Cross Current (25 page)

“Who?”

“
Le Capitaine
.” She turned her head to stare out into the night as the light turned green.

XVIII

As I pulled the Jeep into Jeannie’s yard, I cursed at the sight of the white Suburban with the green lettering. I checked my watch, then winced. It was after ten. I didn’t want to give Rusty Elliot any reason to think I wasn’t taking care of Solange properly, any reason for him to take her away. How the hell was I going to explain bringing her home in a dress splattered with blood?

Racine had handed me a plastic bag with Solange’s shorts and T-shirt as we had passed through the house on our way out, and now I dug around in the back of the Jeep to find them. I figured I would change her clothes before taking her upstairs. It wasn’t only that Rusty was here; Jeannie hadn’t been all that thrilled at my taking the child off to that Voodoo house at night, either. She’d go ballistic, too, if she saw her now.

As I helped Solange unbuckle her seat belt, the porch light went on upstairs, and Jeannie appeared on the landing. “Hey, you. What took you so long? I’ve been trying to entertain Mr. Wonderful up here for a couple of hours now, and he’s been getting more and more charming by the minute. Get yourself and that kid up here.”

Damn. My chance to cover up the evidence had just evaporated. “Okay, we’re coming.”

Rusty came through the door just as we reached the top of the landing. I saw something in the way his face lit up when he saw me that told me he hadn’t come only on business. I was sorry that I was going to disappoint him.

In his green work uniform, with its patches and badges, leather belt and gun, he looked more intimidating than he had in his shorts. This was not a man to play around with.

He looked at Solange. “What the hell happened to this child?” he asked.

She was walking on her own, awake and alert, but in the bright glare of Jeannie’s porch light, it was clear her white dress had red polka dots.

“Calm down,” I said, and as I said it, I couldn’t help but think that those were the exact words Racine had told me less than an hour earlier. “Look at her.” Solange smiled up at me. “See?” I pointed to her smile. “It worked, so don’t gripe.” I smoothed her loose clean hair back from her brow, tucked it into her white headscarf. “And as far as I know, they’re going to eat the chicken.” Rusty’s jaw dropped.

Jeannie pushed Rusty out of the doorway and stood on the landing with her hands on her hips. “What chicken?”

I ignored her, tried to act like it was perfectly normal to come home after ten o’clock at night with a ten-year-old covered in chicken blood. “It’s not really that different from your going to Winn Dixie, when you think about it, except when you buy the chicken there, you don’t risk getting the blood on you.” Rusty hadn’t moved, he just continued to stare at me. Finally he said, “You took this child to some kind of animal sacrifice?”

“Well—”

Jeannie shook her head, took the girl’s hand, and said, “I’ll go wash her up and get her into some clean pajamas.” She fixed me with a stare over the top of Solange’s head and said in a soft voice, “You and I will discuss this later.”

“You didn’t answer me, Miss Sullivan,” Rusty said when Jeannie had disappeared through the door and down the hall. “Did you or did you not take that child to a place where they were engaged in animal sacrifice?”

“Oh Rusty, yes. Yes, I did. Okay? This is South Florida, though. Come on. You’d have a right to be that shocked in Omaha or Wisconsin or somewhere, but not here.”

“She’s got blood on her!” he yelled.

“And she’s
Haitian
,” I yelled back. “For Pete’s sake, man, down in Miami they’ve got a guy at the courthouse whose job it is to go out and pick the dead chickens up off the sidewalk every morning. Family members leave them when the prisoners are transferred from jail to court. Wake up, man. You’re not in Kansas anymore.”

He crossed his arms, his lips stretched thin. He stared at me for several seconds, letting the silence stretch out. “Are you finished?”

“Yeah, for now.” I stepped around him and walked into Jeannie’s living room.

Rusty followed me. “Seychelle, you don’t seem to understand that I am stretching the regulations very thin even to allow this child to stay in this home.” He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “What were you thinking?”

“You are so out of your element on this one, Rusty. Hell, we both are.” I spun away, out of range of his touch. “I’m not sure you and I have an explanation for what happened to her at the hospital the other night or out at Mambo Racine’s tonight. But didn’t you hear what I said? It worked. She’s talking again. And one thing I do know is that those people were not faking it. What I saw tonight—” I paused, not knowing how to explain it to him, how to give it the reality and the dignity I had seen. “Rusty, they believed completely. I’m not sure I'm ready to believe they were possessed by spirits, but it sure as hell was every bit as real as what your cousins up in the Georgia mountains do when they handle snakes and speak in tongues.” I crossed the living room and plopped down on the couch, leaned back, and closed my eyes. “Man, am I tired.” My stomach gurgled, and I pulled my arm across my belly to try to muffle the sound. “And starving. Haven’t eaten anything since about noon.”

Rusty walked over to the front door, crossed his arms again, leaned against the doorjamb, and stared out into the yard.

Jeannie had one of those couches with tons of throw pillows and cushions, and the cushions seemed to be pulling me down, relaxing me. I’d just about nodded off when I heard Rusty say something.

“What?”

“They’ll still be serving over at the Downtowner. Do you want to go over and grab a bite? I’ll buy if you’ll stop yelling at me and tell me what’s really going on with this kid.”

I opened one eye and looked up at him. I wasn’t thrilled about being seen with him in that uniform. Could scare off some of my clients who sometimes tread lightly on the wrong side of the law. But I was starving. “Conch fritters and fries?”

He lifted his cell phone off his belt and dialed a number. “Hi, it’s Rusty. Think you could pick me up at Cooley’s Landing in about ten?... Thanks.” He put away the cell phone, then reached for my hand to pull me up off the deep couch. “Let’s go. The Water Taxi’ll pick us up at the marina.”

I took his hand but let my body remain a dead weight. He had to strain to lift me up from those deep cushions.

“Man, you are heavy, Sullivan.”

“Wimp,” I said, and smiled as he pulled me to my feet, and I bumped into his left side, where the cold steel of his gun brushed against my arm. “Seeing as you are wearing a gun, however, I guess it’s Mr. Wimp.”

“Damn right.”

I stopped briefly to tuck Solange in like my mother used to do for me and wondered, as I kissed her forehead, why I was flirting with Rusty. As I passed by the master bedroom, I told Jeannie we’d be gone for about an hour.

Rusty came down the hall and motioned to me with a “let’s go” signal. I turned back to Jeannie.

“Thanks again, Jeannie. I know she’s better off with you than anywhere
he
wants to send her.” I cocked my head in Rusty’s direction.

“So I’m the bad guy, eh?” Rusty said over my shoulder.

“Yes,” Jeannie said. “Get over it.”

“Jeannie,” I said, “I’ve got a connection to the
Miss Agnes
from my visit to Pompano tonight. I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”

“Sounds good. Animal sacrifice, Voodoo, secret meetings. I can’t wait.” She winked.

The walk to Cooley’s Landing Marina was only about three blocks, but being tired, I began to wish we’d taken the car. The Downtowner was on the other side of the river, and they had a large parking lot, so the car would have been easy. I feared we’d have a long wait for a Water Taxi.

Rusty sensed that I was not in a talkative mood. The streets were dark under the heavy canopy of old trees that covered most of Sailboat Bend.

“Over there,” Rusty said when we reached the marina parking lot, and he pointed to the boat idling at the dock next to the launch ramp. There were no other passengers aboard. “Hey, Carlos,” he said to the captain, a kid about twenty years old. “Thanks for the lift. This is Seychelle Sullivan.”

“Sullivan Towing?
Gorda
?"

I nodded.

“Thought I recognized you. Seen you go by on your boat a lot.”

“Carlos’s dad works with me at the Border Patrol.” He clapped his hand on the young man’s back. “We’ve been fishing together since this guy was in diapers.”

I leaned back and watched the lights of the parks and businesses downtown as we motored downriver. Too often lately, the river became just the place where I worked. It was pleasant being a passenger for a change, enjoying the view without worrying about bridges or currents or traffic.

The restaurant and bar were nearly empty inside. I waved hello to Pete behind the bar and his one customer, Nestor, a charter-boat captain. Pete raised his eyebrows at me when he saw I was with a guy wearing a gun.

“You want to sit outside?” I asked Rusty. The privacy of it would make it much easier to tell him about the evening’s events—the story still sounded weird even to me—and more difficult for the guys inside to eavesdrop.

I waited until the server had taken our orders and brought us our cold draft beer.

“So tomorrow I’ll go see this friend of Juliette’s at the Swap Shop. I’m fairly certain that this girl actually came over on the
Miss Agnes
."

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to get involved like this. You should leave this to the professionals. We could round up the people who work in this Swap Shop booth and question them all.”

“Come on, Rusty. From the first minute I saw that kid’s face, I’ve been involved. Do you really think these Haitians are going to say anything to Immigration? In their eyes, you guys are worse than the smugglers—even if the smugglers are bashing in a few heads.”

He took a long swig from his beer, then reached for my hand. “I worry about you. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“That’s nice, but I’m just meeting a kid at the Swap Shop—one of the most populated tourist attractions around here. I’m not walking into some den of bad guys. Not this time.”

He shot me a questioning look, and I hurriedly changed the subject. “On the way home tonight, Solange said she saw ‘Le Capitaine’ at the Toussaint house. The guy on the boat that brought her here. He must have been the guy who knocked me down running out of the altar room. I didn’t get a good enough look at his face to say whether or not he’s the same guy who was in her hospital room, but the height, build, and facial hair were about right. And I remember seeing rings, several of them on the left hand, both times.” I thought about mentioning the skull and crossbones on the sunglasses I had found on board the
Miss Agnes
but thought better of it. I didn’t want to be accused of tampering with evidence. “It’s got to be the same guy, but I don’t know that I could pick him out of a lineup.”

“Here’s a question,” Rusty said, and he hitched forward in his chair, now grasping my hand in both of his. “What was he trying to do to her tonight, and why didn’t he succeed?”

“I assume he was going to shut her up—permanently,” I said. “As to why he didn’t succeed, well, according to Racine Toussaint, he couldn’t do it because the
lwa
protected her. Racine wanted me to leave her there overnight. She said it was the only place Solange would be safe.” With my free hand, I fingered the pouch Racine had given me that I had tucked inside my T-shirt.

“I’m sorry, Seychelle, but that’s bullshit. I hope you don’t believe that.”

I pulled my hand back out of his grasp and finished off the last of my beer, feeling light-headed and confused from the combination of beer, exhaustion, and an empty stomach. “You know, Rusty, I don’t know what to believe.” Looking around me, at the glamorous yachts docked along the river, and above me at the blue and white lights of the downtown highrises, I found it hard to believe what I had seen in that yard in Pompano just hours before. “I’m not going to just dismiss this as hocus-pocus, though. I can’t. I was there and something very powerful was going on,” I said. “Just because we don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.” 

“You’re more open-minded than I am.”

“Trust me, open-mindedness doesn’t come all that easily to me. I’m having to work at it. This guy, though, this
Capitaine
, he scares me. He’s so persistent in going after this kid.” I leaned forward and put my arms on the table. “Let’s just say Solange did see him kill that woman. What can she do to him? She doesn’t know his name. She can’t do anything except maybe pick him out of a lineup. So what’s he doing still hanging around here? Why hasn’t he gone back to the Bahamas? And here’s another thing: If we assume that this guy is the one who killed the other three, then there have been witnesses before, and there are probably more witnesses among the people who came on the
Miss Agnes
. What makes this kid different?”

“You’re right. And I don’t buy that business about some kind of spirits protecting the kid. He had the chance to kill her tonight, and he didn’t. That means he didn’t intend to. So what does he want with her?”

The waitress brought our food then, and I didn’t say another word as I filled my mouth with conch fritters. The ground conch was sweet and chewy and drowned in fresh lime juice. Rusty had ordered chicken wings, and I found I was unable to look at his plate without my stomach twisting in a little queasy twinge. It might be a while before I felt like eating chicken again.

“I hate all this,” Rusty said, pointing a chicken bone at the brightly lit buildings across the river from us. “Look at that skyline. Have you counted the construction cranes lately? Seven. I counted seven the other day. What are they doing to our town? Remember what it was like when we were kids?” 

I smiled. “‘Course I do. But I also remember when downtown was dead, the storefronts were mostly empty, and there were homeless guys wandering all around here. There was good and bad in those good old days.”