Pip dared to peer from the doorway, back toward Chartres Street. Nothing. No cartoon heavies hunched together, weapons cocked. Now he wanted to laugh, to scream.
He ran. One downward step and another, and he hit the sidewalk almost brushing the wall as he went. The newspaper blocking the holes in his shoes was sodden—what was left of the thin leather soles, sodden. At least they didn’t make much noise.
The rain fell heavier again, slanted into his face, but didn’t cool the blinding heat swelling in his head. He opened his mouth and let his breath drag in and out, lengthened his stride, punched the seething air with jabbing fists.
Asking for money, letting it out that he had proof he was owed, had been a crazy move. He’d launched into a diatribe about ruining reputations and putting people in jail, even though their sneers should have shut him up. He had threatened some of the most dangerous people in New Orleans.
His left ankle turned. Pain shot through his foot, up his leg, but what the hell, he could run with no legs if he had to. He ran on. With freedom in your sights, you could limp at the speed of a Jaguar.
The ankle buckled at every step. He stumbled and caught at a street-sign pole. He wanted to be sick.
There could be a bone broken down there.
He was almost on top of a small cross street. He was going to make it. His breaths turned to sobs. His eyes filmed over. He would make it. There wasn’t any sound of heavy men running in hard shoes. All he heard through the roaring in his brain was the approach of a car from the left.
He paused, panting, his veins fluttering, and checked his pockets to make sure he hadn’t dropped anything. He hadn’t. Bending over at the curb, his hands on his knees, Pip waited for the car to pass. Damn them all. He’d taken too long to find a way to get back what he’d lost. He’d owed them big, but not so big they should have taken everything he had.
He had to show Zinnia he was man enough to fix things.
The first shot caught him in his injured leg. He screamed and began to crumple forward.
The second shot punctured his right shoulder, drove straight back. He heard the bones explode, felt the flesh burn, saw red blossoms like flames. He couldn’t see.
The third shot…
1
Toussaint, Louisiana
Jilly Gable had a man to confront. Maybe this time Guy Gautreaux would keep his big mouth shut and let her finish what she had to say before he piled in and told her what to do and why, and reminded her of his earlier warning that the reappearance of her long-lost mother could be bad news.
Guy had trouble with the concept that a woman could have a change of heart after thirty years of not giving a damn about a person. He didn’t believe people changed; he thought that as years went by they became more of what they had always been. In this case, once a bad mother, eventually a really bad mother.
Jilly pulled her aging VW Beetle into the forecourt at Homer Devol’s gas station—the last gas station on the way out of the town of Toussaint, and first on the way in, depending on whether you were going or coming and which side of the sign you looked at.
Homer usually went to pick his granddaughter up from school in the afternoon, leaving Guy to tend the gas station and the convenience store beyond, where a string of colored lights outlined the roof. The lights stayed on all day and into the evening, all year.
Pots of showy geraniums hung beneath the eaves with ivy trailing to the ground.
Jilly looked around. Nothing on two legs moved. With her head out of the window, she called, “Homer! Guy!” then she screwed up her eyes and listened. No response. She looked quickly toward the road. All day she’d had a sick sensation that she was being followed, watched. Last night she had got a warning, even if it wasn’t direct, that someone was watching her movements. Who better to advise her than Guy, a New Orleans Police Department homicide detective on extended leave?
Way to the left, closer to the bayou, Homer’s split-timber house stood on stilts with its gallery facing the bayou across the sloping back lawn.
She got out of the lime-green Beetle and went through the useless exercise of trying to take in a breath. Hot didn’t cover it. Heat eddies wavered above the burned-out grass and did their shaky dance on tops of the roofs. From where she was she could see cypress trees crouching, totally still, over Bayou Teche. Beards of Spanish moss hung from branches as if they were painted there, and the pea-green surface of the bayou might have been set-up Jell-O. Even the gators would be sleeping now.
She reached behind her seat and hauled out several bakery boxes tied together with string. If she didn’t get them inside fast, the contents would be gooey puddles. Jilly owned All Tarted Up, Flakiest Pastry In Town, one of Toussaint’s favorite gathering places. Her brother, Joe—a lawyer—had been her partner until his marriage the previous year. She’d been able to assume the loans and she loved having the business to herself.
Guy’s beat-up gray Pontiac hugged a slice of shade beside the store, but she saw no sign of the man, either in the gas station or the store. He didn’t live out here and mostly stayed away from the house.
A walk toward the bayou ended her search. He stood on the dock, a cell phone clamped to his ear, his arms crossed, and his face pointing away from her.
A door slid open behind her and she jumped, swung around and barely kept her balance. Homer’s fish-boiling operations were housed in this other building, one you didn’t see until you got close to the bayou. Ozaire Dupre walked out and turned to slide the doors shut, but not before the dense smell of boiling fish rushed free. Ozaire, caretaker at the church, man of many schemes, also helped out with Homer’s boiling and drove the giant pots of fish, and sometimes vats of his part-time boss’s own special gumbo, to backyard barbecues or any event looking for real Louisiana cooking.
Ozaire saw Jilly and frowned, shook his big, shaved head dolefully. “Better you keep me company today, girl. That one down there—he’s one big, black cloud, him.” Ozaire fooled some people with his short, thick, slow-moving body. In fact, the man’s strength was legendary in the area, and his speed if he chose to hurry.
A part-grown black mutt with long, silky hair loped around his legs but soon left to investigate Jilly.
“You say that every time I come,” Jilly pointed out, scratching the dog’s velvet head. “Who’s this good-looking fella?”
“That Guy Gautreaux’s a big, black cloud all the time, that’s why I say it.” Ozaire looked smug. His scalp shone in the sunlight and sweat ran down the sides of his round face and heavy neck. “Never got nuthin’ good to say. I reckon he’s got a curse on him. Bad-luck boy, that one.”
“You should be more careful what you say, you,” Jilly told Ozaire. “A man could get in trouble for saying things like that.”
“Get on. I’m just sayin’ it like it is. Last woman that boy got close to is in a cemetery.”
Last year Guy’s longtime girlfriend had been murdered in New Orleans. He blamed himself.
“Later,” Jilly said, exasperated. She held out the boxes. “We had extra at the bakery. They’re fresh. Put them in the store case for Homer to sell.”
Ozaire took the load from her and gave a rare grin. “An’ I thought you was bringin’ me a treat.”
Jilly wagged a finger at him. A bug flew into her eye and she dealt with it, then pointed at him again. “You get one. I’ve counted those pastries, I’ll count them again when I come back up. There better be no more than one gone.” Give the man the chance and he’d be hauling the stuff off to sell to whoever was using the church hall at St. Cécil’s.
“That there’s a dog what’s a prize, that’s what he is,” Ozaire said, as if the topic had never been pastries.