The Goddess Legacy (9 page)

“You can’t be more specific?” Allie asked.

“I wasn’t trying to memorize it.”

“Any landmarks? Lake? Big mountain shaped like a goat head or something?” Drake asked.

“Not that I remember.”

Allie tilted her head and studied Spencer as though she’d had an idea. “I wonder if there are any scissors in this dump?”

“Why?” Spencer asked.

“Because they’d work better than a knife.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We need to alter your appearance. Best way is a haircut and some dye. And maybe some makeup to darken your complexion.”

Drake joined Allie on the sofa. “We can see if Roland will take us to a market.”

“I really don’t want to cut all this off,” Spencer protested.

“You were on TV. It’s got to go,” Allie said. “You stand out like a sore thumb.”

“I can wear a hat.”

“Then you’ll look like a white guy with a hat,” Drake reasoned. “She’s right.”

When they emerged from the houseboat, Roland was standing on the bow, smoking one of his endless string of cigarettes, looking like he hadn’t slept all night but wearing a different shirt. Allie told him what they wanted, and he nodded glumly, his expression that of a man who’d just drunk vinegar.

“I know a place,” he said, and flicked his smoke into the river.

An older green sedan was parked at the bank, the battered SUV nowhere to be seen. The Frenchman offered no explanation for its absence or the different car, and merely climbed behind the wheel while Drake and Allie slid into the rear seat.

Daylight had done little to improve their impression of the river, and when they bounced onto pavement from the dirt track that led to the water, Allie’s eyes widened at the sight of the buildings nearby.

“Yikes,” she said, and Drake nodded. The dwellings were little more than ten-by-ten cinder-block boxes painted garish hues. Half-naked toddlers played at the edge of the street as vehicles roared by, barely missing them as they honked their way into town. The sense of despair in the faces of the pedestrians trudging along the shoulder was palpable, the poverty borne like an unshakable burden by a population that would live and die in misery.

“How long have you lived in India, Roland?” Allie tried, and was rewarded with a scowl and a flash of dark eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Too long,” he said, and spit out his open window.

“I don’t suppose the air works,” Drake said.

Roland didn’t say anything more, which Drake took as a no.

The market turned out to be a medium-sized grocery store with a passable pharmacy section, and a helpful clerk assisted them with selecting hair dye. Allie stopped and picked out several containers of makeup, scissors, and three bags of fruit and a package of unleavened bread, as well as a jar of instant coffee that looked like it had been manufactured when Gandhi was still alive.

Back at the houseboat, Spencer sat unhappily while Allie clipped his hair to within an inch of his scalp, and then mixed a batch of ebony dye and slathered it on before pulling a plastic sack over his head.

“How long will this take?” he asked.

“I think it says twenty minutes,” Allie said.

“Think?”

“I don’t speak Hindi, but that seems about right.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

“No idea. This is a first for me.”

He scowled. “I thought women knew about stuff like this.”

“Yet another incorrect generalization about my gender, you misogynist. Believe it or not, they don’t teach cosmetology as part of the archeology curriculum.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She gave him her best stink eye. “Uh-huh.”

When the dye was rinsed off and Spencer had showered, he returned with a dour expression. “I look like an idiot.”

Allie considered her work. “With the darker base and some sunglasses, you could pass for a bad Bollywood wannabe.”

“Is there such a thing as a good one?”

She ignored him and offered a cup of coffee. “Drake and I were talking about how to get your buddy’s phone unlocked.”

“He wasn’t really my buddy. He was one of my instructors when I was in the SEAL program…”

“Reynolds said something interesting last night,” Drake said. “I mean, besides threatening us with life in prison if we didn’t play ball.”

“Yeah? What?” Spencer asked.

“Reynolds mentioned that Carson was lying on a slab in the Subzi Mandi mortuary. Allie looked it up,” Drake said, pointing to her tablet computer on the coffee table.

Spencer nodded. “Right. Because he’s dead.” A look of understanding slowly spread across his face. “Dude. Are you for real?”

It was Drake’s turn to share a smile with Allie. “Don’t see a lot of other options, do you?”

“How do you plan to get in, much less find him?” Spencer asked quietly.

Drake shrugged. “Make it up as I go along. Judging by most of what I’ve seen here, things are so unorganized it shouldn’t be that big a hurdle.” He sat back and stared at the ceiling. “As to finding Carson, that’ll be pretty easy. My hunch is there aren’t a ton of headless horsemen in the Delhi morgue.”

Drake tried to talk Allie out of accompanying him to the mortuary, but she was having none of it. They decided to strike out on their own, leaving Spencer at the houseboat; his new look wasn’t sufficiently convincing to risk someone getting suspicious while his photo was all over the news. They had Roland drop them off at the same market. He seemed surprised when they told him they’d find their own way back, and argued that it was a dangerous section of the city to be wandering alone. After giving Allie his cell phone number, he’d acquiesced, but seemed glummer than usual as he pulled away.

They made for the pharmacy section of the market again, and Drake made three purchases – a cheap long-sleeved olive dress shirt, a package of surgical gloves, and a surgical mask like those he’d seen many locals wearing as first-line defense against the pervasive airborne dust. “Hepatitis waiting to happen,” Drake said, and Allie nodded.

“You always take me to the most romantic spots.”

“Believe me, if I could do it over again…”

“No, really. First a hostel filled with cockroaches and vomit, then a boat in the middle of the world’s largest septic stream, and now a morgue. What more could a girl want?”

Drake paid and they waved down a rickshaw. The driver blinked when they gave him their destination and averted his eyes.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, and then twisted the throttle and careened into traffic.

The morgue was on the edge of Kamla Nehru Park, a verdant expanse in the northern section of Delhi. Drake had the driver drop them off at the bus station across the boulevard from the morgue, and they sat at a brown plastic table, watching the building, sipping bottles of water as the sun blazed down with relentless fury.

“What do you think?” Allie asked after twenty minutes.

Several ambulances and a coroner’s van had arrived and departed from the morgue during their brief stay, and groups of bereaved relatives had come and gone, no doubt to identify the remains of loved ones or say their final goodbyes before cremation. Most were obviously poor, in a city swarming with the impoverished, and the few uniformed guards sheltered from the sun by tall trees in the front of the building showed no interest in anyone.

Which made sense, given that they were guarding the dead, whom circumstance had transported beyond the world’s ability to harm them further. Even the police who accompanied the coroner’s van remained outside in their car, obviously unwilling to go into the death house if they could avoid it.

“Looks like I should be able to just stroll in,” Drake responded. “Might not even need the mask.”

She looked at him skeptically. “You know nothing’s ever that easy.”

“I’m psyching myself up.”

“We can go in together. You can escort me. I’ll be the bereaved relative.”

He shook his head. “We already covered that. It would be harder to pull off than if I’m alone. With the mask on, they might assume I’m there on business.”

They’d discussed it in hushed tones on the way there, and Drake had argued against involving Allie. If for some reason he got caught, he didn’t want her at risk. A gust of wind blew from the direction of the large building, carrying with it a stink so powerful it made them both blanch.

“Good God…” Drake said, turning away.

“On second thought, I’ll stay here. Have fun. Wash your hands when you’re done.”

“That’s…wow. Just wow.”

Allie winked at him. “Nobody’s getting any younger. It’s showtime, Ramsey. Knock ’em dead.”

“You have a way with words.”

He crossed the boulevard and ambled to the entrance of the morgue, a pair of gloves hanging conspicuously from the pocket of his new shirt and the surgical mask in his hand. Nobody gave him a second look as he mounted the stairs to the front doors. A putrid stench was drifting from the opening, and he tied the mask in place and breathed through his mouth as he neared the darkened doorway.

Once inside the foyer, he was shocked at the temperature in the building. Drake had assumed that a morgue would be well chilled as a matter of course, but nothing could have been further from reality. The halls were stifling. As he stopped to get his bearings, two orderlies pushed past him with a gurney, upon which was the corpse of an unfortunate who’d probably starved to death, judging from appearances.

He fought back nausea at the swarm of flies that trailed the body, and watched as the men wheeled it into a room on his left. Drake checked his watch, mainly to have something to do. A man led a sobbing woman from another room, his arm around her as tears streamed down her face, and a cadaverous-looking man in a stained lab coat met them near the entrance with a clipboard and pen.

The orderlies returned from their chore with an empty gurney, the top of which was smeared with fluids from the last passenger. Sour bile rose in Drake’s throat and flooded the sides of his mouth. He choked it back and steeled himself as he made his way down the hall, gloves in hand, trying to appear businesslike. He glanced further down the hall when he arrived at the door and quickly looked away – two more corpses, their limbs twisted unnaturally, lay on the floor beside a wall, no doubt awaiting processing, stacked like cordwood in a gloomy niche.

Inside the main morgue room, his revulsion nearly overpowered him. The room was only marginally cooler than the corridor, and bodies awaiting space in refrigerated drawers were slowly decomposing in the heat. Only a few were in body bags, most of them merely covered with filthy sheets, and Drake swallowed hard at the task before him. There were at least fifteen corpses out in the open, and he counted thirty refrigerated compartments. He made short work of the exposed dead, all of whom had their heads connected to their torsos, and then began the process of sliding open drawers in the hopes of finding Carson’s remains.

He’d considered cutting the man’s thumb off, but the only tools in the room he could see were inadequate for a clean job – rusting cleavers, a blade that looked like it was from the Bronze Age, and a few tongs. His fallback position was to find the torso, and…

A woman’s voice called out to him from the entry in Hindi. Drake turned to the woman and pointed to his watch, as though that signified something, his gloved hands and mask hopefully making him look official.

Judging by her reaction, which sounded annoyed but not alarmed, he might have bought himself sufficient time. She retreated, and he slid more drawers open until he hit pay dirt halfway down the row. A headless Caucasian, the body that of an older male, lay in the cool metal drawer with a tag in Hindi affixed to its toe.

Drake slid Carson’s iPhone from his pocket and powered it on, and then pressed the corpse’s thumb against the screen when prompted. The phone beeped and the screen changed from the security interface to a desktop just as agitated voices reached him from the hallway. He dropped the phone back into his pocket and reclosed the drawer, and was almost to the door when the woman reappeared with two men. The taller of the pair barked at him in Hindi, and Drake had to abandon the act.

“What? I was given authority to look for my wife,” he said in English.

The tall orderly took a step into the room. “By whom? No unauthorized personnel are allowed in the morgue without accompaniment by one of the staff.”

“That’s not what I was told. Just to bring gloves and a mask for hygiene reasons.”

“Who told you this?” the man repeated.

“I don’t know his name. Short fellow, balding.” Drake could see hesitation on their faces, so pressed his advantage as he edged closer to the door. “Look, this has been a very difficult day. She’s been missing for forty-eight hours, and this was my last hope. But she’s not here. So at least she may still be alive.”

“Now see here. This is most irregular…”

“I know. And believe me, if I could have avoided it, I would have. These conditions are deplorable. You should be ashamed of yourselves. I’ve never seen anything worse in my life.”

The woman’s face changed to one of outrage. “How dare you–”

“How dare I? Look around you. This is prehistoric. I’m out of here. Absolutely disgusting,” Drake said, and didn’t have to pretend hard to sell his loathing for the place.

Drake pushed past the group with a shake of his head and shrugged off the smaller of the two men when he grabbed at Drake’s shirtsleeve. The man seemed surprised that he didn’t stop, and Drake picked up his pace, the front entrance now within reach.

“Now see here–” the orderly said, but Drake didn’t slow. He doubted that low-paid city employees would go to the trouble of chasing him, especially since he was on his way out. What would they do if they caught him? File charges for daring to go into the morgue without a chaperone?

“I’m leaving, all right? Just keep your shirt on,” Drake said, and then spotted a short man on his way into the morgue. “Oh, there he is!”

Drake pretended to recognize the man and peeled off his gloves as he rushed toward him, one hand outstretched in greeting. The man, clearly surprised, drew back but shook Drake’s hand as Drake babbled nonsense at him.