Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  The door locks sprang up in unison.

  Scott cracked the door out an inch and peered through.

  The door whipped open and Stencek crashed into it, flailing for a hold.

  Scott leaped out and caught him. “Jesus. I thought you were Larry. I saw an explosion.”

  “No shit,” Stencek wheezed. He thrust the zippo in Scott’s hand. “Larry says ‘Hi’.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Help me in.”

  Scott hoisted Stencek into the passenger seat. When Scott grabbed his right arm, Stencek screamed and kicked out. “Easy! Fucker shot me!”

  “Henry? I don’t understand!”

  “Right now you just need to drive.”

  “Where’s the keys?”

  “I think I dropped em behind the car. Make sure you torch the other car too.”

  “What?”

  “Henry’s car. Light the zippo, stand well back, and toss it in.”

  “Oh, right. Where to then?”

  “Anywhere but here.”

  The Book Of Jonah

  The Storm

  For change and renewal

  Chapter 44

  01:34 am CDT, Katrina -4 Hours

  As Scott barreled them back up Highway 190, a tangerine flash erupted in his rearview as the Continental’s tank blew. Embers spewed from the flaming house into the nightsky, quickly snuffing out under the rain’s onslaught. Slidell was flooding fast. Whatever didn’t burn now would be flotsam by dawn.

  Stencek flicked on the cabin lights and ripped his shirt open. He felt inside, gingerly testing the hole in his right shoulder. When he removed his hand, Scott saw the sickening smear of blood on Stencek’s fingers.

  “Jesus, Mike. You’re really bleeding.”

  A dark stain was creeping down Stencek’s right jacket sleeve and across his front. “Ya think, really?” he spat. “Keep your eyes on the road.”

  Stencek undid his belt buckle and wriggled to remove it from his pants. He reached down, extracted a folded knife from a hidden ankle scabbard, and thrust it under Scott’s nose. “Open it.”

  Scott rested his wrists on the wheel and straightened the blade out from the rubber handle. He handed it back. “You’re not going to—”

  “What?” Stencek snapped. “Cut the bullet outta me while we’re racing along in a four-ton tank in the eye of a hurricane?” He blew contemptuously. “I think you’ve seen one-too-many Die Hards.”

  “Sorry. You want me to stop? What can I do?”

  “Just keep going. Bullet passed through, most of it anyways.” Stencek grabbed a fresh bundle of gauze pads and stuffed them under his shirt to both sides of the wound. He pulled the belt end around his shoulder and threaded it through the buckle, tightening it to the point where sheer agony threatened.

  “Fuck,” he grumbled, letting go of the belt end. “You gotta do this. I’ll just wimp out.”

  “What?”

  The interchange with I-10 loomed ahead. “Stop the car,” Stencek barked.

  Scott pulled up and faced Stencek. He prodded the Sat-Nav display. “You gotta hold on. There has to be a hospital in this neighborhood. Just find something on here and let’s get you there.”

  Stencek indicated his jacket breast pocket. “Reach in, would ya?”

  Scott pulled a slip of paper out. “What’s this?” He read, his eyes widening.

  J! I’M AT THIBEAUX’S 3881 BIENVILLE.

  LEAVE SOON AS YOU GET HERE.

  BE SAFE. MONICA.

  Scott could barely catch his breath. “This is Jule’s handwriting! Jesus, where did you get this?”

  “Rondell’s brother. Says he found it on the porch.”

  “Where is that,” Scott asked, “Thib-E-Ux?”

  “Not where, who. Tee-Bow. I dunno. But that address is back in New Orleans.”

  Scott squinted, perplexed. “Who’s Monica? This was written by Jules. I don’t understand.”

  “Listen to me. Take this.” Stencek turned to Scott and offered him the belt end. “And this.” He handed Scott the knife. “I need you to pull this sucker as tight as you can humanly get it and punch a hole to hold it right.”

  “Mike, there’ll be a hospital up here.”

  Mike thumped Scott in the chest. “And there’s any number of em in the city, Numbnuts. Just do it!”

  Scott leaned across, adjusted the belt around Stencek’s shoulder, and slowly pulled the slack through the buckle til it pressed against the wound. Stencek grabbed the back of Scott’s neck and dug his fingers in there, anticipating the next bit.

  “How will I know when it’s tight enough?” Scott asked.

  “When I actually start ripping your head off.” Stencek puffed in readiness.

  Scott wound the belt end around his left fist. With the knife in a ready grip, he pressed the back of his right hand against the buckle. “Here goes!” He yanked the belt end down hard. Stencek shrieked in unholy torment, his hold vice-like around Scott’s neck as he leaned forward for relief. Scott gritted his teeth and thrust his forearm against Stencek’s collarbone to pin Stencek back to his seat. Scott ground the point of the knife into the belt strap and gouged a hole as tight to the buckle as possible. One last pull and he managed to poke the beltpin though it.

  Stencek went limp in the seat, his grip mercifully releasing Scott’s neck. To Scott, the belt tourniquet looked comfortable. Stencek looked anything but.

  “Mike?” Scott shook him. “Fuck. Mike?”

  Stencek groaned.

  “Sorry bout that,” Scott sat back in his seat. “You did say tight.”

  “So you know,” Stencek whispered, “I hate you. I’m sorry I ever met you and I’m going to kill you. Just saying.” He ran his fingers weakly over the Sat-Nav for a new destination. “Til then, punch it in, would ya?” he ordered Scott. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  The full fury of the hurricane was waiting back on the Twin-Span bridge. Cross-winds battered the Navigator as Scott fought to keep a lurching line along the Westbound channel. Breaking waves crashed over the low sidewalls, hefty bomb-bursts of spray raining all around.

  “Why are we slowing?” Stencek asked when they were halfway across.

  “I was afraid of that.” Scott came to a complete stop.

  On the separate eastbound lane, an entire slab of the road surface rested at an angle, one end sloping ramplike down into the water.

  Scott crawled ahead, braking again when they found another eastbound section completely missing. In the gap left, a black body of water surged level with the now-interrupted lane. He peered down their own lane as far as the spots showed, the path thankfully unbroken—that far ahead anyway.

  “Other side’s taking the full force,” Stencek concluded. “Lucky for us.”

  “What if there’s one waiting for us farther along?” Scott asked. “We’ll go right into the drink.”

  “Well,” Stencek puffed, “could be one behind us right now. So it’s the Devil or the—”

  Suddenly the Navigator pitched, a stomach-shifting wobble as they rose and fell in an instant. When it subsided, both men looked to the sidewall of their own lane. Up ahead, it now misaligned with the next section, a gap big enough for a man to slip through.

  “Shit,” Stencek yelled. “The wind did that?”

  “No. The water. The storm surge is lifting the slabs.”

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

  “Whatever,” Scott snapped. “I’m not waiting to score you a repeat demonstration.” He stood on the accelerator and the Navigator took off. When they hit a hundred, he held it there.

  Stencek put his seatbelt on and braced his good hand to the dash. “You are shitting me,” he kept repeating.

  Scott gripped the wheel and locked his elbows as he pushed the Navigator along the bridge.

  “How much more?” Stencek shouted. A quarter-mile of road lit before them and disappeared into the darkness beyond.

  “Dunno!” Scott wasn’t looking at the
speed anymore. Now his foot was flat to the mat for every ounce she had.

  The front tires jarred over something—the rising ridge of a slab. They bounced across it and for one second they seemed to float; in the next, the Navigator dropped to the far slab with a sickening slam and carried on, the shocks still bouncing.

  “Was that one?” Mike gasped.

  “Oh yeah!”

  “Oh man!”

  “No going back now.”

  As they came within sight of the shore, Stencek issued a loud ‘Amen’ for them both. Scott eased off the pedal as greenery started whizzing past the windows.

  “That’s gotta be the worst of it,” Stencek decided.

  Scott didn’t answer. He figured Mike already knew they were headed for a city entirely under sea level, surrounded on all sides by the same rising waters, trusted to defenses that might prove as useless as the Twin-Span.

  Why Debbie-Downer an otherwise fun evening, right?

  They raced along the now blessedly-grounded interstate. The Sat-Nav showed them cutting through a wide swathe of parkland.

  “How many times is that?” Scott asked.

  “How many times what?”

  “That you’ve been shot?”

  “Apparently not enough.”

  The green-blue Sat-Nav glow disguised Stencek’s true pallor, but to Scott, he looked awful anyway. His face was a film of sweat, even after Scott cranked the AC fully up.

  “What happened back there?”

  “Henry got what-for.”

  “You killed him?”

  “Yeah. Single bullet. Quick and painless. More than the prick deserved.”

  “What about Larry?”

  “Why would you give a fuck about Larry?”

  “I don’t. Just wondering, why did Larry shoot you?”

  Stencek fumbled in his pockets until he found his small pill bottle. “Didn’t we have this conversation on the way up?”

  “I know. But he worked for you, right?”

  “This particular business don’t abide by occupational health regs.” Stencek bit into the bottle cap and tried to twist it open.

  “I know that,” Scott blurted. “I just…”

  Stencek seized the bottle between his knees instead and popped the cap off. “Jesus! Just blurt it out, would ya?”

  “Ok. Look, I’m just asking so… don’t take offence, ok? Were you planning on this?”

  “This being?”

  “Being…” Scott took a deep breath. “Leaving Larry… behind.”

  “Am I cleaning house?”

  “I guess.”

  “Tying up loose ends?”

  “Yes.”

  “No witnesses?”

  “Mike. For the love of God.”

  “I can’t have anyone asking awkward questions after, now can I?”

  “Are you… well, what about me?”

  “Scott?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Stop asking awkward questions.”

  “Ok.”

  Mike forced his fingers into the bottle and tried to extract a Vicodin. He was down to the last few suckers—it had been that kind of week. The Navigator bumped hard over something. The bottle jumped from his knees and onto the floor. “What the fuck?”

  “Sorry. I think we ran over a branch.”

  As Stencek tried to reach down, the seatbelt bit into his shoulder. “Jesus wept.” He flopped back, wincing.

  “Don’t,” Scott said. “I’ll get it.” He engaged the cruise-control and, with one hand on the wheel, leaned over and reached beneath Stencek. “Move your leg, dammit.” He swatted Stencek’s knee aside and groped blindly for a loose pill, full-stretched, all the while keeping his eyeline over the dash. All he felt was the slew of Henry papers spilled out around Stencek’s feet.

  “Chrissakes.” Scott leaned fully down to find the bottle pronto, and with Scott’s eyes off the road, Katrina seized her chance to finally kill them.

  She’d been trying the last seven miles. But what good was dispatching a windborne roof or a panicked deer across the interstate when her quarry had long passed? What odds a lightning strike with lethal precision, on a battleground this vast and empty? Even the bridge had failed her, every attempt thwarted.

  Her forbearers were watching. The Old Man of San Calixto eyed her with derision, rubbing his own 25,000 dry souls between his bony fingers. Even the teenager Mitch curled his lip in scorn, chewing on the grist of his 18,000. Their contempt was scathing; killing for kudos was the only currency they prized. Katrina had promised great things, but in the Great Casino of Chance that is the ocean Atlantic, she was a busted flush.

  And she was dying. A once formidable F-5, now waning past F-4. Queen only for a day.

  It was merely her pride now, a brutal bloodless last bitch act of spite, the chance to make two widows remember her.

  Scott Jameson and Mike Stencek were sure-thing snake-eyes in her fist.

  And shouldn’t a southern belle always have a memorable exit from her own ball?

  High above the racing Navigator, Katrina closed her eye. She blew a last breezy kiss down and then she cast their die.

  A tree toppled.

  The pylon it struck gave out one leg support and lurched forward.

  Twin fibers of live power cable sagged down toward the I-10 tarmac.

  Stencek saw them first. “Look out,” he yelled. He reached over Scott’s back and grabbed the wheel. The cables trailed little more than four feet from the ground.

  Scott tried to right himself in the seat. He banged against Stencek’s arm. “What? Lemme up!”

  Stencek swore he saw the air above the wires crackle and steam. He let go of the wheel. “Get up! Brake! Brake!”

  Scott straightened himself and looked ahead. “Fuck!” He pushed his foot down, panicked, and hit the accelerator instead.

  They surged forward and some large thing snagged in the cables caught Mike’s eye just before he put his arm across his face.

  At 90 miles an hour, the Navigator slammed into the wires.

  The windshield cracked instantly but held.

  The Sat-Nav screen flared to full brightness. The dash lit up like a Christmas tree.

  Scott finally found the brake and pumped it manically. The windshield was a dark nothing and he could only hear what sounded like the wires whipping over the front of the Navigator.

  Toward the roof rack.

  To flip them or rip them apart.

  And they weren’t slowing. The brakes did nada.

  They lifted—actually lifted—sensed the nose of the Navigator rising as if taking flight.

  Then it slammed back to earth and Scott went headfirst against the wheel and lights-out cold.

  Stencek grabbed the wheel and pulled it toward himself. The Navigator slewed right, still bulleting along, and slammed sideways against an unseen crash barrier. Stencek’s side window disintegrated but he fought to keep them against the barrier, to slow them somehow. Above the rain and wind, the screaming sound of metal-eat-metal said different. He looked over his shoulder and saw sparks flying past his busted window.

  Scott slumped against him.

  “Come on!” Stencek screamed.

  The wheel threatened to pull his good arm off as he held against the barrier. Suddenly the Navigator nosedived down a steep unseen fall in the road, faster than ever.

  On a lunatic hunch—and a prayer—Stencek let go.

  The steering wheel spun away.

  The front tires locked around.

  The Navigator glanced against the opposite barrier and whipped into a sickening spin.

  Freed.

  Folding around itself.

  Falling forward.

  Flying.

  Both men were flung to their doors. Stencek thought he must be dead, because when he looked at Scott, Scott didn’t look bothered, just eyes-shut clam-happy dead-drunk, his head bobbing side-to-side. So Stencek had to be drunk-dead too. That made sense. Died and gone to Raggs bar on 119th, both of them
propping up the end of the counter, shoulder-to-shoulder, arms locked about arms, old buddies sharing a song and a brewski—a lot of brewskis—as they spun and caroused. It wasn’t so bad, cept the jukebox buzzed out some horrid thrash metal guitar opera. Someone suddenly threw a beer in Stencek’s face and he spun round to see who was about to get a slap. “Hey!” He grabbed the empty frame of the shattered window and pulled himself around. The rain pelted through against his face and a gloomy vista of flat Louisiana fields stretched out before him. After a few seconds, the scene stopped wobbling and he realized they were still alive. And still in the fucking Navigator. “Scott?”

  Scott stirred, put his hand to his forehead. “Ugh…”

  Stencek looked at the windshield, at the starburst of cracks radiating in all directions from its center.

  Scott groaned again. “What?”

  “You alive?” Mike asked.

  The Navigator certainly wasn’t. Stencek could hear the cooling engine tick under the hood. He felt his own stomach lurch in sympathy. In the nick of time, he threw his face into the elements and barfed two dozen crabcakes out the window.

  “What the hell is that?” Scott pointed at the windshield.

  The view through the windshield was still obscured; a dark blue nothing, because the entire windshield was covered by a dark blue something.

  “Dunno.” Mike wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “It’s not the tinting though.”

  “I’ll check.” Scott opened his door and his ass fell out of the Navigator and onto the water-carpeted road. “Oops!” he called up.

  Mike blew a snot laugh. “Quit jerking round.”

  Scott propped himself on his elbows. His head pounded. The smell of burnt rubber was everywhere. As his own spinning settled, he righted himself and stuck his head back inside. “Hand me a light, would ya?”

  Mike felt under his seat and pulled up a nightwatchman’s flashlight, handing it across. It was as long as Scott’s forearm and heavy as hell as Scott grabbed it. He snapped it on and examined the undercarriage. A length of tarp was snagged around the front wheels, held by two ragged holes where the tires had eaten through in their fight for grip. He stood and followed the way it wrapped up over the hood and windshield, the other end tangled in the roof spots by some type of rope ties.