The Storm Read online

  Goatee had a blade in his right hand, held low, and Latino was swinging his right fist at me in a wide arc. I caught the glint of brass on his knuckles and stepped inside the arc of his punch with my left raised and rigid. As his fist slammed behind my back I wrapped my arm around his, pressing his elbow hard against my side and bringing my hand up under his armpit. His face was just a couple of feet from mine and I rammed the heel of my hand into his chin. I heard the crunch of teeth and saw blood ooze from his lips. Goatee was already on me and I swung Latino viciously around into his path, shoved hard and gave him a kick in his solar plexus for good measure.

  While they stumbled against each other, the Gut came rolling up and hurled himself at me. A take down is most men’s preferred way to fight, so nine times out of ten, they will grab hold of you with both hands to try and drag you to the ground. That is their most vulnerable moment, because they have no weapons, and you have all of yours available.

  The Gut charged me and grabbed hold of my jacket. I took a big step back, pulling him with me, and jabbed hard with my knuckles into his windpipe. His eyes bulged when he realized he couldn’t breathe. I shoved him aside as he bent double, clawing at his throat. I’d come back for him later.

  Goatee was pushing Latino out of the way so he could run at me. I shoved my left hand at his face so he wouldn’t see the kick coming from my right foot. I smashed the heel of my boot into his kneecap, and as he bent double with the pain, I grabbed his right wrist and twisted his arm, pressing the palm of my left hand against the joint. He didn’t want to let go of the knife so I rammed my left forearm into his elbow and broke it.

  Then, he dropped the knife and let out a small, gasping scream. But by then, I had his hair in my left hand and I’d pulled the Fairbairn and Sykes from my boot. I keep it razor sharp and it slipped easily through his jugular and out through his windpipe. He gurgled and bled out in a few seconds.

  Latino was recovering, staggering to his feet. I took a single step toward him and rammed the blade hard into his fifth intercostal, on his left side. He went into spasm for a moment, as his heart seized on the blade, then he slid off the knife.

  The Gut had collapsed onto his face in the mud and was writhing in pain, so I broke his vertebrae with a kick to the back of his neck and ended it for him. That left the big guy. I stepped over to him and finished the job with my knife. Not much blood drained into the puddles beneath him, where the neon sign for the Full Moon danced and rippled in the rain. He was probably dead already. A kick like that can break your neck.

  I collected their watches, their knives, and Latino’s knuckle dusters, plus a few other tokens, put them in my pocket, and stepped into the bar.

  It wasn’t crowded. There was no band tonight, but there were maybe a dozen people there, or a little more. The bartender looked surprised to see me, but not in a good way. Maybe he’d thought I was going home. I smiled at him.

  “That wind is getting pretty crazy out there. Gimme a beer, will you? Say, is Ive in yet?”

  He cracked a bottle for me and put it on the bar. Now he looked worried. “Yeah, he’s in back. But you can’t go in there.”

  I gave him an idiot grin. “I can’t or I mayn’t?”

  He made a face like brain-ache. “What?”

  “Well, you see? I may not, means I have no permission. I can’t means that physically, I am not able.” I held his eye. “I’m pretty sure that physically I am able. What do you think?”

  He swallowed. “It’s private, members only.”

  “How do I become a member? See, I’m in the mood for a hand of poker or two.” I leaned across the bar, leered at him and spoke in a very quiet voice. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, pal. Either you can let me in to the back room, so I can play cards with the boys, or I can tear your heart out of your chest and sit here and eat it while I blow your patrons’ heads off. Now, I’m telling you that Ive will want to see me, because I have things I need to discuss with him. So you make a smart decision about what you’re going to do next.”

  He stared at me for what seemed like a long time, but was probably no more than four or five seconds. Eventually, a voice from down the bar, calling for a beer, seemed to bring him around. He glanced at the guy, said, “I’m coming,” and stepped out from behind the bar to look out the front door. I turned on my stool and watched him gaze out into the wind and the rain. He turned back to stare at me. Now he looked scared.

  I said, “How about it?”

  I followed him across the room, past the stage, to the door marked private. He opened it with a key and stepped in and spoke quietly to some people I couldn’t see. I stayed close, with my hand on the butt of my Sig behind my back. After a moment, he glanced at me and left without saying anything. I stepped through the open door.

  The room was maybe twenty feet square. There were two girls on the right, sitting on a couch at the foot of some stairs that climbed to the next floor. They had a coffee table in front of them with a small, dusty mirror on it. There was another mirror on the wall beside me, in a steel frame. On my left, there was a window.

  Ahead of me, there was a red, vinyl bar backed with more mirrors, and a coat rack with four coats; and between me and the bar there was a large, round table with six men seated around it. They were all watching me, they were all smoking, and each one had a glass of either rum or whiskey. Ivory was hard to miss. He was facing me just as Trixy had described him, like a snake. Sitting in front of him was a box of Marlboro cigarettes.

  I glanced at the other men around the table. They were all between forty and sixty and well dressed. One of them was black, the other four were WASPs.

  I hooked the door with my heel and slammed it closed. I saw a few eyebrows twitch. I nodded at the table.

  “What’s the stake?” Nobody said anything. I pointed at the snake. “You Ivory?”

  “This is a private club, mister. You ain’t been invited.”

  “What’s the stake?”

  He glanced at his companions. They were getting nervous. He grinned suddenly. His teeth were very white. “Five grand. If you got that much on you, pull up a chair.”

  “Is that all?” I took a couple of steps over to the table, between two of the suits. “I figure I’d like to raise the stakes, Ivory.”

  I reached in my pocket and pulled out the four watches I’d taken from his goons. I dropped them on the table and looked around. They were all frowning at the timepieces, except Ivory. He was looking at my face.

  “What would you say these watches are worth, Ivory?”

  “They ain’t worth shit. If they were, they wouldn’t be on my table.”

  One of the WASPs, a guy with permed, silver hair, shrugged. “A grand, at most.”

  I smiled at him and pulled out the three knives and the knuckle dusters, tossed them on the table. “How about if we throw these in, Ivory? That increase the stake at all?”

  The permed WASP scowled. “What is this? Who is this clown?”

  Ivory said, “Don’t talk, Bill.” To me, he said, “Your stake still ain’t worth squat. I suggest you turn around and go home before you find yourself out of your depth.”

  I looked at the black lenses of his sunglasses and saw myself reflected there. I thought of Bat Hays, waiting back at his house, waiting to know whether he would spend the rest of his life behind bars, whether he was to have his own life taken from him; waiting to find out exactly what this son of a bitch had done to him, secretly, behind his back, slithering and hissing in the dark corners of his world.

  I reached in my pocket again and pulled out four blood-stained thumbs. I tossed them on the table. A couple of them bounced once and settled. There was a second of absolute silence, then a collective gasp and the four WASPs backed up and stood. A chair keeled over and hit the floor. Bill said, “Holy shit!”

  Ivory and the guy I knew was his right hand man looked at the thumbs and looked serious. There was a sudden bustling and the four WASPs made for the door, grabbing their co
ats, blustering about how they didn’t need this kind of shit and Ivory had better get his damned act together. They wrenched the door open and stomed out, closing it behind them.

  “How’s that stake doing, Ive?”

  “You out of your depth, Walker.”

  I shook my head. “Ive, you have no idea. I am the ocean. You? You’re a babe in arms lost at sea. I am going to give you a chance. Tell me what happened to Sarah Carmichael, tell me what your connection is with Charles Carmichael, tell me what happened at Solitude, what happened that night, and I won’t kill you.”

  His companion grinned. Ivory leaned back and opened his big mouth. His teeth really were very large and very white. He laughed a long, wheezing, high-pitched laugh. Then, he flopped his head forward and giggled quietly. Finally, he grinned at his companion.

  “Yo-yo, it seems that Sarah is going to take all kinds of people down with her. She is one mother of a bad storm.” Then, he turned to me and his smile faded. “Get the hell out of here.”

  I gave my head a small shake. “You made the wrong choice.”

  I left the club and stepped out into the black storm. The four bodies were still there, saturated by the rain with their wet clothes flapping in the wind. Ivory was right about one thing. Sarah was going to take a lot of people down with her.

  SEVENTEEN

  By the time I got back to the Soniat, the rain had started in earnest. All the way there, the windshield wipers had been beating a rhythm like a panicking heart, trying to push away the deluge. But they were overwhelmed at every sweep by the torrential downpour. The road was practically invisible and I had to crawl the eleven miles back to Burgundy. A journey that should have taken ten minutes took over half an hour. All the way, I was thinking I should have taken Ivory right there, broken every bone in his body, one by one, until he confessed. But I knew that his testimony would have been worthless if extracted by torture. I had got what I had gone there to get: confirmation that Ivory was my man. Now I needed to plan my next steps.

  I finally parked outside the front door on a flooded Chartres Street, barely lit by streetlamps that reflected not so much off wet cobbles, as off the streaming water. I climbed out of my car and ran the three strides to the door, ducking into my collar. As I stepped into the patio, the sound of drumming water overhead was almost deafening. Luis made hand gestures at me, pointing up, above his head. “The tarpaulin, we have to put it up, or we are flooded! It’s crazy!”

  I looked at my watch. It was after nine. “Am I too late to eat?”

  He flapped his hands at me. “No, no, everything upside down, don’t worry. Mr. Hirschfield is in the dining room. He likes to eat. He likes to take his time. This storm…!” He sighed loudly.

  “What’s the latest?”

  “Is not a hurricane no more.” He held out his hands like he was holding two giant melons. “But biiiig motherfocker tropical storm. Big flooding! They expect landfall in New Orleans in twenty-four or forty-eight hours. Is gonna be bad. Those poor people… poor city!”

  I leaned over his desk to look at the screen of his TV. It looked like the apocalypse.

  I muttered something that wanted to be sympathetic and made my way into the dining room, removing my jacket. Hirschfield hailed me. He was half way through demolishing a cheese board and had a bottle of cognac open on the table. I gave my jacket to the waiter and said, “Bring me your biggest steak, and a bottle of wine.”

  He hung up my jacket, goggled at the Sig in my waistband, and hurried away to the kitchen. As I sat, Hirschfield raised an eyebrow at me. “Unless something spectacular happens to you when you put your Y-fronts on over your pants, you have not been to Washington, D.C.”

  “Correct.”

  “I am offended. I have served some of the greatest criminal minds in America, and I have been loyal to every one of them. Why won’t you trust me?”

  “Don’t get sensitive on me, Hirschfield. I trust you as much as I trust anyone, and I don’t trust anyone when they’re having their fingers removed with pliers.”

  He spread his hands and raised one shoulder. “Fair point. Where did you go?”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow after three. Have you any news for me?”

  “Good and bad. First, Baton Rouge is closed! Any hope that New Orleans would take the brunt of the storm and spare the capital has been abandoned. Baton Rouge is going to get hit, and hard. This means the trial is postponed. If you are thinking of smuggling Hays out of the country, now is the time to do it.”

  “No.”

  “Good. Now, you wanted me to find out who the beneficiaries of their wills were. I had to pull some strings, but that’s my specialty.” He scratched his head. “She was the sole beneficiary of his will. If he died, she got everything. I don’t know what you were hoping for, but whatever it was, I am not personally surprised by these terms. It was a safe bet. He’s crazy about her, ergo he leaves her everything. They also had substantial insurance on each other, as you would expect.”

  He raised his eyebrows and stuck out his bottom lip. “Her will was a little more surprising. I was not able to get the precise terms because the will is being contested and it is sub judice.”

  I frowned. “Contested?”

  “Don’t ask me by whom, because I do not know. I can only surmise.”

  “Her sister?”

  He shrugged. “That would seem logical.”

  “Correct me if I am wrong, but the grounds for contesting a will are pretty limited.”

  “The grounds, and the people who have standing. That means the people who are entitled to contest it. It’s either a person who would have inherited something if she had died intestate—without leaving a will—i.e. family. Or a person who was named in a previous will, and the will was changed. In either case, what the challenger is trying to do is prove that the terms of the will they are challenging are invalid, that they don’t reflect the true wishes of the deceased.”

  The waiter brought me my steak and poured me a glass of wine. I sat staring at them both without seeing them. After a moment, I raised my eyes to meet Hirschfield’s.

  “Either Charles Carmichael is contesting a will in which Simone is the beneficiary, or Simone is challenging a will in which Charles Carmichael is the beneficiary. The chances of it being anybody else….”

  “Nonexistent. Nobody else has standing.”

  “Are we looking at a side issue or motive?”

  He raised his eyebrows high on his forehead and spread his hands. “Search me. You’re the one playing detective, and you won’t make me a party to what you know. So until after three PM tomorrow, you are paying me to sit here and eat cheese.”

  “What about the slug?”

  “I’ll have a full report in a couple of days, but I hope he’ll give me a call tomorrow at some point with the preliminary results.”

  I cut into the steak and stared at him while I chewed. Finally, I said, “I found Ivory.”

  He slowly raised an eyebrow.

  “And when were you planning on telling me this? It is good news.”

  “I’m trying to figure out what it means.”

  “It means we have some corroboration for Hays’ story! For crying out loud, Lacklan! Keep me in the goddamn loop or there is no point in employing me at all! Let me do my job!”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry. But it’s complicated. When I called you and asked you about Wilberforce…”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Yeah, yesterday. I followed him and Carmichael and a couple of suits to the Full Moon, a club six miles southeast of St. Francisville.”

  He shrugged. “You told me, and I said then that there is nothing very special in that.”

  “Yeah, well, it turns out Ivory operates out of a back room there, a private club where they play poker, snort coke, and have a bit of bad boy fun. The day I followed them, that was where they went, to Ivory’s back room.”

  He grunted.

  I went on. “I went there again tonight to talk to Ivory
…”

  “Wait a minute. Let’s take this one step at a time. How did you know Ivory was there? How did you know it was him in the backroom?”

  I hesitated. For now, at least, I wanted to keep Sarah out of it. “I had a chat with Harry at the Blue Lagoon. He told me the guy who’d been talking to Bat was called Ivory. Bat had told me the same thing. The night I followed Carmichael and Wilberforce, a cute young girl at the Full Moon asked if I wanted to buy some blow from Ive, in the back room. I put two and two together.”

  “OK, Ive was Ivory. And that’s where you’ve just come from?”

  “Yeah. I left word I wanted to talk to him, so he was expecting me. Four of his boys had a reception committee ready.”

  His eyes flicked over me, looking for cuts or bruises.

  I ignored him. “I killed them.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Then I went in to talk to Ivory. He was there, just like Bat and Harry described him. He was playing poker with four guys who looked like businessmen, attorneys, surgeons… You know the type: German car, permed hair, Italian suit.”

  “I know the type. The Carmichael type.”

  I nodded.

  “So you’re thinking maybe he got into trouble with Ivory or some of his friends and, as you suggested before, he was the intended target.”

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “She wasn’t supposed to be in that bedroom. I heard from Simone that they were sleeping in separate rooms. She’d moved into a guest room, and apparently that was common knowledge, thanks to the staff gossip machine. But her body was found in the master bedroom.”

  “So somebody with a personal grudge against her would not have expected her to be in that room.”

  I sipped my wine. “So, on the one hand it suggests the intended victim was Carmichael, on the other, it raises the question, what the hell was she doing in that room?”