City of the Dead Read online

  Fourteen

  Bourbon Street was at its tawdriest. Neon winked and skipped and spun all along the street. Crowds milled in and out of a dozen clubs that had once offered good jazz or mediocre blues, but now only played mediocre covers of bad rock or canned zydeco. Bored hawkers waved customers into strip joints or transgender clubs, and cops kept to their cars.

  At the corner of St. Louis and Bourbon, a taxi pulled to a halt. “This is as close as I can get,” the driver said.

  Chastity handed over the fare and opened the back door, her hand shaking and the sweat already soaking through her halter top. Her feet hurt from the four-inch heels she wore, and fishnet stockings abraded her ass. The leather miniskirt she’d borrowed from Kareena’s closet barely covered her crotch.

  “You okay?” the cabbie asked, his voice a bit disconcerted.

  Chastity knew just what she looked like. Pale and perspiry and trembly. A woman at the end of her tether. She climbed out of the cab without a word.

  The crowd surged around her, shouting and laughing. At one corner a dozen Harleys thundered into motion. Cheap beads winked in the flashing lights, and pretty young women stumbled into stupidity. It was close to ten o’clock, and the crowd wanted to feel as if they were sinning for a lifetime. It was the perfect place for a woman intent on disaster.

  She’d lasted all day. From the moment James had dropped her off back at Kareena’s, neither of them saying a word about what had happened at Max’s, her hands already shaking so hard she could hardly put a key in the lock. Long enough to get Kareena back out of the house so she could go to hell in her own way.

  She couldn’t last any longer.

  She kept seeing the courtroom. That formal, ritualistic scene straight out of a Law and Order episode, frozen in flashes. The sound of air-conditioning. The rustle of paper and the smell of dust. A shaft of sunlight hitting the defense table, illuminating her father as he did his best impression of Spencer Tracy in Boys Town. The acid that roiled in her stomach as she told the truth nobody wanted to believe. The deathly cold humiliation as her father’s lawyer filleted her for the pleasure of the jury.

  “How can we believe you, Ms. Byrnes?” he asked in a voice a parent would use for a fractious child. “Don’t you have a history of lying? Of running away from home? Of drug use and dangerous sexual behavior?”

  She did. All of it.

  Faith was sitting in the front row, holding hands with their mother and glaring. The Faith glare. The “How dare you do this to us?” glare. Hope was there, too. Poor Hope, who by then had completely disappeared beneath her fat.

  Chastity couldn’t get that scene out of her head.

  She marched down the middle of Bourbon Street, Kareena’s stiletto heels clacking on the blacktop, the humid air wrapping around her bare arms and legs. Nobody noticed her. Nobody interfered as she counted buildings and windows.

  There it was, right in the center of the 400 block of Bourbon. The Big Dawg Saloon. ZZ Top blared from the speakers, and partyers pushed in for their drink orders. The woman behind the counter looked like Carol Channing’s slutty sister, her aged, crepey breasts pushed to impossible heights by a red bustier, her wide blue eyes rimmed in bluer glittered shadow and Tammy Fae Baker mascara. Chastity reached the open door and looked up. She counted windows. She stood there, knowing she shouldn’t take another step.

  “Can you tell us, in your own words, Miss Byrnes, what your relationship is with your father?”

  Hope was the one who sat in the witness stand this time. Faith had already testified. She’d called Chastity a liar. Chastity didn’t think Hope would say anything different. All Hope wanted, after all, was peace. She sat there, hunched over as if hoping no one would see her, her hands writhing in her lap. She kept her eyes down, too terrified of her father to face him. To confront that genial smile that camouflaged the monster.

  Even before Hope spoke, Chastity knew her sister had used up her last reserves of courage just to make the walk up to that chair.

  Not quite all.

  Hope never looked up. “Everything Chastity said is true.”

  In the movies, a statement like that would have caused an eruption in the courtroom, instead, there was silence. Profound, stricken silence.

  And a moan from Hope.

  “Can I help you, honey?” the Carol Charming look-alike asked.

  Chastity stepped right inside the Big Dawg. “You bet,” she said. “Something overwhelmingly alcoholic in the biggest go-cup in New Orleans. Oh, and a set of those purple, green, and gold beads.”

  The beads went over her head. The Hurricane mostly went down her throat. When she felt properly prepared, she walked out to the next doorway, where a grilled gate hid a set of stairs. The grill was unlocked, but she knew it would be. Taking a slug of alcohol, she climbed four stories into the littered darkness.

  “James, open up,” she commanded with a couple of good raps on the plywood door at the top of the stairs. Fourth floor. A perfect view of all the amateur desperation out on the street.

  James answered the door wearing nothing but gym shorts. Chastity thought she was prepared to see the extent of James’s old injuries. She wasn’t sure she was prepared for the rest of him.

  He was buff. Pecs and a six-pack and strong, hard thighs on a swimmer’s frame. And, of course, a tattoo, high on his right bicep. Homemade and obscene and whimsical. A fire hose as a phallic symbol. And all gleaming just a bit with sweat from the heat.

  Chastity grinned like a girl getting her first glimpse of Christmas. “Oh, good,” she said with a leer at his naked chest as she stalked in. “You value expediency.”

  James backed up into the uncertain light of his living room and let her past. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

  Chastity stopped long enough to run a finger down his sternum, just to the right of the worst burns. “You’re not going to tell me I’m predictable, are you, fireman?”

  James didn’t move. “I kinda expected this. Yes.”

  She sighed and started pacing. “You do know how to insult a girl.”

  Before he shut the door, he took a peek out into the hall. “Where’s Kareena?”

  Chastity waved her hand. “Oh, she had a hot date. I didn’t want to interfere.”

  “So she doesn’t know what happened today.”

  “She would have missed her date. I couldn’t do that.”

  “Do I recognize Kareena’s clothes?”

  Chastity spun around once, arms wide. “She has great taste, huh?”

  Then, before James could deter her, she dropped her purse on the floor and set to pacing through the rooms.

  The apartment was a surprise. Not the stark, basic decor that looked as if it had been rescued from a Dumpster. Chastity knew enough men to recognize that decorating scheme. Single male uncommitted.

  James had two rooms with a kitchenette and tiny bathroom. A faded brown couch, three big green throw pillows and a sound system, a two-person formica table and unmatched metal chairs. A mattress lay on the bedroom floor, and sheer curtains blew fitfully at the open windows that faced the street below. His chest of drawers listed, and his closet door stood open and draped in jeans.

  But none of that surprised Chastity. His bedroom ceiling did. His bedroom ceiling, where every night the neon from Bourbon Street washed the walls like frantic tides.

  Chastity caught sight of it and stopped her pacing. She found herself walking right through the bedroom doorway, not sure she believed what she’d seen there in the dark.

  She thought the ceiling might be light blue. She wasn’t sure, especially with the neon shuddering over it. What she was sure of, though, was the decoration. Because there, in a shabby apartment on Bourbon Street, re-created in painstaking detail in fluorescent paint, was the night sky. Constellations crossed the ceiling in miraculous order as if there were no ceiling. No roof at all.

  For a moment Chastity could do no more than stand in the doorway, awed. “I didn’t know you were a romanti
c.”

  “I used to go camping.”

  He was standing behind her, right in the bedroom doorway. The ZZ Top downstairs morphed into Bruce Springsteen, and across the street some bad band was trying to wail out some Thunderbirds.

  For a second, just to be sure, Chastity flipped on the bedroom light. The night sky magically transformed to day. White, wispy clouds and sunshine. It meant something, she was sure. She just didn’t know what. She only knew that it made her more anxious, more hungry. More skittish. So she sucked down her drink, set it on the TV by the door, and shut off the light.

  “Well, fireman. I hear you want some ya-ya.”

  She thought he sighed. “You want to talk about your father?”

  Chastity spun around on him, her heart stumbling all over her chest. “No, I don’t want to talk about my father. I want what Kareena’s getting tonight.”

  He was standing there in his shorts, the shadows collecting along those terrible scars. He wasn’t smiling. Chastity wanted him to smile. She wanted noise and heat and a good, mindless fuck. So she reached out and rested a hand on his left shoulder.

  “That doesn’t extend to vital areas, does it?” she asked, motioning to what lay beneath her hand.

  The scars stretched all the way down his side. From cheekbone to thigh. Red, raw, motley, as if somebody had tried to lay a patchwork quilt over his old injuries and it had fused to him.

  “I thought your father was dead,” he said.

  She laughed. “No. I just wanted him to be. I pretended he was.”

  It was the only way she’d kept her sanity.

  “And he was here all along?”

  “He was in prison. Fifteen-to-twenty-five.”

  He never did believe he was going to be convicted. Even as they walked him out in handcuffs. He’d looked back at his daughters as if he were Joan of Arc going to the stake. Chastity’s mother spit in her face.

  “And when he got out?” James asked. “What then?”

  Chastity started walking again, as if pacing those two rooms could distance her from what had happened that afternoon. “He was supposed to be considerate enough to disappear into the ether, where he couldn’t ever bother us again. Bother me again. Obviously Faith didn’t think it was as much of a bother as I did.”

  She couldn’t breathe again. If she did, she just smelled James, and if she smelled him, she knew she was going to simply tip him onto the floor. She was shivering with the need of it. The need of him. Sweaty and hot and frantic. Chastity suddenly felt like a little girl, and God, she hated that worse than anything.

  “Come here,” he said, his voice quiet.

  She chuckled, the sound high and thin. “About time.”

  She walked right into his arms, and he pulled them around her.

  And then, he just stood there.

  Chastity lifted her face for the kiss of a lifetime. James avoided her like a pro.

  “What’s this?” Chastity demanded. “Zen sex?”

  “Shhhhhh.”

  He was holding her. Bending his head over hers so she couldn’t reach him with her mouth. He wrapped his arms around her so tightly she could feel that scar tissue. She could feel the strength in him, the hard leanness.

  The trap.

  Suddenly she was trying like hell to get away.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded, bucking like a toddler in a tantrum. “Come on. I’m ready to throw caution to the wind. I’m ready to throw your gym shorts out the window. What’s the matter with you?”

  James never so much as flinched. He just held her. “Hasn’t anybody ever done this for you before?”

  “Not unless a blow job was involved. Let me go!”

  He walked her right over to the couch and eased down onto it, still wrapped tightly around her. “Nope.”

  And he held her.

  Chastity didn’t know what to do. She felt like a bird caught in a chimney. She knew her heart was going to explode, right there in her chest. She wanted to cry, and damn it, she didn’t cry in front of anybody. Not anybody.

  “Let me go.”

  “In a minute.”

  “You said you wanted sex!” She was shrill. She knew it. She couldn’t stop. “What the hell’s this?”

  “We’ll have sex when it’s for fun, nurse.”

  “Sex is never fun, fireman.”

  “No, you’ve never had it for fun. You told me so yourself.”

  She was shaking so hard she thought she’d fly apart. “I can’t…don’t humiliate me like this.”

  “It’s comfort,” he said quietly, his face right against her hair. “Normal people do it all the time.”

  Her laugh was brittle and sharp. “They can’t. It’s too terrifying.”

  “I know. First time somebody did it to me, I clocked ’em.”

  She tried to pull back. He didn’t let her. “You clocked Kareena?”

  He chuckled. “Actually, I did. First time she saw me after the burns, and I couldn’t bear anybody touching me. Not because it hurt. Because…”

  Nobody knew better than Chastity. “Yeah.”

  “But you know Kareena.”

  “Yeah, I know Kareena.”

  Kareena was a toucher, a patter, a woman who nursed with every inch of her. Chastity touched in her job. She held. But it had never been natural, and she was always afraid her patients knew it.

  It wasn’t natural for James, either. She could tell. But he wouldn’t let go. And suddenly Chastity realized that she wasn’t fighting anymore.

  She couldn’t believe it. She was settling. She was calming, right there where she couldn’t get away. She was breathing better, and she found herself just wanting to close her eyes and settle against his chest like a tired child.

  Was this what families felt in her ER when she held them? When she softened the blows she leveled on them by wrapping them in strong arms? They talked to her, she knew. They poured out grief and anger and surprise, right along with the tears that stained her shoulders. They gave her more trust in response to a simple act of compassion than she’d ever given another human in her life.

  For a few moments, she actually thought she could do it, too. Could allow herself to be comforted just like a normal person. For a few moments, she held still.

  But only for a few moments.

  The panic resurfaced, and it was sharp and suffocating. Her heart slammed against her chest. She couldn’t think of anything but escape. The minute James let down his guard, Chastity launched off that couch like a catapult.

  She could tolerate anything, it seemed, but compassion. Compassion, she’d learned a long time ago, came at a price.

  “Thanks, fireman,” she said, tottering on those four-inch heels as she tried to find her balance. “Really. But I gotta go.”

  James climbed to his feet. Chastity backed away.

  “You can stay,” he offered. “I have cable.”

  Nobody had ever said anything so nice to her in her life. “I’d just buy something I can’t afford.” Her laugh sounded really shaky.

  “Then let me drive you back to Kareena’s.”

  “You’re not the only cab in town.”

  “Chaz…”

  She looked at him. At those once-distant eyes that glittered in the odd lighting of his apartment. At the devastation his body had suffered, that most days nobody even noticed anymore. She fought a fresh wash of lust and a worse one of shame, because they always came paired that way.

  “Don’t worry, fireman. I was only going to come here, where it was safe.”

  His smile was wry. “It’s not as safe here as you think, Chaz.”

  She smiled, because of course she’d felt how hard he’d gotten, just holding her. “Oh, shit, James,” she sighed, “but I think it is. Immutable laws of physical nature notwithstanding. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have imposed on you this way.”

  She shouldn’t have bared herself that much. Now she felt frayed and raw, and she didn’t know how to escape.

  His shrug
was a thing of ease. “You’re dressed up to go out. Wait a minute and let’s go on down to Frenchmen Street.”

  Chastity thought of that empty, echoing house back in the Irish Channel, and the fact that she’d stolen Kareena’s clothes to go get laid. She thought about the temptations the rest of this city had to offer a woman with an addiction, and how easy it would be to find somebody who’d be happy to help her look for them.

  She thought that James, with his obvious scars, was the person she could be with right now.

  Chastity turned for the door and stopped, still in the shadows. “Ya know, it’s really embarrassing. You reach a certain age, and you think you’ve finally become mature. Put other people’s concerns ahead of your own. And then, in one day I see a dead woman who’s left behind a child—who happens, in the grotesque scheme of things, to be my niece—and a fresh picture of my father. And what do I throw a tantrum over? I ask you, fireman. How mature is that?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person, nurse. I have tantrums over parking spaces.”

  She grinned to his door, which was as scarred as he was. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  He nodded. “Tell Carol you get a Hurricane on me.”

  Chastity actually laughed. “Her name really is Carol?”

  “Yeah. She used to work the strip clubs. Now she owns Big Dawg. She also makes a great chicken soup.”

  Chastity nodded and opened the door. Turned back. Did something as maudlin as just kiss James right on that scarred cheek of his. Then she walked out.

  Chastity was standing in front of the stairs to James’s apartment watching the pedestrians when she felt a hand on her elbow. She knew it wasn’t James. Even Superman didn’t change that fast. For only a moment, she considered just walking off with whoever it was. Disappearing into the night and taking her consequences where she wouldn’t have to face James again. She started to turn so she could at least address the person.

  Then she was pushed from behind. Hard.

  “Hey!” she yelled, trying to pull away. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Her attacker grabbed hold again and propelled her toward the alleyway between the buildings. As Chastity struggled to stay on her feet, she caught sight of his face in the streetlight. She gaped like a fish.