Russell Blake - The Goddess Legacy

“Do you remember the area of India he showed you?” Drake asked.

“It was big — like about a hundred-mile square shot from Google Earth. Someplace in Kashmir.”

“You can’t be more specific?” Allie asked.

“I wasn’t trying to memorize it.”

“Any landmarks? Lake? Big mountain shaped like a goat head or something?” Drake asked.

“Not that I remember.”

Allie tilted her head and studied Spencer as though she’d had an idea. “I wonder if there are any scissors in this dump?”

“Why?” Spencer asked.

“Because they’d work better than a knife.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We need to alter your appearance. Best way is a haircut and some dye. And maybe some makeup to darken your complexion.”

Drake joined Allie on the sofa. “We can see if Roland will take us to a market.”

“I really don’t want to cut all this off,” Spencer protested.

“You were on TV. It’s got to go,” Allie said. “You stand out like a sore thumb.”

“I can wear a hat.”

“Then you’ll look like a white guy with a hat,” Drake reasoned. “She’s right.”

When they emerged from the houseboat, Roland was standing on the bow, smoking one of his endless string of cigarettes, looking like he hadn’t slept all night but wearing a different shirt. Allie told him what they wanted, and he nodded glumly, his expression that of a man who’d just drunk vinegar.

“I know a place,” he said, and flicked his smoke into the river.

An older green sedan was parked at the bank, the battered SUV nowhere to be seen. The Frenchman offered no explanation for its absence or the different car, and merely climbed behind the wheel while Drake and Allie slid into the rear seat.

Daylight had done little to improve their impression of the river, and when they bounced onto pavement from the dirt track that led to the water, Allie’s eyes widened at the sight of the buildings nearby.

“Yikes,” she said, and Drake nodded. The dwellings were little more than ten-by-ten cinder-block boxes painted garish hues. Half-naked toddlers played at the edge of the street as vehicles roared by, barely missing them as they honked their way into town. The sense of despair in the faces of the pedestrians trudging along the shoulder was palpable, the poverty borne like an unshakable burden by a population that would live and die in misery.

“How long have you lived in India, Roland?” Allie tried, and was rewarded with a scowl and a flash of dark eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Too long,” he said, and spit out his open window.

“I don’t suppose the air works,” Drake said.

Roland didn’t say anything more, which Drake took as a no.

The market turned out to be a medium-sized grocery store with a passable pharmacy section, and a helpful clerk assisted them with selecting hair dye. Allie stopped and picked out several containers of makeup, scissors, and three bags of fruit and a package of unleavened bread, as well as a jar of instant coffee that looked like it had been manufactured when Gandhi was still alive.

Back at the houseboat, Spencer sat unhappily while Allie clipped his hair to within an inch of his scalp, and then mixed a batch of ebony dye and slathered it on before pulling a plastic sack over his head.

“How long will this take?” he asked.

“I think it says twenty minutes,” Allie said.

“Think?”

“I don’t speak Hindi, but that seems about right.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

“No idea. This is a first for me.”

He scowled. “I thought women knew about stuff like this.”

“Yet another incorrect generalization about my gender, you misogynist. Believe it or not, they don’t teach cosmetology as part of the archeology curriculum.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She gave him her best stink eye. “Uh-huh.”

When the dye was rinsed off and Spencer had showered, he returned with a dour expression. “I look like an idiot.”

Allie considered her work. “With the darker base and some sunglasses, you could pass for a bad Bollywood wannabe.”

“Is there such a thing as a good one?”

She ignored him and offered a cup of coffee. “Drake and I were talking about how to get your buddy’s phone unlocked.”

“He wasn’t really my buddy. He was one of my instructors when I was in the SEAL program…”

“Reynolds said something interesting last night,” Drake said. “I mean, besides threatening us with life in prison if we didn’t play ball.”

“Yeah? What?” Spencer asked.

“Reynolds mentioned that Carson was lying on a slab in the Subzi Mandi mortuary. Allie looked it up,” Drake said, pointing to her tablet computer on the coffee table.

Spencer nodded. “Right. Because he’s dead.” A look of understanding slowly spread across his face. “Dude. Are you for real?”

It was Drake’s turn to share a smile with Allie. “Don’t see a lot of other options, do you?”

“How do you plan to get in, much less find him?” Spencer asked quietly.

Drake shrugged. “Make it up as I go along. Judging by most of what I’ve seen here, things are so unorganized it shouldn’t be that big a hurdle.” He sat back and stared at the ceiling. “As to finding Carson, that’ll be pretty easy. My hunch is there aren’t a ton of headless horsemen in the Delhi morgue.”

Drake tried to talk Allie out of accompanying him to the mortuary, but she was having none of it. They decided to strike out on their own, leaving Spencer at the houseboat; his new look wasn’t sufficiently convincing to risk someone getting suspicious while his photo was all over the news. They had Roland drop them off at the same market. He seemed surprised when they told him they’d find their own way back, and argued that it was a dangerous section of the city to be wandering alone. After giving Allie his cell phone number, he’d acquiesced, but seemed glummer than usual as he pulled away.

They made for the pharmacy section of the market again, and Drake made three purchases — a cheap long-sleeved olive dress shirt, a package of surgical gloves, and a surgical mask like those he’d seen many locals wearing as first-line defense against the pervasive airborne dust. “Hepatitis waiting to happen,” Drake said, and Allie nodded.

“You always take me to the most romantic spots.”

“Believe me, if I could do it over again…”

“No, really. First a hostel filled with cockroaches and vomit, then a boat in the middle of the world’s largest septic stream, and now a morgue. What more could a girl want?”

Drake paid and they waved down a rickshaw. The driver blinked when they gave him their destination and averted his eyes.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, and then twisted the throttle and careened into traffic.

The morgue was on the edge of Kamla Nehru Park, a verdant expanse in the northern section of Delhi. Drake had the driver drop them off at the bus station across the boulevard from the morgue, and they sat at a brown plastic table, watching the building, sipping bottles of water as the sun blazed down with relentless fury.

“What do you think?” Allie asked after twenty minutes.

Several ambulances and a coroner’s van had arrived and departed from the morgue during their brief stay, and groups of bereaved relatives had come and gone, no doubt to identify the remains of loved ones or say their final goodbyes before cremation. Most were obviously poor, in a city swarming with the impoverished, and the few uniformed guards sheltered from the sun by tall trees in the front of the building showed no interest in anyone.

Which made sense, given that they were guarding the dead, whom circumstance had transported beyond the world’s ability to harm them further. Even the police who accompanied the coroner’s van remained outside in their car, obviously unwilling to go into the death house if they could avoid it.