Amaia stopped her game. Her instinct, acute as that of a roebuck, made her step back. She stuck her hands into the pockets of her overcoat. Good girl, Ignacio thought as he focused on the car.
The town’s proximity to the French border had provided it with many things throughout its long history, both good and bad. Relations with the neighbors on the other side were generally very good. For centuries, men and women from the two sides had coexisted, exchanging friendship, language, love, black-market goods, and livestock, nimbly avoiding the customs regulations rigorously applied at official crossing points. French neighbors were one thing, but French tourists were something quite different. Given the exchange rate between the franc and the peseta, it suited them to cross the border to send mail, to buy tobacco, alcohol, and food, or just to have a good time. More and more frequently, the town was full of tourists, some of whom had been celebrating so hard they couldn’t find their way home.
French visitors lost and looking for the border crossing, a voice of reason told him. His instinct raised a red flag. Logic told him the window on the passenger side would lower so someone could ask for directions to get back home. But no—the rear door opened instead.
Ignacio took a big step in that direction. A pale white feminine hand and a sleeve in billowing sheer fabric emerged and beckoned to the girl. There was something seductive and spellbinding in that gesture, as elegant as the choreographed move of a ballerina. The small pale hand hovered in the air like the head of a serpent.
Amaia stepped toward the car and Ignacio hurled himself in her direction. Engrasi and Joxepi broke off their conversation, astonished at his bizarre behavior, and turned to watch as he ran. His racing figure blocked their view of the vehicle. Thinking of it later, Ignacio had the impression that everything had happened very quickly but also with terrible slowness, simultaneously at full speed and in slow motion. He shouted to the girl, but his throat closed up and no words came out, only a wheeze as desperate as a dying breath.
But the girl with the roebuck’s distrustful heart had learned to stay alert. Amaia’s head swiveled toward him, and her eyes registered the shepherd’s frantic alarm. She froze. She gasped, petrified by the menace and yet entranced and lured toward the car. Ignacio had almost reached her on the sidewalk, but the distance still seemed immense. He had to go faster, because he was as close to the child as she was to the car. Amaia didn’t budge, apparently hypnotized by the death angel’s white hand reaching out to possess her. Engrasi and Joxepi screamed hysterically behind him, for they’d just seen the car and now understood what was happening.
He reached out, almost there. His fingers brushed the fur around the hood of Amaia’s coat just as a leg clad in dark trousers and a high-heeled boot came out of the back seat and planted itself at the edge of the sidewalk. The head of the woman with that pale hand was covered by the cowl of her cloak, and her face was screened by a profusion of dark hair. The color and texture of that skin was burned into Ignacio’s mind, forever remembered as that of a wolf. Her elegant hand darted through the air, seized Amaia’s arm, and pulled the girl off balance with a powerful yank. Ignacio had no plan; he wrapped his arms around the child’s waist and pulled with all his might. Amaia’s body rose above the sidewalk as she was jerked off her feet. The white hand on her arm couldn’t maintain its grip, and its nails made a long tearing sound as they were dragged the full length of the girl’s gabardine coat sleeve. The clutching hand didn’t relax its grip even when it reached Amaia’s bare hand, where its nails slashed deep red furrows. That hand held on to the very last, until Ignacio’s second frantic heave pulled the girl free of those claws.
Everything happened incredibly quickly after that. The woman leaped back into the car and slammed the door. The car roared off. Engrasi and Joxepi came running. Ignacio gasped for air, holding Amaia so close he could feel the wildly fluttering beat of her little roebuck heart. He put the girl down, but he didn’t release her. He stepped back only when Engrasi and Joxepi gathered her up, their voices a simultaneous confusion. “My God!” and “Thank God!” rang out as they caressed her head and clothing, demanding to know what had happened. Engrasi shrieked when she saw that the child was bleeding. Ignacio bent over and took the girl’s hand. The rip along the sleeve was deep and clean, as if it had been torn not with fingernails but with the sharp tines of a carving fork. The red furrows he’d seen across the back of her hand were bordered by torn whitish shreds of skin that exposed the girl’s pink, oozing flesh to the night air.
“It’s nothing,” Amaia whispered, catching his gaze. “It hardly hurts at all.”
She couldn’t fool Ignacio, for he heard the quaver of panic in her voice as she tried to reassure them. His heart nearly burst when he heard that. It hardly hurts at all, he thought as he fought to catch his breath, but he wasn’t reassured, not at all, far from it. He’d give it time and calm down, because, after all, his wife and the girl’s aunt kept insisting he’d saved her. Maybe he’d have accepted that if he hadn’t glimpsed that fury’s eyes, if only for an instant. They were completely empty. No hatred, resentment, or madness; as he defied her, determined not to release the child, she was amused. She showed him her row of sharp tiny yellow baby teeth. Like rat’s teeth. He held her gaze until the car door broke their contact. What mesmerized him was the fact that she’d showed not the slightest trace of annoyance.
That she-wolf wasn’t defeated. She was sure to try again.
42
BAZAGRÁ
New Orleans, Louisiana
5:00 a.m., Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Johnson tapped her gently on the shoulder. “Salazar, wake up. We have a report of gunshots. Close by.”
“The sun’s not up,” she said, trying to clear her groggy mind as she peered through the window. “What time is it?”
“Just past five.”
She shrugged into her ballistic vest and quickly checked the room to make sure they were leaving nothing behind. “Several shots?”
“The report was very specific. Gunshots in a family residence close to Saint Louis Cemetery,” Bull said. “They think it was Bienville Street, but they’re not sure.”
“That’s no help at all!” Charbou complained. “Bienville runs from Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 to No. 2. They have the same name.”
Amaia dropped into the Zodiac and took a seat in the stern next to Bull, who’d already started the motor and was ready to steer them into the street.
“He’s still with them? Do we know that?” she asked. “Is he holding hostages?”
“No idea,” Bull admitted. “The report wasn’t from the ops center. It came from a Red Cross launch passing through the area. That’s why they couldn’t give a precise location. Lots of their volunteers aren’t from the city, and most of the street signs are gone.”
They elected to head toward Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1. If the person who’d radioed it in wasn’t familiar with the city, he wouldn’t know there was another Saint Louis Cemetery; otherwise he’d have given a more specific address.
They reached Bienville and throttled back the motor. Terrified screams from a single-story house told them where to go.