The Heavens Rise (20 page)

Lloyd Duchamp would have stood at his kitchen window forever watching the scene unfold if it hadn’t been for the gas. The smell was overpowering him now.

He threw open the cabinet doors under the sink. When the wave of gas hit him, his eyes started to water and he had to blink madly before he saw that the gas line snaking out from behind the oven had been completely unscrewed. It hadn’t popped off or slipped out of joint. It was unscrewed, and that meant someone—

Then Lloyd Duchamp’s vision seemed to slide sideways, losing resolution as it went, as if his entire world were being wiped away by a giant, invisible hand.

•   •   •

The gunshot turned Ben’s panic into clear, focused action.

He drove himself straight down under the water. It turned out to be the magic direction. His neck jerked loose from the chain and when he surfaced, he was several feet away from the mangled propeller Marissa has lassoed his head to.
An accident. It had to be. An accident. She panicked . . .
But there was no sign of her, and that’s when he realized they’d shot her.

One of the deputies on the bank was beckoning him toward the
shore with both hands, and Ben focused on the man’s stoic expression as if it were a goalpost.
Impossible. Impossible.
The word kept repeating itself in his brain, then, when he tasted rank water, he realized he was rasping it to himself even as he swam. Only now he could feel how deeply the water had gone into his lungs. His neck stung in a dozen different places from where the scored propeller had sliced into flesh as he’d struggled to free himself. But the deputy kept beckoning and Ben kept swimming.

And then, some strange sense of foreboding stirred inside him, and something behind the deputy caught his eye. At first, Ben thought he was hallucinating the clouds of splintered wood and glass hurtling through the air toward the assemblage of cops a few yards in front of him. Then everything seemed to arrive out of sequence: the belt of orange flames that exploded from the center of the redbrick house just down the riverbank, the uniformed deputies toppling like rag dolls, the explosion’s deafening pop that seemed to come like an afterthought to the blaze of lights and flying debris.

He forced himself under the water again just as flaming timbers splashed down on all sides of him, praying that when he surfaced again, this deranged, impossible nightmare would suddenly be over.

C
an you walk?”

From the expression on the man’s face, it looked like the sheriff’s deputy crouching down over Ben had screamed these words at the top of the lungs. But to Ben they sounded distant and distorted; he was still partially deafened by the explosion, a
whomp
so deep and powerful it had rattled his teeth and kicked bile into the back of his throat.

Before the blast, it had been an orderly crime scene lined with uniformed deputies walking grid patterns. Now it was a war zone of flaming debris and crumpled bodies. The redbrick house a few yards away was geysering flames from its first-floor windows. And the fire had spread to the roof of the house next door, a stone French Regency affair Ben assumed to be the Stevens place.
Gas. It had to be
, he thought, because now it looked like the fire’s only fuel was the interior of the redbrick house where it had started.

“Was it the gunshot?” the deputy screamed. “What was it? Did you see?”

Ben was startled by the question, then by the brief rain of flaming leaves that fell from the burning oak branches overhead. The deputy shoved them both out of the way. And that’s when Ben realized the cop next to him hadn’t witnessed the surfacing corpse, Ben’s near beheading and the shooting.

The bodies along the bank lay facedown, motionless. Ben blinked a few times and saw that the bright red stains in their khaki uniforms had dimension and depth. They weren’t stains; pieces of the men had been torn away from them by the explosion. One of those deputies had shot Marissa, and all three of them had witnessed the crazy thing she’d done to him with the chain.

And there was the boat, undamaged, still drifting a few yards from shore, Marissa a dark shadow across the floor next to the captain’s chair.

No witnesses. None that were conscious anyway. Maybe not even alive.

“What the hell happened?” the deputy screamed at him.

“I don’t know!” Ben shouted back, his voice sounding louder inside his own head than the nearby screams and approaching sirens. And the answer was partly true. He didn’t have a damn clue what had started the fire. All he knew was that as soon as Stevens’s body had shot to the surface of the river, his boss, one of his closest friends for eight years, had almost torn his head off. But it was all so quick, so confusing. Maybe she really had been trying to help him . . .
Then why did the deputy shoot her?
Ben thought, before he could stop himself.
If she wasn’t about to kill you, why did the deputy shoot her where she stood?

He didn’t use the word casually, but this was honest-to-God
chaos
. The bloody scene all around them, the deranged events that had created it in the blink of an eye. There was no other word for it. He’d interviewed enough soldiers and surgeons to know they were trained to take quick, decisive action in the midst of chaos, but he was not a solider or a surgeon; his training told him to gather evidence, assess each piece, assemble a bigger picture once he’d managed to take a breath and get a pen in hand.

Had some kind of trip wire been attached to the corpse? Had Marissa
somehow realized the explosion was imminent, panicked and gone to start the boat without realizing she was about to tear his head off in the propeller?

“
Why
did they
shoot
her?” the deputy shouted, with a kindergarten teacher’s careful emphasis.

I’m not leaving your life. Not now, not ever. And you won’t have to chase me from bar to bar to keep me in it, either.
She’d said these words to him just minutes before everything had gone to hell. How could she have gone from those words to trying to kill him? How was it possible? It wasn’t possible. That had to be it. It
wasn’t.

“It was an accident!” Ben shouted. “We’re reporters. And Stevens—he’s in the water. It looks like he was weighted down, but our propeller caught on him, and I fell overboard. And they must have thought—I mean, they must have thought she was going to hurt me because she couldn’t hear them and she was going to start the boat. I don’t know. She needs help. Now!”

The deputy shook off his own skepticism; neither of them had time for an interrogation. “There’s a new perimeter just beyond that Mercedes. Go there and wait for the ambulance. You need . . .” He gestured absently at Ben’s neck, then ran back toward the riverbank he’d been steadily guiding Ben away from as they’d yelled at each other.

Ben was almost as far as the new perimeter the deputy had directed him to when his legs went out from under him, and another set of hands was on him, another deputy, this one a woman. And charging toward them around the bend in the oak-lined street was an ambulance, lights flashing against the falling dark, the first of several.

•   •   •

Marissa was in surgery.

That was the best information he could get. In separate ambulances they’d both been taken to Lakeview Regional Medical Center, a short drive from Beau Chêne, and when they’d found him wandering the
hallways after being treated in the ER for his minor cuts, the plainclothes homicide detectives from the sheriff’s department expressed surprise that Ben had decided to wait around so they could take his statement.

He didn’t correct their mistaken impression. If you were going to lie to the police, it was important to look cooperative. And he’d fine-tuned his lies by then, even though he wasn’t sure who he was buying time for, himself or the friend who had almost torn him to pieces.

There’d been such confusion after the corpse of Daniel Stevens had scared them all half to death, well, those poor deputies on the bank (the homicide detectives refused to disclose any details of their respective conditions despite the number of times Ben referred to them as
those poor deputies
) must have thought Marissa was trying to hurt him when really she was as confused as everyone else.

The gunshot? Simple. Ben had seen the deputy draw his gun on Marissa, but it must have gone off when the house blew. Maybe the force of the blast had caused him to fire by mistake?

Maybe. Perhaps. I’m not sure.
Every statement he gave them was peppered with these qualifying phrases; he knew he’d have to back out of them eventually if any of the deputies recovered. But for now, the detectives had little to say in return; Ben hoped that was a sign that the Stevens murder was still their focus, that they knew more about the explosion then they were letting on. But he knew better than to ask, and when one of them firmly instructed him not to go anywhere, he nodded gravely and assured them he would camp out in the waiting room.

It was only then that he realized he’d been wearing wet clothes for almost two hours. They weren’t soaked anymore, but they weren’t exactly dry either. He tried to turn his iPhone on but it was fried. He’d asked a drowsy-looking woman sitting nearby if he could use her cell phone before he’d planned what he was going to say to Anthem if he answered. Only once he heard the ringing on the other end did he realize he couldn’t ask Anthem to drive all the way across the lake. Not
tonight. For one, he was on call, and secondly, he didn’t want to tell anymore lies that night.

This thought speared him in the gut. Maybe it had been the mention of Marshall Ferriot’s trust earlier that night, or maybe it was just fatigue and shock combining into a kind of nervous delirium, but the extent to which he had lied to Anthem over the years overwhelmed him suddenly. Eight years and he’d never said one word to the man about his suspicions of Marshall Ferriot. How many years did it take before a lie of omission that big became an all-out betrayal?

The waiting room was filling up, mostly with frantic women who stormed in as they talked on cell phones, detailing everything they didn’t know yet about their loved ones to the person on the other end. The wives of the injured deputies from Beau Chêne; they had to be. He walked a safe distance away from the woman whose phone he’d borrowed. Then, before he thought twice about it, he pressed his nose to a plate-glass window that reflected the harshly lit interior of the room behind him.

“Hello?” Anthem finally answered.

“I’m okay.”

“Ben! You’re . . . Why? What happened?”

“There was an accident, on the North Shore.”

“Beau Chêne! You were there?”

“Me and Marissa. Were we on the news?”

“No.”
Good. More time,
Ben thought. “But it’s crazy. That goddamn pipeline and now this. My brothers all called me ’cause they think the whole state’s about to blow up.”

“Listen, if we
do
show up on the news, call me, okay? Then call my mother in St. Louis and tell her I’m fine. My phone’s fried and she won’t be able to get me.”

“I’ll call her right now if you want me to.”

“No. No. I don’t need her freaking out before she absolutely has to.”

“Is Marissa, okay? . . . Ben?”

“She’s fine. Just . . . She’s fine.”

“You need me to come?”

“You can’t drive all the way to Covington. You’re on call.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’ll get
off
call if I need to.”

Anthem 2.0, indeed, Ben thought, when he heard the man’s eagerness to put someone else’s needs ahead of his own for once. But remembering Marissa’s utterance of this flattering term earlier that day only reminded him of her lifeless expression as she lunged at him like a snake and shoved him overboard, of the scored propeller blades biting into his neck.

Ben’s eyes watered.

“Ben?”

“I’m good. A- Team. But I appreciate it.”

“All right then. Well . . . Hey, when you see Marissa, thank her for me.”

“For what?”

“My piece. It’s up. Sixty comments already. Some of them think I’m a shithead, but the rest of ’em . . . they’re callin’ me a hero, Benny.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

The words he’d meant to say next were
You are a hero,
but a great, silent wave of darkness seemed to course through his entire body before it robbed him of his vision, and then his hearing a few seconds later. Ben expected to feel the floor rising up to meet him. Instead he felt nothing at all.

•   •   •

“Ben?”

A few more tries, and then Anthem Landry was answered by a dial tone, and once again he was alone with his glowing computer screen, filled with the big headline they’d given his article, “The River’s Response,” and the smart-looking photo he’d emailed them earlier that day. Ben had probably been called away or the call itself had dropped
and he’d ring again in a second. Whatever the case, there was no sense in standing there like an idiot listening to a mocking dial tone.

Of course, that wasn’t really what he was doing, now that he thought about it. It was the computer he couldn’t tear himself away from. Every few minutes or so, more comments were posted. Hell, if the whole state could stop catching fire for an hour or two, his first piece of journalism just might make the evening news. But the suddenly dropped call had made it feel too quiet all of a sudden, and that’s when Anthem realized that something else was missing, a comforting and familiar sound he usually took for granted.

His apartment was on the second floor of an old corner grocery store on Tchoupitoulas, directly across the street from the concrete Mississippi River floodwall and the wharves just behind it. The constant hum of idling container ships drove most of his neighbors insane, but he loved it. It made him feel connected to his lifeblood, especially on nights like this, when he was giddy with anticipation about going out on a ship. That’s why he’d left open the door to the exterior staircase’s second-floor landing. So he could hear the pulse and the throb of the river’s constant call as he went about finding various ways to kill time until the phone rang.