as we knew, Hendricks hadn’t had time to run our plates, but that didn’t mean that every cop for miles around wasn’t going to be looking for us at this point. We didn’t need to make it any easier for them to find us by driving around in the same car with the same license plate, Dmitri explained. By switching the plates, we could at least pass a general inspection without raising too many red flags.

  Human nature being what it is, I knew that if Dmitri simply took the other license plate off the car and didn’t put anything in its place, it would be noticed a lot faster than if he replaced the missing one with our own. The eye is trained to notice change; an empty spot where the plate should be was the kind of thing that caught your eye. But if the eye saw a license plate where a license plate was expected to be, then very few people would actually pay attention to what was on the plate itself.

  In fact, it might take the owner of the other vehicle from several days to a week before they realized that something was different. A few days would be more than enough time for us to ditch the stolen plates and figure something else out.

  Or so I hoped.

  It was the work of only a few more minutes to put the stolen plate on the Charger. Back in the room I found Denise was already up and about, getting ready for the second leg of our trip, and so I asked about what she’d seen.

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “What was what?”

  “Your vision.”

  Her silence spoke volumes.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No,” she said, and I could hear the confusion in her voice. “I had a vision?”

  At first I couldn’t believe that she didn’t remember, but after questioning her for several minutes, it was clear that she did not. Nor did she remember her comments in the middle of the night.

  While she grabbed a quick shower, Dmitri and I studied the map and tried to figure out the best route for us to take. Given the fact that we weren’t sure just how much interest local law enforcement would show in us, it seemed safer to stick to the back roads for a while longer, at least until we put another state line between us and the Tennessee state police. We were able to trace out a route that would get us across the western tip of Georgia and into Alabama without too much trouble.

  By just after seven we were on the road, headed southwest once more. We had another five hundred some odd miles to go, which meant a good ten- to twelve-hour drive, depending upon what we ran into along the way, and we didn’t have any time to waste.

  The morning passed without incident and we decided to risk getting back on the main thoroughfares, picking up Interstate 59 after crossing into Alabama. That continued the diagonal route we’d planned, taking us through Birmingham and the middle part of the state. We stopped for a late lunch somewhere north of the Mississippi line, then crossed the rest of the state and entered Louisiana itself.

  We caught the first news report about a hundred miles outside of New Orleans. I was flipping through the stations, looking for something other than country music, when I landed on the tail end of a broadcast.

  “… another strange case of that mystery illness in New Orleans, this time a
young woman in her twenties. Local authorities tell us they suspect some kind of a flulike virus, maybe even a mutated strain of H1N1, but tests have so far been inconclusive. This is Tyler Jackson, reporting live from New Orleans.”

  I cocked my head, wondering if I’d heard correctly. Unknown illness? New Orleans?

  Denise was having the same difficulty in making sense of it that I was. “Did he say New Orleans?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  I spun the dial, looking for another newscast, but eventually gave up without finding anything. It seemed we’d have to wait a little longer to figure out what was going on.

  I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so why stress?

  At least that’s what I told myself.

  Unfortunately, things didn’t work that way. The closer we got to the city, the more anxious I became. It was like my body knew something that my head hadn’t managed to figure out yet and it was doing its best to communicate that information with the only tools it had at its disposal. The increased heart rate, the difficulty breathing, the inability to sit still for more than a few moments, all of which were evidence that my body was trying to tell my brain it was making a big mistake.

  It didn’t matter what I did to try to calm myself: the anxiety wouldn’t go away.

  By the time the city loomed ahead of us, I was a nervous wreck.

  9

  HUNT

  We entered New Orleans from the east, driving south through St. Tammany Parish to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and then into the city proper across the Causeway. In the setting sunlight I couldn’t see, so I asked Dmitri to describe the Causeway to me as we drove across. It wasn’t every day that you found yourself atop the world’s longest continuous bridge over water.

  Dmitri was his usual eloquent self. “It’s a long stretch of road over a big muddy lake.”