Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“Help!” he shouts, panic filling his dull eyes. “I can’t breathe!”

His lungs are probably filling with blood. He could drown internally before the river gets him. I can’t go in after him; he could drown me even without meaning to.

“Please!” he shouts. “I can’t stay up!”

“Go to hell!” I yell, though I need to save him.

He’s twenty-five feet into the channel now, turning in slow circles in the wake of a distant tug. Spinning away from me, he shouts something I can’t hear. Then, as his face comes around, again he repeats it.

“Your sister’s alive!”

A bolus of adrenaline flushes through my veins, and I have to fight every muscle to keep from leaping in after him. That’s just what he wants, of course. He has to be lying.

“Where is she?” I cry.

“Save me!” he yells again. “I can save her! Please!”

“Tell me first!”

His head slips under the water, then bobs up again. I struggle down to the river’s edge, where a big piece of driftwood lies wedged in the rock. It’s a long branch, worn smooth by the water on its journey south.

“Jordan!” shouts a voice from miles away. It’s John, back at the steps. “Bring him in with the branch!”

I pull at the limb with all my strength, but I can’t free it from the rocks. Every second he slips farther downstream, my sister’s fate going with him. I can’t save the bastard without jumping in myself, and that would be insanity. Good swimmers drown in the Mississippi, even without someone trying to kill them.

Suddenly, without conscious thought, my hand flies to the zipper of my fanny pack, and my hand jerks out the Canon point-and-shoot I used at the gallery fire in New York.

I point the lens at the drowning man and shoot one exposure, then scrabble along the riprap, leaping from rock to rock with no regard for my bones, trying to get close enough for a clear shot. But the channel has him now. He’s thirty-five feet out and spinning away. As his face comes around again, I shoot three quick shots, then sprint along the tops of the rocks, hoping for another turn. When he’s forty feet out, I get off two more; then his head slips below the surface and does not return.

Panting with exhaustion, I turn away from the water and climb carefully to the top of the levee. John is sitting on top of the steps, fifty yards away, a cell phone in his hand. The sound of approaching sirens rolls over me from the direction of the Quarter. As I trot down to where John sits, he puts down the phone and tightens his belt, which he has tied around his thigh.

“You’re hit in the leg?” I ask.

Clearly in great pain, he nods, then points down the steps. “Go down there and see if you can find his gun. He might have dropped it. Fingerprints.”

I study every inch of weathered wood as I work my way down the steps, but there’s no gun. There is blood, and a lot of it.

“Look on the rocks just under the water,” calls John.

They don’t call the Mississippi the Big Muddy for nothing. You can’t see through it. Dropping to my knees, I feel my way along the first submerged step, but a soft splinter is my only reward. The second is coated with funk. Moving sideways, I feel among the submerged rocks, and again find nothing. But as my hand comes out of the water, I freeze. Lying between two rocks in a rainbowed pool of oily water is a cellular telephone. Retrieving it from the water, I see blood on it.

“What have you got?” John shouts.

Holding the phone by its antenna, I climb back up the steps.

“Son of a bitch,” John groans.

“It’s still on,” I tell him, looking at the water-filled LCD screen.

“Careful.” He takes the phone by its antenna and holds it before his eyes. “Shit! It just shorted out. While I was looking at it!”

“You can still get prints, though, right?”

“Maybe. But what we really need is the memory chip. This phone’s getting on a plane to Washington. Don’t mention it to any beat cops. Wait for Homicide.”

He points down the levee toward the French Market, where two white-helmeted mounted policemen are spurring their horses across the streetcar tracks.

I sit beside John, and in the first seconds of stillness, I start to shake. I wring my hands, trying to make them stop.

“Wendy’s dead,” I say softly.

He nods.

“She threw herself in front of me.”

“I saw her. She did her job. She was a good kid.”

“She wasn’t a kid. She was a hero. And she worshiped the ground you walked on.”

“I know. Goddamn it.”

“She deserves a medal. For her family.”

“Goes without saying.”

“So what the hell were you doing here?”

John shakes his head but doesn’t look at me. “I didn’t feel good about you walking around the Quarter. I knew you’d gotten upset at Frank Smith’s, and I’ve always felt you were in more danger than anyone realized. I also knew you didn’t have your gun.”

I squeeze his hand. “I’m glad you’re paranoid.”

“What did the guy say to you down there?”

“He said Jane was alive.”

John looks at me, his eyes hard. “Did you believe him?”

“I don’t know. What I do know is, he wasn’t Roger Wheaton or Leon Gaines or Frank Smith.”

“I know.”

“He said something else, John.”

“What?”

“If he had to shoot me in the spine, it would still be nice and warm between my legs, and I’d still make a pretty picture for the man.”

John’s face pales. “He said that? ‘For the man’?”

“For the man.”

“Jesus.”

The clatter of hooves on brick is closer. John takes his wallet out of his pants and opens it to show his FBI credentials.

“You lied to me, John.”

“What?”

“The Dorignac’s victim was raped, and you knew it. They found semen in her.”

He says nothing at first. Then: “The post was inconclusive as to rape.”

“You must have asked the husband when he last had sex with her.”

He sighs with resignation. “Okay, it was probably rape. I didn’t want that weighing on you. Especially before the interviews. I didn’t want you suffering needlessly, and nobody wanted you so mad at the suspects that you couldn’t be professional.”

“I understand all that, okay? But don’t ever hold anything back again.”

He nods. “Okay.”

“Nothing John.”

“I got it.”

The horses are upon us. Two cops – one black, one white – stare down with drawn guns.

“Get your hands up! Both of you!”

John holds up his credentials so that the cops can see them.

“Special Agent John Kaiser, FBI. This crime scene is to be secured for the joint task force. I’ve been shot and I can’t walk, so you men get to it.”

The wake of Wendy’s death is a blur to me now, as I ride the elevator up to the fourth floor of the FBI fortress on Lake Pontchartrain. While John spent ninety minutes in the accident room at Charity Hospital downtown, I sat in a waiting room with enough armed special agents to make me feel like the First Lady. Daniel Baxter and SAC Bowles rushed out from the field office, but only to make their presence felt with John and the doctors. They sped off to manage the hunt for the UNSUB’s body and a hundred other details, leaving me with images of Wendy fighting and dying to save me, her lifeblood spattered over my chest, and the UNSUB’s voice hot in my ear: If I shoot you in the spine, it’ll still be nice and warm between your legs… I was lucky that one of my new protectors was a female agent. She brought me a new blouse from her car and bagged the bloodstained one I wore in case it was needed as evidence. But removing the blouse did nothing to erase my waking nightmare.