Chapter 13
CHAMBERS SPENT A MISERABLE NIGHT. He found the silence and memories that greeted him when he got home almost overwhelming.
The day had been… unique in his experience.
His impulsive “confession” to Estevez, imaginative but false; getting reamed out and banished from the office; taking on a crappy case that, on closer look, turned out to be slightly less crappy than expected.
But the fact was there had been periods when he’d almost forgotten his fierce anguish.
Although he kept the bottle of gin uncracked on one bedside table, this night his sidearm had slept locked away in the drawer.
He lay awake as the world brightened outside his bedroom windows, the sun rising at last. He showered, dressed, and shaved, wondering what this day would bring.
Dreading was probably a better word. His mind wandered over to the man with the amputated arm, and Pendergast’s seemingly extrasensory deductions. What a strange guy he was.
He heard the doorbell. Hastily washing the foam from his face, he trotted downstairs and opened the front door—to find a uniformed man standing there, cap in hand.
“Agent Chambers?” the man asked.
For a brief moment, Chambers wondered if the OPR—the Bureau’s version of Internal Affairs—had sent over a flying squad to bring him in.
But the cut of the man’s uniform and his deferential attitude made this obviously paranoid.
He glanced out at his driveway and saw the gleaming outline of a vintage Rolls-Royce.
The man was a chauffeur.
“What do you want?” Chambers asked.
“Begging your pardon, sir, but Mr. Pendergast sent me.”
“He what?”
“He sent me to bring you to his residence. He asked me to tell—to suggest to you that it might be a convenient location to continue the work you began yesterday.”
“He sent a Rolls?”
“Yes, sir.”
Chambers did his best to conceal his surprise. This was strange. But hell, it beat sitting at home with his demons.
“Give me a moment, please,” he told the man.
Ten minutes later, the long, gleaming machine was turning heads as it glided through the suburban sprawl north of New Orleans.
Chambers, practically drowning in the soft rich leather of the rear seat, was taken aback by the opulence of the interior: the retractable drinks setup in book-matched burlwood, the crystal decanters of expensive liquor, the ashtray, the hinges and trim plated in gold.
The car soon emerged from the crowded streets and entered the sleepy byways of St. Charles Parish, where the trees hung thick with Spanish moss and ancient mansions could be glimpsed past ancient tree trunks, set among dark bayous and old, private family cemeteries, where the stones lay at angles and moss hid forgotten names.
Then the Rolls made a turn into a long, white-graveled lane—lined with black oaks—that led to a pillared plantation house.
Two trucks, with blue IBM logos and the words GLOBAL RESOURCES AND SOLUTIONS on their sides, were parked before the covered porch: one had a huge dish antenna on its roof, and several thick black cables snaked from the other, up the front steps and into the house.
They looked anachronistic in this placid antebellum setting.
The chauffeur parked, got out, and opened the door for Chambers. He had barely made it up the steps before the entrance opened. The slender figure of Pendergast—pale as a ghost and dressed, as always, in a tailored black suit—greeted him.