3.: Saint Joan(ah) Redux
(Atlanta, regarding January 12, 2011)
The way I heard it, Ms. Esmé Symes was born Esther Simon, the youngest daughter of an evangelical minister who spoke in tongues, handled rattlesnakes, and drank strychnine from Ball mason jars. There are two or three different stories floating around about why she up and left that pissant backwater Florida town, but they all come back around to her daddy not keeping his hands to himself. Might be she killed him. Might be her momma killed him. Might be the man only lost his ministry to the scandal and slunk off into the Everglades to drink away whatever was left of his miserable, sorry life. Whichever, Esther became Esmé and spent some time with a traveling show, reading palms and tarot cards, telling rubes what they’d want to hear about their futures, instead of telling them what she really saw. Oh, I’m not saying I believe she was a bona fide psychic or clairvoyant or whatever. But that lady, she most definitely made a living convincing people she was, and, to tell the God’s honest truth, if I’m gonna deny there’s anything to all this sixth-sense folderol, well, then I’m left with the mystery of how exactly it was she led two detectives from APD Homicide to that empty warehouse between Spring Street and West Peachtree.
Of course, it wasn’t the first time she’d helped the police. There was that kid who’d gone missing out in Stone Mountain, two years earlier, and there was the Decatur woman who’d been raped, murdered, dismembered, and buried in her own backyard. Remember her? Well, Esmé found both of them, so when she made the call about the warehouse, we sat up and listened. Now, if she’d been upfront and warned us what she thought we were going to find in there, I like to think someone would have had the good sense to hang up on her. Tell her to go fuck herself. But apparently full disclosure was not that woman’s style. And looking back, the whole day seems sorta like walking into an ambush, climbing the three flights of stairs up to that long fucking hall, and then, she’d told us, go all the way down to the end. That’s where we’d find what we were looking for. Down at the end of the hall.
Franklin Babineaux, that skinny kid from New Orleans, he’s first into the room, and then me, and then Audrey. Yeah, she was still my partner, right. This was still six months or so before her accident. Anyway, so, by the time I make it through the door, Babineaux, he’s already gotten a big, juicy eyeful, and he’s just sorta standing off to the side, fucking dumbstruck, gawking. And there before us was the nightmare that Esmé Symes had neglected to elaborate on. My first thought—I shit you not—my very first thought was how it all had to be some sort of sick-ass practical joke. Something like that, your brain doesn’t want to admit you’re really seeing what you think you’re seeing, and if you are seeing it, well, then it can’t possibly be what it looks like. Oh, you’ve seen the photos, I know, but the photos, let me assure you, they don’t convey one one-hundredth of the sheer surreal fucked-upness. The photos, they’re like a fading memory of the real thing, like, let’s say, a copy of a copy. For one, you look at them and you don’t get the smell. Like a fish market or a salt marsh at low tide, and just beneath the oily, fishy ocean smell there was the sharp metallic stink of all that blood. See, you take away the smell and you take away that punch to the gut. Thank sweet damn Jesus it was winter. I don’t even want to imagine what it would have been like walking into that shitstorm in July instead of January.
But, like I said, first thing through my head was that someone had set it all up just to fuck with us. Because right there in front of me, hanging from the ceiling, was this goddamn fourteen-foot great white shark. The tip of its nose was just barely touching the concrete floor. I knew what kind of shark it was, because when I was a kid, my dad and me, we used to deep-sea fish down in Destin, and once one of his buddies landed a great white. Only, the one in the warehouse was bigger, a lot bigger. Probably, right then, it looked like just about the biggest goddamn fish ever was. Later, I heard it weighed in at something like fifteen hundred pounds. Anyway, the shark had been suspended from a hook, from a block and tackle rig that had been set into the ceiling of that place, a rope looped about the shark’s tail. Its jaws were bulging out of its mouth, just because of gravity, I guess, because of its own weight. There were rows and rows of glistening triangular teeth big as my damn thumb, serrated like a steak knife. And its eyes were bugging out, too, those horrible black fucking eyes. Even when a shark’s alive, its eyes look dead.
Of course, you know that’s not the worst of it. Not even close. That fish was just the opening act, right?
So, there we are, and the initial shock’s beginning to fade. Audrey, I remember she started in laughing. At the time, it pissed me off, but now I get it. I mean, it really is like the setup for a bad joke, right? Three cops walk
