“He was,” I said. “And I should have listened to you about that, because you, Ali Cross, are an expert in all things zombie.”
He beamed and said, “My friends say that too.”
“Smart kids, your friends.”
They took Nana Mama out first. “I’m fine,” she said weakly as she went past me. “I’ll see you all soon.”
“Nana Mama, zombie killer,” Ali said in awe as she was carried through the hatch door.
Troopers picked up the stretcher my wife was on and took her out next.
“I’m going with Bree and Nana,” I said to the others. “But you’ll be right behind us.”
“In a helicopter?” Ali asked.
“I think so.”
“Oh, this is so cool.”
“I know,” Jannie said. “No one at school’s going to believe it.”
“No one,” Damon agreed.
Aaliyah helped me to the hatch. I refused to look back at the sheet that covered the doomed, soulless creature that had been Thierry Mulch and Marcus Sunday.
Instead, I stepped out into the heat and the humidity of a late Louisiana morning and squinted at the sun, feeling like I’d been in that claustrophobic box for days, not less than an hour.
The sky was this incredible blue, and the vegetation the deepest of greens. There were birds diving and arcing, hunting an insect hatch. I took deep breaths through my nose and smelled the salt marsh and the river and thought there had never been a better smell or a better day, ever.
Two helicopters had landed on the stacks of container cars. One bore the logo of the Louisiana State Police, and the other, larger, one, that of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Airmen in the federal chopper were working a winch to lower a rescue basket to the deck for Bree and Nana Mama. Behind them, a Coast Guard officer stood next to Captain Creel, who was in plastic cuffs, despondent.
I looked at Detective Aaliyah as if she were some kind of miracle worker and asked, “How in God’s name did you ever find us?”
CHAPTER
100
AS THE COAST GUARD rescue specialists winched up the baskets containing Bree and Nana Mama, Aaliyah explained how she’d discovered lading documents inside Acadia Le Duc’s rental car and how she’d come to realize that my family was probably being held in a container on a Mississippi River barge called the Pandora.
Paul Gauvin, the Jefferson County sheriff, was in the hospital on heavy doses of painkillers, and his deputies were highly skeptical of her theory. The Louisiana police investigators had been too until she’d finally reached a woman who worked at the shipping and barge service listed on the documents.
Her name was Shirley Creel.
Aaliyah learned that the container car was supposed to be offloaded at a multimodal transfer station in New Orleans. The barge captain’s wife tried to call her husband on his cell phone and via shortwave radio and got no answer.
“She promised to keep calling, but I badgered the state police guys into getting me a helicopter,” she said. “First, we flew to the pier in New Orleans where the barge was supposed to have offloaded the container. It had never docked. That’s when we started downriver and called the Coast Guard. Luckily, they had a search-and-rescue helicopter doing training about twenty-five miles from here, at their Venice station. It started upriver soon afterward. We both found you at almost the same time.”
I threw my good arm around her shoulder and kissed the top of her head. She drew back, surprised.
“Thank you, Detective,” I said. “You’ve been like my guardian angel in this whole sordid mess.”
Aaliyah didn’t seem to know what to say at first, but then she smiled and said, “Glad to help.”
“You’ve done your dad prouder than proud.”
Blushing, she looked down and said, “Well, thank you, Alex. That means a whole lot.”