Mortal Fear

After a couple of beats, Mayeux says in a confiding tone, “I play a little in the market myself. Nickle-and-dime stuff. Never tried commodities, but I’m open to it. Got any tips for an honest cop?”

“You sound like Columbo. The Cajun Columbo.”

He pulls a sour face.

“Buy mutual funds and blue chips and forget them. Anything else is a losing game for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you can’t beat the market from where you are. You haven’t got the money or the time.”

He nods sagely, but he’ll drop a few thousand on some half-baked brother-in-law tip before six months are up.

“What about Turner?” he asks. “That boy’s got alibi problems.”

“I know. But he’s not the killer.” I pause. “I wasn’t sure at first, but I know now.”

He cuts his eyes at me again. “Okay. But look, is he queer or what? It ain’t like I care or anything, but it’d clear up my thinking, you know?”

I wonder where Mayeux is getting his information. “I don’t know if he is or isn’t. And I don’t care. I think he’s trying to protect a married lover by keeping quiet about his whereabouts on the nights of the murders. Whether that lover is a man or a woman is anybody’s guess.”

Mercifully Mayeux speaks no more. I watch the dark sky and wonder if Drewe is on the road home yet. She’s probably done with the delivery by now, but you can never tell with babies.

I jump in my seat the first time thunder shakes the car. This is no empty threat, booming hollow over the fields and dying into nothing. It rattles my eardrums, buffets the reservoir of dead air at the bottom of my lungs, hammers the car like a bass drum in a gymnasium. Mayeux feels it too. He’s from New Orleans, where rain is a constant companion, but even he hunches in his seat when a big blast rocks the car. Otherwise, he remains silent, eating up the miles with a determined stare. Perhaps some of my apprehension has seeped into him.

Suddenly there is wind against the car where there was none before. It whines at the seam of the windshield, hisses at the windows. Then the rain is upon us. Big round drops splatter on the glass like pellets from a sawed-off shotgun; then a hail of water engulfs us like enfiladed musket fire.

“Shit!” Mayeux curses, slowing the Cadillac to forty-five.

“Try to keep your speed up,” I urge him.

“Hey, I’m trying.”

I tap my fingers nervously against the dashboard.

“This Delta’s some fuckin’ flat,” he grumbles, leaning forward and squinting into the rain. “A minute ago I was gonna say it was like the Atchafalaya Swamp without the water, but I guess we got the water now. One of God’s little jokes, yeah.”

The Caddy crawls through the downpour, Mayeux struggling to keep his eyes on the faded white line that marks the right margin of the highway. “What kind of shoulder we got?” he asks.

“Flat dirt. About fifteen feet. But if you go into a cotton field, we won’t be getting out until somebody comes with a winch.”

“Great. How much farther we got?”

“We’re about four miles out.”

“Hey, you see that?”

Something in Mayeux’s voice brings me erect in my seat. “What?”

“Blue lights. Way off there, to the left.”

“Where?”

“Look!” he says, pointing. “That’s a blue bar making that. Mississippi Highway Patrol. Guy must be pretty gung-ho to stop speeders in this rain.”

I narrow my eyes to slits and probe the gray wall for blue light. There. A sapphire halo pulsing far to the left. As I stare, a terrible premonition tightens my gut.

“Fire?” I ask, praying for a yes.

“Wrong color. That’s police lights. Lots of ’em. Looks like Mississippi Highway Patrol, or some local sheriff’s department. Where you think that is?”

“I think it’s my house, Mike. Punch it.”

“Hey, I’m pushing now.”

“Floor this motherfucker!”

The sudden acceleration presses me back into my seat. Mayeux flicks on his blue flasher, and we hurtle through the wall of rain like teenage lovers with a death wish. Even with Mayeux tempting fate, I grip the Caddy’s padded armrest and will the car to go faster. The sapphire glow quickly blossoms into a flashing ball, like a miniature mushroom cloud. What the hell could have happened? Part of me knows the answer, but I fight that knowledge with all my soul, unwilling to believe that Brahma has somehow penetrated Miles’s digital shield, that I have exposed Drewe to the white-hot flame of his insanity. We blast through Rain proper like a blue monorail, leaving a howling vacuum for a wake.

“Slow down! Half a mile to the turn!”

Mayeux touches the brake gently, then begins pumping it as the riot of flashing blue and red differentiates into distinct images. Squad cars, sheriff’s cruisers, rescue and highway patrol vehicles. They surround our farmhouse like a motorized posse. Mayeux turns into the drive and pulls as far forward as he can. I’m out of the car and sprinting through the rain before he even shifts into park.

“Wait up, Cole!”

I run for the porch, dodging between cars, stunned by the amount of light pouring from our house. Two blue-white flashes suddenly blank out my office windows.

“Stop!” someone shouts.

A knot of uniformed men blocks the front door. I charge them without pausing, triggering a metallic flurry of gun slides and hammers.

“FREEZE!”

“This is my house!” I shout, throwing up my arms in the face of a half dozen pistol barrels. “Where’s my wife?”

“FREEZE ASSHOLE!”

I finally stop in an ankle-deep puddle at the foot of the porch steps, barely able to contain my panic.

“Anybody know this guy?” asks a Mississippi state trooper with rain sluicing off his hat brim.

“He’s okay!” shouts Mayeux from behind. The detective skids to a stop beside me with his wallet open. “Mike Mayeux, New Orleans homicide. This guy owns the house. What’s going on?”

“One-eighty-seven,” says the trooper. “A double.”

“Who got it?”

“Is that a murder?” I shout. “Get out of my fucking way!”

The cops start to restrain me, but Mayeux manages to get in front and by some combination of civility and intimidation clear a path through them.

“Drewe!” I scream wildly. “Drewe, where are you?”

Nothing.

Another group of cops blocks the door of my office.

“Harper?” A female voice.

I careen up the hall, leaving Mayeux behind.

“Harper? Is that you?”

Drewe whirls from the kitchen sink, dwarfed by uniformed men at both shoulders. Her white blouse is covered with blood, her eyes blanker than I’ve ever seen them. I run to her and grab her by the arms, hearing the uniforms say my name but ignoring them, searching her body for wounds, feeling the reassuring tightness of her biceps.

“Are you hurt?”

She shakes her head violently. “No. But I couldn’t… couldn’t do anything.”

“What happened?” I ask, touching her bloody blouse.

“It won’t come out,” she says, her chest heaving.

“Drewe! What happened?”