The Storm Read online

  He clambered in and I moved off, back toward Chartres Avenue while he pulled the door closed.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “You Yanks go on about how we’re always talkin’ about the fuckin’ weather. But you lot get a bit of rain, and you never stop fuckin’ moanin’.”

  “A bit of rain…”

  “Yeah. So where are we goin’?”

  “We might have a breakthrough.”

  “Good to know.”

  I crawled around the corner and pulled up in front of the hotel.

  “Try not to get washed away by the drizzle on your way to the door.”

  “Don’t be such a fuckin’ wuss. Sir.”

  We got out, leaned into the lashing wind and struggled to the entrance to the Soniat. We stepped through into the patio, wiping water from our faces and our hair. Above our heads, the awning thundered to the sound of the wind and the drumming downpour. Luis stood in reception looking at us and shaking his head.

  I said, “Ask Mr. Hirschfield to come down, will you? And get us some towels.”

  Ten minutes later, Hirschfield found us in the bar, toweling our hair and drinking whiskey. We took the table behind the fern and I started to speak.

  “I’ll make this brief. I haven’t got a lot of time. In about ten minutes, I’m going to go to the Full Moon club.”

  Hirschfield raised an eyebrow at me. “Have you gone completely crazy?”

  “No, there is a logic to this. Listen…”

  I related my meeting with Carmichael in detail and they listened in absolute silence. When I had finished, Bat said, “I don’t like it. It stinks.”

  And Hirschfield made a face like sour cream and said, “Grumman? I know Grumman. This isn’t Grumman’s scene.”

  To Hirschfield, I said, “If he turns up, it’s him.” To Bat, I said, “I know, but it’s the only shot we have and we have to take it. But we do it my way. Our way. I have an arsenal in the back of the car. You come with me. You take up a position in the forest with my assault rifle, while I place the bugs and prepare a few surprises.”

  He nodded. “OK. What you got, the HK?”

  “Yeah, the 416 A5, eleven inch.”

  “OK, cool.”

  “The bugs will transmit to a cell, which I will leave with you. It will record any conversation that goes down in that room. I’m going to come back and collect Carmichael. My guess is the targets won’t get there till after we arrive. If they do, you stay put and record.”

  “Will Carmichael know I’m there?”

  “No. It’s not that I don’t trust him, but we operate on a need to know basis. We three know it, nobody else. We get the recording and then we go in and take them down. I want you watching my back every step.”

  “Got it.”

  Hirschfield coughed. “Are you making me a party to a murder conspiracy?”

  “No. We are going to arrest them, not kill them.”

  “That is not what Carmichael thinks.”

  “I need him on board. When the time comes, I’ll stop him. I’m trying to get Hays off a murder charge, remember?”

  Hirschfield smiled, satisfied.

  It took a full forty minutes to get to the Full Moon. We pulled off the road shortly before we got there and hid the car among the trees in the woodland. There, I popped the trunk and opened my kit bag. I handed Bat the Heckler & Koch and he helped himself to ammunition. Meanwhile, I collected the bits and pieces I was going to need.

  Then, we picked our way silently through the forest until we came to the rear of the building. We selected a position among the trees and the ferns where Bat could keep the front of the club covered, and at the same time see the windows at the back, where Ivory had his private rooms.

  When Bat was settled, I sprinted across the thirty feet of open ground that separated the trees from the building. On the left, there was a shed, and beyond that a door that I figured led to the kitchen and the storerooms. I didn’t have time to waste, so I blew the lock and went inside.

  It was a storeroom, stacked with crates of coke, gin, and whiskey. I moved quickly past them and came, as I had expected, to a small kitchen kitted out to make hamburgers and hot dogs. I moved on through and came out behind the bar. It was very still and silent. It was a silence that was oddly enhanced by the howl and whistle of the wind, and the lash and spatter of the rain.

  I vaulted the bar and moved across, past the small stage, to the door marked private. This was a lock I didn’t want to blow, but it took me only fifteen seconds to pick it and let myself in. The room was dark, but there was enough light coming through the window at the back to see what I was doing.

  I set the bugs, one under the table, the other on the lamp fitment overhead, then I went to the window. I couldn’t see Bat, but I knew he could make out my silhouette in the glass. I spoke in a normal voice.

  “Testing, one, two, three. If you can hear me, oh Lord, give me a sign.”

  A hand rose up out of the ferns, waved once, and disappeared again. Then, I set about the second part of my plan, which took another five minutes or so, and I left the way I’d come.

  Ninety seconds later, I scrambled in among the ferns and the undergrowth next to Bat. He grinned at me.

  “All set? I haven’t had this much fun since I shot me future mother-in-law.”

  “All set. So who was the woman you paid me to shoot?”

  “Oh, that was my ex-mother-in-law.”

  We both laughed at the old routine, “OK, pal, I’m going to get Carmichael. I have no idea what is going to happen next, so stay alert.”

  “Gotcha.”

  I crouch-ran back through the trees till I came to the car. Then I pulled out the kit bag, buried it at the foot of a tree under a pile of leaves and branches, and took off back toward St. Francisville and Burgundy.

  What I had told Bat was true. I had no damn idea what was going to happen next, except that all bloody hell was about to break loose. That much was for sure, and he knew it too.

  That was why he was smiling when I left him.

  Twenty ONE

  The call came as I was arriving at the crossroads at St. Francisville. I didn’t recognize the number. I set my cell on the jack and it put it on speakerphone.

  “Yeah, Lacklan Walker. Who’s this?”

  There was a lot of hiss and crackle, but I recognized the voice. “Captain Walker, this is Katy Glendinning, from the lab.”

  I pulled over to the side of the road.

  “The reception is really bad, we’re in the middle of the storm here.”

  “You’re in the storm?”

  “It’s a long story. I might lose the signal at any moment. What have you got?”

  “OK, I’ll cut to the chase. The blood samples were not a match. I repeat, not a match.”

  “OK, listen. Have you got access to Federal databases? Can you check the profiles?”

  “Yes, of course, and I am running one of the samples through CODIS as we speak…”

  “Why only one?”

  She hesitated a moment. “Because the other one was pig’s blood.”

  “What?”

  “The one you asked me to label ‘DA’, belongs to an as yet unidentified person, but the one you asked me to label ‘Walker’ is pig’s blood.”

  “Are you certain? Is there any possibility of a mistake?”

  I heard her laugh through the crackle. “You must know yourself that that is absurd. Of course not. It’s pig’s blood.”

  “OK, thanks, Kate. I’ll be in touch…”

  “I’ll email you my report as soon as I’ve finished the search on CODIS.”

  “Thanks.”

  The wind and the rain hammered the car. I sat for a full two minutes with my mind spinning, struggling to get to grips with the implications. I reached in my pocket, pulled out my cigarettes, and lit up, forcing myself to work methodically through the facts, forcing myself to see what they meant.

  Finally, I put the Zombie in gear and turned north, toward Burgu
ndy. The road was invisible under the flow of water, and my headlamps did nothing to penetrate the fog of windblown spray that battered and drenched everything in its path. I crawled, leaning over the steering wheel, squinting through the windshield, trying to make some sense of what I saw, trying to identify where I was. And all the while, my mind was screaming at me to go, to go faster, before it was too late. Because I had understood at last what the pig’s blood meant, and I knew I had to get to Simone.

  After what felt like hours, but was probably only minutes, I finally recognized the gas station and knew that I was leaving St. Francisville, and the next left would take me into Simone’s drive. I pulled across the road and plunged in to the dark tunnel formed by the tossing, waving woodland that surrounded her driveway. The screaming and howling was deafening, even inside the car, but the trees shielded the path from some of the downpour and the visibility improved enough for me to accelerate, sliding and swerving in the mud.

  As I came out of the trees, I saw light in her windows, and the front door was open. I skidded to a halt at the bottom of the stairs that rose to her porch and scrambled out of the car. The wind was slamming her door, over and over, like it was trapped in an eternal, childish tantrum of cosmic proportions. I ran up the steps, shouting her name. But the wind snatched my words and hurled them out and over the trees.

  I stepped over the threshold, closed the door, and locked it, muffling but not extinguishing the fury of the tempest outside. The walls seemed to sigh and creak, and everywhere, there were the chaotic noises of random objects being tossed, hurled, and rolled across roads, paths, and lawns. I shouted her name again and moved into the broad, open space of her living room. The lights were on. The shutters had been closed to protect the glass in the windows. They rattled and creaked. On a coffee table, a tall glass held four cubes of melting ice, and a slice of lime. I raised my voice. “Simone!”

  A bubble of impenetrable silence seemed to hold the house, keeping the noise and the chaos on the outside. My voice was lost.

  In the kitchen, a pot of cold rice stood on the cooker, and beside it a pan of meat in tomato sauce.

  I ran up the stairs and went into the bedrooms one by one. They were empty and bare. In her room, the bed was still unmade and the familiar scent of her body invaded my mind for a moment, taking me back to the texture of her skin and the smell of her hair. On impulse, stupidly, I shouted her name again.

  Her study was at the end of the landing, overlooking the front of the house. I pushed in and flipped on the light. The room wasn’t big, not more than fifteen feet by twenty. The walls were lined with modern, blond-wood bookcases. Where Carmichael’s books were all hardbacks, Simone’s were mainly paperback textbooks, and looked well-used. Books by Freud and Jung knocked elbows with Juliet Mitchell, Karl Pribram and plastic-bound drafts of articles and reports. A coffee pot and a stained demitasse stood beside her computer on a substantial pine desk.

  I bellowed her name again, knowing I was being absurd. She was not there and she could not hear me. Suddenly, I was wrenching open the drawers in her desk, pulling out papers, correspondence and documents, throwing them on the floor. What I was looking for was not there.

  Two filing cabinets stood against the wall. I yanked open those drawers too, going through file after file. They were all patients and case studies. I searched for a safe, but there wasn’t one. Then I saw the lever-arch files on the shelf above her desk. Bank statements, electricity bills, gas bills, tax.

  And then I had it. Correspondence with her attorney. I sat in her chair and opened the box. There, at the top, was Sarah Carmichael’s last will and testament. It was a photocopy. The original would be with her attorney. It was dated 30th September, less than two months ago. It was not a long document, but I read it slowly, carefully. It stated categorically that this document revoked all prior wills and codicils, and that being of sound mind, and without coercion, she left everything that she owned, both realty and personalty, to her stepsister, Simone D’Arcy.

  There followed a comprehensive list of everything that she owned, and it began to dawn on me that Sarah Carmichael had been a very rich woman indeed. There was not only a substantial fortune in cash, stocks, and bonds, but her property holdings ran into several million dollars, including the land that Simone had talked about, that ran for over a mile on both sides of the Sara Bayou.

  I put aside the will and started going through the correspondence with her attorney. It soon became apparent also that the dealings with Carmichael had not been as friendly as he had led me to believe. In fact, the letters and emails from Wilberforce were nothing if not openly aggressive, alleging coercion and manipulation, and threatening not just legal action, but prosecution to the full extent of the law.

  Carmichael was threatening prison.

  For a moment, it struck me that two people were going down for Sarah’s death, both of them were black, and both, to some extent, had been Sarah’s lovers. My head throbbed. It was like trying to read letter soup through spaghetti Bolognese.

  Images flashed in my mind: the light streaming from the windows and the doors out onto the veranda, among the mist, rain, and the howling gale. The door, open, slamming over and over. The empty house, the empty glass with the melting ice and the lime.

  I swore under my breath, snatched up the will, and ran, clattering down the stairs three at a time. I slipped and fell at the bottom, scrambled to my feet, and hurtled across the room, wrenched open the front door, and clambered into my car.

  Again the agonizingly slow crawl north up Route 61, along a road made invisible by the deluge, the mist, and the spray. The beams from my headlamps danced on the flow, and reflected back at me off the billion shining needles that fell and danced, hurled this way and that, like gossamer drapes in the wind.

  Finally, the gates to Carmichael’s house loomed ahead on the left. They were open, and through them I could see lighted windows. I turned in, crunched to a halt in front of his gabled portico and sat staring.

  Like a bizarre, resonant synchronicity, his door also was open, and creaked and banged in the wind to the slow, angry rhythm of a dirge. As though I were acting out a strange déjà vu, I climbed the steps, wiping rain from my eyes. The lock had been shot out. I stepped inside and wedged the door closed with a heavy umbrella stand. This stone house did not creak like Simone’s, but the gale coiled and whipped around it, howling and moaning like a host of mourning banshees, peering and reaching through the keyholes and trying to crawl down the chimneys.

  I stood on the checkerboard floor in the vaulted entrance hall and called his name. My voice echoed and died unanswered. My footsteps were startling and loud as I crossed the floor to his study and pushed through the tall, walnut door. The flames were still dancing and quivering in the grate. His glass of bourbon was still on his small table by the chesterfield. But he was not there.

  I went across the echoing hall and into the drawing room. Here, too, there was a fire in the grate. It was the only light in the room, save the gray, dying luminescence of the day, dwindling under the heavy blanket of unforgiving cloud overhead. The double glazing of the windows and the French doors muffled Sarah’s rage, but I could see the trees through the glass, twisting and writing, and the lash of the rain against the glass.

  The dull light was enough to see his body. There was not much blood, because he had died almost instantly. It had not been a slow, cruel death, like Sarah’s, but a quick, efficient one. It had not been a murder of passion, but of expedience, appropriate to a man who had admired the army so much.

  I approached and looked down at James’ wide eyes, staring up at the ceiling, as though it was the last thing he had ever expected to see. His right hand was extended, half-open, cupped around the butt of a Colt revolver. The shot had been a good one, right through his forehead. There was no exit wound, only a snake of dark blood across his brow that had pooled on the floor and now reflected the flames from the fire. But it had no fire of its own.

  For a
moment, I could see Sergeant Bradley, grinning wolfishly by the light of a camp fire, high in the mountains in Afghanistan with the flames dancing in his eyes. “Nobody gets out of here alive, mate. Nobody. Best you can hope for is to die well.”

  He hadn’t been talking about Afghanistan. He’d been talking about life. I hoped James had died well. I had liked him.

  I went upstairs and checked all the bedrooms. I noticed that the master bedroom had finally been cleaned. I checked the bathrooms, too. There was no sign of anybody, no sign of a struggle, no sign of anything at all.

  I went back down to his study. The door to the gun cupboard was locked, so I blew the lock out with my Sig. The cabinets were intact and no guns were missing, either from them or from the drawers.

  Where the hell was he? Him and Simone. It was not a coincidence.

  I stepped back into the hall. There was a uniformed cop standing in the doorway looking at me with no expression on his face. Another cop standing outside the drawing room door glanced at me, then spoke through the door. A moment later, Jackson came out. His face was like stone, if stone could look mad.

  “You killed James? Why the hell did you have to kill James?”

  I didn’t know where to begin my answer, but he didn’t let me talk anyway.

  Instead he asked me another question. “Where is Carmichael? What have you done with him?”

  Twenty TWO

  I studied Jackson a moment before answering, wondering if his concern was an act, or genuine. I pulled my cigarettes from my pocket and looked at them. They were soaked. I sighed and put them back.