Burn- pigeon 16 (10 page)

THIRTEEN

A clap of homemade thunder loud enough to penetrate the glass tore Jordan's gaze from Laura and dragged it to the counter where Anna and Racine stood. Even at a distance of thirty feet and through a window Anna could feel the heat from his eyes. Eyes like burning coals, like embers, like pools of desire--the cliches dropped into her mind and, made real, ceased being cliches.

Air was leaking out of the world. Hissing. The thoughts rattled through Anna's head and were gone in an instant. The paranormal had not stepped into the magic shop, at least not yet. Racine was hissing like a snake. Her empty moon face altered, the eyes narrowing, the lips drawn tight and thin down over the teeth the way children's do when they're playing as toothless old crones. Racine looked like a snake. Like she was becoming a snake. Or a snake inside her was allowing itself to be seen.

Jordan must have glimpsed the snake as well. The eyes that so troubled Anna were immediately hooded. He turned, stumbling, regained his balance, and walked slowly toward the levee and the river, his gait as uncertain as that of a man three times his age. It was as if the snake loa Racine had called down had sunk its fangs into him and poisoned him to the marrow of his bones.

"What was that about?" Anna asked.

Racine's humanity was back; no trace of the serpentine face remained. Anna didn't believe it was truly gone, and she was no longer crazy enough to believe she hadn't really seen it. The sense she was left with was that of newly stilled waters where a monster, risen briefly from the depths, had resubmerged.

"We close the shop for lunch," Racine said calmly. The book of veves was clutched to her chest. That had been the clap of thunder that had changed their wee scrap of world. The proprietress had slammed it shut with enough violence for the sound to penetrate walls.

Anna stood her ground. "Has that guy threatened you, pestered Laura?" she asked.

"We reopen at one," Racine said.

"If he has, you should call the police."

A hint of snakiness played around Racine's mouth. Book still held to her chest, she came around the counter, walked to the front door, flipped the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
, and, one hand on the knob, looked pointedly at Anna.

Admitting defeat--at least for the moment--Anna thanked her for the information on veves and left the shop. Her butt had scarcely cleared the lintel when she heard the chunk of the dead bolt sliding into place.

Jordan, a block ahead, was crossing North Peters against the light. A white SUV stopped politely; a green sedan honked. He seemed unaware of either but continued his shuffling progress till he reached the far curb and went on toward the art gallery, past the fountain, and through the floodgates to the trolley tracks and the river walk. Anna glanced back into the voodoo shop. It was deserted, the door to the upstairs firmly closed and, no doubt, locked.

Anna's mention of the police had bounced off Racine's hard shell. Was it because, in New Orleans, the police were not trusted to protect and serve? Or was it because she had reasons of her own not to want police looking too closely into her life? Like, say, skewering live pigeons and delivering them door to door?

Anna knew she should leave it alone just as certainly as she knew she wouldn't. For the best part of twenty years she'd been in the business of rescuing things and people from other things and other people. The habit was too strong to break at this late date. Added to force of habit, Helena, a baby she'd helped to keep alive in Big Bend, Texas, had forever removed the insulating idea of "children" and replaced it with a dear little face. Since Helena, every baby, every child, was personal. If Laura was in danger from Jordan, Anna would put a stop to it. One way or another. It was the only way she would be able to sleep at night.

Besides, she thought with a wry smile, Jordan was so wasted and frail she could probably take him two falls out of three. It was rare in the life of a female law enforcement officer to face a criminal that was physically weaker or smaller than she. She doubted most men would be as comfortable facing a world of foes that outweighed them by fifty to a hundred pounds. Women cops, rangers, and border patrol officers did it every day, all day.

She thought about calling the police, her brothers in blue. Except rangers didn't have brothers in blue, not the way real cops did. She'd probably get more attention as the wife of an Episcopal priest than as a ranger from the Far West, and one on administrative leave to boot. Besides, what could she tell them? That she'd found a dead bird in the trash and, thus, decided her neighbor was a pervert?

"Anna, you don't have to do anything. You're on vacation, remember? You left home and husband because you were working too hard doing nothing."

"This isn't nothing," Anna said.

"I know it isn't, love."

Paul's voice, a sweet tenor at the worst of times, said the word "love" with a tenderness that annoyed Anna because there was no defense against that kind of wonderful.

Too many years of risking whatever was hers--health, youth, charm, good looks, money, time, and sanity--in the pursuit of an idiosyncratic sense of justice wouldn't let her feel more than a passing gratitude for the man who wanted to keep her safe. "Geneva told me he's got a job, a night job. He leaves for work around ten o'clock most nights."

"You don't know where this guy works. You yourself described him as chased by demons. Maybe he's chasing the demons instead. You could follow him right into the middle of something that would be tricky to get out of. To say the least."

The last bit was almost a whisper, and Anna smiled in spite of herself. Paul had been at her side when the shots were fired in Big Bend. He'd handed her the knife to try to save a dead woman's unborn child; he'd wrestled a man eight inches taller, forty pounds heavier, and fifteen years younger to the ground and bashed him on the head with a stone because he looked as if he were going to hurt her.

"Geneva said he doesn't smell half bad when he's going to work," Anna said.

"And this not reeking guarantees he works in an OSHA-approved place?"

Anna said nothing.

"Could you get one of the rangers there to go with you? Preferably one that can see?"

"They're musicians," Anna said. She thought she heard a minute sigh from Port Gibson, Mississippi.

"Could you at least wait till I can come down to serve as your backup?"

Again she said nothing. This time the sigh was quite audible.

"Promise me you'll be careful," Paul said.

"I will."

"Really, really careful."

"I promise."

Paul laughed, a sound of both love and exasperation. "Your definition of 'careful' is vaguely analogous to most people's definition of 'damn the torpedoes.' "

"I'm careful," Anna said. "It's just that occasionally my luck runs out."

"From the way you describe him, he sounds like a man who has it all: scabies, crabs, AIDS, gonorrhea, hangnails. If, God forbid, you have to take him down, promise me you'll wash your hands afterward."

Anna laughed. "And use sanitizer."

"Call me the minute you get back. No, call me the minute you get to wherever it is that your not-too-stinking, occasionally violent, demon-ridden little friend goes to work in the middle of the night."

"I'll do my best," Anna said. Cell phones were not a favored tool of hers. She didn't like conducting private conversations in public places, didn't like phone calls emanating from her pants pocket pushing their way into places where conversations--or those instigating them--didn't belong, like bathroom stalls, grocery aisles, fistfights, and just about anyplace else she could think of.

"Am I going to have to settle for that?"

"Pretty much," Anna said honestly.

"I love you."

"And I you."

Anna closed the phone, then opened it again and turned it off, watching the gray and white "Good-bye" fade from view on a star-trekkian whoosh of electronic noise. There were a lot of people who'd rather see her alive than dead--most, she liked to think--but, other than her sister, it had been a long time since there was anyone who was so hell-bent on keeping her alive and in one piece that it could be a pain in the pasta fagioli.

She would be careful, really, really careful. Her survival instinct had pretty much recovered from previous adventures; that was part of it. Mostly, though, she knew for a fact, knew with every gram of gray matter left in her cranium, that her death would devastate her husband.

Love was a grand burden.

Clad in black Levi's and a red tank top, lights off, she sat inside the open doors to her abbreviated balcony and waited. From the bedroom of the guesthouse she couldn't see Jordan's door, but she would hear when he opened it, would hear his feet on the brick, the squeak of the gate on his side of the apartments. The small deep courtyard funneled sounds up from below with such efficiency she heard even the faint scratching of insects in the leaf litter around the turtles' pond.

Most cities Anna was familiar with began to settle after the evening rush hour. Even on Friday and Saturday nights, there was a slowing and a sense of drowsiness that came over neighborhoods as breadwinners arrived home, suppers were cooked, children kissed and put to bed. Perhaps that was true in other parts of New Orleans. Not so in the French Quarter.

As the hour grew later there was a sense of waking up, the sound of laughter from the street, scraps of conversations drifting up from stoops and balconies, the crush of automobile tires as cars negotiated the narrow, one-way streets. On Ursulines, a few blocks from Bourbon, Royal, Chartres, and North Peters, where the bulk of the night tourists found entertainment, the coming to life wasn't hectic or edgy, just the waking of a nocturnal world as at home in the darkness as bats and cats and owls.

Since Geneva had given her Jordan's customary time of departure, Anna hadn't been listening for more than a quarter of an hour before she heard Jordan's door open, then shut, then the snuck-chunk sound of the lock.

When she heard his footfalls moving toward the iron door that let onto the street, Anna rose.

She didn't change into dark clothes, or mute the paleness of her flesh, or any of the things she might have done had she been going to track a possible malefactor through the woods at night. She didn't pull a ball cap low over her eyes or wear dark glasses to avoid being recognized as one might in other cities. This was New Orleans. On her way downstairs she pulled on a mask bright with red feathers and black sequins that she'd picked up in a souvenir shop on the corner of North Peters and Dumaine after Geneva finished her set, then wrapped a red and gold boa obtained at the same emporium of the tacky and predictable around her neck. All she need do was add a brightly colored hurricane in a shapely plastic two-foot-high glass and she would be just another tourist, all but invisible to the locals.

FOURTEEN

A silent descent made impossible by the old cottage's xylophone stairs, Anna trusted to distance and ambient noise to cover her, pattered down the three flights, and let herself out the front door. Once on the brick, she moved as silently as a cloud.

She didn't trail Jordan down his side of the house. The iron gates to the street were locked with a dead bolt and needed a key to open from either side. Geneva had given her a key to her gate; Anna had neglected to check whether it worked on the second gate. A task for another day, she thought as she stood quietly behind the iron, head cocked, ears straining for the sound of Jordan's retreating footsteps. Keen as her hearing was, she couldn't separate his footfalls from the general murmur of the Quarter.

She gave it a slow twenty count to let him get far enough that he wouldn't hear the lock unlocking, then let herself out onto Ursulines. He was a block and a half away, heading toward the river. Anna closed and locked the gate behind her, then crossed the street to make herself less obviously connected to Geneva's house and followed.

At Bourbon, Jordan turned right and disappeared from sight. Anna jogged half a block and turned right as well. Bourbon smelled faintly of vomit and urine, but, according to Geneva, it was positively aromatic compared to before Katrina. One of the good things the storm heralded was a cleaner French Quarter.

The street was well lit by streetlights that mimicked gas lamps from the turn of the twentieth century and by light spilling out of bars and shops. All was made deliciously lurid by neon.

It wasn't crowded, but there was a sufficiency of people and noise. Anna didn't worry about being noticed tailing Jordan. Not many people were wearing masks--Mardi Gras had come and gone--but there were a few. Two large-bottomed women in shorts and flip-flops had on cat masks. Feather boas were fairly common. There was a peculiar hat here and there. Three young men were talking and laughing around the front of Lafitte's, one shirtless wearing black leather short-shorts and a pirate hat with a great white plume, one in a black leather miniskirt that complemented his tattoos and silver pumps, and the third in khaki pants, loafers, and a madras shirt.

Anna, in red feathers and black sequins, did not stand out.

Jordan was all in black: shoes, trousers, and a long-sleeved shirt with a collar. That much she'd ascertained from the dimmer view on Ursulines. Now she could see that the clothes were nice--at least compared to the garb he wore when he was hanging with the gutter punks. The pants were clean-looking and not too wrinkled, as was the shirt. He wore a black leather belt and black running shoes. His hair had been slicked back and greased--or was still wet from the shower. That, combined with the smudge of beardlet beneath his lower lip and the crown of thorns, gave him the look of Druggie Number Two in a B movie.

New Orleans residents tended to avoid Bourbon. The famous street was always in party mode. Locals looking for a bar open late or just mingling for the fun of the night scene came, but, for the most part, the party was for out-of-towners. Maybe at one time New Orleans had been a hotbed of sin. Now it was merely tolerant of it. Bourbon was about the only place that overt, commercial sin could be found, and much of that was "sin lite," more show than anything. The draw was the nudity and the booze and the illusion of walking on the wild side. Or maybe Anna had seen too much of the world. Maybe for normal people, pole dancing and pasties, thongs and booze and lap dances, were the wild side.

The street was home to the city's strip clubs, Larry Flynt's, Rick's Cabaret, Crazy Horse, and others less well known and less well funded. Jordan passed the higher-end joints and turned into a black rectangle of doorway in a seedy-looking building sporting the signs
LIVE GIRLS LIVE
and
LIVE SEX ACTS
.

Better than dead girls dead and dead sex acts, Anna supposed. Still, it struck her as prurient and adolescent, not a fitting lure for a grown person. Here, she was in the minority. Beside the door was a box, like a speaker's lectern, with a handsome young barker extolling the virtues of the establishment to passersby. On the front of his box was a list of prices for drinks and other services offered within.

Anna stopped in front of the barker. He was a lovely creature with wavy hair the color of old honey and a smile full of fun and fine orthodonture. "Hello, beautiful," he said cheerfully. "Please tell me you are going to add a touch of class to our humble establishment tonight."

"I am," Anna said. "How much do I pay you for the privilege?"

He laid his hand over his heart and looked stricken. "Darlin', do I look like a man who extorts money from lovely ladies? For you, free." Then he added conspiratorially, "There's a two-drink minimum, ten bucks a drink. Don't waste it ordering water."

"I won't," Anna assured him.

He winked and said, "Our girls won't be able to take their eyes off you."

"That's the idea." Anna winked back. It was good to be a lesbian for the evening. Had she thought of it, she would have played that aspect up, though she really couldn't think of how. Butch haircuts and men's clothes were a bit out of fashion. Sedans and children in soccer camp were closer to the mark. Then again, that might merely be the age group of Anna's girlfriends.

These thoughts trailing as she stepped out of the night into the greater darkness of
LIVE GIRLS LIVE
, it occurred to her that a life spent in the woods wearing a duller shade of green than Robin's merry men was not particularly good training for what was new and happening in the rest of the world.

The club would have had to work hard to be any seedier. From the facades of the higher-end pole-dancing establishments, Anna guessed they had some of the amenities: carpet, mood lighting, and tables with matching chairs. Not the LGL. The room she'd stepped into was maybe twenty by forty feet and had been painted black--floors, walls, ceiling, stage, all flat black. Before this stunning transformation into nothing, it had been pinkish beige. Where the paint was peeling or had been scraped from the plaster walls by chair backs or bored customers, the previous incarnation showed through like bits of decaying flesh through a shredded burka.

Along the left-hand wall was a bar, also painted black. Jordan was behind it, his face a smudge in the gloom, tying a black apron over his clothes. There were no bar stools, and the bar itself was short and narrow and looked to be constructed of plywood.

To the left, six feet from the bar, creating a bottleneck in the middle of the long room, was the stage, also flat black, also built of plywood or something as cheap and uninteresting. Two silver poles were the only setting, one near either end of the three-and-a-half-foot-high, six-by-fifteen-foot rectangle. There were no entrances, no fly space, and no curtains. Just the box and the poles and two performers involved in the "live sex acts" part of the evening.

An athletic young man, dressed in leather cuffs and skintight black pants, had his feet and hands on the floor, face to the ceiling, creating a bench of his midsection. Astraddle the bench, in a tiny blue-and-white pleated skirt, like a much abbreviated Catholic schoolgirl's uniform, bare from the waist up, a woman in her late teens or early twenties bounced as if she were engaged in sex with the bench. Her thighs were taking the brunt of the action so she wouldn't drop her weight--which was not inconsiderable--on her fellow actor. The woman had a baby face as empty of emotion as a badly made doll's. The man looked so bored, had Anna ever wondered where the phrase "the old bump and grind" came from, she did no longer. Given the stunning lack of enthusiasm with which they went through the charade, she was unsure whether these live sex acts would indeed prove more appealing than dead sex acts. Or if there was even a difference in the LGL.

Relief swept through her, so sudden and unexpected it was unsettling, and she thanked any gods still standing that Paul wasn't with her. She found the proceedings sad and distasteful. Paul would have found the dehumanization of the girl and her bench almost intolerably painful.

On her end of the stage, the furniture in the sitting area consisted of thirty-inch wooden cubes for tables, each with a few molded black plastic patio-type chairs kneeing up to them. There were five of these clumps. Two were occupied by college-age men with too many beers on the table and too many under their belts. A third was the temporary home of a balding middle-aged man as intent on the simulated sex act as the boys were on their beers. His clothes were the ubiquitous khaki pants and polo shirt. His stomach rested on his splayed thighs, his crossed arms on his stomach. The flesh of his face, dragged down by fast food and disappointment, was formed into an expression Anna could only describe as equal parts misery, ecstasy, and guilt.

No, she corrected herself with a second look, not ecstasy, avidity.

Sitting down at the empty table farthest from the bar, Anna adjusted her mask and set about getting to know Jordan.

Looking disgusted, he was wiping down the bar with a rag, scrubbing industriously at places his predecessor had left sticky. When he finished, he folded the rag into a neat square, then began picking up and fiddling with things that were invisible to Anna. As she watched, and her eyes adjusted, she realized he was gathering up black cocktail napkins and arranging them in neat fans. That done, he looked up, noticed the newcomer, and came out from behind the bar, moving toward her corner, his hands rubbing one another in the black of his apron.

For an instant, Anna thought he'd recognized her. Then she noticed the paucity of waitresses. He stopped by her table and said, "Two-drink minimum, drinks are ten dollars each."

"I'll take a Coke," Anna replied in a voice an octave lower than she customarily used. Either it fooled Jordan or he didn't care who she was or what she did on her time off.

"It's still ten dollars," he said.

"That'll be fine."

Jordan turned, continuing to rub his hands in a tortured homage to Pontius Pilate. Back behind the bar, he stooped; a light paled his face, then winked out, and he rose with a bottle of Pepsi in his hand. He returned to her table, put down a black napkin, set the Pepsi carefully in the middle of it, and said, "You need to pay for the drinks up front."

Anna pulled a money clip with several twenties from her pocket and peeled one off, plus a couple of ones for his tip. Ten percent. Usually, Anna overtipped. To work her way through college, she'd waited tables, and she believed if one couldn't afford a tip, one couldn't afford to eat out. Whatever Jordan was into, she suspected it wasn't something she wanted to help bankroll, but stiffing him would have called too much attention to her. Servers noticed people who stiffed them.

Pocketing the tip and closing his fist around the twenty, he went back to the bar, put the money under the counter, and began scrubbing the bar again, though neither drink nor food had touched it in the interim. Not once did he look at the stage.

The bench man slid from beneath the schoolgirl. Both clumped down stairs on the far side of the stage, wove their way between more box tables, and disappeared in the back. They were replaced by a handsome black woman in her midthirties wearing a high school marching band outfit--sans pants--and high-heeled red gladiator sandals. She took the stage as if she meant to do something with it and nodded at Jordan, who turned his back and put a CD in a portable player.

"House of the Rising Sun."

Anna couldn't remember ever walking through the entertainment district of any city in America where she didn't hear that song leaking out of at least one barroom.

After a few gyrations the band uniform came off with a ripping of Velcro. Jordan showed no interest in anything but compulsively cleaning his small corner of this dirty world, an activity Anna wouldn't have expected of him, given the way he smelled and looked in his free time. It reminded her of the clean lilac scent of his little black dog. Perhaps he'd learned to compartmentalize his filth in order to allow himself to live with it.

Compartmentalization was even better than denial. It was how the Baptist preachers who stopped at pullouts on the Natchez Trace to have anonymous sex with other men on the way home from church to family were able to live with themselves, the way brokers and bankers could defraud the public and continue to consider themselves righteous members of the community. People did it all the time. One compartment was not allowed to touch the other. Internal peace was maintained. To a point.

The woman on the stage had worked through bra and panties and was down to G-string and pasties. The boys with the beers were taking notice, and their excitement and noise level had increased accordingly. The balding man in khaki was intermittently staring and then closing his eyes as if the intensity of the sight were too much to take in for any length of time.

Jordan disappeared into the back for a few minutes, carrying bottles to tables beyond the stage. Everything served, Anna noticed, was in the original bottles: one-shot airplane-sized bottles of hard liquor, one-glass bottles of cheap wine, Pepsi, bottled water. Not even twisting the tops off, Jordan set them on his endless supply of black napkins. The bald man had a plastic glass with ice in it for his tiny bottle of bourbon. He must have requested it to make this night even more special.

A shape loomed from the darkness behind Anna and became corporeal in the plastic chair at her elbow.

"Is this seat taken?"

Anna adjusted her mask so she could see. Being flamboyantly incognito had its drawbacks. A woman of about her age, maybe a little older, early fifties, with the corded arms and seamed face of someone who did hard manual labor for a living, sat smiling at her with crooked teeth and a lascivious gleam in her eye.

"Hey," she said. She stuck out her hand. "I'm Betty." Anna couldn't resist the rakishness of the smile and the hard-knuckled, calloused hand. Rakishness, in a blackout room full of sad addictions, was positively refreshing. Naughtiness: the kind of misbehavior that still retained humor and fun.