City of the Dead Read online

That brought a big, shit-eatin’ grin to his face. “Firemen ain’t the only people get burned, baby.”

  “Bet they’re the only ones who keep an IAFF local sticker in the back window of their hack. You know what union I belong to?”

  Another grin. “You gotta be a nurse.”

  She grinned right back, a coconspirator, even if he’d never worked her neck of the woods. Nobody got along better than trauma nurses and firemen. Nobody respected or relied on each other more. Chastity would have had to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to see the street on him.

  Besides, she’d been led here like Balthazar to Bethlehem.

  “Trauma,” she acknowledged. “Know any multisyllabic words? Read books? Editorials?”

  “What? You auditioning me?”

  “I gotta spend a lot of time in a car with you, fireman. I want to know I can survive it.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest, just like a kid staring down a challenge. “How’s German expressionism? Chauvinism? Nihilism? Contrarianism?”

  “That your personal philosophy?”

  “Ever since my last day on the job.”

  “And you wouldn’t mind driving me around to the police and the coroner’s, places like that?”

  “I don’t have any outstanding warrants, if that’s what you mean. And if you know where you’re going, why ask me?”

  “I’m temporarily short of a driver’s license.”

  His intact eyebrow lifted. “Speeding or alcohol?”

  She grimaced. “The speeding ticket set me up. The parking tickets put me away.”

  His grin was a little lopsided. “You say your sister’s lost?”

  “I don’t know. She might know right where she is. But her husband doesn’t, and he’s worried. Asked me to try and find her. And since the missing person report was filed in the Eighth District, which I’m told this is, I thought I’d start here.”

  “I gotta get off the meter.”

  “Like I said. What’s the cost?”

  “What you offering?”

  “Money,” she said. “Only money.”

  His chuckle was a lot easier than it would have been if he’d known what was going on inside her pants. But Chastity needed this fireman. She trusted firemen, even if they weren’t working the rigs anymore. At least he wouldn’t get all hinky about how she was going to handle things. And, she thought, doing her best to ignore her body’s hijinks, if absolutely necessary, she thought she could trust him with her secrets.

  Then he opened the back door with a flourish worthy of a Ritz doorman, and she was hooked.

  “Climb in, baby. We goin’ on a ride.”

  Chastity slung her stuff into the backseat and scooted in, careful not to show how grateful she was. “I also need a place to crash.”

  “The brother-in-law isn’t putting you up?”

  “He would. I won’t.”

  Her fireman just nodded. “What you have in mind?”

  “Well, I hear my friend Kareena Boudreaux has a place nearby.”

  The fireman forgot to close the door. For a long second, he just stared at her, his scowl even fiercer when edged with the scar tissue that ate up the side of his face. “You been lookin’ for me all along?”

  Chastity smiled. “Kareena said she might have a cousin who drove cabs. Said he might have been a firefighter, so I could trust him.”

  Still he just stood there. Chastity felt the pull of pheromones, and thought that this was the last chance to get out of that cab before she got herself into trouble. Bigger trouble than looking for her sister. The kind of trouble she’d sworn off five long years ago.

  Still, he didn’t smell like lavender or bleach. He didn’t have gray hair. And he was a fireman.

  Chastity sucked in a big breath to calm her maidenly flutters. “Please,” she said. “Kareena said I could trust you.”

  His scowl darkened, but only for a moment. Then, abruptly, he nodded. “As long as she’s not doing me any favors.”

  Finally Chastity laughed. “Trust me, fireman. I’m no favor.”

  Which seemed enough. He slammed the door shut and climbed in the front. Chastity let go a sigh of relief. She knew better than to think that things were better. At least they seemed more manageable. They had to be. She couldn’t survive what was coming otherwise.

  Opening her purse, Chastity took hold of her velvet drawstring bag. No question. She was about to take a hell of a ride.

  Three

  “Where you want to start?” the cabbie asked, glancing into the rearview mirror.

  Chastity took another look out the taxi window to see an elderly lady in pearls and biker shorts walking a black cat on a leash. She heard that faint, tinny music again, like something you could barely remember. She saw the clouds piling up toward the river and knew they were in for rain. She smelled another whiff of decay, as if it had followed her into the cab to remind her that secrets lay hidden on perfectly dry land.

  “I don’t suppose we could start with a three-hour session at a local bar listening to great jazz and getting completely tanked?”

  He grinned into the rearview mirror. “Of course we can. It’s usually where I start when I have to go looking for my family.”

  “They get lost often?”

  “Not nearly often enough.”

  “Well, what do they call you when you do find them, fireman?”

  She got a pretty decent lopsided grin off that one. “I don’t think I’m up to having you call me that,” he demurred. “The name’s James. James Guidry.”

  She leaned forward, reached out a hand. “A pleasure, James. Chastity Byrnes.”

  She was met by a profound silence.

  “Yes,” Chastity allowed without moving. “You may entertain any objectionable reactions you want. Just don’t share them with me.”

  “B-U-R-N-S?”

  “My only saving grace. B-Y-R-N-E-S.”

  “Thank God.”

  “And I prefer to be called Chaz,” she said. “It lessens the incidence of having my failure to live up to a perfectly good name rubbed in my face.”

  “Okay.”

  He reached over the seat with his left hand. A bit of a challenge in itself, Chastity knew. She clasped that terrible, rubbery raw claw and shook.

  Then, leaning back, she took stock of the cab. Clean, tidy, and free of all the knickknacks that tended to accumulate in a cab. Except for a small framed picture hanging over the backseat. A kind of charcoal sketch of the Marine Corps symbol.

  “You a marine?” she asked.

  “Nah. A friend.”

  Must have been a good friend, she thought.

  “So,” he said, starting the engine. “Is it a bar you want? A little early for the good jazz.”

  “Well, James,” she said, “much as I’d really like to, I need to get settled, I need to contact those police to find out they don’t know anything more than they did before, and then I have to figure out what the hell I have to do next.”

  “They didn’t make you a trauma nurse cause they liked the color of your hair, baby.”

  “Yeah, well, James, they made me a trauma nurse. Not a missing persons detective.”

  “We’ll figure it out. Where first?”

  Chastity considered the fact that her brother-in-law was probably elbow deep in somebody’s thoracic cavity right about then, and that she was going to try and do her passive-aggressive best to avoid staying with him. She thought of what she needed from that house, and how she didn’t want him to see her rifle through it.

  “I guess the first thing I need is a picture of my sister.”

  “You don’t have one?”

  “Nope. Not since she was twenty.”

  “How old is she now?”

  “Way past twenty.”

  Chastity knew she’d picked the right cabbie when James merely nodded and put the car into gear. “Seems reasonable. Where is it we’re looking for your sister’s picture?”

  “At her house. The River Run development s
outh of the river.”

  “West of the river, actually. East, south, north don’t do you no good in this city. It’s lakeside, riverside, uptown, downtown. Other side of the river’s considered west.”

  “Well, then, it’s a good thing I have a cabbie who knows that stuff, huh?”

  “I guess it is. You said River Run?”

  “Yeah. I have a key and all the security codes.”

  His laugh was wry. “Interesting place.”

  “I’d rather go to hell,” she retorted more hotly than she’d intended. “It’s in the middle of a damn swamp. Did you know that?”

  “Sure. You know why they have walls?”

  “Because they’re exclusionary and generally terrified of the rest of the populace of the area?”

  “Because they need to protect themselves from the wild pigs that have the run of that area.”

  “Pigs?”

  “Killed a guy a couple months ago.”

  Chastity actually smiled. “Ah. Allegory. My favorite literary device.”

  James chuckled. “You are going to be fun.”

  “Not if I find my sister I won’t.”

  She was going to have to find her sister. Then, for the first time in ten years, she was going to have to talk to her.

  Ten years.

  Ten years of silence and rage and betrayal. Ten years of Chastity being the bad guy and Faith being the victim. Ten years when the people Chastity had loved the most had disappeared from her life as if she’d never existed.

  Well, she existed. And she was going to have to face her sister.

  But first, Chastity had to find her.

  He waited in the shadows. There weren’t many. The sun was high, and humidity gathered like a shroud over the land. But in a swamp, there were always places to hide. Places to watch. He was sweating hard from the exertion, and breathless with anticipation. He’d worked hard today, and it was about to pay off.

  Across the water a young gator sunned himself on a log. The moss hung limp and thick from the trees, and the air hummed with insects and heat. A pair of raccoons edged closer to the water. There was a tour group coming down the bayou on a covered flatboat, and the raccoons knew they’d get fed marshmallows so the tourists could snap their pictures.

  He was in the perfect place to see, tucked in behind the elephant ears that grew to the size of a man. Far enough upwind that the wildlife didn’t notice. He’d planned this down to the last detail, after all.

  Not twenty feet away, a cypress stuck its thick knees out of the water, catching any debris that floated past. A plastic soda bottle bobbed in the water where some crawdadder had left his line. And there, not fifteen feet away, rose the homemade white wooden cross some family had left tucked in at the edge of the water to remember where their child had died in the swamp. Either that or the tour guides had stuck it there for a good story.

  He watched that white cross. He waited in the shadows, crouched in the thick foliage, for the tour boat to reach it.

  They had to find it.

  If they didn’t, all his hard work would be for nothing.

  He watched that cross and the bloated white thing that floated just next to it, swaying a bit in the sluggish current as if waving to get the attention of that boat that crept up the bayou.

  He held his breath.

  “And here,” the guide called, “this where poor ole Jean Claude Robicheaux, he had the unfortunate experience to mix his alcohol and a visit with a gator—”

  “What’s that? By the cross in the river.”

  “Oh, it nothin’…oh, my God. That’s a body!”

  Tucked back in the foliage, he smiled. It was time to go.

  “She looks just like you,” James said.

  Chastity lifted the framed picture from the back of the piano and shrugged. “All of us looked alike.”

  Nobody had had Faith’s eyes, though. Not the color—all of them had those creepy pale blue eyes, like they were blind or psychic or something—but the intensity. That bright hard light of certainty. It was what Chastity remembered most about her oldest sister. It was what had finally split the family apart.

  Chastity looked for that intensity in this slick studio shot of a woman she didn’t know anymore and wasn’t sure if she saw it. Faith was smiling just beyond the camera, all teeth and high chin and perfect posture in her doctor’s wife attire.

  Pearls. She was wearing pearls, just like June Cleaver, just like that tiny, wrinkled woman in the Quarter with her cat. Faith’s hair, a shade darker than Chastity’s, was coiffed into an elegant chignon. No Peter Pan locks for Faith. No bright wide grin, like Hope once flashed. No impudence or whimsy or rebellion, which had been Chastity’s specialty.

  Once Chastity might have known how to find her sister. But looking at that stiff, formal matron in her hands, she just wasn’t sure anymore.

  And she still had to go through Faith’s closets.

  “Tell you what,” she said, turning from the carefully arranged family of men on the piano. “I think I should settle in tonight. Talk to the cops in the morning and maybe come back then.”

  James shrugged. “Your dime.”

  Chastity looked back toward where the master suite lay, and all but shuddered. She didn’t think she could bear to find out tonight what her sister might have re-created back there. She didn’t really want her sister’s secrets after all. So she tucked the photo under her arm, wrote Max a note on a drug company notepad, and skated out of that house like a fleeing felon.

  God, she wished she were home. She wished she were in her trauma lane where she knew what to do. Where everything was clear and explainable and quantitatively measured. Chastity was great at bodily trauma. She just sucked at life lessons.

  And yet, she’d walked right into one. Hell, she’d walked into the big one. And she couldn’t see any way to get out anytime soon.

  Back they went over that damn bridge, which sucked the air right out of Chastity’s lungs. She knew the Mississippi. She had the Mississippi where she lived, and every once in a while she actually crossed it. But she didn’t have to cross it the way it was here, a sprawling swath of water that seemed to take up all the earth. If she ever came back to New Orleans, she’d never cross that bridge again. But first she’d have to cross Lake Pontchartrain to leave.

  She’d been doing so well in her life, Chastity kept thinking. She’d been productive and content and contained, like a controlled nuclear reaction. She hadn’t been perfect. Who the hell was? But it had been a long time since she’d been forced to rub her face in every failing she possessed. Every tic and tremor and memory that could sneak up so fast you found yourself belted into a hot red car trying to outdistance them.

  She wanted to go home. She wanted to run away before she had to find out just why Faith had run away.

  Even though she knew.

  She knew, and she knew even more that Faith would need her at the end of the run, if only to be held by somebody else who understood. To be reminded that she was strong enough to survive. To remember that she wasn’t alone after all. Even if Chastity was the very last person on earth she’d ever wanted to hear that from.

  “So, where you from?” James asked as they swept back off the highway into cluttered housing and uneven streets.

  Chastity looked out the window and smiled at the whimsical makeup of the neighborhood. It looked as if somebody had shaken up a box of houses and stores and churches and tumbled them out over the wide, tree-lined streets. All a bit worn-looking, listing a little, giving ground to the huge live oaks and ubiquitous magnolias that ate the sidewalks and shaded the streets.

  “St. Louis,” she said.

  “Ah, New Orleans lite.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “You’ve never been here before?”

  “I’ve never been out of St. Louis before.”

  She got quite a look in that mirror. “You’re kidding. Not even to Chicago? Everybody from St. Louis goes to Chicago.”

  �
��Everybody but me.”

  He shook his head. “You’re missing a great city.”

  “Well, now that I’ve made that big break from home, maybe I’ll try that next.”

  But then, Chicago sat on another lake. A lake even bigger than Pontchartrain. Maybe she’d try Wichita first.

  “I’d be happy to give you recommendations.”

  Chicago. Oh, yeah. “You obviously like it.”

  “Did my fire time there. Ten years.”

  “You kidding? You’re from a place like this, and you go to Chicago to be a firefighter?”

  “I’d go anywhere but here when I was young. If you don’t get away from New Orleans right away, you just never manage to escape.”

  “Didn’t take, huh?”

  “Obviously not.”

  Chastity nodded. “St. Louis is the same way. I’m obviously the one who never made it out.”

  “Still time.”

  Chastity laughed, thinking about what kind of a mess her insides were in after only a few hours in a new place. “I doubt it. Where are we in the city?”

  “St. Charles Avenue near the Garden District. Kareena lives off Magazine.”

  “Which doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “You might want to get a map.”

  “I have a cabbie.”

  “How do you know her?”

  Chastity looked up. “Kareena? We’re both forensic nurses. She’s offered to help me with the officials down here.”

  James shook his head. “I think I’ve been had.”

  Chastity smiled. “I know you have.”

  They wove through a few side streets thick with antebellum homes and wrought-iron fences to reach the more mercantile Magazine Street, another of those artistically clogged arteries that seemed to make up most of the city. A couple of blocks on that and James turned again into a neighborhood Chastity would have recognized in her sleep.

  In St. Louis, they called the area Dogtown. A blue-collar neighborhood once made up of Irish immigrants, it still boasted a disproportionate number of city cops and about 60 percent of its hockey fans. Unpretty, unpretentious, uninterested in anything that didn’t involve sports, work, family, or church, in that order.