Hope to Die Read online

  “No,” Aaliyah said. “It’s fine.”

  She walked with Deputy Muntz up the two-track from the Le Duc place wondering if she’d ever forget the gruesome things she’d seen there, and she decided she would not, and could not. That glimpse into the nightmare that was Marcus Sunday was so vivid and lurid, it would be impossible to erase.

  How far would he go? she wondered. How far will he go?

  These were the questions she wanted to ask Acadia Le Duc when she stabilized. The same questions had to be eating at Alex Cross, she thought, as they reached Muntz’s patrol car. She got in, and for the first time in hours, she dug out her phone, looking for a text message about her hotel room.

  There was nothing from Cross or anyone else. That was odd. Cross clearly said he’d book her a room, and that had been when? Around one?

  The deputy put the cruiser in gear, turned north away from town. Aaliyah punched in the number of Cross’s disposable cell. It rang several times and then went to a recording that said, “This message box has not been opened.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  “What’s that?” Muntz said, driving on in the first pale light of dawn.

  “I can’t find Cross,” she said. “He never texted me about my hotel room, and he’s not answering his phone.”

  “Hotel room’s not a problem,” Muntz said. “My sister-in-law’s parents own the Budget. I’ll call and get you one.”

  “Thanks,” Aaliyah said.

  “Don’t mention it,” Muntz said, and punched a number on his speed-dial.

  Aaliyah barely listened to him getting her a room. She felt drained to the point of dizziness, and her eyes got heavy and drifted shut. She was aware that the cruiser was slowing and turning. Muntz had hung up the phone. She dozed deeper on the whine of the tires and then bounced awake when the cruiser hit a rut.

  Her head snapped forward. Her chin hit her chest, and her eyes flew open.

  “Ouch,” the deputy said, stopping the cruiser. “I was afraid that was going to happen. I’m sorry for waking you. You just sit here and crash, and I’ll go ahead on foot to make sure the car is secure. Shouldn’t take more than ten minutes.”

  “What car?” Aaliyah asked, yawning.

  “That rental Acadia Le Duc was driving,” he said.

  “You have the keys?” she asked, coming fully alert.

  “The forensics guys have them,” he said. “They’ll be here to process it after they finish with the cabin. I’m just supposed to check it, make sure the car’s locked up tight.”

  “You have a slim jim?” Aaliyah asked. “Some latex gloves?”

  Muntz’s face lost color. “We’re not messing with evidence.”

  “I’m not planning to mess with any evidence,” she said. “I just want to see it first. So do you have a slim jim or am I going to have to use a rock?”

  The deputy looked like he wanted to argue, but then he sighed. “I’ve got a slim jim and gloves.”

  Using Muntz’s big Maglite, they walked across a dike above rice fields and found the blue Dodge Avenger parked in the weeds where the farmland gave way to dense woods and swamp. The doors were locked. The deputy proved handy with the slim jim and opened the door, which triggered the car alarm.

  “Shit,” Muntz said. “Now everyone’s gonna know we broke in and tampered with—”

  “Grow a set, Deputy,” Aaliyah said. She pushed by him and reached under the dashboard, felt around until her fingers found a cluster of plastic electrical connectors. She yanked at wires that fed into them, felt them budge, and then one tore free, and then another. The third shut off the alarm.

  Straightening up, she peered around inside the car, scanning, trying to catalog everything in plain sight. There were Diet Coke cans in the cup holders. On the passenger seat, there was a bulging white bag with its mouth rolled shut and grease bleeding through its bottom.

  Aaliyah unlocked the other doors, went around to the passenger side, and opened it. The bag smelled of hamburger and fries, and when she unrolled the top, she saw the remnants of the meal and several smashed coffee cups. The glove compartment held nothing more than the rental agreement. And the storage in the central console was empty.

  “Can we button this up now?” Muntz asked. “There’s nothing in there or in the backseat. I looked through the window.”

  Aaliyah was about to tell the deputy to pop the trunk when she noticed something stuck down between the console and the driver’s seat.

  “Gimme your flashlight please, Deputy,” she said.

  Muntz reluctantly handed it to her. She shone it into the crack and saw several papers stapled together and folded. She got hold of them and exited the car before opening them up.

  Aaliyah scanned the papers, seeing a smudged receipt for a $2,129 payment in cash and a two-page disclaimer of liability. The fourth and last page stopped her cold, and she didn’t know why at first.

  “What is it?” Muntz asked.

  “A bill,” she said. “For lading …”

  Something clicked, and her hand shot to her mouth before she barked at the deputy, “Close it. Lock it. We’ve got to get out of here and find Cross. He needs to see these papers right now!”

  Part Five

  CHAPTER

  88

  I CLIMBED FROM THE GTO amid the ruins of Arabi.

  Lester Frost was pissed off because his mother had insisted he give me his brand-new red high-top Converse sneakers, which fit surprisingly well. In the backseat, Madame Minerva had her chin up and was slowly drifting back and forth as if divining.

  “You swim?” she asked.

  “Why’d you say that?” I asked.

  “The cradle is water,” she said. “And this is just the first step in your water journey.”

  I had no time to ask her what that meant; I just nodded and shut the door. The address Sunday had sent me was down a block to the west. In the first light of day I walked past city lots bulldozed clean, others grown over with weeds, and still others haunted by the crippled skeletons of low-income houses.

  Madame Minerva and Lester were right. Though there were new mobile homes here and there, Arabi did feel like a place for ghosts, and memories.

  As I walked on, specters of my own memories flew before me. Nana Mama was in the kitchen, making pancakes and laughing at a joke Damon had told. Jannie and Ali were in the front room watching The Walking Dead and trying to convince me it was the greatest show ever. Bree and I were dancing at a club shortly after we met, and my heart was just beginning to melt for her.

  I got closer to the address on Pontalba Street and forced the ghosts of those precious memories back into my mental cabinet and locked it. This could easily be an ambush. This could easily be Sunday’s endgame.

  I slowed and scanned the area around me in the gathering light. Did Sunday have my family in one of these condemned buildings? Or in one of the double-wide trailers? Were they here at all?

  When I was able to see the actual wreckage of the house at the correct address, I stopped and watched and listened. Even in the gray light, I could see that the front wall of the baby-blue bungalow had buckled inward and was twisted like an old man suffering hip pain. The windows were boarded up. And I could make out a sign of some kind on the door, probably the condemnation notice.

  Nothing moved.

  In the distance I heard the tuba-deep braying of a ship’s horn. But nothing moved.

  When I moved, I did it quickly, dropping into an active combat position, the gun and the Maglite up before me, and running right at the house. I was alert to any threat; my eyes darted to every shadow, and my hands and gun followed, ready.

  But nothing moved.

  I jumped over a low, rusted chain-link fence and into the yard, my attention and weapon now focused on the darkest places there: the windows, the door, that gap between the broken front wall and the cinder-block foundation.

  But still nothing moved. No muzzle flashes. No shotgun blasts. If Sunday were inside, he’d have sh
ot at me by now.

  So why bring me here?

  I began wondering how I was going to get inside. The windows were covered with sheets of plywood. And the door was sealed with two-by-fours and screws.

  Then I put the flashlight beam on the condemnation notice inside a plastic sleeve that dangled from a screw in the center of the door. I could see the perimeters of the notice, but not the center of the document. A standard envelope blocked my view of that, and it stopped me cold.

  On the envelope, scrawled in green crayon, were the words Go to the river, Cross, and find the mythological box before it floats out to sea.

  Below that was a crude drawing of a boat with six crosses rising off the deck and six stick figures crucified upon them.

  CHAPTER

  89

  A DEEP HORN WOKE Nana Mama, and she came around more fully than before. Her eyelids fluttered open into almost complete darkness save for tiny, soft green lights blinking above her and softly glowing red numbers changing above them: 71, 71, 72, 71 …

  What did they mean?

  Regina Hope rolled her head to the left and saw nothing but pitch-darkness. When she looked lazily right, however, and up, she saw the edge of something long and silhouetted by the barest glow from other blinking green and red lights.

  Where am I?

  What is this place?

  How did I get here?

  Cross’s grandmother strained for memories and saw herself in the front seat of a van of some sort. It was lightly raining out, and the van pulled away from the house. She remembered saying something to the driver about St. Anthony’s being in the other direction, and then sharp pain.

  Nana Mama saw it then in her mind’s eye: a hypodermic needle driven into her leg, and then nothing after that. Fear rippled through her, roused her even more. She tried to sit up, but something was holding her snugly across her chest and legs.

  Where am I?

  The panic set in then. She knew she’d been taken. She knew she’d been drugged and brought to this place.

  But where is this place?

  And how long have I been asleep?

  She squirmed and found she could move her body slightly beneath the restraints, especially her legs. When she tried to part them, she felt the catheter line and realized that she wore no underwear, and her fear turned to anger.

  Who did this to me? Why?

  “Hello? Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  But she heard nothing, and she wondered if she had died and if this was her particular purgatory or hell.

  Then the voice of her great-grandchild Jannie came to her weakly, said, “Nana? Is that you?”

  CHAPTER

  90

  ON THE OTHER SIDE of the levee at the foot of Friscoville Avenue, the Mississippi River was the color of clay and smelled of spent fuel and something rotten.

  Lester Frost’s muscle car chugged behind me as I frantically scanned the surface of the water, hearing Sunday’s words clang around in my head.

  Go to the river, Cross, and find the mythological box before it floats out to sea.

  Mythological box? All I could see were massive oceangoing cargo vessels, some heading to the port and others south toward the Gulf of Mexico. I strained to see the names of the ships but could make out only a few, and none of them suggested mythology or a box.

  Before it floats out to sea.

  I turned my attention south about a quarter mile to a small pier where a boom crane was loading pallets of supplies onto a flat-deck boat. Then I saw what bobbed in the water on the north side of the pier.

  I sprinted down the embankment, opened the car door, climbed in, and said, “Take me down to that pier.”

  Lester Frost didn’t like it, but he threw the GTO in gear and blazed down North Peters Street until he reached a ramp that led onto the small pier, which was owned by a service that ferried supplies out to the ocean-goers. As I was about to climb out, Madame Minerva said, “He means the box to be your tomb, pilgrim.”

  “Not today,” I said, and jumped out and ran up the ramp to a small parking lot and the office.

  “You rent boats?” I asked the woman behind the counter.

  “Sometimes,” she said, squinting one eye at me.

  “I’m a Washington, DC, police detective,” I said. “I need to rent that launch down there.”

  “The Whaler’s not for rent,” she said flatly.

  “Please,” I said, painfully aware of the desperation in my voice. “I’m trying to save my family. They were kidnapped almost two weeks ago, and I believe they’re being held on a boat heading downriver.”

  She looked at me hard. “This is straight?”

  “As an arrow. Please. I’m begging for their lives here.”

  She hesitated, and then she reached under the counter, came up with a set of keys. “It’s my husband’s new toy. Whatever you do, don’t put a scratch on it. And give me a credit card to hold.”

  I started to tear up, blessed her, gave her a Visa card, and took the keys. As I was pivoting to leave, I spotted the binoculars on the ledge of the window, facing the river.

  “I could use those binoculars too,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes and then got them for me.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sally Hitchcock.”

  “Sally Hitchcock, I will never forget your kindness.”

  Sally Hitchcock actually smiled.

  I ran out and looked back toward the road, wanting to wave in thanks to Frost and his mother. But the GTO was gone.

  Five minutes later, I was pulling away from the dock in a Whaler 240 Dauntless with a three-hundred-horsepower engine that frankly scared the hell out of me when I pushed down on the throttle.

  In the next half hour, I went thirty miles downriver toward the wetlands that stretched to the Gulf of Mexico, checking out every ship and boat that I passed and scanning the water for a floating box of some sort. In all, I saw thirty-nine vessels, and not one of them had a mythological name.

  For several miles there were no boats at all save barges docked at the refineries and coal-transfer stations. Around nine thirty that morning I reached the Pointe-a-la-Hache Waterworks where the car ferry was crossing from the east to the west bank of the river.

  To say I was shocked to see Lester Frost looking at me from the ferry would be an understatement. I waved. He waved back, with little enthusiasm. Beyond him on the deck, I could see the muscle car with the windows rolled down, and I had no doubt that Madame Minerva was still in the backseat calling the cosmic shots.

  They’re following me, I thought. But how? They’d had no idea where I was on the river, right? In any case, the blind psychic seemed to think I needed her help. Part of me wanted to follow the ferry to the western shore, to ask Madame Minerva what she’d intuited in the past few hours.

  But when the ferry passed, I happened to look downriver, and I saw the blue-and-white tower of a river barge about a mile ahead. A feeling came over me then, like I was being pulled by forces beyond myself, and I sped after the barge until I was within four hundred yards of it.

  Backing off on the throttle, I raised the binoculars and saw a Zodiac-style raft tied to the stern of the Pandora, and scores of colorful container cars stacked on her deck, and I understood immediately that I had found the mythological box, my family, and Marcus Sunday.

  Sure that this was the endgame, I lowered the binoculars and closed my eyes to summon all my smarts, strength, and determination.

  But then my phone buzzed, alerting me to a text: You are tenacious, Cross, but far too slow for your own good. I couldn’t wait any longer. Your family? They’re all d …

  CHAPTER

  91

  SUNDAY WAS PLAYING ME yet again.

  I knew it in my gut, but the last sentence and the way it trailed away after the letter d still threatened to suck the resolve right out of me.

  Then I realized the maniacal sonofabitch had made a mistake sending the
text, a big mistake; my attention shot to the barge, and I scanned its stern and wheelhouse. I saw no one on deck and nothing through the tinted windows on the tower and wheelhouse. But I knew he was right there somewhere, watching me, probably through his own set of binoculars.

  That thought went beyond bolstering me. It turned me to ice and steel.

  Drawing my pistol, I ducked down behind the windshield and hammered the throttle. The Whaler reared up like a warhorse. The four hundred yards that separated me from the Pandora were covered in seconds.

  We were passing mile marker forty-six when I cut the engine and brought the Whaler in at a forty-five-degree angle to the starboard rear corner of the barge, hoping I’d present such a poor target from the windows of the tower that Sunday would hesitate to shoot and reveal his position.

  In any case, I hauled back on the throttle and threw the engine in reverse for less than a second and then cut it again. The Whaler’s bow came up within feet of the rubberized bumpers on the barge’s stern. Pocketing the ignition key, I ran forward, grabbed a rope tied to the bow, stepped up onto the padded sitting area, and jumped.

  I landed on a narrow aft deck thirty feet below the wheelhouse and tied the Whaler to a cleat. Years of police training suggested that I clear the working and living areas of the barge before I went searching for my family.

  Moving with my gun drawn, I saw no one on the way to a narrow metal stairway that climbed the tower. Behind it was a door with a sign that read Engine Room.

  Taking a long breath, I put the Maglite between my teeth and yanked open the hatch. The heat came out like a blast furnace, and the throbbing of the engines boomed up out of the hold below an interior staircase.

  The engine room was reasonably well lit, and I stepped inside onto a steel grate landing. I scanned the place, alert for movement, and spotted a crumpled figure lying between the two huge diesel engines that powered the river barge.