The massive body muffled the roar of the shots to a certain extent, but they were still so deafening to Longarm that they almost drowned out the insane pounding of blood in his head. He emptied the Colt of all five shots and wished he had loaded the empty chamber for a change, rather than letting the hammer rest on it. For a horrible moment, he thought that the bullets hadn't had any effect, because the giant kept choking the life out of him.
How can you kill something that's already dead?
He forced that thought out of his mind as he felt a slight lessening of the pressure on his windpipe. Maybe it was just his imagination, maybe just wishful thinking, but he wasn't going to let it pass. He dropped the empty gun, grabbed the giant's arm with both hands, and wrenched with every bit of strength left in his body.
The fingers slipped off his throat.
Longarm shoved the giant's arm away and heaved great, gasping breaths into his body, filling his lungs. He slid along the wall of the building, out of the giant's reach. He was in such bad shape that if the man came after him again, he wouldn't even be able to put up a fight.
But the giant wasn't coming after him. In the dim light from the street lamps on Decatur, Longarm saw that the man was swaying back and forth, and then he began to slowly topple backward, reminding Longarm once again of a tree. Still without making a sound, he crashed to the cobblestones and lay motionless, arms and legs spraddled out.
Longarm's head was still spinning, but he knew he couldn't wait for the world to settle down in front of his eyes. He stumbled forward, bent over, and fumbled around on the street until he found his gun. He scooped it up and backed quickly away from the fallen giant, putting his back against the wall of the building once more so that nothing else could come at him out of the dark. Moving as much by instinct as by design, he dumped the empty brass from the cylinder of the Colt and thumbed in fresh cartridges that he took from his coat pocket.
Only when the gun was fully loaded did he approach the dead man again. The fella had to be dead, Longarm told himself. He had five slugs in him, enough to kill anybody. But those shots should have dropped him immediately, and it had taken him forever to go down. At least it had seemed like forever to Longarm.
Longarm was ready to pump five more bullets into him if necessary, though. He wanted a better look at this man who had almost killed him. Somebody had probably reported those shots, and the New Orleans police would be here soon.
With the gun held ready in his right hand, Longarm used his left to fish out a lucifer. He bent over and struck the match on the rough surface of the street. It flared up with a stink of sulphur. Which made sense, thought Longarm, because he had surely descended into the fiery pits of Hades. Either that or gone mad, because staring up at him was the face of Luther.
Luther, the former doorman at the Brass Pelican. Luther, who had been murdered two nights earlier by Royale's men.
Longarm had almost had the life choked out of him by a walking dead man.
CHAPTER 9
For a moment, there was a part of Longarm that wanted to drop the match and run like hell. He knew now why Billy Vail had asked him if he was superstitious. The voodoo angle to this case had sort of faded into the background as Longarm got caught up in investigating the rival smuggling rings headed by Jasper Millard and the mysterious Royale.
But it had just poked its ugly head into things again, sure enough, because Longarm was staring down in horror at an honest-to-God zombie.
Or was he?
The rational part of Longarm's brain began to reassert itself. He recalled how Luther had stumbled into the Brass Pelican, gut-shot by Royale's men. The body sprawled on its back in the street had a huge bloodstain on its midsection where Longarm had emptied the Colt into it. That matched Luther's stomach wound, of course, but how could a man who had been dead for over forty-eight hours bleed that much?
But then, how could a man who had been dead for over forty-eight hours be wandering around the streets of NewOrleans and trying to murder federal lawmen? Longarm gave a little shake of his head, trying to keep his mind from wandering too far off down dark paths.
Quickly, before the match went out, Longarm holstered his gun and reached down to grasp the dead man's shoulder. There was one sure test. He had seen Luther shot at nearly point-blank range in the back of the head by one of Royale's men. With a grunt of effort, Longarm heaved the massive corpse onto its side. He held the match closer to the back of the dead man's skull.
There was no bullet hole, no sign of a wound of any kind. With a sigh of relief, Longarm let go of the body and let it slump onto its back again.
So this dead man wasn't Luther after all. He just looked a hell of a lot like the doorman from the Brass Pelican.
Which still didn't answer the question of why he had been trying to kill Longarm... or why he had shuffled along the way he had... or why he had fought in complete silence and stood up for so long against the impact of five slugs from a.44.
Zombie. The word echoed in Longarm's brain.
Grimacing, he shook out the match just before it could burn his fingers and backed away from the body. He turned around and found his hat, picking it up and putting it on as he walked quickly along the street. He headed away from Decatur Street and soon found himself on Chartres Street. The mansion where Annie and Paul Clement lived when they were visiting New Orleans wasn't far from where he was, he realized. He wondered how they would react if he knocked on their door in the cold gray light of dawn and told them he'd just had a run-in with a walking dead man. They'd probably try to have him locked up in an asylum somewhere.
Maybe that was where he belonged. He had always been a rational, pragmatic, even hardheaded man. Carrying a badge made a fella that way. Now here he was thinking all sorts of wild thoughts, considering possibilities that he never would have dreamed he would consider.
There had to be an explanation. There just had to be.
But as he made his way back to the St. Charles Hotel by a roundabout route, he was damned if he could think
