The Heavens Rise

unscrewed. It hadn’t popped off or slipped out of joint. It was unscrewed, and that meant someone—

Then Lloyd Duchamp’s vision seemed to slide sideways, losing resolution as it went, as if his entire world were being wiped away by a giant, invisible hand.

•   •   •

The gunshot turned Ben’s panic into clear, focused action.

He drove himself straight down under the water. It turned out to be the magic direction. His neck jerked loose from the chain and when he surfaced, he was several feet away from the mangled propeller Marissa has lassoed his head to. An accident. It had to be. An accident. She panicked . . . But there was no sign of her, and that’s when he realized they’d shot her.

One of the deputies on the bank was beckoning him toward the shore with both hands, and Ben focused on the man’s stoic expression as if it were a goalpost. Impossible. Impossible. The word kept repeating itself in his brain, then, when he tasted rank water, he realized he was rasping it to himself even as he swam. Only now he could feel how deeply the water had gone into his lungs. His neck stung in a dozen different places from where the scored propeller had sliced into flesh as he’d struggled to free himself. But the deputy kept beckoning and Ben kept swimming.

And then, some strange sense of foreboding stirred inside him, and something behind the deputy caught his eye. At first, Ben thought he was hallucinating the clouds of splintered wood and glass hurtling through the air toward the assemblage of cops a few yards in front of him. Then everything seemed to arrive out of sequence: the belt of orange flames that exploded from the center of the redbrick house just down the riverbank, the uniformed deputies toppling like rag dolls, the explosion’s deafening pop that seemed to come like an afterthought to the blaze of lights and flying debris.

He forced himself under the water again just as flaming timbers splashed down on all sides of him, praying that when he surfaced again, this deranged, impossible nightmare would suddenly be over.

20

Can you walk?”

From the expression on the man’s face, it looked like the sheriff’s deputy crouching down over Ben had screamed these words at the top of the lungs. But to Ben they sounded distant and distorted; he was still partially deafened by the explosion, a whomp so deep and powerful it had rattled his teeth and kicked bile into the back of his throat.

Before the blast, it had been an orderly crime scene lined with uniformed deputies walking grid patterns. Now it was a war zone of flaming debris and crumpled bodies. The redbrick house a few yards away was geysering flames from its first-floor windows. And the fire had spread to the roof of the house next door, a stone French Regency affair Ben assumed to be the Stevens place. Gas. It had to be, he thought, because now it looked like the fire’s only fuel was the interior of the redbrick house where it had started.

“Was it the gunshot?” the deputy screamed. “What was it? Did you see?”

Ben was startled by the question, then by the brief rain of flaming leaves that fell from the burning oak branches overhead. The deputy shoved them both out of the way. And that’s when Ben realized the cop next to him hadn’t witnessed the surfacing corpse, Ben’s near beheading and the shooting.

The bodies along the bank lay facedown, motionless. Ben blinked a few times and saw that the bright red stains in their khaki uniforms had dimension and depth. They weren’t stains; pieces of the men had been torn away from them by the explosion. One of those deputies had shot Marissa, and all three of them had witnessed the crazy thing she’d done to him with the chain.

And there was the boat, undamaged, still drifting a few yards from shore, Marissa a dark shadow across the floor next to the captain’s chair.

No witnesses. None that were conscious anyway. Maybe not even alive.

“What the hell happened?” the deputy screamed at him.

“I don’t know!” Ben shouted back, his voice sounding louder inside his own head than the nearby screams and approaching sirens. And the answer was partly true. He didn’t have a damn clue what had started the fire. All he knew was that as soon as Stevens’s body had shot to the surface of the river, his boss, one of his closest friends for eight years, had almost torn his head off. But it was all so quick, so confusing. Maybe she really had been trying to help him . . . Then why did the deputy shoot her? Ben thought, before he could stop himself. If she wasn’t about to kill you, why did the deputy shoot her where she stood?

He didn’t use the word casually, but this was honest-to-God chaos. The bloody scene all around them, the deranged events that had created it in the blink of an eye. There was no other word for it. He’d interviewed enough soldiers and surgeons to know they were trained to take quick, decisive action in the midst of chaos, but he was not a solider or a surgeon; his training told him to gather evidence, assess each piece, assemble a bigger picture once he’d managed to take a breath and get a pen in hand.

Had some kind of trip wire been attached to the corpse? Had Marissa somehow realized the explosion was imminent, panicked and gone to start the boat without realizing she was about to tear his head off in the propeller?

“Why did they shoot her?” the deputy shouted, with a kindergarten teacher’s careful emphasis.

I’m not leaving your life. Not now, not ever. And you won’t have to chase me from bar to bar to keep me in it, either. She’d said these words to him just minutes before everything had gone to hell. How could she have gone from those words to trying to kill him? How was it possible? It wasn’t possible. That had to be it. It wasn’t.

“It was an accident!” Ben shouted. “We’re reporters. And Stevens—he’s in the water. It looks like he was weighted down, but our propeller caught on him, and I fell overboard. And they must have thought—I mean, they must have thought she was going to hurt me because she couldn’t hear them and she was going to start the boat. I don’t know. She needs help. Now!”

The deputy shook off his own skepticism; neither of them had time for an interrogation. “There’s a new perimeter just beyond that Mercedes. Go there and wait for the ambulance. You need . . .” He gestured absently at Ben’s neck, then ran back toward the riverbank he’d been steadily guiding Ben away from as they’d yelled at each other.

Ben was almost as far as the new perimeter the deputy had directed him to when his legs went out from under him, and another set of hands was on him, another deputy, this one a woman. And charging toward them around the bend in the oak-lined street was an ambulance, lights flashing against the falling dark, the first of several.

•   •   •

Marissa was in surgery.

That was the best information he could get. In separate ambulances they’d both been taken to Lakeview Regional Medical Center, a short drive from Beau Chene, and when they’d found him wandering the hallways after being treated in the ER for his minor cuts, the plainclothes homicide detectives from the sheriff’s department expressed surprise that Ben had decided to wait around so they could take his statement.

He didn’t correct their mistaken impression. If you were going to lie to the police, it was important to look cooperative. And he’d fine-tuned his lies by then, even though he wasn’t sure who he was buying time for, himself or the friend who had almost torn him to pieces.

There’d been such confusion after the corpse of Daniel Stevens had scared them all half to death, well, those poor deputies on the bank (the homicide detectives refused to disclose any details of their respective conditions despite the number of times Ben referred to them as those poor deputies) must have thought Marissa was trying to hurt him when really she was as confused as everyone else.

The gunshot? Simple. Ben had seen the deputy draw his gun on Marissa, but it must have gone off when the house blew. Maybe the force of the blast had caused him to fire by mistake?