NO Quarter (30 page)

I did a fast risk-calculation and decided to duck into my place. Bone and I had run along Chartres for half a block, turned onto Madison which is a short, quiet street, then came out on Decatur where we had to slow. We were too visible, what with Café du Monde across the street and the security guards that wandered up and down around the levee wall. We did a brisk pace along Decatur. I didn’t have to tell Bone not to look around, to appear casual. I didn’t hear any sirens, which meant the fire I’d lit had already been put out. Any fire in the Quarter is treated like a four-alarmer, since the Quarter is a tinderbox waiting for a light. It has already burned twice in its long history and is probably due. Sometimes the age of the buildings here makes me think of the whole place as little more than decorative, aged firewood.

I wanted both of us off the street entirely, which was why I decided to go to my place instead of slipping into a bar. I didn’t want the cops or Bone’s new playmates dropping in.

Swinging away from the river, I stayed in hyper-alert mode until my gate locked shut behind us and I’d led Bone to my back patio apartment. The smell of jasmine from the bushes hung thick on the hot night air. The lights were out in the building that overlooks my smaller unit. I ushered Bone inside.

I felt a kind of territorial discomfort, realizing it had been a while since I’d had a guest. Bone stood looking at the swords mounted on the front room wall. He looked like he could use a drink, but I don’t keep liquor in the place. Drinking at home or alone is too close to an alcoholic’s shtick for me. Bone looked like somebody waiting to get the shakes.

“Want a cup of coffee, or some milk?” I asked, playing the host.

“Got any tea—herb tea, no caffeine?”

“Sure.” I snapped on the air-conditioning, put on water in my small kitchen, and picked out the most soothing tea I could find. Bone had been through a lot tonight, experiences I’d wager he’d never had before. He seemed to be handling it better than your average citizen would, though.

I changed out of my shirt, wringing wet from our brief run. My heart still pounded in my chest, and I realized I wasn’t in the same shape as when I’d taught epée fencing two days a week.

Bone sat on the sofa blinking at nothing. I brought him his tea and took a chair.

“Feel up to telling me all the details?” I sat back and lit a smoke.

He seemed to take that as a cue and lit one of his own. He turned his gaze on me.

“Thanks for getting me out of there,” he said heavily.

“I just made the diversion.
You
got you out of there.”

“I had help.”

“Those two guys who ran out with you?” I asked. “The big black fellow and the guy with the weird white hair?”

“He’s an albino. That’s Firecracker. Werewolf’s a West Indian. They’re both cooks where I work.”

“Werewolf” and “Firecracker”? And I sometimes thought “Maestro” was a strange handle.

Bone sipped at his tea and told me what had happened. I made sure he didn’t see my fingers digging deeper and deeper into the arm of my chair as he explained the heavy risks he’d run tonight. When he was done talking, he ground out his cigarette and sighed.

“That was genius, you know. Setting that cushion or whatever on fire right outside the door. It was the perfect distraction.”

Genius
, I thought, was stretching it. I had jogged along Chartres and through Jackson Square as fast as I dared, the address Bone had given me during his quick SOS on the cell phone burned into my brain. I didn’t have any intel on what I was heading into, and I seriously didn’t like that. But Bone in trouble was a drop-everything situation.

I had done a fast shadow pass down Dumaine, had seen Bone and the kid with the gun through the door, and I knew whatever I was going to do had to be now. I couldn’t storm the place, not unless I wanted to virtually guarantee Bone a bullet in the face. Then, like
that
, it came together. It was one of those weird preternatural moments where you suddenly know the universe is cooperating with you. I spotted a dirty cushion in the gutter, something the garbage men had missed. I grabbed it, snuck up along behind the parked cars, used my lighter, and hung back. As a bonus from the gods, the cushion was soaked with cheap alcohol and lit up nicely.

Bone yawned, maybe the ginseng taking effect. Maybe he was just coming down off the mortal-jeopardy rush. I had experienced it a few times—well, more than a few. It was powerful and could affect a person in many different ways.

“So I guess this puts Lester on our list,” he said. “He certainly didn’t seem like the most stable of personalities.”

From what Bone had told me, I figured Lester as mostly bluff, and the gun his way of getting people to take him seriously.

“People in the drug trade sometimes get into their own product,” I said. I took a last pull on my own cigarette and tossed it in the ashtray. “He might just be paranoid from using too much of it.”

“The way Sunshine was killed,” Bone said, “was calculated, like you said. Not random. I don’t know if this Lester nimrod could get it together enough to carry off anything that premeditated. If he was going to kill somebody, I think it would be spur of the moment.”

I nodded. He was actually thinking smart. Maybe some of me was rubbing off on him. I hoped to hell it was enough to keep him from diving into something foolishly dangerous again.

“How about you?” he asked. “What did you do tonight besides saving my bacon?”

I told him what had gone down at the Stage Door. I didn’t add that his emergency phone call had interrupted my tailing Jo-Jo to someplace where I might have plied him with a few useful questions. Bone’s welfare naturally took precedent, but now that the crisis was over, I permitted myself a little annoyance that I’d lost a valuable trail.

“What do you think about that?” Bone asked. “Makes Jo-Jo look the part of the ladies’ man all right.”

I pursed my lips. “But being publicly embarrassed by not just one but two women didn’t set him off. He looked kind of sad and disgusted by what was happening, but he didn’t show any signs of violence at all. That doesn’t exactly fit the profile of some guy who would decide to knife Sunshine over a love affair gone bad.”

“I guess that’s true.” Bone shrugged. “Except we know he’s already stabbed one woman.”

“From what I understand, it was more or less self-defense.” Lynch J. Morise had said the girl Jo-Jo had killed with a kitchen knife had tried to stab him with it first.

“Maybe he does all his angry stuff on the inside and lets it out later,” Bone suggested.

It was possible. Then again we were faced with a whole lot of “possibles.” Way too many for my taste. I very much wanted to winnow out our suspect list.

“Jesus,” Bone muttered, shaking his head now. “I keep wondering, what if Sunshine’s killer isn’t in the Quarter anywhere? What if he’s blown town?”

“Then he’s out of our range,” I said firmly. “We can affect things here, Bone, in the Quarter. It’s our turf and we have a special understanding of it. We maybe have some influence and the ability to do something worthwhile. But only here. Only here.”

It had come out more wise-old-man-on-the-mountaintop than I’d meant, and Bone looked for a moment as if he were ready to disagree. Then he nodded and said, “Okay, Maestro. I get it. I’m the junior partner, I understand that, but I’m not a kid. I’m not going to lose it if we hit a dead end.”

I stood from the chair and crossed the front room to the wide, double-doored closet in which my small altar stands. I didn’t know where the sudden impulse to share this rather personal facet of my life had come from, but I went with it. Bone was my friend, my partner in this hunt. He needed to know that he could trust me.

“Bone,” I said.

He cocked his head, gave me a funny look. “Yeah?”

“I trust you,” I said. I kicked off my shoes, unlocked and then pulled back the sliding doors. I heard Bone’s sharp intake of breath behind me as I adjusted the carved fossil-coral statue of Kali on the altar, lit two small candles and a stick of incense. I went to my knees, then bowed down and touched my head to the floor. I rose, straightened back up, and arranged my stiff legs to sit cross-legged before the altar. I took in a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “With our eyes on the horizon,” I said, “we do not see what lies at our feet.”

The candlelight revealed my treasures: the prayers inscribed on the hanging silk; the laquered
katanakake
stand that held the three sheathed blades; the
tachi
stand that held the long blade upright beside the altar; the crossed, polished staffs behind it; the two stone fu dogs; and the altar itself, with its carefully arranged bits of coral, crystal, silk, wood, and feathers.

“Wow!” Bone’s quiet exclamation of wonder didn’t surprise me. “Is that
...
are
those
what I think they are? Samurai swords? Real ones?”

“Yes,” I said. “They’re real, and they’re old.” I touched in turn the blue silk that wrapped each of the rayskin grips (
tsukas
) in the traditional diamond patterns. “This is the
tanto
, the dagger, sometimes used for
seppuku
but also a combat blade. This is the
wakizashi
, the middle-length fighting blade. This is the
katana
, the longer fighting blade. And this,” I said as I reached out to touch the last blade, which stood on its own, “is the
tachi
, the cavalry longsword.”

I gestured at the staffs that stood crossed over the prayer scroll. “Those are the
baston
and
olisi
, sticks used in the Filipino
eskrima
fighting style. One is made of rattan, the other from a resilient wood known as
kamagong
. The hanging prayer scroll is caligraphed in Tibetian. The statue represents Kali, the Hindu goddess of both death and destruction, as well as creation and rebirth—or, as I like to call her, the four-armed dealer. The incense I get from Mother Mystic’s shop, and as for the rest, well, you might just call me a pantheist or an ecumenical. Or maybe I’m just hedging my bets. I’ve been around a bit and seen a few things, and I’ve picked up the occasional
objet de arte
along the way. I guess you could look at all this as a kind of a road map.”

“Wow,” Bone said again. “And you are
...
where did you
...
what
...
” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Maestro, just
who
the hell
are
you?

I didn’t get up, just scooted around to face him, grinned, and said, “Me? I’m just a retired bloodhound who’s held onto some of his old tricks.” Bone’s return smile was forced, but after a moment he nodded his understanding. One didn’t normally ask that kind of question of another Quarterite, not even of a friend—not even of a partner.

And what he’d asked—
What and who are you?
That was a good question—too good, because I didn’t really have a straight answer. I’ve followed the path of contemplation—that’s Zen Buddhism, to the unenlightened—ever since ... well, for a long time. The old samurai meditation techniques served me well in my old life and my old line of work. The Zen discipline had worked even better in allowing me to accept the life I’d made for myself afterwards—a life lived in a kind of permanent impermanence. Zen, at least for me, has never been about finding the answer or the question, but about the satisfaction offered by the search. Lately, though, the search—if not the hunt—had become no longer enough to satisfy. I needed to find the real question, at least, if not the whole answer.

I’d learned a bit about paganism in ‘Nam, but it was coming to New Orleans that had stirred my interest in it. Or maybe it was my age. Maybe it was the growing vacuum I seemed to find myself living within. Whatever, it seemed to make more and more sense to me to acknowledge the world’s basic energies, to recognize the old gods that were so much easier to digest than the modern one. Earth, soil, rock, animals
...
that all these things and more had spirits was something I was starting to take for granted.

Or maybe, just maybe, I was once again tracking the wrong prey down a blind alley. So be it—the search goes on, and sometime, someday, the hunter doesn’t come home from the hill.