The Kindness of Strangers (Skip Langdon Mystery #6) (The Skip Langdon Series) (39 page)

She said, “Hi. Kind of wet out, huh?”

He didn’t answer, instead let his nasty eyes bore through her, silently asking how this uppity piece of road furniture dared address him.

Skip recognized the expression: it was one way of dealing with intrusive civilians. It was no fun on this side of it. Quickly, she produced her badge. “New Orleans police. I’ve got an emergency in Lockport.”

“Let me see your commission card.”

She showed him that as well, but instead of glancing at it, he studied it for a long, maddening time, looking back and forth from her picture to her face.

Does the word “emergency” have too many syllables for you?
she thought, and gritted her teeth to keep from saying it.

Finally, he said, “What kind of emergency you got?”

“Kidnapping. Three teenage girls.”

“Kidnapper’s not goin’ nowhere. This road’s impassable. We been here for four hours, issuing warnings— just closed it half an hour ago.”

“You’ve been here four hours?”

“Sure have.”

“Have you seen a white female adult, late twenties, with two white female juveniles and one black one?”

“Plate number?”

He had to be kidding. She answered in bureaucratese, a language she thought he might be able to grasp. “That information is not available.”

“Make and model of car?”

“Look, if you’ve stopped every car, you’ve looked inside. Just tell me—have you seen anybody like that?”

“Nope.” He spread his hands. “No mixed groups at all. Doesn’t matter, nohow. The problem is, you’re not listening. What I’m trying to tell you, this road’s impassable.”

She was tired of playing games with him. “I’m a police officer. Let me through, please.”

“Now you know I can’t do that. How you gonna drive on a road that’s impassable?”

“That’s my problem.”

His tone changed from a kind of neutral stubbornness to a sort of nasty triumphant purring. “Listen, be a good little girl, why don’t you. You’re a New Orleans police officer. So why don’t you just go on home to New Orleans? When the storm’s over, we’ll handle your little kidnapping for you, right up here.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re preventing another officer from doing her job? Is that what I just heard?”

He turned red. “You bitch.” He responded more to her tone than anything else, she thought. She sounded like a schoolteacher dressing down a class.

“Call your commander and ask him what to do, please.” She knew he had to do it, and so did he. He turned redder still, and when he was in the car, he fumbled in his pockets for a long time, finally extracted a cigarette, lit it, and sat there smoking, not making a move for his radio. It was probably out anyway.

She mouthed, “Fuck you, asshole!” not even bothering to shout, and drove through the roadblock.

The young cop leaned on the horn, but that was all he could do.

Steve leaned out the window and hollered, “Fuck yoooooooooou!”

“I already said that.”

“It needed saying again. Besides, you ever seen a grown man explode in an Explorer? Not a pretty sight.”

She put a hand on his knee. “Hey. Thanks for keeping your mouth shut.”

“I’ll probably recover in fifteen years or so.”

As they crossed the Company Canal, Steve asked for the second time, “How’re you going to find Paulette’s dad’s house?”

“I’m going to ask somebody.”

“Like maybe a cop?”

“Well, I thought of that. Don’t think I didn’t think long and hard about it. The trouble is, you can’t know how these small-town guys are going to respond. They might say, ‘let’s go, not a minute to waste’; or they might keep me around for hours asking questions and waiting for the rain to stop or their shift to be over.” She glanced at him. “We’ve got to move now, Steve. You game?”

“Hey, I didn’t get up in the middle of the night so I could wimp out at the last minute. Hey, stop!”

Skip slammed on the brakes. “What’s going on?”

He pointed. “There’s a light in that window.”

The windows of the house had been taped rather than boarded, and from one came a glow, probably produced by a hurricane lamp.

“And there’s a boat in the yard. Obviously these people didn’t want to evacuate—they must think they can get away in the boat if things get tough.”

Skip went in alone. She was met at the door by a man in T-shirt and shorts. Though it wasn’t cold, further back in the room a woman huddled under a blanket. “I saw your lights, and I’m desperate. Do you have a phone book? Or better yet, do you know Denis Thibodeaux?”

The man shook his head, puzzled. “Come in, come in. Renee—she needs a phone book.”

The woman moved fast. She brought the book, looking worried. “Ya all right, out in that? Ya want to stay here with us?”

Skip didn’t have to fake looking regretful. “I have an emergency. Here’s the address—where’s Terrebonne Street?”

The man nodded vigorously, indicating he was now in control. “Ya keep goin’ on Highway 1. Ya gon’ pass a lot of streets with women’s names and some named fa trees. Ya keep goin’ and goin’, and finally ya gon’ come to a house already decorated fa Hallowe’en. And here it is, first week o’ September!”

“Decorated how?”

“Bats and pumpkins and things in da windows. Ya see dat, and da next street’s gon’ be Terrebonne. If ya pass da Valentine Bridge, ya’ve gone too far.”

Terrebonne was a mean little road, pebbles dumped on dirt. The car shook. If they’d crawled before, they were snails now.

The night was black as dirt, but they could make out a little by their headlights. Homes were mingy little dwellings, many of them trailers, windows boarded against disaster.

As they drew near, they heard gunshots, close together.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

THE MAN’S VOICE was so loud Torian thought he must have brought a megaphone. She hadn’t heard his car over the noise of the storm, but his voice was deep and commanding; terrifying. “Paulette. Don’t shoot, baby. We’re here to help you.”

Sheila and Faylice had lifted the cabinet off her, just a little, and Sheila was looking under it. “I think you’re cut. I think I see blood. I’m pretty sure.”

“Ya’ll stay down,” Paulette snapped.

“We’ve got to get this thing off her.”

“Be careful, that’s all.” Her gaze never left the window.

Between them, the girls righted the thing and Torian looked at her legs. The right one was cut, the one that hurt so bad, but the cut didn’t seem to be in the same place that hurt. She tried moving the left one and found the feeling gradually returning to it.

“Oh, shit, look at that,” said Faylice, and went into the kitchen. Kneeling, Sheila held Torian’s hand, her body between Torian’s face and her leg, shielding her from her own wound. But Torian could feel the sticky wetness.

Paulette said, “Y’all stay
down!
” Then to Torian’s surprise, she answered the man outside. “Who’s that— Potter Menard? Is Daddy with you? I need to talk to Daddy. Bad. Lemme talk to Daddy.”

Faylice socked a folded dish towel on to Torian’s leg. Torian winced.

“I gotta apply pressure.”

The man shouted: “Give up the girls, Paulette. Kidnapping is nothing to mess with.”

“Y’all really think you can get ‘em away?”

Sheila whispered, “Why is she talking to him?”

“She must be tryin’ to find out somethin’—like where he standin’,” said Faylice. “So she can shoot him.”

Torian’s leg hardly hurt at all now, except where Faylice had her hand, was pressing as hard as she could.

A tinkling sound made her neck prickle. “What’s that?”

Faylice’s eyes were huge. “It come from the back.”

Paulette apparently hadn’t heard it.

Sheila pinched the flame of the candle they were using, wax poured into heavy glass, the kind carried both by botanicas and by convenience stores in hurricane country—good for magic spells and storms. She flattened herself against the wall next to the doorway from the hall. A man stepped into the doorframe, and Sheila swung the candle like a baseball bat.

The man doubled over, just as the first shot came through the window. Paulette shot back and almost immediately started cursing.

Seizing the advantage, Sheila whacked the man on the head, now at her chest level. He staggered a little, and she hit him again. A third time.

“Shit,” said Paulette. “Shit! How the fuck I’m s’posed to know how many of ‘em out there?”

The man staggered a moment more before his knees buckled. He thudded to the floor, his head rolling to the side. Torian couldn’t see his face.

She tried again with her left leg, gradually trying to get some feeling back, to get it moving. She heard a slight something behind her, she never knew what—perhaps it was a man brushing the wall as he tried to keep quiet.

She saw him come through the door, and she saw Sheila swing, but this time he saw it, too. A hand darted out and caught the heavy candle. The other arm caught Sheila. The hand in it held a gun.

Torian saw that he was a white man, more broad than tall, but definitely the sort you’d want to avoid on a poorly lit street. He reminded her of Stanley Kowalski— not the Brando Kowalski, but Stanley as she pictured him—ugly and brutal.

Paulette spun around, mouth open with shock, no words coming out. The man said, “Put the gun down, or I’ll kill her.”

Paulette didn’t speak, just let her eyes pierce his body with a thousand astral arrows, none of which drew a drop of blood. Torian couldn’t believe she had the guts to try.

A great weight fell across the front door, which flew open with a rush of wind and rain. The tall black man from Paulette’s, the one who had chased and caught Sheila, stepped in and closed the door behind him. He trained his gun on Paulette.

He spoke very fast, but somehow the words came out lazy. “You could get me with that thing, but Rob’s gonna waste that kid simultaneously.” He nodded at Sheila, now tight in the white man’s grip. “You Cajuns know that word? Means ‘at exactly the same time.’ ”

Sheila’s cheeks flamed watermelon. Her eyes were dark pools, big as sand dollars. Her body was tense with fear, but she wasn’t shaking, she wasn’t crying. For a second, Torian wondered if she could be that brave, and gave it up; she knew she couldn’t. She was shaking.

But I’ve lost blood, she thought, and saw that Faylice was still holding the cloth tight to her leg, her face down, looking at it. Her way of escaping.
Wish I could do it.

She couldn’t. She wanted to know if she was going to die.

Paulette dropped the gun. “I know the word, Potter. We’re colorful, we’re not dumb.”

The black man said, “Let her go.”

The white man, Rob, gave Sheila a nasty little push, so that she stumbled toward Torian and Faylice, had to fall to the right to avoid hitting them. Torian gasped at the cruelty of it.

Sheila sat rubbing her leg, slightly hurt from the fall, as the white man picked up the gun. He tucked it into his waistband and turned towards Sheila. “I kind of liked the way that one felt when I was holding her.”

Paulette said. “Ya take one step toward her and I swear I’ll…”

Rob interrupted her. “You’ll what? Get killed. That’s all you’ll do. And I wouldn’t like that at all, because I want to fuck you before I kill you.

“Fact, I’d like to fuck every one of you girls, ‘cept maybe the dark meat over there.” He glanced at Potter. “Hey, no offense, man. It ain’t her color, it’s her fat bottom.”

Potter said, “Look after Gerard.”

“Oh, man, you ain’t no fun at all. Which one do you want? I’ll let you have first pick—go on ahead. You want that little one with the hurt leg? She’s skinny, but she’s mighty pretty.”

“Have you lost your mind, man? I want no talk of rape, do you understand me?” The black man was furious. “I want you to remember who you represent and what. If you’re not a Christian, get out of here. Gerard and I’ll handle this.”

“Since when aren’t Christians entitled to a little poon?”

The man on the floor stirred, turned his head toward Torian. He was black, but that was about all she could tell about him.

Potter said, “Gerard. You all right?”

Slowly, the man folded himself to a sitting position. “Head hurts.”

Rob jerked his shin towards Sheila. “You can thank that little bitch over there.”

Potter said, “See if you can get up. We’ve got to take these people out and get out of here.”

Take us out?
thought Torian, her pulse pounding in her ear. These were church people. He couldn’t mean—

Sheila said, “Excuse me…” in a voice like a toddler’s. She cleared her throat and spoke up. “Excuse me. Where are you taking us?”

Rob laughed in that cruel way that gives rednecks a bad name. “You ain’t even gonna care, sweet baby. You ain’t even gonna care.”

* * *

The water was higher here, so high that even with the Explorer, Skip was afraid it would reach her tailpipe and kill her engine.

But it’s that or walk
, she thought, panicked after what they’d heard. Her thoughts whirled.

Steve said, “Maybe we should wade. At least we’d have a car to come back to.”

“Just what I was thinking.” Along with fifty other things.

There were no more gunshots, and in moments they saw the house, candlelight streaming serenely from one or two of the windows. They were in a cul-de-sac.

Who the hell is in there?
Skip dreaded finding out, noticed there were two cars in the front yard, looking driveable. Where she had parked must be a low spot, she thought, and realized that leaving the Explorer there meant no one else could leave. Maybe that was good.

She remembered Boo’s gun in the glove box and thought hard about giving it to Steve.

These people are armed—I sure can’t let him go in there without it. The question is, can I let him go in at all?

“Do you know how to shoot?” she finally asked.

“Why? Is there another gun?”

“Do you?”

“Not really.”

“Forget it then. You stand guard.”

“Uh-uh. If you’ve got a gun, give it to me. I’m not watching you commit suicide.”

He’s got a point. I can’t go in there without backup, but I
am
going in there.