Full MoonCity (28 page)

“What happened to your friend?” John asked her. He had an accent she couldn’t place.

She faced him, stared into nearly golden irises. Something in his gaze closed around her like a steel trap, pinning her. The moment passed, and she threw off a shiver, blinked, and took a step back. Instead of answering, she found herself telling him, “You’ll be joining us on the bus.”

“Yes,” he answered, “of course.”

The transfer of hostages went smoothly. Svekis could appreciate that they’d given this a lot of thought.

The robbers split the hostages into two groups. The only one left behind was the guard, trussed up in the vault. Everybody got a Halloween mask, and each group was bound by a clothesline rope looped around their wrists and held by the robber in the middle of the group. The groups shuffled out to the bus like two bent, ungainly centipedes. They clambered up the steps and past the driver-no doubt a cop-and through a privacy curtain into the back. Wonder Woman told the driver to turn off the interior lights. Then she assigned everybody their seats. She put Svekis at the back.

Hockey Mask, meanwhile, had pulled out a knife and was cutting the rope between the rows and using each length to tie the duos together. He pushed their masks up, too, to make it harder for them to see, but Svekis couldn’t tell if that actually had a purpose or if he just enjoyed it.

The woman returned to the front and sat down behind the driver and quietly gave him orders.

The bus lurched into gear.

She got up and walked up the aisle again. A speaker crackled to life. The woman counted off the rows as she passed them, touching the people in the aisle seats as she said their number. She came to Svekis as she said, “Eleven.” Then she passed him and said, “Twelve.” Turning back, she headed toward the front again, passing her partner as he finished tying up their hands. Her voice blared like that of a tour guide. “You all sit in your seats, and when you’re told to get off-when I call your number-you get up and get out. The bus will slow down enough for you to jump, but we’re not stopping. So try not to break something. What you do after you get out, I don’t care, but if you want to live, you’ll follow my orders. I told you your numbers. You don’t get up unless you’re called.”

The bus rolled along through the city. After ten minutes the speaker crackled again and she called out, “Three!” Two people scrambled up and ran clumsily, strung together, to the front of the bus. He heard her say to the driver, “Just slow enough that they can jump.” Svekis looked out the window. The area was deserted, full of warehouses. It would be a while before they found anyone to help them. Alternatively, they might be mugged. He sat back and waited his turn.

The bus rolled along out of the city proper and toward the western suburbs. They entered an area of tenement rowhouses, and two more were let go.

Hockey Mask had passed by him after tying his hands, and now Wonder Woman followed into the very back of the bus. He listened to the rustle of her clothes, to the sound of a zipper, to other noises. He had a good idea what they were up to.

The speaker crackled again, and the woman called out, “Twelve. Get up, get out. Now.”

Svekis watched a fashionable pair of slacks, a turquoise blouse, and dark hair pass him. The mask was different, too. She carried a small, full backpack over one shoulder. No doubt it was loaded with the contents of one satchel. She held her hands out in front of her, rope looped around her wrists and connected to the man behind her in the jeans, windbreaker, and another backpack. They walked down the aisle and through the curtain. The door hissed open and the bus slowed for a moment.

Then, over the speakers, she said, “Go on,” as if she were still inside the bus. Svekis smiled. It was a clever trick.

The bus picked up speed. He tore off his mask. He’d already made one hand transform so that he could slip it out of the ropes. Standing, he glanced to the rear where her and her partner’s clothes lay in heaps beside both discarded satchels. He knelt and rifled through both bags. He found his cell phone, but that was all.

He rose and walked down the aisle. Passengers lifted their heads at his passing, instinctively fearful. Most of them had left their masks askew. They kept their tied hands in their laps, too.

Even as he reached the curtain the woman’s voice blared over the intercom: “Take your next right and drive for two miles until you go under the interstate.”

Svekis stepped up beside the driver. “How is the door opened?” he asked. The driver glanced up in astonishment.

“But she said-”

“I must insist.” He placed his hand on the driver’s shoulder, and the driver pointed to the handle that operated the door. “Thank you. Now, please, don’t slow down any further. Do exactly as you were instructed.” The door opened with a hiss, and Svekis sprang into the night like a man jumping off a cliff.

They’d parked the Toyota on a tree-lined street a block from the nearest regional train stop. The plan had been for her and Andy to take the car and for Markie to jump on the next train back into the city. Nobody would expect that. She changed the plan now. She would take the train and he could drive off alone. That way they wouldn’t match anything anyone was looking for; but with Markie dead, they needed to get out of town soon.

They stood on the sidewalk beside the car. A man was walking his dog, a white terrier, in their direction. She stepped up to Andy and said loudly, “I’ll see you when you get back, sweetheart,” then gave him a big kiss. “Drive safely. Don’t speed.”

The dog-walker looked away, a shy smile on his face. Just what she’d hoped. They stood together, waiting while he rounded the corner and went on up the street. She pulled away. “I mean it about the speed,” she said.

“Yeah, I got it in one.”

Around the corner, the terrier started barking. She took that as her cue and started up the street. She heard the car door open. She was thinking about how they’d actually pulled it off-her plan so carefully worked out. By now the bus had reached the interstate and was waiting for her to tell them to let the next passengers go. She switched on the walkie-talkie and said, “Okay, six, get up and get out.” The thing was supposed to have a ten-mile range. If it did, they’d go a while longer, and she would broadcast one more set of orders, send the bus out into the ’burbs for another half hour. If not, they’d shortly be looking for a man and woman in masks. She was halfway up the street before she realized that the car door had never closed.

She turned around, walking backwards. The Toyota sat there against the curb. The driver’s door hung open wide. She couldn’t see if Andy was in the car or not. What the hell could he be doing, putting his bag of loot in the trunk? Idiot. For a second she considered going back, and she slowed her pace. Something was wrong back there. Instinct compelled her to move, to get off the street. She turned and picked up speed.

The thing came out of the darkness beside her, a moon-colored blur moving in swift smears across the night, across a lawn from shadow to shadow, and then suddenly right before her. Golden feral eyes met hers. She ought to have been terrified but it was as if she’d expected this, as if someone had told her it was coming. The rich, dark voice-real or imagined-said, “You’ve borrowed something of mine, I’m afraid, that you should not have.”

She thought of words to say but couldn’t find them before the eyes swelled like twin suns and drank her down.

“It was terrible,” said the branch manager. Iancu Svekis nodded.

“A tragedy, I’m sure,” he said.

“They
could
have killed them. You know, that’s what everybody’s scared will happen in a robbery. That one girl-the one they shot-she’s going to be okay.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“But you were there, right? I had to call Erica, because she’d put through your wire transfer and she knew what was going on with it-”

“Yes,” he said heavily, “I was there.”

“That thing in the bathroom-she said even the cops can’t figure it out. They think maybe it was a gang thing, but nobody saw any gang, did they?” Svekis said nothing, but she went right on. “Of course, finding the bodies in that car trunk along with the money-that’s got everyone thinking it’s a gang thing, too. It’s so
weird
.” When he only sighed, she seemed to understand that he didn’t want to talk about this any further.

“Anyway,” she said, and handed him back his passport, “everything’s fine, your money was transferred from overseas into your new account. Here’s the documentation and the number. You can draw on that at any of our branches anywhere from here to Boston. There’s a list of addresses in here, too. But you should get your ATM card in about ten days.”

“Thank you.” He took the envelope she held out and started to get up.

“I was wondering,” she said. “Can I ask you one more thing?”

“Yes?”

“Um, Erica wanted to know how you got your passport back. She said she was sure they scooped it up when they were cleaning out the tellers.”

He looked at her with some concern. “Oh, no,” he assured her. “They left it on her desk and I took it back when they weren’t watching.”

“Wow. That was pretty brave.”

“I did not, you know, think of it that way. Perhaps brave, perhaps foolish. But then, stealing is foolish.” He tucked the envelope into his jacket and reached out. “Thank you,” he repeated, and she shook his hand. No one was watching, and he only needed to hold on to her for a few moments.

He left her sitting, staring off into space. Someone would notice eventually and shake her back into the here and now, but she would remain vaguely confused as to what had occurred and to whom she’d been speaking just before she dozed off.

Svekis pushed open the door and walked out into the light.

E
ven once a month, Arceneaux hated driving his daughter Noelle’s car. There was no way to be comfortable: he was a big old man, and the stick-shift hatchback cramped his legs and elbows, playing Baptist hell with the bad knee. Garrigue was dozing peacefully beside him in the passenger seat, as he had done for the whole journey; but then, Garrigue always adapted more easily than he to changes in his circumstances.
All these years up north in the city, Damballa, and I still don’t fit nowhere, never did.

Paved road giving way to gravel, pinging off the car’s undercarriage… then to a dirt track and the shaky wooden bridge across the stream; then to little more than untamed underbrush, springing back as he plowed through to the log cabin.
Got to check them shutters-meant to do it last time. Damn raccoons been back. I can smell it.

Garrigue didn’t wake, even with all the jouncing and rattling, until Arceneaux cut the engine. Then his eyes came open immediately, and he turned his head and smiled like a sleepy baby. He was a few months the elder, but he had always looked distinctly younger, in spite of being white, which more often shows the wear. He said, “I was dreaming, me.”

Arceneaux grunted. “Same damn dream, I ain’t want to hear about it.”

“No, wasn’t that one. Was you and me really gone fishing, just like folks. You and me in the shade, couple of trotlines out, couple of Dixie beers, nice dream. A
real
dream.”

Arceneaux got out of the car and stood stretching himself, trying to forestall a back spasm. Garrigue joined him, still describing his dream in detail. Arceneaux had been taciturn almost from birth, while Garrigue, it was said in Joyelle Parish, bounced out of his mother chattering like a squirrel. Regarding the friendship-unusual, in those days, between a black Creole and a
blanc-
Arceneaux’s father had growled to Garrigue’s, “Mine cain’t talk,
l’t’en
cain’t shut up. Might do.”

And the closeness had lasted for very nearly seventy years (they quarreled mildly at times over the exact number), through schooling, work, marriages, family struggles, and even their final, grudging relocation. They had briefly considered sharing a place after Garrigue moved up north, but then agreed that each was too old and cranky, too stubbornly set in his ways, to risk the relationship over the window being open or shut at night. They met once a week, sometimes at Arceneaux’s apartment, but more usually at the home of Garrigue’s son Claude, where Garrigue lived; and they both fell asleep, each on his own side of the great park that divided the city, listening to the music of Clifton Chenier, Dennis McGee and Amédé Ardoin.

Garrigue glanced up at the darkening overcast sky. “Cut it close again, moon coming on so fast these nights. I keep telling you, Jean-Marc-”

Arceneaux was already limping away from the rear of the car, having opened the trunk and taken out most of the grocery bags. Still scolding him, Garrigue took the rest and followed, leaving one hand free to open the cabin door for Arceneaux and then switch on the single bare light in the room. It was right above the entrance, and the shadows, as though startled themselves to be suddenly awakened, danced briefly over the room when Garrigue stepped inside, swung the door to, and double-locked it behind them.

Arceneaux tipped the bags he carried, and let a dozen bloody steaks and roasts fall to the floor.

The single room was small but tidy, even homely, with two Indian-patterned rag rugs, two cane-bottomed rockers, and a card table with two folding chairs drawn up around it. There was a fireplace, and a refrigerator in one corner, but no beds or cots. The two windows were double-barred on the inside, and the shutters closing them were not wooden, but steel.

Another grocery bag held a bottle of Calvados, which Arceneaux set on the table, next to the two glasses, deck of cards, and cribbage board waiting there. In a curiously military fashion, they padlocked and dropbolted the door, carefully checked the security of the windows, and even blocked the fireplace with a heavy steel screen. Then, finally, they sat down at the table, and Arceneaux opened the Calvados and said, “Cut.”

Garrigue cut. Arceneaux dealt. Garrigue said, “My littlest grandbaby, Manette, she going to First Communion a week Saturday. You be there?” Arceneaux nodded wordlessly, jabbing pegs into the cribbage board. Garrigue started to say “She so excited, she been asking me, did I ever do First Communion, what did it feel like and all…” but then his words dissolved into a hoarse growl as he slipped from the chair. Garrigue was almost always the first; neither understood why.

Werewolves-
loups-garoux
in Louisiana-are notably bigger than ordinary wolves, running to larger skulls with bolder, more marked bones, deeper-set eyes, broader chests, and paws, front and rear, whose dew claw serves very nearly as an opposable thumb. Even so, for a small, chattery white man, Garrigue stood up as a huge wolf, black from nose to tail-tip, with eyes unchanged from his normal snow-gray, shocking in their humanity. He was at the food before Arceneaux’s front feet hit the floor, and there was the customary snarling between them as they snapped up the meat within minutes. The table went over, cards and brandy and all, and both of them hurled themselves at walls and barred windows until the entire cabin shook with their frenzied fury. The wolf that was Arceneaux stood on its hind legs and tried to reach the window latches with uncannily dextrous paws, while the wolf that was Garrigue broke a front claw tearing at the door. They never howled.

First madness spent, they circled the room restlessly, their eyes glowing as dogs’ and wolves’ eyes do not glow. In time they settled into a light, reluctant sleep-Garrigue under a chair, Arceneaux in the ruins of the rug he had torn to pieces. Even in sleep they whined softly and eagerly, lips constantly twitching back from the fangs they never quite covered.

Towards dawn, with the moon gray and small, looking almost triangular because of the moisture in the air, something brought Arceneaux to the barred window nearest the door, rearing once again with his paws on the sill. There was nothing to see through the closed metal shutters, but the deep, nearly-inaudible sound that constantly pulsed through his body in this form grew louder as he stared, threatening to break its banks and swell into a full-throated howl. Once again he clawed at the bars, but Garrigue had screwed down the bolts holding them in place too tightly even for a
loup-garou
’s deftness, and Arceneaux’s snarl bared his fangs to the black gums. Garrigue joined him, puzzled but curious, and the two of them stood side by side, panting rapidly, ears flattened against their skulls. And still there was no hint of movement anywhere outside.

Then the howl came, surging up from somewhere very near, soaring over the trees like some skeletal ancient bird, almost visible in its dreadful ardency. The werewolves went mad, howling their own possessed challenges, even snapping furiously at each other. Arceneaux sprang at the barred windows until they shivered. He was crouching to leap again when he heard the familiar whimper behind him, and simultaneously felt the brief but overwhelming pain, unlike any other, of distorted molecules regaining their natural shape. Coming back always took longer, and hurt worse.

As always afterward, he collapsed to the floor and lay there, quickly human enough to curse the weakness that always overtook a returning
loup-garou,
old or young. He heard Garrigue gasping,
“Duplessis… Duplessis…”
but could not yet respond. A face began to form in his mind: dark, clever, handsome in a way that meant no good to anyone who responded to it… Still unable to speak, Arceneaux shook his head against the worn, stained floorboards. He had better reason than most to know why that sound, that cold wail of triumph, could not have been uttered by Alexandre Duplessis of Pointe Coupee Parish.

They climbed slowly to their feet, two stiff-jointed old men, looking around them at the usual wreckage of the cabin. Over the years that they had been renting it together, Garrigue and Arceneaux had made it proof, as best they could, against the rage of what would be trapped there every month. Even so, the rugs were in shreds, the refrigerator was on its side, there were deep claw-marks on the log walls to match the ones already there, and they would definitely need a new card table. Arceneaux pointed at the overturned Calvados bottle and said, “Shame, that. Wish I’d got the cap back on.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Garrigue shivered violently-common for most after the return. He said, “Jean-Marc, it was Duplessis, you know and I know. Duplessis
back
.”

“Not in this world.” Arceneaux’s voice was bleak and slow. “Maybe in some other world he back, but ain’t in this one.” He turned from the window to face Garrigue. “I killed Duplessis, man. Ain’t none of us come back from what I done, Duplessis or nobody. You was there, Rene Garrigue! You saw how I done!”

Garrigue was hugging himself to stop the shivering, closing his eyes against the seeing. Abruptly he said in a strangely quiet tone, “He outside right now. He
there
, Jean-Marc.”

“Naw, man,” Arceneaux said. “Naw, Rene. He gone, Rene, my word. You got my word on it.” But Garrigue was lunging past him to fumble with the locks and throw the door wide. The freezing dawn air rushed in over the body spilled across the path, so near the door that Garrigue almost tripped over it. It was a woman-a vagrant, clearly, wearing what looked like five or six coats, sweaters, and undergarments. Her throat had been ripped out, and what remained of her intestines were draped neatly over a tree branch. Even in the cold, there were already flies.

Arceneaux breathed the name of his god, his
loa,
Damballa Wedo, the serpent. Garrigue whispered, “Women. Always the women, always the belly. Duplessis.”

“He carry her here.” Arceneaux was calming himself, as well as Garrigue. “Killed her somewhere back there, maybe in the city, carry her here, leave her like a business card. You right, Rene. Can’t
be
, but you right.”

“Business card.” Garrigue’s voice was still tranquil, almost dreamy. “He know this place, Jean-Marc. If he know this place, he know everything.
Everything
.”

“Hush you, man, hush now, mind me.” Arceneaux might have been talking to a child wakened out of a nightmare. “Shovel out back, under the crabapple, saw it last time. We got to take her off and bury her, first thing. You go get me that shovel, Rene.”

Garrigue stared at him. Arceneaux said it again, more gently. “Go on, Rene. Find me that shovel,
compe
’.”

Alone, he felt every hair on his own body standing up; his big dark hands were trembling so that he could not even cover the woman’s face or close her eyes.
Alexandre Duplessis, c’est vraiment li, vraiment, vraiment
; but the knowledge frightened the old man far less than the terrible lure of the crumpled thing at his feet, torn open and emptied out, gutted and drained and abandoned, the reek of her terror dominating the hot, musky scent of the beast that had hunted her down in the hours before dawn.
The fear, Damballa, the fear-you once get that smell in you head, you throat, you gut, you never get it out. Better than the meat, the blood even, you smell the fear.
He was shaking badly now, and he knew that he needed to get out of there with Garrigue before he hurled himself upon the pitiful remains, to roll and wallow in them like the beast he was.
Hold me, Damballa. Hide me, hold me.

Garrigue returned with the rusty shovel and together they carried the dead woman deeper into the woods. Then he stood by, rubbing his mouth compulsively as he watched Arceneaux hack at the hard earth. In the same small voice as before, he said, “I scare, me, Ti-Jean,” calling Arceneaux by his childhood nickname. “What we do to him.”

“What he did to us.” Arceneaux’s own voice was cold and steady. “What he did to
ma Sophie.
”

As he had known it would, the mention of Arceneaux’s sister immediately brought Garrigue back from wherever terror and guilt together had taken him. “I ain’t forgot Sophie.” His gray eyes had closed down like the steel shutters whose color they matched. “I ain’t forget nothing.”

“I know, man,” Arceneaux said gently. He finished his work, patted the new grave as flat as he could make it-
one good rain, two, grass cover it all-
and said, “We come back before next moon, clean up a little. Right now, we going home.” Garrigue nodded eagerly.

In the car, approaching the freeway, Garrigue could not keep from talking about Sophie Arceneaux as he had not done in a very long while. “So pretty, that girl, that sister of yours. So pretty, so kind, who wouldn’t want to marry such a fine woman like her?” Then he hurriedly added, “Of course, my Elizabeth, Elizabeth was a fine woman too, I don’t say a word against Elizabeth. But Sophie…
la Sophie…
” He fell silent for a time, and then said in a different voice, “I ain’t blame Duplessis for wanting her. Can’t do that, Jean-Marc.”

“She didn’t want him,” Arceneaux said. There was no expression at all in his voice now. “Didn’t want nothing to do with him, no mind what he gave her, where he took her, never mind what he promised. So he killed her.” After a pause, he went on, “You know how he killed her.”

Garrigue folded his hands in his lap and looked at them.

So low he could barely be heard, he answered, “In the wolf… in the wolf shape. Hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed.”

“Ripped her throat out,” Arceneaux said. “
Ma colombe, ma pauv’ p’ti,
she never had no chance-no more than him with her.” He looked off down the freeway, seeing, not a thousand cars nor a distant city skyline, but his entire Louisiana family, wolves all, demanding that as oldest male he take immediate vengeance on Duplessis. For once-and it was a rare enough occurrence-he found himself in complete agreement with his blood kin and their ancient notions of honor and retribution. In company with Garrigue, one of Sophie’s more tongue-tied admirers, he had set off on the track of his sister’s murderer.