Wages of Sin (48 page)

“He said he was helping Daddy find the runaway girl,” Katie said, “but I know he was lying. Because he would've known her name then, wouldn't he have? Only he didn't.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Miss Remy said, using one of Daddy's favorite naughty words. She made a funny little half step forward, toward the swinging door, and then back, as if she wasn't sure which way she wanted to go. “I do believe that the man the whole of the Crescent City police department is out looking for has just walked right into this squad room, and then walked right back out again.”

Gillian Daly hadn't given up.

Three times she'd drifted away into the white nothingness, but she kept crawling back, and she'd pulled and twisted against the chain, strained and reached, and still the tips of her fingers fell just inches short from the wrench, and so she wept and screamed her silent screams, and listened all the while for the scrape of the bay doors and the footsteps on the oiled gravel floor, while she strained and stretched some more, and came up short.

It was never going to happen, she was never going to reach the wrench without pulling the radiator from the wall. So she tried doing that, yanking on the chain until the links cut so deeply into her wrists that blood smeared in patches on the oily floor.

She lay back, shaking from exhaustion, the pain in her arms so bad it felt like somebody was trying to twist them right off. Her chest bucked for air; tears and sweat blurred her eyes.

I hate you,
she screamed behind the gag at the man who was coming to kill her, screamed at God and fate and herself, and she gave one last mighty heave against the chain even though the radiator was never coming loose, never.

One end of it popped out of the wall with such force that it swung around and hit her on the head, knocking her almost senseless. Pain blazed in white lightning flashes across her eyes, blanking out everything but the need to get at the wrench before he came back. She could feel him, like a hot breath on her neck, she could feel him coming.

One clawed leg of the radiator was still bolted to the wall, but the other leg had busted free, and she was able to work loose one loop of the chain, giving her more slack. Enough slack that she could reach easily for the wrench with her right hand now.

Her fingers closed around it—

“Hey, Gilly girl.”

Chapter Thirty

G
illian Daly hadn't heard the scrape of the door and the crunch of gravel. He was suddenly just there, looming up in front of her, bending over her, coming to kill her.

She swung the wrench at his head.

He saw the blow coming and reared back, so that it missed, but the terror-fueled power of her swing popped the other end of the radiator loose from the wall.

He laughed, and his laughter snapped the few threads of sanity left inside of her, made her more furious than scared, it made her want to beat him to a pulp. She swung the wrench at his legs, but he dodged it easily and kicked out at her with his heavy brogan, connecting with her forearm and her arm broke, because she heard it before she felt it. A sharp crack, like the snap of a wishbone.

The wrench clattered to the floor and she scrambled after it, but he was on her, throwing her onto her back and pressing down on her with the full weight of his big body.

“That wasn't being a good girl, Gilly,” he said, his breath blowing harsh on her face. “Not a good girl at all.”

She bucked against him, tried to kick, but he was too heavy. She tried to beat at him with the chain, but he punched her hard in the face and then wrapped the loose end of the chain once more around the radiator. The radiator wasn't bolted to the wall anymore, but it still acted as a weight, effectively pinning her arms back in place above her head.

He pushed up onto his knees, straddling her, and she looked up into his face. Tears of pain and terror blurred her eyes, but she could tell that he was smiling and his smile was the most horrible thing she'd ever seen in her young life, because it made him look kind. His smile made him look like he would never hurt her.

“Don't cry, Gilly. Don't cry, baby,” he said, and his voice was so low and gentle. Like her own daddy's voice when she was a little girl and she'd wake up crying from a nightmare, and he would stroke the hair out of her face and kiss her wet cheek, and croon to her in a lullaby singsong.

“I'm going to treat you really good, baby, you'll see. So good, so good, so good…”

The SPAD dove in a wild, tight spin. Rourke watched the sinking altimeter and revolving compass, trying desperately and blindly to stabilize the controls. Burning pain from the rushing air pressed against his ears, and the blood left his hands and feet. Darkness began to creep around the edge of his vision.

Suddenly the nose of the plane punched through the clouds, and Rourke saw a few scattered lights and the tidal path along the coastline, only the world had been turned upside down and the black water was rushing at him with dizzying speed.

He had only seconds to live, but it was all he needed, because with the sight of the lights and the water, his equilibrium had returned. He shoved the throttle forward and snapped the plane out of its spin with a jerk that jarred his teeth. The propeller bit the air fifty feet from the water, so close it sent up a salt spray into his face, and Daman Rourke laughed because he'd beaten death once again and that victory was always so sweet, so sweet.

The storm still raged around him, sharp and crooked bolts of lightning doing a dance above his head like marionettes jerking on a string, but he saw the denser lights of New Orleans now, and he laughed again and thought,
Home free.

Half an hour later Rourke was driving his Indian Chief motorcycle down the wet and dangerously slippery blacktop of the St. Bernard Highway as if he'd been shot out of the gates of hell. That brush with his own mortality had blown through his head like a snort of cocaine, cleaning it out.

He knew where Bloom was keeping the girl.

He cut the motorcycle's engine when he was three blocks away and cruised to a silent stop alongside the macaroni factory. He studied the hot car farm across the street, the one that had been shut down in a much publicized police raid only two weeks ago. The chicken wire fence rattled and the Victory Gasoline sign creaked loudly in the stiff wind. Trash twirled and danced around the pumps.

He approached the place on silent feet. Shadows cloaked the garage, a gray clapboard building leprosied with rust. He saw no signs of life, but there was a brand-new padlock on the gate in the fence, and fresh graffiti had been chalked on the garage's bay doors, warning the hobos to stay away.

He was about to be prudent for a change, about to jog the two blocks down to the call box, get the precinct house on the line and have them send in the cavalry, when he heard a little cry, like the mew of a weak kitten.

He ran softly along the perimeter of the fence until he found a small gap that he could work into a larger one. He crawled through, snagging his leather jacket on the wire.

The bay doors were partly open, and Rourke approached them carefully with his gun drawn and held in front of him in a two-handed grip. The gap in the doors was wide enough for him to slip through silently.

He stopped as soon as he was inside, letting his eyes adjust to the deeper darkness within the building.

He smelled her before he saw her: urine, blood, and semen. Still, it would have taken a while for him to find her, stuffed as she was deep in a corner, if she hadn't started whimpering again.

He made himself take his time going to her, stopping every couple of feet to sweep the dark and shrouded spaces with his gun. He could see all of the garage now, though, and Bloom wasn't here.

The girl's naked flesh was pale as death where it wasn't battered bloody. One of her arms was bent at an unnatural angle and her wrists were wrapped up in a thick chain that was tangled up with a broken radiator.

Rourke crouched down beside her, resting his gun hand on his bent knee, and reached with his other hand to touch her shoulder, saying, “Gilly…”

She arched up, wild with fear, screaming and flailing at him with her legs. She kicked the gun hard out of his hand, and it slid across the floor and fell down the open shaft of what had once been an hydraulic automobile lift.

He wrapped her up in his arms, making soft shushing noises, calling her by name and she slowly quieted. He kept holding her, most of her in his lap now, while he leaned over, working to untangle the chain from the radiator. She stared up at him, and the look on her face, in her eyes, wasn't quite human anymore…

Eyes that suddenly bulged wide with terror.

Rourke caught the flash of something black flaring like a bat's wing and he twisted around, instinctively flinging up his arm as a wrench slammed into the side of his head.

“I knew,” said Otis Bloom, “that you would find my Mercedes for me, Detective.”

Rourke blinked the sweat and blood out of his eyes and strained to focus. Then his vision blurred and darkened again, as nausea rose burning in his nose and throat. An oily rag that reeked of gasoline was stuffed in his mouth.

A match hissed and then the dark around them was banished by a flood of yellow light. “Someone has cut off the electricity, I'm afraid,” Bloom said as he set a hurricane lantern down on a workbench. “Now I do hope you will tell me where she is without too much unpleasantness.”

Rourke had turned his head toward the lantern, and the movement almost sent him slipping back into unconsciousness. He groaned, sagging against the ropes that held him.

He was tied down to a tall-legged chair, with a chimney sweep's weighted rope wrapped around his chest and left arm, and another around his legs. His right arm was stretched out straight, across the flat top of a workbench, and tied down with another rope wrapped around his forearm to the bench's vise block.

His flying jacket had been taken off and his shirtsleeves rolled up, and his arm was tied down in such a way that his wrist and hand turned were upward. And even though he knew what this meant, his mind screamed,
Oh, God, no
…

Otis Bloom leaned into him, his face only inches away from Rourke's, and his stiff mustache lifted in a smile. “Regrettably, I don't have the time to tease it out of you slowly. So I'll do the one wrist without any more to-do. That should give you quite an incentive, I think, to take seriously all of my melodramatic threats and promises, and then you'll tell me what you know and we'll be done here.”

Bloom straightened and went to the other end of the workbench, behind Rourke's back, and Rourke lifted his head, fighting down another bout of nausea. His gaze searched the deep shadows behind the hydraulic lift for what Bloom had done with the girl. She was still there, discarded by her rapist in the corner like a pile of trash. She looked dead, but then she stirred a little, and Rourke quickly looked away so that he wouldn't draw attention to her.

For Bloom was back again with a small carpetbag that he set on the bench near Rourke's pinioned and exposed wrist. “You are wrong about me, you know,” he was saying. “You believe I'm afflicted with a mental illness, but there is a perfectly rational explanation for all of this.”

He unsnapped the clasp and spread open the bag. “You see, when Mercedes ran away from me, I thought surely her best friend knew where she had gone. I picked up Nina Duboche just to have a little chat with her, but quite to my chagrin, as you can well imagine, I went a little too far and I had a dead girl on my hands…”

Bloom looked up, but his gaze was turned inward, as if he were reliving the rapes, the strangling, and Rourke thought,
You enjoyed it, though, didn't you, you sick bastard.

“I had killed her very dead, Detective, but that was easily enough dealt with. My Mercedes likes to talk in bed, so I knew the girl had been fucking that nigger chimney sweep. I simply framed the boy for her murder and that was that. But as for getting my Mercedes back…well, I was at an impasse.”

He reached in the carpetbag and took out a mallet, whose grip was about a foot long, and it had a steel-capped head. He hefted the mallet in his hand, looked over at Rourke, and smiled.

“So you can imagine my delight and surprise when one night I learn from my sweet and accommodating wife how it was that stupid, interfering priest had helped my girl to run away. I did so want to kill him for that, but what I wanted most from him was a simple answer to a simple question.”

Bloom was tossing the mallet from hand to hand, taunting Rourke with it. In the soft glow of the lantern light, his eyes seemed to be gleaming with an unholy delight.

“Now I did amuse myself, I admit it—and in a rather ingenious way if I do say so myself. The saintly father's palms started bleeding at Mass one day, did you know? I was there, serving him at the altar, and I saw it with my own eyes. It might have been a true miracle, what was going on there, but I rather doubt it. I told him he should've taken the time to look it up in a book and see how a crucifixion is properly done. And then I showed him.”

He caught the mallet on the last toss with a flourish and set it with slow deliberation on the bench next to Rourke's wrist. Rourke felt his throat swallow convulsively. He didn't want to be scared of what was coming, but he was.

Bloom, feeling his fear, leaned close and looked deep into Rourke's eyes, feeding off it.

Then he sighed and straightened. “Where was I? Oh yes…Unfortunately, not only did the saintly Father Pat turn out to be much more stubborn than one could ever imagine, but I was interrupted by that whimpering boy. And so—another impasse.”

He reached in the carpetbag and took out the nails, and Rourke's guts clenched hard around his fear.

“Another impasse, that is, until I thought of you, Detective,” Bloom was saying. “You see, I am quite the admirer of yours. Indeed I've made rather a project out of studying you. You have one of those minds that can leap across chasms, but you're addicted to risk. And you won't ever quit or back down before a threat, because you see that as a weakness and you're terrified of being weak.”