Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  Casting the weak glow around, he finally found the satphone. He had to get her back. But it was toast as well. No. The battery had popped.

  He scoured every inch of the floor, finally realized it had to be under the body. He flipped Dennis over and snatched the battery up, snapped it in, and powered up.

  It wanted a password.

  Dammit, Mike. He had to get a phone, now.

  The hospital!

  Scott stuffed the phones and Dennis’s driver’s license in his pocket and collected the Glock.

  Feeling along the wall, he found his way out the front door and back into the loving arms of Katrina. The city was riding the spin-cycle of the hurricane now. The winds tore through him as though they meant to have him, atom-by-atom. The sound of it was like a million angry hooves stampeding overhead. Unseen structures around him literally groaned in the struggle to stay grounded.

  A barrage of gusts shoulder-charged him, the swatting of a giant’s hand, and put him over. He braced his body low and, as they eased, fought his way standing. He stumbled on into the nothing before his eyes like a blind man swept up in a riot.

  A lone circle of strong light showed in the distance. He moved in its direction, and when he bumped against a low fence on the sidewalk, he latched on and pulled himself, hand-over-hand, along it.

  A vehicle was parked next to a low long brick building, its headlights reflecting off the wall. Scott followed the rail around the corner and staggered over to it: a white van with a sturdy box body and New Orleans Police painted on the side.

  He looked through the window of the empty cab. Just then, a shuffling sounded somewhere in the rear compartment.

  Scott walked to the back. The heavy security doors were swung open and he peered into the lighted interior. A half-dozen boxed plasma TVs were stacked on the floor between the two facing rows of seats. On the seats themselves, dozens of smaller boxes—macAir laptops, Canon camcorders, Casio cash registers—were stacked high.

  A figure leaped to life behind a mesh-screen at the far end of the compartment.

  “Hey! You! Man, you gotta let me out,” the caged man pleaded, his eyes wide. “Get the keys from up front quick, fore they come back!” He spotted the Glock in Scott’s hand. “You can shoot the lock. Get on up in here!”

  Voices sounded from front of the van. Scott looked in time to see a cop stoop under a half-raised shutter up on the loading platform beside the van and emerge into the light. He wore a beat-issue jacket and cradled a bundle of boxes in his arms.

  Spotting Scott, the cop yelled, “Hey!”

  “What?” another voice barked inside the shutter.

  “Who the hell are you?” the cop shouted at Scott.

  “Thank God,” Scott said. “Please, I need your help.”

  A second cop came—empty-handed—from under the shutter. “What the fuck?”

  “I have to get in contact with my wife. Do you have a radio or something?”

  “Hey!” the second cop spat. “You need to fuck off, friend! Cancha see we got a situation here?”

  “I need your help!” Scott roared.

  “We got a looter to take care of.” The cop jumped down from the loading bay. “You just turn round and start walking.”

  Inside the van, the man in the cage jumped up and down furiously. “That ain’t true! Bullshit!” he screamed. “I weren’t doing nothing. You fucks just lifted me in the Quarter for squat!”

  The cop banged the outside of the van. “Zip it the fuck up!” He glowered at Scott. “Fuckin meth head’ll say anything to wriggle his ass outta this.”

  The cop stepped slowly toward Scott, almost too casual, too pally. The other on the loading bay stood still, boxes-in-hand.

  Partly hidden by the swung-open van door, Scott repositioned the Glock in his hand, pulling it higher in his grip until the barrel itself was in his fist, the rest mostly concealed up his jacket sleeve. He stepped out from the rear. “You’re right. This is none of my business. I’ll leave you to it.”

  “That sounds like a plan,” the cop chirped.

  The prisoner went apeshit. “Don’t leave me!” he screamed. “I’m just a patsy. They just using me as cover case they get found. I’m begging you!” he sobbed.

  “Shut up, man!” the cop thumped the van again.

  “Don’t fuckin ‘Man’ me!” the prisoner yelled. “What’s my name? You ain’t even radio’d me in.” He started to laugh manically. “I got you, mind! I got you! Your pals been radioing you, find out where your asses at. Officers Robichaux and Peck.” He stared at Scott. “You hear that, friend? Robichaux and Peck. Mind that! I’m Mac Wilson. Mac Wilson!”

  Scott tried to walk away.

  The cop put a rough hand on Scott’s arm. “Second thoughts—”

  Scott didn’t think. He smashed the side of the Glock into the cop’s face and grabbed his collar, dropping the Glock back into his own grip properly.

  The cop on the platform dropped the boxes and went for his sidearm.

  “Don’t!” Scott yelled, swinging his captive round for cover. He pressed the muzzle of the Glock to the cop’s neck. “Throw your gun down here! Now!”

  “Waste their sorry asses!” Mac Wilson urged. “They’d do the same to you.”

  The cop on the platform removed his weapon slowly and tossed it down beside the van. Scott pulled the gun from his hostage’s own holster and shoved him away.

  “Get up on the platform,” Scott shouted at the dazed cop. “Go on!”

  Keeping the Glock on both cops, Scott tossed the cop gun in his possession onto the roof of the warehouse.

  “Fuck, man! Don’t,” the cop pleaded as he hauled his groggy partner onto the loading bay. “Just take watcha want.”

  Scott picked the second gun from the ground and flung it after the first. “Fuck the lot of you!” he spat. He pointed the Glock at the van’s front tire and fired. It collapsed like a wet bag. He stepped back and pulled the trigger on the rear tire. The barrel of the Glock snapped back and locked, the trigger stiff. He pulled it again. Nothing.

  Scott didn’t wait to see the first cop leap from the loading bay. In an instant, he was beating a rapid retreat onto the road.

  “Nate! Get in the van!” he heard someone shout. “Move it!”

  Scott bolted into the dark, praying he held a line up the middle of the street. If he ran into a parked car or a signpost, he was dead.

  Several van doors slammed shut over his shoulder.

  In the distance, he spotted familiar windows illuminated high up.

  The hospital—he was on the other side of Lindy Boggs.

  Somewhere behind him, the horsey whinnying of the van reversing frantically.

  Light spilled up the road before him as the van straightened up in his direction.

  He sped up, the way ahead now sighted for him.

  The van charged forward, the light strengthening all around.

  Scott darted between the line of ornamental trees planted on the curb and skipped to the sidewalk. His shadow leaped onto the high solid brick wall beside him and stretched along it.

  A lighted entrance appeared up ahead.

  His shadow fell off the wall and onto the ground as he heard the van bump onto the curb, the screech of its punctured wheel now spinning in the gutter.

  A Thwock as it ploughed across a tree.

  He pumped his legs toward the entrance, saw steps up into the building.

  The van pummeled over another tree.

  Scott reached for the chrome hand-rail up the steps.

  The headlights lit everything around him in ominous harsh clarity.

  His shadow had deserted him.

  He grabbed the rail and launched himself into the turn.

  The nose of the van lifted him and served him to the windshield. He tumbled across the van roof and spilled off the rear.

  His head slammed the sidewalk with a thud that he heard but never felt.

  He lay side-on to the world and watched the brakelights f
lare on the back of the van. As the reversing whites came on, new figures climbed from a hole in the ground and ran up the vertical wall in his vision. A pair of gravity-defying legs in light-green scrubs rushed toward him; another pair stood watching as the van lights changed again and it raced off into the distance, itself holding to the sideways skewed gravity of Scott’s tilted perspective.

  He spoke one word, not hearing it but feeling his entire being fight to form and utter it, as though it might be his last living act.

  Julianna.

  Then the whole crazy slanted scene went still and quiet and dark.

  The Book Of Mariamne

  The Turtle

  For female strength

  and enduring life

  Chapter 48

  Tuesday July 5th, 2005.

  Dear Scott,

  I can start at the end and you will know me as a liar. Or I can start at the beginning and you will think me a storyteller—maybe. But before the thing unravels—be it my story or the courage to tell it—why don’t we start with a fact that can never be contended.

  You are my husband, my love. My Man! And I miss you terribly. I miss ‘us’, what we were, and I loath what we have become.

  I’m home, sitting by the window, as I begin to write. In the cemetery below, I can see small flags and fresh flowers dotted around the veterans’ section; small celebrations to mark yesterday’s occasion, special additions to the normally bleak paste and cover above the worms and epitaphs of the fallen few. To me this is little more than a tease, a weary attempt to imbue sorrow with joy. Nothing grows on a grave, nothing but the regret and wishfulness of the living. But, for now, it looks pretty. Maybe later I will go down and see if her parents placed anything on Sharon’s plot. I will apologize to her, and when you read more you will understand why.

  This journal you are reading has been delivered to you by a man you have never met. It was he who gave it to me a lifetime ago, something to help me accept a lie he no doubt thought was in my best interests then. I haven’t held it in over two decades. Now I find myself constantly closing it as I write, to stare with amazement at its elaborate cover, to let that stir the memories in me. And they come flooding back, so much so that they overwhelm me, and I find myself crying, shaking, on the verge of tearing the pages themselves to ribbons. I wonder if I shouldn’t just stop writing, just wait for you to come home tonight so I can look you in the eye and let you in, completely and finally. But I know I won’t. I’ll just vacillate, like the last eight years, because my deepest fear always breaks the surface of my defenses: if I let you in, it will hasten you out. Maybe at the start of us, when we were stronger, should have been the time to do this. For what it’s worth, my love for you was always weaker than my fear for us. I loved you too much to risk you. This much was my fault, not yours.

  I’ll need days, perhaps weeks, to get this all down; my history—mon histoire—so you will understand, if not accept, why I am gone. Yes, gone, by the time you read this. I am resigned to as much now; it is my only certainty, it’s just a matter of ‘when’. So I must fill these pages with as much as you need to know—as I need to tell—before it comes to that. It is the worst thing to do for the best eventual outcome. I keep stopping and trying to phrase it in my head, some better explanation. It’s impossible. So I’ll just write and hope it becomes self-evident.

  In the meantime, this Saturday I will turn 30. But there will be no celebration, no teasing from you, no special additions to our now bleak everyday home life; not because we no longer have a home life—and yes, there is so much I want to speak to that topic, but I fear events will outpace me so I won’t digress from the purpose of this journal—but because you won’t even know Saturday is my true birthday. It’s one of the lesser truths I’ve kept from you. Alone in that knowledge, I’ll imagine we had a wonderful time, delude myself that it was our best day ever, and so maybe right now I have something nice to look forward to, some last gentle moment to look back on afterward.

  And I do look back—I’ve never stopped looking back—at our moments in time. Like the day we met; how proud and stubborn you were, how it almost killed you on the day I found you. And then your intensity and determination, your honorableness—how it led to you finding me again. That should have been enough. You should have been the saving of me. You almost were. And this is how I repay you! ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ they say. There’s your French word again: ‘Punishment.’ How much nastier it feels in the actual execution. I guess this is what I’m trying to do, to end the punishment. I pray you treasure the perfect moments which remain.

  Right. Stop! The memories swirl around my head like storm leaves. I need to kill these lapses if I’m going to get this done. From now on, I’ll stick to the story. I know you won’t be able to when you’re reading. I know you’ll remember. That’s good. It’s necessary. I want you to. Knowing you will makes my writing this easier.

  ‘The Beginning’ it is then, just like our own. I can see you sitting there in your brokedown car, all those years ago. Let that image be my only indulgence as I write. I’m hoping you’ll remember the same thing as you read, our thoughts as one, though our lives may no longer be.

  I love you.

  J.

  Remember us. And when you are ready, turn the page and I will begin.

  Cyclogenesis

  Here goes.

  My name was Juliana Bourget. I was born in New Orleans on July 9th 1975, and one day I did a terrible thing and nothing was ever right again.

  It happened on Iona Street, in the house of Henry Almonester. To appreciate my story, you need to know Henry’s. This is some of it.

  He was born Henry Huval, to a feckless pasty-skinned Cajun girl in Montegut, Louisiana, sometime during Prohibition. His father was a stray Italian who played no more part in Henry’s life than the minute it took to lose the twinkle in his eye and the itch in his pants. The infant was still in diapers when his scat-headed mother dumped Henry with her parents and followed the roaming Romeo to California.

  Henry grew to be a frustrated embittered young man. Beyond the walls of his grandparents’ shack, out Lapeyrouse-way, the other kids called him ‘Mulladago’ and ‘Guinea Griffe’, drawing on the traditional southern slang for half-caste mutts. To such witticisms, Henry responded with his own brand of physical creativity, and he soon found himself regularly swapping the worn-ass trappings of Lapeyrouse for the purely ‘trapping’ amenities of the Louisiana State Reformatory. When he’d finally had enough of being an outcast in his own community—or perhaps when he’d taken enough from the unique curriculum within the state corrections system—Henry decided that he could only make more of himself by abandoning every last worthless piece of his self. One morning soon after his 21st birthday, his grandparents woke to find Henry Huval gone from Montegut. The following morning, Henry Almonester watched a new sun rise over the Industrial Canal in New Orleans.

  His new appellation was no random pick. It insinuated a connection to New Orleans royal stock, however loose, the connotation of a heritage bequeathed by the city’s esteemed bygone benefactors. Henry didn’t plan to pass himself off as a blueblood. He didn’t expect any red carpet welcome. He choose it merely to conjure interest and doubt. And he truly wanted to bury his past and the bad mix that made him, the self-loathing it had fostered. The name-calling had hurt. Henry wondered if the fists and stabs and bites with which he had repaid them had maimed as much as the insults had maimed him. Nothing was more wounding to Henry than the truth anyway: he was bad blood, the backward product of an errant mother and her impetuous lust. But no one in New Orleans needed to know that. If he couldn’t bleed right for his own stinking Cajun kind, he could sure as hell bluff his way up the greasy venal rungs of the city’s crooked social ladder. A new name, a new skin. It was his only possession now and already he felt like the richest man in the world because of it.

  It is odd but I admit, Scott, that I can empathize with him in this one thing, even knowing now the monster h
e truly was. How different am I from him? I also, you will come to learn, slipped into a new skin, appropriated an identity that wasn’t mine, thereafter denying who I had been and what I had done. Just understand that, in New Orleans, blood is everything. The river may shape the city but what courses within our bodies is what defines and drives us. At least Henry was blameless of his birth. Why wouldn’t he embrace the falsehoods he constructed over it? My façade never sat that easy. I didn’t have his strength of evil. I failed to forget so I chose to remember.

  For the briefest of times, Henry tried to play it straight. He got line work at the Higgins plant, making the landing boats which would later assault the beaches at Normandy and Okinawa. He was canned within a month however, since his take on ‘Salvage Scrap’ was to thieve batteries from his employer’s stores. Henry didn’t consider this dismissal a setback. It was 1942. If you weren’t dying in some foreign field, Henry discovered, there was a killing to be made at home.

  So Henry heard his true calling and he responded with a vengeance. Petty theft begat bootlegging, black-marketeering advanced to extortion, thereafter inroads to brothels and gambling joints. He murdered for pay and he paid for murder. He stole for the Mafia. He stole from the Mafia. He never was one of them and I suppose he never wanted to be. He probably still had Daddy issues as far as the Italians were concerned. He didn’t need to belong. He was his own master. He just kept quiet and let the Crescent tittle-tattle weave his chic mystery for him. Before long, Henry Almonester had his pure skin broken-in. His name was like the label inside a suit. The cut of the cloth was irrelevant. Perception alone makes the man.

  And Henry was attentive even to this detail. He began by stitching Joe Haspel labels across those of the cheap Victory suits he bought on Dryades Street. As his tastes refined, he moved up to stealing the genuine article from wholesalers and dry-cleaners around the city. After that, he never wore anything less, until finally one day he walked into Rubensteins and laid down dishonest money for his first honest custom-tailored GGG suit. From that day forward, no one fit them better than him.