46

I helped the man to his feet and asked him what he remembered. He recalled very little, except to say that a repulsive but unstoppable darkness had been growing inside him like a cancer, until it took him over entirely. But now, he said with a look of astonishment, “It’s gone. . . . It’s been lifted.”

“Do you know why you are here at Dead Point?”

He shook his head no.

I asked him if he was familiar with a church in Port Sulphur, and he nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ve driven past it. I know it.”

“Good. Go there. See the pastor first thing tomorrow. His name is Wilhem Ventrie. Tell him what happened and that I sent you. I’m Trevor Black.”

When I climbed inside the Mustang, Heather was drop-jawed. “You want to tell me what all that was about?”

“Well,” I asked, “what did you see out there just now?”

“You sort of wrestling with that man. And he shouted. You were on top of him on the ground and you shouted something. Then, all of a sudden, the two of you were talking together like nothing happened. Almost buddies.”

She waited. Then, finally, “So . . . what was going on?”

I said simply, “Deliverance. Rescue.”

Heather was quiet after that.

There was a heavy silence in the car as we drove back to the hotel in New Orleans. Heather was the first to break it. But when she did, she avoided asking about my encounter with the pickup driver.

Instead she went back, several times, in several different ways, to the girl in the window of the boat and whether there was an innocent explanation for it. I wanted there to be, but I told her I doubted it. “The chances that a freak coincidence could have happened exactly like Henry Bosant predicted, at night, forty-eight hours later, going down the Mississippi? Slim to none.”

She was carrying a desperate expression. I said, “Heather, this kind of work will break your heart. But then, it ought to. Look what’s at stake. On the other hand, there’s hope. . . .”

“Oh yeah? I’m not seeing it.”

“Hearts get broken. But I know someone who can fix them.”

I saw a struggling smile. “Yeah . . . I know what you’re talking about. Thanks for the mini sermon,” she said.

Still, I was struggling against desperation myself. No call back from the sheriff’s department. And despite the fact that Heather left a message on Detective Ashley Linderman’s voice mail, asking her to call me, no call from her either.

The toughest question Heather asked was the next one, and the most obvious. “What now?”

I wasn’t sure. Not at first. All I knew was that the sheriff’s department at Port Sulphur needed to know what we saw. But despite what I had just said to Heather, I realized that skeptical minds could still discount it. Especially if they didn’t know the backstory from Henry Bosant.

As we entered the city limits of New Orleans, I called the sheriff’s office once more, this time demanding to be put through to Deputy St. Martin’s voice mail.

I left a detailed message. In accord with what I had promised to Henry Bosant, I omitted any facts that might implicate him personally. But I described everything else: how a credible witness had told me about a child abduction ring operating down the Mississippi with ties to New Orleans, and that boats would periodically motor past Port Sulphur, getting supplies on the water near Dead Point from a smaller tender boat as they headed south toward Port Eads and then eventually into the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

I continued my voice mail message, saying, “I wanted to tell you all of that at the sheriff’s department, but before I could, I was placed into custody as a lunatic, cuffed, and carted off to Morehaven.”

In closing I said, “In any case, Deputy, on a tip, I went to Dead Point tonight around nine thirty and spotted a young girl who looked as if she were being held captive in the hold of a forty- to fifty-foot craft heading toward the Gulf as it passed by my position. I saw her in the porthole of the boat, and it appeared she was yelling for help. Exactly as my tipster said would happen.”

I left my cell number and asked that he return the call.

Then I was hit with a last-ditch idea. I asked Heather to look up the number for the local branch of the Coast Guard and place the call for me on my cell so I could talk to them.

I was transferred to the master chief of that sector, and I told him I had evidence of illegal conduct taking place on the Mississippi around the area of Port Sulphur. A possible kidnapping ring, and that the boat was on its way to Port Eads.

Then the predictable answer. “Sir, you need to contact the local sheriff’s department. They’ll decide whether they need our backup for an interdiction.”

I was unable to tie the female abduction cult to the possessed pickup truck driver who encountered us at Dead Point, but I had a strong suspicion that he had been one of the worker bees in the conspiracy. In Reverend Cannon’s words, one of the low-level “henchmen.” Whoever he had been working for, whoever the “overlord” was at the top of the pyramid —“the king of lust and pain . . . the destroyer of children” —he had successfully intimidated his followers through a pitiless exercise of power.

As we drove closer to our hotel, I knew there were still mountains to climb and so much that I still didn’t know. We hadn’t stopped the boat floating past us on the Mississippi. And every hour that passed, more innocent young lives would be swept down a demonic sewer, orchestrated by a level of evil I had never experienced before.

Yet despite all that, something struck me out of the blue. And when it did, I was buoyed. Lifted unexpectedly by a quiet but powerful current. My presence at Dead Point wasn’t in vain after all. Why did it take me so long to realize it? The dark side owned that tough guy in the pickup truck. He was lost. Possessed. But I was there by the banks of the river just in time to meet him. I was used by the same God who raises the dead and rescues the living. And he used me to raise that man from the walking dead and breathe life back into him.

Heather must have seen that in my face, because I was smiling. She bent around from the passenger seat to take a closer look. “Hmm” was all she said, but there was a half smile on her face.

Heather and I caught a late dinner in the hotel restaurant. Conversation was sparse. The exhaustion of the day had set in for both of us. But before I paid the check, I asked Heather what turned into a long, rambling question. “What you’ve experienced lately . . . you know, the ABA convention and my speech, and being approached by that female mystery lawyer, and the goings-on at Bayou Bon Coeur and at Six Flags; then our meeting with Henry Bosant at Dead Point, and my being taken into custody and admitted to Morehaven, and the court hearing; what happened tonight at the river and what we saw, and then the possessed guy in the pickup . . . I was wondering . . .”

“Wondering what?” she asked.

“Well, just wondering what you’ve thought about all of it.”

“I’m still processing it.”

A safe answer. I didn’t blame her.

Then she said, “Look, I don’t want to get into it right now —I’m too tired —but basically, I’m glad I’ve been here. Seeing it all. And seeing it with you. How you fit into this crazy stuff. You’re . . .” She took a moment before she ended it. When she did, she said, “You’re kinda unique, you know? I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

There was so much swimming just below the surface of her words.

I said, “And it’s not over yet.”

I looked at the fatigue on her face and decided right then that my important conversation with her would have to wait until tomorrow morning. The talk about her real father. Over breakfast. When our minds were fresh.