A Passing Curse (2011) (54 page)

“Follow the blood.”

There was a low pop behind them and when they turned, flames fluttered low and blue across Ajax’s body. There was a smell of burning hair and then, far off, sulfur.

His left thigh felt like an exploding sun. His mouth salty from spitting up blood. He’d broken something inside. He kept going up the stone stairway, Rusty next to him, both climbing, both helping each other, until they came to a landing, then hobbling through a door and then carpet and a hallway.

He lost her blood trail in the crimson carpet but picked it up again on the white tile. The wall was smeared where she’d stopped to rest.

The sounds of a party, the governor’s party, laughter and flutes, echoed from far away. People having fun, he thought. People living.

He went past Hernandez’s head, staring blankly from a side table, absurd under the brim of Cheevy’s hat. The eyes open, dry, and utterly amazed. The stupid fuck, was all he could think.

“Your friend?” she asked. “The one you told me about? The one who belongs to the body back there?”

“Yes,” he said, and then, “a fellow cop.” He had to say that.

They followed her blood into a small room lined with glass cabinets. A bed with dangling, bloody straps told the story. Ted on his back to the right of the table, dead and staring at the ceiling, a glint of something shining in his ear.

Needles and syringes spread across the counter along with scattered chocolates. One empty vial similar to the one he’d taken from the box. The needles dark with chocolate, one needle broken off into the cork of a lone champagne bottle.

“The box?” he asked.

She pointed past her tools, bloody and scattered, and in the corner, untouched, the box he’d first seen in Ajax’s office. He opened the top. Four empty slots: the original vial he’d given Halloran, the one Rawlings had dropped, the one now on the counter, and the one that Ajax had somehow sent to Unicorn and on to Pine Creek. He touched the fingernail mark he’d left two days, three days ago?

He carried the box down the hall and cranked open a large window and leaned out. The hillside was fifty feet down, moonlit and curving away to a small creek and then up again to a ridge, a sheer cliff, and, finally, the top of the mountain. He threw the box as far as he could. It cleared the patch of bare land surrounding the castle, sailed over the electric fence, and hit a spread of manzanita, burying itself in the leaves and branches.

“Why did you do that?” She was right behind him. “Shouldn’t we have turned that over to the Chief?”

“It’s safe now, until I can figure things out. I don’t know which way the Chief will fall on this. I can’t take any chances.”

“As long as he doesn’t fall on us,” she said.

He briefly envisioned a thousand boxes floating though the air. How many people had Ajax already infected? He heard the sound of summer rain, the flutes. He went back down the hall and into the room where she’d almost died, holding the counter to steady himself. The room spun. She held him, kept him from falling. He shook his head, clearing it.

He looked at the counter, the champagne bottle, the chocolates scattered there.

“I hope we’re not too late,” she said over the flutes and laughing.

They half stumbled, half ran, following the music, until they stood on a small balcony overlooking the party with stairs leading down.

The band was going good and loud, the musicians in serapes and funny hats, guitars and flutes, dancers twirling in front of them, a panel of color and action.

Dinner was over. The plates had been cleared. Fifteen maybe twenty couples stood around the huge room, some swaying with the music, you really couldn’t dance to it, some just chatting with each other.

The women wore sequined cocktail gowns, generous on the diamonds. The men wore dinner jackets combined with black tie and an unhurried air of distinction.

The silver-haired governor waltzed with his wife, out of sync with the music but smiling as he twirled, lit by the high golden fire coming from six or seven logs burning in the apartment-sized fireplace.

The two state marshals along for protection, wide-backed with gray hair, stared at him and Rusty like they were Charles Manson and bride come to crash the party.

A small man wearing a black smock pushed out a cart of champagne, held in sweating silver buckets.

He hobbled down the stairs. The pain manageable. His second wind.

“Police,” he yelled, causing the two marshals to draw down on him, large automatics coming out as smooth as well oiled machines because he sure as hell didn’t look like any police they’d ever seen.

“Show me them hands and some ID,” a marshal yelled at him.

He said, “There’s a bomb in the champagne cart. Clear the room.” He looked hard at the governor and hoped his official voice would override his lack of uniform and badge and the silly notion that the champagne was booby-trapped, which it was, but still - “Clear the fucking room!”

One marshal kept pointing his weapon and screaming, “Down on the floor! Down on the floor.” The other jumped in front of the governor, shielding him, his pistol also aimed at Reese, taking no chances.

“A bomb in the champagne?” she asked in his ear.

“It’s all I could think of.” He had to make sure they didn’t drink the champagne or eat the chocolate. “The champagne is filled with C-4,” he said firmly. “High explosives.”

A marshal said, “The only thing going to explode is you, you don’t get them hands up.”

She stepped around him. “Put your guns away, please, and leave the room. I know it sounds silly but there is a bomb. Believe me. The local police are on their way.” She said this so matter-of-factly that the two marshals dipped their pistols and looked at each other as if she might even be telling the truth. “Ajax Rasmussen asked us to warn you,” she added. “He’ll be here shortly. Move towards the exits, please.” She moved her hands in a scooting motion looking like a very calm stewardess.

The crowd went quietly. The whispering stopped. The last pan flute wheezed. The governor looked at Rusty. “Where is Ajax?”

“He sent us,” Rusty said. “The party’s over. Please go.”

The governor nodded to his two bodyguards. “I think it’s time we leave,” he said diplomatically. “Thank you, young lady.” He moved to embrace Rusty, but noticed, for the first time, the blood on her. He patted her shoulder and walked away.

Reese saw the grate under the burning logs, guessing it drained the water when they cleaned the fireplace. He grabbed two bottles off the cart. He couldn’t risk Halloran or anyone else getting their hands on the formula.

He kicked the fire screen, the size of a hockey net, out of the way and lobbed the bottles into the fireplace. They exploded, fizzing and hissing, the burning smell of electrified grapes.

The marshals surrounded the governor, hustling him and his wife out, keeping their pistols on Reese the whole time, in case he tossed a bottle their way. If they thought that throwing bottles in a raging fire was an absurd way to treat C-4, they said nothing.

The other guests followed the governor’s lead, the women clutching at their necklines as they scurried out, the men coughing, those inclined lighting cigarettes on the run and, except for their eyes, trying hard to look debonair.

The little man with the black smock and the page boy haircut tugged at his arm, saying, “What you doing? You crazy!” Reese lobbed in two more bottles. The fire sputtered then burned brightly, red orange from the alcohol. With a light stiff-arm, he casually knocked the little man down, walked to the cart, and grabbed two more bottles.

One of the musicians swung on him with a pan flute. He slapped the flute away with a champagne bottle and kicked the man in the kneecap. The man, his multi-colored hat askew, crawled a bit before Black Smock helped him up and they both hobbled away. At a safe distance, they stopped and looked deeply into each other’s eyes before moving on.

Rusty waved her arms at the other musicians and yelled, “Go!”, shooing them off. They ran carrying their guitars and flutes, their gaily colored serapes trailing behind them, one quickly grabbing a tray of canapes, another accidentally dropping a small silver tureen he’d hidden under his serape.

Reese was running on adrenaline now. He felt no pain. The governor was gone. The remaining guests had scattered for the exits. He threw the last two bottles against the back of the hearth and watched the champagne run into the grate as the huge logs roared from the alcohol. In twenty seconds everything was quiet except for sirens echoing in the canyon.

Rusty held up a party basket wrapped in green and red cellophane. “The chocolates?”

“Burn’em,” he said. It went against every rule of preserving evidence that he’d ever learned, but he could not chance LX falling into the wrong hands, even if it left him in a bind trying to explain why he and Rusty had killed a perfectly legitimate billionaire.

The straw baskets burst into flames. The chocolate melted and bubbled, the baskets burned blue green and filled the hall with a candy-store smell. In a few minutes they were finished. Everything was on fire.

He sat on the table, totally spent. She looked over his shoulder and said, “Who’s that?”

He turned. Walking straight for them, bounding down the stairs, was a fit-looking young man in a brown shirt and shorts. He wore sunglasses and carried an electronic notebook. He seemed single-minded and did not notice the disruption in the massive room.

“Package pick-up,” he said cheerily. When they answered with astonished looks, he double-checked his notebook and looked hopefully at Reese. “Mr. Rasmussen? Mr. Ajax Rasmussen?”

34

The next morning Rusty, hiding in the trees above Ajax’s castle, watched the hearse move slowly down the driveway into town. Two ambulances had departed five minutes earlier, red lights flickering against the castle walls.

She watched the Chief glance around suspiciously before locking the front doors, pasting a red seal over the lock, and ceremoniously wrapping yellow tape around the porch’s pillars. He then tiptoed down the stairs like a thief, got into his station wagon, and left.

It was eleven in the morning and cool, the fog giving way to light haze. She guessed that the Chief had the investigation on ice until he contrived a good explanation, an explanation aimed at keeping the Chief out of jail.

She’d left the hospital two hours earlier. AMA. Against medical advice. Doctors and nurses had patched up the puncture wounds and given her a tetanus shot. She’d refused a blood transfusion.

She was here to find and destroy the box of vials Reese had thrown out the window and search for any remaining LX and possible proof of Ajax’s madness that would keep her and Reese out of prison for killing one of the richest men on the planet. She also needed an explanation, a reason for Ajax’s madness. And was that all it was? Madness?

She felt weak, which was a good sign that Ajax had only been taking her blood and not slipping her his drug or virus or whatever it was. And she wondered now, as she had been wondering for a while, if Ajax had really invented a new compound or had been using one twelve centuries old.

She left the shelter of the eucalyptus trees. She wore green twill pants and a khaki shirt. She carried a small backpack. She touched the wire mesh with a branch and felt no telltale tingling, definitely gunshy after watching Reese nearly get electrocuted on television. She removed a pair of wire cutters from her pack and quickly snipped a four foot length of fence. She was in no mood to deal with the concertina wire snarled on top. She folded the wire back and ducked through.

She went down the hill and across the intricate purple and green bricks. She disregarded the red label on the door, warning of stiff penalties, and kicked out the stained glass panel above the lock.

The great hall was a mess. The huge fireplace overflowed with shards of dull green glass. The dried champagne on the hearthstones reflected purple and green hues. The smell was burned vinegar, ash, a hint of chocolate.

Upstairs, she forced herself to look at the end table, between the two bouquets, the once bright roses, lilies, and orchids now down-turned and wilted, as if ashamed of what they’d seen. The missing head had left a rust-colored smear on the polished wood. Ted and Hernandez’s bodies must have been in the ambulances preceding the hearse. The Chief had been a busy man.

Inside Ajax’s office, a slight breeze came through the shattered bronze window behind the desk. The huge room had been cleaned but still retained a hint of smoke. The wood floor was dry but water-stained. The oval rug had not been replaced.

She found the gold cross in the desk drawer and put it in her pack.

She inspected the glass cases. Three jade whistles, the darker red in the satin where the fourth had been, another doll, many baskets. Several pairs of bullhide sandals. A few wide-eyed skulls.

She slid out the panel holding the jade whales. She put her whale in line with the others, fitting the dark outline perfectly. She inspected the other three whales, exactly like hers except there was no engraving. No initials. No Et EL Hoc.

Had her whistle beaten Ajax? Summoned an unseen angel? Or had she imagined it? She put it back in her pocket. Her official good luck charm. Sometimes it was best not to question luck. Go with the flow was sound advice.

She searched a file cabinet. Empty. She ransacked the sidebar. Nothing but booze. She downed a jigger of Canadian Club and sat at the desk.

She ran her fingers along a row of buttons under the desk. A computer screen and keyboard rose craftily from a sliding panel. The secret door clicked open in the far wall.

The computer screen was stone dead. She ran her fingers over the keyboard, pushed the power switch. Nothing. She smacked the monitor but got no response.

She rifled through the desk, found a folder stuffed with newspaper articles about Reese. She scanned them quickly, nodded to herself, and put the folder in her pack.

Through the secret door and down a small hallway, she found a room with a desk, another computer, and a bank of twelve-inch screens.

She turned on the computer. The screen’s desktop was clean. She opened the hard drive. She opened folders and searched files. All empty. All erased. She clicked FIND and typed in LX; she found nothing and typed in blood, vampire, Cirrus, Romania, Richard Lamb, Homer Wermels, Penelope Webber, Reese Tarrant. Nothing. She typed in Red Cross. Nothing. She checked the in-and-out box. Nothing. Had the Chief already erased the hard drives or had there been nothing to begin with?