Twisted (24 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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Electric heat began to bolt up the entity's spine, something as pure as liquid sunlight, crashing in his brain, resonating through him in the darkness like a tuning fork being struck: The final rite, the last part of the ritual, the sacred sacrifice was about to commence!
In that radiant instant, the Holy Ghost felt the rage crackle in his nervous system.
This was anger dating back centuries, anger worse than the bloodiest of tribal feuds, anger predating the modern world. This was anger formed over the centuries, fired in the furnace of eternal hellish misery. Like a lump of coal transformed into a diamond, this rage was cast under tremendous pressure and heat, a crystallization of pain into the sharpest, most brilliant, most deadly of all emotions: the need for revenge. It had survived the great Mayan rulers, the Toltec civilizations, the brutal Aztec empire, the Colonial periods, the wars, the Indian dictators, Pancho Villa, Zapata, earthquakes, floods, and year after year of hurricanes. And now, tonight, this instant, it had denatured into a single glimpse of a caramel-skinned man aiming a gun in the eye of a storm.
This was the one. The manhunter. The shaman. The mourning spirit.
The one who must be destroyed.
 
 
Grove got very still, standing thigh-deep in the mire, both hands on the Tracker, his body frozen in the tripod position. He now could see the shimmering length of chain up there, dangling from Doerr's hand, terminating in a long, curved, razor-edge sickle. The death grimace on Doerr's face widened, as though he had come to some arcane conclusion. Tremors shivered through Doerr's upper body, making the terrible chain jangle.
In that single instant, a sense of imminent violence bristled in the air like a magnetic field, and Grove got the distinct impression that this showdown would become the centerpiece of the ritual.
Suddenly, almost in response to Grove's thought pattern, the creature tossed its head back, then began to hiss a rapid sequence of sibilant foreign phrases and words that Grove could not begin to identify. The chain began to slowly rotate, the killing blade gently orbiting like a slow-motion lariat.
Grove felt the cold tableau, the bloodshed forthcoming, like a clammy breath on the back of his neck. “
Go ahead! Go ahead and do it! Do it!”
The chain bull-whipped suddenly as Grove's gun came up in one fluid—perhaps involuntary—motion of the arm.
The muzzle roared.
The blast lit up the night air, and the chain soared through the darkness, a silver bird of prey swooping down on Grove. The two equal and opposite actions glittered for an instant in the mist.
The curved blade struck Grove's right arm, slicing through his raincoat and tearing a bite out of his upper biceps. It gashed him down to the bone before bouncing off and skipping into the water, but Grove barely felt anything, his blood now boiling with so many neurochemicals it was almost humming.
On the roof Michael Doerr was reeling at the impact of the blast. The bullet had grazed him, chewing a gob of tissue from his left shoulder, and sending him slamming backward against the steep tile pitch.
Down on the street, in a cloud of blood mist and cordite, Grove struggled to stay on his feet, awash in adrenaline, eyes going out of focus, brain swimming. The pistol slipped out of his hand, plopping into the water and sinking out of sight. He immediately crouched down and fished around for the weapon.
Up on the roof the maniac that used to be Michael Doerr had vanished.
Grove did not panic. He finally got his greasy fingers around the gun. Now time was critical. The eye wall was closing fast.
He didn't know it then, but the ritual had just begun.
20
In all the postmortems of that horrible, deadly night, the single detail that remained fairly consistent was the estimated span of time it took Fiona's eye to travel across central New Orleans. The FBI's 243-page
Report to the Director on the Events of 23 September 2006
listed the elapsed time it took the eye to pass through the area at a mere fourteen minutes. The transcript of the Orleans Parish district attorney's
Inquest on the United States versus Michael Doerr
clocked it at only twelve minutes and thirty seconds. The National Weather Service, not to be outdone in the exactitude department, posted the official time at thirteen minutes, eleven seconds.
In any case, it was generally agreed that the eye crossed the city in an amazingly short amount of time. The heart of New Orleans comprises a roughly nine-square-kilometer area, which includes the French Quarter, the Garden District, and the Downtown area, and features all manner of restoration and architectural renewal, from the funky galleries of the Quarter, to the soaring church steeples and high-rises of the Central Business District, to the massive, stately plantation homes along St. Charles Avenue. The city had done such a splendid job of rebuilding itself in the twelve months since Katrina's floods, it was heartbreaking to see the tender wounds of this grand old town torn asunder once again by the angry winds.
But very few citizens knew of the secret, epochal battle that was also unfolding in that brief period of time.
In the FBI's
Report to the Director
, investigators managed to find a single eyewitness, a surgical orderly named Andy Drood, who happened to be barricaded inside a top floor of St. Charles General Hospital during the worst of the storm. When the eye wall hit, and the sudden calm was broken by the sound of Grove's gun, Drood ran to the north windows—many of which had been broken out—and gazed down at St. Charles Avenue. He recounted later, in a sworn affidavit:
... a few blocks west of the hospital I saw this figure leaping from rooftop to rooftop. I mean, I just couldn't believe my eyes. This guy was dressed all in black, and he vaults off the roof of a house and lands in the water at the corner of General Pershing and St. Charles. Then I realize there's another guy chasing him with a gun. I saw a flash, and I ... I heard a shot. I couldn't believe it. But then this guy in black climbs on top of a stalled streetcar, which is obviously swamped in the floodwater, and he starts running across the roof of the train! He's heading northeast toward the French Quarter, leaping from car to car. Unbe-lievable! Then I saw something even more bizarre. This other guy, the one with the gun, he tries to follow the guy onto the streetcar, tries to hop on back of the caboose, but just as he's about jump onto the traincar, something yanks him backward. I mean, it was like whiplash, man, it was like somebody grabbed him by the neck and jerked him backward, and he fell into the water... .
At that moment—which official records pinpoint at 10:05 p.m.—Ulysses Grove was completely submerged, stricken senseless in the black, cold, moving floodwater. Everything was utterly silent and dark, and he flailed and gasped and swallowed a mouthful of water, and he struggled to see, struggled to get his bearings, to grab hold of something. Had somebody ambushed him? He felt an iron grip clutching at his belt. His mind raced. He finally burst back to the surface, coughing for air, spitting salt water and blood.
He glanced around for the source of his fall and realized instantly what had happened.
The guide rope had reached the end of its length. It was no good to him now.
He quickly wrestled it off the belt, unsnapping the metal carabineer that the Russian had used to secure the rope. The gouge in Grove's arm had opened farther, and now it burned, but he put it out of his mind.
He searched for something to which he could attach the rope. He chose a fire hydrant a half block north, a rusty little iron plug embedded in the sidewalk, pocked with peeling red paint. Grove hastily looped the rope around it, then tied the loose end in a square knot.
It had taken roughly thirty seconds to do all this, but thirty seconds was forever inside the eye. Like a dream, time had no meaning here. Thirty seconds was a blink and was also a thousand years.
Wading back toward the streetcar, Grove felt as though he were trapped inside the dislocated, surreal futility of a nightmare. His strides were inhibited by the water, slowed down to a syrupy trudge, and the harder he tried to charge toward that derailed streetcar the more difficult it became. But worse than that, he could hear the ululating moan that had risen now to the level of a shriek. The eye was on the move. How long had he been outside in it? Three minutes? Five? Soon the town would be plunged back into chaos ... and there would be refuge for neither good
nor
evil.
Grove reached the downed streetcar, then climbed onto the rear step rail with his Tracker still gripped in his frozen-wet hand. He scaled the back of the train, which was treacherous with oily, rain-slick surfaces, and then climbed onto the roof.
He started creeping across the top of the trolley as swiftly as possible without slipping—side-stepping the vent stacks and the low-hanging power cables, which were as tangled and crisscrossed as giant steel spiderwebs—searching the distance for Doerr.
The dark figure was visible seven or eight cars away, his black coattails furling in the wind. Grove cocked the gun and hurried after the killer. The first leap between train cars was nearly his last.
He slipped twice: once while launching himself off the greasy caboose (when he didn't get the lift he needed) and a second time as he landed on the next car. His knees slammed the door's glass lintel, cracking the pane and sending him over the top, sprawling across the car's roof.
He slid headfirst into an exhaust stack, skyrockets bursting across his field of vision. He nearly dropped the Tracker again. Gasping for breath, shaking off the pain, he rose to kneeling position.
Grove swallowed his dizziness and wiped the moisture from his face. The wind had kicked up again, tossling Grove's long coat: Gusts of maybe forty miles an hour now—maybe even fifty or sixty—threatening to buffet Grove off the top of the train. And that horrible, moaning jackal howl, growing louder and louder, tearing open the sky.
Panic slithered through Grove's gut like a cold snake. He refused to allow Doerr to flee. He shoved the gun inside his coat, down into his harness holster, which was sticky and cold with his blood.
Then he grasped the night-vision goggles. Raised them to his eyes. Yanked the rubber strap to secure them. He flipped them on.
Luminous green silhouettes materialized before him. Buildings became glowing monoliths. Broken telephone poles became radiant green stalagmites. Lightning became phosphorous tongues of emerald fire. The French Quarter, whose border lay only a few blocks away, was transformed into a flickering video game.
Grove's pulse thumped in his neck as he rose and started across the train's roof. Blocks rushed by.
In the chartreuse distance, a little glowing figure climbed the side of a dilapidated row house on Julia Street.
 
 
When Grove was a kid, he used to climb the tallest trees in his Northside Chicago neighborhood in seconds flat like a little lemur. He just had a knack for it. A skinny kid, nimble and light on his feet, he grew into a natural athlete. While at the academy, he blew his fellow bureau cadets off the obstacle course. But now, decades later, hindered by extra pounds, and a gun clutched in his hand, and a fresh wound still bleeding under his sleeve, he moved like an old man.
Making matters worse was the dizzying disorientation caused by the goggles. It was like trying to run through a deadly pop-up book full of nasty booby traps using only a tiny telescope for guidance. Depth perception had gone all to hell. The moonlight put a halo around everything like a frozen photographic negative. Grove couldn't see his feet, or the power lines dangling willy-nilly across the top of the train, now registering as thin silken lines across the green view-screen.
Two blocks ahead of him, the luminous figure vaulted through the air and landed batlike on the back of an abandoned semi trailer lying cold and dark in the water near Lafayette Square. From this distance, the truck looked like something prehistoric lying there in the moon shadows.
Doerr was getting away.
 
 
At the bottom of Canal Street the Holy Ghost abruptly changed course and headed northwest, backtracking through the moonbeams, in synch with the moving eye. Silently, almost gracefully, he crossed the dark landscape, leaping from rooftop to car top, splashing through floodwater, his entire being vibrating with ancient emotions.
 
 
It took Grove less than a minute to reach the top of the Highway 90 overpass, but in the fifty seconds or so that it took to scale the ladder, the atmosphere across the French Quarter and the Warehouse District had changed significantly.
The air pressure had dropped ruthlessly, enough to make the hairs on Grove's neck and arms bristle again, and the moonlight had faded, as the inner eye-wall clouds began churning counterclockwise over the riverfront like a vast dilating pupil. The levees began hemorrhaging tidewaters again, and the howling winds closed in, the locomotive roar returning on a wave of high-pitched screams.
Grove tore the goggles off his face, tossing them over the side of the overpass. He had no use for them anymore. In the transition winds, he would be able to see better with his naked eyes. He gazed off to the west. He could see St. Charles Avenue stretching ribbonlike into the Garden District a half mile away.
He had started toward the ladder when he saw something out of the corner of his eye that made him abruptly stop.
Despite the fact that every second counted now, and despite the fact that he was close to collapse—he had already lost an alarming amount of blood—he still paused there for a moment, gaping down at the black night-scape to the west. Just beyond the Warehouse District, where the tight little storefront shops and flickering sodium lights gave way to the massive shadows of live oaks and plantation homes, Grove could see the boulevard down which he had just come.
He swallowed hard. He could not believe what he was seeing. It simply would not compute in his mind. And for a long moment—and this was a critical time for Grove, a life-and-death stretch of time—he stood there thinking he
must
be seeing things. It must be a trick of the light, an artifact of all the adrenaline and exhaust. But the more he gazed out over the rooftops and tangled power lines, the more he realized that what he was looking at was real.
It stretched from Coliseum Square to Audubon Park, the entire length of the flooded, storm-ravaged Garden District. From this distance, in the moonlight, Doerr's victims, most of which floated along the central avenue, anchored to the rails of the median, looked like rubbery, fleshy buoys, each one highlighted by a corona of bloody water as dark as India ink. But it was the big picture seen from Grove's proximity on the overpass that gave the seemingly cryptic placement of victims its true meaning: a vast constellation of victims, the corners joined by deeper shadowed tributaries of inky black blood, a perfect terrestrial rendering of a five-pointed star.
A pentagram.
With two points facing north like horns.
 
 
For the first seventeen minutes of the arduous trek back to the bungalow, Grove made good progress. He found enough footholds along the tops of swamped cars and vans and low-hanging awnings and barricades sticking out of the water to get from the Pontchartrain Bridge all the way to the St. Charles General Hospital—a total of fifteen blocks—without breaking his stride more than a couple of times. During this period of time, the moon was swallowed by boiling clouds, and the night darkened, and the rain started back up. But the worsening atmosphere merely spurred Grove on.
He got into a rhythm of running, jumping, running, and jumping some more, while the eye-wall winds bore down on him in frightening stages, each one more violent and treacherous than the last.
He faltered once at Felicity Street where he ran into a swirling whirlpool of broken glass—with nary a car roof or wall on which to jump. At that point he dove in without hesitation, and swam, freestyle, churning his arms and legs, through the glistening soup of jagged glass diamonds and twisted car fenders, nearly a block and a half, past floating mannequins and bobbing street signs and colorful gobs of torn haute couture like shredded seaweed.
Then the eye wall arrived.
It came on a freight train chorus of wailing winds, and Grove instinctively held on to a telephone pole still rooted in the pavement as the tide crashed across the district. Like a great, black, phosphorescent blanket unfurling over flooded streets, the Mississippi went rampaging northward. From Grove's position in front of the hospital—which unbelievably still had some lights on inside some of the windows—it was like watching the very ground billow in great undulating waves.
The first wave carried with it scores of wrecked cars and fragments of buildings. Grove clung to the telephone pole as the water surged around him, cold and salty and greasy, enveloping him with the g-forces of a nosedive. A series of magnificent crashes in every direction put the final kibosh on his hearing—a plume of sparks going up near the hospital as a lighted sign ripped free, a sonic boom as a bus careened into the side of a building. Grove's ears rang fiercely now.

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