Sacrifice (19 page)

“I love you too.”

“Don’t ever leave me. I need you. I would die without you.”

“Then come away with me. Let’s leave this place. Let’s leave all of it. Just come with me. Just you and me,” April said.

Delilah slowly shook her head. The tears glistening in her eyes finally fell, rolling in crystal streams over her angular cheeks. “I can’t. I can’t leave my congregation. Besides, Pops and Tony would never let me.”

“Who are those guys? I thought they worked for you.”

“They don’t work for me. If anything, I work for them. They’re really bad men, April. Criminals, I think. They’d hurt me. They’d hurt you if you tried to take me away. I’ve seen what they can do.”

April looked around in a panic, searching the ceiling, walls, and floor as if the answer to their dilemma was somewhere in the room and she just needed to find it.

“Then we don’t tell them. We just leave when no one is around. We can go back to your homeland; Haiti. Or we can go to Europe somewhere. I always wanted to go to Sweden or Switzerland.”

Delilah smiled at April. It was the smile you gave to children when they talked about what Santa was bringing them for Christmas. An indulgent, knowing smile, part amused, part sympathetic, because you knew it wouldn’t be long before their illusions were shattered. “They would find us, my love. They would find us wherever we go. They need me. They won’t ever let me leave.”

“There has to be a way. We belong together, without this pain, without … without hurting children.”

A sad smile crept onto Delilah’s face. Despite her efforts to make the smile appear genuine, it was still obviously affected, an artifice manufactured for April’s benefit. When the lie came they both recognized it but allowed it to slide by unchallenged.

“Okay, April. We leave together. It will all be over after tonight. Just one last ceremony and then we can be together.”

“No more, Delilah. Please! Why can’t we leave now? Please don’t do this again.”

“I have to.”

“And hurt another innocent child?”

Delilah’s eyes glistened again. All the hurt and pain inside her sparkled in her eyes like starlight. It made her look even more beautiful, tragically so. In her eyes, April could see her lover’s torturous childhood. The sorrow of losing her parents, the beatings and rapes she endured from her foster parents, the fathoms of hurt and anger she’d ingested from her acolytes, the ravenous parasites who used her for her gift. She looked just as she’d once described herself - a whipping boy, an innocent born to suffer.

The voodoo priestess leaned forward and kissed April again, sucking out a small iota of her pain through her saliva, just enough to get her through the moment. When they made love, April knew Delilah would take the rest of it and they would be happy again … and another little girl would be the recipient of the rage and horror Delilah absorbed.

“It’s how it has to be, chile’. I’m sorry,” Delilah said.

Chapter 32

Malloy waited in the car while Mohammed walked toward the house to get Emily. He called out the window to his partner. “You sure you want to do this, Mo?”

Mohammed turned and nodded. “I’m sure.” He continued up the walkway to his house, taking the steps to his porch in quick little hops.

“We’ve already got Mr. and Mrs. Wells. I’m sure we can make them testify. We can shut this thing down without risking either of your lives.”

Mohammed dropped his head and sighed, turning around at the front door before entering his house. He looked frustrated and annoyed, like an adult trying to explain algebra to a toddler. The resolve was evident in his eyes when he looked up again. There would be no changing his mind.

“Nevermind, Mo. You do what you need to do.”

“Thank you, John. Just trust me. Everything’s going to be fine. You’ll see.”

“Yeah, bro. I hope so,” Malloy said. He only called Mohammed “bro” when he was annoyed, and they both knew it. Mohammed had once remarked that “bro” sounded a lot like “nigger” the way Malloy said it.

“I’m sorry. I meant it to sound like ‘asshole,’” Malloy had said, and they’d laughed.

Neither were laughing now.

Malloy rolled up the car window and slumped back in his seat, thinking of all the reasons he should be calling the captain and letting him handle this instead of going rogue with his partner and possibly getting them both fired or killed. They would need back-up no matter what, and one of the sergeants monitoring dispatch would hear the call when it went out. There was no way to avoid that. The best they could do would be to wait until the last minute to place the call for assistance. Then dispatch would have no choice but to send squad cars. The captain would be pissed when he found out, but he couldn’t leave them out there alone. And once they made their arrests, it would all be academic - unless somebody got killed. Unfortunately, the only way that would work is if they waited to call for back-up until Mohammed and Emily were inside, in danger.

Fuck, Mo. What the hell are you getting us into?

Mohammed walked out of the house with Emily in tow. She was beaming, happy to be spending the day with her man, oblivious to the danger they were both in.

“Hi, John,” Emily said.

“Hi, Emily.”

“I can’t believe I’m going undercover!”

“Neither can I,” Malloy mumbled angrily.

“We can’t take this car. It looks like a cop car. We’ll look like fucking NARCs. They’ll make us coming down the street,” Mohammed said.

“Then we have to take your car,” Malloy answered, getting out of the car, leaving the police radio behind. Now the only way he could call for back-up was on his cell phone. This was getting more reckless by the second.

“Okay, we can take my Chrysler,” Mohammed said.

“The 300? Their going to think you’re a pimp.”

“Better a pimp than a cop. It could have been worse. I wanted a Cadillac.”

They walked up the driveway to the silver Chrysler 300. It was freshly waxed, the chrome gleaming like a new nickel.

Mohammed opened the car door for Emily and then slid into the backseat beside her. He held out the car keys to Malloy. “Uh, would you mind driving?”

Malloy wrinkled his forehead, annoyed to be suddenly cast in the role of chauffeur, but he remained quiet, wanting to avoid the drama it would have caused if he’d asked Mohammed to sit in the front seat where he belonged instead of cuddling up in the back with his wife.

He took the keys and climbed behind the wheel. He pulled out of the driveway and headed toward Seven Hills and Delilah, hoping that Frank’s lawyer hadn’t sprung him from custody yet and that he hadn’t called ahead to warn Delilah and her people they were coming. They had left orders to hold Mr. and Mrs. Wells until the morning and not to let them use the phone.

In the backseat, Mohammed and his wife chatted away. Or, more accurately, Emily chatted away, asking her husband one annoying question after another:

“Where are we going?” “What do you want me to do when we get there?” “Am I dressed right?” “Should we use fake names?” “Will anyone I know be there?” “Oh, no! What if we see people we know?” “What should I say?”

She repeated the same questions again and again and again and Mohammed answered each one with a level of patience that should have qualified him for sainthood. Malloy wanted to choke her unconscious. He looked at Mohammed’s face in the rearview mirror and could see the strain all over it. Mohammed was making a Herculean effort to remain calm, but the struggle was taking its toll; he was close to cracking.

Mohammed’s forced smile, little more than a pulling back of his lips from his teeth, was wavering, trembling, as if about to crash. There was no joy in it. His eyes mirrored the exhaustion evident in his posture and the tone of his voice. Emily continued chattering on, wearing her husband down, oblivious to the fact that he was about to snap.

Malloy considered that maybe he hadn’t understood how badly his partner needed this, how overwhelmed he was by his marriage. Still, he remained skeptical of the outcome. Voodoo couldn’t make someone less irritating, less needy. It couldn’t turn a vapid, needy, empty-headed, soap-opera, reality-TV, and talk-show addict into someone sensitive, independent, and profound. He was almost certain that, one way or another, Mohammed was in for a grand disappointment.

Driving back up Eastern Avenue was surreal. Just a few hours ago, the place had been crawling with insects and animals. Now the only evidence that remained of the previous chaos was the tow truck hauling Terrance Taylor’s Cadillac Escalade to the police impound so CSU could dismantle it when they searched it for evidence.

The children they interviewed were gone now, along with the voracious living cloud that had devoured Terrance Taylor. Malloy could still picture the man’s carcass, the flesh flensed from his bones, maggots and bees crawling in his eye sockets. Malloy took a deep breath and tried his best to still the shaking of his hands, the trembling in his legs, to chase the image of Terrance Taylor’s fleshless face grinning at him through the shattered windshield and the terrible sense of foreboding that accompanied it. It was far too easy to imagine Mohammed’s face in place of Triple T’s. It was far too easy to see himself screaming soundlessly through a mouth filled with insects and vermin, rats gnawing through his cheeks and crawling out his vacant orbital cavities. He shivered. Behind him, Emily chattered away and Mohammed looked even more desperate and defeated.

Eastern Avenue had reverted from the site of a grisly, inexplicable homicide to its former state of frenetic yet banal normalcy. The animal carcasses that had littered the street had been removed by animal control, the blood hosed off the street or scattered by traffic, ground into the asphalt by the thousands of tires an hour that traversed this particular stretch of road.

They passed SUVs bloated with children and shopping bags; exhausted construction workers in pick-up trucks splattered with dirt, paint, and drywall mud; and sedans driven by angry nine-to-fivers shouting at the other commuters. Delivery trucks, motorcycles, compact cars filled with teenagers blasting rap music at bone-rattling volume, a team of bicyclists in matching skintight outfits all flowed with the ebb of traffic, drawing Malloy, Mohammed, and Emily inexorably toward the house on the hill.

They followed the long driveway to Delilah’s mansion. Malloy’s stomach twisted and knotted. The trees towered above them, casting long gloomy shadows. Their intertwined branches blocked the setting sun. Malloy felt like they were traveling through a dark cavern. It gave the huge trees the appearance of something haunted. He could imagine satanic cults performing their malevolent rituals in some moonlit clearing beyond the wall of trees, standing like sentinels, guarding their arcane rites from the eyes of the uninitiated.

The stillness was unnerving, adding to the anticipation and the feeling that they had left the real world behind and were traveling through a portal into another reality - a strange and dangerous world where happiness was worth more than your own children’s lives.

Malloy had the irrational fear that the trees were reaching out for the car. He imagined branches and limbs shattering the windows and dragging the three of them from the vehicle or lifting the entire car from the road and smashing it, crushing it like a soda can. Finally the trees parted, revealing Delilah’s massive home. Malloy let out a sigh of relief.

The house was massive but normal. Stucco and stone surrounded by wrought-iron gates and a huge manicured lawn. It looked like every other home in Seven Hills except for the forest of trees that surrounded it. Nothing like the rotting Transylvanian castle he’d been half-expecting.

There were more than a dozen cars parked in the circular driveway. Two men in black suits, one older, one younger, stood at the front door. They wore black leather gloves and had matching bulges beneath their jackets. The older of the two had that disgusted, cynical, world-weary look of someone who could dismember a corpse while yawning. The younger one had the twinkle of madness in his eyes. There was an aura of violence around them both, but whereas the older one was the type who viewed violence as simply the most expedient way to remove an obstacle, the young tough with the slick-backed hair was the type for whom violence was a recreational activity.

The thugs spotted the three and eyed their car suspiciously as Malloy pulled in front of the house and parked. Malloy looked like a cop, tragically so. He only hoped they took him for the bodyguard.

“Okay, your cover story is that you’re a couple of music producers and I’m your driver.”

“Don’t you think we should have worked out a cover story ahead of time? What do I say?” Emily asked, clearly nervous.

“Nothing. Your husband knows the drill. We’ve done this a dozen times. You just stay quiet and let Mo do all the talking. If someone asks you a question, you give yes or no answers. Don’t elaborate. Just look pissed off, like you don’t even want to be there.”

Malloy cast a worried look at Mohammed, who returned it with a shrug. Something about that shrug pissed Malloy off. It had a “Let’s just roll the dice” feel to it that seemed inappropriate for the severity of the situation and made Malloy question, once again, the wisdom of their actions.

Emily looked genuinely frightened for the first time since she’d gotten into the car. She was finally taking this seriously. Malloy entertained a brief hope that she would back out of it, but then Mohammed reached over and patted her on the arm.

“Everything’ll be fine, Em. You’ll see. You should probably open the doors for us, John. You know, to keep up appearances.”

Malloy stepped out of the car, straightened his sports coat, and walked over to Emily’s door to let her out, taking her hand and helping her out of the car. Emily smiled and thanked him.

Malloy leaned in and whispered to her. “Don’t smile. You’re not supposed to be happy about being here.”

He walked around to the other side and let Mohammed out. “Thanks. I’ll try to make this as quick as possible,” he whispered.

Malloy just nodded, unconvinced. The three walked up to the front door, Malloy walking slightly behind Mohammed and Emily. Mohammed turned just as they reached the two goons. “Wait for us in the car. We’ll be back in a little while.”