City of the Dead

by Eileen Dreyer

  “Nonsense, Sergeant. I’ve just been driving a wounded man around in a boosted cab. Not robbing banks.”

  “You just shot a man.”

  “I did. But as you can see, he shot me first. And James. And he beat my sister.”

  “Oh? Isn’t the man you’re pointing the gun at your brother-in-law?”

  “No, sir. I know you haven’t met, but you probably recognize him from his photo. This is my father, Sergeant. Charles Byrnes. My brother-in-law is the one lying in the ditch. You should probably get an ambulance for him. Not to mention James.”

  “And you, I think, Ms. Byrnes.”

  She shrugged. “Okay. I guess.”

  “There’s nobody in the ditch,” somebody said.

  Everybody looked, and damned if he wasn’t right. There was a wash of blood against the curb, but no Max.

  “Might have seen him trying to climb that wall when we pulled in here,” one of the uniforms offered.

  “Then you might want to go find him,” Chastity suggested, not moving. “He’s got a lot of money in a nonextraditing country and at least three capital murder charges, not to mention kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, and blackmail.”

  “Why don’t you do that, Paissant?” Gaudet said. “Go find the man.”

  There was some reorganizing, and a couple of the cops hotfooted it back out the gates.

  “Now, how ’bout you, Ms. Byrnes? Can we do something for you?”

  Chastity nodded, her focus still on her pasty-faced father, who was standing there shaking in the rain. “Yeah. Okay. We should probably get out of this hellhole before the hurricane hits.”

  “Haven’t you heard the news?” Sergeant Gaudet demanded. “This is it. Most of the hurricane hit land down the coast and slid off west. Not only that, but it’s weakened to about a two.”

  “So the big threat is just a worthless blowhard?”

  “That’s what they’re saying.”

  Chastity started laughing again. It fit so beautifully, really. The perfect coda to this farce.

  “Wanna give me the gun before these other police get nervous?” Gaudet asked. “Then we can let the rescue people in.”

  “Sure. But before you just let my father walk away, Sergeant, you might want to know that if you search either the computer here or the one at my father’s house, you’ll find proof that my father has been downloading quite a bit of kiddie porn. Which I’m pretty sure cancels his Get Out of Jail card.”

  At that, Faith swung on her father. “You what?” she demanded.

  “She’s lying, baby,” their father swore. “I promised I’d never do that again.”

  “I let you in my home,” Faith shrieked, suddenly ramrod straight. “You promised!”

  Chastity finally let the gun drop. She didn’t need it after all. The police all uncocked their weapons and straightened. Chastity’s father took two steps toward her, his face furious and frightened at the same time.

  “Why did you do this to me, Chastity? Why!”

  Chastity stood there, gape-jawed. Why did she do that to him? God, she’d been right. She wasn’t helpless after all. In fact, considering what she’d accomplished today, she’d have to say she was pretty damned strong. Stronger than this monster had ever been.

  Chastity felt unholy laughter bubbling up in her chest. It would feel so good, she thought, just to laugh right in his face. Just to finally tell him how little she thought of him.

  She didn’t have to. Faith did it for her. With the shovel. Nobody thought to stop her. Not even when they saw her swing. Chastity saw that big-ass shovel heading for her father’s face, and finally laughed until she was sick. She didn’t think she’d ever seen anything so funny as the look in his eyes right before he got his comeuppance.

  Epilogue

  She screamed like a B-movie actress. She screamed like a hockey fan at the Stanley Cups. She screamed like a woman who was experiencing the first ever, no-holds-barred, four-star orgasm of her life. She screamed, and James, sweaty and gasping, smiled back.

  The room was still sparse, the neon flickering over the walls like a scene from Blade Runner. From four stories down Chastity could hear the raucous celebration of a Wednesday night on Bourbon Street. But for the first time in her life, she wallowed in the surreal feeling that she’d just been lifted right out of that world.

  Of any world.

  Exhausted, she sank back into the tumbled sheets on James’s bed and tucked herself nicely beneath his left arm. He was using his healed right one to stroke her hair away from her face. He was chuckling, too, that kind of self-satisfied sound a man makes when he’s just proved himself right.

  “That,” he said, “was good ya-ya.”

  Chastity chortled right back. “No kidding.”

  “You stay down here, you can get it often as you like.”

  “I stay down here, I’ll become a sybaritic wastrel.”

  His hand was starting to stray again. Chastity wiggled her ass a bit at the surprising shivers that were starting to skitter through her.

  “Yeah, baby, but you’d make a damn cute sybaritic wastrel.”

  Chastity smiled. How odd. She was in a tumble-down apartment on Bourbon Street with an ex-felonious cabdriver listening to “Born to Be Wild” and working herself up for another round of hot, nasty sex, and she felt cherished.

  She’d never felt cherished. Not in her entire life.

  But James managed to do it with one good arm and half a smile.

  But then, it was positively indecent what James could do with one arm.

  And half a smile.

  “Well,” Chastity said. “I have nothing better to do.”

  “Not since your father went back to the joint and your brother-in-law died.”

  “I still can’t believe he drowned in seven inches of salt water. That’s just not right.”

  “That’s justice. Tante Edie told you so.”

  They had still been there on Faith’s lawn when they found out. It had been Kareena who told them. She’d pulled up right behind the paramedics and sashayed out of that T-bird of hers like the prom queen.

  “Where’ve you been?” Chastity demanded from where she was seated on the lawn. The rain had let up and the thunder was passing. Her father was tucked inside a cruiser and James was being given fluids.

  “I’ve been savin’ people, just like the good nurse I am! Hey, ain’t this hurricane a big letdown? Me, I expected houses to fly by an’ everything!”

  “Come see a tornado, you want to see that, Kareena.”

  “I did see a drowned man,” she said. “Right outside those walls.”

  Even Obie Gaudet turned to hear that. “A drowned man?”

  Kareena smiled like a shark. “Dead as disco, Sergeant. And how are you this fine evening? You like dancin’?”

  “I’m sure I do, Mizz Boudreaux. But first, I’d like to hear about that drowned man.”

  Kareena planted a hand on her hip and smiled big. “Well, I’m surprised no police came to tell you. It seems somebody was running from all you and fell in the water ’bout half mile down the road. I saw ’em drag him out.”

  “Did you recognize him?”

  “Look a lot like that Max Stanton, who fixed the police commissioner’s heart.”

  “I killed him?” Chastity asked, feeling even more light-headed.

  “Nah, girl. You just winged him. He drowned right in the swamp. Now, ain’t that just some kind of poetic justice, yeah? I think ole Yamaya, she got him after all.”

  Kareena was now Obie Gaudet’s new fling, and Mrs. Ellen Stanton was on her way back to Italy with her grandchildren after burying her only son. It was only left for Chastity to figure out what she was going to do with herself and her dog.

  “What about that job Kareena got set up for you?” James asked.

  “Senior death investigator?” she asked. “You really think they’re gonna let a woman do that in a city this hidebound? I thought the guy now was somebody’s cousin or somet
hin’.”

  “But so am I. And you have the recommendation of everybody at Cold Case.”

  Chastity smiled. “Yeah. That was awfully nice of them.”

  “Since you put a multiple murderer away and all.”

  “And sent a sexual predator back to prison.”

  “Liked that, huh?”

  She smiled. “Most of all. Why, since his hearing, I’ve been able to cut my drugs down by half, and my therapist says that she’s gonna miss me.”

  “And just think how much better you’re gonna get now that you have all this good ya-ya.”

  “Yeah. That and my pretty bracelets.”

  It was, even though James didn’t know it yet, what had tipped her decision. He’d had his cousin the jeweler take her treasure out of that small velvet bag and set it into a couple of bangle bracelets. Chastity had a feeling she wasn’t going to take them off for quite a while. They gave a very satisfying clink as she set off on her own exploration to find that those scars of James’s didn’t extend to any vital areas after all.

  She was feeling aroused again. Really excited, not crowded with shame and hunger and loss. She was just horny and happy and expectant. She’d turned a corner back at Faith’s house. She’d walked away from her past.

  And now, her toes still tingling from what James had just done—and was starting to do again—she was stepping into her future.

  She really hadn’t known that a man’s touch could feel so good.

  But then, she’d never known a man who could cherish a woman with nothing more than a smile.

  “I’m just sorry that Faith hasn’t done as well.”

  Faith had definitely swung that shovel. She’d given her father a whack worth thirty years of rage that left his nose flat against his cheek and his mouth split like a melon. But after such a promising start, she’d faded. She’d packed up her house and packed up her life and moved back to St. Louis. And she’d done it without once talking to Chastity.

  But Chastity understood. She’d even passed along the number of her own therapist. She hoped that one day her sister would heal as much as she had. She hoped she’d come back down and help raise funds for the brand-new Reeves-Savage-Tolliver Women’s Shelter that Chastity and Kareena were putting together along with the survivors of that group of women who’d banded together to save Faith.

  But that was for another day. For today, Chastity was going to find out how many other ways James could make her scream.

  And how many ways she could make him smile.

  And then, come summer, she would be the one to host the Annual New Orleans Hurricane Parade and All Day Party. Because, she realized, there was nothing wrong with hurricanes. After all, they swept away a lot of broken and useless things. And left behind the things that were strongest.

  “I hope you like dogs,” she murmured against his chest.

  “I love dogs.”

  “How ’bout baseball?”

  “How ’bout concentrating on what I’m doing?”

  She concentrated.

  “They should name a hurricane James,” she sighed an hour later. Then, for the first time in her life, nestled in a safe place, she slept all night long.

  Before You Go…

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  Page Ahead for an Excerpt From:

  With a Vengeance

  With a Vengeance

  It took Maggie another fifteen minutes to face poor crazy Montana Bob, and even then she wasn’t sure she was up to it. She found him strapped down in four-point restraints and all but frothing at the mouth, his eyes rolling, his face sweaty and ashen. One arm sported a bandage, the other an IV for antibiotics. His face was scraped and bruised, and his dirty, scrawny body was only half-covered by a sagging patient gown.

  “Maggie, they didn’t get you yet,” he whispered, turning big washed-out blue eyes at her. Eyes that saw things nobody else did. “I’m glad.”

  Maggie wet a washcloth and wiped the sweat and spittle away. “I’m just fine, Bob.”

  He tried to smile. “That’s because you’re Rambo today. You’re immune. Stay Rambo.”

  Maggie looked down at the cammos and jump boots she still wore along with her black POLICE/PARAMEDIC T-shirt. She did, in fact, know she swaggered when she wore them. Ever since she’d first tried them on for Tactical EMS School at Camp Ripley, she’d been thinking of wearing them down to the ED for work. Maybe help keep some of the crazies in line. Or the doctors.

  “I might just stay Rambo, Bob,” she told the poor sad man who had caused her SWAT team to deploy. “I can protect you, too.”

  “It’s too late, Maggie,” he sighed, briefly closing his eyes. “They’ve injected me with bacteria. I can feel it weighing on my heart, Maggie, heavy on my heart where my sins live...”

  “That’s just antibiotics for your gunshot, Bob,” she hushed.

  But Bob wouldn’t be settled. “No, no it isn’t. You know. You know. Get my stash and run, Maggie. Get my stash, where my heart lived. You get it, okay?”

  Maggie smiled as if she meant it. “Sure, Bob. I promise.”

  Tears filled his eyes, and for a moment, Bob was really there. Afraid, ashamed, appalled at what he knew the world thought of him. Of what Maggie thought of him. He tried to reach for her with a hand that was tied to the cart, and Maggie stretched over to meet him halfway.

  “It’ll be all right, Bob,” she soothed, squeezing hard to get past the layers of delusion and terror and emptiness. “I promise.”

  Bob’s smile, when it came, was infinitely sad. “Don’t... promise...” He hiccupped, twitched, refocused. ”...get it, Maggie—”

  And that fast, his eyes rolled back and he began to convulse.

  For a second, Maggie just stared. He wasn’t even on a monitor, for God’s sake. He’d just been shot in the arm. But if there was one thing Maggie could recognize, it was cardiac arrest.

  “Call a code!” she yelled, vaulting right up onto the cart to punch on his chest. “Call a goddamn code!”

  “What’s O’Brien up to now?” somebody demanded.

  But nobody ignored a code call. The announcement went out. Carmen scuttled in to crank up the monitor as Maggie bent down to breathe into that terrible, gaping mouth.

  The team poured in like water over a dam. Patsy Levins, the medical resident on, choreographed the code like a chorus number from Les Mis. Maggie took over the drug position, shoving everything in the crash cart straight into Bob’s bigger vessels. She pumped and exhorted and demanded answers, but right on the stroke of five o’clock, Patsy yanked off her gloves with a definite snap and walked from the room. Montana Bob, still strapped to the emergency room cart he’d so often called home, lay silent and staring.

  “I guess he should have listened,” Carmen said as she pulled out morgue sheet and toe tags.

  Maggie couldn’t quite move from the bottom of the bed, her hand on Bob’s cold, waxy foot. “Listened?”

  “The voices told him he was going to die,” Carmen said. “I guess they were right.”

  But they shouldn’t have been, was all Maggie could think. She’d been there. She’d seen his injury. It hadn’t been fatal. Hell, it hadn’t even been minor.

  He shouldn’t be dead, no matter what his voices had said. No matter what anybody said. As she stood looking down on that empty, wasted husk of a human body, Maggie wanted to know why the hell he was.

  She c
ouldn’t quite say that, though. She couldn’t tell the staff that she was terrified she’d let this sad little man down. So she patted his foot, as if he would know, and fought surprising tears for a homeless psychotic.

  “He brought me flowers,” she said, and turned away.

  To purchase

  With a Vengeance

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  Also by Eileen Dreyer

  Medical Thrillers

  A Man to Die For

  Nothing Personal

  Brain Dead

  Bad Medicine

  With a Vengeance

  City of the Dead

  Head Games

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  If Looks Could Kill

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  Korbel Classic Romance Humorous Series

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  A Prince of a Guy

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  A Fine Madness

  Acknowledgments

  The list this time is a long one. I can’t sufficiently express my thanks to all the people who gave their time, expertise, and assistance—not to mention all those great stories. As ever, any mistakes are mine.

  One point to be made. The laws on fertility assistance are ever changing. At the time of publication, Louisiana was still the only state that forbade the auctioning of human eggs. But as fast as laws change, I decided to take my chances that it was coming.

  And now, my thanks.

  First, my regulars. Dr. Mary Case and Mary Fran Ernst of the St. Louis County Medical Examiner’s Office. Lt. John Podolak, St. Louis City Police, and his ever-patient (with me) wife, Michelle.