“Ready?” Nico shouted again and the men standing behind the kneelers lifted their blades, showing that they were in fact in position and ready. No doubt the men kneeling expected a bullet between the eyes. A quick executioner death given the positions in which they were forced. But Nico had a flair for the dramatic. And he wanted his message to the agencies that would hunt them to be very clear.
If this move didn’t rid him of his enemies, and convert the rest to allies, he wasn’t sure what would.
“Ninety seconds.”
The man removed the lens cap from the machine and adjusted it. Once satisfied with the camera’s setup, he plugged a small microphone into the side of the machine before passing it over to Nico.
“More light, please!” he called up to the rafters. And until that moment, Nico had forgotten about the men up there, working the spotlights that set their little stage.
Bright light filtered down on the kneeling men. It looked like a Broadway play ready to begin.
“Very good,” the cameraman said. He adjusted the lens one more time. “Sixty seconds.”
He pulled the cigar from his mouth, and wiping its burning end across the bottom of his boot, left a smear of gray ash in its tread. He tucked the fat roll behind his large ear and leaned down into the camera.
Waiting.
Nico tried to still the hammering of his heart. Nico struggled to tell the difference between fear and excitement, but he suspected this one was the latter. He needed only make sure it was not mistaken in his voice.
“Ten, nine, eight, seven…”
The cameraman held up his hand, showing all five fingers. Then four, then three…
The men at the corners of the room froze.
Then the cameraman was holding up only a fist, which he lowered, and Nico understood it was now his time to speak into the microphone poised before his dry lips.
“For years, the Americans have waged war against us. They call it the War on Drugs. But we know better. This is the war on poverty. The war against those who dare to rise above their circumstances. Those who want to feed their families, warm their homes, send their children to good schools. The system abandoned them, so they created a new system—and were punished for it. You blame drugs for destroying families, destroying lives. But it is your own greed. Your own unwillingness to invest in the people around you…That is what is destroying the world.”
Nico wet his lips, took a breath. He motioned for the men to remove the black sacks from the kneeling man’s heads.
“You send your dogs after us. But we are not afraid.”
Nico waved his hand, the signal. And eight pale throats were stretched like sheets before the knives slid across them. A red mouth split open on each, blood bubbling up and over. The men squawked like chickens in the hen house.
“We will tolerate your tyranny no longer.” Nico put his mouth close to the microphone. He spoke in the clearest English he could, enunciating each word carefully. “I am Paolo Konstantine. You will hear from me again, very soon.”
16
King sat on the balcony overlooking Royal Street. The ferns lining his patio waved in a gentle breeze. The sweat on the back of his neck chilled and offered some relief from the heat of the day. A trash truck beeped as it backed up toward the alley to seize a dumpster there.
He’d tried working inside, preferring the air conditioning and overhead fans to the mugginess of the day. But the walls wouldn’t let up. The heat spiked. It was like trying to breathe with a blanket over his face. Opening the balcony doors to let in the breeze hadn’t been enough to loosen the crushing hold the walls had on his heart yet. He understood it wasn’t really the heat of the day wearing him down.
Every time he thought of Lucy, of the scare they’d had the morning before, it felt as if a fist squeezed his heart. He’d managed to linger in the hospital for hours, a parade of nurses and four different doctors, six trips from the room to perform this or that test. All of it had yielded only a “stable” condition.
The doctor told him vaguely about spiking compounds in the blood and stresses to her heart. Nothing which really meant anything to King except, of course, the three things he already knew.
One: Lucy was dying.
Two: They were running out of time.
Three: There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
He carried this heavy reality with him as he moved his workspace out onto the balcony. The sunlight, the people, the elevation, and open space, all of it helped. A little.
At least he’d salvaged most of the afternoon. He’d removed six more marks against Lou from the databases he’d swept. Three that were her handiwork without question, known drug mules plucked from a park in New York, a subway stop in Boston, and outside a corner store in Detroit. And three that might have been Lou. He worried he was abusing his privilege. Was keeping his friend’s daughter safe—Lucy’s niece—away from the public eye really enough reason to destroy evidence? It wasn’t evidence of a crime exactly. A couple keystrokes here and a video deleted there. Any threads that could lead back to her if someone decided to start digging.
And what if someone caught on to what he was doing? The dummy IP addresses he used to crack the system would defer suspicion only to a certain extent. If anyone was remotely as skilled as he was—and he wasn’t even top shelf talent—they could find him easy enough. Then what?
You know what, he thought. Lou would put a bullet in the unfortunate soul and call it a day.
Sneakers on his kitchen floor caught his ear.
“Okay,” Piper called out. She walked out onto the balcony with a glass pitcher of Mel’s sweet tea in her right fist and two glasses stacked on one another in the other. “Two glasses of sweet tea as requested.”
She put the pitcher on the outdoor table and flipped the glasses over. She poured them each a tall glass, making sure one of the lemon wedges slopped out into King’s glass.
“Thanks, kid,” he said, squinting at her through the sunshine.
“It’s the least I could do. Thanks for covering for me earlier.” Piper gave him a sheepish grin. “Mel would’ve killed me.”
King had opened the storeroom, looking for the register tape Mel had asked for and had come upon Piper in the passionate embrace of another girl. This one had a high, sideways ponytail of black curls spilling down over one shoulder.
The girl was ready to laugh. King saw the embarrassed grin and barely repressed giggles threatening to erupt from her. Piper must’ve seen it too, because she’d clamped one hand over the girl’s mouth. King could only stare at Piper’s ruddy red nose and swollen lips for a moment, before reaching over and plucking a white roll of register tape off the storeroom shelf.
He’d closed the door without saying a word, replacing the tape while Mel continued giving her tarot reading behind the velvet curtain, none the wiser.
“I doubt she would’ve killed you,” King said, taking a deep drink of the tea. Ice clinked against his front teeth until he pulled his upper lip down to shield them. “A lecture maybe.”
“She hates it when I use the stockroom as a make-out closet.”
King barked a laugh. “I didn’t realize this was a common occurrence.”
“Only if there’s no one in the store.” Piper gave another sheepish grin.
“Mel will appreciate that you put the customers first.” He balanced the cool glass against his knee.
Piper didn’t seem to hear. At least, she’d already turned to her laptop in front of her, a large archaic machine that probably cost her no more than a couple hundred bucks from a local pawn shop. The laptop’s fan sounded as if it were about to take off, simply lift the laptop off the table and fly it away over the Quarter’s streets.
“So what am I looking up first?” Piper asked.
King had been covering Mel’s expenses by giving Piper grunt work through the summer and into the fall. Most of it was reading news stories for suspicious activity. Anything on the drug trade or border control.
Politicians suspected of any connections. Missing persons. But that was before he realized he could crack the DEA’s and FBI’s private servers.
Piper took a deep drink of her tea, crunching ice between her teeth. “Come on. What has our girl gotten into lately?”
King snorted. Our girl.
“I want you to find out who carries mermaid wedding dresses in town. Probably a size six or eight. He pulled the magazine that Lucy had flipped through from his bag at his feet and handed it over to Piper, opening it up to the dog-eared page.
“You’re going to marry her!” Piper exclaimed, taking the magazine. It fell open across the keyboard of her laptop, right to the earmarked dress page.
“If she’ll have me,” King said.
Piper’s face screwed up. “You’re going to marry, Lou?”
“No!” King shouted, perhaps too forcefully. “I’m talking about Lucy.”
Piper put a hand over her heart, her silver rings catching the sunlight. Prismatic light danced on the tabletop. “Whew. My goddess. Okay. Right.”
King wasn’t sure how to take this. Did Piper think he was too old for Lou? He would’ve agreed with her there. But any other disqualification would’ve hurt.
“Would you be sad if Lou got married?” King asked, teasing her.
“Uh, yeah. You know she’s my dream girl.”
“You seemed to be doing just fine in the storeroom earlier.”
“Vanessa? Oh, we’re friends.”
King snorted, the sound of it echoing in his tea glass. “I’d hate to see how you treat your enemies.”
King wouldn’t ask the wildly inappropriate question how many women have you slept with Piper? He tried to do the math in his head. How many women had he seen around the shop this year alone? A dozen at least, since January. And he’d seen her in Jackson Square a few times, kissing one girl or another in passing as he left Café du Monde with his sack of beignets and coffee.
Had she really slept with them all?
“You have a lot of friends,” King said, cautiously, as Piper continued to clack away at the keyboard, scribbling names of dress shops in town on the top of the yellow legal pad he’d given her. The black ink pressed hard into the page.
Piper shrugged. “I’m good company.”
That could mean a hundred things, he supposed. And he had seen a core group of the girls over and over again. Return customers were usually pleased customers.
Customers.
“Do they pay you?” he asked.
Piper’s mouth fell open. “Hey! Just because I’m capitalizing on my youth and good looks doesn’t mean I’m a prostitute, man. Geez.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“Damn right. And what have you got against prostitutes? Whatever a woman wants to do with her body is her business.”
“Of course it is,” he said, offering no protest. And feeling like he’d just stepped in a massive pile of dog shit, added, “And I like prostitutes.”
Piper’s eyebrows shot up. “TMI, man.”
“They are great sources of information.”
She pulled out her cell phone and started dialing the first number on her list. King could hear the ringing across the table.
“Hi, yeah. Can you tell me if you carry any mermaids? What color?” Piper’s lips turned down. She looked at King and then seemed to think better of it. “Uh…one sec.”
She frowned at the dress in the magazine. She squinted at the fine print below the model, describing the dress. “Uh, cream maybe. Yeah, no. Not white. What sizes are available?”
Piper leaned back in her chair, waiting for the woman to check the colors they had available.
“What are you supposed to be doing?” she asked him, turning the cell phone up so that the mouthpiece was pointed toward the sky over her head.
He was supposed to be scanning the databases for more evidence of Lou’s hunt. “I don’t know. I can’t focus today.”
Piper looked ready to say something but she pivoted the phone over her mouth again and began to speak to the shopkeeper again. “Yep. Ready.” She grabbed the pen, scrawling notes. “Awesome. How much?” Her eyes bulged, and she whistled. “And the other two?”
More scribbling.
He watched her write and wondered if he was a fool. Of course he was. What use did dresses and flowers and all that have now? Lucy might not even see the end of the week. And she was bone tired and in so much pain. Why would King drag her from her bed, put her in a dress and make her play some part? This was his own desperation shining through, as if marrying her will tie her to this world—and to him.
But she’d been so happy looking through the magazines, talking about cake. It had been the brightest he’d seen her eyes in weeks. Maybe clinging to the hope this would make her happy did make him a fool. But frankly, he didn’t know what else to do with himself between now and visiting hours.
King turned on his own laptop.
“Yeah, thanks for your time.” Piper terminated the call and started dialing the second number on her list.
When she finished, he’d have her start on the flowers. He would do the cake and food himself. He wondered if Café du Monde could do a croquembouche out of beignets. A small one. What else…
A photographer?
His dark screen finally lit with his welcome page. A search engine that compiled the daily news. He was halfway through typing New Orleans Wedding Photographers when the banner changed to the bright red Breaking News!
He clicked it without thinking and saw a face he recognized.
Paolo Konstantine. Martinelli’s bastard son stared back at him from the screen.
A polished news anchor with swept blond hair spoke to the camera. King expanded the video with a double click of his mouse. “Authorities say they have identified the man responsible for the on-camera slaughter of eight federal agents. While the man’s face is never seen on camera…”
King sat back in his chair, watching the blonde rewrite a story worthy of the news. Sensationalism at its best. But now that he’d seen it, he couldn’t take it back. He googled Konstantine, and found that the man’s face was the leading story on over twenty online news sites, with more and more updates pouring in. Trending with an upward arrow appeared by his name.
And he’d thought Lou had problems before…
“Did you hear what I said?” Piper asked, tapping her pen against the legal pad.
King reluctantly pulled himself from his thoughts. “Sorry.”
“I said I’ve got over twenty dresses here. Should I stop now or call the other three shops?”
“Twenty is plenty,” he said. He fished his wallet out of his back pocket and offered Piper the plastic card. “Why don’t you take one of your lady friends dress shopping. Pick one about Lucy’s size and shape.”
“The dress?”
“The girl,” he said.
“Nah,” Piper said, plucking the plastic from between his fingers. “I can’t take someone wedding dress shopping. It sends the wrong message.”
“How will you know how they fit?”
Piper tore the dress from the magazine and folded it into eighths before slipping it into her own Teenage Turtle wallet with King’s credit card. “I’ll try it on myself.”
“Try to keep it under $2500. And if in doubt, get it a little larger rather than smaller. We can always tailor it down, not the other way around,” he said, as Piper saluted and started down the fire escape on the side of the balcony. He had no idea why she liked to climb up and down that thing so much. King’s back and shoulders ached just looking at it.
He returned his interest to the computer screen and Konstantine’s face. A myriad of portraits from every conceivable angle. The internet darling, a forward facing death glare.
King wondered if his efforts to protect Lou might prove pointless after all.
There were some things you couldn’t prepare for.
17
Lou’s eyes flew open. She sat up in bed. Bed. Lou
turned toward the skyline and saw it was night. The pool shone two stories below, its spotlights ominous in the dark. The sparkling water seeming to beckon unwary swimmers into its depth. Someone had replaced the petunias with mums in the patio planters and cut back the creeping morning glory entwined with the No Lifeguard On Duty sign.
Stretching out beyond the pool and its walled garden was the St. Louis skyline. The arch cut the sky with a delicate whoosh. Lights shimmered like candles from distant windows.
Ice clinked in a glass.
She turned and saw Konstantine sitting on her sofa. His arm draped lazily across the back of it, a chilled glass of water perched on top of his thigh.
He watched her with a guarded expression. “Dare I ask what happened to you?”
Memories bobbed up from the inky depths of her mind. Benji on a park swing. A wooden walkway collapsing beneath her. The scream of gulls. Cam on his knees in front of her, hate screwing up his snarling face.
“I’m not sure,” she said. And she wasn’t. She didn’t have the whole story anyway. She vaguely recalled the melodious voice of a priest in the confession box. And all her strength leaving her at once. But then what?
“You appeared here about four hours ago,” he said, those liquid eyes remaining unreadable. “Were you in a hospital?”
She frowned. “Hospital?”
He pointed at her. No. At the wrist resting on her coverlet. Encircling the small, bird-like bones was a white hospital bracelet. Boston University Hospital. The new bracelet wasn’t the only change. Her Kevlar jacket, father’s vest, and every gun were gone. Even her underwear. She had only the scrubs, the hospital bracelet and the gauze covering her upper left arm.
“Fuck,” she swore. “Did I look like this when I showed up?”
“I haven’t touched you. You appeared in the bed, as you are now. If I hadn’t been sitting here, I would have thought you’d come home and put yourself to bed.”
She noted the novel open and face down on the sofa cushion beside him. He was more than halfway through. Of course, she had no television, laptop or radio in the apartment. What else could he do with his time except perhaps plot his revenge against Nico.
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