Wages of Sin (29 page)

She was carried along with the press of people, the way a twig is pulled downstream by rushing rapids, and then somehow she was off the platform and out on the lawn.

She stumbled toward the Zip Cola billboard, where the crowd was thinner. She had to lean up against one of its supporting struts, her legs were shaking so. The terror that had jolted through her when she'd been caught in that panicked mass had left her exhausted and her head feeling mushy. It surprised her how scared she'd been. She usually didn't scare so easily.

The smoke was starting to clear now, and the screams had died down. She looked for Freddy, for someone from the studio, but everyone around her was a stranger.

Nearby, a little girl in a pink dress was turning in circles, crying for her mama. Remy had just taken the first step toward the child, when rough hands wrapped around her throat, and a harsh voice grated in her ear:

“Are you good and scared now, Remy?”

Chapter Nineteen

D
aman Rourke's heart stopped when he drove through the City Park gate and saw the squad cars and the ambulance parked by the bandstand.

He sent the Bearcat hurtling off the road and up across the green lawn. He slewed to a stop and jumped out, flashing his shield at the uniform cop who started toward him.

“What happened?”

“Don't know yet for sure,” the cop said. “Looks like some kids set off a cannon cracker and then a string of little crackers, and folk reacted like it was frigging Armageddon.”

Two men carrying a stretcher approached a small knot of people who'd gathered around something lying at the bottom of the steps to the bandstand. “Somebody get hurt?” Rourke said.

The cop turned to see what Rourke was looking at. “Somebody got dead.”

The body lay on the ground beneath a blanket, and all he could see of her was the one hand that lay flung out from her side. He'd done this twice before, walked toward women he loved, who were lying dead on the ground.

Once, it had happened on a sunny day in October, when white cottontail clouds tumbled across a sun-washed sky, and she had been laughing. Once, it had happened on a night when the moon was new and sharp as a sickle, and she had been screaming. Each time it had been nearly more than he could bear.

He knelt and turned back the edge of the blanket, uncovering her head, and saw a plump, middle-aged face with graying red hair.

“Must've been a heart attack,” he heard someone say.

He got slowly back to his feet, his legs feeling rubbery, his throat thick.

It was the sun sparkling off her dress that caught his eye. She knelt in the grass beneath a giant billboard of herself dancing on a piano. She was hugging a small bawling child to her chest, stroking the child's hair.

She looked up when he got close to her, and when she saw him, she smiled and said, “See, honey. Here's a big strong policeman come to help us find your mama.”

“Hey, Remy,” he said, and then he saw the blood on her neck.

He tilted her chin up so that he could get a better look. Her attacker's fingernails had left bloody gouges as she'd twisted away from the grasp he'd had on her throat. The man's thumbs had left dark red blotches on the soft flesh beneath her chin. They'd be turning into bruises later.

Rourke's hands eased down onto her shoulders, and he pulled her against him until he could smell the sun's heat in her hair.

“Are you sure you're okay?”

Her hair brushed his cheek as she nodded. “I just feel so stupid now, for behaving like such a hysterical little ninny.”

“Jesus, baby. He tried to strangle you.”

“I don't think he was going to choke me dead, Day. He's still trying to scare me, and he was just upping the stakes.” She laughed, pushing a little away from him, and then coming right back into his arms. “I gave him a good ol' jab in the belly with my elbow, though. I hope it's aching now.”

“Jesus.” She was trying to sound so tough, but he'd heard the little catch in her voice. She'd been more frightened than she would ever let on.

After Rourke had reunited the lost little girl with her frantic mama, he had taken Remy to the Bearcat and driven deeper into the park, away from the bandstand and the dance marathon that had turned out to be more of an exploitation stunt than either of its sponsors had ever wanted. He'd pulled off the road again and parked beneath a couple of oaks, where once, almost a hundred years ago, Creole men had fought duels of honor in the dawn mist over women and cards.

Yellow light was splashing now through the moss-draped branches and onto her face. He smoothed a damp wisp of hair off her forehead with the backs of his knuckles. He, too, had been more frightened than he was letting on.

“You sure you didn't get any feel at all for who it was? Did you notice anybody familiar hanging around you right before it happened?”

She started to daub at the scratches on her neck with her fingers, and he gave her his handkerchief. “There were a lot of people, most of them running around like headless chickens,” she said. “But they were all strangers to me. And after I fought loose from him and turned around, I would swear there wasn't a soul behind me either. It was as if he'd just disappeared into the air.”

She made a sudden, jerky movement and turned into him, pressed into him hard, and as awkward as it was, with the gearshift sticking up between them, he pulled her even tighter to him, as if he would never let go. As if he were trying to disappear into her, or she would disappear into him.

He turned his head to rub his mouth in her hair.

“My big, strong policeman,” she said. “I'm sure not complaining that you're here, Day, but I don't think you came to watch me dance. It's something bad, isn't it?”

He told her about the girls. About Mary Lou Trescher and Nina Duboche and Mercedes Bloom, and what they all had in common.

By the time he was done, she was back in her own seat. The fitful wind, gone for most of the morning, had come back up. It lifted the moss on the branches of the oaks and ruffled the short shingled locks of her hair.

“I met her at the studio yesterday,” she said. “Mary Lou Trescher. She—” She pushed her fist against her lips and shut her eyes. “I was going to say she reminded me of myself…Oh, God, Day. I feel like it's all my fault. Do you think it's Romeo doing it? That he's warming up to killing me by killing them?”

“I don't know what to think. Except that whoever the killer is, he sure as hell isn't picking them at random.”

He took the photograph of the Fantastics out of his coat pocket and held it cupped in his hand. He rubbed his thumb over their faces, but he was seeing them dead.

And he was seeing someone else dead, too.

She stilled his restless hand with her own. “Titus Dupre,” she said, reading his thoughts.

“Yeah.”

“Day, it wasn't your—”

“Yes, it was.”

Rourke started up the car and pulled out from beneath the oaks and back onto the road. He drove in silence to his father-in-law's house and found Katie out by the swimming pool, sailing paper boats with her cousins. He told her he had to work a while longer and that she was going to be having Sunday supper with her nana and paw-paw. He hugged her tight, and she must have felt his need for comforting, because she hugged him back and said, “I love you, Daddy,” her breath soft and warm against his neck.

He crossed the Mississippi River by car ferry and drove, with Remy in the passenger seat next to him, through the wetlands and along the sugar country of the Bayou Lafourche. Getting away from New Orleans, away from himself and the image of Titus Dupre on fire and the guilt he felt over that. The guilt that was like a fist squeezing his heart.

Out here, the land and water were at war with each other, with the water mostly winning. Rows of sugarcane would lay claim for a while, only to give way to the swamp and cypress and saw grass.

It was the harvest season, but at some farms the cane was still uncut, growing thick and gold and purple in the fields. At others, they were already burning the stubble. The hundreds of small fires sent up plumes of gray-brown smoke to dirty the sky. Rourke sent the 'Cat's speedometer up well past eighty, until the needle was flirting with the red zone. The wind that pushed against their faces smelled of burnt sugar.

His gaze kept cutting back and forth between the oiled dirt road and the love of his life. She was watching the miles click away, not saying anything. It was Remy Lelourie all over, though, to go driving off into the wild blue yonder without the least idea or care of where they were going.

Since he knew her enough to know she would never ask, he told her. “Paris,” he said, only he pronounced it the way the little town's natives did:
Pa-ree,
like the song.

Her gaze remained on the road ahead, but a smile played over her mouth. “It's always been my heart's desire to go to Paris.”

They drove on in silence for a few more miles, and then from out of the corner of his eye, he saw her hand move. An instant later, he felt her touch his thigh. Felt her stroking his thigh, up and then down, up and then down, and with each upward stroke she got closer and closer to his cock, and his cock, having enough of a mind of its own to know what was coming, got hard.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “We got trouble.”

Her hand stroked up and down some more, stroked up again and then stayed there, her fingernails lightly grazing his erection through the soft gray flannel of his trousers, and he felt huge now against her hand.

“Big trouble,” she said.

“We, uh…we gotta…”

“Go to Paris.”

“…take care of something here.”

She gripped him, gave him a little squeeze.

“Jesus.” He groaned, shifting in his seat.

She took her hand away.

He looked over at her. She looked out the window and began to whistle.

“You tell her,” he drawled in his Irish Channel gangster accent. “You tell her that no dame plays Daman Rourke for a chump and gets away wid it.”

She laughed, and then her eyes went wide. “Day, watch out!”

Rourke slammed on the brakes and swerved, swinging wide into the oncoming lane, reacting before he was even sure what it was that he was trying to avoid hitting at eighty miles an hour with the Bearcat's precious chrome grille.

He had the impression of a big knobby head with bulging eyes and a lot of teeth, and he thought, 'Gator, out for a stroll across the goddamn road, just as a truck full of cows rounded a bend, heading right at them.

He whipped the wheel back again and floored the accelerator. The Bearcat's back end fishtailed violently, and then the front end hit gravel and the whole car slid sideways toward the deep ditch that lined the road and was filled with dust-coated four-o'clocks and stagnant water left over from last week's rain.

Rourke turned into the skid and for half an instant, he felt the right rear tire spin through air, and then the other three tires bit at the packed, oiled dirt, and the Bearcat pulled out of it and settled right down, going at a reasonable speed now, and on her own side of the road just as the truck rattled past them, its horn blowing, the cows mooing.

Remy, being Remy, had been laughing wildly the whole time, and when she got it back under control, she said, “Well, I guess that's one way of taking care of your big trouble without stopping the car.”

“Hell, baby,” Rourke said. “Who said it got taken care of? I'm still stiff as a pole down there,” and then he began to sing, “How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?…”

When they quieted back down again, he looked over at her, feeling wildly and hopelessly in love, and without thinking about it, just letting it happen, and for the second time that morning, he broke one of his cardinal rules: the rule that said he never talked about the job to anybody not on the job.

“That crucifixion killing that I'm working on,” he said. “The priest is supposed to have grown up in an orphanage in Paris, on the Bayou Lafourche.” And then he told her everything else that he knew about the case and Father Patrick Walsh—including that he was a she.

It was hard sometimes to get Remy to take things seriously. She carried her scars on the inside, buried deep, and then played at life to show the bastards how much she didn't care. So as he told her about the case, what surprised him, what he never expected, was how closely she listened, and the kind of questions she asked, and how she right off saw angles that he hadn't thought of yet.

“Something earth-shattering must have happened to Father Pat,” Rourke said, after they'd been working through it together for a while, sifting and hashing it out. “Something that sent him off down the road that eventually ended in that macaroni factory Friday night. Maybe whatever it was, happened, or at least got its start, in Paris, Louisiana.”

“Or maybe,” she said, “it happened in New Orleans an hour before he was crucified.”

Rourke grunted. “Yeah. Dammit…Still, you don't just wake up one day and decide you're going to cut your hair and bind your breasts and become a priest. You got to be
driven
into something like that. Or be pulled into it. And whatever is doing the driving or the pulling has to be powerful enough to make you willing to live every moment with that secret in your heart, and the fear that someday you could be found out.”

He hadn't been thinking of her when he'd said it, until the moment the words left his mouth. She went quiet beside him, and when he looked at her, he saw that her head was turned way from him, toward the burning cane fields.

“Remy…”

“You don't need to go to Paris to find out what it was like for her, Day; I can tell you. There were whole hours at a time when she forgot what she really was, but then something would happen, or somebody would say something, and the truth would come crashing in on her, making her feel afraid and sick clean through her soul and all the way down to the bone. Afraid and sick and ashamed, and hating herself so much for her shame—
especially
for her shame—that even the consequences of the truth coming out would seem preferable to the lie she was living.”

“I love you,” he said.