Ray had been home from prison for six months, and he had been working at the House for six months. But in all that time he had spoken to her only once, nothing but cruel words in the parking lot. It was like they didn’t know each other. No, it was worse than that. Men she didn’t know talked to her all the time. It was as if Ray didn’t want to know her, as if he were disgusted by her.
Every night Ray sat next to the downstairs bar, and every night she passed him a dozen times going up and down the stairs. He always looked away. When other men looked at her, it was like they were undressing her, some like they were raping her. When Ray looked at her, it was like he had coughed something up from the back of his throat and needed to spit it out.
She knew he wasn’t normally a cruel person, at least he hadn’t been before he went to prison. When he had first come back, she ran to him, wanting to explain what had happened. She needed to explain about Tony, but he had pushed her away.
“I know you need some time to sort things out,” she had told him, saying she would wait until he got adjusted to being back in the real world, then they could talk, then she could explain. But it never happened. She waited, but they never talked. When she tried, he walked away.
Six o’clock one morning, two months after Ray was released. The Rising Sun had just closed. She waited for him in the parking lot on Decatur, two blocks from the House, determined to have it out with him. She had only seen him once that night. Around midnight he had been standing by the counting room when she walked down from the third floor. He had looked at her, giving her nothing but a hard, hateful stare. She could tell from that stare that he knew she had been upstairs with a customer.
In the parking lot she tried to tell him what had happened after he got sent to prison. She told him how her mother got sick. How the cancer got so bad she had needed a nurse twenty-four hours a day and $2,000 worth of prescription medications a month. Then finally—before the end came—how her mother had spent eight weeks in the hospital. There was no insurance. Did he know how much that kind of medical care cost?
“Did you get a lot of use out of my apartment?” Ray had asked, his blue eyes so cold they made her shiver. “Was that where you and Tony shacked up? Or did you go to his place? Maybe slip into his bed while his wife was out shopping?”
They had ended up screaming at each other. What the hell did he expect? she asked him. Instead of being there for her when she really needed him, he was serving five years in fucking prison. There had been no way to earn the kind of money her mother needed by serving drinks at a French Quarter tourist bar. So she quit and went to work at the House, knowing what that job meant, but also knowing it meant she could take care of her mother.
“She’s dead, so why are you still here?” he had asked.
Looking in the mirror now, Jenny remembered that early morning argument so clearly, so vividly, like it had just happened yesterday instead of four months ago. She had tears in her eyes then, too. Debts, she had told him. Her mom died but her debts lived on. Jenny had made her mother as comfortable as possible, but she was still paying for that comfort.
As they got louder, the parking lot attendant came over. Ray didn’t say anything, just glared at him. The little old man shuffled off.
In the end, Ray had balled up his fist like he was going to hit her, but Ray had never hit her before, and he didn’t hit her that night. Instead he did something worse. “You’re a whore,” he said. Then he got in his car and drove away. They hadn’t spoken since, until tonight, and he had come close to saying the same thing.
Ray stood at the edge of the roof, facing east. The first pink rays of the morning sun were visible coming up over the treetops on Esplanade Avenue. He liked it up here. It made him feel clean. He didn’t know why, didn’t know if it was the crisp morning air, the sunrise, or something else. Whatever it was, he liked it, and because he liked it, he climbed up here almost every morning.
He tapped a Lucky Strike from his nearly empty pack and stuck it between his lips. Then he flicked his beat-up Zippo a couple of times. Damn thing wouldn’t work. He had to flick it half a dozen more times before finally getting a dribble of flame.
The smoke he sucked into his lungs triggered a coughing fit that almost pitched him over the foot-high parapet at the edge of the roof. A lucky grab at one of the guy wires for the satellite dish was all that kept him from doing a four-story nosedive. Fucking smoking. They say it’ll kill you.
Looking down to where he had almost fallen, Ray saw the filthy alley that ran between the House and the building next door. Two bums lay on cardboard pallets beside a Dumpster. He took a deep breath and smelled the stink rising from the alley. It reminded him that the brief feeling of cleanliness he had up here was nothing but an illusion, because even up here, he was still surrounded by shit.
Illusion or not, this brief moment of solitude was something he looked forward to each morning, and in order to enjoy it on this really fucked-up morning, he pushed everything out of his mind—Pete Messina, Tony Zello, Carl Landry, Jenny Porter, the two bums lying on the ground four stories below—and let the crisp air wash over him as the sun peeked over the treetops and painted the clouds crimson. The scene before him brought back a childhood memory, back before his mother died, before his father sank into a bottle. It reminded him of something his dad told him one morning. How did that go . . . mornings red sky . . . No, that wasn’t it. He thought hard for a minute. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Yeah, that was it. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. With the sun halfway above the trees, the sky was bloodred. Rain was coming.
That fucking Jenny. What nerve. Coming up, asking if he was all right. Acting like she was worried about a bump on his head and a black eye. Why would she care about that after she drove a dagger into my heart? Well, fuck her, fuck everybody. He didn’t need her sympathy. He didn’t need her at all. He didn’t need anybody.
Ray took a deep drag on his cigarette as he looked down at the two winos sleeping on their cardboard beds. He flicked his butt over the edge of the roof at them, watching it spin in a lazy arc toward the alley, trailing hot ashes in the air.
He missed, but not by much. The cigarette hit the side of the Dumpster, glanced off, and settled on the ground about four feet from one of the sleeping bums. Looking up at the sky, at the clouds that were forming, Ray thought about the soaking the two derelicts would get when the rain came.
CHAPTER THREE
Jenny dragged into her apartment and closed the door. The clock on the stove read 7:25 AM. Stripping off her waitress uniform, looking at it, thinking of it again, like she did every day, as her slut suit, Jenny left a trail of clothes from the door to the bathroom. She wondered if Ray was angry because she was still in the apartment, his apartment, the one they had lived in together.
It had been his place first, before she moved in with him. Then after he went to prison, she had thought about giving it up but decided to keep it. Why not? French Quarter apartments weren’t easy to find, and it was within walking distance of the bar where she had worked at the time. It was even closer to the Rising Sun, so when she had gone to work at the House it made even more sense to keep the apartment.
She spun the taps on in the tub, making the water as hot as she could stand it before flipping the lever that turned on the showerhead. She eased one foot at a time over the side of the tub and slipped under the blast of water, pulling the shower curtain closed behind her. Inside it was safe and warm, and she felt like she was shutting out the whole damn world.
Every morning after she left the House, the first thing Jenny did when she got home was take a shower, always staying under the hot water for as long as it lasted.
For a full ten minutes Jenny leaned forward, palms pressed against the wall below the showerhead, her head hanging under the water as it cascaded through her hair, leaving it draped in thick strands along both sides of her face. Then she tilted forward a bit more and let the stream blast the back of her neck, rolling it first in la
rge clockwise circles, then circling it to the left as she tried to work out the knots.
Only after the water had washed away some of the tension did Jenny start scrubbing. Using a long-handled wooden brush with stiff bristles, she raked her back, her shoulders, and her arms. Then she sat down under the steady stream and did the same with her legs and feet. She scrubbed until her skin felt raw, but even then she still didn’t feel clean. As Jenny stood up, she let the last of the warm liquid wash over her like rain and imagined it rinsing away all the filth.
When the water turned cool, she shut it off. Sliding the shower curtain aside, she stepped out of the tub and pulled a thick towel down from a wide shelf. As she dried herself, she thought about Ray.
After their encounter this morning, she had seen him again, just past six o’clock, right after the cops finally cleared out. She had been up on the second floor, trying to get away from everyone downstairs, when she saw Ray slipping out the emergency exit. She had seen him leaving through that door before and knew he was going to climb the outside fire escape to the roof. This time she thought about going after him, about trying to talk to him again, but she didn’t. There was no use in it. Too much had passed between them to ever go back to the way it was.
A few minutes after Jenny spotted Ray climbing to the roof, on his way to do whatever the hell he did up there every morning, she saw Tony Zello practically skipping down the stairwell. She figured he was coming from Vinnie Messina’s apartment on the fourth floor. Judging by the big, shit-eating grin on Tony’s face, she also figured he had been successful in convincing his boss that the robbery wasn’t his fault.
Tony slowed when he saw Jenny leaning against the bar. He stepped out of the stairwell and strolled toward her. “Shane really fucked up this time.”
Jenny kept her back against the bar and tried hard to look unconcerned. “How’s that?”
“Are you kidding me?” Tony threw an elbow over the bar, dangerously close to Jenny’s shoulders. It bugged her, but she didn’t move. He did stuff like that all the time. Because they used to sleep together, he seemed to think she didn’t have a right to personal space anymore, that he could walk up and violate it anytime he wanted.
“We did that asshole a favor,” Tony said. “We gave him a job and put him in charge of security. Then he let four guys come in and knock us off.”
“Four guys with guns, Tony.”
“Twenty years we been in business here, and you know how many times we been robbed?”
She didn’t know but had a feeling she was going to find out. Tony held up his hand and made a circle with his fingers and thumb. “Zero. That’s how many.”
Jenny stood up straight as she felt her anger rising. “What was he supposed to do?”
“What we pay him for.” Tony stood up straight. “If he had any balls, he would’ve stopped those cocksuckers.”
“Stop them with what, a mean look?”
Tony turned toward her and shrugged. “When Old Man Carlos calls me, I’m gonna tell him straight out, Shane blew it.”
She knew Tony was talking shit, still trying to impress her with what a big man he was. “Why would Carlos call you?”
“Business. The Old Man calls me just about every day.”
She pointed to the stairs. “Weren’t you just up on the fourth floor making sure Vinnie didn’t think it was your fault?”
Tony’s eyes narrowed. “Nobody cares what Vinnie thinks. Carlos is the boss. Only reason he lets Vinnie run this place is because they’re brothers, and it keeps Vinnie from fucking up anything else.”
“Can I quote you on that?”
“He’s like the Queen of fucking England.”
“Are you calling Vinnie a queen?”
Tony snorted and shook his head. “What’s she really do? The Queen of England, I mean. She don’t do nothing. She’s a figurehead, just like Vinnie.” He tapped a finger against his chest. “I run the House.”
“That’s going to be a surprise to Vinnie. Finding out that you think he’s an English homosexual, and that he works for you.”
Tony jabbed his finger in her face. “You keep your mouth shut, or you’ll end up on the street, selling your pussy on Tulane Avenue like any other crack whore.” Then he reached down and scooped her crotch.
Jenny knocked his arm away. “Keep your hands off me.”
Tony stepped even closer. “That’s not what you used to tell me.” He dropped his voice into what she knew he thought of as a smooth, sexy baritone. “How about you go home and get cleaned up, and later on I could drop by.”
Jenny looked Tony straight in the eyes. “You want to screw somebody, why don’t you go home and screw your wife?” She turned away from him and walked toward the stairs.
Because Jenny had known Tony for years, she knew how his devious little mind worked. As a class-A brownnoser, he wasn’t going to let any of the shit from the robbery fall on him. He would suck up to Vinnie, then go behind Vinnie’s back to his brother Carlos and bad-mouth Vinnie, subtly but effectively. It was a dangerous game playing the two brothers against each other, but if anyone was weasel enough to pull it off, it was Tony Z.
As Jenny finished drying off, she wrapped the towel around her head and stepped to the vanity. The naked reflection staring back at her from the mirror above the sink made her want to cry. On the outside she looked basically the same as before Ray went to prison: five foot seven, with a slender waist and soft curves. She had the kind of body men wanted—and would pay well for—but she could see past the roundness of her hips and the swell of her breasts, she could see the hollowness inside, she could see the degradation she had wrought on her soul.
Jenny shook her towel-wrapped head, forcing the self-pitying thoughts from it, and turned her focus back toward Ray. Since replaying her conversation with Tony in her mind, she knew she should warn Ray that Tony was blaming him for the robbery. If Ray was going to defend himself, he needed to know what was going on. But would the stubborn Irish son of a bitch listen? And even if he did listen, and understood the danger, would he do anything about it? Since coming home from prison, Ray didn’t seem to care about anything anymore, especially himself.
Jenny unwound the towel from her head and dried her hair. When she finished, she tossed the towel onto the vanity and stepped into a pair of pink panties. Then she slipped on an extra-large man’s T-shirt. The gray shirt had a dark blue star-and-crescent, the symbol of the New Orleans Police Department, silk-screened onto the left breast.
In the bedroom, she sat on the bed and stared at the telephone on the nightstand. Only then did she realize she didn’t even know how to get in touch with Ray. Someone had told her he was living out by the marina, in one of those boathouse apartments, but she didn’t know his telephone number, or even if he had a telephone. It would be just like him not to have a phone. He wasn’t exactly a people person.
She called the House just for the hell of it and was surprised when someone answered. It was one of the bartenders, stuck there waiting for a delivery. After a few minutes he managed to find Ray’s cell number. She wrote it down on a notepad beside her telephone. She hung up and looked at her alarm clock. It was 8:15. Her eyes shifted from the clock to the notepad. Then to the cordless phone in her hand. Then back to the clock.
It was too early to call Ray. He was probably just getting to bed. She needed sleep, too. Noon, she decided. She would wake up and call him at noon. It wasn’t that urgent. Tony had probably been talking just to hear his own voice.
When Jenny woke up, the first thought she had was that last night had been a bad dream. Just another nightmare. Then she remembered. Everything had been real. Gunmen had taken down the Rising Sun. One of them had bashed Ray in the head and nearly put a bullet in his skull. Tony had knocked Ray around. Then a cop had knocked Ray around. And Tony was blaming everything on Ray.
Jenny sat up. She had to call him. The glowing green numbers on the clock showed 12:05 PM. She picked up the telephone, glanced at the scratch
pad on the nightstand, then dialed Ray’s number.
The shrill ring of his cell phone jerked Ray out of a nightmare. He had been tied up, hanging from the ceiling in a meat locker, a couple of goons about to go to work on him with carving knives. He had no idea why it was happening or what he had done to piss them off. The goons wouldn’t say. They couldn’t say. Neither had a face, just blank skin pulled over bone.
For a few seconds after the first ring, Ray was caught in that gray area between sleep and wakefulness, but was still conscious enough to realize he was home in bed and not hanging from the ceiling of a meat locker. He was glad for that.
The cell phone shrieked again. Ray looked for it. He couldn’t find it. Then it screamed again. He spotted it on the overturned beer crate he used for a bedside table. He fumbled for it and knocked it on the floor just as it rang again.
Finally, he got the phone in his hand. For a moment he was disoriented, not sure how to answer it. He didn’t get many calls. The only reason he even had a phone was so he could order pizza.
The phone rang again.
Ray punched the green send button. He jammed the phone against his ear. “Yeah?”
Nothing.
He was about to hang up when Jenny Porter’s voice said, “Ray?”
Ray’s head was pounding. “What do you want?”
“How are you feeling?”
“I was asleep until you called.” He didn’t tell her about the dream, about how he was glad the phone had woken him up.
“I thought you’d be awake by now.”
He looked at his watch. It was just past noon. “I am now.”
Several seconds of silence. Then Jenny said, “When did you get in?”
He eased his throbbing head back onto the pillow and closed his eyes. “Ten o’clock.”
“Why so late?”
Ray rested his free hand on his forehead. The pounding was so loud he thought Jenny could hear it through the phone. “Why do you think?”
House of the Rising Sun Page 3