The Lazarus Heart (16 page)

Vince dropped the butt of his Pall Mall to the floor and crushed it out with the toe of one shoe. "And we ain't talking about life in prison, Mr. Poe. We're talking about death by electrocution. You do understand that?"

"Come on," Jim said, reaching for the doorknob. "Let's give him some time alone. I'm sure he's gonna figure this all out sooner or later. A man can't be up to his ears in his own shit and not smell something sooner or later."

Jim Unger finishes another cigarette and stubs it out in a ceramic ashtray the color of dead sunflowers, something Julie's niece made in school, a bright present filled with butts and tobacco ash and burned-out matches. There's another flash of lightning and he thinks about turning on the television. Maybe the weather reports would take his mind off the dream, off these things he shouldn't be remembering anyway, gnawing over like a dog with an old meatless bone. The storm is real, solid,
immediate,
the sort of threat he can at least comprehend, not like these haunted patches of memory trapped inside his head or the lie that there was something more he could have done for Vince

Norris.

The news of Vince's suicide reached Jim the day after he heard Jared Poe was dead. It had been months since Vince's release from the hospital, but his mind was still broken, barely held together from day to day by pills and biweekly visits to a therapist. He was living with his mother in Slidell, and Jim had kept promising himself he'd do more than check up on him, that he'd make the drive across the lake and spend an afternoon with Vince. But he'd put it off and put it off and finally the call came from a friend in the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Department. By the time Jim got to Slidell they'd already taken Vince's body away. There was only the blood he'd left behind in his bedroom and his mother, sitting alone and staring vacantly out a kitchen window at a backyard gone wild with dandelions and polk salad. There were still a few cops on the scene too, and one of them, a detective named Kennedy, took Jim aside.

"There's something in there I need your opinion on," he said, pointing down a long gloomy hallway toward Vince Norris's room. Jim had already looked in the room and he didn't really relish the thought of going in there again.

"What? Look, I don't really-"

"I know he was a friend of yours," Kennedy said. "That's why I was hoping you could help make some sense of this."

"Make sense of
what?"
but the detective was already on his way back down the hall, back to the room where Vince Norris had cut his own throat with a jagged shard of broken mirror. And Jim followed, wanting to be back in his car and putting as many miles between himself and this house as he could, as fast as he could.

The detective led him through the bedroom door and Jim was trying to tell him again that he'd already been in there, had already seen everything there was to see and didn't care to see any of it again, thank you, when Kennedy pointed at the low ceiling and then crossed his arms.

"That," he said, and Jim looked up.

The grade-school crude outline of a bird, a huge bird with wide outstretched wings and a beak like a dagger, had been traced onto the ceiling directly above the bed. The blood was already dry. Jim Unger stood speechless and staring, dizzy. Suddenly the room seemed cold.

"No note or nothing. Just this," Kennedy said. "We think he did it with his fingers, before he cut his throat. All the fingertips on his right hand were scraped raw."

"Can you keep this out of the report?" Jim asked, unable to look away from the unsteady maroon smears across the white plasterboard, remembering Vince's tranquilized voice over the telephone:
I can still see it, Jimbo. I can still see what was up there.

"If you know something about this, I'd like-"

Jim interrupted before he could finish. "I'm asking you if you can
please
keep this out of the fucking report." The hot surge of anger broke the spell. He turned away, better to see Vince's blood soaking into the shit-brown shag carpet and the bed.

"But-"

"Just say yes or no, Detective. But it doesn't mean anything, okay? Vince wasn't well. He had bad dreams."

There was a long silence between them while the other detective watched Jim, then glanced back at the grisly outline on the ceiling.

"Yeah," Kennedy finally replied. "Yeah. What the fuck. You got it." Jim said thanks, or he meant to say thanks, before he stepped back out into the hall. And there was Vince's mother, waiting for him, blocking his escape. She wore a dead woman's face, too much sorrow in her eyes for anything like life.

"You
tell
me," she said, and she sounded old, old as the festering swamps and the skies above them, old as the first mother who ever lost a son. "Vincent was so afraid and he wouldn't ever tell me or his doctors what he was scared of. But you know, don't you? I want you to
tell
me."

He could have told her, could have sat her down and told her about his own bad dreams, about the dripping red nightmare they'd walked into on Ursulines, details he suspected Vince had never shared with anyone. And it might have made a difference.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Norris," he said instead. "I swear to God I wish I did know, but I don't. I'm very, very sorry." Then he stepped past her and didn't stop moving until he was out of the house and across the weathered concrete driveway to his car. He looked back then, just for a second, and she was watching him from between the living room drapes, her accusing face grown as old as her voice had sounded.

He doesn't turn on the television, but leaves Julie sleeping on their bed and goes downstairs to the living room. He removes his revolver from its holster and takes it with him. He doesn't like to be too far away from it anymore.

Outside the house the storm is battering the city. Jim thinks he'll just sit in the kitchen and have a beer and watch it for a while through the bay windows, hopes that the

alcohol will be enough to make him sleepy again. He has a prescription bottle of Valium in the medicine cabinet, little blue bits of calm, but he doesn't like to use them, doesn't like their unreal, detached brand of comfort.

The rain is making a sound like giant fingers drumming against the roof as he pops open the can of Miller and sits down. The gun lies on the table in front of him and he stares past it into the wet, storm-lashed night. The beer feels reassuring going down and he drains half the can in one long swallow.

"You gotta get it together, Jimbo," he whispers, wiping his mouth. The night outside is lit by another brilliant flash of lightning. A split second of daylight pours over the world and he freezes, the can halfway to the tabletop, the back of his other hand still damp with beer and saliva.

What the fuck was that,
before he can prevent the thought, before he can tell himself it was only a trick of the sudden light shining through the driving rain, just a mistake made by his tired eyes. The thunder rumbles overhead. Jim Unger puts the can down, picks up the .38, and steps around the table to the window.

What the fuck do you
think
you saw out there?

"Nothing,"
he says out loud, "absolutely nothing at all," but then the lightning comes again, crackles above the Metairie subdivision and makes a liar of him. Because what he
thought
he saw is still standing a few feet from the kitchen window, staring in at him through bottomless cat-slit eyes. Eyes punched into a grinning harlequin face, wrinkled flesh the color of something that's been in the tub too long.

"Holy
Jesus..."
he whispers. He brings up the gun, but the thing outside is faster, much faster. The glass shatters, explodes around him in a roar of wind and a drenching diamond spray of slicing glass and rain. Jim feels the gun slip from his grip, hears it clatter across the linoleum as he tries to protect his face from shards of flying glass.

Above the noise of the storm and breaking window panes there is another sound, a frantic fluttering, the terribly familiar sound of angry black wings.
I'm still dreaming,
he thinks as he stumbles backward into the table.

"Detective Unger," a voice says from somewhere very nearby, a voice that seems to weave its substance from the cacophony of unseen birds.

"Who the fuck
are
you?" Jim screams into the night sweeping through the broken windows. His arms and the backs of his hands are cut and bleeding, and he can taste blood in his mouth. But none of it hurts, not yet. There's no room in him for anything but the fear, a hundred times more demanding than the pain from any mere physical wound could ever be.

"I know it's been a while," the voice says. He realizes that it too is familiar. "But it hurts to think you could have forgotten me
already."

"You stay the fuck away from me," Jim growls, trying to sound cool, trying to sound like he's not about to shit himself. He glances at the floor for some sign of the dropped .38, but the lights above the sink have started to flicker and the floor is covered with glass and water that catch the unsteady light and wink it back at him, making it impossible to find the gun.

"You don't seem very glad to see me," the voice says, coming now from somewhere behind him. Jim turns his back on the gaping hole where the window used to be, and the thing with the smirking harlequin face is silhouetted for a moment in the flickering light before it bleeds away into the shadows.

No way, no fucking way any of this is happening,
Jim tells himself. It is a hollow reassurance at best.

"I've got a gun, you weirdo son of a bitch," he says, and takes a step toward the door that leads from the kitchen into the carport. There are things out there he can defend himself with, sharp things.

"No, Detective. This time
I
have the gun." Suddenly there is cold metal pressing hard against his temple.

"Don't waste precious time asking yourself
how,"
the voice says, speaking directly into his ear now, and he knows there's no point anymore pretending that it isn't the voice of Jared Poe. No point pretending the dead man isn't standing in his kitchen with his own fucking gun pressed to his head.

"'Cause
how
doesn't matter right now. All that matters is whether or not I think you're telling me the truth."

He's shoved into one of the chairs, one hand on his shoulder as cold as the barrel of the .38, one hand as hard and indisputable as tempered steel forcing him to sit when every muscle in his body is telling him to run.

"I think you remember how this works, so let's try to make it as painless as possible," the voice says. Then strong fingers are tangling themselves in his hair, pulling his head back so he's staring straight up into the pale grinning face. Now he can see it's just a cheap Mardi Gras mask, not a real face at all.

"You're not Poe," he says. "If you're Poe, take off the mask, you fucking coward."

"Wrong,"
the white face says without moving its lips, and the butt of the pistol

comes down fast across the bridge of his nose, cracking bone, tearing cartilage. Warm blood spurts down his chin. Jim Unger screams as the searing pain fills his head, but a thunderclap devours the sound.

"Now, see what you made me do?" The barrel of the gun is already jammed against his temple again. Jim gasps and more blood spills out of his nostrils and into his mouth, gagging him.

"You
knew,
didn't you?" the man behind the mask asks. "You knew I wasn't the one who killed Benny."

"Bullshit," Jim Unger coughs, spitting out a mouthful of blood and snot, blowing a finer drizzle of gore from his broken nose. His eyes are watering and it's hard to see the mask, just an alabaster smear now against the flickering dark.

"Don't lie to me, you fucking pig." Now the gun is pressed against the tip of Jim's chin, pointing upward. "I have no reason in the whole fucking world not to pull this trigger and blow your brains out, so don't you fucking
lie
to me."

Jim hears the weakness in the voice then, the strain of anger. A chink that might let him past the mask, might even give him a chance if he doesn't screw it up.

"What difference does it make?" he asks. "Even if we didn't get the killer, we got another sicko off the street, right?"

"You really think this is all some sort of fucking
game,
don't you?" The hand holding the gun is trembling with rage that wants out, anger like a starving dog on a very short leash.

So much anger can make a person careless. Jim swallows, hating the bitter, salty taste of his own blood.

"Either way, I was just doing my
job,
right?" he says.

"Wrong,"
Jared Poe snarls back at him, a voice that could be Jared Poe's if such a thing were possible. The gun is suddenly past Jim's lips, chipping teeth as the stubby barrel is forced across his tongue. Thunder rushes from the sky to cover the deafening boom of the gunshot.

Four blocks west of Jim Unger's house Jared finally stops running, collapses into a row of oleander, and lies staring up into the rain, the belly of low, roiling clouds stained orange by the Metairie streetlights. Benny's mask is still clutched in his right hand. The rain has already washed most of the cop's blood off him, washes his own blood from the hundred scrapes and gashes left by his dive through the window.

Is there anything he could have said that would have stopped you from killing him?
he thinks, but it sounds like Lucrece asking the question, Lucrece speaking from behind his eyes.

"What difference does it make?" he asks her, knowing that there won't be an answer. The crow lights on the ground beside the oleander bushes and Jared turns his head so he can see her. The water rolls off her black feathers; a single raindrop catches on the end of her beak and hangs there like a jewel until the bird shakes it off.

"And where were
you,
bitch? I thought you were supposed to be here to help me."

The bird caws and spreads her wings, blinks her golden eyes in a way that is somehow indifferent and accusatory at the same time. Not that Jared has to rely on anything as subtle as body language. Her voice would be impossible for him not to hear, not to understand.