by Angela Henry
When we got out of the alley, she made me stand by her black Camry while she ran a strange glowing green wand over my clothes. The wand never changed color until she got to my feet, at which point it glowed bright red. I assumed it must have detected the blood on the bottoms of my shoes. I’d never seen a contraption like that before and hoped it had just proved that the lack of blood on my clothes meant I hadn’t ripped that poor bastard to pieces.
“Got any idea what could have happened to that poor guy?” I asked.
“Hard to say until we put all the pieces together,” she replied with a straight face. “Why don’t you tell me what you think happened?”
I couldn’t tell if she was being funny. And there was no way in hell I was going to tell her about my involvement with the recently deceased Mr. DePreist any more than I was going to tell her that I thought a reanimated corpse was her perp. But for some strange reason I couldn’t pinpoint, I had the feeling she already knew.
“Looks like an animal ripped him apart,” I concluded innocently.
“I’ll need your shoes.”
“What? Why?”
“They’re evidence in a police investigation.” She held out her hand, and I slipped out of my black, Italian, leather Oxfords, wondering how mad Minx was going to be when she found out the five-hundred-dollar pair of shoes she’d bought me were in jail.
“When do I get them back?”
“Thank you, Mr. Knight,” she said, taking my shoes. “You’re free to go, but you’ll need to make yourself available for further questioning. Don’t hesitate to give me a call if you remember anything that might be useful.” She handed me a plain, white business card with the name Desiree West in black block letters with a phone number underneath and the raised gold emblem made up of the letters E and A intertwined in the upper left-hand corner.
It wasn’t the symbol for the New Orleans Police Department, FBI, CIA, Federal Marshals, Freemasons, or the Girl Scouts for that matter. And before I could ask her what law enforcement agency she worked for, a nondescript, black van pulled up, blocking the entrance to the alley, and about half a dozen people dressed in white jumpsuits and booties jumped out and started photographing and processing the scene. Desiree West had started to walk toward one of the crime-scene techs when I stopped her.
“I just remembered something important, detective.”
“What is it?” She looked impatient.
“You forgot to give me back my wallet.”
She practically threw it at me.
****
The next morning I scoured the newspapers, TV, Internet, and any other news outlet I thought might be running a story about what had happened to Anton DePreist. Someone found ripped apart in an alley in the French Quarter was surely national news. I couldn’t find a damned thing. Nothing. Zilch. I even called the NOPD and asked for Detective Desiree West, only to be told no one by that name worked there. When I called the number on the card she’d given me, it went straight to an automated voice message telling me that Agent Desiree West was not available and to please leave a message. Agent West? I hung up without leaving a message and went back to the scene of the crime.
When I got back to the alley, there was no crime-scene tape across the entrance, so I went inside and couldn’t find any evidence that anything had happened last night. Every single scrap of poor Anton had been removed, and the alley had been scoured clean. Trash bags had been neatly placed inside the rusted dumpster where I’d found Anton’s arm with the zombie finger clutched in his hand. There were no bloodstains, no fingerprint powder, and no proof that anything that I’d witnessed last night had even happened. Who the hell were those people last night, and more importantly, why was Ava Duval now Desiree West?
I was headed back to the Range Rover when I spotted something across the street that I hadn’t noticed in all the commotion from last night. Wedged between a restaurant boasting the world’s best gumbo and a tiny bookstore was a shop with a black rectangular sign hanging over the door painted in red curlicue lettering that read “Madame LuLu’s House of Voodoo.” This must be the shop owned by Gisele’s landlady. Anyone looking out of the shop’s large picture window should have been able to see right into the alley. I headed across the street and into the shop, almost colliding with a group of tourists, who were on their way out. It only took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the gloom inside and my nostrils to fill with the heavy scent of vanilla incense that made me sneeze.
Like most shops in the Quarter, Madame LuLu’s was narrow but deep, with long counters on either side and a cash register set up in the back. Every available space was filled with merchandise, ranging from plastic and ceramic skulls, candles in every color, voodoo dolls, juju bags, tarot cards, spirit catchers, and wind chimes, as well as the usual cheap tourist crap of T-shirts, postcards, key chains, and mugs. One whole wall behind the counter to my right was devoted to potions, oils, and herbal remedies, while the wall behind the counter to my left was hung with posters and colorful handwoven rugs.
A pretty teenage girl reading a novel with a half-naked woman being embraced by a pirate was manning the cash register. I started to ask her about Madame LuLu when the beaded curtain behind her parted in a rustling of soft clicks, and I saw a round, middle-aged woman emerge from the room behind the cash register. She was wearing a flowing caftan in tones of blue and burnt orange and had a black scarf wrapped around her head turban-style. Long dreads hung from under the turban down her back.
“Madame LuLu?”
“I already know why you come here, boy. The spirits already done told me to be expecting you.” She spoke in a thick Jamaican patois that seemed fake and exaggerated, probably for the tourists who expected it. The girl manning the register looked at me over the top of her book and winked.
I gave Madame LuLu a blank look, and she laughed a deep throaty laugh and shook a finger at me, causing the silver bracelets around her wrist to jangle.
“I can see into your very soul,” she said, smiling and taking my hand. Then she stiffened and quickly let go of my hand like it had burnt her. She took a step back and looked at me like she was truly seeing me for the first time. “Sweet Jesus,” she exclaimed, putting her hands to her mouth. “Are you what I think you are?” The Jamaican accent was gone, replaced by a soft, lilting southern drawl. This woman was no more Jamaican than Minx was hairy.
When the door to the shop opened, announcing the arrival of more customers, Madame LuLu took my hand and led me round the cash register and through the beaded curtain to the back room, which turned out to be larger than I expected, with a seating area at one end with two black leather couches and a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. A round table covered in a lace tablecloth with two chairs occupied the other end. I guessed it must be where she did her readings. She pushed me down into the chair at the round table and sat down opposite me.
“I never thought I’d see the day when another one of you would walk through my door.”
“Exactly what is it you think I am?”
“Don’t play coy with me, boy,” she said, then burst out laughing. “Listen to me. I’m calling you boy, and I bet you’re a whole lot older than me, huh?”
I’d yet to meet anyone except Minx who knew about my former life. She could have been talking about anything; so far as I was concerned, I wasn’t taking the bait. But Madame LuLu wasn’t about to let my silence get the better of her. She jumped out of her seat and came up behind me. Before I could stop her, she had my T-shirt pulled out of my jeans and hiked up to reveal the jagged vertical scars on my back left behind by my wings.
“What’s your problem, lady?” I jerked my shirt back down and stood up to go. I didn’t need to know what, if anything, she’d seen in the alley last night that badly.
“Oh, hush.” She pushed me back down into my seat and sat back down. “Don’t go getting your balls in a sling. You’ve got balls, don’t you?”
“My balls are none of your business. Look, I just came here to
ask if you saw anything strange in the alley across the street last night?”
“Hmm. So you came looking for information about what happened to that skinny white dude, huh?
“You saw something?”
“Honey, I see everything.”
“You see who the skinny white dude was with?”
“You want something from me, you gotta give up the goods.”
We stared at each other, and when she wouldn’t look away, I finally sighed. “Fine. What is it you think you want to know?”
“What did you do to get cast out?”
“Cast out of where?” I asked. She sighed impatiently. If I had to give up the goods, she was going to have to work for it.
“What did you do to get clipped? I’m no fool. I know what you are. Why’d you get your ass kicked out of heaven?”
“I’m way too sober to tell that story.”
She laughed loud and long, making me laugh, too, then she walked over to a mini fridge in the corner, pulled out a bottle of port, grabbed two wineglasses from a rack on the wall, and set one down in front of me.
“Start talking.”
****
By the time the bottle was empty, I leaned with my elbows propped up on the table, and my cheek rested against my hand with the worst headache I can ever remember having. I knew there was a reason why I didn’t drink much. I’d just forgotten it. As for Madame LuLu, she seemed none the worse for wear, and she’d drunk the majority of the bottle. She mostly just listened while I told her my story, making sure to top off my wineglass whenever I showed signs of slowing down. When I was done, she just looked at me thoughtfully and sighed.
“Doesn’t matter if a man is flying through heaven with wings of gold or walking on the ground, you all manage to trip over your dicks.”
“Hey, you were the one who wanted to know, and now that I’ve told you, you owe me. What did you see in the alley last night?”
“Truth be told, I’m not sure what I saw.” She looked confused.
“You saw what happened to that man, right?”
“I saw him being attacked by something that looked like it crawled out of a grave.”
“A zombie?”
“Well, it sure looked dead like a zombie. But it moved like it could still be alive, not all slow and shuffling like zombies move. And there was something else strange about it.”
“What?”
“It seemed aware. You know, like it knew exactly what it was doing, like it could think on its own. Not like some mindless corpse acting on sheer hunger and instinct. It was like it wasn’t alive, but not all the way dead, either.”
“Can you tell me exactly what you did see?”
“I was putting the closed sign in the window when I saw it grab him. He tried to scream, but it yanked his tongue right out of his mouth and dragged him into the alley. That poor man. I hope it was over quick.” She shuddered.
“Did you see it leave?”
“I’m no fool. I turned off all the lights and hid out in this room chanting protection spells ’til morning.”
“So the police didn’t come by here to question you last night or this morning?”
“No one knocked on my door after I closed up last night, and I wouldn’t have answered if they did.”
“That man was on his way to meet me last night. He had some information I needed. Now he’s dead, and his murder is being covered up.” I told her about what happened after I found the unfortunate Mr. DePreist but left out the part about my ex-lover being a different woman. I pulled out the business card Desiree West gave me and slid it across the table. “You ever see that symbol before?”
She picked it up and looked at it, then held it against her forehead and closed her eyes. Her body instantly started to jerk and twitch violently, like she was being electrocuted. Her mouth fell open, and she let out a low moan that quickly turned into a screeching howl. The teenager running the register ran into the room just as I jumped up and pulled the card from her hand. I threw it on the floor, and it burst into flames and then disappeared in a puff of blue smoke. Madame LuLu slumped forward in her seat, and the teen started frantically shaking her.
“Mama! Mama! What’d you do to her, mister?”
“Nothing! I just handed her a business card.”
Madame LuLu groaned and lifted her head.
“Loreen, get me some water,” she said in a hoarse voice. The girl ran to the mini fridge.
“You saw something. What was it?”
Loreen came back and handed her mother a bottle of water with the red and black Madame LuLu’s House of Voodoo label. She drained half of it before she answered, “Couldn’t see a damned thing. It felt like grabbing hold of an electrified fence. Whoever gave you that card put some kind of hellified protection spell on it.”
“Why do that to a business card? This doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does if the person who gave you that card doesn’t want people like me to be able to pick up anything off of it. Any psychic worth her salt should have been able to tell you about the person who gave you that card. But I don’t know anyone who’d be powerful enough or even willing to try and get past a barrier like that. And if I were you, I wouldn’t be messing around with someone capable of that kind of magic.”
“It’s a little too late now. But thanks for your help. I hope I haven’t caused you too much trouble.”
Madame LuLu started to get up to walk me to the door, but I could tell she was still shaky and told her I could find my own way out. I was halfway to the door when she stopped me.
“Here,” she said, and handed me a slip of paper with an address scribbled on it.
“What’s this?”
“The address of someone you need to meet,” she replied cryptically. “Somebody who can help you with all those other questions I can see swirling around in your head.”
“Thanks.” I eyed the paper suspiciously.
“Oh, and you might need this, too.” She tossed me a heavy-duty, red, plastic squeeze bottle she grabbed from the small frig.
“Catsup?” I was confused. “And I don’t get fries to go with it?”
“It’s not catsup, Mr. Smart-ass. It’s for your protection ’cause I see a lot of dark dangerous stuff in your immediate future.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. I took a quick whiff of the closed cap. I knew the scent well. This was the same stuff Gisele used on my pants.
“Just make damned sure you don’t get any on yourself and you get far away from whoever you use it on.”
FIVE
Desi West was having the same nightmare she’d been having for a year. She can’t breathe. She can feel her throat closing. She knows there’s something that can help her if she can only get to it in time. She staggers down a hallway gasping for breath, her vision blurry and her lungs screaming for air. Then she collapses on the floor and everything goes black. A warm glowing light envelops her. She’s in a swirling light tunnel, and she can see the comforting shadows of several people at the end of the tunnel and starts to move toward them. She’s weightless and filled with joy. Before she can take a step forward, a hand grabs her wrist and gently pulls her back. She turns and sees a pair of eyes filled with kindness and hears a voice in her head.
“Come back. It’s not your time.” But she’s reluctant to go back. The pull of the light is too strong. Then the hand begins shaking her.
“Desi. Wake up!”
Desi woke with a start and sat up abruptly, almost bumping heads with Charles Morel, head of the Equinox Agency’s forensics unit. She looked around groggily as she realized she’d fallen asleep on the break-room couch again.
“You were having that nightmare again, weren’t you?”
“So what?” she said irritably. She knew Morel meant well, but he hovered over her like a mother hen and it annoyed her.
Charles Morel had been with the Equinox Agency for almost forty years. He was short and stocky, with fingers like sausages a
nd white hair that stuck up in unruly tufts because he always ran his fingers through it. Desi was surprised he had any hair left. She’d met him five years ago when she was a rookie with the EA, and he’d instantly been protective of her because she reminded him of his late daughter. It was sweet but unnecessary. She could look after herself. She’d been doing it all of her life.
She saw the hurt look on his face and instantly felt bad. “I’m sorry.” She reached out to squeeze his hand. “You know how grouchy I get when I haven’t had any sleep. Wake me up at your own risk.”
“When are you going to let Kale regress you? It’s the only way to get to the bottom of these nightmares of yours.”
“The only thing at the bottom of these nightmares is stress. Just stress. I haven’t had a vacation in months. I just need a week off so I can sleep. Not that I’m going to get it now.” Desi got off the couch and headed for the coffeemaker, feeling so tired she wondered if snorting the coffee grounds would help her perk her up any faster. “You find out anything from those remains from last night?”
“Still running tests. Only thing I know for sure is that we got remains from two different bodies, most of it from a white male. But there was a finger from another vic. Hard to tell if it’s related to the other victim’s death or if it was already there when whatever happened in that alley went down last night.”
“What about Kale—has she been able to pick up anything from the victim’s clothes?”
“Why don’t you ask me yourself, Agent West,” came a voice from the doorway.
Desi looked up and saw Rena Kale, the EA’s lead psychic and resident pain in the ass. Kale had been a burr in Desi’s backside ever since she joined the EA. Desi greatly admired her extrasensory abilities but thought the woman relied too heavily on them. She acted like a one-woman show to the point that her nickname at the EA was Xena and she had little, if any, respect for those, like Desi, who only had five senses to rely on. Though Desi had risen to the coveted position of agent in only five years, two years faster than she had, Rena Kale was constantly making her prove that she belonged in the EA. Desi couldn’t believe Morel actually thought she’d willingly let that woman crawl through her subconscious over some nightmare.