“You seen Harvey tonight?” Flynn yelled at the bar tender.
He had to lean right in to hear her above the boom-crash of disco music. “Usual table,” he hollered back.
Flynn took her beer and worked her way to an alcove in back of the dance floor where Harvey Destrehan held court amidst a throng of young and handsome admirers, regaling these acolytes with tales of sexual derring-do undertaken in his heyday, most of which were lies. Harvey Destrehan hailed from a family of attorneys, born and bred in New Orleans. The Destrehans had worked their way up the unique Louisiana food chain to respectable upper middle-classdom in the mid-twentieth century.
Harvey also happened to be the best source of gossip in all of New Orleans. If someone were doing something morally or legally dubious, at any time, anywhere in the city, Harvey would likely know something about it.
He spotted Flynn approaching and his eyes narrowed, his smile thinning out. It would’ve been an overstatement to say they were ‘friends. Rather, they were associates who merely tolerated each other on a personal level. Harvey dismissed his adoring acolytes with an imperious flick of his hand as Flynn took a seat uninvited at the table. It was littered with glasses filled with crushed ice, fruit, and multi-colored alcoholic cocktail mixes that Flynn didn’t even recognize.
“Flynn. How very not nice to see you.”
“Need to know what you know about Voodoo and mambos, Harvey.”
“Voodoo?” Harvey echoed, staring at her from beneath the droopy lids of his brown eyes. His fleshy lips made a purse. “Not my thing, dearie.”
Flynn gave him a thin smile. “Fine, because I didn’t ask if it was your thing or not, Harvey. I want to know whose thing it might be.”
He thought this over. “There is a mambo that I’ve heard about. She’s supposed to be able to summon things beyond the Loa, and to make these things do her bidding. But it’s all just rumor and third hand tales, of course. Nothing concrete.” He waved a dismissive paw in the air to indicate how airy-fairy these stories were. When he realized that Flynn still wanted to know what he knew, his piggy eyes glittered. “And what would be in it for me, dearie?”
This was how it went. Harvey would trade information to Flynn in return for her giving him leads on new clients. It wasn’t that Harvey needed the business—or the money—he just liked to collect clients. Flynn assumed he extracted favors from these referred clients, but she never asked because she didn’t want to know. She gave the fat lawyer the name of someone for whom she had recently done some work, and he filed the name away in his steel trap mind before telling her about Johnny Cakes.
“He’s a two-bit hustler goes by the name of Johnny Cakes…” Harvey rolled his eyes. “I suppose it’s better than John Wilson, which is his real name. Anyway, he’s a punk. Hangs out around the cemetery on Basin…in the Tremé. But the word is that he does some procurement for this mambo from time to time.”
“What sort of things does he ‘procure’ for her?” Flynn asked.
Harvey shrugged. “I really don’t know, dearie. Maybe goats. Maybe drugs. Who gives a flying fuck? It’s all superstitious nonsense.”
Flynn couldn’t argue with that.
“So how is business?” Harvey asked her.
“I’m getting by,” Flynn told him and Harvey smirked.
“You must be…if the NOPD are consulting with you?” The lawyer arched one eyebrow at her and Flynn smiled, shook her head.
“Y’all know I won’t talk about that, Harvey.”
He waved this off as easily as he had the mambo rumors. “MJ says hello, by the way,” he added in an equally arch tone.
Flynn ignored that. Harvey made a wet chuckling sound and slurped some of his garishly colored drink, eyeing her over the rim. “She likes you, you know.”
“Yeah. She’d like my head on her wall even better.”
The Johnny Cakes information was not a whole lot to go on, but it was more than Flynn had started out with tonight. She figured she could work with it to turn it into something more. Strictly, the case was no longer her concern—it belonged to the NOPD now—but she had nothing else on her plate, and besides, she felt some responsibility toward Jeannette and Anthea Larue.
“Thanks for the info,” she said, rising from her seat.
Harvey pretended disappointment. “Y’all aren’t staying?”
“Don’t want to cramp your style,” Flynn told him.
Before she headed out to find Johnny Cakes, Flynn returned to the bar to have another beer and to watch the pretty people dancing, including the blonde with the lithe hips. This time their eyes met and the blonde smiled. Flynn inclined her head in a come-here gesture and Blondie detached herself from her gay-boy friends, sauntered over to the bar.
“Hi.”
Flynn checked her out. Nice teeth and full lips, green eyes and button nose. Expensive, preppy-style clothes—what little there were of them. Maybe nineteen or twenty years of age. Flynn smiled. “Aren’t you out a wee bit late on a school night?”
Blondie laughed. “I’m way past twenty-one. And I doubt there’s anything school could teach me now that I don’t know already.”
Flynn would bet Blondie came from money, too, the kind of money that bought a prep-school private education and excellent orthodontic care. Still, even the most respectable money could get dirty given the right circumstances. “What’s your name?” Flynn asked.
“Jennifer,” Blondie replied.
“Would y’all like something to drink, Jennifer?”
“Long Island Iced Tea. Please.”
“Never seen you in here before. First time?”
Jennifer shook her head. “I come around now and then.” She accepted the drink with a little upward-and-sideways glance, and a smile that sent a pleasant shiver through Flynn.
“Must’ve been times when I wasn’t coming around. That’s a pity.”
Jennifer’s flirty smile widened, her pupils growing large in the centre of the green irises.
“You live in the city?” Flynn asked.
Jennifer bobbed her head. “Garden District,” she said. “Upper Garden District, of course.”
Flynn smirked, tilted an inquisitive look Preppy Jennifer’s way. “Are you here with anybody?”
She received a frank stare right back. “I figured I was with you.”
Flynn nodded. “Right answer.”
They left their drinks unfinished and went outside, where Flynn led Jennifer around back of the club to a dimly-lit service alley.
“I get the feeling this isn’t your first time doing this either,” Jennifer teased.
Flynn responded by turning the girl around to face the wall and pushing her against the roughcast brick. She held Jennifer there with one hand flat between her shoulder blades and, with the other hand, she reached under Jennifer’s skimpy skirt. The girl let out a gasp as Flynn’s fingers touched her between her legs, stroked her through the silky material of her panties. With a low, guttural moan, Jennifer pressed herself into Flynn’s hand.
“Fuck me,” she begged.
Flynn found the edge of Jennifer’s silky panties and yanked them down to her knees. Her own clitoris throbbed against the seam of her jeans. She took her hand from Jennifer’s back and wrapped it around the girl’s middle, pulling her back into a tight embrace and growling into her ear, “Spread your legs!”
Leaning into Flynn’s body for support, Jennifer obediently parted her thighs as far as the panties would allow. Flynn slipped two fingers into the warm wetness between the girl’s legs, found the hard bud of clitoris and began to work it slowly. Jennifer panted, bucked against the rough pressure on her sex. No longer needing to balance herself against the wall, she reached around and grabbed Flynn’s ass in both hands, dug her fingers in hard there. “Jesus, yes -!” she gasped. “Fuck me now!”
“They teach you to talk like that at your fancy prep school?” Flynn was breathing heavily herself as she felt the pressure build between her own legs, bearing down with
the need for release.
Jennifer managed to stutter a laugh. She shook her head. “They taught me a lot of things but…oh shit —!” She groaned and shuddered as Flynn’s thumb rolled over the ball of her clitoris. “But not that, no. Sister Mary Margaret would be shocked!”
“Yeah? That’s not what I’ve heard about Catholic girls’ schools.”
Flynn brought the girl to orgasm. Jennifer’s release prompted her own, but it happened in a vaguely unsatisfying way. Flynn took a step back from the girl, all of her own desire had draining away in an instant, replaced by a sense of angry dissatisfaction that she knew could easily spill over into a violent outburst. She shoved her hands, trembling slightly, deep into her pockets and looked away whilst Jennifer tugged her underwear back into place. When she took a step toward Flynn, reaching for her, a warning shake of the head stopped her. She looked at Flynn with an expression equal parts hurt and puzzled.
“This is the way it is,” Flynn told her.
Jennifer cocked one hip, planted her fist there, scowled. “Oh, that’s your thing, is it?” she spat. “Treat a woman like a fucking prostitute? Not even a fucking kiss?”
Flynn sighed. Sometimes they reacted badly when they realized what they’d got themselves into, and then she’d have to fix with smooth words the dent she’d made in their fragile little egos. Tonight, however, she didn’t feel like explaining herself. She just wanted to get the fuck out of there. It had been a mistake to do this. Without taking her eyes off Jennifer’s face, Flynn tugged her own right jeans leg up, just high enough to reveal the holster at her ankle and the .32 snug inside it. Jennifer’s eyes went wide and saucer-like and her mouth dropped open.
“Just fuck off and pretend you never met me,” Flynn sighed. She dropped the jeans leg back into place, fished her cigarettes out of her jacket, and lit one without enthusiasm.
Jennifer stared at her for a moment, then shook her head—just the once, but hard—to convey her disbelief. She turned and stamped away, Flynn hearing the girl’s heels receding down the alleyway and wincing with every step. When Jennifer had retreated far enough to figure that she was out of danger, she yelled back at Flynn, “Fuck you! I’m not a goddamned hooker!”
Flynn sighed. “Never said you were—” she rolled her eyes. “And I didn’t hear you complaining either.”
She leaned back against the wall where she had pushed Jennifer, smoked the rest of the cigarette as she stared morosely up at the dark sky where the lightning of a spring storm flickered through the ink-blot clouds, veining them in bluish silver, charging the air with cordite. Soon it would rain and the air—brassy scented with the impending storm—would cool down a few degrees. An anticipatory shiver wound its way through Flynn. She zippered up her jacket, wondering if the sudden chill had more to do with how she felt than with the weather?
These casual encounters were something onto which she held from her days as a hired killer when—because she could not risk allowing anyone to get close to her and maybe find out what she did—she would pick up some random girl whenever she felt the need and fuck her. Flynn never had taken them to her own place, never gave them her real name, and she never saw them again. She never allowed them to touch her during sex; sometimes, she didn’t even want them to look at her. Sex was one time when you were open and vulnerable, when your guard was all the way down, and Flynn had spent so long being unable to afford that kind of emotional openness in her life that when confronted with it, she was unnerved.
With Pierce Boudreau and Ariel, it was different. Sex was always a two-way street, and it had less of the discomfort and irrational anger Flynn usually associated with the act. But those two were the exceptions to the rule.
It was also another reason why she was reluctant to allow Dana Jordan to get too close to her. She would want to be unguarded with the reporter, and that was just too damned dangerous as far as Flynn was concerned.
She walked back alone to where she had left her car, her mood well and truly soured, and slumped behind the wheel. She wrenched the key around in the ignition, and squealed away from the curb hard enough to leave rubber marks in the asphalt.
Although Tremé was not a bad place—certainly not the worst New Orleans had to offer—neither was it advisable to find yourself there after dark, alone without wheels or a weapon. Everywhere you looked was poor lighting, empty lots, boarded-up businesses, and beaters parked on the street. Music blared from nearly every open apartment window, and the smell of marijuana, beer, and fried food lay heavy in the air. Flynn drove to St Louis Cemetery No. 2 in search Johnny Cakes. The hustler was easy to spot. Harvey’s description of him—“Small, skinny white asshole with bad teeth and a simply horrible dress sense”—was on the button. Johnny hung with a dozen or so younger boys, all of them attired in droopy jeans and hooded sweatshirts, none of them looking particularly street-tough to Flynn. Johnny himself stood at around five-feet-five, and he would have weighed maybe ninety pounds soaking wet. He wore skin-tight red denims that made his legs look like two cut-down pipe cleaners, and a pimp-style coat with a fur collar turned up around his ears. His hair was as red as his jeans and stuck up all over his head in gelled spikes. Apparently Johnny did not have a girlfriend. She certainly would have never allowed him out of the house dressed like that. Or a mama who cared either.
Flynn pulled up at the curb, watched in amusement as the collective hands of Johnny’s posse went to imaginary guns in their waistbands. Flynn shook her head. Those little wannabes no more had guns than she had a pair of gossamer angel’s wings tucked under her jacket. She rolled her window down, ignoring the hangers-on as she zeroed in on Johnny. “Y’all must be Johnny Cakes.”
Harvey had claimed the hustler was twenty-five. He looked twelve. Effecting a scowl that Flynn assumed was meant to intimidate her but which just made her want to laugh again, Johnny hitched his red jeans on his skinny hips and put a swagger in his voice. “I might be him. Would ’pend on who it is axin? Y’all got nice wheels, lady.”
The pimp act was hilarious, or it would have been had Flynn been in the mood for comedy. “You’re either Johnny Cakes or you aren’t, and then I’m wasting my time talking to the wrong guy?” She held Johnny’s lewd stare.
He faltered, unsure how to deal with a woman challenging him in front of his homeboys, and then he spat, “Fuck you, bitch!”
Flynn sighed. “Guess I got the wrong shit-kicker after all.”
The hustler’s curiosity got the better of him, much as Flynn had hoped it would, and he stepped forward, hands patting the air in front of him. “Hey, hey there! Lady wit the cool wheels—” he chided. “I am Johnny Cakes. I am your man!”
Flynn leaned with her elbow on the rubber edge of the driver’s window. As Johnny preened and puffed, satisfied that he had her attention, she cut a quick glance at his ragged bunch of homeboys circling uneasily behind him. “How about you get rid of the choir, Johnny, and you and me sing us a duet?”
He liked that, waving the posse away immediately. “Shoo, flies! Go! Git outta here. Y’all heard the lady—me an’ her got us some bidness to attend to!”
They shuffled away, feet dragging, hands shoved into the pockets of their low-riding jeans, muttering amongst themselves and drawing Johnny’s visitor evil looks.
Flynn jerked her chin toward the dark end of street. “What say y’all walk on down to that empty lot there, Johnny, and I’ll circle around?”
After a moment’s consideration, Johnny nodded agreement. Flynn drove around the block, scanning both sides of the street for any unwelcome company. A dealer and his bodyguards drove by in a tricked-out Caddy, slowing to give her curious looks. A hard-eyed stare made them forget her business and get back to minding their own.
Johnny arrived, ambling and whistling out of the darkness, oblivious to danger. Flynn shook her head in disbelief. Did this idiot want to get killed? She waited until Johnny was two feet from the Trans Am, and then she raised the .32, the click of the safety disengaging loud in the da
rkness of the lot. It brought him to an abrupt halt, the jaunty whistle dying in his throat as he called out to her. “Hey there! That you, Cool Wheels? Take it easy.”
“Take your hands outta your pockets, Johnny. Slowly. Put ‘em where I can see ‘em.”
Johnny obediently removed his hands from his pockets, raised them to shoulder height, turning the palms outward. He’d been through this drill before.
“You carrying a weapon, Johnny?”
He paused, licked his lips. Flynn sighed with impatience. “I’ll know if you’re lying to me.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I gots a knife in my pocket.”
“Then take it out slowly—use your left hand—and toss it over here.”
Johnny removed a Swiss Army knife from his back pocket using only his thumb and forefinger, and tossed it to the ground. Flynn heard the weapon clatter to the concrete.
“That’s it? That’s all you’re carrying?”
“Yes, ma’am. Thass it.”
A Swiss Army knife…damn, but this boy was a whole new kind of stupid. “Okay, Johnny,” Flynn said, “walk to the car and get in.”
Johnny started to walk forward, and then abruptly halted. “Hey, you a cop, lady?” he demanded. He tried to sound tough, managed panicky.
“Y’all think I look like a fucking cop, Johnny?” Flynn demanded. “No, I ain’t a cop. And that makes me even more dangerous to you, ‘cos I can shoot you down right here, right now, like a dog in the street, then I can drive off and ain’t nobody going to know shit from chocolate cake about what happened here. You feeling me, Johnny?”
His head bobbed in a vigorous nod. He was feeling her alright.
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