by Maureen Tan
I did as he said.
“If you like, I can step back so you can pick up his gun,” I offered.
“Yeah, why don’t you just do that for me?”
I took a step backward, then another, and Beauprix put himself between me and the fallen man.
The crimson mask had been knocked nearly off the second carrion bird’s face and it hung, tilted, covering one cheek and most of his chin. It was covered with soil.
Beauprix kept his own gun trained on the man as he bent to retrieve the gun. Then he backed away a few feet, taking me with him. In one smooth motion, he expelled the clip, checked the chamber and put the gun on the sidewalk behind him.
Then he moved forward again.
“Flat on the ground,” he ordered.
He gave the carrion bird a push with his foot to help him into the correct posture, pulled his arms behind him and secured his wrists with handcuffs.
On the porch, my attacker screamed again.
“Think you can call your dog off?”
I didn’t think I could, but I gave it shot. I stepped away from Beauprix, and went around to the railing on Lucky’s side of the porch. I tapped the bars, trying to get his attention.
“Lucky, come here, boy. Come on, Lucky.”
Amazingly, the dog stopped mauling the man on the porch, turned his head in my direction and tilted it as I called again.
“Come on, Lucky!”
The dog trotted over to the railing and I told him what a good boy he was. As he wagged his tail, I told him that I owed him my life. Or a raw steak. Or maybe just an extra few pork-filled steamed buns.
And as I babbled relief inspired nonsense to a one-eyed red dog, a well-chewed carrion bird stumbled off the porch, down the stairs and into Beauprix’s waiting arms.
Other cop cars arrived, apparently called by Beauprix before he’d left his car. At some point, early on, someone had draped a blanket around my bare shoulders and, though I hadn’t realized I was cold, I appreciated its warmth.
Headlights, Mars lights and flashlights lit the scene. But, unlike the fire, no curious neighbors had arrived to witness this particular show. And I imagined the few there were peering out from behind torn curtains, sagging blinds and through cracks in boarded-up windows.
An ambulance arrived, adding red lights to the blue, and I watched a medic put a pressure bandage around my attacker’s arm. I moved my eyes away from him and looked over at his accomplice. Another medic had put a thick pad over the man’s ear and was securing it by wrapping gauze bandage around his head.
No doubt these two were the same men who had attacked me on Bourbon Street. That, I had told the police. And now that it had happened twice, the investigating officer agreed, there was no question that I was the target. I’d given them my real name and age, and left it to Beauprix to explain whatever needed to be explained about my living situation or appearance.
What I hadn’t told the police, because they didn’t need to know, was that the carrion birds’ faces had plagued my sleep nightly. That their last attack had inspired unpredictable thrusts of terror in the middle of the day that compelled me to glance anxiously over my shoulder. But without their masks, my attackers looked unremarkable, the kind of people that one passed on the street every day. The pair who lay handcuffed to the gurneys as they were loaded into the ambulance were nothing more than thick-necked, middle-aged white men. As common as the brown mutts that roamed the streets with Lucky.
My attackers would be interrogated, a uniformed black cop had told me. His muscular arms and shoulders suggested that he lifted weights, and he had, unconsciously, clenched his fists as he assured me that New Orleans cops didn’t much like men who terrorized women. Especially for no reason.
I had smiled and thanked him. But the men who were in custody struck me as hired muscle. Brutal, brainless muscle. Nothing more. And I doubted they even knew the identity of the man who was paying them.
It had to be Uncle Tinh. But why? I asked myself repeatedly. Why? Had I stumbled too close to a secret with the very first drawings I showed him? Perhaps discovered something that he hadn’t expected me to find?
Between answering questions from Beauprix and his cronies, I continued reassuring Lucky, warning everyone else away. Lucky didn’t seem inclined to move from the privacy of his porch. Which was just as well. There were too many guns, too many cops in the yard, walking up and down the driveway, going in and out of the house. The cops would, very rightly, react quickly to a perceived threat. Even if that threat came from a dog who had saved my life.
As Beauprix ventured up onto the front porch with a flashlight, I stood and spoke to Lucky again, actually sticking my fingers through the porch rail and stroking his head. My fingers encountered something sticky on the dog’s muzzle. Blood, I realized. Beauprix picked up the battered mask, looked down at it, then put it in a plastic bag. I noticed that its feathers were also clumped with blood.
Thankfully, the blood wasn’t mine.
“You said you kicked the knife out of the guy’s hand and it fell through a hole,” Beauprix said to me. “Can you tell me where?”
Slowly he played the flashlight’s beam over the shattered boards of the porch floor, moving from gaping hole to gaping hole.
“There,” I said.
Lucky remained calm, ignoring Beauprix, wagging the stump of his tail and the back half of his body as I continued to pet him.
Beauprix flattened himself out on the floor, dangled his head and an arm into the hole, and lifted out a knife using two fingers. It looked as nasty as I remembered it. Long, slim and sharp. A filleting knife, I thought, shuddering. This time there’d been no camera. This time, they’d meant business.
As Beauprix bagged the knife, I thought I was lucky that my blood wasn’t on it, either.
Only when the other vehicles left taking the carrion birds with them, only when Beauprix and I were the only humans left near the house, did Lucky come off the porch. He trotted down the front steps, paused for a moment, then walked directly to me. Ignoring Beauprix, who was again standing by my side, he butted his thick forehead against my hand. I patted him, reached to scratch his muscular neck. He turned his head, gave my hand a quick swipe with a warm, wet tongue. And then he walked away. His bouncy, three-legged gait carried him across the street and into the cover of the neutral ground.
Chapter 22
On the way back up to the second floor, I apologized to Beauprix for not returning his calls.
“I was…distracted…by a fire,” I said. “I’ll tell you about it…after. Okay?”
Beauprix already knew there was something more urgent on my mind, something I needed to do first. And then, I had promised, I would give him the details of my day.
“Okay,” he said as he used his flashlight to pick his way carefully along the path through the front area of the house. “Though it’s just as well you didn’t answer the last time I called. That’s when I started worrying. And decided I’d better drive over here, find out what was going on.”
“Good thing you did,” I said.
We started up the stairs with him in the lead. He was wearing jeans and a maroon dress shirt and, without being told, stayed carefully to the middle of every step.
“Yeah, good thing.” Then Beauprix chuckled softly. “On the way here, I kept telling myself how paranoid I was being. That you’d be pissed as all get-out that I was being so overprotective.”
“Hey, Anthony?” I said.
He half turned to look down at me, keeping the flashlight on the steps in front of him.
“Next time I get pissy, you just remind me of this little incident.”
He grinned.
“You can be sure of it.”
I didn’t want to go back to the second-floor bathroom. Ever. But I forced myself to do it. Because I knew that the irrational fear I now felt—the fear that was simply a reaction to a trauma—could, unless confronted, be crippling.
I was in no danger I told myself.
And, in the more rational part of my mind, I knew it.
But the trip down the narrow balcony was, anyway, enough to make me start trembling. To clutch the blanket that covered my shoulders closer to me. To hesitate when I put my hand on the doorknob.
“I can go first,” Beauprix said.
He was standing just behind me and I could hear sympathy in his voice.
Right now, sympathy was the last thing I needed. This was no time to back away, to give up. I needed to confront my fear, to control it. Needed to prove to myself that the stuff of nightmares no longer lurked in the shadows.
This was the best way for me to do it.
I took a deep breath, pushed the door open and stepped inside. Then I waited until Beauprix had cleared the doorway and asked him to shut the door. And lock it.
Trapped! my fearful, exhausted mind wailed.
I ignored it.
I had borrowed Beauprix’s flashlight and concentrated on keeping the beam steady as I played it against every corner of the room. Lingering in the space between the two tall, narrow sets of shelves on the far wall. Showing myself that what I feared was no longer there.
Another cop had taken my statement, gone to check out the bathroom. So this was the first time Beauprix had been on the second floor of the odd little house. He’d followed me silently through the bedroom. And now he stood silent again, lingering near the doorway, allowing me to view the room unimpeded for as long as I needed to.
But when I stopped moving the light around the room, he stepped in close behind me, close enough that I could feel the heat of his body against my back. He reached around me to put his right hand over mine, so that we both held the flashlight. Then he guided the beam to the floor, used its light to examine the path from my attacker’s hiding place to the door.
He saw the broken tray, spatters of cooled wax, broken candles scattered across the floor. Then he saw the charred remains of my shirt. And I felt, as much as heard, his quick intake of breath.
Then he moved our hands so that the light shone through a gap in the shower curtain, into the deep bathtub. And it revealed…absolutely nothing. But still we stood there, staring at the tub.
I couldn’t help myself. I imagined what would have happened to me if I hadn’t noticed the man who’d been waiting for me, knife ready. If I hadn’t found a way to escape his trap.
Beauprix’s thoughts seemed to follow a similar line. He shuddered, folded his arms around me, pulling me against him. The flashlight’s beam bounced uselessly against a wall as he pressed his lips to the top of my head.
“If anything had happened to you—”
He didn’t finish his sentence, just hugged me tighter.
At that moment I wanted nothing more than his arms around me. I wanted him to hold me forever, to protect me, to keep me safe. And that, I was sure, was exactly what he wanted to do.
He held me for another moment, leaned to brush his lips against my cheek, then tucked his face in close to my neck and shoulder as he spoke.
“I saw you tonight. Half naked. Unarmed. Outnumbered. And still fighting.”
His voice cracked, and he took a deep breath. Exhaled slowly. Then he straightened and stepped back. Just a little. But he kept his arms around me.
When he spoke again, he almost managed to sound irritated.
“Damn it, little girl, you just don’t know how to give up, do you?”
I turned in his arms, looked up into his handsome face and smiled mostly because he was such a lousy actor.
“That really pisses you off, doesn’t it?” I said lightly.
Then I put my hands flat against his chest and gave him a little shove in the direction of the door.
“Get out of here,” I said. “Go smoke a cigarette if you have to. And let me take my shower.”
“I’ll wait right outside the door.”
He said it like it was a question.
And though I knew the shower was safe, I didn’t argue.
Not much later, I was warm and clean and dressed in the sweats I’d taken into the bathroom with me during my first attempt at showering.
Beauprix and I sat on my bed, talking. With candles glowing on the nightstand. Terrifically romantic, except that I was under the covers with my back propped against the headboard and was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt. And Beauprix was sitting cross-legged on top of the blankets, facing me, still fully dressed in jeans and a dress shirt.
The conversation was anything but romantic.
“I ran all those prints from off the teacups. Nothing surprising about the ones belonging to the Young Businessmen—every one of them had a record. Petty crimes, mostly. Coupled with the license plates you gave me, we have current addresses on all of them. None of them have outstanding warrants. But when this is done, we’ll pick them up anyway. For questioning. Who knows, maybe someone in the Benevolent Society will be willing to testify against them in exchange for a reduced sentence on the trafficking charges. Without that, we only have your account of the extortion incident at the Red Lotus, and if no one else will admit it happened…”
He paused for a moment, frowned, then shrugged. That bridge, apparently, would be crossed when we came to it.
“Anyway, the big surprise was Vincent Ngo. When we ran his prints against the FBI’s database, we got back the kind of result that sets off red flags, probably in any local P.D. in the nation. The kind of non-information that is a clear sign that some federal agency is mucking around on your turf.”
I nodded, understanding, idly wondering what kind of information a local police department would get if they queried my prints.
“So I set Remy on our little problem—he hates the Feds, by the way—and by the end of the day, he’d come up with something. Your boy was somehow connected to the FBI.”
My eyes widened, but he lifted a hand to stop any questions.
“There’s more. I know a gal who works for the FBI here, in their local office. She has a weakness for one of the more interesting recreational activities that New Orleans has to offer. She got herself caught in a raid about a year back—wasn’t doing anything illegal herself, but there were reporters outside and that kind of publicity would have been career-ending. So I let her slip out the back door. Today, I called in that favor. Based on your assessment of his personality, I figured Vincent Ngo for a snitch. I was wrong.”
He paused dramatically, leaned back on his elbows as he stretched out his legs so his stockinged feet were near my hips.
I pinched his big toe.
“Give,” I said.
“Turns out your Vincent is an FBI agent, working undercover.”
Later—when the candles had burned down to nothing—Beauprix moved his head onto the pillow next to mine. With his gun on the nightstand, ready to fend off any attack, he lay on his back on top of the blankets.
Earlier—when the last candle still flickered—I’d looked around my bedroom at all the sketches I’d hung on the wall. Faces of enemies and of friends. Faces of people I didn’t trust. And those that I did. Faces of people that I’d liked and loved and respected.
Then that flame died, leaving me in darkness. Tears that I’d fended off all night slid, warm and silent, down my cheeks. And in the cover of darkness, I was finally able to tell the only person I knew I could trust what I’d been thinking for hours.
“Tinh Vu, who has loved me like I was his own blood, sent those men after me,” I said, and I struggled to keep my voice from betraying my tears. “And Vincent Ngo, who my every instinct tells me not to trust, is one of the good guys. And Tommy, Mr. Yang, the others—my God, Anthony—how could so many decent, hardworking people be trafficking human cargo?”
He lay very still.
“You’re exhausted,” he said. “Forget about it for now. We’ll think about it tomorrow.”
Unbidden, my stepmother’s favorite movie flashed to mind. But in this Beauprix-inspired remake, he’d said Scarlett’s lines. And the image prompted the faintest o
f smiles.
I rolled onto my side, moved my hands beneath the blanket so they were tucked in next to Beauprix.
“G’night, Anthony,” I said.
I let my body relax. Encouraged my breathing to become slower, deeper. Began to drift.
He must have thought I was soundly asleep.
“Don’t worry, little girl,” he whispered. “I’ll keep you safe for as long as you’ll let me.”
Sleep had become more urgent than talk. But my drowsing mind insisted that I make one thing clear.
“I’m not a child,” I muttered.
I felt him shift and his lips brushed my forehead.
“Yes, Lacie. I know.”
I awakened after no more than two hours of sleep. Sleep that had been plagued by fragmented dreams—scattered images, really—which now I couldn’t recall. But beyond vague feelings of frustration, I felt refreshed. As if I’d had a full night’s sleep—an event that I had experienced so rarely of late that it, too, was hard to remember. Obviously, I was developing a teenager’s resilience, I thought to myself with a smile, and I hoped it would persist when I went back to being my twenty-something self.
Beauprix’s eyes had snapped open the moment I stirred, and I’d taken a moment to stroke my hand along his cheek. And to think a few lust-driven thoughts, which I promptly dismissed in favor of a shower. I didn’t at the moment need the complexities of a new relationship. Even with a man as tempting as Anthony Beauprix.
“Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’m just going to the bathroom.”
He was just tired enough that my announcement set off no alarms, and he closed his eyes again.
So I gathered my clothing and, without an escort, walked along the balcony to the bathroom. I searched the lingering darkness for anything that might indicate a threat, but saw only birds and the dog pack wandering the empty lot next door. Not a surprise. Despite his concern over my remaining in the house last night and his insistence that he stay to protect me, Beauprix and I had both agreed that it was unlikely that another attack would be organized in the space of a few hours. I had a day, I thought to myself. Perhaps two. And then, until Uncle Tinh was behind bars, I would constantly watch my back.
