LITMIR.BIZ

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the only way to get out of here. “There’s Captain Piazza.”

      Sean’s head whips to the left. “Where?”

      Another knife thrust. “I thought I saw her. You’d better get back in there.”

      He squeezes my upper arms, then opens the door of the Audi and helps me inside. “Be careful driving home.”

      “Don’t worry about me.”

      Instead of leaving, he kneels in the open door, clasps my left wrist, and speaks with genuine urgency. “I am worried about you. What is it? I know you, damn it. Tell me!”

      I crank the engine and pull slowly away from the curb, leaving Sean no choice but to let go of my wrist.

      “Cat!” he yells, but I close the door and drive on, leaving him standing in the wet street staring after my taillights.

      “I’m pregnant,” I tell him, far too late.

      Two miles from my house on Lake Pontchartrain, I realize I can’t go home. If I do, the walls will close around me like suffocating pillows, and I’ll pace the shrinking rooms like a madwoman until Sean pulls into the garage and lets down the door with his remote control. Every word he says after that I will hear against a ticking clock that marks the time remaining before he has to go home to his wife and kids. And I absolutely cannot endure that tonight.

      Normally, after working a crime scene, I stop at a liquor store and buy a bottle of vodka. But not tonight. The little agglomeration of cells growing inside me is the only pure thing in my life right now, and I will not do it injury. Even if it means the screaming heebie-jeebies and a rubber room. That’s the only thing I’m sure of this minute.

      I tried to go cold turkey in the beginning, thinking it was best for the baby. Twenty hours into that particular mistake, I got the shakes so bad I couldn’t unzip my jeans to pee. A couple of hours later, I started seeing snakes in the house. A small rattler in a corner of the kitchen, curled into a deadly spiral. A fat cottonmouth moccasin hanging from a fern planter in the living room. A brilliantly hued coral snake sunning itself in the painful glare by the glass doors in the den. All lethal, all planning to slither up to me, bury their fangs in my flesh, and not let go until every drop of poison in their venom sacs had been injected into me.

      Hello delirium tremens …

      Cold turkey wasn’t going to cut it. I hit my medical books, which told me that the first forty-eight hours of withdrawal would be the worst. Addiction specialists prescribe Valium to blunt the physical symptoms while the psychological addiction is cured, but Valium can cause cleft palate in a developing fetus, the risk depending on dosage and duration of use. The full-blown d.t.’s, on the other hand, can cause seizure, stroke, and death in the mother. This choice of evils was ultimately no choice at all. I know a dozen oral surgeons who can repair a cleft palate; I know no one who can bring back the dead. When the coral snake began slithering toward me, I climbed onto a table, called the Rite Aid pharmacy, and self-prescribed enough Valium to get me through forty-eight hours.

      The Audi’s tires squeal as I wrench it into a U-turn and stop at the base of the Interstate 10 on-ramp. Cars and trucks roar by, angrily blasting their horns. An hour of driving west on I-10 would put me in Baton Rouge. From Baton Rouge, Highway 61 follows the Mississippi River northward for ninety miles to Natchez, Mississippi, my childhood home. I’ve begun that journey many times without completing it. Tonight, though …

      Home, I say silently. The place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in. I can’t remember who said that, but it’s always seemed apt to me. On the face of things it shouldn’t. My family has always begged me to visit. My mother actually wants me to move back into the house where I grew up. (House isn’t exactly accurate. It’s an estate big enough to hold me and about twelve other families.) But I could never move back to that house. I can’t even move back to Natchez. And I don’t know why. It’s a beautiful city, more so than New Orleans in many ways. Certainly safer and more peaceful. And it’s drawn back many who’ve tried to leave it over the years.

      But not me.

      You leave a place young and you don’t know why, only that you have to get out. I graduated high school when I was sixteen, left for college, and never looked back. The one or two interesting boys I knew wanted out as badly as I did, and they made it, too. I returned for Christmases and Thanksgivings but little else, and this deeply wounded my family. They never understood, and they never let me forget it. Looking back across fifteen years, I think I fled my home because elsewhere—anywhere—Cat Ferry was only what I could make of her. In Natchez, she was heir to a suffocating matrix of expectations and obligations that I couldn’t bear to face.

      But now I’ve wrecked my carefully constructed sanctuary. It was inevitable, of course. I’ve been warned by the best. As predicted, my troubles here now dwarf those I left behind me, and my options have dwindled to one. For a moment I consider going back to my house and packing a bag. But if I do that, I’ll never leave. The pregnancy scene with Sean will be played out, and then … maybe the end for us. Or perhaps only for me. I’m not going to walk myself up to that ledge tonight.

      My cell phone rings out “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” again. The screen reads Det. Sean Regan. I’m tempted to answer, but Sean isn’t calling about the case. He wants to see me. To question me about my “episode” at the crime scene. He wants to hash out what Captain Piazza might or might not know about our affair. To decompress after the frustration of dealing with the task force.

      He wants sex.

      I switch the ringer to silent and drive up the ramp, joining the night traffic leaving the city.

       FOUR

      In the South you are never far from the wild. In less than ten minutes, I-10 leaps off terra firma and sweeps over a fetid marsh filled with alligators, pit vipers, wild hogs, and panthers. All through the night they will stalk and kill, enacting the ritual of death that preserves their lives. Predators and prey, an eternal dance. Which am I? Sean would say hunter, and he wouldn’t be wrong. But he wouldn’t be quite right, either. I’ve been prey in my life. I carry scars Sean has never seen. I’m neither predator nor prey now, but a hybrid creature who knows the minds of both. I track predators to protect the most endangered species of all—the innocent.

      A naive term these days, perhaps. The innocent. No one who reaches adulthood with his sanity intact is innocent. But none of us deserves to be prey for the truly damned. The older men dying back in New Orleans did something to draw their killer to them. Something innocuous, perhaps—or maybe something terrible. I’m concerned with that only insofar as it helps me find the killer who took their lives. But of course, I shouldn’t be concerned with it at all. Because Captain Piazza has excluded me from that hunt.

      No, you excluded yourself, chides the censor in my head.

      My cell phone lights up green on the passenger seat. Sean again. I turn over the phone so I won’t have to see the glow.

      For the past year, when anxiety or depression has become unbearable, I’ve run to Sean Regan. Tonight I’m running away from him. I’m running because I’m afraid. When Sean learns that I’m pregnant—and that I intend to keep the baby—he will either honor the promises he’s made to me or betray them. And I’m terrified that he won’t give up his family for me. This fear is so tangible that the outcome seems a foregone conclusion, something I’ve known all along and was foolish to ever lie to myself about.

      Sean has never hidden his doubts. He worries about my drinking. My depression. My occasional manic states. He worries that I can’t be sexually faithful. Based on my history, these are legitimate concerns. But at some point, I believe, you just have to go for it, to risk everything for the other person regardless of your fears. Besides … can’t Sean see that if he doesn’t have faith in me after coming to know me so intimately, it’s so much harder for me to have faith in myself?

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