Angel Dance: A Shadow Council Case Files Novella: Quest for Glory Part 3

by John G. Hartness

  The man I was holding scowled at the younger boy. “Why you ain’t tell nobody that shit, Junior? You know we take care of our own. Pops was our people, man. You can’t be letting some cracker motherfucker come up in here messing with our people.” I let go of his crotch, and he took a step back to sit on the steps, rubbing his sore groin.

  Junior looked at his shoes, not meeting his friend’s gaze. “I don’t know. I thought if y’all heard me talking about magic fireworks and shit, y’all wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Fool, this New Orleans,” another one of the boys on the porch said, laughing. “Everybody know magic real, fool. We all got a granny or aunt doing the root. You don’t believe in magic, you ain’t been in Nola long.”

  A general murmur of agreement went through the young men, and I nodded. I certainly was more well-acquainted with magic than even these young men would readily believe. I looked at the young man. “Do you remember anything else about the man you saw? Any details that might help me find him?”

  “Nah, man, I was pretty high. I don’t remember shit.” He bumped fists with one of the other boys, but the one I had released reached up and slapped him.

  “I told you about getting high. You don’t do that shit. You gone go to college, get the fuck out this ‘hood. Tell him, big man.” He turned to me.

  “He is correct. You should go to college. Your friends here will very likely end up imprisoned or dead before they are thirty years old. If you leave this environment as soon as possible, you are more likely to survive and have children of your own someday.” The boys on the porch glared at me, but no one spoke up to contradict me.

  “What if I don’t wanna go nowhere?” the youth said with a sneer.

  “Going to college will still allow you to earn more money with less risk of jail than any career you can find without a degree. I see nothing wrong with recreational marijuana use, but the price typically does not agree with me.” I didn’t bother to mention that a side effect of my unusual physiology is a complete lack of capacity to become intoxicated. Since I am animated by magical means, my body is merely a vessel for my soul. There is no real connection between me and my body, so mind-altering substances have little to no effect on me. That is the theory Vlad, Abraham, and I crafted, at any rate.

  “Whatever, man.” He waved me off with the dismissive air of the internally wise teenager.

  I shrugged and held out my hand to his friend. “Thank you for your help. I do not think I did any permanent damage to your firearm. I hope I did not do any permanent damage to your person.”

  He shook my hand. “Yeah, big man, I think both my pistols gonna be okay.” He grinned at me and said, “You need a ride back into town? Frodo’ll drop you.” He jerked a thumb at one of the men on the porch behind him. “Frodo” waved.

  “That would be nice,” I said. “My Uber driver did not feel safe in this neighborhood.”

  “Yeah, lot of people think that,” the young man said. “I think we got us a public image problem.” The crowd on the porch laughed, and Frodo stood up. He walked to a black Escalade parked on the street and got behind the wheel. I walked over and got in on the passenger’s side, then gave him the address of my hotel.

  “Fancy,” he remarked.

  “Why do they call you Frodo?” I asked. “You are not particularly short.” He wasn’t. He wasn’t tall, either, at somewhere slightly below six feet tall, but he was not a short man by any rate.

  Frodo held up his right hand, and I saw that he was missing his ring finger. “Got it shot off. So now they call me Frodo.”

  “What did they call you before Frodo?”

  “My moms named me Gerald, but that didn’t sound real tough. So my street name was Skullfucker, on account of—”

  I raised a hand to stop him. “Please, don’t share the origin of ‘Skullfucker.’ I think Frodo is a much better choice.”

  We rode in silence back to my hotel, but could only get within three blocks. The streets were blocked by emergency vehicles and police cramming the streets of the French Quarter. Frodo pulled over, and I got out of the SUV, looking up into the sky ahead of us.

  Whoever killed Oliver apparently heard that I was in town and wasn’t thrilled at the news. My hotel was surrounded by firetrucks attempting to save the adjacent buildings as a pillar of black smoke rose to the sky. Onlookers crammed the sidewalks and nearby streets, all necks craning to see the inferno that was my lodging. My hotel was on fire, and I had no doubt that I was the intended target.

  4

  I ducked into a restaurant with a sandwich board out front announcing “Live Music Every Day!” and requested a table for one. Then I wove through the tables to the bathroom and locked the door.

  I took out my phone. “Dennis, are you there?”

  His unicorn face popped onto my screen and he said, “I’m everywhere, baby. Except in your hotel room, which is a good thing. Before you ask, no I can’t get into the hotel security system, because the hard drives burned up and they didn’t back that shit up to the cloud. And yes, all your shit is now toast, so you’re going to need to find a Big & Tall Men’s store to buy some new underwear.”

  “And perhaps a t-shirt,” I agreed.

  “Nah, there’s plenty of ‘I Support Single Moms’ shirts available on Bourbon.” His image on the screen changed to a stocky young man with a head full of tight red curls wearing a t-shirt with an image of a woman swinging on a pole. The connection took a moment, but when I made it, I laughed.

  “I think my life can be considered more or less complete without ever owning a shirt that promotes that level of misogyny,” I said.

  “Okay, fine, whatever,” Dennis replied, changing his avatar into a giant frowny face. “I’ve called you an Uber to take you to the nearest tailor that does big and tall work. They have a delivery service, too, so once you get measured and pick out some stuff, they can deliver it to your new hotel. I’ve already got you a reservation at Harrah’s casino, with a new laptop and tablet en route to you.”

  “Thank you, Dennis. I will pass on the trip to the tailor for now, however. I wish to speak to these firefighters and police officers.” I pressed the button on the screen to disconnect the call, but Dennis’ face remained.

  “Dude. You don’t really think you can actually hang up on me, do you? Not gonna happen. Anyway, nobody is going to talk to you until they’re sure the whole Quarter isn’t going up in flames. Go get some new threads ordered and come back in a couple of hours.”

  As much as I longed to push my way through the throngs of people and demand answers from those in charge, I recognized the wisdom in his words. Hopefully my sartorial side trip would allow enough time for the onlookers to disperse and give me an opportunity to speak with the arson inspector. A slight delay would also remove much of the cover for the firebug if he was still in the area.

  Two hours later, I returned with a hefty receipt for a very large selection of clothing that all promised to make me look far more presentable than my normal black pants, boots, and thin sweatshirts. I tend to wear durable clothing in solid dark colors. It hides blood better. It usually is not my blood that stains my clothes. I did choose to wear the new hat I purchased, a jaunty fedora in a dark gray check with a small feather in the hatband. I decided that it made me look somewhat less threatening than my normal appearance.

  I approached a man standing near a firetruck in a heavy turnout coat, rubber boots, but without the facemask and fireproof pants of an active firefighter. “Are you the investigator?” I asked.

  “Naw,” he drawled. “I’m the assistant. The investigator’s in there, poking around where she ain’t got no business being ’til things cool down a bit. But she’s always been hard-headed.” The slight smile on his face and the pride in his voice told me that he considered “hard-headed” a compliment.

  “Do you have any idea what caused the fire?” I asked.

  He turned to me and started a little when his eyes were even with the middle of my chest. He
looked up at my face, then took a step back to make conversation easier. I gave him my most reassuring smile, but that never seems to reassure anyone. He took another step back. “I’m sorry, mister…?”

  “Franks,” I said, reaching into my back pocket for the badge holder there. I flipped open my credentials and passed them to him. “Department of Homeland Security. I’m not official, just curious. My room was in that hotel, and I want to know if the office is going to give me too much crap about getting my laptop replaced.” I tried to affect a more casual tone, to use more slang in my speech that he would perceive me as a fellow law enforcement officer.

  The badge went much further toward that end than anything, I believe. It was an excellent forgery, one Dennis had created for me by a contact he knew in North Carolina.

  The firefighter, or assistant inspector, nodded at the badge and handed it back to me. “You ain’t working?”

  “No sir, just down here to see the sights,” I said. “Might be now, if anything about this looks suspicious.”

  “Jerry, get over here!” a voice called from inside the wreckage of the building. The assistant turned and moved at a fast walk to the sound. I looked around, then set my hat on the back of a nearby firetruck, picked up a helmet that lay nearby, clapped it on my head, and followed Jerry into the skeletal frame of my burned-out hotel.

  A red-haired woman with a spray of freckles that stood out on her pale skin was bent over, cursing at a large chunk of wood. “I can’t move this son of a bitch. Can you give me a hand? I need to look at the burn pattern on the bottom side of this beam.”

  She looked up and scowled at me. “Who the hell is this, Jerry? You know better than to—”

  Jerry’s head whipped around to me, and he fixed me with an icy glare. “This is Agent Franks. He’s a DHS agent on vacation. He was staying here.”

  “Well, Agent, you gonna stand there like a lump or you gonna help us move this beam?” the woman asked.

  I looked at the beam, estimating its weight. I stepped to the broken end and bent my legs. I reached down with both hands and stood, bringing the end of the beam up with me. “Where do you want it?” I asked.

  The woman just pointed, her mouth hanging wide open as I hoisted several hundred pounds of charred wood and moved it sideways just far enough for her to get an unimpeded view of the floor. I rolled the beam slightly when I set it down, so she could photograph the side of the beam that was on the bottom.

  “There we go,” she said, pointing to a silvery residue on the alligator-like burned area of the beam. “That’s phosphorous residue. It burns super-hot.”

  “And water only makes it burn more,” I continued.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Very good.”

  “So this fire was definitely set and was designed to get worse once firefighters arrived,” I said.

  “Or when the sprinklers kicked on, which happened several minutes before the first trucks got here,” Jerry said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “This wasn’t just arson,” the redhead replied. “This fire was set to kill someone.”

  I was pretty sure I knew who was supposed to end up dead. Now I just needed to find out why.

  “I’m Anna Hernandez,” the redhead said, holding out her hand. “Chief Arson Inspector for the City of New Orleans.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Inspector…Hernandez,” I replied, looking at her pale skin and red hair.

  She laughed. “Married name, Agent. My wife is from Chile. Now, what brings you to my fire scene?”

  “I just popped by to pick up my luggage, but it seems to have been incinerated,” I said.

  “You were staying in this hotel?” she asked, pulling out a little notebook.

  “Yes, I was.”

  “How many people were aware of that fact?”

  “I suspect the entire hotel staff knew about it, but unless I have been followed, no one else would have been aware of that. I am not here working. I am on vacation.” The lie came easily to me. I do not have the many physical tells that humans have when they are lying. My pupils do not dilate; my heart rate does not increase. Lying comes as naturally to me as breathing. This has proven very useful in my work with Quincy Harker, but sometimes provides a moral conundrum when trying to live a better life than I have in the past.

  “Do you have any active cases that may cause someone to seek retribution?” Inspector Hernandez asked.

  “I sincerely doubt it,” I said. “I am not a field agent. I am a backline support evidence technician. I make sure that the chain of custody is followed precisely to aid in achieving a conviction. My work is essential, but not glamorous.” Quincy came up with that cover story for me several years ago. His thought was that if he made me utterly boring, no one would want to delve deeper into my fabricated employment. So far, life had proven him quite correct.

  Inspector Hernandez’s eyes glazed over long before I finished the summary of my mythical job duties. “Yeah, doesn’t sound like you were the target. But I doubt that anything in your room would be salvageable. What floor were you on?”

  “The sixth. Where did the fire originate?”

  “It’s hard to tell with the amount of interior damage. There was so much accelerant used that it burned out a big chunk of the center of the building. So we can’t tell yet what floor it started on. All we’re sure of is that it was above the third, given the amount of damage on the lowest floors.”

  “Well, if I can be of any assistance, please let me know.” I produced a business card and passed it over. It had an authentic Homeland Security logo and a fabricated office number that Dennis monitored. The cell number did correspond to the phone in my pocket, though.

  I turned and walked away to retrieve my hatg and return the helmet, pulling out the cell phone and tapping at the screen. Dennis’ face appeared, and I pressed the phone to my ear, since my earbuds were now melted slag in what used to be my duffel bag. “What did you find out?” I asked.

  “A whole lot of nothing. Like we already knew, the hotel’s security footage is literal toast, and the ATM camera across the street mysteriously went on the fritz about two minutes before the first 911 call came in.”

  “Mysteriously.”

  “Yeah, like a mysterious hand went in front of the lens, a mysterious spark came out of the hand, and the camera mysteriously didn’t work anymore,” Dennis said.

  “Magic,” I said, nodding.

  “Yup.”

  “That sounds reminiscent of what the young boy said he saw at Oliver’s the night he died. Bright flashes of light. Perhaps you could—”

  “Check traffic cams in the area to see if I can find a black Maserati anywhere near the hotel before the fire? Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll hit you back. The address of your new hotel is in your phone. Your clothes are being delivered in two hours.”

  “I have another old acquaintance to visit. I will go chat with her, then go to my hotel to see my new threads, as you kids say.”

  “Okay, one—I’m not a kid. I’m a sentient bundle of super-genius electrons. And two—pretty sure nobody says ‘threads’ anymore. Not since 1940, anyway.”

  “What’s seven decades between friends?” I asked. I took the phone down from my ear and tapped a query into the device’s map function. It popped up the name of my next destination—Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo. It was time to visit my old friend the voodoo priestess.

  5

  The walls of Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo pressed in on my massive shoulders. Tourist-trap tchotchkes and bundles of decorative beads and herbs hung from spikes on the slatted display wall, and bookshelves dominated one entire side of the store. I ducked to avoid a grinning sugar skull hanging from the ceiling and addressed the young man behind the counter. He was a thin black man with an afro broader than his shoulders, bobbing his head to the reggae music that rumbled through the shop, providing a deep undercurrent to both conversation and commerce. He was reading a tattered Shadowman graphic novel, oblivi
ous even to my decidedly stealth-less approach.

  “I am here to see Madison,” I said, trying to smile to soothe the young man as he jumped at my words. My smile was about as soothing as it normally is, and he slipped off the backless stool he was sitting on to stagger back. He knocked into a display of incense, then whirled around to catch the spinning rack before it spilled all its contents on the ground.

  “I’m sorry, who are you?” he asked.

  “I am an old friend of Madison’s. Please tell her I am here.” I handed him one of my cards. Not the one with Homeland Security on it. The one that is just my name, Adam Franks, and my cell number.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he started. “We don’t have anyone—”

  I leaned forward, snarling at the young man. His dark skin turned ashen, and I said, “Do not play with me, child. I am here to see Madison, and you can tell her I am here, or I can injure you and find her myself. I would prefer not to do that, but you have a decision to make.”

  He backed up against a wall of herbs, incense, dried chicken feet, and other conjuring supplies and spun around to make sure nothing fell to the floor. Since I knew Madison kept the real supplies behind the counter, I didn’t blame him for being nervous. I stood, waiting like a silent sentinel, until he turned back to face me.

  “Well?” I packed as much threat into one syllable as I knew how, and that is not an inconsiderable amount. The young man gulped and pointed toward the back of the store. I followed his finger with my gaze, and my eyes lit on a narrow passage covered with multi-hued silks, a festoon of colored fabric forming a camouflaged door into Madison’s work and stockroom.

  “Thank you,” I said, nodding at the boy. “You can call her and tell her Adam is coming back. Or I can surprise her, but we both know that is not the best option.”

  He gave a nod in return and picked up the telephone, pressing an intercom button and saying, “There’s a giant on his way back to see you. He says his name is Adam. I’m sorry, I couldn’t…okay.”