The White Road-CP-4 (44 page)

“But you’re not going to hand Melia over to them,” I said.

“No, I’m going to kill them.”

“Alone.”

His white teeth gleamed.

“No,” he said. “I told you. Not alone. Never alone.”

It was still as Poveda had described it after all these years. There was the broken fence that I had skirted days earlier and the pock-marked NO TRESPASSING sign. I could see the sinkholes, some of them small and masked by vegetation, others so large that whole trees had fallen into them. We had walked for about five minutes when I smelled an acrid chemical stink in the air that at first was merely unpleasant but, as we drew closer to the hole, began to scorch the nostrils and cause the eyes to water. Discarded trash lay unmoving upon the ground without a breeze to stir it, and the skeletons of decayed trees, their trunks gray and lifeless, stretched thin shadows across the limestone. The hole itself was about twenty feet in circumference, and so deep that its base was lost in darkness. Roots and grasses overhung the verge, trailing down into the shadows. Two men stood at the far side of the hole, looking down into its depths. One was Earl Jr. The second man was Kittim. He was without his trademark shades now that it was growing dark and he was the first to sense our approach. His face remained blank even as we stood and faced them across the expanse of the pit, Kittim’s eyes briefly resting on me before he gave his full attention to Tereus.

“Do you recognize him?” he asked Earl Jr.

Earl Jr. shook his head. Kittim seemed dissatisfied with the answer, with the fact that he did not have the information he required to make an accurate assessment of the situation.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Tereus.”

“Did you kill Marianne Larousse?”

“No, I did not. I killed the others, and I watched Foster attach a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car and feed it in through his window. But I didn’t kill the Larousse girl.”

“Then who did?”

She was nearby. I knew she was. I could feel her. It seemed to me that Larousse did too, because I watched his head flick back suddenly like a startled deer, his eyes roving across the trees, looking for the source of his unease.

“I asked you a question,” Kittim persisted. “Who killed her?”

Three armed men emerged from the trees at either side of us. Instantly Tereus dropped his gun to the ground and I knew that he had never planned to walk away from this. Two of the men beside us I did not recognize.

The third was Elliot Norton.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me, Charlie,” he said.

“It takes a lot to surprise me, Elliot.”

“Even the return of an old friend from the dead?”

“I have a feeling you’ll be making a more permanent return in the near future.” I was too tired even to show my anger. “The blood in the car was a nice touch. How were you going to explain your resurrection? A miracle?”

“We were under threat from some crazy Negro, so I did what I had to do to hide myself. What are they going to charge me with? Wasting police time? False suicide?”

“You killed, Elliot. You led people to their deaths. You bailed Atys just so your friends could torture him and find out what he knew.”

He shrugged. “Your fault, Charlie. If you’d been better at your job and got him to tell all, he might still be alive.”

I winced. He’d struck close to the bone, but I wasn’t going to bear the responsibility for Atys Jones’s death alone.

“And the Singletons. What did you do, Elliot? Sit with them in the kitchen drinking their lemonade, waiting for your friends to come and kill them while the only person who could have protected them was in the shower? The old man said it was a changeling that attacked them, and the police thought that he was talking about Atys until he turned up tortured to death, but it was you. You were the changeling. Look at what they’ve reduced you to, Elliot, what you’ve reduced yourself to. Look at what you’ve become.”

Elliot shrugged. “I had no choice. Mobley told Bowen everything, once when he was drunk. Landron never admitted it, but it was him. So Bowen had something on all of us and he used it to make me bring you down here. But by then all of this”—he made an all-encompassing gesture with his free hand, taking in the hole, the swamp, dead men, and the memory of raped girls—

“had started happening, so we used you. You’re good, Charlie, I’ll give you that. In a way, you’ve brought us all to this point. You should go to your grave a satisfied man.”

“Enough.” It was Kittim. “Make the Negro tell us what he knows and we can finish this for good.”

Elliot raised his gun, pointing it first at Tereus, then at me.

“You shouldn’t have come to the swamp alone, Charlie.”

I smiled at him.

“I didn’t.”

The bullet hit him on the bridge of the nose and knocked his head back so hard I could hear the vertebrae in his neck crack. The men at either side of him barely had a chance to react before they too fell. Larousse stood confused and then Kittim was raising his weapon and I felt Tereus push me to the ground. There were shots, and warm blood splashed my face. I looked up to catch the look of surprise in Tereus’s eyes before he tumbled into the pit and landed with a splash in the water far below.

I picked up his fallen revolver and ran for the woods, expecting to feel one of Kittim’s shots tear into me at any moment, but he was already fleeing. I caught a glimpse of Larousse disappearing into the trees, and then he also disappeared from sight.

But only for a moment.

He reemerged seconds later, backing slowly away from something in the trees. I saw her moving toward him, draped in the light material, the only cloth that she could wear without paining her ruined body. Her head was uncovered. The skull was hairless, the features beneath it melting into one another, a blur of disfigurement and remembered beauty. Only her eyes appeared intact, glittering beneath her swollen eyelids. She extended a hand to Larousse and there was almost a tenderness to the gesture, like a rejected lover reaching out one last time to the man who had turned his back upon her. Larousse released a small cry then struck out at her arm, breaking the skin. Instinctively, he rubbed his hand with disgust against his jacket, then moved quickly to his right in an effort to get by her and make for the safety of the forest. Louis stepped from the shadows and pointed his gun at Larousse’s face.

“Now where you goin’?” he asked.

He stopped, caught between the woman and the gun.

Then she sprang at him, the force of her propelling them both backward, and she wrapped herself around him as they fell, he screaming, she silent, into the black water below. For a moment, I thought I saw a whiteness spread upon the surface, and then they were gone.
26

W E WALKED BACK to Louis’s car, but could find no trace of Kittim along the way.

“You understand now?” asked Louis. “You understand why we can’t let them go, can’t let none of them go?”

I nodded.

“The bail hearing is in three day’s time,” he said. “The preacher’s gonna walk, and then none of us will be safe again.”

“I’m in,” I said.

“You sure?”

I barely paused.

“I’m sure. What about Kittim?”

“What about him?”

“He got away.”

Louis almost smiled.

“Did he?”

Kittim drove at speed into the Blue Ridge, arriving at his destination in the early hours. There would be other chances for him, other opportunities. For the present, it was time to rest up and wait for the preacher to be brought to safety. After that, there would be a new momentum achieved.

He pulled into the clearing before the cabin, then walked to the door and unlocked it. The moonlight streamed through the windows, illuminating the cheap furniture, the unadorned walls. It shone too on the man who sat facing the door, and on the silenced pistol in his hand. He wore sneakers and faded jeans, and a loud silk shirt that he’d bought at final markdown in Filene’s Basement. His face was unshaven and very pale. He didn’t even blink as the shot hit Kittim in the belly. Kittim fell and tried to wrench his gun from his belt, but the man was already upon him. His gun dug into Kittim’s right temple as Kittim eased his hand away from his belt and his weapon was taken from him.

“Who are you?” he shouted. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m an angel,” said the man. “What the fuck are you?”

Now there were other figures around him. Kittim’s hands were pulled behind his back and cuffed before he was turned onto his back to face his captors: the small man in the mismatched shirt, two younger men armed with pistols who came in from the yard, and an older man who emerged from the shadows at the back of Kittim’s cabin.

“Kittim,” said Epstein, as he examined the man on the ground. “An unusual name, a scholarly name.”

Kittim did not move. There was a watchfulness about him now, despite the agony of his wound. He kept his eyes fixed on the older man.

“I recall that the Kittim were the tribe destined to lead the final assault against the sons of light, the earthly agents of the powers of darkness,” continued Epstein. He leaned forward, so close that he could smell the breath of the injured man. “You should have read your scrolls more closely, my friend: they tell us that the dominion of the Kittim is short-lived, and for the sons of darkness there shall be no escape.”

Epstein’s hands had been clasped behind his back. Now they emerged, and the light caught the metal case in their grasp.

“We have questions for you,” said Epstein, removing the syringe and sending a jet of clear liquid into the air. The needle descended toward Kittim, as the thing that lived inside him began the fruitless struggle to escape its host.

I left Charleston late the following evening. I told the SLED agents in Columbia, Adams and Addams beside them in the interview room, almost everything that I knew, lying only to leave out the involvement of Louis and the part I had played in the deaths of the two men in Congaree. Tereus had disposed of their bodies while I was tied up in his shack, and the swamp had a long history of swallowing up the remains of the dead. They would not be found. As for those who had been killed by the old sinkhole, I lied and said that they had died at the hands of Tereus and the woman, taken by surprise before they even had a chance to react. Tereus’s body had floated to the surface, but there was no sign as yet of the woman or Earl Jr. As I sat in the interrogation room, I saw them falling once again, disappearing into the dark pool, sinking, the woman dragging the man down with her into the streams that lay beneath the stone, holding him until he drowned, the two united unto death and beyond. At the Charleston airport terminal, a limousine waited, the tinted windows up so that no one could see the occupants. As I walked to the doorway, my baggage in my hand, one window rolled slowly down and Earl Larousse looked at me, waiting for me to approach.

“My son,” he said.

“Dead, like I told the police.”

His lips trembled, and he blinked away tears. I felt nothing for him.

“You knew,” I said. “You must have known all along what your son did. When he came home that night, covered in her blood, didn’t he tell you everything that he had done? Didn’t he beg for your help? And you gave it to him, to save him and to save your family name, and you held on to that piece of worthless land in the hope that what had happened there would remain hidden. But then Bowen came along and got his hooks into you, and suddenly you weren’t in control anymore. His people were in your house, and my guess is he was bleeding you for money. How much did you give him, Mr. Larousse? Enough to bail Faulkner, and then some?”

He didn’t look at me. Instead, he retreated into the past, descending into the grief and madness that would finally consume him.

“We were like royalty in this city,” he whispered. “We’ve been here since its birth. We are part of its history, and our name has lived for centuries.”

“Your name is going to die with you now, and they can bury your history with you.”

I walked away. When I reached the doors the car was no longer reflected in the glass.

And in a shack on the outskirts of Caina, Georgia, Virgil Gossard awoke to a feeling of pressure on his lips. He opened his eyes as the gun forced itself into his mouth. The figure before him was dressed entirely in black, its face concealed beneath a ski mask.

“Up,” it said, and Virgil recognized the voice from the night at Little Tom’s. His hair was gripped and he was dragged from his bed, the gun trailing spittle and blood as it was pulled from his mouth. Virgil, wearing only his tattered briefs, was pushed toward the kitchen of his pitiful home, and the back door leading to the fields beyond.

“Open it.”

Virgil began to cry.

“Open it!”

He opened the door and a hand at his back forced him out into the night. Barefoot, he walked through the yard, feeling the coldness of the ground beneath his feet, the long blades of overgrown grass slicing at his skin. He could hear the man breathing behind him as he walked toward the woods at the verge of his land. A low wall, barely three bricks high, came into view. A sheet of corrugated iron had been laid across it. It was the old well.

“Take the cover off.”

Virgil shook his head. “No, don’t,” he said. “Please.”

“Do it!”

Virgil squatted down and dragged the sheet away, exposing the hole beneath.

“Kneel down on the wall.”

Virgil’s face was contorted with fear and the force of his tears. He could taste snot and salt in his mouth as he eased himself down and stared into the darkness of the well.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry.”

He felt the pressure of the gun in the hollow at the base of his skull.

“What did you see?” said the man.

“I saw a man,” said Virgil. He was beyond lying now. “I looked up, I saw a man, a black man. There was another man with him. He was white. I didn’t get a good look at him. I shouldn’t have looked. I shouldn’t have looked.”

“What did you see?”

“I told you. I saw—”

The gun cocked.

“What did you see?”

And Virgil at last understood.