chanting got louder, and then…I realized there were more than the four of us in the room.”
He stopped and had to swallow. She could see sweat beading on his forehead, although the afternoon was growing cool. “What do you mean, more?”
“They came through the smoke. I couldn’t see their faces too good, but I knew who they were. Dodo Cortez and the other one, Moore. The Voodoo Killer. So, the theory is when you kill someone your spirit is tied to theirs and you kind of take on the evil they did in life and carry it. I mean spiritually. And before you can get free you have to experience it, what it means to kill someone, and after you do that they can wash it away. So I did and they did. Oh, the cherry on top was that there’s a demon after me, but it’s got nothing to do with Santeria. Not their department, sorry, and I should be careful. Thank you very much, Emmylou Dideroff. End of story. Now, what’s the matter with you?”
She pretended she hadn’t heard this last. “I don’t understand. You already experienced killing when you shot them.”
“It’s the wrong word, then. Ikilled two human beings. It doesn’t matter that they were a couple of warped sons of bitches, or that they deserved it, or it was self-defense, or any of that legalistic bullshit. The theory is each person is a piece of Olodumare, the creator, and when you kill you disturb the order of heaven and you have to be cleansed. You have to experience the sadness of God. I was crying like a baby and I puked my guts out.”
“But people kill hundreds, thousands even, and it doesn’t seem to bother them. Why did you have to go through all that? It doesn’t seem fair.”
“Santeria isn’t about fair. It’s about balance and walking with the saints. Christ, Lorna! Do you think Icomprehend what the fuck is going on here? What my mother is up to with me? I just keep my head down and do what I’m told. And it works. I felt clean and I still feel clean. Except for the occasional demonic attack, there’s less buzzing shit in my head. Things look brighter, I mean things in the world, like those flowers.” He pointed to a bush of hydrangeas. “And your eyes.” He stared into these. “Now, what’s wrong with you?”
“I’m dying of cancer.”
His face contorted into that ridiculous monkey expression we all wear, with the semismile, when we have heard impossibly bad news. “What do you mean you’re dying of cancer? When were you diagnosed?”
“I haven’t been yet. But I have all the classic symptoms of lymphoma.”
“Oh, please! What is this, the do-it-yourself school of cancer research? Lorna, they have machines now, microscopes, chemicals, whatever….”
“But I know. Iknow, Jimmy. My grandmother died of cancer, my mother died of cancer, and now it’s my turn. I have enlarged lymph nodes, sweats, weakness, weight loss, skin itching. I feel nauseated all the time, which means it’s really locked in there, it’s spread to my internal organs, maybe even the pancreas.”
Paz cursed in Spanish under his breath and hung his head like a boxer who’s taken one hit too many. Time slowed down a little in the car; even the wind seemed to die. He asked, “How long has this been going on?”
“I don’t know. Months maybe, but I’ve been in denial about it. It got so obvious recently that I couldn’t do that anymore.”
Paz started the car and tore down the priory drive in a spray of gravel. He was surprised at himself. He was usually a really focused guy, he prided himself on it, in fact, and the other parts of his life he kept in neat pockets? life as a fishing vest, a tackle box. He was on a case now, certainly the most difficult case of his career, with no backup, with no support above him, confronting forces of unknown dimension, not all of them in the material world, but certainly malign, and nothing else should have mattered very much. But now he found that this did matter, Lorna being sick, and it occurred to him as he barreled along the mountain roads that this was a real difference. He told himself he hardly knew the woman, sad sure if she was dying, but people die, and anyway the whole thing was a rebound from Willa, he needed something and she was it. Sorry, so sorry and good-bye. No! He caught that line of thought and strangled it in its cradle. And then he broke the speed limit more than he usually did driving to Roanoke, and bullied her into going to the emergency room, and he completely abandoned the tempo of his investigation to sit in waiting rooms in hospitals in Roanoke and then Washington while they looked at her and he pretended to be her husband and got in the faces of doctors and nurses to ensure that they treated her like a human person and not a diseased lump of meat.
Lorna wonders why he’s doing this. She wonders why she has relaxed so entirely into the hands of a man she hardly knows, why her will, which she had thought was of steel, has proved in these last weeks to be taffy. She allows him to move her around like a mannequin, she submits to the probing and questionings and procedures, although previously she would never have allowed a doc to touch her without the most elaborate investigation of her background and record. It is very strange, and in a peculiar way, it contents her. She has never allowed strangeness to enter her life, and now she is with this strange man, who lights up her (unfortunately dying) body as it has not ever been lit up before, who defies her lifelong understanding of what a suitable mate ought to be, who participates in voodoo, sorry, Santeria, and kills people. From time to time she finds a foolish grin arriving on her face, startling the oncology nurses. The tests take a good long time, days and days. She is in the hospital, the hypochondriac’s wet dream, but she finds she has become passive about the practice of medicine on her body. Paz will take care of everything. He is in and out, seeing people in Washington offices. He tells her things he’s learned, things he suspects. There really is an outfit called SRPU, it’s part of the Department of Homeland Security, and they never heard of Floyd Mitchell or David Packer and they really can’t tell him anything else, he doesn’t have the clearances.
Now she is looking at a doc, whose name (Waring? Watson?) has slipped her mind, although she is certain Jimmy knows and has checked him out like a murder suspect. He is kindly and has a full head of gray hair, like the men on TV who sell drugstore remedies, and he tells her from a long distance away that she has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, stage four, based on the biopsy and her symptoms, and that it may have metastasized to other organs, and that they would like to check her into George Washington University Hospital for more tests. She feels, oddly enough, not the horrified sense of denial that is usual in such interviews but a rush of something like satisfaction. She wants to tell the world,See! Not a crock. She looks over at Paz, the pseudo-husband, and sees his face, his eyes. No, she tells Waring or Watson, I think I’d like to go back home to Miami.
But first they fly to Orlando, and rent another Taurus, because there is still Emmylou to consider. This is Lorna’s idea, Paz wants to go immediately back to Miami and get her started on therapy, but now she digs in her front paws and hunches her back and will not budge. She is not much interested in the criminal case per se anymore, but she desperately wants to talk to Emmylou Dideroff again.
Paz knew he was driving like a maniac, weaving in and out of the interstate traffic, drawing outraged honks and hoots from the 18-wheelers he challenged. He told himself that it was because he wanted to resolve this whole thing so he could get Lorna into treatment, but at some level he knew it was not the real reason. Dangerous driving occupied his mind as ordinary freeway cruising did not; it blanked thought. Had it not been shut out he knew it would turn toxic. He would start asking the why questions, the gut rippers. He would have to think about his life and about his connection with the woman sitting quietly beside him. He would have to admit he’d lost control of his life, that he was scared to death, frightened that she’d die, frightened that she wouldn’t and that he’d have to admit to love, the kind his mother was talking about when she’d yelled at him about Willa, crazy love. And what if she said get lost, bub, no high school grad need apply?
He exited onto the state road and drove toward Clewiston. At the little county two-lane he had to pull over for an ambulance and a state trooper, screaming by with lights and sirens. When they got to the Barlows’ yard and he saw the cars from the state police and the county sheriff, his heart froze.
Sometime later they found Cletis Barlow in a waiting room at Community Hospital in Clewiston, sitting calmly and reading a Bible.
“How is she?” asked Paz.
“Oh, she’s hurt, but she’s a tough old lady,” said Barlow in a tired voice. “You don’t last long around a cattle ranch if you’re any kind of fragile. She came to in the ambulance, and the first thing she asked was if Emmylou was all right. She didn’t see their faces. Three of them, masked with cartoon masks, Porky Pig, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Bugs Bunny. They pistol-whipped her for no reason when they took Emmylou. She’s getting x-rayed and some other tests now.”
“My God, I’m sorry, Cletis. If I had any idea something like this was going to happen…”
“It ain’t your fault, Jimmy. We can’t be constrained in doing good because evil might take advantage of it.
