The horizon of water.
Chastity couldn’t believe it. There were cars on that bridge. Moving slowly with wipers and lights on, they crept toward her like a funeral procession. Just seeing that it could be done made Chastity sick all over again.
“If we tell the police officer what’s going on, he’ll help,” she said. “Then we can just stay here.”
James didn’t bother to open his eyes. “We could do that.”
And James could then comfortably bleed to death in the front seat of his cab.
“There have to be hospitals on this side of the lake.”
“I’m sure there are.”
“And, I mean, what could I really do against a murderer? I don’t have a gun. Hell, I don’t even have a good nail file. The best I could do is lack him with my tennis shoes.”
“Did a nice job on his nose.”
She actually managed a smile. “Yeah, I did. Didn’t I?”
“Whatever you decide to do, you have to do it soon. It’s already almost four-thirty, and even the bridge is gonna take a while.”
“Okay,” she said with a sharp nod. “Okay. I’m deciding. We’ll talk to the cop. Then they can intercept Faith and we can go the long route. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“Besides. I don’t have the toll. Do you?”
“Probably not.”
She nodded again, trying to tell herself that she really was going to let the police handle Max. That she had the luxury to circle the entire lake to get back to the house.
She couldn’t breathe again. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t get the image of Faith out of her head, of Margaret Jane, who’d lost a mother and had the Byrnes eyes. Of her father, standing there in Max’s house. She couldn’t get over the idea that no matter what she did, the police wouldn’t get there in time. But that somehow, she could.
She couldn’t do this.
She couldn’t.
James shifted in his seat. “Chastity?”
“Oh, shit,” she moaned, turning the engine over.
James didn’t say a word.
“Let’s go talk to that cop,” she said.
He smiled, his eyes still closed.
The cop was standing just a few feet away in a bright yellow rain slicker. Chastity tried hard to keep her attention on him. But he was so close to where the water was.
An entire world of it stretched beyond those tollbooths, and it was all angry and frothing, a sickly green-gray color that mirrored the roiling clouds. Lightning flickered along the horizon, where the sky was even darker. Another storm was sweeping over the water, and with it the wind. The wind that would tear at a car up on the heights of that span and send it spinning off the road right into that churning water.
Chastity sat there shaking. She needed to get closer to the cop, but she was already too close to the water. She sat idling no more than fifty feet from her goal.
“Come on, Chastity,” James said. “There’s that phone we’ve been looking for.”
Chastity sucked in a breath. She nodded. “Okay.”
She could see that the cop was watching them. So she pulled up until she sat at an angle to his unit as if she meant to go past onto the causeway, and then she put the cab in park. Her hand shaking, she rolled down the window to let in a gust of fetid wind from the storm.
The policeman, scowling at them as if they were trespassing, walked on up to them. “Probably not a good idea to try the causeway today, ma’am,” he said, his voice pitched to be heard above the rising wind. “Storms are getting stronger, and the wind is causing problems. Besides, evacuation order’s gone out for the city. Hurricane Bob’s on his way, or hadn’t you heard?”
“We heard,” James said, because Chastity was still looking at the water.
The cop leaned a little farther over to answer James and caught his first good look at him. He suddenly went very still. “You folks wanna tell me what’s going on?”
“I hope you don’t want the long version,” James answered, barely moving. “I don’t think I have time.”
“We need your help, Officer,” Chastity said, not budging. She wanted to get out of the car, but cops tended to see that as aggressive behavior. Let him stay in control. She just wanted him to make a phone call.
“And how’s that?”
And just how did she explain the mess she was in in twenty words or less?
“I need to get hold of the New Orleans police. My sister is in danger. Her husband is on his way to kill her, and he has to be stopped.”
“And just how do you know that?”
“He told us.”
“Right about the same time he shot me,” James said.
“Look,” Chastity said, finally facing the cop. “Check me out with Detective Obie Gaudet of Cold Case. We’ve been working together on this. But everything blew up today, and we don’t have any more time. My sister is going to be at forty-one River Bend Estate Road at six o’clock, and her husband is going to be waiting there for her. He’s going to kill her, I swear to you.”
“And you are?”
“My name is Chastity Byrnes. My sister is Faith Byrnes Stanton. Her husband is Max Stanton. Please…”
“Do you have some identification, ma’am?”
Chastity damn near did get out of the car then. It might be quicker for her to make the damn call herself. “No, sir, I don’t. My brother-in-law has my purse with him. He abducted James and me and left us to die out in a swamp someplace.”
“And you just happened to pop the ignition on this car?”
“It’s my cab,” James said quietly, reaching into his pocket. His hand stalled there. “He took my wallet.”
“I see.” The cop straightened. “Can you step out of the car, please?”
“Look at my hack license in the back,” he suggested. “Run the plates.”
The cop actually looked, his hand now resting on his gun. “The only thing back here is a Marine Corps Etch A Sketch. And there are no plates. Get out of the car.”
James sighed. “I just don’t think I can.”
“Can’t you call Detective Gaudet?” Chastity pleaded. “He’ll tell you who I am.”
“Yes, ma’am. Step out of the car.”
Chastity really couldn’t breathe now. She’d been right all along. They were going to get stuck here playing a round of dick-pull with a cop while Faith died and James bled out. Chastity just couldn’t let that happen.
She couldn’t wait that long. She couldn’t think of what she had to do. So she just did it.
Whipping the steering wheel around so she’d miss the cop and his car, she slid the car into gear, slammed her foot on the accelerator, and ran right over the orange hazard cone that blocked the second tollbooth. Then she smashed through the lowered gate like the defensive line sacking a quarterback and sent wood splinters flying at least twenty feet.
“Oh, God,” she moaned, seeing the cop jump into action in her rearview mirror. “I’m a fleeing suspect.”
“So much for the toll.”
“I’ll make it up to them later.”
“Well,” James said, curiously unmoved, “at least you got his attention. He’ll certainly check out your story.”
“After he has me locked away in a cell somewhere.” Chastity fought hard to keep her eyes on the road. But even if she did that, she was faced with water. Water everywhere, stretching as far as the eye could see.
And behind her, the police. He was standing outside his car, excitedly talking on his radio.
“He’s not following us,” she said.
“He’ll let the guys on the other end stop us.”
“Oh.”
“Hopefully they’ll have called Gaudet by then.”
“Well, at least we’ll get you some help.”
Which was right about when Chastity realized just what she’d clone. She was already a couple of miles out onto the bridge, sweeping up into thin air over the water and heading for that terrible horizon.
�
��Oh, my God,” she moaned, her foot slipping off the accelerator. “What did I just do?”
“Keep your eyes open, nurse.”
She really had closed them. And the cab was still moving.
Her heart was thundering in her throat. She was sweating like a malaria victim and shaking even worse. She was on water. She was trapped by it, surrounded by it, and she couldn’t do this.
She just couldn’t do this.
“Can’t you drive?” Chastity begged James, her voice impossibly small as the car coasted aimlessly onward. “Please?”
James managed to shake his head. “Even if I had two arms, I’m still half bagged. He really shot some shit into me. I can’t even read the road signs. And I swear the bridge is undulating like a snake.”
Chastity groaned, squeezing her eyes shut again. They’d rolled to a stop, just beyond the land where she couldn’t get back.
“It is undulating,” she retorted. “I can see it, too.”
“Nah. That’s just panic talking. Come on, nurse. We have to get off this water before it bites us.”
The wind was gusting. Chastity felt it tug at the car. She was cold all of a sudden in the cab air-conditioning. Her shirt was soaked with sweat, and she thought maybe there was glass in her lungs.
“We’re running out of time here, Chastity.”
Chastity pulled in a breath that wheezed with fear. “Well,” she said, opening her eyes. “If you can’t go back, you go ahead.”
“That’s the way, baby.”
She got the car rolling again and pointed it down that too-narrow line. She tried hard, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the water. It pulled her like a drug. It settled in her chest until she couldn’t sit up or sit still.
“You don’t want to go too fast,” James said. “Especially over the high points of the bridge. Nasty crosswinds up there.”
She focused on keeping the wheel pointed straight. “Uh-huh.”
Silence.
“You might want to go just a bit faster, though. We have a ways to go, and I don’t think twenty miles an hour is going to get us there in time.”
Chastity tried her best not to close her eyes as she eased down on the accelerator. The car bucked against the wind, fighting her hold on it.
“How far is it to the city?” she asked.
“Twenty-three miles. And then about seven more to the Mississippi.”
Another bridge. Chastity nodded, her attention on the road. The road that seemed to stretch into nowhere. The water that waited for her.
The rails were too low, weren’t they? Wouldn’t it be too easy to roll over them? Shouldn’t there be some kind of wall? A roof? Something that kept her from seeing all that water?
“I have this recurring dream,” she said, trying not to notice that her heart rate was redlining again. “I’m driving across a bridge just like this one. Over so much water that it eats up the world. But the bridge doesn’t go all the way across. When it almost reaches the horizon, it simply sinks straight into the water, and I sink with it. I can’t stop it.” Were those tears on her face? She couldn’t stop to think about it. “Please tell me this bridge goes all the way across.”
“It goes all the way across. We’ll get there.”
Chastity let go a sharp, manic laugh. “We have to. I need to get you to a hospital.”
“After you make sure Faith is okay.”
“Yeah.”
The rain started again. Chastity turned the wipers and lights on, just like the people who were passing on the other side.
They were so close to the water. Suspended right above it, as if caught between reality and nightmare. And she had no choice but to keep driving farther and farther into it, away from the safety of land. Far from the possibility of rescue.
She was heading into hell, and there was no way to turn back.
“Have you considered what you’re going to do when we do get there?” James asked, his eyes closed, his head back against the seat.
Chastity thought about it a second. Better than thinking about the fact that the wind was tugging at the car like a kid pulling on a kite string.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t suppose you’re packin’ heat in this thing.”
“I don’t even have a tire iron. I lent it to somebody and haven’t gotten it back.”
“How ’bout a cloak of invisibility? I have to figure out how to get into that house.”
“We still have some time left. It’s only ten after five. Maybe we can head her off.”
“Maybe.”
They were rising now, on one of the high arches of the causeway, where Chastity guessed ships could pass under. The wind was waiting, swirling and hard and hungry. Chastity held on, despite how much her hands were sweating, and fought it. She was not going into that water.
“We have the element of surprise,” James said, and Chastity knew that his voice was thinning out.
“Yeah, until we show up in that neighborhood in a black cab.”
“You want to leave it outside the wall and climb over?”
“The way Kareena talks, the subdivision is built up out of that swamp. You might float away while I’m busy.”
James was distracting her. Chastity knew it. But for the moment, it was working.
Mostly.
She still kept watching that water. It still filled her chest like acid and tumbled in her stomach until she just knew she had to pull over and puke. She felt her father closing in like death, and it terrified her, almost as much as the water. No, maybe more.
Yes, more.
Because without him, water would have just been wet.
But it wasn’t. It was a living, predatory thing, and Chastity couldn’t bear it.
“Pay attention,” James snapped.
Chastity pulled her eyes back to the road.
“You’re doing fine.”
“No I’m not. There’s nothing but water. Nothing in the world. And it’s all mad at me.”
“Well, you’re probably right there. But you don’t want to give it the satisfaction of winning.”
Chastity’s laugh was as shaky as her hands. “I don’t think I’m going to have any choice.”
“Then don’t give Max the satisfaction.”
She’d say she was living a nightmare, but who could imagine a nightmare like this? There was no land anywhere. No solid ground. No sanity. Just roiling, smashing water and the eerie howling of the wind as it built over the lake. The clouds, skudding fast.
And the water.
She really was going to puke.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit…”
Hours.
She drove for hours. Right into the darkness that held New Orleans hostage. Right into the hurricane that was eating up the coast and swamping the streets. Chastity held her breath until she saw spots in front of her eyes, and then she gasped like a fish.
She rubbed her hands against her pants and then she held on again. She listened to James in the passenger seat as he slipped further away.
And she kept driving.
At least, though, the terror of the endless road took away the more awful fear of her father.
She just didn’t have time for it.
Not yet.
“How’s our time?” she asked.
“Go faster.”
And then she saw it. Rising like Oz from the end of the poppy fields. Like the first sight of land after the Atlantic.
New Orleans.
She saw the buildings rise, a geometric miracle, from the horizon.
She felt the tears again, flooding her eyes and spilling down her chest without stop. She couldn’t believe that she might actually make it.
“Where do we go when we get there?” she asked, her voice wobbling like a bad coloratura.
“Six-ten to ten east.”
“Okay.”
“But that’s if the cops don’t stop you first.”
Chastity blew off a pent-up breath. She’d managed to forget to d
o that, too.
“Don’t worry,” James assured her. “If you just keep going, they’ll follow you.”
“What if they shoot at us?”
“Baby, this is New Orleans. The cops don’t actually hit anything.”
Another shaky laugh. “I’ll hold you to that.”
But weirdly enough, there weren’t any cops to greet them. There was just empty roadway, sweeping down off the causeway and into Metairie, where the traffic was all coming the other way and the streets were filling again with water.
Chastity rolled off Causeway Boulevard and onto 10 east toward the city, and thought she could accomplish anything now.
She’d driven right across her nightmare and made it out the other side.
She’d found land.
Well, mostly. The puddles were still deep enough to drown a truck, and the thunder was cracking again. The wind had taken to keening, tugging at the car, and the rain was falling sideways again. They were in imminent danger from flying street signs and downed power lines, but at least she’d conquered the water.
She saw police, of course, now that she didn’t want to stop them. They were in the evacuation lanes, directing traffic in their slickers and flashlights. Chastity watched them with longing as she sloshed by.
“We might just make it,” she said.
Forty minutes later, she knew they wouldn’t.
They did reach Max’s subdivision. After crossing Pontchartrain, Chastity even managed to cross the Mississippi bridge without so much as a tremor. She sailed through the flooded streets like the Ark. She even ignored the debris that was starting to fly with the fresh wind gusts. She had to get to Faith in time.
She actually thought she would. She pulled up to the gates of Faith’s subdivision with ten minutes to spare. It was when she punched the security code in that she realized she’d run out of luck.
The gates didn’t open. Chastity looked up through the storm darkness to realize that there weren’t any lights on anywhere.
“The power’s out,” she said, sitting on the wrong side of the wrought-iron gates.
“Can you climb?”
“How much do you like this cab?”
James just sighed and closed his eyes. Chastity slammed through that wrought-iron fence like a tank. James still refused to open his eyes, even as the heavy gates screeched and crashed across his hood before falling away.
City of the Dead Page 37
