“Good. Now, get in the goddamned car before my patience wears out.”
Johnny stumbled the rest of the way, fumbled the passenger door open, and all but fell into the car. He was shaking with nerves. Up close, with the dubious benefit of illumination, Johnny’s face showed the ravages of adolescent acne and early crack usage. He stared at the 32. Flynn had pointed at his abdomen, his eyes wide, his face slack. His mouth tried to quirk itself into an ingratiating smile that fit badly. “Hey, lady, I don’t even know your name, and you holdin a gun on me?”
“My name is of no consequence to you, Johnny. What I want from you is some information, and if you give me what I want, I won’t kill you. How does that sound?”
“That’s it?” Johnny croaked. “Y’all want—information? That’s all?”
Flynn nodded. “Yep, that’s all. I like to keep things simple. Whaddya say, Johnny?”
“Okay. Sure. I can do that. What do you wanna know?”
“I’m told you’re the man to ask about a certain mambo. A mambo who can make the Loa do her bidding—and who might be using them to help her dabble in some very bad ju-ju.”
Johnny’s face lost what precious little color it had. He shook his head. Fast. His hands flew up in front of him and flapped about like great white birds. “Uh uh! No way! Uh uh. No. I can’t talk about that,” he gabbled.
Flynn shrugged. “Your call, Johnny. So, do you want me to gut-shoot you? That way, you might have a chance to live if some kind soul calls for an ambulance and it actually gets here in time…although I wouldn’t be prepared to bet on that. Or would you prefer I shot you in the head? That’d be pretty final, but it’d be all over quick.”
Johnny made a horrible piglet-like squealing sound. Tears sprang into his eyes. Flynn almost felt sorry for him. If he caved this easily every time he was threatened, he wasn’t going to make it on the street to twenty-six. How he had even made it this far, she wasn’t at all sure.
“Man, I talk to anyone about her—she gonna kill me!” he insisted.
Flynn shrugged again. That wasn’t her problem. She raised the gun. A flock of expletives flew from Johnny’s mouth. “Hey, hey -!” he pleaded, hands frantically patting the air between them, eyes riveted to the gun. “Let’s not be hasty here, huh? Maybe—maybe—I can tell you a little about her.”
Flynn shook her head. “I’m an all-or-nothing kind of gal, Johnny. Sorry.”
Johnny was breathing so heavily he was practically panting. He shook his head again, spluttered out a few more expletives, and then he gave a resigned nod. “I’ll tell you! Okay? I’ll tell you every fucking thing I know about her, and anything else you wanna know. Just—please! Don’t shoot me!”
“That might still depend on what you tell me, Johnny,” Flynn said. She was messing with him because she didn’t like him and she wanted to mess with him—just for the hell of it. “So, start talking and let’s see if you can’t spare me the cost of engaging a valet service to get the bloodstains outta my nice ride.”
He talked fast, his words falling over one another in their haste to get out. Flynn listened, and kept the gun trained on him, just to give him some encouragement.
The mambo called herself Jean-Marie, Johnny said. No last name, just Jean-Marie. With a hyphen. Johnny opined that the Jean—the French version of John—was probably for Dr John, and Marie would be for Marie Laveau, probably the most famous New Orleans Voodoo priestess there ever was. Flynn didn’t disagree. This modern-day Jean-Marie was a white woman, and she had acolytes—followers—all over the city.
“You’ve met her then?” Flynn asked.
Johnny reluctantly admitted that no, he had never dealt with Jean-Marie directly, only with her representatives.
“Then how do you know she’s a white woman?” Flynn asked.
Johnny shrugged. “Her man—Antoine—he deals wit me a lot, an he said she was the ‘best white mambo he’d ever met’.”
Flynn’s ears pricked. “This Antoine—what does he look like?”
Johnny drew a deep breath, closed his eyes briefly. He actually shuddered as he let the breath out. “What’s he look like? He a white dude, looks like a fuckin Dutch barn that grew legs and arms, is what. Big. Muss be six-four, sumthin around there. Scary fucker.”
That could be Boudreau’s suspect, Flynn thought. “What do you do for the mambo? I’m told that you ‘procure’ things for her?”
Johnny gave an eager nod, happy to be back on familiar ground. “I guess you could say I procure stuff for her, yeah. She wants a goat—say, a white goat—she sends Antoine to me an’ I find her a white fuckin goat. Antoine comes and collects it, brings me my money for services rendered. Sometimes it’s other stuff, like chickens, or roosters. Or stuff like stones from some cemetery, or a bunch of weeds from the river.”
“Strange requests,” Flynn pointed out.
Johnny shrugged. “Mebbe, but she pays me an I don’t ask no questions.”
“How’d you and Antoine stay in touch?”
“He calls me. We meet in the cemetery—” Johnny hooked a thumb in the general direction of St Louis Cemetery No. 2. “He always uses payphones. An I always get paid in cash—the hustler grimaced. “Sometimes I wonder why I keep on doin it, since I’m scared practically shitless of this Antoine dude—and of her. She the real deal, man, she can even read minds.”
Flynn’ s expression must have betrayed her skepticism. Johnny bobbed his head, eyes wide and aglow with the sincerity of a believer. “She knows stuff, this Jean-Marie, she really does. Like, she knew one time when I tried to stiff her on the cost of sumthin an’ she sent a temp’ray curse to me? I got the chills an’ pukin for three days ‘til she sent Antoine over to give me sumthin stopped it all. Told me never to stiff her like that again, an’ I tell ya, I ain’t never.”
Flynn sighed. “It’s all psychology, Johnny. Y’all want to believe you’ve been cursed—not that you’ve just eaten a bad taco.”
Even as Flynn was speaking, Johnny shook his head in denial. He scratched at a zit on his face, eyes drifting, a dreamy smile on his face. “There is one good point to procurin for the mambo though—I gets to go in that shop… ” he trailed off into a wide, lecherous grin that Flynn just wanted to take some pliers to. “It’s just off Royal? Real interestin lil’ shop, an’ this really cool good-lookin chick wit green eyes runs it. I get nearly all the stuff for Jean-Marie in there.”
Flynn sucked air in as she realized that Johnny was talking about Ariel Rousseau, and Ariel’s store, Voodoo Realty. Not for a second did she consider that Jean-Marie was anything other than a clever con, but that didn’t make her any less a bad person to cross. If Ariel were to inadvertently poke at some ant hill only to discover it was a hornet’s nest, Jean-Marie might come after her with some very real-world violence.
“This mambo, Jean-Marie…” Flynn allowed her upper lip to curl. “Has she ever asked you to procure any human beings for her?”
Johnny’s eyes got impossibly wide and seemed to fill his entire face. He shook his head. “Human beings —you mean, like people?”
Flynn nodded. “What the fuck did you think I meant, Johnny?” she demanded.
Johnny licked his lips, shook his head again, but harder this time. “Uh uh. No way. She ain’t never asked me to do that, nossir, an I wouldn’t even if’n she did. I ain’t goin anywhere near that shit. You gotta believe me on that.”
Flynn did believe him. She asked Johnny a few more questions about the mambo, and when she figured he was dry, she told him to get the fuck out of her car…forget he ever saw her face if he wanted to keep his nuts in the place God intended for them to be. Pale as a ghost, sweat popping out on his upper lip, Johnny Cakes fell all over himself once more as he scrambled out of the Trans Am.
Flynn called after him, “Oh, Johnny, one more thing…” His shoulders bunched in fear and he looked around reluctantly. Flynn gave him a humorless smile. “If I were y’all, I’d think about getting out of New Orleans for a while. At
least until Jean-Marie decides to move on herself. You feeling me, Johnny?”
Johnny Cakes stared at her for a moment. Then he nodded. He sprinted off into the darkness.
He hadn’t even tried to retrieve his knife, Flynn realized. With a derisive snort, she tucked the .32 away in its ankle holster, and leaned over the seat to close the passenger side door Johnny had forgotten in his haste. As she drove away, she thought about the hustler’s forgotten knife, and she shook her head. No doubt by morning some project kid would have happened upon it, and he’d take it, thinking himself the Big Man On Campus because he had a knife. Eventually he’d use it to stab one of his little project friends to death.
Oh well. Such was the natural cycle of life in The City That Care Forgot.
CHAPTER EIGHT
There were forces at work, human forces which aligned themselves against her. Fools convinced they could defeat her and stay the hand of the Old Ones.
Such fools did not understand that the Old Ones were too powerful to be stopped.
She had to prepare herself for the final and most important part of the ritual, setting the Old Ones free so that they might walk between the worlds of the living and the dead. She had to make her physical body, and her spiritual self ready to act as a human conduit for them. As the first step in doing so, she needed to bathe and she lowered herself into a bathtub of steaming water into which a potent cocktail of herbs and powders, roots and bones, and her own blood, had been mixed. The brackish water moved around her body, bits of root and bone scraping her naked flesh, the heat searing it.
“Guide me,” she whispered.
The mambo became light-headed as images lit up the backsides of her eyelids, and visions fired off in her brain in rapid, colorful succession. She breathed deeply, making herself relax into the experience of meeting the Loa on their plane of existence.
There was Erzulie, smiling enchantingly with her full, red-lipped mouth and crystal-blue eyes. And Ogun, his long penis fully erect, his jet-dark eyes ablaze with lust. Papa Legba appeared, too, as a friendly face to guide her, and with him came Damballah and the Baron Samedi. Behind these Loa, in the shadows, were the Old Ones, watching and waiting.
Laying back against the smooth metal side of the bathtub, the mambo let her head droop backward and her hands sink beneath the water’s surface, seeking her own sex. All the time she watched the voyeuristic pleasure on the faces of the Loa and the Old Ones.
The final ritual had to involve a third sacrifice, that of someone for whom a love was unrequited. The mambo needed to find the right person, and to do that she would ask for the guidance of the Loa. She thought of the ritual to come, and a surge of renewed lust catch at her body, bucking it, twisting it in the water. She moaned her pleasure, and thrust her fingers deeper inside of herself. When the moment was right, the chosen sacrifice would share with her in drinking this water which would have been enriched with her own juices and those of the Loa.
And those fools who thought they could stop her? She laughed. They would be the first to feel the wrath of the Old Ones. They would die hard deaths, screaming in agony, begging their own God to save their tortured souls. But their God would be as powerless as they were.
“It will be done,” the mambo whispered.
CHAPTER NINE
Dana Jordan had not intended that yesterday would be the day when she finally asked Flynn why they had never gotten together; the question had just sort of popped out without forethought.
Now that she had Flynn’s answer, neither could she deny that what she had heard had stung her, mostly because what Flynn had said about her was true. Whatever else Dana might have implied, she’d never seen herself as a one-night-stand person. But neither did she think Flynn had been completely truthful about her own reasons for avoiding a relationship, and that too, filled Dana with frustration.
Still thinking about the PI the following day, and about whether they had any chance of ever getting together in future, Dana sat at her desk at the newspaper office, trying to muster even a little enthusiasm for work that she usually loved. The Voodoo murders story would run all week—it was big news, even in a city where murder was not uncommon. There wasn’t a whole lot of information to go on—not even after talking to Flynn—but Dana had managed to cobble together a respectable piece from what she had. Today though, her heart just didn’t feel in it.
On impulse she shut down the screen she was trying to work on and called up a new file, one which contained research she had done in moments of downtime. Personal research, the file contained everything she had been able to find out about Willie Rae Flynn.
It didn’t amount to much at all. A birth certificate, a couple of early high school records, and a newspaper report concerning the death of a New Orleans man, Michael John Flynn. The report stated that Mr Flynn had fallen into a canal after a night of heavy drinking. The incident occurred near the old Florida projects, back in the mid 1980s. Michael John Flynn had been well-known around the blue-collar Irish Channel area, both as a hard drinker and a brawler. Michael John Flynn had also been the father of Willie Rae Flynn.
Flynn never talked about her early life, and rarely said much about her life in New York City. She would change the subject whenever Dana tried to bring it up. Of course, that had made Dana even more curious. Willie Rae’s mother, Miriam Pirie Flynn, had been one of those clumsy, uncoordinated women who were always walking into things. At least that was what Miriam claimed on the few occasions when her neighbors felt they could not sit back and listen to Michael beat any more shit out of her and had called the police. Miriam had never once pressed charges against her abusive husband. When he died in the canal accident, she placed a strangely loving obit in the newspaper. She herself had died nine years ago from cirrhosis of the liver after suffering from alcohol addiction for many years. Sometimes fate was a cruel bitch, Dana reflected.
A wife-beating drunk of a father and a weak-willed mother who also turned to drink—that wasn’t the kind of start in life anyone would wish to dwell upon.
Flynn had no siblings, and no other family members that Dana could find. There had been an uncle on her mother’s side, living down in Evangeline Parish, but he disappeared during Katrina and hadn’t been heard from since. The chances were good that he’d died in the hurricane which eviscerated Evangeline Parish.
Dana looked up as Sy Lehane came bustling toward her, and she quickly shut down the screen before he could see that she was mooning over her personal crush on company time.
However, the editor was distracted by other, bigger things. “Anthea Larue’s body has been found,” he announced. “Same ritualistic killing as her mother.”
“Damn,” Dana said softly.
Sy nodded, but his eyes were alight behind his glasses, his nostrils flared with the scent of a story. “This is big,” he gloated. “Even without the Voodoo angle, it’s the kind of tragic stuff people eat off the front page with a spoon.”
What that said about humanity, Dana did not care to dwell upon and so she asked instead if Pierce Boudreau were handling the daughter’s murder?
Sy nodded. “There’s a press conference today. I was thinking maybe you could get some sort of jump on that with Detective Boudreau?”
Dana was not sure what sort of ‘jump’ she might be able to get since Boudreau would be reluctant at best to do her any favors. Neither did Dana imagine Flynn being further involved with the investigation now that it was an official NOPD case. Still, Flynn was sleeping with the lead detective and Dana wondered if she could use that knowledge to wheedle some information out of either.
“I’ll talk to Flynn again,” she said.
If last night had been shitty, this morning was double shitty with sprinkles of crap on top. Boudreau tottered home in the wee hours, exhausted and pissed off, to crawl fully-clothed into bed. She slept until the alarm clock woke her again at six-thirty am and then, feeling hardly refreshed and still in a bad mood, she shed yesterday’s rumpled, sweaty clothes, and to
ok a much needed shower that made her feel somewhat better. She grabbed a cup of coffee to go from the deli down the street and drove back to the station with the heavy feeling that she never had left it.
A call-back message awaited at the station. Reverend George Petersen had called with new information. New information—or just old information that he had withheld? Boudreau dialed the number and the reverend answered on the third ring.
“Reverend Petersen, it’s Detective Boudreau. You called me, I believe?”
“Yes. Thank you for calling back, Detective.” He cleared his throat in a way that, in Boudreau’s experience, often signaled the lead-up to a confession. “I’m afraid that I may have misled you somewhat regarding Anthea Larue the other day, Detective.”
“Uh huh?” Boudreau kept her tone neutral. She leaned forward, elbows on the desktop, using the fingers of her free hand to massage her temples where a headache was threatening to bloom into something would have her chewing aspirin by mid-afternoon. Flynn and her fucking weed. Of course, no one had held her down and forced her to partake of Flynn’s weed. Boudreau considered herself to be a good cop, a fair cop, an honest cop, but sometimes… well, even the best cops needed a little R&R.
“Um, yes, and I’m really sorry,” Reverend Petersen went on, sounding awkward and abashed in a way that Boudreau didn’t doubt was genuine. She wished, however, he’d just get on with telling her now so that she could go hunt down some aspirin.
“That’s fine, Reverend, you’re telling me now,” she said as soothingly as she could.
“Thank you for being understanding, Detective. I told you that Anthea didn’t know anything about Voodoo, but the thing is that I, uh—I found something a few weeks ago. It dropped out of her school backpack when she was leaving the church after Bible class. A Voodoo drawing—what do they call those things?”
“A veve?” Boudreau guessed. She was sitting up now, heart beating a little faster as she scrambled for a pen and paper.
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