Alex's hands could hardly function, but he'd made them function. After twenty minutes of mind-numbing cold, they were ordered out to lie on the metal pier, where they were ordered to do one hundred push-ups, “to heat up your sorry-assed bodies,” while the instructor called for the hoses and they were blasted with bay water on the pier.
“ Keep you all from overheatin' too quick,” the instructor called out sarcastically from his vantage point on the now-docked boat.
The man beside Sincebaugh, Slattery, confessed to having lost his boots to the bay. The instructor replied, “What a shame, boys. Slattery here's lost his goddamned Navy issue. Ordinance don't come cheap. All right, everybody dive!”
“ What?”
“ Oh, shit!”
“ That's an order! Till we solve Slattery's little mystery and locate them damned boots, nobody's dry!”
Slattery was sincerely and universally hated after that night. Everyone returned to the water, bitching under his breath, until Gahan, the drill instructor, ordered silence.
They dived until they found Slattery's fucking boots, which fortunately had remained tied to one another. It was the cold and the darkness out there which had stolen Slattery's footwear from him. Frigid temperatures and frozen fingers and darkness had a way of taking things, and by then the SEAL would-bes and wanna-bes had been reduced to children fearful of what their own bodies might do against them. Slattery, had he not been stopped by Sincebaugh, would have taken his own hand off at the wrist with his bayonet.
Slattery didn't last the week. Nor did many others. During Hell Week, the recruits were almost constantly wet and cold. They lost toenails, were rubbed raw in places, losing huge patches of skin. Their joints were swollen like melons. Sincebaugh learned early never to remove his boots unless ordered to do so, since getting them back on was hell, and some guys never did get them back on, having to continue barefooted. A constant sight was of exhausted men fainting, vomiting and hallucinating, sometimes all at once.
It was the toughest military training in the United States, and all for the privilege of becoming a sea-air-land commando. Over half of those enrolled failed to complete the week-long intensive training and torture. Sincebaugh only made it by turning a corner in his mind, which left him with a strange aloofness in which he felt he literally sucked up pain, went looking for it, enjoyed it. It was what had gotten him through the ten-times-worse tortures of Vietnam when he became a prisoner of war.
So why was he afraid to sleep now?
Instead, he drove around his city, New Orleans, at night. The place had everything any other large American city had and more, yet it was unique. A blend of Spanish, French, Louisiana, Creole, Cajun and American. Street corners were lined with storefronts, fast-food restaurants, dry cleaners, taverns and hardwares, billboards and free-standing signs; sections of the city were grimy and lousy, rotten little holes into which children were born, areas completely at odds with Bourbon Street and the museums and shopping malls along the rivers and lakes of beautiful downtown Orleans.
He drove down to the district he guessed that Kim Faith Desinor most likely grew up in. He kept driving through it, around it, about it, staring, wondering how she'd gotten so good, so smooth, so well educated, coming from this cesspool. Had she been born with the gift of a great mind, or were drive and determination beaten into her at an early age as he'd had them beaten into him?
Either way, she was intriguing, and he wished that he had met her under different circumstances. He'd pulled over to the curb now, staring out at St. Domitilla's, its small enclosure, church and reformatories for boys and girls looking like a prison yard with ten-foot-high wrought-iron fencing going the length of the concrete grounds. He'd done a little checking of his own, and records showed a Kim Faith Desinor had spent time here, that in fact her father had placed her here after the death of her mother.
It was a far cry from New Orleans' ornate and world-renowned St. Stephen's Cathedral, with its huge pinnacles reaching into the night sky, its lavish spires and colored lights piercing the fog cloud which almost nightly descended over the darkened city this time of year. By comparison, the fog here at the poor parish church lay like a confining canvas over an open grave, reflecting only the neon and orange vapor lights of the street sign and lamp.
“ Where are the answers?” he asked the empty interior of his unmarked squad car.
Big Ben was home with his family. Sincebaugh had no one but an uncommunicative, uncaring father, a father whose only response to his having completed the SEAL training course was, “Will that get you more on your paycheck?”
His father didn't know him.
Who really did, for that matter? How could anyone truly know the heart of another, isolated as each man and woman was from another?
Being a SEAL still meant something to him, but it meant nothing to anyone else. But she knew he was a SEAL, knew all about him, respected him. She'd read his record, thanks to Landry, who'd forked it over without a thought. She knew his history… but Kim Desinor knew even more than that. She knew of his fear, and this fact most of all had caused him to run from her.
“ Hey, Rockefella man! Lookin' for some action, mi amigol Compadre comprende?” It was a pimply-faced Spanish boy barely out of his pre-teens. “I know where you can get your fantasy come true, bro.”
Sincebaugh lifted his. 38 and jammed it into the kid's face, making the boy shake in the shadow of the cathedral. “Who've you got in mind, son, your sister?”
“ Hey, man, I'm gone. I'm outta here, out-cho face gone!”
“ Don't move!”
The kid froze. “Whatchu want with me, man? I don't go that way.”
“ You know the word on the street about the Hearts Killer, though, don't you? Don't you?”
“ Christ, you… you ain't him, are you?”
“ What's being said? Who knows what?”
“ Nothing… nobody knows nothing… I don't hear a word. Everybody's stone cold on it, man.”
“ Stone cold, huh?” replied Sincebaugh. “Tell you this, man… if you don't talk, you're going to be stone cold.”
“ Whatchu mean, man? I'm tellin' you, there's nothing on it that's goin' round, except now they got a psychic on the case and the guy doing the killing, his time's runnin' out.”
“ Who knew the victims? Give me a name, kid.”
“ Philly.”
“ Philly? A guy from Philadelphia? What's his real name?”
“ You the fuzz, aren't you?”
“ What's his goddamned real name?”
“ Don't know. All I know is he's a transvestite; sings in one of the bars. Calls himself Phyllis and ain't got nothing to do with Philly. Now, that's all I hear or know.”
“ Phyllis… okay, kid, get out of here and get a productive life.”
“ Sure, sure, dickhead, maybe I'll work on that degree.” The kid disappeared the way he came, like a ghost, materializing and dematerializing amidst the landscape he knew so well. A powerful wind began to sweep through the area, lifting drooping tree limbs and blasting here and there in drafts. Alex gave another thought to Kim Desinor as a child inside the prison compound of St. Domitilla's with its paper refuse rising in a miniature tornado and flying about the courtyard as bits and shards and fragments of ghosts. The old place had been condemned years before, its doors closed forever, awaiting the wrecking bail.
Alex heard no refrain of long-ago laughter in her walls.
24
The light that lies In woman's eyes. Has been my heart's undoing.