Medusa (21 page)

Fain’s eyes grew big, and he made a sound in his throat, a tiny sound, like a little boy who had just seen something frightening.
 

After a second, he actually smiled, and said, “You got me, Longville. I always knew if somebody did me in, it would be you or that crotchety old bastard, Tiller.”
 

He was fading, but he looked me in the face and smiled, smiled like this was all some kind of joke at his expense, a surprise party where his friends presented him with an embarrassing gag gift, instead of death, the last few seconds of his life slipping away. Now, he shrugged and spoke again, his voice getting ragged as his energy left him. Blood oozed out of his chest around the blue metal of the pipe.
 

“You always wanted to know what happened to her, didn’t you. Little Georgia Champion?”
 

I spotted my .45 now, and moved down the boards to where it lay. I picked it up and came back to Fain. I stood over him with the gun in his hand. Dark shapes swirled in the water behind Fain.
 

“She helped me plan the whole thing. I didn’t abduct her. I rescued her.”
 

“No. You abducted a little girl. No one was rescued.”
 

“We were in love.”
 

“You’re insane.”
 

“She came away with me. Willingly. She stayed with me, out there in the desert.”
 

I shook my head. “No.”
 

“Yes. You saw her there. I know you did. She was there, with me, all the time.”
 

“No. We would have found her body when we arrested you. There was no one else out there.”
 

“Body? What body? Georgia wasn’t dead, Longville. Oh, no. Use your head. We had a plan, she and I. If I was ever arrested, she knew where to go. She would wait for me until I came to join her.”
 

“You’re a freak, Fain. You probably killed that little girl and dumped her body somewhere, and she was just never found. Little girls don’t fall in love with monsters. You are pathetic. You just want your sick fantasy to be true.”
 

“But you saw her. You told me so yourself.”
 

I felt a chill run along my spine. Fain had touched a sore spot, and most likely knew it, and was using it to throw me off balance. I sidestepped his ploy by asking a question, which I threw out as casually as I could manage.
 

“Then where is Georgia Champion now, Fain? You might as well tell me, because you’re dying. You’ll never leave this pier alive.”
 

Fain laughed, and his deep bassoon of a voice made it an oddly pleasant sound in that hellish nightmare of a place. “Did you forget? I’m the Magician. That’s what the tabloids call me. I might just still have a trick or two up my sleeve.”
 

I opened my mouth to respond, but Fain lurched forward, trying to rise to his feet and pound me in one quick move, perhaps trying to drag me with him into the dark water that thrashed below him. I drove my fist into his face, and he staggered back, arms flailing like a clown about to do a pratfall. His massive bulk shattered the railing’s ancient wood, and into the water he went, that black swill that writhed beneath us like a living thing. As he hit the water, there were fast, snakelike movements. Fain cried out like a woman in childbirth, a shriek that turned into a low sobbing wail, as the alligators got their teeth into him, and began their crazy thrashing in that black water that glittered beneath the stars.
 

I took a couple of steps backward. My head swam, and my side ached. I shook my head, but the nightmare was real and all around me, and I found that I could not close my eyes to the naked horror of it. The gruesome spectacle of the man being eaten alive in the water refused to go away.

Chapter 29

Tiller came up to me a few minutes later, looking a little dazed. “You okay?” he asked. There were cops moving around the scene now, and Bishop and Burns were barking orders. I shook my head slightly, but said nothing.
 

“Roland? Where’s Fain?”
 

I turned and looked at Tiller with what must have been a very strange expression. “He’s . . . there. In the water.” I pointed vaguely out over the swamp.
 

Tiller looked out over the black water where dark forms thrashed and low croaking sounds echoed through the brooding, moss-hung swamps.
 

“Sweet Jesus.”
 

Tiller put his hand on my shoulder.
 

“Roland. Look at me, buddy. Danielle LeGrandville. The girl’s safe, Roland. She made it out of here. She told us everything. You did it.”
 

“We did it, Tiller, old friend.”
 

I stood on the pier and looked down into that black water. Fain was surely gone this time, gone to a fate as dark and horrible as he had inflicted on so many others.
 

“The bastard’s finally dead, then,” Tiller said. That was Tiller—sum it up and file it away. He looked back out over the swamp.
 

“Yeah. It sure looks that way,” I managed to say.
 

“Alligators?” Tiller asked, his voice thick with horror.
 

“Think so. I think the Patreaux gang screened off the swamp to keep the alligators in. Fain told me . . . that’s how they got rid of the bodies.”
 

“Holy Mary, Mother of God. This has got to be the most demonic scheme I’ve ever seen. I nabbed Old Granny Patreaux. Had to take down some poor dumb lummox she had trained as an attack dog. Let me tell you, that’s one evil old bitty. Never seen anything like her, either, thank Christ. She was the brains of the outfit, apparently, before Fain hooked up with them. The rest just followed orders, no matter how frikkin’ diabolical they were. Kind of like the Manson Family meets Disneyland. They’ve been doing this for a while, it seems. We found vehicles belonging to people who’ve been missing for years. They didn’t even try to hide them. One belongs to a whole family from Virginia. They’re still trying to figure out how many people these freaks might have done away with over the years. My guess is that the number is going to turn out to be pretty high.”
 

Tiller looked down at the black water and shivered.
 

“Too damned bad about Corsack.”
 

I turned away from the black water and looked at Tiller. “He got what he would have wanted, Tiller. After what they did to his wife, all he would have wanted was to destroy them, to die knowing that they were either dead or ruined, too. That’s been done, at least.”
 

“Well, then, good for old Corsack, anyway. He tried to make it here in the U.S., but he went about it all wrong.” Tiller shook his head sadly. “Poor bastard.”
 

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster,” I said.
 

“What?” Tiller stopped and looked at Roland.
 

“It’s something someone wrote once. Nietzsche, I think.”
 

Tiller put his hand on my shoulder.
 

“Nietzsche was a shithead. Let’s get out of here.”

Chapter 30

Tiller, Bishop, Burns and I all sat in Bishop’s office. Outside, it was raining, and the water hissed against Bishop’s window panes. Occasionally, the storm would throw a splash against the window, like someone outside with a bucket was trying to get our attention. It was a futile effort. The four of us were piecing together what had happened to Corsack and his wife, and how it had tied in with the wanderings of Samson Fain, and the abduction of Danielle LeGrandville.
 

Bishop was talking it out, and with his hands he was drawing a timeline in the air that only he could see.
 

“So Fain leaves Arizona somehow, and makes for New Orleans. How? Why?”
 

“Fain always thought ahead,” I answered. “He had his escape from Birmingham well-planned, long before he ever needed to use it. When the time came, he just disappeared. His only mistake was sending a girl in Birmingham a postcard. Tiller managed to track him down from that, though it was far from easy. He probably had New Orleans selected a long time ago as a second destination. He likely worked his way down to the coast somehow and came here on a ship—maybe working passage. He was big and awfully strong.”
 

“So he asks around and finds his way to the Patreaux funhouse, talks that insane old lady into using the place as some kind of murder factory.” Burns was shaking his head while he spoke. “Like something out of a nightmare, or a horror movie. They lured people in, people from out of town, then killed them for whatever money or valuables they were carrying.”
 

“That’s right,” Tiller put in. “They probably made a ton of money in identity theft alone. Fain was a computer whiz, so he could cover their tracks. Then they had muscle aplenty with Bertrand and Culver Ray and Fain himself, if anybody ever had a chance to fight back. Which, it appears,” he said ruefully, “no one ever did.”
 

Bishop nodded solemnly. “Some of those vehicles had been out there for years. We’ve cleared missing person’s files that have been open for four years, one on a missing family from Virginia.”
 

“People that were killed for no reason, other than these freaks wanted to see what they had in their pockets. They killed them and fed their bodies to the alligators they had trapped in the enclosed lake that surrounded the place. In return for all of the new-found treasure from the poor unwitting people they murdered,” Burns went on, “Granny Patreaux let Fain, her new golden boy, keep his abductees in her secret underground torture chamber. It’s all simply beyond belief.”
 

That hung in the air, because we all knew that none of it was beyond belief. Every man in that office had seen so much of human treachery, violence, and inhumanity, that we could believe it, all right. Burns’s comment was an homage to some ideal of human decency to which we all clung, more than anything else, so no one contradicted him. We needed that ideal to do what we did every day.
 

Bishop stood up and stretched. It had been a long night, and his eyes were slightly red, his face a little haggard behind its usual healthy glow.
 

“I’m for coffee. Anyone else?”

Tiller and Burns rose and followed him out of the office.
 

Tiller turned and looked at me. “Hey, Longville, you coming?”
 

I looked up at Tiller. I realized that I had had been lost in thought. “Yeah, give me just a minute.”
 

I rose from the chair, and went over to the window. I looked out into the immensity of the night and watched the falling rain. I had succeeded, I knew, where before I had failed. I felt good about that. And Tiller and I had saved Danielle LeGrandville. She had been dealt horrors, but she was alive and reunited with her family. She could still have a life, a good life, and that was what mattered, I told myself.
 

It was hard to find hope in a world so full of evil sometimes, but here I had discovered that I could find things that gave me hope. New Orleans had been to the brink of destruction, and she had struggled back. It was a hard struggle—and she was struggling still—but she would win in the end. I knew I could go back to Birmingham now, and lay one of my demons to rest for good, a demon named Samson Fain, who wasn’t ever going to hurt anyone, ever again.
 

Samson Fain would never spirit away another little girl, never harm another living soul. I might have won this one, but I knew I had been helped by a person whose living face I had never seen, but by a presence I had felt, and maybe, just maybe, I had glimpsed, several years ago, somewhere out in the desert.
 

As I turned to follow Tiller and the others to the lounge, where a hot cup of coffee and friendly talk awaited, I glanced back once more out the window, into the night and the falling rain.
 

I was going to leave New Orleans a little less cynical, after all. I tried to find words or some sort of gesture to express my thanks; I could find none. Instead, I simply nodded. Wherever she is tonight, I hope that helpful spirit can finally rest in peace. I turned, and closed the door quietly behind me, and let the rain and the darkness make their own separate peace without me.

– THE END –

Notes and Acknowledgments:
This book and its prequel,
Magician
, are written with a great debt of thanks to my dear friend Chris Colvard, for a certain dark inspiration that he alone could have provided. Many thanks, old friend.

In addition, the lyrics to “Carelessly” appear as performed by Billy Holiday, written by Charles F. Kenney, Nick Kenney and N. Ellis, 1937.
 

Although the name Patreaux is a real Cajun (Arcadian) surname, the “Patreaux family” and Patreaux Island described in this novel are fictional, and no similarity to any real persons or place is intended, nor should any be inferred.