The Incident Under the Overpass

by Anne McClane

  Lacey remembered reading somewhere that Catherine Bourgeois, a.k.a. Cat Ballou, had gone to NOCCA, probably around the same time he had.

  “Preposterous?”

  “Yes. Preposterous.” Lacey was having fun. Her caution was slipping.

  “Good word. But what about you?” Nathan asked. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a fan of LeViticum-style music.”

  “You don’t know me that well,” Lacey replied, and left it at that. “Do you talk often?”

  “Who?”

  “You and Cat.”

  “No,” Nathan said. He looked thoughtful. “Very rarely. Although I did get to see her before her show tonight. It was nice. There’s a shorthand you get to use with people you were close with.”

  “How short a shorthand?” It sounded a lot more seductive than Lacey had intended.

  Nathan looked at her, not understanding at first. “What? Oh! No. That’s barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Really? Old girlfriend, your wife out of town?” Lacey asked, a tinge of resentment in her tone.

  “No, no, no.” Nathan went on the defensive. “She just got married. Met the guy briefly, he seems all right. They have a couple of kids together already; we talked a little about them.”

  Lacey tried to display the appropriate amount of interest, but was exceedingly distracted. Hearing Nathan talk about a long-ago girlfriend, she imagined him younger and less buttoned-down.

  “You know what she said to me?” Nathan asked.

  She shook her head and tried to shake off whatever it was she was feeling.

  “Cat said she could tell something was ‘massively different’ about me. Different in a good way. Like I was coming back to the person she’d always expected I would grow up to be when we were young.”

  “She didn’t expect you to be the way you are now?” Lacey asked.

  “Whoever does?” he answered. “I’m not quite sure I followed what she meant, but on a really deep, gut level, I think I do.”

  The distance between them had become nonexistent. It was hard to hear anything—the house music was rising in volume the closer it got to showtime—but Lacey heard Nathan loud and clear. The heat between them was now palpable. Lacey grabbed the back of her neck, attempting to dissipate the blood flow.

  Nathan stared at the curve of Lacey’s arm. He took a step back, as much as the crowd would allow, and turned his attention toward the floor.

  “I’m going to get a drink,” he said. “Can I get you anything?”

  It took Lacey several seconds to respond. “No,” she said. “I’m good.”

  Nathan nodded, distracted, and turned toward the bar. He turned back almost as quickly, an unreadable expression on his face. He moved in toward Lacey, grabbed her elbow to anchor himself, and put his lips an inch from her ear. The back of his hand touched her breast.

  “Don’t forget I’ve seen you naked,” he said.

  He let her go as quickly as he’d grabbed her, flashed a full-on bedroom smile, and turned his back to her.

  26

  Lacey watched Dave Guidry at the back of the darkened stage. He had escaped the attention of any fans, dressed all in black with a ball cap shading his eyes. He was making adjustments to the drum set. She wondered if Dave even had any fans, and if so, if they would be upset that they were missing this nonperformance sighting.

  She had just regained her breath after the near-miss kiss, or whatever it was that had passed between her and Nathan. She was glad to have the distance from him, but it did seem like he had been gone an extraordinarily long time just to get a drink.

  Trying to appear nonchalant, she turned her head toward the bar. She found Nathan, or rather his back. They were now separated by ten feet and at least twenty people. Nathan appeared to be talking to someone, someone big, who looked more out of place at the Uptown, college-crowd venue than he did. She saw a full head of dark hair, slick with gel, shaved above the ear, and a white T-shirt sleeve tight on a bulging biceps.

  They moved away from the bar together. Lacey thought absently that if they both left the bar, equilibrium might be restored at the Publiq House. But then Nathan turned his head.

  He didn’t see her, but in a split second, Lacey saw the panic in his eyes. The back of her neck felt tingly.

  Pay attention. The words echoed in her brain, propelling her forward as she followed Nathan and the stranger through the crowd. She had no idea what she would do if she caught up to them. She realized that was an unlikely outcome, anyway, when they reached the doorway and she was still ten feet away and surrounded by a sea of people.

  Lacey felt like she was drowning when a hand grabbed her shoulder from behind. She whipped her head around, angry at being stopped.

  “Let go of me!” she said. Her anger dissipated when she saw that it was Helga.

  “Lacey, what’s going on?” Helga asked. Her tone was soothing and even.

  “I think my friend, someone I know, is in some kind of trouble,” she said.

  Helga kept her hand on Lacey’s shoulder. “Show me,” she said.

  Lacey pointed to the door, and Helga instantly moved to point position. “What does your friend look like?” she asked, voice raised.

  Lacey was embarrassed to describe him, and was glad Helga couldn’t see her face. “Uh, he’s probably six foot or a little over, big, but fit. He’s wearing khaki shorts with a belt, and a solid, dark-colored T-shirt, maybe black. Dirty blond-brownish hair.”

  With Helga leading the way, they sliced the crowd and covered the distance to the door in seconds.

  Far down the street, Lacey saw a white T-shirt and a black T-shirt. The men wearing them were standing beside an ancient-looking sedan, a Lincoln or Cadillac.

  “That’s him!” she said.

  Nathan was slumped. White T-shirt, hand on Nathan’s bent head, pushed him through the car door.

  “Stay here,” Helga said. She looked Lacey directly in the eye when she said it, and Lacey knew it was a non-negotiable command.

  Helga moved rapidly down the street, not walking and not quite running. It was almost like she was levitating. The sedan started a slow roll toward her.

  A gun appeared in Helga’s hand, and she nailed both front tires and the driver’s side rear with three quick shots, just as the car was attempting to pick up speed. She shouted for Lacey to stand clear as it passed in front of her.

  Lacey would later find out that Helga kept her gun in an ankle holster, but at the time she produced it, it appeared to have popped up straight from the ground.

  An explosion of sound erupted from inside the Publiq House. The whining guitars of LeViticum’s heavy metal cover of “Time Passages.”

  The car bumped and scraped to a stop just five yards past where Lacey stood. A scrawny, unkempt man drove the car. He looked like a cornered animal. White T-shirt was in the passenger seat, and looked very angry. Nathan was in the backseat, passed out.

  Helga used her magical moving powers again—one moment she was forty yards away, shooting out tires, the next she was standing by the passenger door of the car, about to get charged by White T-shirt.

  The cornered animal attempted to pull a semiconscious Nathan from the backseat. The last thing Lacey remembered hearing from her brother’s set was Trevor’s lead vocals.

  He sounds really good, she thought as she ran to the car. The sound from the Publiq House faded over the short distance.

  Lacey heard the man with his hands on Nathan speaking as she approached. Either to himself or Nathan, she wasn’t sure. His sinewy limbs looked a lot more powerful close up. He gave off the stink of an animal too. Lacey thought of a weasel.

  “Fuck it all,” the Weasel said, “I wasn’t supposed to do any heavy lifting with this job. Fuck it all.”

  He was too focused on Nathan to see Lacey. She saw Nathan’s leg rise and kick the Weasel in the groin, and then Nathan’s arms were forward, like a zombie, going for his neck.

  The Weasel let out a high-pitched howl and bolted
from the car. The edge of the car door caught Lacey above her eye as he fled out of sight.

  “Oh, fuck!” Her response to the pain was involuntary. She held her hand over her eye and looked in on Nathan.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him. The question felt remarkably innocuous.

  “Yeah,” he replied. He rubbed his head and sounded like he’d just woken up.

  “You’re bleeding,” he said when he looked at Lacey.

  She felt something dripping in her eye. She’d thought it was sweat. “Yeah, maybe.” She pressed her sleeve to her forehead. “Come on, we need to get you out of there.”

  Nathan scooted out of the car, and Lacey peered over the vehicle’s roof, looking for Helga. She saw two figures brawling in an alley between two old storefronts.

  “Where did he go?” Nathan asked.

  “Who?”

  “That guy, the driver,” he said.

  “I don’t know. He scampered away pretty quickly.”

  “He was one of the guys from the first time,” Nathan said, looking first at Lacey, then searching the horizon. “The one who wouldn’t shut up.”

  “I don’t know,” Lacey repeated. “But the other guy is still here.”

  She walked toward the alley. A capricious street lamp flickered on and off, illuminating the tight space like a slow strobe. Lacey heard a single shot ring out. It was like the sound from Helga’s gun before, but with more echo.

  For the second time that night, Lacey found herself at a full sprint, this time toward the sound of that shot. She heard another one, the light flicked on, and she saw a figure falling backward. Dread torqued her entire body as she feared the fallen might be Helga.

  The light flicked off. Lacey willed her eyes to stay open and blood free as she searched the darkness. After an interminable interval, the light came on again. Helga was on her back, but with her head raised and gun still poised. It was the man in the white T-shirt who lay in front of Lacey, a single bullet hole centered precisely between his eyes.

  “Idiot,” Helga said as she put down the gun and clutched her leg. “He shouldn’t have come after me.”

  Lacey looked down at the dead man. She gingerly stepped over the body and felt a fleeting flash of danger, noticing another gun next to the lifeless hand. She felt like she was crossing the border between two warring nations—two places where the rules were diametrically opposed, and you crossed between at your own peril.

  Once clear, she rushed to Helga. A pool of blood was rapidly growing beneath her. She looked quickly at the dead body, and saw it wasn’t coming from him.

  “Amy, you’re hurt!” Lacey said as she knelt beside her.

  “Just grazed, I think,” Helga replied. She sounded like she was sleeping.

  Lacey put her hands over Helga’s leg. Helga let her hand slip and lay her head down, and Lacey could feel the pulse of the blood as it poured from the wound. There was a hole in Helga’s black pants, and Lacey hooked in two fingers and ripped away a sizeable section to get a better look. A palm-sized hunk of flesh appeared to be missing from her thigh.

  Lacey’s stomach jumped into her throat, her head went light, and she was overcome by a profound sadness. She could feel the life ebbing away from Helga’s body, and some part of her was trying to remember how much blood loss a person could sustain and still stay alive. And what was it that ran through the leg? The femoral artery? If these things were things she even knew.

  Lacey’s hands began to tingle, a heat radiating up her arms. She kept her hands on Helga.

  “That feels nice,” Helga said.

  Lacey became unbearably hot. Fire was coursing through her veins, her lymph nodes, her neurons. It wasn’t painful. It was…engaging.

  There was no pain, only heat. Her clothes were an impediment. She remembered what had happened on the riverboat, the smoking blouse. Always keeping contact with the wound, she started to rip away her clothes. With one hand, she pulled off her blouse. Her bra, a yoke, needed to go. Off it came.

  She stood. She had already wriggled out of her sandals. Keeping a bare foot on the wound, off came her skirt, and her underwear. Everything must go.

  Now fully naked and blood-smeared, she crouched at Helga’s side, both hands on the wound. Heat radiated from her, and she glowed like the afternoon sun on the walls of a sandstone church. Helga’s blood flow eased, the size of the wound shrunk. Lacey felt nothing but a slight spark at the center of her brain. Like a thought trying to form.

  Both Lacey and Helga were out of their heads and didn’t realize they were being watched. Nathan stood against the alley wall, his eyes fixed on Lacey.

  He hadn’t understood, until that moment, that the light radiated from her. He remembered the light from that night under the overpass, but had been barely conscious when Lacey had worked on him. In the weeks that had passed, he had convinced himself that the light must have been an illusion, a fevered vision brought on by his damaged condition. No, the light was her. He stood, mesmerized.

  Lacey felt something like a small stone atop Helga’s leg. It was hot and it burned her palm. She brushed it off with a quick, mindless, gesture—like she was shooing a fly.

  A thought finally took shape in Lacey’s head. She thought she must have hallucinated the size of the injury, or been in shock after her first sight of the wound. She looked down at Helga’s leg, and one hand easily covered the damage. Only a trickle of blood oozed from it. Old scar tissue covered a large area above it. Knowing Helga’s occupation, she figured it was from some other injury sustained in the line of duty.

  “Lacey, what are you doing?” Helga’s voice was low, but more alert than before. “Where are your clothes?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. She was overwhelmed by déjà vu. That sense of waking from a wonderful dream. A sense of completeness.

  Her déjà vu slipped away as she looked down at her naked body, felt a hand on her shoulder, and looked up to see Nathan Quirk’s face.

  “Why does this keep happening?” she said to him with a look of utter resignation.

  Nathan experienced his own rush of déjà vu. “C’mon, let’s get you dressed,” he managed to say, his voice raspy and barely above a whisper.

  Lacey let Nathan assist her, too drained to feel any sense of modesty.

  Helga struggled to get to her feet.

  “Wait,” Lacey said. “You shouldn’t—”

  Her words were cut off by the shrill of a siren. Nathan moved to help Helga stand. Something by Helga’s foot caught Lacey’s eye. The small stone that had burned her palm. It was a spent bullet. Lacey picked it up—it was still warm to the touch—and stuffed it in her pocket.

  In less than a minute, the alley was filled with strobing red and blue lights.

  27

  “You should go to the hospital,” Lacey said to Helga.

  Lacey looked at Nathan. “You too. You probably have a concussion.”

  They were sitting in Jimmy’s tour bus, under the watchful eye of an impossibly fit uniformed NOPD officer. Lacey wanted to ask her how much longer they would have to wait for the homicide detective, but it had taken a major feat of diplomacy just to get to the bus. She didn’t want to press her luck.

  Helga was resting on one of the recliners, a towel underneath her leg, and sipping a protein drink.

  Lacey and Nathan were beside each other on the sofa. She wanted more distance from him, but both her energy and her resolve failed her.

  “If this takes much longer…” Lacey began to say. “I’m really concerned about your leg.”

  “Lacey, stop,” Helga replied. “I will get myself checked out as soon as we’re done here. Quit nagging.”

  Nathan nodded at Lacey.

  She blew a breath out of pursed lips and folded her arms over her chest.

  She felt her phone vibrate in her skirt pocket. A text from Angele: Show’s letting out. Where the fuck are you?

  Lacey looked at the policewoman, who was staring through the windshield of the bu
s. Confident she wasn’t being watched, Lacey typed, very discreetly, More fugue business. Stay clear of the bus. Will call you later.

  Nathan, eyes closed, put his hands on his knees like he was ready to stand up. But he stayed seated, opened his eyes, and said, “I haven’t thanked you yet. Either of you.”

  “That’s two you owe me, junior,” Lacey said, smiling. Nathan didn’t seem to get the reference.

  “But,” she continued, “you really owe our friend here.”

  Lacey swept her hand toward Helga. “Amy” didn’t sound right, and she didn’t want to perpetuate the nickname, so she settled for calling her nothing. “If she hadn’t stopped the car,” Lacey said, “I’m not sure…” She didn’t follow through on the thought.

  Nathan looked at Helga. “Thank you,” he said. He sounded earnest.

  “You’re welcome,” Helga answered. An almost imperceptible smile turned up one side of her mouth as she closed her eyes and fell silent.

  Lacey opened her eyes when she heard the bus door open. She wasn’t sure how long she had been asleep. Helga was standing at the front of the bus, talking to someone.

  Helga, fatigued in both her face and her gait, approached Lacey.

  “Is the detective here?” Lacey asked.

  “No,” Helga said, returning to the recliner. “It’s Jimmy.”

  Lacey shot up from the sofa. Nathan looked up at her.

  “NOPD won’t let him in,” Helga said. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Will they let me go out?” Lacey asked.

  Helga nodded and closed her eyes again.

  “Okay, good,” Lacey said. She avoided Nathan’s gaze as she moved to the front of the bus. She glanced at the police officer. She returned a disinterested stare.

  Jimmy looked like a bored teenager waiting for school to let out. Trevor was standing with him. He smiled sweetly at Lacey as she came down the steps.

  Everything bottled up inside Lacey began to uncork at the sight of her big brother. Still bloodstained and looking the worse for wear, Lacey felt tears stream down her cheeks.