Danse Macabre

by Kory M. Shrum

  She could reach him in four steps. Maybe three.

  “Excuse me,” a woman said.

  Lou turned toward the voice. A woman in a red cocktail dress waved Lou over to her table.

  “These prawns are cold, and they still have grit in them. Were they even washed?” Her petulant tone made Lou’s teeth set on edge.

  “I don’t know,” Lou said, her eyes scanning the room.

  “Daphne,” the man beside her said. He had thick white hair and deep-set eyes behind glasses.

  “No—I’m sending this back,” the woman insisted pushing the plate across the white tablecloth toward Lou. “I want the baked chicken.”

  “Okay,” Lou said, lifting the plate.

  As she forced a smile, her eyes scanned the room one more time. She saw not one but four pairs of eyes on her. All men. She suspected this was mild sexual interest at first. But one of the men caused her to look again.

  When their eyes locked, he froze, his thumb pausing in the middle of a text. He looked like a deer ready to run.

  Getting a good look at his face, committing it to memory—the bushy brow, almost Neanderthal in its forward thrust, the eyes set too close together and oversized mouth, pockmarked cheeks—she noted it all.

  He lowered his phone slowly to hide it beneath the table, a damning gesture. Lou knew the hunt well enough to know when she’d been made. The man excused himself from his party and walked through an adjacent door. Lou considered following him.

  “I’m hungry,” the petulant woman whined. “Can I get my dinner tonight please? What are you waiting for?”

  Sikes also rose from his table, excusing himself. He headed in the same direction as the man, through the same door.

  “I’ll change it now.” Lou spoke absentmindedly as she followed Sikes out of the room.

  “The kitchen is that way!” cried the woman behind her.

  Lou didn’t care. She placed the cold prawns in front of another, very confused woman who sat closest to the exit doors.

  When Lou stepped into the hall, it was just in time to see Sikes enter into the adjacent bathroom, through the barrier-free doorway marked Men. Further down the hall, the mystery man spoke rapidly into his cell phone. Then, as if he felt the eyes on his back, he turned and looked directly at Lou.

  She had a choice. Seize the man and end his call, follow whatever trail had sprung up there, or finish with Sikes.

  He can wait, her father suggested.

  You won’t be able to kill him anyway, taunted the critic.

  Lou took a breath and stepped into the men’s restroom.

  Sikes stood behind a urinal. He didn’t even look up as Lou entered. She hit the light switch on the wall and he cried out in surprise.

  It was easier to find him in the dark.

  “Hello?” Sikes called. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  She inched toward him, hovering within arms’ reach.

  He has three boys, she was reminded. Three children who will wake up in the night, heartsick for their father.

  You’re no better than Angelo Martinelli.

  Gritting her teeth, Lou seized Sikes by the back of the neck and wrenched him to his knees. He struggled but could do nothing. Her grip was ironclad.

  “Please,” Sikes whimpered. There was fear in his voice, fear that Lou could practically taste. “Whatever you want take it. My wallet is in my back pocket. I won’t stop you.”

  Her hand flexed, tightening on the spinal column. But the rage didn’t come. Lou had only the cold winter wind blowing through her, an endless night of snow.

  Take him, she pleaded.

  Finish it. Just finish it.

  Lou slipped, leaving Sikes crying, but alive, on the bathroom floor.

  8

  Dani woke to a velvet paw tapping her lips and nose.

  “Meow.”

  When Dani didn’t rise, the cat added pressure until she was fully standing on Dani’s face.

  “Meow. Meow.”

  “Christ, Octavia. What do you want?”

  The cat flopped over onto her back, and dragged her tail under Dani’s nose. Batting it away, Dani caved, pulling herself up to sitting. She fumbled her phone off the white side table and checked the time. “It’s not even eight, you little monster!”

  The bedroom door was partially cracked. The chair she’d wedged under the door to deter the cat from entering had clearly been faulty. They made it look so easy in the movies. Stick a chair under the door, and no one can enter. Lies.

  She would have to consider a different setup. Of course, knowing Octavia, she would find another way in. The blue British shorthair seemed to know her place in this arrangement and had wasted no time affectionately reminding Dani who was the servant here.

  Dani climbed from the bed and took the cat with her, cradling her like a baby and looking into those deep gold eyes. “How could I neglect such a sweet princess? My little empress. The noodle-monkey of my heart.”

  The cat purred, obviously vindicated for the momentary lapse of neglect, and leaned into the hand scratching her fluffy cheek and erect ear.

  Dani placed the cat on the island counter, something that would have sent her mother into hysterics, and fished a can of cat food from the cabinet above the stove. She opened the can and forked the minced meat—and god knew what else—into the small porcelain bowl.

  “Wait, you’ll cut your little face!” she begged the impatient cat who seemed ready to eat from the can. “Tavie, we aren’t savages,” Dani said in her best Beverly Allendale voice.

  Dani loved to mimic her mother. Not only because the comic material was rich, but it was all she could do with her pent-up resentment. Her mother wasn’t a bad person, if an entitled and overbearing one.

  While it was certainly true that her mother had made her own money as the owner of a successful cosmetics company, she’d inherited nearly six million from her dead father while she was in college. And he’d gotten his money from his exiled sugar baron father, a man who’d escaped Cuba with his life when Fidel Castro took control of the country.

  Her father’s family had been from Honduras. When he was twenty, he’d opened his own brokerage, and by thirty-eight, when he married Daniella’s mother, he’d amassed a small fortune himself.

  She loved her parents and was immensely grateful for the financial security they’d given her, but they were too materialistic. They knew nothing about passion, or compassion for that matter. She’d tried to use the word calling with her mother once to explain her passion for stories, and Beverly had only blinked at her, uncomprehending.

  I suppose you really do take after my brother, Beverly had said once, standing in her dining room, pearls at her neck and hair in a perfect chiffon bun. He also…wandered.

  True, it had been her Uncle Charles who’d opened her eyes to the hypocrisy of their world when he’d invited her to spend a summer with him in Zimbabwe. She’d been fifteen.

  Her parents had only agreed to let her go because she’d sold them on the idea of her stellar college application. How great would it look to the Harvard Medical School reviewers that she’d spent three months apprenticing with a renowned doctor in Africa, she’d argued.

  And they bought her ticket the next day.

  Two years later Uncle Charles joined Doctors Without Borders in Gaza and died in an air raid with thirteen children.

  Maybe that’s why her parents only passive-aggressively resisted her decision to study writing rather than medicine. But she never forgot what she’d learned in Africa. About income inequality. About how often the rich were very rich and the poor were very poor. But also about how small and limited her parents’ worldview was. They believed things about the world that simply weren’t true.

  Once she got a job at The Herald, Beverly began saying Daniella wants to be a journalist, as if it were an amusing quirk, a hobby she would surrender for a respectable husband and children with time.

  I don’t want a husband or children. I want a Pulitzer.


  God, I sound just like them, she thought as she poured water into the coffeemaker and started a fresh pot.

  How many women out there dreamed of pursuing their passions but had to sacrifice those dreams in order to keep food on the table and predatory loan sharks at bay? Dani knew that the financial security her family afforded her was a rare privilege. The least she could do was not waste it on vapid pursuits.

  Coffee ready, she filled her largest mug and doctored it with a cake’s worth of cream and sugar. She retrieved her laptop off her desk charger and climbed back into bed.

  Now began her search.

  Lou, Piper had said. Of course that could be anyone. Chances were the mystery woman whose identity she sought to establish wouldn’t be named Lou. But Piper had broken off mid-sentence, hadn’t she? Maybe she was going to say Louise or Louann. Maybe it wasn’t Lou at all. Maybe it was going to be Lucy or Lucille?

  Or they could’ve been talking about someone else, her mind insisted.

  But she had to trust her gut on this. If they had been talking about just anyone, would Piper have acted so secretive all of a sudden? Dani didn’t think so.

  She’d start with the obvious. Google. The idea was to do a simple search and try to make a connection to Robert King.

  She took a sip of coffee—what magic—and waited for her browser to load. In the search box she typed Lou DEA.

  The first page had four or five articles, mostly local St. Louis press, outlining the heroism of a young man named Louis Hartford. He was a DEA agent who found three hundred pounds of cocaine hidden in a barge on the Mississippi River.

  She kept scrolling and was nine pages in when an article caught her eye.

  Murdered DEA Agent Hero Not Traitor.

  She double-clicked and began to read. She didn’t even notice the now-fed British blue jump onto her bed and begin washing her ears in the early sunlight.

  Dani slipped on her glasses and lifted the steaming coffee to her lips. She read, learning about Jack Thorne and his wife. How weeks before he was gunned down, he testified against a drug lord from a powerful family.

  At first, the DEA thought Jack had worked with the crime family. However, new evidence proved he was innocent, and in fact, Senator Greg Ryanson and Lieutenant Chaz Brasso had been the moles. They were also responsible for Jack’s murder—and both of them were still missing.

  Only their daughter, Louie Thorne survived.

  Dani choked, spitting half of her coffee back into the mug.

  A small photo of the girl sat in the bottom right of the article. It looked like a school photograph. Twelve-year-old Louie Thorne, pictured above, is the sole survivor of the attack.

  Dani leaned forward. Yes, she could see it. The shape of the face and mouth at least. The nose. She’d only seen the woman at night or behind mirrored sunglasses so she wasn’t one hundred percent sure. But she was damn suspicious.

  Dani tossed the laptop onto the bed, eliciting an irritated flick of the ears from the cat. She hadn’t noticed. She tore through the covers trying to locate her cell phone.

  She found it halfway inside her pillowcase. She punched a number she now knew by heart.

  “The Louisiana Herald, Frederick Barnes speaking.”

  “Freddie!” Dani hissed.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Dani. I have a question.”

  “Hey,” he said. “How’s your undercover sting going?”

  “That’s what I’m calling about. Does your brother still work in the NOLA PD?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I need someone to do an age progression on a photo. I’ve got a kid’s photo, and I want to know what she looks like now.”

  “He’s in Pensacola on some feelings retreat until Monday. But I can ask him when he gets back.”

  Dani drew a steadying breath against her racing heart. “That’ll do.”

  “Send me the pic and I’ll pass it along.”

  “Done.”

  A nasal bark resonated in the background.

  “Gotta go,” Freddie said. “Baker’s tossing around marching orders.”

  “Text me as soon as you hear something.”

  Dani tossed the phone onto the pillow and took up the laptop again. She stared into those flat, black eyes.

  Louie Thorne, she thought as she saved the picture to her computer. Is it really you?

  9

  As Piper walked the French Quarter, she ran her to-do list through her head again. It was growing exponentially fast and she loved it. When the day stretched out before her, and she had nothing to do, a feeling of vast emptiness would wash over her. Almost like a stomachache, or finding herself alone in a club, her friends gone on without her.

  This was better. Direction. Purpose. A list to accomplish so that when she laid her head down at the end of the day, she had something to account for. Something to hold onto so the sleep would come.

  She checked her watch. It was rounding on two in the afternoon. Damn. She needed to drop off these supplies to Mel, check in with King once more and get home before three. If she didn’t…

  Piper picked up her pace, her sneakers scuffing the cobblestone as she rounded the corner onto St. Peter. She stepped into the shop and found the new girl behind the register, tapping her pen against the notepad.

  “Hey,” Piper said. “How’s it going?”

  The girl startled, seizing her notes and clutching them to her chest.

  A ream of nervous laughter escaped her. “Oh my god. You scared me.”

  “Sorry,” Piper said, setting the sack of supplies down behind the counter.

  “It’s okay. I’ve always been jumpy,” she said, sliding the notebook into the pocket of her loose pants. “Probably makes you wonder why I’m working in an occult shop.”

  “What did you do before?” Piper asked.

  “I was a dancer,” she said.

  “Cool,” she said, wondering if that was code for stripper. Of course, it was rude to ask, so she didn’t press it.

  But Piper couldn’t help her curiosity. The girl was cute. She was more than cute, Piper realized. It wasn’t the tiny waist and flaring hips or considerable junk in the trunk. It was her face. Her skin was smooth, almost glowing. Her eyes lifted at the ends. Her lashes were thick. If she was four inches taller, Piper could picture her on the runway.

  Stop ogling her. You don’t have time for this.

  Piper tried to get ahold of herself. “Do you know where Mel is? I need to give her this stuff.”

  Dani tucked her hair behind her ear and pointed at the thick purple curtain. “Back there, behind the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain, thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.”

  Piper wasn’t sure how to react to this strange response.

  “Poe,” the other girl said, her face blushing. “The Raven.”

  “Oh! Yeah. I haven’t read that since high school.”

  Piper couldn’t wait any longer. She still had to check on her mom before returning to King.

  “Can you make sure she gets this?” Piper pointed at the paper bag of supplies on the floor.

  “Sure.”

  “Great. Thanks.” Piper whirled, ready to run out of the shop.

  “Hey, Piper?” Dani called. “I was wondering if you were free later. I’m new to the Big Easy, and I don’t really know the area or have any friends. Wow, that sounds so pathetic. I don’t want to come off as this crazy, clingy person but—” She hesitated.

  “It’s cool,” Piper said, familiar with the way women liked to have such admissions punctuated. A go ahead that green-lighted the conversation.

  “It would be nice to spend some time with someone other than my cat and to learn a little bit about the area. Like where to buy weed?”

  Piper laughed. “I have to close tonight.”

  “Right. No big deal. Maybe some other time then.” Her hopeful face fell dramatically. Oh yeah, this one was trouble. Piper knew it by looking at her and
the way her stomach jerked at that pitiful expression.

  “But after we close, I can take you around if you want,” she said. “And introduce you to Henry.”

  Her face blushed. “Oh, I’m not really looking for a guy…I, uh…”

  Piper laughed. “Henry sells weed. And has two boyfriends.”

  “Oh!” Her face blushed deeper. She covered her mouth with her hand and laughed even harder. “Oh, right. Okay. Yes. That would be awesome.”

  With a wave, Piper ducked out of the shop, checking her watch one more time and knowing she was cutting it close.

  * * *

  Piper stepped off the corner and kept running. Winding through the narrow side streets to the crowded row houses wedged at the end of the district. Old neglected houses that seemed to lean into one another, braced against the wind rolling off the canal.

  A short house with a wooden porch and torn screen door lurched into view.

  Piper took the steps two at a time and found the front door unlocked. Stupid, but not surprising. She only hoped she wasn’t too late.

  “Mom?” she called out, as she crossed the threshold into a smoky hallway. The house reeked of cigarettes and kerosene.

  Piper glanced up the narrow staircase ahead, toward her bedroom. She wanted to get more of her clothes but it could wait. She checked her watch 2:54. Damn, she was out of time. “Mom?”

  “Willy?” a raspy voice called.

  Piper followed the voice into the living room.

  The room was dark except for beams of sunlight piercing the haze. Cheap wool blankets hung over the windows to blot out the cold and the sun. In those stray beams, Piper saw cigarette smoke swirl in the air, not unlike the incense that hung in Mel’s shop.

  The kerosene heater glowed in the center of the room, casting a halo of warmth and light.