“Did ya know ya get crazy in here, Hair Ball? If you don’t get out, you’re crazy as a cat with M40s up its ass. You know that, Hair Ball?”
“Je ne comprends pas,” Jean-Baptiste whispers, a drop of blood running down his chin and disappearing in his baby-fine hair.
He feels for the blood and licks his finger.
“Oh, you comprendez vous, all right. Maybe they stick something up your ass, huh? And kaboom!” Beast softly laughs. “See, once they get you over there in that cage, they can do whatever the fuck they like, and who’s gonna know? You snitch and they hurt you more and say you did it to yourself.”
“Who’s there?”
“I’m so fucking sick of you saying that, knock-knock-shit, Mini-Me Dick! You know damn well who’s there. ’Tis me. Your bud-dy.”
Jean-Baptiste hears Beast breathing. His air travels past two cells and Jean-Baptiste smells garlic and red Burgundy, a young Clos des Mouches, what he calls a stupid wine because it has not slept long enough in dark, damp places to become brilliant and wise. In the dark, Jean-Baptiste’s death-row cell is his cave.
“But here’s the thing, my special pal, your only pal. They gotta transport me in this van to where they do me. Huntsville. What a name. Hunted and a villain, right? Takes an hour, the ride. What if something happens between point A and B?”
At Place Dauphine, chestnut trees, azaleas and roses are blossoming and blooming. Jean-Baptiste does not need to see, only to smell to know where he is: Bar du Caveau and Restaurant Paul, which is a good one. People are disconnected from him, eating and drinking behind glass, smiling and laughing or intensely leaning into candlelight. Some of them will leave and make love, not knowing they are watched. Jean-Baptiste glides through the night to the tip of the Ile St.-Louis, and the lights of Paris are caught in the current of the Seine and shimmer like fine hair. In but a few minutes, he is a mile or so from the morgue.
“Now I ain’t got the wherewithal to do nothing. Bet you do, though. You get that van stopped when I’m on my way to the needle, and I’ll come back for you, Hair Ball. My time’s up. Three days. You hear that? Three goddamn days. I know you can figure out a way. You can arrange it, save my ass and then we’ll be partners.”
Inside a brasserie on the Ile St.-Louis, he sat in a corner and stared out at a balcony crowded with flowerpots, and a woman stepped out to look, perhaps at the blue sky and the river. She was very beautiful, and her windows were open to the fresh, fall air. He remembered that she smelled like lavender. He thought she did.
“You can have her when I’m done,” Jay said as he sipped a Clos de Bèze of the Domaine Prieuré Roch. The wine hinted of smoked almonds.
He slowly swirled the red Burgundy, and it licked around the wide bowl of the glass like a warm tongue slowly licking in circles.
“I know you want some.” Jay lifted the glass and laughed at the double entendre. “But you know how you get, mon frère.”
“You listening, Hair Ball? Three fucking days, just a week before you, I’ll make sure you got all the bitches you want out there. I’ll bring ’em to you, long as you don’t mind if I have my piece of ’em first. Since you can’t, right? So why shouldn’t you share?” A pause, and Beast’s voice turns sinister. “You listening to me, Hair Ball? Free as a bird!”
“So here we go,” Jay said with a wink.
He set down his wineglass and said he’d be right back. Jean-Baptiste, clean-shaven with a cap pulled low over his face, was not to speak to anyone while Jay . . . He can’t call him Jay. Jean-Paul, Jean-Paul was gone. Through the window, Jean-Baptiste watched his beautiful brother call up to the woman on the balcony. He was motioning, pointing, as if in need of directions, and she smiled and began to laugh at his antics. Instantly, she was overcome by his spell and disappeared back inside her apartment.
Then his blessed brother was magically sitting in the booth again. “Leave,” he commanded Jean-Baptiste. “Her apartment is on the third floor.” He nodded toward it. “You see where it is. Hide while she and I have a drink. She will be simple enough. You know what to do. Now get out of here and don’t frighten anyone.”
“You fucking ugly piece of hairy shit.” Beast’s hideous whisper drifts inside Jean-Baptiste’s cell. “You don’t want to die, do ya? Nobody wants to die except the people we do, when they can’t take no more and start begging, right? Free as a bird. Just think of that. Free as a bird.”
Jean-Baptiste envisions the woman doctor named Scarpetta. She will fall asleep in his arms, his eyes never leaving her, and she will be with him always. He strokes the letter she sent him, typed and brief, begging to come see him, asking for his help. He wishes she had written it by hand so he could study every curve and contour of her sensual penmanship. Jean-Baptiste imagines her naked and sucks his tongue.
THUNDER SOUNDS LIKE kettledrums in the distance, and clouds roll past the waning moon.
Bev will not head back to Dutch Bayou until the storm passes if it moves this far southeast, and the forecast on the car radio doesn’t call for that. But she isn’t ready to return to the boat landing. The lamb in the forest-green Ford Explorer has followed an interesting route for the past two hours, and Bev can’t figure it out. She—whoever she is—has cruised streets and especially parking lots for no reason that Bev can tell.
Her guess is that the lamb had a fight with her man and refuses to go home right now, probably to worry him sick, one of those little games. Bev has been careful to keep her distance, to turn up side streets, to pull off in gas stations along Highway 19, then speed up. Several times, Bev has passed the Explorer in the left lane, going ahead at least ten miles, pulling off the highway and waiting for her prey to get ahead of her again. Soon enough, they pass through Baker, a tiny town with businesses that have strange names: Raif’s Po-Boy, Money Flash Cash, Crawfish Depot.
The town vanishes like a mirage, and the stretch of highway becomes pitch dark. There is nothing out here, no lights, only trees, and a billboard that reads: You Need Jesus.
GATOR EYES REMIND BEV OF periscopes fixing her in their sights before vanishing under water the color of weak coffee.
Jay told her gators won’t bother her unless she bothers them. He says the same about cottonmouths.
“Did you ask them their opinion? And if it’s the truth, then how come cottonmouths come crashing out of the trees, trying to get in the boat? And remember that movie we watched? Oh, what was it called . . . ?”
“Faces of Death,” he replied, on this occasion amused instead of annoyed by her questions.
“Remember that game warden who fell in the lake and right there on camera, this huge gator got him?”
“Cottonmouths don’t fall into the boat unless you startle them,” Jay explained. “And the gator got the game warden because the game warden was trying to get him.”
That sounded reasonable enough, and Bev felt slightly reassured until Jay smiled that cruel smile of his and did a complete about-face and explained how she can tell if an animal or reptile is a predator, and therefore an aggressor, and therefore the fearless hunter.
“It’s all in the eyes, baby,” he said. “The eyes of predators are in front of the head, like mine.” He pointed to his beautiful blue eyes. “Like a gator’s, like a cottonmouth’s, like a tiger’s. Us predators are going to look straight-on for something to attack. The eyes of non-predators are more on the sides of the head, because how the hell is a rabbit going to defend itself against a gator, right? So the little bunny needs peripheral vision to see what’s coming and run like hell.”
“I’ve got predator eyes,” Bev said, pleased to know it but not at all happy to hear that gators and cottonmouths are predators.
Eyes like that, she realized, meant something’s on the prowl, looking to hurt or kill. Predators, especially reptiles, aren’t afraid of people. Shit! As far as Bev’s concerned, she’s no match for a gator or a snake. If she falls in the water or steps on a cottonmouth, who’s going to win? Not her.
“Hum
ans are the ultimate predator,” Jay said. “But we’re complicated. A gator is always a gator. A snake’s always a snake. A human can be a wolf or a lamb.”
Bev is a wolf.
She feels her wolfish hot blood stirring as she glides past cypress knees jutting from the bayou like the ridges of a sea monster’s back. The pretty blonde woman hog-tied on the floor of the boat squints in intermittent early morning sunlight. Wherever cypress roots break the surface, the water isn’t deep, and Bev is vigilant as she motors slowly toward the fishing shack. Now and then her prisoner tries to shift her position to ease the terrible pain in her joints, and her labored breathing flares her nostrils, the gag around her mouth wetly sucking in and out.
Bev doesn’t know her name and warned her not to say it. This was hours ago, inside the Cherokee, after the lamb realized she couldn’t get out the passenger door, and if she tried to climb over the seat, Bev was going to shoot her. Then the lamb got chatty, trying to be friendly, trying to make Bev like her, going so far as to politely ask Bev’s name. They all do that, and Bev always says the same thing: “My name is none of your fucking business, and I don’t want to know yours or a damn thing about you.”
The woman was instantly powerless, realizing that she wasn’t going to talk her way out of whatever horror was in store for her.
Names have only two purposes: use them to manipulate people into feeling that their lives have value, and refuse to use them, to cause people to feel that their lives have no value. Besides, Bev will learn a lot about this pretty little lamb soon enough, when Jay monitors the news on his battery-powered radio.
“Please don’t hurt me,” the lamb begs. “I have family.”
“I’m not listening,” Bev tells her. “You know why? Because you’re nothing but the catch of the day.”
Bev laughs, enjoying the strength of her own voice, because very soon, she won’t have a voice. Jay will. Once he takes possession of the lamb, there will be nothing left for Bev to do, except what he orders her to do or not to do. Mostly, Bev will watch, and thoughts of that overwhelm her with a compulsion to control and abuse while she can. She binds the lambs tighter than Jay does, tying ankles to wrists behind the back so the body is bowed, making it all the more difficult for the lamb’s diaphragm to relax and contract as she struggles to breathe.
“Tell you what, honey,” Bev says as she steers. “We’re going to anchor right over there under those shade trees, and I’m gonna cover you good with skeeter spray, every inch of you, because my man ain’t gonna want you swelled up and itching.”
She laughs as her prisoner’s eyes widen and tears flood her puffy red lids. This is the first the lamb’s heard mention of a man.
“Now you quit your bawling, honey. You need to look pretty, and right now you’re looking like shit.”
The lamb blinks hard, the gag making wet noises with each agonizing, rapid, shallow breath. Bev steers the boat closer to shore, cuts the engine and drops anchor. She picks up the shotgun and scans the trees, checking for snakes. Satisfied that the only one in harm’s way is her prisoner, she lays the pump-action shotgun on top of the tarp and places a boat cushion on the floor just inches from her “cute little catch of the day,” as she continues to call her. Bev digs in her beach bag and pulls out a plastic squirt bottle of insect repellent.
“What I’m going to do now is take off your gag and untie you,” Bev says. “You know why I can be that nice, honey? Because you ain’t got nowhere to go but overboard, and if you think about what’s in these waters, you ain’t likely to want to go for a little swim. Or how about the fish box?”
Bev opens the lid of the coffin-sized fish box. It is filled with ice.
“That’ll keep you nice and fresh if you decide to get rowdy. And you’re not gonna do that, are you?”
The woman vigorously shakes her head and dryly says “No” as the gag comes off. “Thank you, thank you,” she says in a shaking voice, wetting her lips.
“Bet your joints are hurting like hell,” Bev says, taking her time untying her. “My man Jay tied me up once, my ankles and wrists tied up tight together behind my back until I was bent like a pretzel, just like you. It turned him on, you know.” She tosses the rope on top of the tarp. “Well, you’ll find out soon enough.”
The woman rubs her raw ankles and wrists, trying to catch her breath. She reminds Bev of a cheerleader, one of those athletic blondes with pure prettiness, like those in Seventeen magazine. She wears small horn-rimmed glasses that make her look smart, and she’s the right age, late thirties, maybe forty.
“You go to college?” Bev asks her.
“Yes.”
“Good. That’s real good.” She disappears inside her thoughts for a moment, a slack expression on her fleshy, weathered face.
“Please take me back. We’ve got money. We’ll pay you whatever you want.”
Bev’s meanness snaps back into her eyes. Jay’s smart and has money. The woman is smart and has money. She leans close to the woman, the whine of mosquitoes loud beneath the trees. Not far away, a fish splashes. The higher the sun gets, the hotter it is, and Bev’s Hawaiian shirt is damp with sweat.
“Money’s not what this is about,” Bev says as the woman stares at her, hope fading from her light blue eyes. “Don’t you know what this is about?”
“I didn’t do anything to you. Please just let me go home and I’ll never tell anyone. I won’t ever do anything to get you into trouble. How could I, anyway? I don’t know you.”
“Well, you’re getting ready to know me, honey,” Bev says, laying a rough, dry hand on the woman’s neck and stroking it with her thumb. “We’re getting ready to know each other real good.”
The woman blinks, wetting her chapped lips as Bev’s hand works its way down, touching the hollow of her neck, then down lower, exploring wherever she pleases. The woman sits rigidly and shuts her eyes. She jerks when Bev reaches under her clothing, unhooking her bra in back. Bev starts squeezing the insect repellent, rubbing it on the lamb’s naked body, feeling her luscious, firm flesh tremble like Jell-O. Bev thinks of Jay and the bleached area of the floor beneath the bed, and she shoves the lamb hard, slamming her head into the outboard motor.
AT THE CORNER OF 83RD and Lexington, a delivery truck struck a pedestrian—an elderly woman.
Benton Wesley overhears excited talk in the gawking crowd as emergency lights flash, the block cordoned off in yellow crime-scene tape. The fatal accident occurred less than an hour earlier, and Benton has seen enough gore in his life to walk swiftly past and respectfully avert his eyes from the body trapped under one of the truck’s back tires.
He catches the words brains and decapitated, and something about dentures lying on the street. If the public had its way, every death scene would be pay-per-view: Five dollars for a ticket, and you can stare at blood and guts to your heart’s content. When he used to arrive at crime scenes and all the cops would move out of the way to allow his expert eye to take in every detail, he had the right to order unauthorized people to leave. He could vent his disgust as he pleased—sometimes calmly, sometimes not.
He surveys the area from behind his dark glasses, his lean body moving along the crowded sidewalk, cutting in and out with the agility of a lynx. A plain black baseball cap covers his shaved head, and he backtracks toward Lucy’s headquarters, having gotten out of a taxi ten blocks north instead of directly in front of her building or even near it. Benton probably could walk right past Lucy and say “excuse me,” and she would not recognize him. Six years it has been since he has seen or talked to her, and he is desperate to know what she looks like, sounds like, acts like. Anxiety presses him onward at his determined pace until he nears the modern polished granite building on 75th Street. A doorman stands in front, hands behind his back. He is hot in his gray uniform and shifts his weight from leg to leg, indicating that his feet hurt.
“I’m looking for The Last Precinct,” Benton says to him.
“The what?” The doorman looks at him
as if he’s crazy.
Benton repeats himself.
“You talking about some kind of police precinct?” The doorman scrutinizes him, and homeless and wacko register on his jaded Irish face. “Maybe you mean the precinct on Sixty-ninth.”
“Twenty-first floor, suite twenty-one-oh-three,” Benton replies.
“Yeah, now I know what you’re talking about, but it ain’t called The Last Precinct. Twenty-one-oh-three’s a software company—you know, computer stuff.”
“You sure?”
“Hell, I work here, don’t I?” The doorman is getting impatient, and he glares at a woman whose dog is sniffing too close to the planter in front of the building. “Hey,” he says to her. “No dogs doing their business in the hedge.”
“She’s just sniffing,” the woman indignantly replies, jerking the leash, tugging her hapless toy poodle back to the middle of the sidewalk.
Having asserted himself, the doorman ignores the woman and her dog. Benton digs in a pocket of his faded jeans and pulls out a folded piece of paper. He smooths it open and glances at an address and phone number that have nothing to do with Lucy or her building or the office that really is called The Last Precinct, despite what the doorman thinks. If the doorman happens to relay to her, perhaps in jest, that some weirdo stopped by asking for The Last Precinct, she will go on the alert, get very worried. Marino believes that Jean-Baptiste knows Lucy’s company by that name. Benton wants Marino and Lucy on the alert and worried.
“Says here, twenty-one-oh-three,” Benton tells the doorman, shoving the piece of paper back in his pocket. “What’s the name of the company? Maybe the information I was given is wrong.”
The doorman steps inside and picks up a clipboard. Running his finger down a page, he replies, “Okay, okay, twenty-one-oh-three. Like I said, some computer outfit. Infosearch Solutions. You want to go up, I gotta call ’em and see an ID.”