"Good news: Lashonna's conscious and doing better than expected."
"Thank you, God," Jasmine said softly. Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "And thank you, Doctor."
Her kiss cheered me for a fleeting instant, then I read the next paragraph.
"I wish I had better news for you regarding Camilla, but you should probably click here to check out the new images. The files are on the hospital's server, but don't worry, a series of proxies accessed through dark IP addresses sanitizes the access."
My admiration for Tyrone's technical prowess in covering his tracks and hiding Myers's evidence slipped beneath the darkness in my soul that gathered as I paged through the images.
Camilla had died when I wasn't looking.
I cried.
CHAPTER 64
As Dan Gabriel steered his rental car north on Highway 101 north of Paso Robles, his cell phone rang.
"Gabriel," he answered.
"You stopping at the In-N-Out Burger down the road?" Jack Kilgore's voice asked.
"How'd you know where I am?"
"You've got a new wireless phone, with the GPS locator."
"Oh, I forgot… So, did you learn anything?"
"A lot," Kilgore said. "Stone's a real mensch. Plus he's a natural twopercenter, highly lethal, capable, always under control. Back then, if you wanted somebody-or multiple somebodies-dead, you sent Stone. Then he got religion or something, requested and got training for paramedical rescue. Saved a lot of lives. Then he left and becomes a hot-shit doctor."
"Not the kind of person I want to terminate," Gabriel said
"Roger that. Makes me question the General more than I ever have before."
Silence filled the connection with unspoken doubt.
"And a lot of freaky stuff's going down in Mississippi, not far from the old prisoncamp hospital the General was in. I've got some of my guys keeping an eye on things. I structured it as an exercise to assess the operational competence of the Homeland Security screwups driving the show there.
"A troop of Cub Scouts could do a better job at radio discipline. Operational security's full of holes. It's the usual bullshit in a china shop thing, not surprising since Brown and his Customs bozos are running things. They're the ones who nailed all those innocent Muslims' butts to a tree after 9/11 just to make bureaucratic brownie points. They've now circulated photos of Stone and Jasmine Thompson as wanted fugitives."
"Charged with?"
"Murder and drug running out of L.A."
"Marvelous,"
"And, Dan?"
"Yeah?"
"Brown's been calling Clark Braxton's cell phone an awfully lot."
CHAPTER 65
I have no clear idea how long I walked the levee. I know I walked out of Tyrone Freedman's trailer, but I don't remember what or whether I said anything to Jasmine at the time. Camilla's death blew the center out of me like a ton of lead shot through a paper bag, and I walked the two-tracked gravel path atop the levee down to the striped metal barrier across the road padlocked to a metal post set in concrete.
I stood for a moment.
Humidity smothered my face as the sun burned it. Sweat dripped everywhere. Around me, the land wobbled and swayed, warped by undead water rising from the soil to haunt the Delta with another day of mildew and humidity which would eventually give life to more thunderstorms.
Horseflies bit at my bare legs, and mosquitoes heavy with someone else's blood blanketed me. My hands moved with a frantic palsy that barely interrupted their bloodlust. Finally, I set off at a dead run toward Tyrone's trailer, leaving the insects behind; guilt, anger, and sorrow paced me relentlessly.
It took me almost fifteen minutes to reach Tyrone's cabin, meaning I had walked two, maybe two and a half miles. As I stumbled down the steep levee bank, I heard the syncopated, guitar-slapping rhythm of Robert Johnson's "Preaching Blues, Up Jumped the Devil" coming from the trailer.
The lyrics reached out for me and I followed them. Despite the heat, the front door was open and I walked in.
"Jasmine?" I called, and when I got no answer, I closed the door.
The desperate urgency of this song set it apart from Johnson's usual cool nasality. So much of Johnson's work moved me to introspection with its sanguine acknowledgment of the evil dogging our lives. But "Preaching Blues" always ripped at me like a scream. I stood at the window and parted the curtains, hoping to catch a glimpse of Jasmine walking back from the SUV.
Johnson's frantic raw emotions cut right through to my own as I listened to the familiar lyrics. The blues behind blues music ate people like heart disease. Hopelessness was the ultimate hell.
When Johnson finished, his vice and guitar trailed off like the last notes of rain after a storm. Then the silence filled with the surf of my heart and the distant drone of a crop duster. A moment later the floor creaked behind me, followed by Jasmine's fragrance, spicy, earthy, welcome, warm.
"How did you know?" When I turned around, her gaze froze me in place. The wisteria hues of her eyes seemed limitless in their depth and beauty. "The music, I mean?"
In the background, Johnson began "Love in Vain" and my ear recognized this was the same Hellhound on My Trail CD from Indigo Recordings I had left in the rental truck.
"I don't know," Jasmine said. "I just knew when I saw it next to Tyrone's stereo." Jasmine and I moved toward each other and embraced in the middle of the living room.
"You okay?"
"Yes," I lied. "No. No, I'm not. Camilla in the middle of all this is… "
"Too much?"
"No," I said truthfully. "But damned close."
She put her head on my shoulder I folded her in my arms and basked in her comfort for a time that stretched comfortably beyond the moment. So much death, so much loss. I wanted the moment to last.
Then, as if a switch had been thrown somewhere far beyond thought and decisions, we held each other tighter, somewhere between desperation and love. The sensuous press of her breasts instantly aroused me. When Jasmine thrust her hips against me, a seismic passion sucker-punched me with feelings forgotten in the past six years.
Then everything fast-forwarded. Suddenly we were naked from the waist up and hastening with the rest. Jasmine's elegant abundance of curves beneath the soft, burnished luminosity of her skin stunned me and banished every thought beyond this remarkable moment to a distant and irrelevant horizon.
Then alarms sounded in my head.
Pure, undiluted passion-whether from lust, hate, anger, or fear-terrified me. I'd seen it leave battlefields littered with the bodies of innocent people and derail young lives with unwanted children. Prison cells held legions of basically decent people who'd let passion dump their lives into an endless pit of regret.
As a teenager I ran with a rough crowd, always ready with fists, a phallus, and fast cars. But over the course of less than a year, they all fell by the wayside, snared by police, parents, and unplanned parenthood.
Through their mistakes, I realized that unbridled passion could generate an irresistible black hole of unsatisfied regret from which there was no escape. I feared the way it blinded us to consequences and erased everything but the singular urge for release. It was the devil's deal where we traded the future for a blinding spasm of release that always left us hungrier than ever
Urgent warnings gripped my heart as Jasmine's hands made their way across my chest and down my belly. As I bent low to kiss her, she slipped her right hand down the front of my partly unzipped shorts. With an effort much like that needed to awaken from particularly horrific nightmares, I struggled back.