Then his nostrils flared in deep amusement. He studied me while twiddling three of his fingers just above Bree’s slack jaw and open mouth.
“Listen for it, you hear, Cross?” Sunday said. “Even out cold, this sow of yours is gonna squeal ’fore she dies.”
CHAPTER
96
A LOW, THROBBING NOISE grew outside the container car.
Sunday looked to the roof in alarm.
And then the sonofabitch let loose with an absolutely bloodcurdling scream.
Sunday struggled and screeched trying to get his fingers out of Bree’s mouth. But she’d bitten into him hard and she held on like a crazed terrier until he pistol-whipped the side of her head.
He staggered back against Damon’s bunk, staring in shock at his wounds. The pinkie and ring fingers were almost completely severed above the second knuckle. His middle finger was spurting blood and was bent grotesquely.
For me, the next few moments unfolded in slow motion. I just couldn’t get there fast enough, but I saw every second of it with a weird clarity.
As I lurched to my feet, Sunday’s pain and disbelief turned to rage. He screamed something incomprehensible at Bree, who was dazed and smiling weakly, his blood trickling from her mouth.
He aimed the gun at her point-blank and screeched, “Die, you fucking—”
Damon’s elbow smashed the back of Sunday’s neck and unbalanced him. He lurched to his left. Damon’s second swing at him just missed.
“Get him, Dad!” Ali yelled as I barreled past with my hands still duct-taped behind my head.
Sunday seemed not to hear me coming; he shook off Damon’s blow and made a bizarre clacking sound with his teeth before trying to aim at Bree again.
Out of his peripheral vision, he caught me charging and tried to swing the gun my way. But I dropped my shoulder under his line of fire, exploded from my knees, and smashed all my weight and momentum into his rib cage.
The impact knocked Sunday off his feet.
He hit the container floor so hard, the .357 flew from his hand, ricocheted off the rear wall, and went skittering under Nana Mama’s bunk.
The force knocked me down at an odd, twisting angle, and I hit the container floor hard, face-first and then left shoulder. I saw stars and felt bones break.
“Kill him, Dad!” Ali yelled. “Kill him!”
Pain pulsed like fire and radiated in my shoulder and face. But the hit must also have triggered some kind of full-on adrenaline response, because instead of lying there in shock, I went insane with fury.
Sunday’s back was to me. He was hurt but trying to get to his feet.
I kicked him high in the hamstring, just below his ass cheeks. He stumbled and hit his head against the container wall. Ignoring the agony of my blown shoulder and fractured face, I squirmed forward and lashed out with my foot, trying to kick him in the back of his knee, his calf, his ankle, anything.
I missed.
“Dad, watch out!” Damon yelled.
In a single motion, Sunday pushed away from the wall, pivoted, and hauled off and kicked me in the ribs just below my bad arm, blowing the air out of me and making me curl up like a whipped dog. He jumped over me, spun, and kicked me even harder in the kidney.
Sunday might as well have hit me with a Taser because it felt like a lightning bolt passed through me, and I puked. Then he looped his belt around my neck and cinched it tight.
“No!” Ali yelled. “Don’t!”
“You just don’t learn, do you, Cross?” Sunday snarled, and he wrenched me up off the ground by my neck, the belt right up under my jaw. “You’ll never learn, will you?”
“Never,” I choked, fighting not to pass out.
He dragged me against him and pulled even tighter on the belt, cutting off my air and the blood supply to my brain.
“Incorrigible, I can see that, and I admit defeat with you.” He grunted. “But let’s see if your family learns better. Let’s let them see what life’s all about.”
Sunday yanked again, and I strained against the strangler, whipping my head side to side.
“It’s meaningless!” he crowed. “It’s all so meaningless!”
I stopped struggling, and my eyes sought my family.
Bree watched me, blinking slowly, blood from the head wound streaking her cheeks. Damon and Jannie were almost free of their restraints but frozen on their bunks, watching me die. Ali hung off his bunk, screaming and reaching for me.
Spots were becoming blotches in front of my eyes, and all I could hear was my heart pounding like so many anvil strikes when I looked to my last hope on earth.
CHAPTER
97
“LET HIM GO, OR I’ll shoot you!”
Sunday wasn’t sure who’d shouted the order at first. He’d been staring at the top of Cross’s head, waiting for the big collapse, the pissing and shitting in the pants that always seemed to mark a death by strangulation.
But then he glanced up and saw Nana Mama.
The old woman was lying on her bunk with her knees drawn up under the sheets. Her bony hands held his .357.
She was aiming at him from ten, maybe fifteen feet away, and the nickel-plated barrel of the gun rested in a cradle of sheet fabric stretched between her knees.
“Do it!” Nana Mama shouted.
Sunday grinned lazily at her and eased up slightly on the belt. Cross started coughing and hacking.
“Watch yourself there,” he said to the detective’s grandmother. “Bullet gets to ricocheting around here, who knows who it will kill.”
“Shoot him, Nana!” Ali said. “In the head. Like he’s a zombie!”
Sunday considered himself a brilliant interpreter of body language, and he saw in the old lady’s face and trembling upper body that she did not want to kill him and that she was afraid of even trying.
“You won’t kill me, now,” he drawled. “Catholic, southern lady and all. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not.”
Every inch of Nana Mama was shaking now.
“See there?” Sunday said, as soft and sincere as a funeral director. “You can’t even aim, you old bitch. You shoot, you’ll kill your grandson.”
“No,” she said. “I will shoot you!”
“No, you won’t,” Sunday said with a knowing grin as he leaned back and pulled on the belt with all his might. “Not in my universe. No—”
The flash, the explosion, and the impact seemed to happen all at once.
It felt like some invisible force had swatted Sunday, backhanded him as if he were no more than a fly. The bullet caught him square in the chest and flung him against the rear wall of the container car.
Looking down, Sunday saw the bright red color expand on his shirt like a rose unfolding, and he felt sick and began to slide down the wall, all too aware that he had lost his grip on the belt around Cross’s neck.
“No,” Sunday rasped, already tasting blood in his throat. “There’s no meaning … no point if he doesn’t …”
The hatch door at the far end of the container opened as the blood poured from him, and his breath got labored and raspy, and Sunday’s life began to ebb away. But not before one last image registered in his brain, a final vision that filled him with acute terror as he died.
A sunbeam had come in through the open hatch door, run across the container floor, and lit up Cross, who was not two feet away, fighting for air.
CHAPTER
98
I CAN’T SAY THAT I remember everything that happened in the moments after Sunday began to strangle me again, only that Nana Mama was yelling and then she shot. And for what seemed an eternity after that shot, there was nothing but the ringing in my ears, blood rushing to my head, and me wanting air.
Then someone was cutting the duct tape that bound my wrists and hands to my head. Flames shot through my shoulder, and I gagged against the dry, bruised sensation in my throat as someone turned me over. It was Tess Aaliyah. She was grinning through her tears.
“They’re
all safe!” she said. “They’re all alive!”
I looked beyond and around her, seeing Damon sitting on the edge of his bunk, and Bree smiling sleepily, and Jannie and Ali being freed by Louisiana state troopers. A U.S. Coast Guard medic was already working on my grandmother.
All alive.
All safe.
Never abandoned.
“Help me up,” I said to Aaliyah in a harsh whisper.
“Let’s get you—”
“Help me up,” I demanded. “I want to hold them.”
The detective hesitated, but then she got me under my good arm and lifted me to my feet. The container car swam, and then steadied.
I went to Bree first, put my hand on her bare shoulder and my forehead against hers, and the dam burst, and I broke down weeping.
“There were times when I thought I might never …” I choked.
“Shhh, now, sugar,” my wife said with a slight slur, stroking my cheek. “We’re good now. It’s all good and good.”
Through my tears, I could see her pupils were constricted and her gaze was drifting. I drew my head back, saw a tiny trickle of blood in her ear, and panicked. “She’s got a closed-head injury,” I shouted.
Another Coast Guard medic who’d just come into the container rushed to her side, did a quick exam, and said, “Okay, her vitals are good, but she’s on the first flight out.”
“And great-grandma,” said the other medic. “She’s having trouble breathing and I don’t like the sound of her heart.”
I turned from Bree and crouched by Nana Mama, whose breathing was labored. She looked at me sideways, and then her hand shot out and grabbed mine tight.
“I did the right thing, didn’t I?” She gasped. “You have to put mad dogs down, don’t you?”
I started to break down again as I nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For all of this. Because of me you had to—”
“Sir,” the medic said. “We really need to get her to a hospital.”
“I’m going with them,” I said.
The two medics exchanged glances, and then the one working on Nana Mama said, “We’ll make room.”
Louisiana state troopers and coastguardsmen brought stretchers. I went to my children, and as I held each of them, I broke down, thanking God they were alive.
“Do people at school think I’m dead?” Damon asked.
“They held a memorial service for you. I was there.”
He frowned at that. “What’d they say?”
“That you were the very best kind of person. You have made a big impression on the Kraft School. You have many friends and admirers. And I am very proud of you.”
“I screwed up,” he said, blinking back tears. “That woman. Karla Mepps.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “We caught her.”
After a pause, he said, “It was Bree’s idea for some of us to act like we were still out and then follow her lead.”
“You did good, son,” I said, stroking his hair. “Real good.”
He whispered, “She almost bit his fingers off, Dad!”
“I saw that. Well, almost.”
“I would never, ever mess with her,” he said. “Or Nana Mama either.”
I smiled and laughed softly. “I learned a long, long time ago never to mess with the women in this family.”
CHAPTER
99
JANNIE AND ALI WERE sitting up on their bunks as medics removed their IV lines.
“I knew you were looking for us,” Jannie said, breaking into tears that wrecked me all over again. “That was the first thing I thought when I woke up. Dad’s looking.”
“From the moment you were taken,” I said. “And I never gave up hope that I’d find you and that one day you’d run again.”
“Will I?”
“Of course,” I said firmly. “You will not let this stop you in any way.”
Jannie nodded and kissed me. “I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you too,” I choked.
“What about me?” Ali asked.
“You!” I said, kneeling to hug him with my good arm. “You are my best little boy. My …” I stopped and couldn’t say anything while they were moving Bree onto the stretcher.
Ali said, “He was that guy who wore the red beard and came to school, wasn’t he, Dad? The one who smelled like a zombie?”
“He was,” I said. “And I should have listened to you about that, because you, Ali Cross, are an expert in all things zombie.”
He beamed and said, “My friends say that too.”
“Smart kids, your friends.”
They took Nana Mama out first. “I’m fine,” she said weakly as she went past me. “I’ll see you all soon.”
“Nana Mama, zombie killer,” Ali said in awe as she was carried through the hatch door.
Troopers picked up the stretcher my wife was on and took her out next.
“I’m going with Bree and Nana,” I said to the others. “But you’ll be right behind us.”
“In a helicopter?” Ali asked.
“I think so.”
“Oh, this is so cool.”
“I know,” Jannie said. “No one at school’s going to believe it.”
“No one,” Damon agreed.
Aaliyah helped me to the hatch. I refused to look back at the sheet that covered the doomed, soulless creature that had been Thierry Mulch and Marcus Sunday.
Instead, I stepped out into the heat and the humidity of a late Louisiana morning and squinted at the sun, feeling like I’d been in that claustrophobic box for days, not less than an hour.
The sky was this incredible blue, and the vegetation the deepest of greens. There were birds diving and arcing, hunting an insect hatch. I took deep breaths through my nose and smelled the salt marsh and the river and thought there had never been a better smell or a better day, ever.
Two helicopters had landed on the stacks of container cars. One bore the logo of the Louisiana State Police, and the other, larger, one, that of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Airmen in the federal chopper were working a winch to lower a rescue basket to the deck for Bree and Nana Mama. Behind them, a Coast Guard officer stood next to Captain Creel, who was in plastic cuffs, despondent.
I looked at Detective Aaliyah as if she were some kind of miracle worker and asked, “How in God’s name did you ever find us?”
CHAPTER
100
AS THE COAST GUARD rescue specialists winched up the baskets containing Bree and Nana Mama, Aaliyah explained how she’d discovered lading documents inside Acadia Le Duc’s rental car and how she’d come to realize that my family was probably being held in a container on a Mississippi River barge called the Pandora.
Paul Gauvin, the Jefferson County sheriff, was in the hospital on heavy doses of painkillers, and his deputies were highly skeptical of her theory. The Louisiana police investigators had been too until she’d finally reached a woman who worked at the shipping and barge service listed on the documents.
Her name was Shirley Creel.
Aaliyah learned that the container car was supposed to be offloaded at a multimodal transfer station in New Orleans. The barge captain’s wife tried to call her husband on his cell phone and via shortwave radio and got no answer.
“She promised to keep calling, but I badgered the state police guys into getting me a helicopter,” she said. “First, we flew to the pier in New Orleans where the barge was supposed to have offloaded the container. It had never docked. That’s when we started downriver and called the Coast Guard. Luckily, they had a search-and-rescue helicopter doing training about twenty-five miles from here, at their Venice station. It started upriver soon afterward. We both found you at almost the same time.”
I threw my good arm around her shoulder and kissed the top of her head. She drew back, surprised.
“Thank you, Detective,” I said. “You’ve been like my guardian angel in this whole sordid mess.”
Aaliyah didn’t seem to know what to say at first, but then she smiled and said, “Glad to help.”
“You’ve done your dad prouder than proud.”
Blushing, she looked down and said, “Well, thank you, Alex. That means a whole lot.”
A Coast Guard airman signaled me to the basket. I told Aaliyah about the Whaler. She promised to have it returned and to bring my kids to me. When I got in the helicopter, a medic was working on Bree’s scalp wound. My wife was conscious, but confused.
My grandmother’s eyes were closed. They had hooked her up to a new set of IV lines and monitors, and the ninety-something-year-old David who’d slain Goliath looked as tiny and fragile as a newborn bird.
I wanted to sit between the two of them, but an airman told me I had to harness myself into one of the jump seats. I took one where I could see out a window in the side door.
The chopper began to vibrate, and we got airborne, leaving several state police officers and coastguardsmen to control the crime scene and keep the barge from floating out to sea.
As we rose, the chopper slowly rotated, revealing the mighty Mississippi and the vast deltas that surrounded it. We cleared a low line of trees to the west, and I was surprised to see how close State Route 23 was to the riverbanks and positively amazed to see Lester Frost’s GTO parked on the narrow shoulder.
I saw Madame Minerva standing next to the open passenger door of the muscle car and gesturing frantically with her white cane before we turned and flew upriver.
“Did you see that crazy old lady down there?” one of the airmen said.
Before I could nod, an alarm sounded inside the hold.
And the medic tending to my grandmother shouted, “Code blue! She’s in cardiac arrest!”
CHAPTER
101
WHEN THE FUNERAL ENDED, pallbearers lifted the casket, which was draped in forest-green cloth and an American flag. They carried it solemnly down the church’s central aisle.