Twisted (21 page)

Read Twisted Online

Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
7.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Somehow Michael manages to crawl across the room to the back door and struggle down the stairs.
He makes his way outside as the first outer bands of Katrina's eye wall reach the West Bank, the rain clawing the side of his face like nails, making his soggy hospital gown flap wildly against his bare ass. He smells the ozone and apocalypse on the wind as he grasps a telephone pole for purchase, the first waves of floodwater shoving across the Quarter. His bandages tear away and fly up into the sky. Fire and brimstone are in the air.
He looks up, and squints at the southern horizon.
He sees it coming on hell winds, illuminated by lightning and thunder as brilliant and deadly as phosphorous. It looms over the world, a great noxious swirling nucleus in the sky, an insult to God and reason. Michael holds on for dear life as it approaches. He wails, his shriek consumed by the unearthly roar of trumpets and cymbals and broken pipe organs. The hole in the sky approaches, as empty and void of goodness as the stare of an abusive father, or the gaze of the devil.
Katrina's eye.
 
 
Now. Tonight. Almost precisely one year later. Michael Doerr found himself curled into a fetal ball on the floor of Madam Tina Lucien's House of Charms, awaiting the arrival of another eye altogether, wanting to die, wanting to finish the job of killing himself, but knowing he was powerless.
For nearly a year, he had been harboring this secret thing inside him, pretending to be normal, even pretending to be getting better, but knowing all along in his secret thoughts that the thing inside would return. It would return as soon as the next hurricane season came, as soon as the next category-four storm descended on the beleaguered Gulf Coast.
The trigger was the wind. Always the wind. The wind was the clarion call that announced the coming of the eye, and the eye was the key. The key that unlocked the door to hell, the window through which evil passed.
It would happen again, tonight, in a matter of minutes. The trigger: the otherworldly sound of the eye wall approaching, like a million runaway freight trains. And then, like a guillotine falling on the land, the abrupt and violent silence. Michael Doerr began to cry, but his tears hardly had time to well up in his eyes before the transformation began once again.
His body stiffened against the display shelf of magic potions and herbs. A bottle jiggled, then slid off the shelf and fell to the floor. A wheat-colored powder bloomed across the tiles. Michael convulsed. He flopped to the floor and shrank inside himself, and watched his hands and limbs flex and jerk and curl and straighten.
It was like watching a puppeteer jerk his synapses, sending inertia down through his vessels and into his tendons, through his cartilage, and into his marrow and muscle—
twitch-twitch-whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
—until the thing inside him spread its black wings and—
Whap
! The Holy Ghost suddenly took control, sitting up with a jerk.
Eyes shifting around the darkened shop with insect stealth, ears tuning in the oncoming winds with the sensitivity of a satellite dish, he took in a big, lusty breath, filling his lungs with the delicious smell of must and rot, then rose to his feet. Chains dangling, weapons tucked into inner pockets, long black coat hanging to the floor, he smiled to himself.
It was time.
The eye was approaching, and the manhunter was precisely where the Holy Ghost wanted him.
18
They got situated inside the pantry just in time. It seemed the moment Grove shut the inner door, the entire front half of the bungalow erupted. It sounded as though wild animals had been let loose out there: the muffled zephyr wailing, glass shattering, temblors rocking through the bungalow's foundation. The electricity immediately fizzed out again, and inside the secret room, the specimen jars and picture frames and ritual objects rattled and clanked in the darkness as the threesome crouched down in the far corner where Grove had carefully shoved aside the cadenza and piles of doctored articles and photos. Each person now gazed up at the shadows of exposed ceiling conduit and the trembling, dangling bones, and watched and listened as though the room might collapse at any moment.
They would not know the extent of the damage around them for some time, but it sounded as though anything that wasn't nailed down out in the living room had just bitten the dust. They knew there was a risk of losing the roof—it was now starting to creak and buzz with the sustained chorus of winds—which would probably mean the end of
them
. But the inner room, thank Christ, seemed to be holding up with stubborn integrity. Thank Christ again that Kaminski had had the foresight to retrieve a large battery-powered Coleman camping lantern from the back of his Jeep. He had also brought inside his wireless laptop just in case they got lucky and grabbed hold of an operational satellite cell. He also grabbed a duffel bag full of necessary “survival” items such as cigars, airline-sized bottles of vodka, a box of twelve-gauge shotgun shells, playing cards, condoms, a pair of size-17 Converse high-top tennis shoes, a paperback atlas, an ounce-bag of Maui-Wowie, a hash pipe, a Bic lighter, a half dozen Little Debbie chocolate snack cakes, an iPod digital music player loaded with mostly Frankie Yankavic polka tunes, an eighteen-inch torpedo of hard salami, a couple of XXL T-shirts silk-screened with the National Security Agency logo, a box of waterproof matches, and a battery-operated Bose shortwave radio.
Grove had also gathered as many supplies as possible from the duffel bag he had thrown in the back of the Jeep. He managed to bring in a change of clothes, a toiletry case, his notebooks, and three extra speed-loaders filled with .357 hollow-points. He had also found that old two-shot derringer pistol that he kept disassembled in a side pocket of his duffel bag, a nostalgic throwback to the Cold War era. The gun was a gift from a range instructor at Quantico named Hanratty, an old codger who had befriended Grove during his early days at the bureau academy. The derringer was a “last-chance” weapon, the kind of pistol usually taped to shins and the backs of toilets, the kind the cops used to call a “throw-down” gun. Grove wasn't sure how true it fired, but he thought it would at least give Maura an extra layer of confidence.
She had gone through another gruesome ordeal—thankfully not as invasive as the kidnapping a year ago, but horrific nonetheless—and she had done it strictly for Grove. The guilt lying in the pit of Grove's stomach now was overwhelming. He knew Maura was here only out of love and loyalty. He knew she would rather be back in San Francisco, sitting in a coffee shop, sipping an espresso, reading an obscure scientific journal and plotting out her next article. But now it was too late. She had plunged into this nightmare, like Kaminsky, with eyes wide open. The least Grove could do was make sure that she was adequately armed.
All told, with the .38 Smith & Wesson that Doerr had left behind, and Kaminsky's pistol-grip shotgun, they had four firearms and a grand total of thirty-eight rounds of ammunition. Not exactly a well-stocked armory but probably enough to bring down an ordinary man.
Of course, calling Doerr “ordinary” was probably akin to calling Fiona a little passing sprinkle. From all indications, the student was in the grips of an off-the-scale dissociative fugue state, a true psychotic break, which had its own set of rules. Over the course of his career, Grove had made it a point to familiarize himself with these rules. But now, with the tantalizing clues in the secret room—not to mention the connection between the subject and Grove, which, for the moment, remained just out of Grove's reach—the rule book now seemed superfluous.
“I am getting something, hold on a moment!” Kaminsky blurted from the corner, his face owlish in the light of the lantern. He sat Indian-style next to the cadenza, his big barrel of a belly jutting out over his belt. He wore one of the NSA T-shirts (while his damp coat and shirt hung on a nail across the room, drying). He held the small shortwave in his lap, an earphone jacked into it. “Quiet please!” He listened some more, the faint static audible above the muffled winds. “Some news here.”
“What is it?” Maura was shivering against the wall with her knees pulled up against her slender body, her arms wrapped around herself.
Kaminsky listened some more. “She has unfortunately just been upgraded once again.”
“Upgraded?” Grove stood up and gazed around the narrow chamber. The ceiling was so low, with so many obstacles, Grove had to slump to avoid rubbing the top of his head on the mobiles of human bones. He too wore one of Kaminsky's XXL T-shirts while his clothes dried out. “I thought she was already at category five. Doesn't that top her out at—”
Kaminsky raised a hand to cut him off, then listened some more. “Her winds, I am afraid, according to the NWS, have already passed the two-hundred mark, which makes her officially anomalous.”
Maura looked confused. “Anomalous?”
The Russian looked at her. His gravelly voice softened. “It means
bad
, Miss County, I am afraid, far worse than Katrina. Only two others on record that I know of.”
“Jesus,
Jesus
... what are we
doing
? What if the floods make it up here?”
“We'll have to cross that bridge when we get there,” Grove said, only half joking, hands thrust in his pockets now. The walls seemed closer.
“If there
is
a bridge left,” she commented. “God, I need a cigarette.”
“Are you out?” Grove asked her.
“Ran out on the way over here.” She gave him a defeated shake of her head.
The Russian was listening to the shortwave more intently now, pressing a finger against the earphone. The faint sizzle of static came out of it.
Grove gave Maura a wink. “You can always smoke one of Kaminsky's wretched cigars.”
She looked over at the pack of Antonio Varga cigarillos lying on the floor next to the Russian. “You know something, that might not be a bad idea.”
“Are you serious!”
She scooped up the box. “It'll mask the smell in here, which is about to make me puke.”
“God help us,” Grove murmured, then glanced at the opposite wall, now draped in a sheet, behind which sat rows of macabre specimens in their fluid-filled jars. Grove had covered much of the ghastly evidence with linens that he had found in the hall closet. He used duct tape, and had covered as much of it as possible so that Maura would not have to look at it, or dwell on it. But now he almost missed having it all within his field of view. He almost relished the smell. This was his habit, his drug. The hunt. And the odor of hard evidence—no matter how gruesome—was now almost Pavlovian to Grove.
“The eye is currently twenty-five miles offshore,” Kaminsky announced. “Which means she is less than sixty miles away from us.”
“ETA.?” Grove asked.
“I would say about an hour to forty-five minutes, plus or minus.”
Maura lit one of the cigars with the Bic and coughed around a mouthful of smoke. The roaring white noise continued all around them, rattling the foundation, vibrating the walls. It seemed impossible that the storm would continue to worsen, but so it was. “You're not still thinking of going out there, are you?” Maura said, looking at Grove.
Grove didn't say anything.
Maura grimaced at the smell of the cigar. The smoke, as thick and acrid as that of a burning tire, filled the room. “Ivan, let me ask you a question.”
The Russian took the earphone out of his ear. He grabbed the box of cigars, lit up one for himself, and savored the smoke. “Yes, Miss County, go ahead.”
“First of all, call me Maura. Okay?”
“Yes, Maura, of course.”
“Second of all, is it even
possible
for a man to just wander outside in the middle of the eye of a hurricane?”
“Well, the truth is—”
“I know you just flew an aircraft into one, but is it actually possible to do it on the ground, like it's just some peaceful summer night, and a man's just gonna go out and catch a bad guy during a commercial break in the action?”
Grove broke in. “I know where you're going with this, Maura, and you can just—”
“To answer the question for the lady,” Kaminsky asserted, “I would say that it is possible but not probable. Considering the behavior of the eye.”
“I don't follow.”
Grove and Kaminsky exchanged a glance. Kaminsky let out a sigh and began rummaging through his duffel bag. He had a fleck of ash in his beard. “Think of it this way, Miss Coun—I am sorry—
Maura.
Think of it this way. It is like trying to thread a needle while skating on thin ice, if I may mix some more metaphors with my clumsy way of English.”
Maura stared for a moment. Grove watched her. She touched her lips, then said very softly, “So what's the worst-case scenario?”
“The
probable
scenario, even if our courageous Agent Grove can stay in the path of the eye, is that it will close on him in the heat of battle.”
“And?”
“And ... then poof! No more good guy
or
bad guy,” Kaminsky said, pulling the tube of sausage out of his bag. “Salami, anyone?”
 
 
Scholarly studies, many of them published in the wake of congressional emergency management reform, could only speculate on the number of living human souls remaining within the New Orleans city limits that night between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and midnight—despite all the ghostly reminders of Katrina still hanging over the place.
Many of those officially declared as “missing” were most likely carried out to sea, lost in the currents of the swelling Mississippi, or washed away in the ensuing floods. The following day, survivors were found all across the city in air pockets within capsized vehicles, floating on wreckage, or perched on rooftops or high ground waving makeshift flags made of torn clothing and rags. But for the most part, authorities acknowledged how the scope of the previous week's evacuation had saved millions of lives.
That night, by eleven o'clock, central standard time, the town's population had been reduced to only a few hundred people—and most of those hearty souls were safely tucked away “uptown” (far to the west, in newly established hurricane shelters). The only stragglers remaining within the confines of the French Quarter were the mad, the lost, the homeless, the forgotten, and the foolhardy. At 11:04 p.m., as the inner eye wall pushed into town, and the angry surge reached its apex twenty-five feet over the awnings of the marketplace, crashing through the air like a great fragment bomb, inundating Jackson Square, tearing through the park, ripping bronze statues from their pedestals: Sixteen transients lurked in the moldering nooks and crannies around St. Louis Cathedral. Seven of these were women—prostitutes all—most of whom now huddled, terrified, inside the basement of the free clinic on Chartres Street. The other nine ranged in ages from seventeen to sixty-three.
They were each about to learn that the hurricane was the least of their problems.
A Haitian gentleman with graying tufts of hair and wild eyes by the name of Charles Petiere—street name Carpet Man, due to his propensity to acquire rancid carpet remnants—was the first to see the devil himself materialize out of the storm. Petiere had been clinging to a padlocked door inside one of the cathedral's portals, clutching at the bars like a gargoyle, while the horizontal rain tried to claw him into oblivion. When the levees finally began to fail, the first black waves crashed over the square, the furious river slamming up against the stones of the cathedral like an invading army.
Petiere lost his grip then, and went careening into the floodwater now devouring St. Ann Street, floodwater that had already risen to nearly four feet and was traveling inland with the speed and intensity of a rapid-moving river. Madly flailing his arms, his garbled, watery cries inaudible in the din, the Haitian coursed westward like a leaf tossing on the rapids, careening across Canal Street, then into the Warehouse District, before getting tangled in a fallen traffic signal. His head tagged the iron wreckage hard enough to knock him senseless, and he gasped for air for a moment as he instinctively held on to the mangled metal post.
Before passing out, he managed to look up at the wind-torn surface of the water before him.
The figure rose out of the black currents like some kind of fabled sea monster, moored to the street-grating by strong nylon ropes and anchors. Black cape flagging crazily in the hellish wind, his narrow dark face creased with evil and madness, the devil growled something inaudible at Petiere—the screaming heavens drowning out all sound but the storm. Then, moving with cobralike speed, the devil lashed out at the Haitian, the barbed chain sinking into Petiere's jugular. The homeless man's blood mist and scream both vanished instantly in the wind.

Other books

Social Engineer by Ian Sutherland
The Shards by Gary Alan Wassner
SEALs Honor by Elle James
Twisted Shadows by Potter, Patricia;
The Panda Theory by Pascal Garnier
Darnell Rock Reporting by Walter Dean Myers
One of the Guys by Strassner, Jessica