Phantom of the French Quarter

by Colleen Thompson

  Another hesitation, then he murmured, “You’ve been talking to Paine?”

  “He called to threaten you if you came anywhere near this city again. Whatever you do, be very careful. He’s a dangerous man once provoked.”

  Marcus’s voice dropped to a low rumble. “So he proved with his gun. But he’s the one who should be scared.”

  She sighed at his male bluster. After everything that had happened to him, surely he must know the kind of danger he was in. “Maybe you should be, too. I heard from the police that someone shot at you again tonight after your ambulance crashed. Did he hit you? Were you hurt in the wreck?”

  “I’ll be fine,” he promised. “What about you, Caitlyn? Are you all right? The police give you any trouble?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle,” she said, her heart squeezing at the thought of what Detective Robinson had told her about Marcus’s brother. Had Marcus known and lied about it, or was she about to shatter his world as he knew it? “I have to see you. We need to talk as soon as possible.”

  “I can’t come there. They’re watching your place.”

  “Who is?” she asked.

  “The cops, I think, or maybe Reuben. There’s someone waiting in a big sedan just down the street.”

  “It has to be the police. Reuben’s in the hospital.”

  “What happened?”

  “I wish I knew,” she answered. “A nurse called to let me know he’s under observation for a concussion and that he’ll call me in the morning.”

  “So you’re alone at the house? With the murderer who’s stalking you still out there?”

  Wincing, she shot back, “Thanks, Marcus. I was just sitting here thinking how sleep is overrated.”

  “Clearly you can’t stay there. But I can’t come to you, so you need to take the truck and lose whoever’s out there. Can you do that? Will you?”

  Reflexively, she shook her head, her stomach flipping at the thought of leaving the safety of this refuge. But was she really safe here? Or, as Marcus had reminded her, was she a sitting duck for the same sick killer who had left two mutilated bodies for her to find, including the one on her front lawn?

  Could he, rather than the police, be the man waiting and watching out front in his car?

  The man waiting for her to switch the lights off before he moved in to finish the deadly game that he had started…

  Chapter Seventeen

  Such a strange place to meet a woman, where strands of moonlight pierced the wispy clouds and restless spirits wandered row after row of the mausoleums housing the dust of their remains.

  Strange and somewhat dangerous, yet tonight Marcus had been drawn to Metairie Cemetery, a place he had so far avoided, though it was one of the most beautiful and storied in New Orleans. He’d steered clear mostly out of fear that if he stopped by her tomb, he would never again be able to photograph the others without the thought of his mother’s grave blotting out their images.

  There it was, just as he remembered. Her name, Eva Dauphin Le Carpentier, inscribed above “Beloved Wife and Mother” and the tragically brief span of her life. She didn’t have the tomb, an oven-style bank crowned by an open book and a laurel wreath, to herself but shared eternity with her parents, grandparents and a few other lost relations.

  She had been the last of them, save for the three children and the hard-drinking husband she had left behind.

  Why? Why did you leave your kids with a drunken father? And what the hell am I supposed to do about our family now?

  In the questions’ wake, guilt rolled in, flooding his conscience with regret. So he turned away, striding among the chorusing insects and toward the back gate where he had promised to meet Caitlyn.

  Though he had seen and heard no one since his arrival, his senses remained attuned to the slightest stirring of the light breeze, the subtlest flickering of the shadows.

  Twelve minutes passed, stretching his anxiety to the breaking point, because Caitlyn should have been there by this time. Had she been arrested attempting to elude the officer outside her house? Or, more frightening still, had she been caught on her way to the detached garage by a murderer lurking nearby, eager for such a golden opportunity?

  And what of the brief but potentially dangerous walk from where she would have to park the truck to this spot? Shifting his position, he struggled to watch from every angle, to keep his vow to see her through this safely.

  He strode past a temple-like tomb, sick with the visions taking shape in his imagination, dark memories of his murdered fiancée, her body bearing Caitlyn’s face. Tasting bile, he ripped the phone out of his pocket, only to feel it fly from his hand.

  Relieved when it landed on grass rather than concrete, he bent to pick it up, then jerked his head toward a sound. A blur of movement caught his eye just beyond the back gate.

  He released the breath he had been holding. “Caitlyn?”

  “Marcus,” she called back. “How do I get in? Oh, I see.”

  Rushing toward her, he helped her push aside the broken fence so she could squeeze inside.

  “I was so damned worried I’d gotten you killed.” He pulled her into a hard, possessive embrace as she wrapped her arms around him. Pain flared in his injured arm, but he shoved it aside. “I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”

  She cupped his face in her hands and looked into it, her eyes only inches from his. “Talk about scaring someone. I thought I’d never see you aga—”

  He covered her mouth with his own, feeding his hunger for a woman he could never get enough of. She murmured in protest before melting against him in surrender to the moment. From deep in her throat, he heard a small moan, a sound that had him aching to give and take every pleasure their bodies had to offer.

  There was an almost-painful urgency in the meeting of their mouths, the slick touch of their tongues against each other, and the way their hands skimmed curve and plane alike, his hard muscle and her velvet softness. But all too soon it ended, with Caitlyn breaking off the kiss and pushing him away to say, “No, we can’t. They’re watching.”

  Reflexively, he whirled around, ready to fight whatever intruder offered either threat or interruption. Then he stopped, embarrassed to remember where they were and who was looking on.

  The dead were all around them. He felt their presence as they watched from behind the bricked-off windows and iron grates of tombs and mausoleums. And he felt, or imagined that he did, the mix of curiosity and disapproval from behind their sightless eyes.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s disrespectful. I just forget myself around you.”

  But Caitlyn was shaking her head, turning to point out a pair of dark silhouettes emerging from behind a tomb, reminding Marcus that the living posed a far greater threat to their survival than the dead.

  CAITLYN TOOK AN INVOLUNTARY STEP BACKWARD as the light of the full moon washed over a pair of haggard, unshaved faces. Already shaky from her struggle to elude the dark car tailing her from her place, she’d barely given a thought to the vagrants that sometimes turned to the dubious shelter of the cemeteries.

  Marcus stepped in front of her as the two gaunt men approached, coming so close she could smell their gamey reek.

  “Got cash on you?” slurred a dark-skinned man with gray hair. “Could use a couple burgers and maybe one more six-pack.”

  “You’ll want to back off,” Marcus warned, his stance squaring and his muscles tensing. “You step away, and we’ll talk.”

  Instead, the younger man, his bald head scabby, moved in closer and craned his skinny neck to look Caitlyn up and down. “Girl’s got herself a purse there. Come and share what you got, sweetie. All you got.”

  At their suggestive laughter, Marcus withdrew a folded bill from his jeans and warned, “I’m giving you two choices. Back off with a twenty and have yourselves a pleasant evening, or hobble off with my shoe leather jammed between your cheeks.”

  What came next happened so fast, Caitlyn barely saw i
t. As the first man stooped to grab the money Marcus let flutter to the ground, the second pulled a blade from somewhere, a movement she recognized only in swift blur of reflected moonlight.

  Marcus moved even faster, spinning sideways in a roundhouse kick that cracked against the attacker’s wrist and sent the knife clattering off a tombstone. With a sharp cry, the man grasped his injured forearm and lumbered back into the shadows. The gray-haired man took off in the opposite direction with the money clutched tightly to his chest.

  “Funny,” said Marcus, grinning, “he doesn’t seem much into sharing with his friend, either.”

  Her relief morphed into anger. “That man—he could have killed us, and you’re enjoying this?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. I don’t like to hurt the homeless, and I was wrong to put us in this situation.”

  “So why did you?” she asked him.

  He sighed. “I’m sorry. I’ve been asking myself the same question. But my mother’s buried here, and as much as it hurts to see her grave, I…I couldn’t bring myself to leave without saying goodbye.”

  The sadness in his voice extinguished her anger like a lit match. She slipped her hand into his. “Did you get the chance to see her?”

  “I did. But I’m afraid she’s fresh out of advice about dealing with my brother.”

  Caitlyn felt of pang of foreboding. Clearly he had no idea his brother was dead. How would it affect him, hearing it on this already hellish night?

  “Let’s go for a ride,” she suggested. “The truck’s not far.”

  He nodded. “We need to get out of here anyway, before we have more company than I can deal with.”

  “Speaking of which,” she said, as she preceded him through the gate, “where’d you learn to fight like that? You looked like Chuck Norris or somebody.”

  He laughed, shaking his head, and squeezed through the gap behind her. “Not quite, but let’s just say a guy living on the lam picks up what he needs to know to keep himself in one piece. To me, the greatest strength is avoiding conflict whenever possible.”

  As they walked toward the parked truck, she tried to memorize his clean scent and the comforting weight of his hand at her waist. Tried to draw whatever comfort she could from being in his presence.

  An instant later the sound of gunfire shattered the illusion, bullets zinging off the pavement and punching through the sheet metal of the truck’s rear panel.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Marcus grabbed for Caitlyn, and she went down beside him with a shriek.

  He dragged her toward the passenger door and wrenched it open, shoving her inside. “Head down!” he shouted, as another gunshot took out the back window.

  Caitlyn crunched her way across the glass-strewn bench seat, then jammed the keys into the ignition as he swung in behind her.

  As the door slammed shut, the Dodge’s big engine roared to life. Their tires squealed as Caitlyn floored the accelerator and pulled away from the curb.

  Marcus looked her over, relieved to see no blood but unable to be certain in the dim light. “You okay? Were you hit?”

  “Not hit,” she said, “but my heart feels like it’s about to explode. Who was shooting? Did you see? One of those homeless guys?”

  Marcus shook his head. “The shots were coming from the street, I think.”

  He looked behind them, through the shattered rear window, his fears confirmed when he spotted a pair of headlights swiftly approaching. He was certain it was the dark sedan that belonged to whoever had been watching the front of Caitlyn’s house.

  Her gaze flicking to the rearview, she obviously drew the same conclusion, because she said, “Oh, no. I thought for sure I’d lost him. I’m so sorry. I must have led him straight here.”

  “We’ll get rid of him,” Marcus told her. “Turn off your headlights and keep going.”

  “It’s dark out here. We’ll crash.”

  “Let me guide you,” he assured her. “I grew up around here. My sister and I used to ride our bikes on these streets.”

  Rimmed with white, her eyes darted toward him. “Did you used to ride them at sixty miles an hour in the pitch dark? With some maniac with a gun behind you?”

  “Calm down,” he said. “Calm down, and we’ll get through this.”

  “Calm down?” she asked, as if he were insane.

  But maybe he was, he decided as he said, “It all boils down to this. Do you trust me, Caitlyn? Will you trust me with our lives?”

  NEARLY AN HOUR LATER, Caitlyn was still shaking, certain that at any moment shots would follow them into Natalie’s apartment, in a partitioned-off old house in a mostly resurrected neighborhood not far outside the Quarter. Marcus had pulled the truck behind the building, wanting to keep it close by in case they had to make a quick escape.

  “No one will find us here,” she repeated for at least the fifth time, more to reassure herself than Marcus, who was sitting on the sofa beside her in a room lit only by the watery glow of a large saltwater aquarium. As the blue and yellow and orange-striped fish swam in lazy circles, his uninjured arm was draped over her for comfort.

  Yet the longer she sat there, nervously watching the closed curtains for unfamiliar shadows and jumping when the air-conditioning kicked on, the more her mind gave way to visions of an armed man kicking in the front door, spraying gunfire over the room where she had so often stopped by to chat with Natalie or play with her daughter, Kylie. As her eyes closed, nightmare images flashed through her mind: the stuffing exploding, from Kylie’s shot-up teddy bear, the aquarium glass shattering with the impact, and Marcus sliding to the floor, a far more terrifying outcome than if she’d been struck herself.

  Gasping, Caitlyn jerked awake, gasping as if she’d run a footrace.

  “It’s okay. Everything’s fine,” Marcus told her. “You only dozed off for a minute, but you’re safe. We really lost him.”

  Her gaze met his, and in his eyes she saw the strain of worry, the weight of the pain he hadn’t mentioned as he watched over her in the dark. But she saw strength, too, strength and courage he was more than willing to allow her to rely on.

  “How ’bout something to drink?” he asked her. “Water? Soda? Maybe your friend has something stronger in the kitchen?”

  She shook her head, trusting him to feel the movement. “No. I need to stay right here, just like this.”

  It felt safe. He felt safe to her, though she knew that beyond this oasis of calm, there were no guarantees for either of them.

  “Then let’s stay a little longer.” Warm and solid, his arm tightened around her. “No one will be looking for us here.”

  She sighed, drawing on his strength for a few more minutes before guilt made her restless. Sitting up, she kept one hand to his chest. “There’s something…something I wanted to tell you—before the shooting started.”

  Beside her, he straightened. “What is it, Caitlyn? Whatever it is, I can take it.”

  Though she’d gone over it a dozen times in her head, she couldn’t think of a gentle way to ease into such a brutal subject. So she said it plainly, as calmly and compassionately as she could manage. “Detective Robinson says your brother’s dead. That he’s been dead for four years.”

  “What? They’re wrong. Like I told you, he’s in a private care facility.” Anger dropped his words to a growl. “Damned cops are using you. Using you to mess with my head.”

  “He was shot by a security guard as he left a condo where somebody triggered a panic alarm.” Touching his arm, she added quietly, “They found the resident, Marcus…a young woman who’d been strangled. And your brother had set fires on his way out, in the bedroom where the body—”

  “He wasn’t shot killing Samantha. He escaped. I saw him after, before I—”

  Caitlyn shook her head. “That’s not who I mean, Marcus. I’m telling you he was shot after murdering a second woman, a short time after you left.”

  “No. That’s bullshit. There was no second woman. We put Theo in a s
afe place. My sister checks in on him twice a month. And heaven knows I’ve paid enough all these years to keep him—”

  “The police in your hometown—they know he killed Samantha, too. After Theo died, they compared the DNA, but somehow the department’s discovery was never entered into the federal database, so when the New Orleans PD looked, they saw you were wanted in connection—”

  “They’re lying.” Anguish roared through his voice. “Making this all up to get me to let my guard down. Theo couldn’t have… He’s in a good place, a safe place where he’ll always be well treated. There’s even a chance that he’ll get better, a new medicine that might help.”

  She wanted nothing more than to drag Marcus into her arms, to comfort him and tell him he was right, and the cops had it all wrong. But she wouldn’t lie to him, not even to ease his pain.

  Instead, she asked a simple question. “When was the last time you spoke to your brother?”

  “We don’t speak anymore. We tried it once on the phone, and he became so agitated that…”

  Beside her on the sofa, Marcus leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Seeing him in such pain, regret spiked through her. Once more she was seized with the desire to take everything back.

  Instead, she asked, “When, Marcus? When did you last hear your brother’s voice?”

  He considered, then shrugged. “Maybe a week or two after…after Samantha. Then Stacey said I shouldn’t call. She said—oh, God, not Stacey. My little sister couldn’t— She would never…”

  “You brought in a backpack from the truck, right?” she asked, relieved that they had grabbed it from where he’d left it behind the seat. “Is your laptop in there?”

  He nodded mutely, his jaws clenched so tightly she half expected to hear the crack of fractured teeth.

  “Let’s double check this, just to be sure. Maybe we can log onto Natalie’s wireless network, if we can figure out the password.”