PART V THE CATHOLIC ESTATE #2
The last sign of him: the taunting delivery of his eyes to the Carter family in a gaudy little trophy.
I crouched in front of the seated figure, looking hard at Art’s trademark bolo tie.
Leaning forward, I gently lifted his head so I could see his face.
The eye sockets yawned empty.
‘Like I said, wounds . . .’ Heidi said.
I recalled the note that had accompanied the delivery of Art’s eyes in the trophy.
‘Matthew 18:9,’ I said. ‘“If your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.” He found this place, so they cut out his eyes.’
I checked Art’s body.
Apart from the mutilation of his eyes, there were no visible lethal wounds. He hadn’t been stabbed or shot.
‘I can’t tell how he died,’ Heidi said. ‘I think maybe they chained him to the wall, cut out his eyes and just left him here.’
I pulled my hypodermic syringe from my backpack, inserted it between two of Art’s ribs—into a lung—and then slowly withdrew the plunger.
The syringe filled with brown water.
‘His lungs are full of water,’ I said. ‘He drowned.’
I looked at the old brick-walled subterranean space around us. ‘This whole chamber is basically one big water tank. I imagine it fills up to the ceiling during every storm surge, flood or hurricane.
‘I think Art found this place and these victims, but then someone found him. Whoever they were, they cut his eyes out, chained him up and left him here in agony to drown, like these thirteen others. Thirteen . . .’
‘What? What is it?’
‘Thirteen is a baker’s dozen. Cyrus Barbin used that phrase when he spoke about this place: how he came here as a child and marvelled at the bishop’s collection, his baker’s dozen.’
I gazed at the thirteen rag-wearing souls manacled to the brick walls of the cistern.
‘The bishop’s collection?’ Heidi said. ‘Are you saying . . .’
‘. . . that the local bishop of New Orleans collected these people,’ I finished.
We looked at each other.
‘Are you talking about slaves? Now? In the twenty-first century?’ Heidi said in disbelief.
I said, ‘All I know for certain is that when Art Hillerman found these people in this tomb, it was worth killing him to keep it secret—’
Meeeeeeeeep!
My phone beeped.
Before coming inside the tomb, I’d launched one of my cheap little aerial drones. While we’d been inside, it’d been scanning the area from high above for movement.
It had picked up something.
Someone was coming.
‘Quick,’ I said. ‘Take as many photos as you can and let’s get out of here before they arrive. I don’t want what happened to Art to happen to us.’
We took a bunch of photos of the grim cistern and left, making sure to relock the iron door on our way out.
Night had fallen as Heidi, Brenda and I hustled back to the concrete dock flanked by the scary angel statues.
In the moonlight, the mansion and its graveyard looked very forbidding.
Heidi joined Brenda in their airboat.
I jumped into the Rascal and was about to start the engine when multiple shafts of light burst to life all around us.
The beams of powerful floodlights.
Whoever it was had good boats: they’d got here fast. Much faster than I’d anticipated.
A siren warbled.
Four airboats emerged from the darkness, gliding silently out of the long allée, their searchlights sabring through the night.
They fanned out about twenty yards from the dock.
They looked like police boats—with broad black-painted hulls, siren lights and bullhorns. Each airboat’s three-man crew wore grey-and-black police-like uniforms. Some gripped shotguns.
But they weren’t cops.
They were private security guards.
Written on the four boats’ black hulls were the words:
sss: southern security systems
The same company I’d encountered in Victorville.
Curious that they would also have the contract to patrol this property.
Curious and alarming.
The lead guard’s voice barked out of one of the bullhorns: ‘This is private property! Turn off your engines and stay where you are!’
Shielding my eyes from the glare of the floodlights, I saw him tilt his head at something in his other hand: a cell phone.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said into the phone and then pointed it at us, as if to show the person on the other end of the call who was on the dock.
The phone was close enough for me to see the face on its screen.
It was Deek Hammonds, the Hammer.
‘Dr Speedman,’ he said. ‘You were warned.’ Then, to the guards: ‘Kill them and dispose of the bodies.’
Be prepared.
After using two of my flash-bang grenades at the Four Seasons Hotel, I’d restocked my backpack with two more and I now threw them at the airboats.
One landed in the first boat.
It detonated—loud and bright—hurling the boat’s three crew members into the water.
The second grenade detonated in the branches of an oak tree above one of the other boats—blowing splinters every which way and causing all the other security guards to shy away and shield their faces.
I spun to Heidi and Brenda.
‘Go! Now!’ I called. ‘Rendezvous later!’
Heidi gunned it.
Her airboat’s floodlights blazed to life and she and Brenda peeled away to the left, heading around the mansion’s island.
I hit the gas, too, and as the first wild shots from the security guards’ guns rang out in the night, my Rascal sped off, shooting like a bullet between the gang of black airboats, down the oak-lined allée.
As I sped down the allée, I didn’t turn on my little boat’s forward lights.
Darkness was my friend right now.
Three of the four black airboats were right behind me.
As I’d sped away, I’d seen the crew of the first boat—the ones who had been hurled into the water—desperately trying to climb back into it.
Two of them made it, the last one didn’t: with a terrified scream, he was yanked under the water’s surface by a large alligator that had seen its chance.
Fuck.
The bouncing light beams of my three pursuers lit up the -canopy of oak branches that flashed by above me.
Gunshots rang out over the roar of their fans.
Their boats were larger than mine and, over straight stretches, much faster.
I couldn’t outrun them back to civilisation.
My Rascal, however, was more nimble.
I had to lose them here.
I cut hard left between two oaks, narrowly missing a giant alligator that bellowed angrily at me.
One of my three chasers overshot the turn, but the other two banked into it, close on my tail.
I zigzagged back toward the Catholic mansion, weaving in between the evenly spaced oak trees.
My pursuers did the same, their searchlights creating a strobe-like effect as they jagged left then right, left then right.
Then I shot through a gap in the old picket fence surrounding the flooded priests’ graveyard and sped into it.
I zoomed between the chunky grey headstones that jutted above the water’s surface, barely seeing them in the darkness.
They were deadly obstacles, seriously solid.
I avoided two more and whipped around a larger mausoleum, banking hard when—
Bam!
One of the security airboats—the one that had overshot my initial evasive turn back in the allée—slammed against my port side, almost causing my little boat to tip over.
A gunshot rang out.
A round sizzled past my ear.
As one guard drove the black airboat, the other two held on, trying to fire their guns—one pistol, one shotgun—with their free hands.
But I kept up my speed and rammed them back and—
—WHACK!—
—their airboat slammed bow-first into a mausoleum. Its nose crumpled and its occupants were all hurled like rag dolls into the marble wall of the tomb with shocking force.
But the other two airboats were still close behind me, banking and weaving, our wakes sloshing and slapping against the gravestones.
I sped on, racing around another grime-covered mausoleum, only to turn hard left as I suddenly found myself hemmed in by the graveyard’s eastern fence.
Boom! Boom!
Shotgun rounds shattered the rotted fenceposts as I whipped past them and one of the airboats swung in right behind me.
I turned inward, heading back toward the mansion, swinging between two trees and underneath a thick horizontal rope suspended between them about five feet above the waterline.
A preparation of mine that I’d set up before entering the LaSalle tomb.
I ducked as I shot under the rope, my little turbo fan only just squeezing under it.
In the airboat behind me, the three guards also ducked, but that didn’t help them.
Their fan was too tall and it slammed hard against the unforgiving rope and their boat stopped instantly, hurling the crew forward into the water as their boat came to a sudden jarring halt.
I turned to face forward just in time to see a shotgun pointed at my face from the other side.
The third enemy airboat was right there, speeding along beside me, its shotgun-wielding guard only three feet away and about to blow my head off.
I ducked.
He fired.
Boom!
My ears rang.
I reached out, grabbed the shotgun’s pump-action forestock and we wrestled over it as we zoomed along at breakneck speed.
‘You little motherfucker, I’m gonna kill you!’ the guard yelled as we roared through the darkness.
Then I got a better grip on the gun and slammed it into the guard’s face.
His nose exploded with blood, broken, and he shouted in pain.
I gunned my engine and swept in front of his speeding airboat, racing out of the graveyard and onto the mansion’s flooded front lawn.
I aimed my little Rascal directly at the front doors of the mansion.
They were once ornate, with arch-shaped stained-glass inserts, but the paint on them had peeled and the wood was old and weathered.
Both doors hung askew, partially open.
I sped toward them, gaining speed, and with the third boat hammering on my tail, I smashed into the front doors—
—and blasted right through them, flinging them off their hinges as I burst into the flooded interior of the mansion without any loss of speed.
The airboat didn’t.
Because it couldn’t fit.
With a shrill metallic squeal, it lodged in the doorway and jolted to a halt, held fast by the doorframe.
I didn’t stop.