Now that she was awake Flynn figured she ought to check on the patient. She found Pierce asleep and alive, although snoring like a warthog. Flynn backed out of the bedroom again without disturbing her. It would take more than getting beaned to kill Pierce Boudreau, she reflected. Maybe shooting would do it. But you might want to take the bleeding carcass out back, run it over with a truck a few times. Just to be sure.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
She knew now what she had to do. The Loa had visited her again, given to her the instructions of the Old Ones. They had also sent a propitious sign regarding the final sacrifice. But time grew short, they warned, the moon would soon be full, and Full Moon was the best time for the final part of the ritual to be completed. The mambo needed to act fast.
She visited a cemetery in a less salubrious area of the city, going there specifically because she would not be disturbed in what she needed to do. There were other places where the power was greater—where her connection to the Other Worlds would have been stronger—but those places were too public, and since she could not risk exposure at this stage, she settled instead for making use of the St Roch Cemetery. She drove there with one of her closest, most trusted acolytes to perform the first part of the final ritual, a sleeping rooster in a cage traveling with them in back of the vehicle. Its blood was required for the final ritual, and the blood had to be shed in a cemetery.
As the City of The Dead drew closer, the mambo began to feel the power of the Loa, and of the Old Ones, reaching out to her. She opened herself up to them, welcomed them in as she touched the amulets she wore around her neck. On each were carved the veves of the respective Loa to whom she must appeal to assist in the final ritual, and each amulet had been smeared with a variety of substances, including the mambo’s own menstrual blood. Human blood—especially the blood of a woman’s menstruation—was a most powerful tool indeed.
The mambo brought her aged vehicle to a lurching halt at the gates of St Roch Cemetery, waking the rooster which screeched loud enough to jolt her acolyte out of their own light trance.
“We are here. We must act fast,” the mambo said.
In her mind’s eye she pictured the intended third sacrifice. The Old Ones saw it, too, smiling and nodding their delight with this choice. A numinous light filled the mambo’s mind and a pure joy suffused her soul. Knowing that the Old Ones approved caused tears of ecstasy to bleed down her cheeks. This sacrifice would be all the sweeter, too, because it would prove to one who professed scornful disbelief the true enormity of the Old Ones’ power. The mambo smiled to herself.
It was true what they said…
…it matters not whether you believe in the Loa, only that the Loa believe in you.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Flynn was making coffee next morning when Boudreau shuffled into the kitchen wearing a Disney World t-shirt, matching boxers, and oversized slippers in the shape of big-eared rabbits’ heads. Flynn couldn’t help but laugh.
“Not a fucking word,” Boudreau growled. She sighed, plucked the t-shirt away from her chest, and looked down at her feet in the huge floppy-eared slippers. “Carol got me them for my birthday—as a joke.”
Flynn clamped the smile, nodded solemnly. “It’s good to know that Carol has a sense of humor underneath that starchy hide of hers. Y’all want some coffee?”
“I want a large bourbon and beer chaser. And a cigarette. And to kill the fucker did this to me. But yeah, I’ll take coffee.” Boudreau into toward the living room.
“No consuming alcohol with those painkillers. Doctor’s orders, remember?”
Boudreau manufactured an innocent tone. “Really? I heard “Not too much alcohol with those painkillers”. I’m sure y’all must’ve been mistaken, Flynn.”
Shaking her head, Flynn brewed two cups and carried them to the couch where Boudreau sat slumped in front of the blank screen of the TV. Some of the most colorful bruising Flynn had ever seen had erupted overnight across the side of the detective’s face. It bloomed a garish, poisonous purple-green-brown-black hue, like rotted eggplant, spreading from her temple to her cheekbone. Boudreau noticed Flynn’s admiring stare, and lifted her lip in a sneer.
“I don’t want to hear a word about this either.”
“My lips are sealed. Just like your eye.”
“Fuck off, Flynn.”
“Carol is gonna love it. And it goes real well with the bunny slippers.”
With a resigned sigh, Boudreau leaned back against the couch, and then winced when her stitched head came into contact with it. “Y’all don’t know what it is that I see in Carol, do you?” she asked out of the blue.
Flynn hesitated. She was rarely comfortable with conversations about other peoples’ love lives—or her own love life, for that matter. “I guess I don’t. But it isn’t really much of my business anyway,” she muttered.
“She’s steady. She works in a bank. She looks and acts normal. She is normal. I know I never have to worry that she’ll do something might wind up reflecting badly on me or my career. Is that a purely selfish motive for being with someone?”
Since they appeared to be going there anyway, Flynn gave the question a moment of thought. Then she shrugged. “All kinds of love are selfish in some way.”
Boudreau threw her a surprised look.
“What? You thought I couldn’t be deep? Y’all do love Carol, right?”
“I’m not sure I do sometimes.”
Flynn had no ready response to that. She chose silence instead, waited for Boudreau to elaborate.
Or not. “How do you suppose Antoine Camber is mixed up in all of this Voodoo murder shit?” Boudreau asked. “He kept yammering at me about how he ‘didn’t want to do it’…while he was swinging that two-by-four at my head.”
Flynn let the conversation go in this new direction. “Maybe the mambo is controlling him?” She frowned at a damp patch in the wallpaper, high up behind the television set. Goddamned dampness, you found it in all kinds of places. In the almost constant humidity of New Orleans it never went away completely. “Y’know, Ariel told me she had a cell mate who was into Voodoo. Just about every woman in the prison—black and white both—would come to this woman for all kinds of shit. She was raking money in, and no one fucked with her either. Some of these mambos use drugs to control certain of their followers. Like zombies.”
“Whenever folks feel like regular religion has failed ‘em, they turn to the fringe-nut stuff,” Boudreau sighed. She cocked an eyebrow. “D’you remember all the Voodoo signs got painted on doors during Katrina?”
Flynn nodded. “I saw a few, yeah.”
“Ariel’s been very informative, hasn’t she?” Sarcasm dripped from Boudreau’s words. Flynn rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know. You don’t pry into my love life, so I shouldn’t pry into yours. Fuck you. I’ve been warned to stay home and do shit-all for the next few days. Cap’n Embry says if he sees my face around the station, he will suspend me…his words exactly. Fussy fucker, like he’s my Mom. So I’m in a bad mood, and that means I’ll pry if I want to. I expect y’all to be my eyes and ears on the street for now, Flynn. That means I can’t have you distracted by Ariel Rousseau’s charms. Whatever they are.”
Flynn took her empty coffee cup into the kitchen, rinsed it under the faucet. “You know Waylon ought to be all the eyes and ears you need, Pierce. I’ve got stuff of my own I need to do. But I will stay in touch with Waylon. Just make sure you tell him to be okay with that. You know how he feels about me.”
“Waylon loves y’all really. He just has trouble expressing his emotions.”
Flynn walked out of the kitchen, scooped her jacket from the chair where she’d left it last night. She shook her head at Boudreau. “Funny thing that—Waylon has no trouble expressing his negative emotions about me.”
Flynn rode from Boudreau’s place to her own apartment lost in a mire of thoughts, most of which concerned Ariel and Dana. The two women elicited similar and yet differing responses in her, and Flynn was both a
larmed and fascinated by her own feelings regarding each. She retrieved the Wing-Master from the trunk and carried it inside, stopping briefly to scoop a handful of mail from behind the door, and to pet Charlie, who appeared from under the stairs to entwine himself around her legs. He mewled loudly at her. “Yeah, I know. You want fed.” She gave the cat an affectionate scratch. “Seems like everybody wants a piece of me. I suppose I ought to be flattered.”
Charlie followed her to the office and watched her, with a feline’s supreme indifference to the affairs of humans, whilst she locked the shotgun back in the gun cabinet and dropped the mail, unread, on her desk. Then she headed upstairs to her apartment to feed the impatient cat and to shower and change before meeting with Dana Jordan.
Café du Monde was perhaps the most famous coffee stand in New Orleans. Flynn was a regular customer and she was immediately seated under the pavilion delivered her coffee and beignets promptly. Around Jackson Square, the artists and street mimes—starting to return after Katrina had swept them, too, out of the city—were firing up their acts, and Flynn idly watched them. At ten-thirty on the dot, she spotted Dana Jordan across the street, and she raised a wave to attract the reporter’s attention.
“Good morning,” Flynn greeted Dana with a genuine smile.
“Hey.” The reporter sat down, then looked around at the queue of people waiting to be graced with a table. “You must have friends in some very high places.”
“Low ones, too,” Flynn assured her.
“Hard to tell the difference in Louisiana sometimes.”
A waitress approached. Dana asked for coffee only.
“Have a beignet,” Flynn suggested, grinning. “Live dangerously.”
Beignets, donut-like squares of deep-fried sweet pastry liberally sprinkled in even sweeter powdered sugar, might well have qualified as the messiest foodstuff ever invented, but they were undeniably delicious. Dana considered for a moment, then nodded.
“And I’ll have a refill,” Flynn added, smiling at the waitress.
Ever since Dana had sat down, Flynn had been surreptitiously running an appreciative eye over the reporter, appreciating what she saw. “So, last night you sounded as though there were something important you wanted to talk about?” Flynn asked.
Dana hesitated, her gaze dropping to the tabletop. “I was worried about you.”
“Nice to know someone is worrying about me.”
“Hmm…” Dana flicked a smile on and off. The she changed the subject. “How is Pierce today?”
Flynn shrugged. “When I left her, she was bitching and moaning about being told to stay home. My guess is she’ll live.”
Still keeping her gaze fixed on the tabletop, Dana nodded. “That’s good.”
Flynn was about to pursue the matter, but the coffees and beignets arrived and she remained silent whilst the waitress laid the table. Dana sipped her coffee, then bit into one of the sweet pastries. Powdered sugar dripped from her lips onto her blouse, sticking to her fingers when she tried to wipe it away. The tightening in her gut, the catch of her breath, made Flynn wonder—not for the first time—why this woman could so effortlessly make her feel things she did not want to feel?
“How’s the case going?”
The sound of Dana’s voice dragged Flynn from her ruminations. She shook her head, sipped some coffee whilst she recovered herself. Then she told Dana briefly some of the things Ariel had shared with her. Those weren’t privileged information. Dana leaned forward across the table, her reporter’s interest piqued, oblivious to her right elbow sitting in a ring of spilled powdered sugar and coffee. “So who’s Ariel then?” she asked.
Uh oh. “Ariel is an old friend,” Flynn answered carefully. “She made some wrong choices and wound up in jail for a time. Now she runs a little Voodoo supply store…” Flynn’s cell phone rang, sparing her the need to go into further details. She checked the caller ID. “Hey Pierce—where y’at?”
“Going slowly out of my mind with boredom. I mean, what do housewives find to do all fucking day? Besides eat Moon Pies, and watch crap TV?”
Flynn snickered. “Y’all called me just to moan about that?”
“No. I called Waylon. He says the lab got a good print from Anthea Larue’s student ID that matched other prints taken from around Camber’s apartment. But wasn’t a match to anything in the system—so far. And the Slidell cops found my department vehicle. You want to hear where?” Boudreau blew an angry sigh down the line. “Found it in the fucking bayou. Just as well I didn’t take my own car. Carol would’ve had a goddamn fit if I got that car damaged. She got me the loan on it.”
Flynn gave a dry chuckle. “It’s good to know that Carol has both a sense of humor and her priorities in order. Waylon tell you anything else?”
“Yeah. No sign of my fucking piece in either the vehicle or the bayou. I’ll be filling out reports on that for the rest of my career. Remind me, when we catch up with that asshole Camber, to give him an extra smack in the teeth. Autopsy report on Anthea Larue is in. Anthea died first, in much the same way as her mother—same weapon used, sexual assault. Blah blah blah. And there was a veve carved on her. Baron Samedi. He’s something to do with cemeteries and the dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he is,” Flynn confirmed. “He’s also one of the oldest and most powerful of the Loa.” She heard a rasping noise on the line, followed by a soft hiss of gas as Boudreau lit up a cigarette. She had given up smoking eight months ago at Carol’s insistence, but must have kept a pack around for emergencies. Flynn declined to comment. She wasn’t Boudreau’s girlfriend, it wasn’t her place to nag her about her habits.
“Oh, and those drugs I told y’all that we found in Camber’s condo,” Boudreau added, exhaling smoke. “The stuff in his medicine cabinet was your common-and-garden variety tranquillizers, sleeping tablets, and assorted shit of that nature. Waylon has been trying to contact all four of the different doctors prescribed the shit to Camber. The other stuff—the powder, it’s a bit more interesting. Some weird mix of herbs and hypnotics, an hallucinogenic or two, some other even weirder shit. There’s something with a big-ass Latin-sounding name I can’t even pronounce, but it does things to the adrenalin apparently. Sounds like maybe Camber might’ve been tripping off his tits when he attacked me. Fits with the way he was babbling, I guess.”
Boudreau went quiet for a moment, the line humming softly to itself in the silence. Flynn heard her inhale again on the cigarette. “Whoever made up this concoction, Flynn, they are one talented chemist.”
A chill crawled up from the base of Flynn’s spine and settled between her shoulder blades. Boudreau had just echoed Ariel’s own very words.
“They call it Zombie Dust,” Flynn said. Her mouth was dry and she had to gulp down some coffee. She saw Dana give her a sharp glance from across the table. “The mixture you’re describing is actually a variation on the classic Zombie Dust. It’s way more powerful and allows for the mambo to control her subjects more effectively. It’s also incredibly addictive.”
“Well, that’s a cheery thought. A big-ass murderer running around the city high on some addictive Zombie Dust variant—” Boudreau sighed. “I hate my job.”
“Anything else breaks, call me,” Flynn told her. She hung up, turned her attention back to Dana Jordan. “So. No more stalling. What did you want to talk to me about?”
Dana frowned at the crowded café. “D’you think we could take a walk? It’s kind of busy in here, and this isn’t something I’d want to be overheard.”
“Okay. I’m intrigued. Lets walk and talk.”
They left Café du Monde and headed for the brick walkway along the levee. The musky and salt smell of the river mingled with the diesel fumes from boats that constantly plied its winding length, and the sweet scents of coffee and deep-fried pastries wafting from the many cafes and restaurants. Flynn paused for a moment on the levee to breathe the scents in.
Dana smiled at her. “You really love this city, don’t you?”
“You didn’t bring me here to discuss my feelings about New Orleans, did you?”
As Dana Jordan gazed back at her, Flynn saw something cloud the reporter’s dark eyes—an uncertainty, almost a fear. “I got a call yesterday—from an FBI agent,” Dana said. “Her name is Erin Krueger. Does that ring any bells?”
Flynn shook her head. “Should it?”
“She says she headed up an investigation in New York into the murder of a Mob guy. Agent Krueger believes that you were the hit woman.”
Flynn went very still inside. “This FBI agent—what else did she tell you?” she asked coldly.
Dana’s eyes went wide with the revelation. “Shit,” she breathed. “You were a hired killer, weren’t you?”
Flynn moved in quickly to close the distance between them, circling one arm around Dana’s neck, the other around her waist, pulling her into an embrace and a kiss. Taken aback, Dana chose to follow her first instinct, which was to respond to being kissed. Her arms went around Flynn’s back where Flynn felt the warmth of her palms pressing there. The sensation sent goose bumps riffling up and down her arms and legs, made her scalp tingle and tighten. As Dana arched her neck up, moving in tight and letting her mouth open a little, Flynn could not resist gently probing with her tongue. The reporter sighed, and kissed her harder. Flynn felt the sharp sting of guilt through her own desire. This was not what Dana thought it was and when she found that out momentarily, she was going to be pissed. Nevertheless, Flynn slipped both hands beneath Dana’s jacket, letting them roam over the reporter’s incredible body. It felt good to do so, but she broke contact after a few moments, and stepped back.
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