Ascension Day

22

I desperately need you to tell me more to be able to do anything with your communication. As it stands, it could be from anyone: a hoaxer, a friend of Durrant’s… I can’t even begin to put it in front of the DA or Governor. If you can’t give your name for some reason, then we can talk about protection and anonymity. You can also feel safe in initially sharing that information with me under client discretion. If you are serious about helping Larry Durrant, then please come forward. And at the same time I’ll do everything I possibly can to help you.

Jac gave the e-mail one last read through, then pressed SEND.

He’d felt increasingly uneasy just leaving everything on that final, flawed note with his mystery e-mailer: very likely spooked and so no further contact. And when the night before he’d shared his thoughts with Alaysha, finally told her the whole saga, she’d urged him on.

‘Don’t just give up with him there, Jac. Keep pushing, send him more e-mails, try and draw him out. If he is real, he must have a conscience to have made contact in the first place. Remember that, try and play on that.’

Jac had nodded a slow acceptance, her words in that moment seeming so right. But now, having sent the e-mail, he wondered whether it wasn’t just that added voice to his own thoughts, but because of his other frustrations; the desperate need to keep things rolling positively on at least one front.

Four calls he’d put in to Truelle’s office, leaving messages, before he finally got a call back. Now there was a further forty-two hour delay — early the day after tomorrow — before he’d actually be able to see him.

‘Sorry. That’s the earliest, I’m afraid. I’m up to my neck with things — that’s why the delay in getting back to you.’

And Dr Thallerey, Jessica Roche’s old obstetrician, was away at a medical convention in Houston till the end of the week.

‘He doesn’t like to be disturbed at these things, so we have strict instructions not to do so unless it’s an absolute medical emergency. Does it fall into that category, sir?’

‘No… no. It’s okay. I’ll contact him when he gets back.’

Jac felt the clock ticking down against Durrant like a tight coil at the back of his neck.

Superficially he looked fine after his accident, except for a slight limp in his right leg. A thigh gash had taken fourteen stitches and his calf muscles had been heavily bruised, probably from when he wrenched his leg free. The doctor said that within a week it should have healed enough for the limp to subside; but what was going on inside Jac’s head was another matter.

Now that the clemency plea had been filed, he was back assisting John Langfranc with other cases and was meant to spend no more than four man-hours a week on the Durrant case, for what Beaton described as ‘residual maintenance’. But Jac found it hard to concentrate on the fresh files before him, and more than a few times he’d noticed John Langfranc look up at him through his glass screen: a searching appraisal that hadn’t yet fully verged into concern; yet.

Sometimes, when Jac tried to focus, the words would swim and merge and become little more than a blur; a grey blur that seemed to draw him in, becoming deeper, darker as he sank through it… and suddenly he’d back in the lake again, lungs bursting, choking for air…

Jac’s line buzzing broke his thoughts.

‘Lieutenant Wallace for you,’ Penny Vance called across the office.

‘Thanks.’ Jac swallowed and took a fresh breath, noticing John Langfranc look through his glass screen as he picked up: the police mechanic’s report on his car dragged up from Lake Pontchartrain! Jac’s brow knitted as he tried to disentangle Wallace’s description of brake fluid pressures and condition of joint threads. ‘What exactly does all of that mean?’

Wallace took a fresh breath. ‘It means that the findings are inconclusive. But if we had to put money on something — it’d be on it being caused by a fault or wear and tear rather than on tampering. Otherwise the thread on the brake fluid joint would have been clean and in perfect condition. It wasn’t — the thread had shorn off.’

‘I see.’ Jac knew that he should have been relieved, but that emotion still felt out of reach, along with any clarity on Wallace’s account. All he felt was numb.

‘Perhaps the joint simply got weakened with time and wear and tear — then with the sudden jolt of you braking hard, it sheared off.’

‘But what about that truck alongside swinging in? And the fact that he didn’t stop?’

‘I know. But it might have been a driver simply distracted or falling asleep, rather than purposeful. And once he’d straightened up, he’d have been past you by then. Might well not have seen what happened to you.’

‘Yeah. Possibility, I suppose.’ Jac sighed resignedly. Might, might, might. He wasn’t convinced. Langfranc came out of his office as Jac thanked Wallace and signed off.

‘Accident,’ Jac said, looking towards Langfranc. ‘Doesn’t look like brake tampering. At least, that’s what he’s putting the money on.’

‘Well, that’s a relief.’

‘Yeah.’ Jac nodded dolefully. ‘That’s a relief.’

Schlish… schlap… schlish… schlap…. schlish… schlap…

The monotony of the windscreen wipers was starting to wear on Dr Thallerey’s nerves, might have got close to sending him to sleep, if he hadn’t stopped just forty minutes back for a strong fresh coffee and popped a Ritalin straight after.

He’d decided to drive, because since 9/11 he just couldn’t abide airports any more. One-and-half to two hours before check in, with invariably more delays on top. By the time he’d sat for three hours bored mindless at an airport, he could be halfway there in his car.

He tried to keep to 55 mph, but invariably he’d edge up to sixty on clear, flat stretches. Two hours more, and he’d be home.

Schlish… schlap… schlish… schlap…

Thallerey peered through the intermittent film of water on his windscreen at the murky road ahead. A quarter moon was there somewhere, drifting in and out of heavy cloud cover. His squint suddenly widened, hands gripping tighter to the wheel, as out of nowhere — not there in one sweep of the wipers, there in the next — red tail lights loomed ahead and he had to brake sharply.

Thallerey’s speedo plummeted. He glanced at it as it bottomed out: twenty-two miles an hour! Ridiculous! He edged out. A large double-trailer truck, he’d need a clear, straight stretch to get past it.

They followed a long, slow bend, seeming to take forever, and as they straightened out Thallerey peered through the gloom at a clear stretch illuminated in his headlamps, no curves for at least a couple of hundred yards. He swung out and floored it.

Forty… fifty… he should be past it soon. Longer than he thought… a lot longer. It struck him that he wasn’t making much progress past it; the truck had at the same time picked up speed. He pushed the pedal harder — fifty-five…. sixty… the curve in the road still a good hundred yards away.

Yet still he gained only a few yards, appeared to be in much the same position alongside it, just past the coupling for the rear trailer — which meant that it must now be doing the same speed. Sixty. Deciding that he wasn’t going to make it past, Thallerey eased off the pedal and braked to cut back in — when a sudden blast of lights flooded him from behind.

Headlamps full beam, now a top searchlight switched on as well. Looked like a big four-wheeler, but hard to make out fully beyond the glare. It had obviously swung out to overtake following him, and was now showing full lights as if to say: go on, go on… get past it!

He hesitated for a second whether to go for it, but then saw that the bend in the road was only forty yards ahead. He beeped his horn and hit his brakes again to pull back in behind the truck. But the truck also seemed to slow alongside him, and now the lights behind were even closer, only yards from his back bumper.

He felt his chest tighten, beads of sweat starting to break on his forehead. They had him jammed in! He braked and beeped his horn twice again — but still no give. The truck in turn also slowed, and the four-wheeler beeped back: still jammed tight behind, its headlamps flooding his car.

Then, as if the driver had a sudden change of thought, the four-wheeler pulled sharply back and tucked in behind the trailer-truck. In that split second Thallerey was disorientated — his car still seemed to be floodlit — wrenching his eyes from his rear-view mirror to the road ahead as it hit him just why the four-wheeler had cut back in so quickly: an oncoming trailer-truck suddenly, startlingly clear in the upward sweep of his wipers, bearing down on him. Fast.

At least he’d now also be able to tuck in behind the truck, he reckoned, braking hard. But again it braked to hold him there; and there was one difference between his braking and the truck’s, perhaps because in his panic he’d braked that much harder: his wheels locked and his car started to slew on the wet road.

His last hope, as he squinted against the dazzling white of the oncoming headlamps and every nerve-end tightened and froze the breath in his throat, was that the oncoming truck, seeing him blocking the road, would brake and stop in time.

But it didn’t. It just kept going at the same speed, shunting the front of his car straight through him.

‘Yeah, okay babe. Yeah. Another one.’

Nel-M tucked a twenty-dollar bill into the girl’s thigh garter as elegantly, defying her near-nudity — the garter, stockings and cobalt blue high-heels were all she wore — she lifted her leg alongside his chair.

Coffee skin with a touch of au-lait, eyes almost matching — pale toffee with green flecks — full lips, a teasing slant at the corner of her eyes, chestnut brown hair in ringlets breaking on the curve of her breasts, and a bubble-butt to die for. Up close she was even better than viewed from a hundred yards through a car windscreen, Nel-M considered. Far better. Especially with her clothes off.

Nel-M had remembered why the girl struck a chord, where he’d seen her before: Mike ‘Miko’ Ortega’s ‘Pinkies’ club.

Miko managed four lap-dancing clubs on behalf of Carmen Malastra: three in New Orleans and one in Baton Rouge, of which Pinkies was his latest addition. Miko and Nel-M went back twenty years, to the days when they both worked together providing club security muscle, and he’d called in on Miko not long after Pinkies first opened.

Three years ago now, the girl hadn’t been there then. But Nel-M had reason to visit again eleven months back when Roche wanted to put the squeeze on a planning officer obstructing his application for a new refinery. They’d discovered that he was an on and off visitor to Pinkies, and a few steamy photographs landing in his wife’s lap would be none too handy. The only problem was that no photography was allowed inside the club; unless, that is, you first cleared it with Miko and slipped him a G sweetener.

That was when Nel-M had first seen the girl.

Nel-M swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, as she bent down inches from him, parting her legs and looking back at him for a second before swinging round and, from a half-squat, her breasts only inches from his lap, slowly rose again, swaying as she went.

‘Love Hangover’ played, more his generation. He would like to have recalled dancing to it, but more likely than not he and his wife would have been shouting at each other above it in some disco or other, or Miko and him would have been in a club side-alley pounding some drunk they’d just ejected in time with its beat.

‘Okay?’ the girl mouthed, mostly lost in the music, turning it into a wet pout as she half closed her eyes in abandon.

Oh God, she was good. Nel-M nodded back with a satiated smile, in turn half-closing his own eyes as he felt a wave of sensations he’d rather not have — especially with what he might soon have to do to her — wash over him.

Halfway through her first dance for him, he’d asked her name just to make sure.

She’d leant over so that she was heard above the music, her mouth close to his ear.

‘Alaysha.’

Sounded like the gentle swish of surf on a tropical beach, thought Nel-M, hot breath on his ear and her closeness sending a tingle through his body.

No question, it would be a shame to have to kill her.

He paid her for one more dance, then went over to the bar to talk to Miko.

‘Any chance with her for an old fool like me, do you reckon?’ Nel-M said it jovially, as if he was only half-serious.

‘Nah. Missed the boat there. She just hitched with a new guy. Though you might have stood a chance while she was still going out with the last crazy guy.’

‘Crazy?’

‘Yeah. Real schizo. Pushing her around an’ all sorts.’ Miko shook his head. ‘Even came by the club here just last week, making a scene.’

‘Oh?’

Miko didn’t take well to people making a scene in his club, let alone boyfriends of his dancers, so he’d made sure to find out all he could about Alaysha’s ex from a couple of the other girls.

Nel-M made out that he was only mildly interested, but he committed the key details firmly to memory: Gerry Strelloff. Assistant Bar Manager. Golden Bay Casino. Biloxi.

Nel-M checked his watch.

‘Staying long tonight?’ Miko enquired.

‘No, gotta move soon. Maybe just one more dance.’

But he never got to it. Alaysha was tied up with another client, and he was deliberating whether to ask another girl for a dance — maybe best that he didn’t get too close to Alaysha — when the call he was expecting came through.

He escaped the noise of the club to take it, waving a quick goodbye to Miko.

‘All done,’ the voice at the other end confirmed.

‘But sure this time?’ Nel-M pressed. ‘A hundred percent sure?’

‘Yeah. The impact cut him in half. They’re still scraping bits of him into plastic bags.’

‘And clean too, I hope? If you’ll excuse the oxymoron.’

‘Absolutely. Three firm witnesses: the two truck drivers and yours truly in the Bronco, all saying the same thing: he swung out without warning, didn’t give the oncoming truck a chance of stopping.’