Ciji Ware (63 page)

“I can understand why it may look that way to you,” Marchand replied, shifting his gaze from Corlis to her TV crew, who stood in a circle within the grassy area separating several crypts. “But we’re wasting time with all of this! My first priority is to make sure King is all right, and I don’t want any of us to get hurt. Public exposure is the
only
weapon that can do Grover real harm—and he knows it.”

“Well, then…” Corlis said, somewhat mollified. “What do you suggest we do next?” She looked over Marchand’s shoulder. “There must be five hundred aboveground tombs in this place.” She calculated worriedly. “It could take forever to find him, and if the ventilation isn’t good, or if he’s unconscious and can’t answer our calls…”

“We’ve got a couple of hours before the city council meetin’ is due to begin. Let’s fan out systematically and go house to house, so to speak,” Marchand urged.

“But what if Jack or the chauffeur were ordered to stand guard?” Manny asked apprehensively.

“Ebert said Grover told them not to hang around in case someone spotted them. He and his buddy wore ski masks and blindfolded King so he wouldn’t know who did it. Jack’s ’sposed to unlock the tomb after midnight… once the city council has taken its vote, and while it’s too dark for King to see.”

“And so, no harm done,” Corlis said bitterly. “Except that the one thing King truly cares about—preserving those buildings for posterity—would be a lost cause, correct?”

“According to Jack, that’s the plan,” Lafayette Marchand replied grimly.

“Well, you’re right, we’re wasting time standing here,” she cried.

“Let’s get started,” Virgil said.

Lafayette stepped behind a nearby crypt and retrieved a crowbar he’d stowed there earlier. “When one of us finds him, we may need this to spring him free.” He dug into his pockets and handed each of them a whistle. “Blow this if you hit pay dirt, and the rest of us will come running, agreed?”

Without further conversation the foursome began roving through the vast cemetery in search of a captive encased somewhere on the grounds in an oven-like marble tomb. Their ensuing hunt proved to be slow, sweltering, unnerving work. They’d began at the center, moving outward in four directions, down row upon row, searching only those structures with open grates or filigrees incorporated into their designs.

After nearly forty-five minutes, Corlis, perspiring in the midday sun, reached the end of a lane that stood at the farthest point from the cemetery’s gated entrance. She prayed that Jack Ebert had followed instructions and picked a tomb open to the air to guarantee King’s survival. A goodly distance from her fellow searchers, she could only faintly hear the others shouting King’s name.

She approached the corner of a tomb where its slate roof had caved in. She began to work her way down the next path, pausing at crypts large enough to house a tall man like King. At the doors and gates she called into dusky, sepulchral depths and was greeted by unearthly silence.

After ten more minutes Corlis was now perspiring heavily and fighting rising panic.

She approached the entrance to a large, nineteenth-century crypt with the name “Milling” engraved on all four marble sides. Her spirits quickened at the sight of an elaborately filigreed wrought-iron gate secured with a modern padlock and chain.

“King?” she shouted. “King… are you there? King!”

Inside, a shadowy figure suddenly rose like a specter from on top of a sarcophagus at the far end of the Milling family mausoleum. Corlis gave a little scream of surprise.

“Corlis?” a voice echoed.

It was King’s voice!

“Oh my God!” she cried. “It’s
you
!”
She pressed herself against the gate.

“Sweet Jesus, Ace… you are somethin’ else!”

“Are you all
right
?
I got so scared when I saw this body rise up—”

“Just catching forty winks, you might say,” he replied with a shaky laugh. He reached through the gate to touch her shoulder. “I’m not dreaming, am I? This place can do that to you, y’know. It’s really
you
?” In the dim light behind him, four marble-sided coffins were neatly stacked, two to a side. A fifth at the far end of the tomb had provided him with a bed.

“It’s me, all right,” she acknowledged. “Oh, King… I was so afraid that—”

As their fingers hooked through the grillwork, they sought each other’s lips but managed only the barest contact through the rusty iron bars.

“Boy, am I one happy fella to see
your
sweet face!” King exclaimed. “How’d you know to come here?”

Corlis leaned away from the gate and rolled her eyes heavenward. “It’s a long story. I’ll fill you in later, but first we’ve got to get you out.”

“Last week you weren’t even taking my calls.”

Corlis gazed at his haggard face peering through the bars and felt like weeping. “I am
so
glad to
see
you,” she whispered, near tears. “All that nonsense about Cindy Lou and the Mallorys making a donation to help your cause… I was jealous and acted like an ass. The Mallorys have a perfectly legitimate stake in wanting to help save those buildings.”

“The lady from California is apologizing again?” King declared through the iron gate. “My, my, sugar. You haven’t been out in too much sun, have you?”

“I mean it,” Corlis said doggedly. “It was a cheap shot on my part.”

“Well, thanks for saying you’re sorry.”

Corlis drew closer once again and said with a shaky laugh, “Look, now that we’ve got
that
settled… we’ve got to get you to the city council meeting. It’s scheduled for four o’clock.” She put the orange plastic whistle to her lips and blew hard. Then she clasped King’s fingers again. “Oh, baby… thank God you’re all right!”

Suddenly a hand appeared from thin air and seized her forearm in a deathlike grip. In an instant another batted the whistle out of her grasp. From behind her she felt a palm clamp itself over her mouth, and the next thing she knew, she was being yanked back against her assailant’s chest.

“Goddamn you, Jack!” King shouted from behind the locked gate. “I figured it was your shitty little ferret’s face behind that ski mask. If you hurt her, I swear I’ll—”

Corlis didn’t hear the conclusion of King’s threats, for within seconds Jack had dragged her into the narrow space between two tombs. She screamed and fought against him frantically.

“Shut up, you bitch!”

“Let me go!” Corlis shouted, her words muffled by Jack’s hand pressed across her mouth.

“Oh, you’ll go, all right,” Jack snarled. “You’re gonna keep your mouth shut till you pack up and get out of this town. Good thing I came back to check on ol’ King in there. Otherwise I might not have had such a wonderful opportunity to teach you a lesson,
Miz
McCullough.”

A cold rage began to take possession of her. Without warning she slammed her left elbow into Jack’s narrow chest. She heard him grunt and felt his hand loosen on her face.

“You are
such
a slime ball!” she screamed.

She twisted her body with all her strength and brought up her right knee in a swift, sharp, well-aimed blow to his groin.

“Ahhhh… ohhhh!” he moaned, doubling over.

Jack fell and rolled into a fetal ball on the grass. Corlis darted around the pitched-roof vault on her right and began to search frantically for the bright orange plastic whistle he had thrown into the turf near the Milling tomb.

In a panic King called, “Sweet Jesus, Corlis! Are you all right?”

“Yes!” she shouted triumphantly as she spotted a brilliant flash of color in a tufted hillock near the wrought-iron gate behind which King stood, helpless.

“Run!”
King yelled. “Get the hell out of here!”

Corlis ignored his command and instead made a grab for the whistle and blew as hard as she could. Within seconds whistle blasts answered her call from the other side of the cemetery. “Over here!” she screamed, waving her arms frantically and not caring whether Jack heard her. “I found King! Over
here
!
Watch out for Jack Ebert!”

Her foot suddenly encountered something hard. Glancing down, she caught sight of a small stone angel that had fallen off the corner of the adjacent tomb’s caved-in roof and lay half-buried in the grass.

Next to it laid one of its wings that had been sheared off. Corlis reached down and seized the heavy piece of marble. Suddenly she experienced a piercing memory of Dylan Fouché ringing his little bell in an arc over her head the day he performed the space clearing on Julia Street. “This will keep you surrounded in sacred space,” he’d said by way of benediction. “It is here for you whenever you need protection.” She cast a distracted glance at King and began to creep toward the spot where she had left Jack writhing on the ground.

“Corlis,
don’t
!”
King hissed, but Corlis ignored his plea, concentrating instead on imagining a bell jar of protective white light encircling her as she cautiously moved forward.

By this time Ebert had risen to his knees. His pale, slender hands splayed protectively across his groin. Out of the corner of her eye, she was startled to see Virgil’s camera lens nosing its way around the edge of an adjacent tomb, following her every move.

How long had he been rolling video on this macabre scene?
she wondered, her spirits rising. Then she saw Manny, his headset clamped on his ears, holding a boom mike on an extender pole.

“We were just a couple of rows from here when we heard your whistle,” Manny grinned. “Marchand’s way over on the Washington Avenue side.”

“You guys are fantastic,” she said, keeping her eye on her cornered prey and clasping the broken piece of angel’s wing in her right hand like a pitcher on the mound. Then she yelled at Jack, “Get up!” Ebert slowly, painfully rose to his feet. “We’ll just let Virgil here take some pretty pictures of you unlocking the Milling tomb,” Corlis said, “so we’ll have them to show the cops and your employer, Mr. Jeffries, to remind him that ordering someone’s kidnapping is a federal offense.”

From behind his camera Virgil announced triumphantly, “Hey, boss lady! I got great shots of Jack tryin’ to wrestle you to the ground and you givin’ him a chop to his privates.”

Corlis gave him the thumbs-up sign with her free hand. “Just a little maneuver I learned in LA doing a story about women’s self-defense,” she replied grimly, taking a menacing step toward Jack with her marble weapon still in hand.

“Way to go,” Virgil said loudly from behind his camera.

“Would you two have just kept the camera rolling, even if I hadn’t been able to deck the guy?” she asked, never taking her eyes off Jack. “Or would you have rescued me?”

“Naw… you’re a tough cookie,” Manny called from his position near the corner of the tomb. “We
knew
you’d deck ’im!”

“Thanks a bunch,” she muttered, and both men laughed.

However, Jack Ebert wasn’t laughing. He was staring at her, glassy-eyed. He attempted to shift his weight slightly and cried, “Ohhhhh…”

Corlis took a step closer and wagged a finger at him. “Now, if you’ll just be a good boy and do exactly as I say,” she declared to King’s abductor, “I’ll
consider
not broadcasting this on the ten o’clock news. However, if I
do
put this bit on the air, I’ll just do a voice track at this point so no one can hear me say, ‘Get over here, you
rodent
,
and show me the keys!’”

Jack remained hunched over in obvious pain. “They’re… in my pocket,” he said, wincing. “The whole idea for this was Grover’s, y’know.”

“But you just
loved
writing that garbage about King and me, didn’t you, you hack,” Corlis snapped. “Take the damn keys out of your pocket, and unlock the gate.”

While Virgil kept his video camera rolling, Jack gingerly extracted a set of keys from his pants pocket and shuffled toward the wrought-iron gate. Behind the rusted filigree, King stared stonily at his adversary but remained silent. With trembling fingers Jack finally got the key in the lock and opened it.

“Just get
out
of here before your prisoner flattens you!” Corlis growled at Jack. “And if you tip off Grover Jeffries about what’s happened here, just watch WJAZ news tonight. You and your boss will think the story I did about your wedding was a love letter. Now, beat it!”

Jack flushed scarlet to the tips of his ratlike ears. “How do I know you won’t just turn me in to the cops?” he asked truculently.

Before she could answer, King intervened. “You don’t.” He shot Jack a murderous look. “But you’d better just be grateful that I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

Corlis added, “And, in case you’re tempted, later, to get creative, remember something, Jackie boy… we’ve got everything documented on video.”