Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 15 - The Mona Lisa Murders (10 page)

‘Not yet,
cher
. Me, I wants to see what’s around here.’ Instead of heading for the hotel, Edmund made a slow pass around the deserted hotel, and then circled the walls of St. John’s Cemetery across the street. A portion of the south wall had collapsed.

Throttling back, Edmund spoke over his shoulder. ‘I take you to front door now,
oui?’

Latasha and I looked at each other, remembering the alligator back at the bus station.

We had no time to discuss his suggestion for a sharp crack in the bow of the rescue craft followed immediately by the report of a gun cut us off.

A powerboat with two men in volunteer garb raced toward us.

Edmund hit the throttle and spun the wheel, zigzagging for one corner of the cemetery in an effort to put the wall between the two powerboats.

Another shot ran out, exploding in the water off our starboard side.

‘Where did they come from,’ Latasha screamed, having dropped to her knees and grasping tight to the rail along the gunwale.

We shot past the fallen wall, heading for the next corner.

Just as we reached it, the bozos behind whipped around the corner and managed to get off two wild shots before we disappeared once again.

Without warning, Edmund cut sharply right, sending us down a narrow corridor between the wall and a line of ancient elm trees in front of the cemetery.

I worked my way up to the console. ‘What now?’

Deftly guiding us from the trees, then around the next corner, he asked. ‘You drive one these, Boudreaux?’

‘Yeah. Why?’

He pulled out the revolver from under the console and stuck it under his belt. ‘Us, we going into cemetery.’ I started to argue, but he continued. ‘There be room around the walls for the boat. I climb on one of them tombs and stop them
weeshpanks
.’

Another shot rang out, and a slug dug a gouge in the gunwale by my hand. I jerked back. ‘Go!’

 He glanced over his shoulder at Latasha. ‘Hold on,
cher
.’ As we roared toward the fallen wall, he spun the wheel, sending us skimming into the cemetery.

Instantly, I saw what he meant. The two-hundred yard long enclosure sported a twenty-foot walkway along the perimeter of the Eighteenth Century cemetery.

At the end of the wall, we curved back to the left behind the tombs. Edmund cut the power. Even before the rescue craft stopped, he hopped into the water and splashed toward the vaults. He waved us off frantically. ‘
Aller, va
! Go, go!’

I slammed the throttle forward. The stern dipped, too low. Props slammed against the concrete walkway. I backed off.

Latasha glared at me. ‘Don’t tear it up. We’ll never get out of here.’

I eased the throttle forward, sending us along the broad watery path at about fifteen knots, hoping we wouldn’t run into crumbled tombs or floating coffins. Just before we reached the first corner, I glanced back in time to see Edmund leaping lightly from tomb to tomb like a little monkey.

‘Slow down,’ Latasha muttered, pointing to a gray vault with an angel standing on the roof. ‘Looks like something in the water.’

I slowed, skirting a pile of bricks that had fallen from the crypt behind the angel, then accelerated. Across the cemetery, gunfire erupted, half-a-dozen reports followed by an explosion.

Beyond the tombs poking up through the water, a balloon of orange billowed up followed by thick, black smoke.

I cut power. ‘Edmund! Edmund!’

Latasha gasped.

‘Edmund!’

A faint voice replied. ‘
Oui!
Here.’

‘Where?’

‘Here!’

‘I can’t see him,’ Latasha exclaimed.

Muttering a curse, I eased the rescue craft against the spiked iron fence surrounding a marble sepulcher with a dome supported by Grecian pillars. I nodded to the fence. ‘Grab hold.’

I climbed onto the bow, stepped on the fence, then up to the walkway around the dome.

Four rows over, Edmund, holding his leg, lay on a tomb, the top of which was a couple inches under water. Beyond, I saw no evidence of the two goons, only a burning boat. ‘Hurt bad?’

Grimacing, the wiry Melungeon nodded. ‘Pretty much, I think.’

‘Can you walk?’

Clenching his teeth, he shook his head. ‘The leg, I think it be broken.’

‘Hold on. I’ll get you.’

A quick survey of the area told me there was no way we could get the boat to him. So, if we couldn’t get the boat to him, we had to get him to the boat.

I called back. ‘What happened to those two?’

All he did was shrug.

The tomb in front of me was a brick vault, held together by patches of aging stucco. The roof was about two feet beneath me. Without thinking, I half-stepped, half-jumped down, and kept going, through the roof and crashed into a century-old coffin that was no match for my weight.

I looked up. The sky beckoned through what had once been the roof about five feet over my head. I felt bones pressing into my back and frantically kicked out the name plate in front of the tomb, leaving a two foot square opening through which water poured in as I scrambled out, at every moment expecting to feel bony fingers clutching my ankles.

Sloshing through the water, I reached Edmund. A slug had struck his leg below the knee. I stuck his revolver under my belt, put him on my back, and stumbled back to the boat.

We hefted him into the Marlin. I climbed in and slid the revolver under the console. ‘What happened to you,’ Latasha asked as I slipped behind the wheel. ‘You dropped out of sight.’

‘You don’t want to know. Let’s get back to the hotel before a whole blasted army shows up. That fire will bring boats from miles around.’ I turned to Edmund whose swarthy face was beaded with sweat. ‘We don’t have time to look at the leg right now.’

‘
Oui, oui!
Get key and then we go.’

Despite his pain, Edmund pulled himself up on the seat at the console and held the craft while Latasha and I, gasoline sprayers in hand, waded into the lobby. I jerked to a halt when I spotted the stairs leading to the mezzanine. Snakes lay in coils on every step.

I heard her gasp.

‘Just keep your eyes on them. Where the mailboxes?’

‘Behind the counter. Six-nineteen is mine.’

Every sense quivered with tension as I waded behind the counter and opened her mailbox. It contained three letters. I felt the first, then the second, and grinned when my fingers recognized the outline of a key. Taking no chances, I folded the letter into my shirt pocket and started back.

That’s when the cottonmouth glided from under the countertop.

Latasha gasped.

I froze.

Chapter Seventeen

Cottonmouth water moccasins possess a nasty temperament. To add to their charm, they are also very aggressive. I long ago came to the belief that it was cottonmouths, not cats who believed the world was made to serve them.

I gaped at the black serpent some ten feet distant. In no hurry, he swam at a right angle to me, then paused, floating on the surface. He looked around, his tongue flicking the air, trying to catch a whiff of what I was. Satisfied I was nothing of his concern, he continued, disappearing through the open door to an inner office.

In a harsh whisper, I said. ‘Back out, slow. No splashing.’ Keeping my bottle of gasoline ready, I followed my own advice, backing slowly around the counter, my eyes scanning the lobby for any of his buddies.

I threw a glance over my shoulder at the stairs. My heart skipped a beat. The snakes had vanished! Swallowing the lump in my throat, I stared at the muddy water around me, imagining an army of snakes ready to charge my legs.

With a sigh of relief, we made it through the front door only to be startled by Edmund’s shout. ‘
Rapide! Hâte!
Quick! Hurry! They come.’

The two Throat Cutters had climbed the cemetery wall and were wading toward us. I pulled myself over the gunwale. ‘Go, go,’ I shouted, at the same time grabbing Latasha’s hand and yanking her into the boat.

Clenching his teeth, the wiry Melungeon shoved the throttle forward, making a wide sweep to the west through a grove of elm and circling the hotel, heading back in the direction from which we had come.

I took over the wheel while Latasha helped her cousin to the deck and slit his pant leg, revealing a black gaping hole in the tibia about halfway between his ankle and knee.

Kneeling at his side, she worked quickly, retrieving the first aid trauma kit and cleaning, disinfecting, and bandaging the wound as best as she could. ‘We need to get you to a hospital,’ she announced, sitting back on her heels.

‘
Oh, mon non,
’ Edmund growled between clenched teeth. ‘We get to Ninety. Carl, he be waiting for us. I be fixed up over there.’

I checked the fuel gauge. ‘We have half a tank of gas. Is that going to be enough?’

‘
Oui
. It be only about twenty miles. I—’ He grimaced and clenched his teeth, then shivered. He stuck out his hand. ‘Me, I needs a big drink of whiskey.’

He took three or four big drinks, then lay back on the bouncing deck, his head resting on a lifejacket.

‘The top,’ I said to Latasha. ‘Put up the top. Give him some shade. Us too.’

‘No problem.’ Deftly, she unfolded the Bimini top and fastened it to the rails. The shade felt like heaven.

I resisted the urge to go full throttle. First it would call attention to us and second, only the good Lord knew what was floating just beneath the water. So, I kept us moving at a moderate ten knots.

My brain worked feverishly in an effort to second guess the ‘Throat Cutters’. ‘Those two back at the cemetery had to have made contact with their buddies,’ I announced to Latasha who had come to sit beside me.

She looked up at me, her big black eyes sad. ‘I’m sorry for getting you mixed up in this, Tony. If I’d had any idea who I was getting involved with, I’d never have taken the job.’

I clucked my tongue. ‘Don’t beat yourself up. You had no way of knowing.’ I hesitated, then added. ‘I wish Danny or Eddie would call.’

‘Those are the ones you talked to last night?’

‘Yeah. Friends. They know the kind of scum that people like you and me never dreamed even existed. But they do,’ I added.

She gave a wry chuckle. ‘I’m finding that out.’

Rescue craft were beginning to appear, heading to and from the I-Ten ramp. I angled to the southeast for the Ninth Ward and Jefferson Parkway, none too keen on wading back into the bus terminal.

Edmund struggled to sit up. When he saw where I was headed, he smiled and nodded. ‘I show you the way.’

‘No. I can handle it. You lay back down. Those bozos after us are looking for three in a boat. Maybe they won’t pay attention to just a couple volunteers.’

I glanced at my watch. Almost three. The blistering sun baked our shoulders, quickly drying our clothes. The drying mud that had worked into the cloth acted like starch, stiffening the material.

The fecund stench rising from the floodwaters had intensified, but by now, I’d grown used to it.

Thirty minutes later, we turned onto Ramirez, the street on which we had picked up Angelique and her children. All the homes were deserted by now. The water had risen another foot or so. I We glanced at Angelique’s mother’s house, noting that someone had sprayed a slash through the number one.

I grinned. At least, someone was taking care of the poor old woman. I had shivered at the idea of the old lady still lying in her bed, half submerged in stinking floodwaters.

Only the soft purring of our Mercury engine broke the silence.

Latasha had been standing beside the console, one hand on the windshield, the other on one of the Bimini supports. ‘It must have been horrible out here last night for all these people. No lights, just water.’

‘And snake and alligators,’ I added.

‘Yeah.’ She shivered. ‘I hope we don’t have any trouble up ahead.’

My hope exactly, but I didn’t fool myself into the belief we had dodged the Throat Cutters. I hadn’t noticed any powerboats within half-a-mile or so in the last few minutes. Maybe we had given them the slip.

‘What do you think?’

Her question broke into my thoughts. ‘Huh? Oh, yeah. Believe me, I’ve had enough trouble to last for a lifetime.’

‘Look. She pointed over our bow. ‘There’s Jefferson Parkway.’

The stark red brick walls of the bus station rose from the muddy waters. We drew close to the gaping opening in front where the huge plate glass windows had once been.

Latasha gasped. ‘Tony! Look!’

Inside, bloated carcasses of three giant nutria rats floated near the counter on which we had discovered the alligator that morning. One was covered by snakes. The other two bobbed up and down as creatures fed on them from below.

The scene left me speechless except for a few profanities uttered in awe. ‘Ain’t no way we’re wading in there,’ I breathed.

Edmund struggled to sit up. He turned up the pint of Old Crow and drained it. ‘What you be looking at?’ He peered over the gunwale. He was a little more profane than I had been.

I stared at the nutria, frustrated.

‘Boudreaux.’

‘Yeah.’ I looked around at Edmund.

He pointed to the broad expanse of window devoid of glass. ‘Put the top down while I raise the engines.’

‘What are doing?’

Pain filled his eyes. ‘We don’t leave without the package. You look. The water, she be higher. Motors up, we pole inside right up to the stairs.’

Latasha and I stared at him, then each other. I grinned. ‘Sounds like a winner to me.’ I felt my pocket. The envelope and key were still there. ‘Give me a spray can and the revolver. I’ll go alone.’

‘But—’

‘I know where the locker is. You keep the snakes out of the boat.’

‘Boudreaux, he be right,
cher
. It only take one.’

Cautiously, we poled the rescue craft through the open window and up to the stairs. I stuck the revolver under my belt, grabbed an oar. The gasoline quickly dispersed the few snakes on the stairs.

The mezzanine was another matter. Some of the fat reptiles refused to budge, so I had to budge them with the oar.