Race with Death Read online

  “Yes, sir!”

  As the waiter scurried off, Dani laughed. “You ought to be ashamed!”

  “Why? He’s the one who ought to be ashamed,” Savage shrugged. He looked at the pictures of the basketball players on the wall, then added, “If he tells me to have a good day when we leave, I’m going to punch him out!”

  Dani was accustomed to Savage’s ways, and they sat there talking until William brought their food. He said nothing, but retreated as soon as possible. “You’ve got him scared,” Dani said. “You’ll have to give him a big tip to ease your conscience.”

  “Ask the blessing,” Savage said. “A short one, if possible. I’m hungry.”

  Dani bowed her head and murmured a few words of thanks. As they began eating, she thought of how odd it was that Ben always made that request—that she ask the blessing. He was not a believer, but adamantly insisted on this formality As she dissected the golden brown chicken, she wondered about this, but said nothing.

  The meal was delicious, as always. The room was noisy, for the bar was not separated from the dining room, and two television sets gave reruns of basketball and football games. Finally they finished, and Dani noticed that Savage gave William a ten-dollar tip. “See?” she nudged him. “It costs to be crude and impolite.”

  “It’s worth it, though,” he grinned. He allowed her to go first, and as they made their way through the room, she felt him touch her shoulder. She turned and saw him motion with his head to a group seated at a round table by the wall. She recognized the governor of Louisiana, Layne Russell, but waited until they were outside to say, “I guess the governor is slumming.”

  “I’ve seen him here before,” Savage murmured. “He knows good barbecue. I guess that’s the one good thing about the man.”

  “Who was the girl with him?”

  “One of his string, I guess. He changes them with his shirts.”

  After they got into the car, Savage backed out and threaded the Hawk down the narrow strip that led to the exit. He turned right, and drove onto the interstate. The sky was dark now, and Dani sat back, conscious of the throbbing of the big V-8 engine. Savage drove slowly, and Dani paid no heed to where they were going. They crossed over the Mississippi River bridge, and for half an hour, enjoyed the night air. Then Savage turned back, and as they came over the bridge, Dani saw the lights along the edge of the east bank of the river. “They look like strings of emeralds, don’t they,” she said with admiration. She paused, then added, “I wonder how many cases of lung cancer those petrochemical plants have caused?”

  Savage glanced at the brilliant lights before answering. “Quite a few. I read the other day that Louisiana ranked first in air pollution—and I’ll give you one guess which city in Louisiana ranked first.”

  “Baton Rouge?”

  “Sure. So right now we’re in the most polluted spot in the United States. Kind of makes you proud, doesn’t it?”

  “The governor doesn’t seem to be worried.”

  “No. Chemical industry money got him elected. Guess it keeps him in women and fine cars even now.” Savage took the exit and drove through the middle of the Baton Rouge business center—one of the most attractive in the country. The streets were lined with huge live oak trees that had been carefully preserved. Savage commented, “Glad they left those big trees. Now a person can get held up and shot in the shade.”

  He emerged from the business district onto the River Road, and pulled up on a cobblestone street. “Let’s go out on the pier and smooch,” he suggested.

  Dani got out and walked with him up the steep steps that ascended the levee. They walked out on a steel structure of round tubes that arched gracefully and extended out into the Mississippi. The pier was deserted, and it was so quiet that Dani could hear the waves lapping at the steep columns as the muddy waters swept by heading for the gulf.

  “Look, there’s the USS Kidd,” Savage said. “Took some bad hits from kamikazes in the South Pacific.”

  “What’s it doing here?”

  “Been made into a war memorial,” Savage answered. “It’s closed now. Someday we’ll come over and take the tour. It’s just like it was when it was a fighting ship. Papers still in the typewriters, stuff like that.” He turned his back and leaned against the rail. “I come over sometimes and play sailor. Pretend to shoot down Zeros with the pom-poms.”

  “You haven’t outgrown that?”

  “Nope. Just a little boy at heart.”

  Dani leaned on the rail and stared at the sleek outline of the destroyer, then turned to face Savage. “You really are—but I didn’t find out about it for a long time.” Her lips curved into a smile and she put her hand on his arm. “I thought you were just another hard-nosed cop.”

  “Eagle scout with a heart of gold—that’s me.”

  But Dani shook her head. “You’re tough, but you still like to play games. That’s why you like old cars and airplanes. And you only watch old movies. Just a romantic, that’s all you are!”

  Savage was very still, his eyes turned down. A brown pelican floated by, riding the breeze. From far away a hoarse foghorn moaned faintly.

  “Funny you should say that,” he murmured at last. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small object and held it up.

  “What is it, Ben?” Dani asked.

  “For you.”

  Dani was surprised, but took the small box. It was, she saw, from a jeweler’s. She opened it, and a small reflection caught her eye. She touched it, then looked at Savage with a startled expression.

  “Why—it’s a ring!” When he didn’t answer, she removed the ring and held it up, where it caught the silver light of the full moon. “It’s not a diamond, is it?”

  Savage turned to face her, and his eyes were watchful. He seemed tense, and Dani thought that she had seen him so poised only when danger threatened.

  “Yes, it‘s a diamond,” he said slowly. He paused and added, “It’s an engagement ring.”

  For one moment Dani had the notion that Savage had found a girl and wanted her opinion of the ring he’d picked out for her. But one quick look at his face and she knew he was asking her to marry him.

  It was not Dani’s first proposal, but always before she’d been able to handle the situation deftly. Now she was absolutely unable to think of one thing to say. She stood there staring into Ben’s face, trying to read his expression.

  And Savage was no help. He stood quietly, saying nothing, but watching her face. She knew well his ability to read her feelings, and knew that there was no possibility of deceiving him.

  “Why, Ben—” she said slowly. “You’ve caught me off guard. I had no idea—”

  Savage said, “I’m no good at this. No practice, I guess.” He hesitated, then said simply, “I love you, Dani. Have for a long time.”

  Dani waited, but he said no more. She felt his eyes on her, then took a deep breath. “I didn’t know that, Ben.” The inadequacy of her reply moved her to say quickly, “We’ve been good friends, but marriage is more than that, isn’t it?”

  Savage shook his head. “Dani, I’ve never told a woman I loved her. And I’ve got a funny feeling I’ll never tell another one.” He pulled her into his arms and was kissing her before she could even think. Dani felt the strength of his arms, and his lips on hers were demanding. She had felt helpless and lost since the death of her father, and as she rested in Savage’s embrace, she knew a security that she’d longed for. There was a need in her for a man’s strength, and she recognized that Ben Savage had the same purposeful power that had rested in her father.

  But then he pulled his head back and asked quietly, “Do you care for me, Dani?”

  “I—I have always had strong feelings for you, Ben,” Dani answered. She found that her knees were weak, and she knew that she had to say something to him that was going to hurt. “I don’t know if I love—”

  “Somebody else?”

  Dani knew he was thinking of Luke Sixkiller, the brawny chief of the homic
ide department in New Orleans. “Ben, I’m so mixed up,” she whispered. “It’s been a hard time for me—for all of us—since Dad died.” She carefully put the ring back into the box, noting that her fingers were unsteady. “I can’t think about such things now. Mother’s having a hard time—and so are Rob and Allison.”

  Savage took the box and slipped it into his pocket. Then he said, “It’s more than that, isn’t it, Dani?”

  “Well, yes, Ben,” Dani said slowly. “I could never marry any man unless he felt like I do about God. It just wouldn’t work.”

  Savage said slowly, “I know that.” He looked down at the deck, then back up and said, “And I’ve made up my mind. I’ll become a Christian.”

  Dani stared at him, speechless. “Ben, you can’t become a Christian just to please me!”

  “I know that, too. But it’s more than you and me, Dani.” Savage stared out over the water, his face tense in the silver light. “It’s a lot of things—or a lot of people, I guess. I watched your dad. He was the real article. I thought all Christians were really kind of soft—but he wasn’t. And then there’s Luke—nothing soft about him!” Savage smiled faintly. “But it’s you, mostly. Ever since those days in the silo when it looked like we were all going to go belly-up, I’ve been watching you. Kicking your tires, too, trying to shake you up. You’re like your dad and your mother, Dani.” He paused, then said, “I’ve always wanted to think there was something in this life more than what a man could see or feel—but until I met you, I never found it.”

  “Oh, Ben!” Dani whispered. “It would make us all so happy to see you find Christ! Dad spoke about it so often.” But then she shook her head, a warning in her tone and her eyes. “But this is between you and God, not between you and me.”

  Savage considered her, then nodded. “Sure. I figured that, Dani. But I had to tell you. And I know that even after I find God, that doesn’t mean I get you.” He smiled crookedly, then said, “Let’s go home.”

  Dani walked with him off the pier. Ten minutes later they were in the car and headed back toward Mandeville, but she paid no heed to the dark landscape. She was shaken by what had taken place, and somehow knew that the two of them could never go back completely to what they had been.

  Savage began to talk about one of the cases they were on, and she knew that he was telling her that he was not going to overburden her with unwanted attention. When they pulled up in front of the house, she said, “Ben, Mother’s arranged a ‘surprise’ party for you. Just the family. But if you want to get out of it—?”

  Savage grinned at her. “You trying to do me out of some chocolate cake?” He got out of the car and opened her door, adding, “I knew about the party. Allison gave it away.”

  Then he said, “Boss, don’t let what I said be a weight. No matter what happens, it’s okay.”

  They went inside, and as Ben put on a big show of being astonished, Dani was thinking: I can’t hurt him—no matter what!

  2

  Trip to Angola

  * * *

  For several days after Ben’s proposal, Dani moved through her daily rituals efficiently, despite her inner feelings of confusion. She didn’t mention it to her mother, though the temptation to lean on someone was a sharp urging deep inside.

  She had dreaded going to work, not knowing how to behave around Ben. But he took that matter out of her hands, for he never once referred to what had been said. Dani was relieved when he spoke with her naturally and without any sense of strain.

  However, her own work suffered, for she discovered that the proposal had shaken her more than she had dreamed such a thing might. Most of the girls she had grown up with were married already, some of them having started their families. A sense of fleeting time came to her, and somehow she felt left behind and unfulfilled.

  At the age of twenty-seven she had achieved a great deal, more than most young women. She had been a CPA, she had spent many productive years working for the attorney general of Tennessee, and, for the past two years, she had been the head of a successful investigation agency. She was not rich, but money had never been a problem, and she had no yearning for status symbols. And yet—the more she thought of her life, the more barren it seemed. She had never been caught up with the women’s movement, considering most of the leaders to be rather mannish types, unable somehow to take pride in their femininity. She had been approached often by the local leaders in the movement to give herself to the cause, but had always refused.

  On the other hand, her own concept of what a well-balanced and fulfilled woman should be had come from her own mother. She had seen from her childhood a graphic portrayal of a woman who was as lovely and feminine as a human could be—yet at the same time, had been fully equal with her husband. But part of this, Dani recognized, was due to the fact that her father had loved her mother devotedly, and that he understood women and their real place better than anyone she’d ever known.

  “I always wanted to be a king, Dani,” Dan Ross had once told Dani when she was sixteen and struggling with the problem of becoming a woman. She’d gone to him honestly with questions about herself, and he’d taken her for a long walk through the woods. “But the only way I could be a king,” he’d said, “was to be married to a queen. So, when I married your mother, I was smart enough to make her a queen. Do you see what that meant? A man who’s married to a queen is a king—so that’s what I became.” Dani never forgot how he’d smiled at her that day, thoughtfully and seriously, and how he’d taken her hand and finally said, “When you marry a man, Dani, be sure he understands this—that you must be a queen. A man’s first responsibility is to God, but his second is to his wife. She must come before everything else, even before his children. I love you and Rob and Allison more than my own life, but Ellen will always come first. You three will all leave my house someday to find homes and companions of your own. But Ellen is mine as long as I have breath. We’re one flesh,” he’d said, “and nothing can change that.”

  Dani was sitting at her desk on Wednesday morning, thinking of that time. The office of Ross Investigations occupied the second floor of what had once been a fine home on Bourbon Street. The location had once seemed romantic, but parking was terrible—and the evil that had found a place in the Quarter hovered over the section like a dense fog.

  Morning sunlight flooded into the room from the tall windows that lined one side of the room, bringing out the rich glow of the antique walnut desk she sat at, and throwing a spotlight, it seemed, on the fine portrait of her great-great-grandfather on the wall across from her. Dani looked up suddenly at the portrait, and spoke his name aloud.

  “Colonel Daniel Monroe Ross—” She studied the fierce-eyed man dressed in Confederate gray with a red sash around his waist and a steel trap for a mouth. He had made the charge with Pickett at Gettysburg, and she thought of the last sentence in his terse diary entry concerning that day: It was a bold maneuver, doomed to failure—and my heart weeps over friends I left on that dreadful hill!

  Something in even the memory of those words was so painful that Dani rose and turned to the window to stare down on the narrow street below. A battered drunk with his white shirt ripped and dangling over his pants was plodding along across the street. His face was pale as paste and he had what appeared to be dried blood stiffening his dirty blonde hair. As Dani watched, he stumbled, fell headlong, and struggled for a brief time to get to his feet. Finally he put his head down on the concrete and lay motionless.

  Dani had seen such things often, but they never failed to depress her. She knew the man would be picked up by the police and would wake up in the drunk tank. She knew also that he would probably be back on the street and drunk again as soon as he could find the money for a bottle of cheap wine. She turned away in disgust, and as she did, the intercom on her desk buzzed.

  “Yes?”

  “Captain Sixkiller is here, Miss Ross.”

  “Send him in, Angie,” Dani said at once, and turned toward the door. When Luke Sixki
ller entered, he seemed to make the room smaller, for he was perhaps the most physical man Dani had ever known. He was an inch under six feet, but thick and solid in every way. His deep chest arched under the ivory sports jacket. The pale blue shirt, Dani knew, was tailor-made for the policeman, for no shirt on the rack would meet around his thick neck.

  “Hi, Dani,” he said, and came to stand beside her. He had the blackest hair possible, obsidian eyes, a wide mouth, a roman nose, and high cheek bones. He was the terror of the underworld in New Orleans, and the word was, “Don’t try to buy Sixkiller. Kill him if you can, but don’t mess with him.”

  “How about we go get something to eat?”

  “It’s too early for lunch. Besides, I have work to do.”

  Luke grinned at her and his thick hand closed on her arm. “You’re under arrest. Are you going to come quietly, or do I have to put the cuffs on you?”

  Dani felt like a child in his grip, and suddenly was tired of the office. “All right,” she agreed. She eyed his expensive slacks and coat, then said, “You’ve been shopping again, Luke. I feel like a dowdy bird next to you.”

  Luke glanced at her, taking in the orange safari dress she wore, and nodded. “I’ll tell everybody you’re my maiden aunt from Mississippi,” he grinned. “Come on, let’s go.”

  They walked down Bourbon Street, which was beginning to fill up with tourists. Dani watched as they looked through the half open doors of the strip joints and bars that advertised female wrestling, their faces scrubbed and smiling in the morning light. There was in some of the younger ones an innocence that would not last in their oblique fascination with the canned sin. Careless with youth, they squandered it as though nothing ever changed, unaware that they themselves were subject to time and decay—and death. Some of them, she knew, would wake up trembling and sick the next day in a motel off the old Airline Highway, with empty wallets and memories that would sicken them.