12

Down on the street, Heather was even more on my mind after my chat with Turk Kavagian. I hunted for my rental car, but I couldn’t find it. Thinking I must have gone the wrong way, I turned around and headed in the other direction along the sidewalk. After several blocks I had that sinking realization. I knew I had parked legally. Yet my car was nowhere to be found. Only one answer. It must have been stolen.

Figuring that I’d report the car theft when I was back in my hotel room, I was about to call a cab. And I would have done that, except a black Lincoln limo came cruising by and slowed down. I raised my hand, thinking maybe I could grab the limo instead. But in my unusual line of work, I had to be cautious. I checked out the license plate on the rear of the limo. It read For Hire. I strolled over to the tinted glass window on the driver’s side, which was rolled up.

“Can I see your chauffeur’s license?” I said loud enough to be heard.

The window hummed down a few inches. A hand thrust out the window holding a Louisiana chauffeur’s driver’s license for a few seconds, as I hastily scanned the little laminated certificate. The hand disappeared and I crawled in the back, grateful for the favor this guy was offering.

It was one of those limos with a glass panel separating the passenger from the driver. I could see the driver was wearing a dark suit and a chauffeur’s cap. I couldn’t believe they still wore those, and to make matters worse, the cap didn’t fit him very well.

I touched the intercom button and gave him the address to my hotel. I didn’t care about the fare; I needed to get back and make a series of calls. My daughter was still missing, my rental had just been jacked, and Canterelle had still not responded to the message I left him.

The driver nodded. As we headed away from Magazine Street, I heard the electronic click of the doors. For a while I was buried in my thoughts, about how I needed to focus all my energies on Turk Kavagian’s offer to get a swamp guide to take me to the bayou where Heather might be waiting. I had been trying her cell every few hours but still getting voice mail. Frantic thoughts of catastrophe had to be suppressed, but it wasn’t easy.

Eventually I clued into my surroundings. Through the tinted windows I noticed the street sign. Clouet Street. And I looked ahead and noticed the Mississippi River looming. We were in the warehouse district. Big storage buildings, vacant lots, and few houses.

I pressed the intercom. “Hey, this isn’t the way to the hotel. What’s the deal?”

The driver didn’t respond.

“Can you hear me?” I said.

The driver turned his head, revealing his profile, and I felt an electric shiver —an indelible sense that I’d encountered this presence before. I could picture the figure I’d seen from the beach, hovering over the water, defying the laws of nature. Except, at that moment, he was in the front seat, driving that limo.

I banged on the glass. “Talk to me. Where are we going?”

The limo took a sharp turn onto Chartres, and I heard something behind me in the trunk of the limo. A heavy rolling thud. We were running parallel to the river and the limo was picking up speed. It must have been going fifty miles an hour and accelerating.

More banging on the glass, this time with both of my fists. Finally the driver spoke. And when he did, he turned to face me. His face was like it had been carved in granite and his eyes were lifeless. Yes, it was him.

“Trevor Black. We meet again. But not for long . . .” He burst into a cackle like some kind of jungle animal.

The driver was the same monster that I had seen out there on top of the surf, off Ocracoke Island. He hadn’t given up. Of course not. He had just regrouped. And once again, no advance warning; I never caught the scent.

The limo took a wheel-squealing turn onto an industrial entrance to a broad concrete wharf, and there was another rolling thud in the trunk. We were heading straight at the river. No gates and no fences to stop us. Next stop, the Mississippi.

As we sped forward, the driver opened his door and stepped out calmly as if the car were in park. Even though we were going at least sixty, he never missed a step, never fell; he just casually walked away from the speeding limo, defying the rules of physics.

I grabbed the door and jammed my shoulder against it while trying to lift the handle, but it wouldn’t open. I banged on the window. Break the glass, I thought. With what? The limo was maybe thirty feet from the edge of the wharf. I frantically disengaged my seat belt buckle and thrust my hands under the driver’s seat, looking for anything to smash the window. We were almost at the edge of the wharf. My hand touched the handle of something under the seat. I yanked it out. A hammer. What was it doing there? And the business end was dripping with blood.

The car toppled over the edge of the wharf as I tried to swing the hammer against the car window but missed.

Whomp. The limo hit the water with a jolt, front end down, throwing me forward with the back end of the limo easing upward.

I was smashing the window with the hammer. It began to break apart. But the limo was sinking quickly into the river, the driver’s compartment filling with water and the doors locked. The passenger seat would be filling next. More wild smashing of the glass. I dropped the bloody hammer and pushed the busted glass out with my hands as the river water was now up to my door.

I squeezed through the window, finally out, just as the limo fully submerged. I was underwater, having to hold my breath as the limo slipped to the bottom of the river while I did panic strokes upward through the opaque water, my lungs burning, trying to make it to the top and to the air that I needed. Pushing, pushing.

Breaking through the surface of the water and gasping for air, I saw the wharf about twenty feet away. My clothes were like lead, weighing me down, as I stroked with Olympian effort toward the wharf. But when I got there, the concrete dock was too high for me to pull myself up.

Exhausted, and mustering all that I could, I swam around the edge of the wharf until I spotted a rough beachhead and painfully stroked toward it. When my feet hit the soft silt river bottom, I pulled myself forward, waist-deep in river water, then knee-deep, finally dragging myself out of the water and dropping onto the solid dirt of the river’s edge, face-first.

When I made it to the nearest sidewalk, I was trying to get my bearings straight. I tried to turn my cell phone on, but it didn’t light up. So much for waterproof cells.

I needed to get to a hotel or a restaurant so I could pick up another cab and return to the relative safety of my hotel, but I was feeling disoriented and a bit lost. In the interim I had heard a few sirens, and it sounded as if they were heading down to the river’s edge, in the vicinity of where the demon driver steered his limo into the Mississippi, with me in it.

All the while, I kept thinking about that bloody hammer and about the thudding sound of something heavy rolling back and forth in the trunk of the limo every time we took a turn.