Desperate Souls (34 page)

After leaving Jake alone at the Carl Schurz Park walkway, Edgar had run full speed to his car, which he had parked outside the park entrance, one of the benefits of being a cop. Keying the ignition, he raced to Central Park, crossing over to the West Side, then uptown along the West Side Highway. His head throbbed with the stunning revelation that Dawn had been cheating on him with the city’s new drug kingpin; that she had most likely been using information she had gleaned from him to assist Malachai in his conquest of the drug trade; and that, if Jake was right, she was the driving force behind the plague of undead slaves infecting Manhattan.

Impossible,
he thought. He accepted that Dawn had played him in some Machiavellian chess game but not that she was somehow capable of resurrecting fatally overdosed junkies as zombies.

Not zombies. Zonbies.

Jake had managed to surprise and impress him. His former partner had always been a schemer, too smart and too reckless for his own good. It had not been a huge decision for Edgar to destroy the digital file of Jake entering and exiting Marc Gorman’s building. In his opinion, serial killers deserved death, and Jake had spared the state and city untold expense in what would have amounted to a sensational trial.

But Kira Thorn’s sudden disappearance troubled him. He and Maria had sat with Kira when she had vouched for Jake’s whereabouts the day of Gorman’s murder, and nothing about her demeanor suggested she was capable of ordering a hit on Jake. Then again, he had slept with Dawn—had fallen in love with her—and had never suspected that she could possibly be entangled with Malachai and Black Magic.

Damn it!
He pounded the steering wheel’s rim. How could he have been so wrong?

Parking in front of Caribbean, he ran inside and paid the admission fee rather than advertise that a cop was on the premises. There was no telling if someone would alert Malachai or whether or not Edgar would need to conceal his identity. He circled the club’s interior three times before concluding that Malachai and Dawn had already left.

Maybe Jake scared them off without realizing it.

He knew of just one place to look for Dawn: at her apartment. She had given him a copy of her keys on their one-month anniversary. Now he stood before her, the living room filling with the burning candle’s sweet scent. She had been chanting in a language he did not recognize.
Vodou?

“Edgar!” Dawn said, her surprise palpable.

He appraised her dress. Blatantly sexual, not sophisticated at all. “That’s a different look for you.”

Her expression turned pensive. “Did Jake speak to you?”

Edgar drew his Glock from its holster. “What do you think?”

She swallowed. “Then there’s no need to play games.”

“I never played games with you. I loved you. I guess I still do. It’s pretty funny, isn’t it? A guy my age getting his heart broken.”

“I’m sure you’ve broken plenty of hearts. Your son’s mother’s, for one.”

“Don’t ever talk about my son or his mother. Put them out of your mind right now.”

She offered a nod of concession. “For what it’s worth, I do care about you.”

“I never figured you for a drug dealer’s whore.”

“I’m not Malachai’s whore. He’s mine. So are you.”

He tightened his grip on the Glock. “Keep talking, lady. It isn’t helping your case.”

“What case? Are you planning to arrest me, lover? On what charge—infidelity? I didn’t realize that was a legal offense, and we’re not even married.”

“We might have been.”

Mocking laughter escaped her lips. “Oh, did you plan on proposing to me? How sweet. No, thank you. I grew up in poverty and never plan to go down that road again. Your salary couldn’t pay for my wardrobe budget.”

Edgar felt his skin turning hot. “So you’re all about the money, huh? Maybe you should have slept with Gary Brown or Frank Beck instead of killing them.”

Dawn took a step forward. “I didn’t know who they were when I met you. And I knew that you were close to Jake.”

Edgar could not mask his surprise. “Jake?”

She took another step closer. “That’s right. You were my way to reach him.”

“What do you want with Jake?”

She stood before him with the barrel of his gun pressed between her breasts. “That’s for me to know and you to find out, darling. If you can.” Her eyes flicked down to his gun. “Are you going to pull the trigger or talk me to death?”

With his free hand, he reached into his pocket and took out his handcuffs, which he tossed onto the table behind her. The metal clinked on the glass. “Put those on.”

She smiled. “One for the road, huh? You’re on.” Turning, she slinked back to the table. With deliberate exaggeration, she bent over, giving him an unobstructed view of the contours of her ass. Looking over her shoulder at him, she stood up with the handcuffs dangling from one finger. “Are we going into the bedroom, or do you want to take me right here?”

“I wouldn’t put my dick in you again if you were the last woman on Earth.”

She allowed the handcuffs to slip from her finger, and they clattered on the carpet. “That’s what you think, boyfriend. You’ll do anything I tell you to.”

Edgar heard his heart beat in his chest.

What the hell?

No, not his heartbeat and not in his chest. Drumbeats in his head. What had Jake said about hearing them? “I’m not your puppet. You can’t whip me.”

“You think? Stick that gun in your mouth.”

“Go to hell.”

No longer smiling, she burrowed her eyes into his. “Do it.”

Edgar’s arm bent at the elbow, aiming his Glock at the ceiling. Then he raised his elbow to the level of his shoulder.

I didn’t do that!

His forearm shook as he resisted whatever force commanded his body, his muscles aching. Sweat formed on his brow from the strain. The gun inched closer to his face. Using his left hand, he seized the wrist of his gun hand and tried to push it away. Unfortunately, he was right-handed. Staring down the Glock’s barrel, he felt the muscles in his face twitch and jump. Releasing his wrist, he grabbed for the gun and tried to wrest it free from his other hand. No good: his right hand would not relinquish its hold on the weapon, which kissed his lips.

“Open your mouth,” Dawn said.

Glancing at her with bulging eyes, Edgar felt panic as his mouth opened through no effort of his own.

“Good boy.”

He felt the metal scraping over his teeth, the barrel pressing against the roof of his mouth.

“Now get down on your knees.”

He sank to his knees on the carpet, praying the impact would not trigger the gun.

Dawn moved closer to him, a hungry look in her eyes, and he experienced a rare emotion: naked fear. She caressed his cheek with one hand. “Do you see how easily I can control you? Just as easily as I do Malachai and my zonbies. It would be so easy to make you kill yourself but not so easy to explain how a dead cop got in my living room. Multiple identities or not, between Jake and Maria, I have no doubt I’d have to leave the city, and I’ve worked too hard to make it mine. So I’m going to let you live, darling.”

Edgar gagged on his gun.

Dawn inhaled deeply. “Smell that fragrance. Change is in the air.”

Pitching forward, Edgar supported himself on his left hand. With his gun still jammed in his mouth, he choked back vomit.

Jake pulled over to the corner of 104th Street, half a block behind Edgar’s Plymouth. Across the street from Katrina’s building, the skeletal structure of the unfinished skyscraper rose into the night. He had returned to Caribbean first but had not seen Edgar or any of Malachai’s crew. He queried the bouncer and the box office woman, but they just shrugged. Either they didn’t remember seeing Edgar, or they did not want to give him up to Jake. Reaching for the car door handle, he froze. A woman exited the condominium.

Katrina.

She took her time, walking with great poise and confidence. Jake waited to see if Edgar would emerge from somewhere in the darkness and confront her. Instead, Katrina circled the front of Edgar’s car and stopped at the driver’s-side door.

Jake ducked behind the wheel just as she looked in his direction. His heart thundered in his chest, and he reached for his pistol grip. Then she aimed a remote control at the car, and its lights flickered on with an electronic chirp. She opened the door and got in, and a few moments later, he heard the engine rev up. Katrina drove away, and he did not know whether to follow her or search for Edgar.

Damn it all to hell!

He leapt out of the Monte Carlo and locked it with his remote control as he raced to the building. Inside, he ran his finger down the names in the directory until he found Du Pre, D beside 5-C. Then he slipped on his wraparound shades, threw open the inside door, and ran toward the doorman’s station. A man with an alarmed expression got to his feet.

“Hey, did you see that broad who just left here?”

The doorman raised his eyebrows. “Yeah …”

“She just fell down getting into a cab and broke her ankle on the sidewalk! She sent me in here to get you.”

“Oh, God …” The doorman raced around his station.

“Come on. Hurry!” Jumping in place, Jake beckoned the man forward. The doorman ran past him, and Jake watched him go outside. Then Jake ran to the elevator and pressed the call button. The door opened immediately because Katrina had just gotten off it.

As he boarded the elevator, the doorman ran back into the lobby, a flustered look on his face. “Hey!”

Jake thumbed the button for the sixth floor as the doorman sprinted for the elevator. The door closed, and he heard the man slam into the door. On the sixth floor, he ran down a carpeted hallway, searching for the emergency exit. Then he took the gray stairs two at a time down one floor. As he closed his hand around the knob, he prayed the door would open. It did, and he ran full speed down the hallway to Katrina’s apartment.

The door was locked. He rang the buzzer and pounded on the door. Stepping back, he aimed a powerful kick at the door’s lock. A powerful shock wave reverberated through his heel all the way up to his empty eye socket, but the door did not open. He tried again, harder this time despite the pain, and the door burst open.

Staggering inside, he whipped off his sunglasses and drew his Glock, even though Katrina had already left. He closed the broken door and inhaled a sweet scent. Sweeping the perimeter, he entered the living room and saw men’s clothing on the floor. He recognized the slacks and jacket as Edgar’s. But something was wrong: the clothes were arranged facedown, as if Edgar had collapsed on the floor and vanished, his gun near his empty sleeve.

“Edgar?”

Jake checked the bedroom and bathroom, both empty. Returning to the living room, he kneeled before the table and squinted at the burning candle. A single black feather lay on the table’s surface. He picked it up and inspected it. Just an ordinary bird feather but something that could be used in some vodou ritual. Setting it down, he blew out the candle’s flame. Then he noticed a business card tucked into the candle holder. Plucking it out with two fingers, he saw it was his own card, which he had given to Katrina—Dawn—the night he met her. Without thinking about it, he pocketed the card.

Then he heard a deep croaking sound.

Jerking his head toward the floor, he saw a shape moving beneath Edgar’s blazer. He rose, aiming the Glock at the great lump working its way toward the shirt collar beneath the jacket. It appeared to be the length of a cat, but its movements were all wrong for a four-legged animal. Crouching low, he reached forward with tentative fingers and yanked the collar and jacket away.

The black eyes of a raven stared back at him.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Jake looked at the raven in disbelief.
Edgar?

His mind reeled.
No, oh, God, no …

The raven blinked and quivered.

It’s in shock.
“Oh, Edgar …”

He pulled the shirt down, covering the bird, then gently gathered Edgar’s clothes in his arms.

The raven made a low croaking sound.