There was no key, of course. Max was nothing if not organized.
She stood there a moment, fighting the panic. Trying to think. She could hear the water behind her. Below her. Sucking at the supports of that fragile little house. Battering at her fragile self-control.
She had James inside and a limited amount of time to get the cab out past all that water. So she gathered all the rage Max had incited in her and reared back. Then, like an action hero, Chastity kicked the front door in.
It took three tries, and her right foot would probably never be the same, but she thought she’d never heard a more satisfying sound than the sudden splintering as the door slammed in on itself.
Well, maybe James’s chuckle as he shook his head at her. “I just love a strong woman,” he greeted her when she stepped through.
She couldn’t help but grin back, breathless with effort and exultation. “Amazing what a little outrage can do for a girl.”
“I could have climbed out the window, though.”
“Nah. It’ll play much better this way when they make the movie about us.”
Carefully pulling James up out of his chair, Chastity wrapped one arm around his waist and grabbed her purloined tools with the other. Then she led James out onto that rickety porch and right off it again into the water.
“You guide, I’ll support,” Chastity said, closing her eyes.
“Come on, nurse. You just punched out a house. You can do this.”
“Houses are easy, fireman. Water’s hard.”
But she managed to get them both as far as the car, the water pulling at her calves and splashing around her knees. Propping James against the hood, she bent the coat hanger and slid it down alongside the driver’s side window and popped the lock. It took her one more try than her attempts on the front door to achieve success.
“Hmm,” she said, taking hold of James again, “I’m slowing down.”
“Shameful.”
She actually grinned. “Humiliating.”
But she got him into the car. She even got him belted in. Then she reached for the mike on his radio, only to find that it wasn’t there.
Not just the mike. The entire radio.
“My God,” Chastity breathed, stunned. “He took it.”
James shook his head. “I’m going to have to call my insurance company.”
“We’re going to have to go looking for that help after all.”
Chastity closed her eyes a second, just so she didn’t have to see the water. Then she forced her attention to the job at hand.
The lovely thing about ten-year-old GMs was that you didn’t need to waste your time digging wires out and crossing them. All you had to do was wedge a screwdriver in at the base of the steering column and pop the ignition loose. Then you used the screwdriver like a key.
“God bless you, fireman,” she said as she did just that. “You didn’t go for one of those fancy new cars with all that computer shit on ’em.”
“I couldn’t afford one of those fancy new cars with all that computer shit on ’em,” he assured her as he melted back against the passenger seat. “I don’t see your purse here, either.”
“If he stole your radio, I sincerely doubt he’s going to be sloppy enough to leave my cell phone and drugs.”
James lifted an eyebrow. “Drugs I don’t need right now.”
“Me,” she said, “I need the drugs.”
The engine roared to life and Chastity tried to breathe. “Tante Edie said I’d have to wade through water. She didn’t say I’d have to drive through it.”
“At least you can keep your ankles dry now.”
She was shaking so hard again it took her a couple of tries to get the car into gear. “You’re sure you know where to go?”
“Sure. Point for the trees. Beyond that is the traffic.”
She pointed. She kept the car in a straight line, even as the water pushed at the bottom of the doors. She kept her eyes on those trees like a saint seeking heaven. She held her breath.
“I don’t suppose you have airsickness bags in here,” she said, keeping the bile down with nothing but will.
“You’re doing fine. You’re almost at the traffic now. Hear it?”
“I hear the shrieking in my head. You listen for the traffic.”
Then, suddenly she was through the trees, and it was there. All she could think of was the scene in Lawrence of Arabia when Lawrence slogged up the desert hill, dying of thirst after weeks in the desert, to suddenly see the Nile on the other side.
It was a two-lane road. Both lanes were packed with cars, trucks, campers, and trailers, all going the same way. It was like the rush hour from hell, like a scene from every disaster movie Chastity had ever seen, with the entire world trying to escape the asteroid.
“What do we do now?” she asked, overwhelmed.
James considered the scene for a few minutes. “I was hoping we were closer to the city. I think we’re way past Bayou Savage, though. Follow the traffic for a bit. Let’s see if I’m right.”
Chastity wanted to cry. “We’ll never get back in time.”
“Oh, ye of little faith, nurse. If I’m right, we’re not that far from the north end of the lake. In no more than a few miles, the rest of the traffic will keep going north and we’ll go west. In the meantime, take the shoulder.”
“What if I just stopped a car and asked to use their cell phone.”
“Okay.”
She tried that. She climbed out of the car and began banging on doors, begging for help. People treated her like a homeless woman with a hand out. After a few minutes of it, she actually heard car doors locking.
She could stand there. Or she could get in motion. Because even if she did get hold of the police, she had a feeling that Max was going to murder Faith anyway.
She had to get to them. She had to stop it herself.
That was what kept going through her head every time she saw a person turn their head and drive by as she begged to use their phone.
Then a couple in a Volvo stopped.
“Please,” Chastity begged as they cracked their window against the rain that she suddenly realized had drenched her. “I need to call the police.”
The man was already shaking his head. “We’ve been trying to call out for the last twenty miles. The circuits are jammed.”
Chastity damn near fell on the ground and wept. “Can you keep trying? Please. A life is at stake. Call nine-one-one and ask that Detective Gaudet of the Cold Case Department go to forty-one River Bend Estate Road. Tell him that Faith Stanton is going to be murdered if he doesn’t get there in time.”
“Murdered?” the man retorted, his voice a mixture of suspicion and distress.
Chastity held on to her patience by her fingertips. The guy was old, bald, and sweet-looking. And she’d just asked him to play a bit part in a suspense movie.
“On my honor,” she said. “Please. Try and keep calling.”
The window started sliding up. He was wide-eyed, and his wife was leaning over, even more wide-eyed than he. But he was nodding.
So Chastity climbed back into the cab.
“I hope he actually calls,” she said, starting the engine.
“I think you scared him. You’re looking a little wild-eyed.”
“No kidding. Well, the rest of these people didn’t help, so they’d just better get out of the way.”
She revved that engine like a pace car, pointed it in the right direction, and drove.
It was another thing about driving a big, honking cab instead of a Mini Cooper, Chastity realized as she pushed her way into the traffic. A Mini Cooper could certainly find the little spaces to slip into, but a big Caprice could just muscle its way through to where it wanted to go.
And that was precisely what she did. It even felt pretty good. Like throwing a chair through a window. The level of honking escalated precipitously as she pushed her way into the flow, but Chastity didn’t care at all. She had to get the hell back to New Orl
eans, and there was only one way to do it.
In the passenger seat, James managed a wry laugh. “Now I’ll close my eyes, nurse. Your driving positively terrifies me.”
Chastity could actually laugh back. “And you haven’t seen me on an open road yet. You should be afraid, fireman. You should be very afraid.”
She could at least breathe again. They were on dry land. She could mostly ignore the encroaching swamps that stretched out to the right of the road, the open water that stretched away just beyond. The rain was even letting up again, just a little, although the thunder and lightning had returned, syncopated and insistent, as if pushing her on to get her sister. She’d made it out of that cabin before it collapsed into the water, and she was moving. She could only see one problem.
“Where the hell are the police?”
James, leaning more heavily against the far door, did his best to shrug. “Think they’re all already in Mississippi?”
“They should be here directing traffic,” she insisted, pulling the car over in front of a refrigerated shrimp truck. “We’ve got to get hold of somebody to get down to Faith.”
“I’ll look for phone booths.”
Chastity couldn’t help but laugh. “Out here? The only thing out here is herons and fishing boats.”
“A house then, with a phone.”
“More breaking and entering?”
“You telling me you can’t break into a house?”
“Of course I can break into a house. I’d just rather not have to.”
Chastity huffed and yanked the wheel again to pull out to the narrow shoulder. Hitting the accelerator, she ignored more outrage and outdistanced another couple of campers and a length of cars.
It went that way for at least fifteen minutes, until Chastity’s blood pressure redlined and her chest felt full of acid. She knew that James was slumping farther and farther down in his seat. She felt the seconds ticking away in her head. She fought the traffic and the panic and the clock. She fought the water and the time, and still she didn’t see one goddamn cop on the road.
She saw bridges, though. She crossed at least two, sweating harder each time she saw one, saw the water beneath waiting for her. She came damn close to telling James that she just couldn’t do this. Her hands were going to slip off the steering wheel from the sweat, and they were going to end up in the water after all.
And then, after she had crossed another flimsy metal bridge over yet another wide bayou that swept out to sea, James suddenly came to attention. “Okay. Here’s one ninety. We turn off here.”
And finally they escaped the traffic. Chastity slammed her foot onto the accelerator and took the road back along the northside of the lake like a Grand Prix driver getting a white flag.
And still there weren’t any cops. They passed Slidell and found that everybody there had already left.
“Should we break into one of these buildings?” Chastity asked as they sped past a small collection of structures.
“Not unless you want to waste perfectly good time. Those aren’t just power lines lying along the side of the road.”
“Okay, then, that’s one less option. Wish we had a radio. See if Bob’s coming.”
“Your brother-in-law said six hours.”
“That wind looks pretty high to me right now.” Which was when she had to swerve to avoid another set of sparking lines. “I don’t suppose there’d be somebody standing on the side of the road with a damned phone!”
She was getting even more afraid. The good news was that she wasn’t near open water anymore. The bad news was that they were driving through thick woods that seemed to catch the wind. Twice they had to skirt downed limbs, and twice more fallen lines. The wind seemed to be howling now, gusting hard enough to drive the rain sideways.
“Where is everybody?” Chastity moaned, fighting a fresh gust of wind as they hit an open area.
“Going the other way.”
“But shouldn’t, like, the National Guard be here or something?”
“They said they’d be here about six tonight.”
Chastity really did laugh. “This is all a cosmic farce, isn’t it? It’s like the whole thing’s been choreographed to drive me completely insane.”
James managed a grin. “It’s all about you, is it?”
Chastity was surprised into another laugh. “Inside my head it is. My father was with him, you know.” She sucked in a lungful of air and still felt suffocated. “My father.”
“I know. I heard.”
“I can’t believe he’ll go along with Max. No matter what.”
“Why not? Isn’t he evil incarnate?”
“Yes, but he always seemed to like Faith best. I just can’t…” She shook her head, not at all sure this was the time for family psychology’. “I just hope he’s gone before we get there. I can handle a murderous psychopath. I’m not at all sure I can handle my father.”
“Maybe the police will get there first.”
“That’s if we get the police. This thing drives like a tank, you know.”
“All the better to fend off other taxis.”
“There are no other taxis out here, James. Just rain and trees.”
Two more of which they had to swerve around. But it seemed that the storm was easing, the wind not sounding quite so demonic, and the rain falling down now instead of sideways.
“How far do we go?” Chastity asked.
“Almost there.”
“Almost where?”
“Where we’re going to find a policeman.”
“And where’s that?”
It took James a moment to answer. Chastity was just about to look over to make sure that he hadn’t finally passed out, when she saw him lift his burned arm.
“There.”
She looked up to see road signs. Her eyes opened very wide.
“There where?” she demanded, suddenly sounding shrill all over again.
James pointed. “Follow that sign. I promise you’ll find a cop there.”
“The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway? Is that what I think it is?”
Water. All that water.
And only one bridge.
“Yeah. But with the wind this high, cops’ll be at the entranceway pulling people over. I think they close it when the wind tops forty or something.”
“Okay.”
And James was right. There, right by the tollbooth that led to the bridge, that led to the water, sat a car with a light rack on it. But beyond it Chastity saw a steady line of cars approaching from the far expanse of the causeway. Nobody had closed anything yet.
Chastity froze at the sight. How could anybody do that? Just drive over water as far as the eye could see? What if the bridge broke? What if a boat slammed into it? What if the wind just blew them off into the water?
“Okay,” she said, focusing on that cop. “Now we can get help. After we talk to him, how do we get back off the highway?”
“We don’t.”
She actually stopped the car right in the middle of the road. “What?”
“The lake is forty miles around, Chastity. The bridge is only twenty-three miles long.”
“You said they’d close the bridge.”
“I might have forgotten to add that it’s one of the hurricane evacuation routes.”
She shook her head. “I’m not going over that bridge.”
He leveled a hard look at her. “Then you’re not going to get to your sister in time.”
“The police are!” she shot back. “That’s what we’re calling them for!”
“And if they can’t get there in time?”
Chastity opened her mouth. She closed it again. It was what she’d been thinking for the last half hour. She shouldn’t be surprised James said it.
“He’s got a head start on us, Chastity,” James reminded her. “The police have a hurricane to contend with. We don’t have a choice.”
“You always have a choice,” Chastity snarled.
But you might not a
lways be able to tolerate the consequences of the choice you made.
Chastity sat there so long that the cop finally noticed, some hundred yards away. He climbed out of his car, watching her.
And still she sat there, her attention riveted by the endless vista of water. Roiling water. White-capped, angry water. Her heart stuttered badly. Her hands were sweating as if she were a woman in labor. She was dripping with it, hands and forehead and the small of her back.
She had to get to her sister. She had to somehow save her. She had to cross all the water in the world to do it. And then she had to face her father. Chastity reached over and shut off the engine. “No.”
James looked over at her, his expression unreadable. He looked back out over the water, where the policeman waited. He shook his head. “Then it’s over.”
Yes, Chastity thought, sitting there like a stone. He was right. After all that effort, all that pain and grief and trauma, she’d reached her limit. Right at the edge of a lake she couldn’t see across.
Her sister was still in danger, but Chastity simply couldn’t summon the strength to go a step farther. It was over.
Twenty-Five
For the next few moments there was dead silence in the cab.
“Are you quiet because you have no argument?” Chastity asked, her attention on the horizon, her hands wrapped around the steering wheel as if it were Max’s neck. “Or because you’re unconscious?”
“You made your decision,” James said simply.
Which made her turn, of course, to see that he was slumped against the far side of the cab, cradling his freshly injured arm in his lap. And bleeding through her bandage.
The rain was falling again, still only a sprinkle. The wind started to dance across the road. Chastity felt the panic surge in her chest, choking out any kind of logic. She noticed that the police officer had stopped only a few feet from his car, and that he was watching her, his hand positioned near the gun on his hip.
Just beyond him, three tollbooths stretched across the road. The police unit blocked the only open lane. The others were barricaded with orange cones. Beyond that the causeway swept out across the lake, a double span of concrete that dipped and rose and finally disappeared into the horizon.
City of the Dead Page 36
