Текст книги "Cross Current"

Автор книги: Christine Kling

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

XVII

I had been leaning against the side of the building, deep in thought, when I heard a child’s scream.

A branch of the ficus hedge caught on a button of my shirt, ripping it. The door flew open as I came around the corner, and a huge man, dressed in black and wearing a black top hat, ran out, raised his left hand, and pushed me hard. My feet flew out from under me, and I fell to the ground, dazed. When I sat up, he was gone. I’d gotten only a brief glimpse of his face, his mustache and goatee. My eyes had been drawn to the sequined design that adorned his hat: a skull and crossbones.

I pushed myself up and ran into the dark room.

The chair was empty, the pots gone, but on the floor, glistening in the candlelight, was a pool of what looked like blood. There was no sign of the child.

I turned and ran out into the yard.

The drummers’ bodies were slick with sweat as their hands danced over the skins stretched taut across their drums. The pounding beats bounced inside my head, and the rhythm became almost painful. I wanted to yell at them to be quiet, but a part of me was afraid.

The dancers ignored me as I pushed through them, searching for Racine or Max. One man tipped back a bottle of rum, filling his cheeks, then sprayed out the liquid and lit it with a disposable lighter. The ball of fire jumped out of his mouth and seemed to come straight for my hair. I leaped away and fell backward into the arms of a man who was jerking and twitching, his eyes rolled back in his head. He kept in perfect beat with the drums. I pushed myself away from him only to feel something smack me on the backside. When I reached around, my fingers closed on the shaft of a cane. Holding the other end was a strange man dressed in raggedy clothes and dancing a silly jig. The other dancers were laughing and pointing as he mugged and joked in Creole. I let go of the cane when I felt a hand on my forearm. The lady in red, the one Martine had called Erzulie, was speaking to me in Creole. I couldn’t understand a word, but when I shouted Racine’s name, she stroked my hair and my face, then put her arm around my waist and led me out of the crowd of dancers. She pointed to the hut and said something in Creole, the only word of which I understood was Racine’s name. I ran across the dirt yard and burst through the door.

“Racine,” I shouted. The tall woman stood alone in the room before an altar with a painting of the Virgin Mary and dozens of candles, bottles of perfume and rum. The altar was decorated with garlands of Christmas tinsel, beaded flags, and pink silk roses. “She’s gone.”

Racine put her fingers to her lips, indicating quiet.

“There’s blood all over, and Solange is gone.”

She placed her hand on top of my head as though I were a little child. “Calm down. Solange is fine. She is resting.” Her gravelly voice was soft and quiet.

“I heard her scream, Racine. Then this huge man in a black suit and hat ran out. He had a skull and crossbones on his hat.”

The look on her face changed to one of concern. “Bawon?"

“I’ve seen that skull before. On dark glasses I found on the Miss Agnes."

“Come,” she said, nodding her head. “We will see.” She put her hand in the small of my back and pushed me toward the door.

We crossed the yard at a pace that required me to trot to keep up. She walked past the bloody chair without concern and led me to the back of the room. There on the floor, a small mattress and bedding had been laid out. The white sheets were streaked with bloodstains. “We left her here, asleep. She must sleep after the lave tete." She shook her head. “It was the bokor."

“Bokor? What’s that? I don’t understand. Where’s Solange?” The sound of breaking glass caused us both to turn. One of the bottles had fallen off the altar, and the smell of rum filled the room. Then a section of the curtain beneath the altar moved, and a small hand poked out.

“Solange,” I yelled. The broken glass crunched beneath my sneakers as I reached her side. Her eyes looked huge beneath the white scarf that wrapped her head, and I slid my arms under her and lifted her up so her bare feet would not touch the glass. Her white dress was splattered with blood. Until I felt the tears on my cheeks, I had not been aware I was crying.

I set her down on the bed to check her wounds.

Racine, who was standing behind me, said, “She is fine. She is not hurt.”

“But the blood.”

“It is part of the lave tete. We kill a white chicken. It is a gift for the lwa. The blood is not hers.”

Then Solange pushed her head back and looked up at me, her brown eyes focused. “We go now?” she asked.

My whole body sagged, limp with relief. She was talking again. I wrapped my arms around her and held her. I looked at Racine over the top of her head and mouthed, “Thank you.” She smiled and nodded as though she had never had a doubt that things would turn out this way.

Most of the time I’d felt so awkward not knowing what to do for this child, but hugging her skinny little frame at that moment felt just right. I didn’t care if they had used dead chickens, magic herbs, visiting spirits, or whatever. Solange was back from that place deep inside herself.

“Sure, kiddo,” I said. “We’ll go now.”

Racine accompanied us across the yard, which was still filled with dancers. I carried Solange on my hip, afraid to let her go. Inside the house, Racine put her cool hand on my arm.

“Wait one moment, please,” she said. She motioned toward the couch. “Set the child down a moment. We need to speak.”

“Racine, I just want to get her home.”

“You are looking for this child’s father, non?”

“Yes.” I sat Solange down on the couch and joined her. “Can you help me find him?”

“Perhaps. We are both searching for the same answers, you and I.”

“I don’t understand.”

She took my hand in hers again. “Now it is my turn to trust you.” She paused, as though trying to decide whether to continue. “Many Haitians try to come to the United States. Some make a cooperative and build their own boats. They work together for their freedom, but it can take many years. Others, they pay the smugglers, money-hungry men who sometimes dump their human cargo rather than be captured. People go with smugglers because they feel they cannot wait any longer.”

“But Racine, what does this have to do with Solange?”

“There are people here who get word when a boat has left Haiti. A watch is kept and when the boat comes ashore, people drive down to help any make it safely ashore. I was there that night, waiting for someone, when the Miss Agnes sank.”

“You were there? Can you put me in touch with anyone who might know her father?”

“No. And Haitians will not be willing to talk to you, but perhaps they will speak to me. I will see what I can learn. People are very frightened now. It is the bokor. It is very dangerous for you to be asking these questions.” She squeezed my hand, then let go. “I have something for you.”

She stood and walked into a room at the back of the house. Solange had fallen asleep leaning against my arm. The house was quiet, though the sound of the drums outside grew ever louder. I wanted to get out of there, and I was tempted to just get up and leave. Finally, Racine returned with a small sachet-like bag on a leather thong. She placed it over my head.

“Do not take this off. This is from La Sirene. She will help you, protect you from the bokor."

I held the bag to my nose and sniffed. It smelled like old seaweed, and I made a face. “What’s in this?”

“Just wear it, and La Sirene will be watching.”

I shook my head. “Who is La Sirene?”

Racine smiled. “La Sirene is the spirit in the sea, and she watches over you. She will protect you from the bokor."

“And what the heck is a bokor?"

“Americans think Vodou is about black magic. This is not so for mambos and hougans. We are healers. But the bokor...” She looked away and lowered her head. She spoke very softly. “He is not a healer.”

I rubbed my hand over my eyes and then thought about Racine’s kindness and concern. “It’s a lot to digest in one night, you know,” I said. “People possessed by spirits, animal sacrifice”—I held up the pouch—“and magic seaweed.” I shook my head and attempted to smile.

She pointed to a painting filled with bright-colored animals standing around a large wooden cross. “Many years ago, when the missionaries in Haiti asked the African slaves to worship the cross that Christ died on, the Africans saw it as symbolic of the Crossroads—the divider between the spirit world and ours. The Europeans were pleased when the Africans accepted the cross, but what they did not realize was that though they and the Africans were looking at the same cross, each was seeing something profoundly different.” She stroked my hair, as if I were a child like the one sleeping between us. “Always remember, Seychelle, you will see what your experience has prepared you to see.”

All the way to the car, Racine kept insisting that Solange was supposed to sleep in the peristil overnight, that the child needed to stay for the full benefit of the lave tete ceremony. The lwa would protect her, Racine said, and she argued it was too dangerous to take her away.

I thanked her profusely for helping the girl, buckled Solange into the Jeep, then turned back to face her.

“Racine, you said you were going to meet someone on board the Miss Agnes. What happened?”

I could barely make out her features in the dark yard, but I could sense how her body tensed. After several seconds of quiet, I thought she wasn’t going to answer my question. When she spoke, finally, her voice was tight with emotion. “It was my sister. She never made it to shore.”

At the stoplight, waiting to turn onto 1-95, I saw Solange staring into the darkness, the fear raw on her face.

“What happened back there?” I asked. “Why did you scream?”

She turned to face me. “I saw him,” she said.

“Who?”

“Le Capitaine.” She turned her head to stare out into the night as the light turned green.

XVIII

As I pulled the Jeep into Jeannie’s yard, I cursed at the sight of the white Suburban with the green lettering. I checked my watch, then winced. It was after ten. I didn’t want to give Rusty Elliot any reason to think I wasn’t taking care of Solange properly, any reason for him to take her away. How the hell was I going to explain bringing her home in a dress splattered with blood?

Racine had handed me a plastic bag with Solange’s shorts and T-shirt as we had passed through the house on our way out, and now I dug around in the back of the Jeep to find them. I figured I would change her clothes before taking her upstairs. It wasn’t only that Rusty was here; Jeannie hadn’t been all that thrilled at my taking the child off to that Voodoo house at night, either. She’d go ballistic, too, if she saw her now.

As I helped Solange unbuckle her seat belt, the porch light went on upstairs, and Jeannie appeared on the landing. “Hey, you. What took you so long? I’ve been trying to entertain Mr. Wonderful up here for a couple of hours now, and he’s been getting more and more charming by the minute. Get yourself and that kid up here.”

Damn. My chance to cover up the evidence had just evaporated. “Okay, we’re coming.”

Rusty came through the door just as we reached the top of the landing. I saw something in the way his face lit up when he saw me that told me he hadn’t come only on business. I was sorry that I was going to disappoint him.

In his green work uniform, with its patches and badges, leather belt and gun, he looked more intimidating than he had in his shorts. This was not a man to play around with.

He looked at Solange. “What the hell happened to this child?” he asked.

She was walking on her own, awake and alert, but in the bright glare of Jeannie’s porch light, it was clear her white dress had red polka dots.

“Calm down,” I said, and as I said it, I couldn’t help but think that those were the exact words Racine had told me less than an hour earlier. “Look at her.” Solange smiled up at me. “See?” I pointed to her smile. “It worked, so don’t gripe.” I smoothed her loose clean hair back from her brow, tucked it into her white headscarf. “And as far as I know, they’re going to eat the chicken.” Rusty’s jaw dropped.

Jeannie pushed Rusty out of the doorway and stood on the landing with her hands on her hips. “What chicken?”

I ignored her, tried to act like it was perfectly normal to come home after ten o’clock at night with a ten-year-old covered in chicken blood. “It’s not really that different from your going to Winn Dixie, when you think about it, except when you buy the chicken there, you don’t risk getting the blood on you.” Rusty hadn’t moved, he just continued to stare at me. Finally he said, “You took this child to some kind of animal sacrifice?”

“Well—”

Jeannie shook her head, took the girl’s hand, and said, “I’ll go wash her up and get her into some clean pajamas.” She fixed me with a stare over the top of Solange’s head and said in a soft voice, “You and I will discuss this later.”

“You didn’t answer me, Miss Sullivan,” Rusty said when Jeannie had disappeared through the door and down the hall. “Did you or did you not take that child to a place where they were engaged in animal sacrifice?”

“Oh Rusty, yes. Yes, I did. Okay? This is South Florida, though. Come on. You’d have a right to be that shocked in Omaha or Wisconsin or somewhere, but not here.”

“She’s got blood on her!” he yelled.

“And she’s Haitian,” I yelled back. “For Pete’s sake, man, down in Miami they’ve got a guy at the courthouse whose job it is to go out and pick the dead chickens up off the sidewalk every morning. Family members leave them when the prisoners are transferred from jail to court. Wake up, man. You’re not in Kansas anymore.”

He crossed his arms, his lips stretched thin. He stared at me for several seconds, letting the silence stretch out. “Are you finished?”

“Yeah, for now.” I stepped around him and walked into Jeannie’s living room.

Rusty followed me. “Seychelle, you don’t seem to understand that I am stretching the regulations very thin even to allow this child to stay in this home.” He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “What were you thinking?”

“You are so out of your element on this one, Rusty. Hell, we both are.” I spun away, out of range of his touch. “I’m not sure you and I have an explanation for what happened to her at the hospital the other night or out at Mambo Racine’s tonight. But didn’t you hear what I said? It worked. She’s talking again. And one thing I do know is that those people were not faking it. What I saw tonight—” I paused, not knowing how to explain it to him, how to give it the reality and the dignity I had seen. “Rusty, they believed completely. I’m not sure I'm ready to believe they were possessed by spirits, but it sure as hell was every bit as real as what your cousins up in the Georgia mountains do when they handle snakes and speak in tongues.” I crossed the living room and plopped down on the couch, leaned back, and closed my eyes. “Man, am I tired.” My stomach gurgled, and I pulled my arm across my belly to try to muffle the sound. “And starving. Haven’t eaten anything since about noon.”

Rusty walked over to the front door, crossed his arms again, leaned against the doorjamb, and stared out into the yard.

Jeannie had one of those couches with tons of throw pillows and cushions, and the cushions seemed to be pulling me down, relaxing me. I’d just about nodded off when I heard Rusty say something.

“What?”

“They’ll still be serving over at the Downtowner. Do you want to go over and grab a bite? I’ll buy if you’ll stop yelling at me and tell me what’s really going on with this kid.”

I opened one eye and looked up at him. I wasn’t thrilled about being seen with him in that uniform. Could scare off some of my clients who sometimes tread lightly on the wrong side of the law. But I was starving. “Conch fritters and fries?”

He lifted his cell phone off his belt and dialed a number. “Hi, it’s Rusty. Think you could pick me up at Cooley’s Landing in about ten?... Thanks.” He put away the cell phone, then reached for my hand to pull me up off the deep couch. “Let’s go. The Water Taxi’ll pick us up at the marina.”

I took his hand but let my body remain a dead weight. He had to strain to lift me up from those deep cushions.

“Man, you are heavy, Sullivan.”

“Wimp,” I said, and smiled as he pulled me to my feet, and I bumped into his left side, where the cold steel of his gun brushed against my arm. “Seeing as you are wearing a gun, however, I guess it’s Mr. Wimp.”

“Damn right.”

I stopped briefly to tuck Solange in like my mother used to do for me and wondered, as I kissed her forehead, why I was flirting with Rusty. As I passed by the master bedroom, I told Jeannie we’d be gone for about an hour.

Rusty came down the hall and motioned to me with a “let’s go” signal. I turned back to Jeannie.

“Thanks again, Jeannie. I know she’s better off with you than anywhere he wants to send her.” I cocked my head in Rusty’s direction.

“So I’m the bad guy, eh?” Rusty said over my shoulder.

“Yes,” Jeannie said. “Get over it.”

“Jeannie,” I said, “I’ve got a connection to the Miss Agnes from my visit to Pompano tonight. I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”

“Sounds good. Animal sacrifice, Voodoo, secret meetings. I can’t wait.” She winked.

The walk to Cooley’s Landing Marina was only about three blocks, but being tired, I began to wish we’d taken the car. The Downtowner was on the other side of the river, and they had a large parking lot, so the car would have been easy. I feared we’d have a long wait for a Water Taxi.

Rusty sensed that I was not in a talkative mood. The streets were dark under the heavy canopy of old trees that covered most of Sailboat Bend.

“Over there,” Rusty said when we reached the marina parking lot, and he pointed to the boat idling at the dock next to the launch ramp. There were no other passengers aboard. “Hey, Carlos,” he said to the captain, a kid about twenty years old. “Thanks for the lift. This is Seychelle Sullivan.”

“Sullivan Towing? Gorda?"

I nodded.

“Thought I recognized you. Seen you go by on your boat a lot.”

“Carlos’s dad works with me at the Border Patrol.” He clapped his hand on the young man’s back. “We’ve been fishing together since this guy was in diapers.”

I leaned back and watched the lights of the parks and businesses downtown as we motored downriver. Too often lately, the river became just the place where I worked. It was pleasant being a passenger for a change, enjoying the view without worrying about bridges or currents or traffic.

The restaurant and bar were nearly empty inside. I waved hello to Pete behind the bar and his one customer, Nestor, a charter-boat captain. Pete raised his eyebrows at me when he saw I was with a guy wearing a gun.

“You want to sit outside?” I asked Rusty. The privacy of it would make it much easier to tell him about the evening’s events—the story still sounded weird even to me—and more difficult for the guys inside to eavesdrop.

I waited until the server had taken our orders and brought us our cold draft beer.

“So tomorrow I’ll go see this friend of Juliette’s at the Swap Shop. I’m fairly certain that this girl actually came over on the Miss Agnes."

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to get involved like this. You should leave this to the professionals. We could round up the people who work in this Swap Shop booth and question them all.”

“Come on, Rusty. From the first minute I saw that kid’s face, I’ve been involved. Do you really think these Haitians are going to say anything to Immigration? In their eyes, you guys are worse than the smugglers—even if the smugglers are bashing in a few heads.”

He took a long swig from his beer, then reached for my hand. “I worry about you. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“That’s nice, but I’m just meeting a kid at the Swap Shop—one of the most populated tourist attractions around here. I’m not walking into some den of bad guys. Not this time.”

He shot me a questioning look, and I hurriedly changed the subject. “On the way home tonight, Solange said she saw ‘Le Capitaine’ at the Toussaint house. The guy on the boat that brought her here. He must have been the guy who knocked me down running out of the altar room. I didn’t get a good enough look at his face to say whether or not he’s the same guy who was in her hospital room, but the height, build, and facial hair were about right. And I remember seeing rings, several of them on the left hand, both times.” I thought about mentioning the skull and crossbones on the sunglasses I had found on board the Miss Agnes but thought better of it. I didn’t want to be accused of tampering with evidence. “It’s got to be the same guy, but I don’t know that I could pick him out of a lineup.”

“Here’s a question,” Rusty said, and he hitched forward in his chair, now grasping my hand in both of his. “What was he trying to do to her tonight, and why didn’t he succeed?”

“I assume he was going to shut her up—permanently,” I said. “As to why he didn’t succeed, well, according to Racine Toussaint, he couldn’t do it because the lwa protected her. Racine wanted me to leave her there overnight. She said it was the only place Solange would be safe.” With my free hand, I fingered the pouch Racine had given me that I had tucked inside my T-shirt.

“I’m sorry, Seychelle, but that’s bullshit. I hope you don’t believe that.”

I pulled my hand back out of his grasp and finished off the last of my beer, feeling light-headed and confused from the combination of beer, exhaustion, and an empty stomach. “You know, Rusty, I don’t know what to believe.” Looking around me, at the glamorous yachts docked along the river, and above me at the blue and white lights of the downtown highrises, I found it hard to believe what I had seen in that yard in Pompano just hours before. “I’m not going to just dismiss this as hocus-pocus, though. I can’t. I was there and something very powerful was going on,” I said. “Just because we don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

“You’re more open-minded than I am.”

“Trust me, open-mindedness doesn’t come all that easily to me. I’m having to work at it. This guy, though, this Capitaine, he scares me. He’s so persistent in going after this kid.” I leaned forward and put my arms on the table. “Let’s just say Solange did see him kill that woman. What can she do to him? She doesn’t know his name. She can’t do anything except maybe pick him out of a lineup. So what’s he doing still hanging around here? Why hasn’t he gone back to the Bahamas? And here’s another thing: If we assume that this guy is the one who killed the other three, then there have been witnesses before, and there are probably more witnesses among the people who came on the Miss Agnes. What makes this kid different?”

“You’re right. And I don’t buy that business about some kind of spirits protecting the kid. He had the chance to kill her tonight, and he didn’t. That means he didn’t intend to. So what does he want with her?”

The waitress brought our food then, and I didn’t say another word as I filled my mouth with conch fritters. The ground conch was sweet and chewy and drowned in fresh lime juice. Rusty had ordered chicken wings, and I found I was unable to look at his plate without my stomach twisting in a little queasy twinge. It might be a while before I felt like eating chicken again.

“I hate all this,” Rusty said, pointing a chicken bone at the brightly lit buildings across the river from us. “Look at that skyline. Have you counted the construction cranes lately? Seven. I counted seven the other day. What are they doing to our town? Remember what it was like when we were kids?”

I smiled. “‘Course I do. But I also remember when downtown was dead, the storefronts were mostly empty, and there were homeless guys wandering all around here. There was good and bad in those good old days.”

He gnawed on his last wing and began licking the sauce off his fingers. I watched each finger slide between his lips and then slip out, making the sound of a kiss. It took every bit of energy I had left to concentrate on what he was saying.

“Nowadays, everywhere’s changed. They’re building on every last scrap of land. And places where there is no more land, they’re just building straight up.” He finished cleaning his fingers and drank off the last of the beer in his glass. “Everywhere you go nowadays, the person serving your food, bagging your groceries, cutting your lawn, or cleaning your hotel room arrived here just a few months ago. And they got here by slipping past me.” He leaned back in his chair and pushed his plate of bones away. “They’re changing this place I call home, and I can’t stop it. I hate it.”

“So get over it, Rusty. All these immigrants make this place the town I love. The cultures, the languages, the religions, mix together here. Sure, Fort Lauderdale is no longer a little dusty, white-bread, cracker town. But hey, some of us happen to think that’s a good thing.”

He grumbled as he waved at the young Latina waitress, signaling her to bring our check.

Rusty and Carlos talked fishing on the way back to Cooley’s Landing. Carlos was saying how he and his dad had chartered with this great fishing guide, fellow by the name of Bouncer, who worked out of Miami. Carlos was saying it was like Bouncer had some amazing sixth sense—he just knew where the fish were, and with Bouncer’s help, Carlos and his dad had won some big deal tournament down in Key Largo.

I thought about how it was okay for a fishing guide to have a little inexplicable magic, but if it was a Haitian doing it, we called it hocus pocus. I felt the weight of the leather pouch around my neck. What did I believe? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t see the harm in a little extra insurance. I did not intend to remove the pouch any time soon.

I was jerked out of my reverie when the boat bumped up against the dock and the fenders squeaked as the air was squeezed out of them.

“Time to head for home,” Rusty said, hopping out of the boat first and reaching back to offer me his hand. Once on the dock, he didn’t let go. We both said good night to Carlos and started the walk back, still holding hands like a couple of kids.

“Thanks for dinner,” I said.

He didn’t say anything. We walked across the asphalt, listening to the sound of our shoes crunching bits of barnacle from the launch ramp. Just as we reached the grass on the far side of the launch ramp, Rusty pointed to the river on our left. “Look, a manatee.” He let go of my hand, put his arm around my shoulder, and pointed through an empty boat slip. “See those rings in the current mid-river?” Just then the fuzzy snout surfaced, and we saw the black nostrils and the little cloud of mist around them.

“It’s late for a manatee here,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Rusty said, and from the sound of his voice in my ear, I knew he was looking at me, not the manatee. Then he said, “I’m not very good at this,” and he placed a hand on the side of my face and kissed me on the mouth. While I would have to agree with him that his technique for getting there was rather abrupt, when it came to the actual kissing, he wasn’t half bad.

An alarm sounded several blocks over in the neighborhood, and we broke apart, taking an air break. The alarm continued to whoop, and I said, “Sounds like somebody can’t remember their code.”

“Damned gadgets,” he said. “What the hell good are they when everyone ignores them?”

I didn’t get to answer him. It was then I heard the shot. It wasn’t a little pop like they say gunshots make, and not a whomp like an explosion, either. It was a muffled boom. Like it had come from inside a house. We both started running.