Any Minute Now (31 page)

She burst out of the hallway and into the spotlights of the living room, and the moment she did so she knew she was a dead woman because the man standing over Sydny was Luther St. Vincent, head of NSA Directorate N, and his head came up, he saw her, and Julie knew it was the end. He knew how to use a handgun; he was trained. What did she have except scenes of Olivia Benson flying through her head like clouds ahead of an oncoming storm?

 

31

“You were once Whitman's property, his fuck-mama,” St. Vincent said as he stood over the female body. “Now you're nothing but a bloody piece of meat. Think he'll like what he sees?”

Between his spread legs, Sydny, curled on her side in a fetal position, moaned.

“Still trying to talk?” He bent over her. “But you can't. You're a thing, and things can't talk. They can only spread their legs, suck cock, immerse themselves in the basest perversions.” He bent lower. “You disgust me. People like you belong in the gutter to waste away. I'm here to accelerate the process.”

He was about to grab her ankle, when movement at the periphery of his vision caused him to stand up straight. Someone else in the apartment? But the bedroom had been dark, giving him the impression that Sydny was alone.

And then whatever it was appeared framed by the doorway to the hall. He was in the process of lifting his arm to shoot first, ask questions never, when he caught sight of the head, appearing out of the deep shadows. Except that it seemed to keep the shadows with it. Lamplight spun off the shiny black skin, the horns. The metallic glint of the three zippers completed the picture of a monster, not a human being. Into his mind shot a memory of Desmortiers's hovel, of his mother's palpable fear, of the wolf spread across the shack's rear wall like the bat wings of Cthulhu.

And so, with the handgun halfway lifted toward the fetish image come to life, he froze. He could not believe his eyes, he was unnerved, and because of that the fetish had just enough time to shoot him.

He spun around, clutching his right shoulder. He tried to lift his right arm to shoot it, but couldn't. As he was clumsily trying to transfer the weapon to his bloody left hand, the fetish fired again, this time wildly.

It didn't matter; he was undone. In shock and pain, he ran out of the apartment, along the hallway, down the fire stairs. Away from the fetish; away from what he had done; away from what was happening in that hellhole of an apartment.

*   *   *

Julie, her courage unwinding with the flow of adrenaline in her system, ran to the front door, slammed it shut, and double-locked it, because the doorknob and latch were shattered. Then she ran back, knelt beside Sydny, pulled her head into her lap. With a supreme effort she pulled the hood off her head, threw it under the sofa

“Sydny,” she crooned as she wiped her sweat-streaked face with her forearm. “Sydny, what did he do to you?”

Sydny's lips moved, but she was unable to speak. Julie brought out her mobile, called 911, gave their address, then she turned back to her friend.

“What? What is it?” She saw the mass of blood on one side of Sydny's abdomen, another in her chest, and she began to weep. “Oh, dear god.” Shucking off her top, she pressed it against the abdominal wound, keeping one hand there.

Through her tears she saw Sydny making a supreme effort to speak. Julie bent over her, ear to Sydny's lips.

“Kitten, did … Did you see?”

“See what?” Julie said without changing her position.

“Man…”

“I saw his face, I know who he is. I'll hunt him down, Sydny.”

“No! Tell Whit. He'll—”

“Whitman isn't here. I don't know where he is. I'll take—” Julie pulled back as she felt Sydny's body heave against her. “Don't move! For the love of god, stay still!”

Her mind was racing. She had to tell someone, but who? Not the capital cops. God, no. This had to be kept strictly internal. She wished Whitman were in D.C. Who could she turn to but her boss? The trouble was she didn't trust Hemingway, not completely anyway.

“Oh, Sydny, I'm so…” But her words trailed off.

“Kitten…” Sydny's eyes were looking at her but they weren't seeing her. The pupils were fixed and staring. Her breathing had ceased.

“So sorry.”

She rocked Sydny back and forth in her lap, then threw her head back and, inconsolable, screamed. It was the howl of a wolf in torment.

 

PART THREE

THE WELL

[Alchemy] is like unto death, which separates the eternal from the mortal, so that it should properly be known as the death of things.

—Paracelsus

 

32

The Well had been built in the shape of an inverted bell. It was sunk deep into the earth like a mine shaft. It was both sacred and profane: a place of blood sacrifices and the home of unknown gods, terrifying in their different guises. The gods were Monroe, St. Vincent, and his handpicked cadre of behavioral scientists, forensic psychiatrists, as well as experts in the art of persuasion. The blood sacrifices were the ones who never made it out of the Well, the terrorists captured, renditioned in blood-soaked fury, then disappeared. Interrogators were gods. Though their dominion was tiny, they were, in their way, very real masters of life and death.

None of this history Monroe told to Lucy as he guided her from room to room. Actually, “room” did not come close to describing the spaces inside the Well, which were designed to instill in the “visitor” a violent dislocation, disorientation, and, finally, vertigo, destroying the “visitor's” equilibrium. The impossibly high metal walls leaned in or out, or both, with no logic or adherence to the tenets of architectural integrity. The curved spaces abruptly gave way to walls angled sometimes less than ninety degrees, sometimes more, never squared off. It was not only their vertiginous dimensions, but also the distinctive fug of the spaces, comprised of paranoia, despair, and terror. Though these viciously elicited emotions did not have scents per se, Lucy was well enough acquainted with all three to detect their presence in every square inch of the Well. Monroe led her like a docent at a museum, through spaces long and narrow, elliptical and triangular, all with floors that tilted one way or another. Their footsteps fell like hammers on an anvil, with dull, metallic echoes.

At last, they came to the waterfall, and stood before it. Lucy was silent, looking at the glittery glyph carved into the stone wall, visible now and again through the cascade of water.

“This is the Well,” Monroe said.

“Or as the Maya called it, a
cenote
. It's where they disposed of the bodies of their sacrificial victims. The one at Chichen Itza is known as the Well of Souls.” Lucy glanced down. “You built this?”

“No, it was here, it's natural. We built the Well around it.”

“Limestone. Probably been here for ages.” She craned her neck. “Like all
cenotes
this one seems very deep.”

“I understand you have a facility for killing.” Monroe said this as if he were pointing out a favorite sculpture of his.

Lucy looked up, glanced at him speculatively. “Is killing what's required of me?”

Monroe nodded. “It may be. On occasion.” He eyed her. “Will that be a problem?”

“Hardly,” she said. “I've been aching to get my hands wet.”

“Grudges to settle.”

“Exactly.”

Monroe grinned. “A woman after my own heart. What do you drink?”

“Tequila, mezcal. Period.”

“Beautiful.” He put a hand lightly at the small of her back. “I know just the place.”

“It had better be authentic.”

“Huh,” Monroe said, leading her out through the maze of spaces. “I think they grow their own worms.”

*   *   *

Flix was lost. He felt himself tossed in a bloated bag of water, blood, and bone. He was everywhere and nowhere. He was falling, flailing, failing even to remember who he was or had been.

Dimly, he was aware of Whitman crouched beside him, Charlie flitting in and out, there, not there, back again, like the shadow of death he had often dreamed about when he was a boy. That shadow was now more real to him than the human figures around him, his memory of it more real than the fog of the present. Time seemed as elusive as water, moving forward, then flowing backward, repeating patterns that should have had meaning for him, but were as inscrutable as starshine.

Only the shadow, eyes in a hidden face staring at him as if they could see straight through to the core of him, as if the shadow wanted to feed off his brain, as if it wanted nothing but him. And as if the shadow was some terrible harbinger, his chaotic mind was suddenly filled with the child Lucy, the nights when his sister must have tucked her into bed, when she had looked up at Marilena with those huge coffee-colored eyes, asking for something Marilena could not give her. His shame took the form of the shadow, silently laughing, as if it wanted to tell the world his secret longing. And then his shame was crowded out by the monsters of
The Odyssey
: Medusa, the Cyclops, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the Chimera, and, finally, the Lotus Eaters, where, he imaged, Lucy had run off to find—what exactly? Lost. She had been lost to him, and who knew what horrors she had been witness to during her long exile?

A wallop like a bolt of lightning rent the skies of his memory-clogged mind. He felt something palpating the back of his skull, the nape of his neck. Then everything lit up as if he were on the Vegas strip when, at day's death, all the neon signs pop on at once, obliterating night by creating a blinding, unnatural day.

*   *   *

“I hadn't meant to go there,” Lucy said. “In fact, it was almost the last place on earth I'd intended to end up in.”

“The bayous of Louisiana can be a dangerous place.”

Monroe sat back as their mezcal was served, along with the fiery Mexican food Lucy had ordered. They were sitting at a wooden table painted with scenes from typical Mexican peasant life, at Cantina No Sé, heavy on the dark wood and the primitive painting, but 100 percent authentic.

“How did you wind up there?” Monroe asked.

“To be honest, I have no idea. I fell in with a group of meth heads. They had a van. One night I woke up in the bayous.” She downed her mezcal in one gulp, then looked at Monroe. “That carving in the wall behind the waterfall—the triangle with the tail.”

“That's an alchemical symbol for sulfur. Why do you ask?”

Lucy shrugged. “No reason. I thought I'd seen something like that before.”

“Unless you were studying alchemy, that's highly unlikely.”

She picked up a wedge of lime, squeezed the juice onto her food, then popped it into her mouth, chewed reflectively for a moment. Spitting out what was left of the lime, she said, “The image I saw was voodoo—at least that's what the locals claimed. I saw it first carved into a tree, then, later, painted on the side of a church that had been deserted by its flock. Others had moved in. At midnight it was lit up by flares and torches. I didn't see the inside, at least not then, but I watched the people as they filtered through the brush to get to it. Ugly folk, sick-looking.”

“You mean the halt and the lame. A preacher inside claimed to be a faith healer.”

Lucy shook her head. “I mean sick inside—like they saw the world differently than you or me.”

“How in the world could you know that?”

“The people I shared a van with. They had that same look. Sick as rats been fed poison.”

Monroe looked disconcerted. “You must be wrong about the sigil. I don't see how it would show up in the Louisiana bayous.”

Lucy fell silent for so long Monroe called for more mezcal, watched her down it in one gulp all over again, and asked for the bottle to stay with them. This time, he leaned over, refilled her glass himself. Then he took a sip. Their food was growing cold.

“Lucy,” he said softly, “something's clearly on your mind.”

Her eyes rose to the level of his. For a moment they were out of focus. Her thoughts seemed to be locked in an incident in the past. “I was lost for some time.”

He nodded. “Luther told me a bit of that. As much as he knew, I suppose, which wasn't much.”

“No one knows,” Lucy whispered. “No one knows.”

Monroe waited, then decided to take another tack. “I'm known as Monroe, but you can call me—”

“Mr. Tibbs.”

He threw his head back and laughed. “You do have a wicked sense of humor, my dear. But, no. My name is Albin White. I'd be pleased if you called me Albin.”

She cocked her head. “Albin. I like that.”

“Lucy,” he said softly, “tell me what happened to you.”

“Why should I?” She said this not defiantly, not defensively, but out of genuine curiosity.

“Because,” White said, “I suspect the moral of that particular story will explain why you're so eager to kill.”

Lucy appeared to think about this for some time, then she nodded, as if to herself. “A week or so after I arrived in the bayous, a man found me down the road from one of the bars I was hanging out in at night. He had so much hair on his face I could barely see his features. I wasn't interested in him, and I told him so. He only grinned like a moron—grinned because at that moment two of his friends came up behind me and grabbed my arms. When I struggled, the hairy man punched me in the jaw. I stopped after that. I was crying so hard I had no strength left, anyway.”

She paused, staring down at her drink, as if trying to find her reflection there. “They carried me, as if I were a sack of grain. I had a flash of the church, the triangle with its curled little pig's tail painted on the side. Inside someone had made it into a living thing, a sculpture in rusted iron. In front of it was—well, a kind of altar, I guess. They stripped me to the bare skin, and raped me.”