Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  "I'm looking for something a little younger," Jordan said and, forgetting Clare's lighter had been confiscated, shook out a Camel.

  "Younger than Lady Kneepads?" the transvestite said as he leaned forward and struck a light for Jordan's cigarette.

  In the glare, Jordan couldn't but notice the arch look in his eyes and the easy humor around the toothless mouth. He wasn't as old as Clare'd thought, probably forty, and, with his teeth in, could probably still get laid.

  "I know, you thinking, what's a nice girl like me doin' in a place like this."

  The light went out on the sexy chuckle.

  "Real young," Jordan said. "Tender flesh."

  "We talkin' legal tender?" Lady Kneepads asked.

  Jordan said nothing. He took a drag and glanced back at the door locking the others out. Locking him in.

  "You with vice, baby boy?" Lady Kneepads asked.

  "Not a cop," Jordan said on a stream of smoke. "I just like my women young. And women," he added.

  "No need to be insulting. A lousy hundred bucks don't buy meanness in my book. But you aren't talkin' wimmin, are you, baby? You're talkin' girls. Am I right?"

  "Tender flesh," Jordan repeated.

  "Now, you talking big girls or little girls? Barely legal high school or Parchman-Farm-here-I-come kindergarteners?"

  "By the time they get to high school, they're all whores," Jordan said.

  "And why do you suppose that is, hmmmm?" Lady Kneepads asked.

  "You want another hundred or you want to blow every guy in that alley and still end up with a night's take worth half that?"

  "Lady Kneepads would adore another C-note, but if you insist on being a royal shit, she will demand two."

  The lady held out her hand. Jordan dug out another hundred-dollar bill but didn't give it to her.

  All night Clare'd dragged his butt around the underbelly of a city known for sex and sin and gotten nothing. He'd probably get nothing from this broken-down cocksucker, but at least their transaction was honest: money for information. It beat hell out of hinting to overpaid concierges, lap dancers, and bouncers.

  "You got what I want?" Jordan demanded, flicking the bill in her face.

  Lady Kneepads lowered her hand. "What you want doesn't go around advertising. That kind of thing gets the vice boys all hot and bothered, and they come shut down poor hardworking girls like Lady K. So I can't guarantee you're going to get what you want where I send you. Hearsay says if you go to the Bonne Chance--that's chance, c-h-a-n-c-e--you might hear the pitter-patter of little feet, but that's just what I said, it's hearsay."

  "Hearsay." Jordan spat out the word in frustration.

  "You keep your money. And why don't you take yourself off? I don't have much use for the likes of you anyway. I just took the money--"

  "Because you're a whore."

  "That's right, baby, and a girl's got to live. Bye-bye." Lady K rose effortlessly from her chair and glided to the door with dignity. She threw the bolt and held it open for Jordan. As he passed, she hissed, "You ever come to me for a blow job, I'm goin' to put my teeth in, you got that?"

  Jordan got it.

  Clare held tight to the name Bonne Chance.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Geneva's diaphragm swelled, her throat opened, and she began to sing, "Swing low, sweet chariot, comin' for to carry me home," in her rich contralto voice.

  The gang of thugs shuddered as if they'd been hit by a magic spell. Suddenly they were boys again. Whether it was the music/savage beast connection or the shock of having their victim break into song, Anna couldn't begin to guess.

  While they were momentarily human, Anna said, "That guy that got out of the cab. He's a major pedophile. We've been trying to track him down. A hundred bucks to the guy who tells me where he goes." One of the kids at the end of the arc they'd been tightening around Anna and Geneva forgot they were going to steal all of the money anyway and sprinted off in hopes of earning the hundred dollars. After a brief hesitation, another boy took off after him.

  "Ty!" the most vicious kid, the one who'd threatened rape, shouted after them. The thrill of the chase was as much a draw as the money.

  "Fucking pedophile," the biggest kid, the one Anna'd mistaken for the leader, said. Nobody liked pedophiles but other pedophiles. These kids might be murderers and thieves and God knew what else, but they weren't sick. He turned and looked--wistfully, Anna thought--after the two younger boys. Knowing the scene could go against her and Geneva in the time it takes to change a mind, Anna grabbed the singer's hand and started trotting toward the streetlight on the corner as if she'd never expected anything but cooperation.

  Geneva, still singing but with a softer, almost lullaby sound, trotted obediently along, trusting Anna not to run her off a cliff or slam her into a wall. Sammy was not so sanguine. He darted around to get ahead of his mistress, woofed to let her know he was there, and then ran slightly ahead of them to make sure there were no incidents on his watch.

  Behind them, somebody shouted; then came the thuds of sneakers pounding the sidewalk as the rest of the boys caught up. Or readied to run them down. Either way, Anna was neither slowing nor looking back.

  When they reached the corner, the sidewalk was empty, but for the boys who'd chased Dougie. The two of them were standing half a block down, staring at a door in a wall of cinder block, the side of a four-story windowless structure used for storage or parking. Beside the smaller entrance was a closed steel garage door out of sync with the rest of the wall, clearly an addition in the last few years.

  Anna slowed to a walk, and she and Geneva headed toward the boys. The runners passed them in a cannonade of rubber soles on pavement. For now, at least, the target had been moved from Anna's and Geneva's backs to that of Dougie. Before it could switch back, Anna hailed the one cab rolling down the street and, when it stopped at the curb, helped Geneva in. "Wait for me," she instructed the driver. "I just need to pay these kids."

  Feeling that she had, if not backup, at least an escape route and a witness, she walked to where all five boys had clustered, staring at a door that was painted the same color as the wall and looked as if it had been built to withstand battering rams.

  "Dude went in here," the first boy to run after Dougie told her. "Door's locked." He pounded on it.

  "What's this building?" Anna asked.

  "Where's my money?"

  Anna took out her wallet and removed the bills from it, then slipped it back into the front pocket of her pants. Holding the money, she said, "Warehouse? Or what do they do here?"

  "I want my hundred bucks," the kid said belligerently, and Anna realized that the magic of gospel songs and pedophiles was rapidly wearing off and that the kid probably had no idea what the building was and was damned if he was going to admit it.

  "Twenty, twenty-five, thirty." Anna started counting the bills into his outstretched hand, peeling them off slowly, making the count laborious. The quasi-leader of the gang snatched the cash roughly from her hand.

  "We'll take it all."

  "Suit yourself," Anna said and sprinted for the waiting cab. She hoped to be well away before they got around to counting it. At a guess, there was no more than fifty or sixty dollars. She hadn't meant to cheat them; she'd just said the first number that came into her head.

  When the cab let them out in front of Geneva's home on Ursulines, Jordan was waiting for them, pacing the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette.

  "I phoned," he accused Anna. "Where the fuck have you been? I must have called sixteen times."

  "Sorry," Anna said evenly. She seldom turned her cell phone on, certainly not when she was trying to get work done. Old habits die hard, and she hadn't been in any mood to hurry this one to its death. It was not necessary that she be available to everyone all the time. Answering the phone at the ranger station had been a pain in the ass. Carrying one around to be answered in every conceivable circumstance was odious.

  "Jesus fucking--"

  "Good evening, Jordan,"
Geneva said pointedly.

  "Yeah. Right. Open the fu--open the gate, Anna. We got something we got to do." Leaning down, he snatched up a plastic bag from the shadow of the wall and entrance.

  There was no trace of Clare. Not deep in the sunken eyes, not in the knife-thin lips clamping on a smoke and a curse, not in the bowed shoulders, not in the ruined English of the streets.

  Anna turned her back to unlock the gate, wondering if Clare was still in there at all, or if she'd killed herself in one way or another.

  As soon as the gate swung open, Jordan pushed through, his shoulder bumping Anna's rudely. She held the gate till Geneva was in, then closed and locked it. "Get a move on," Jordan growled over his shoulder.

  "Thank you for a lovely evening," Geneva said dryly as she passed Jordan's door, open now and spilling out light. Anna stepped into the small apartment.

  Jordan closed the door with a kick, dumped his plastic bag beside the computer, and vanished into the bedroom.

  Anna heard the toilet flushing. Mackie, unsure why his mistress had ignored him, stood in the doorway between the two rooms looking first at the bath, then at Anna, as if waiting for an explanation.

  Tired from walking on unnatural surfaces for the past five hours, Anna dropped into the chair in front of the computer. Mackie trotted over, and she scratched his ears. At times like these she envied her fur-bearing friends. It would be so good to eat and sleep and live without complications.

  Jordan reappeared, zipping his fly. "Put on the clothes in the bag," he said. "We've got to check out a place called Bonne Chance. It's a members-only sex club a hooker told me about. Membership can be bought at the door, but they don't like guys showing up stag."

  "It's nearly midnight," Anna said. "Won't they be closed?"

  He shot her a look of such scorn she worried Clare would never survive this night.

  "Right," she said. "Party's just beginning."

  "There's a dress and shoes in the bag. Put them on. Looking like you do will get us noticed. I'm thinking the old hippie thing won't play at a place like the Bonne Chance." He turned back into the bedroom, crossed to the bit of mirror above the battered bureau, and ran a comb through his hair. Then he did something that Anna found too creepy for words. He rubbed his fingers along the edge of his jaw as if testing to see if his beard had grown out enough that he needed a shave.

  She glanced down at her baggy drawers, her cinnamon-and-pepper braid falling across her old shirt like a harbinger of age on Pippi Longstocking. She made no move to do as he asked; instead she said sharply, "Clare!" For a long enough moment that she began to worry, Jordan didn't respond. Finally he turned from his self-inspection and looked at her.

  "Clare Sullivan?" Anna pressed.

  Jordan shook himself the way a horse will when the flies are biting. "Yes," came Clare's whisper.

  Anna told her about the boy thugs, the warehouse, the studio of the long-gone opera singer, Dougie, and the locked metal door.

  Clare didn't move throughout the recital but remained standing in the middle of the bedroom, listening through the open doorway. Mackie, sensing perhaps that his mistress had returned in some indefinable way, trotted over and was sitting, his tail sweeping an arc in the dust on the floorboards, his eyes on her face. Even the dog couldn't reach Clare tonight.

  "No perfume of flowers? No strange hissing drop sound?" Clare asked when Anna'd finished. "Just Dougie and a door?"

  "And the apartment where an opera singer practiced when Candy was at the fancy house." Then Anna remembered the newer garage door cut into the side of the building. Construction. "The hissing thud could have been the sound of a nail gun," Anna said with sudden certainty. "They were doing construction near where Candy was kept."

  "This is post-Katrina New Orleans. Everybody's doing construction," Clare said. "You've got nothing. A door. A creep." Anna watched Clare sink into the dark pools of Jordan's eyes, like the fading smudge of white as an undertow sucks a swimmer into the deep water.

  Clare no longer had the strength to so much as remain on her feet without Jordan. Even with his fury and insolence, Anna doubted either of them had much more time. Anna'd yet to see Clare or Jordan eat. They lived on smoke and disappearing dreams.

  "Change," Jordan snapped.

  Anna stripped off her limp trousers and shirt. "Old hippie, my ass," she grumbled as she picked up the plastic sack from the table and upended it. A dress with straps and spangles and very little else was tangled up with a pair of red high-heeled shoes comprised mostly of more straps.

  "Is this all?" she asked, somewhat dismayed.

  "It's about sex, not coverage." The sound of a match striking brought Anna's attention back to Clare. Not Clare, Jordan. He was lighting up and looking at her in her underpants and little muscle shirt as if he were precisely as male and immoral as Clare had designed him to be.

  Refusing to be intimidated, she peeled off the tank top and, wearing nothing but panties covering too much to be considered fashionable, stepped into the abbreviated dress.

  "Is this yours?" she asked, threading the strappy top over her arms and arranging it so she was not visibly hanging out anywhere. "I mean, where did you get a dress and shoes in the middle of the night?"

  "Delilah gave me the dress. The heels are Star's. Her feet are smaller. I figured they'd fit you better."

  He was staring at her with enough heat in his eyes to convince the most discerning audience member that he harbored a Y chromosome.

  "Would you stop pumping imaginary testosterone for a minute?" Anna snapped irritably. "I feel enough of a fool without a fake Lothario ogling me with fake lust. Save it for the matinee crowd."

  "Hurry it up," Jordan said. "I'll wait outside. Do something with your hair. You look like a mountain woman after a bad couple of winters." He left. Mackie followed close on his heels, looking frightened and emitting low whining sounds.

  Finding the insult amusing, Anna finished buckling on the high-heeled sandals, then went to find the mirror and comb he'd been using. The shoes couldn't be called comfortable by any stretch of the imagination, but they fit well enough. Once she suppressed the irritation at being crippled by fashion, she managed to walk with a modicum of grace. The braid she undid and combed out with her fingers. She'd done it up wet, and it fell in a silver and red rippling cascade.

  It might have been sexy and it might have been Bride of Frankenstein, but that was as good as it was going to get. Wishing she had a purse for key and cell phone, she palmed them and joined Jordan on the narrow walk.

  "In low light you don't look half bad," he said.

  "Thank you," Anna said dryly. Handing her cell and keys to him, she said, "Carry these, would you? Men think women have penis envy. Not so. We have pocket envy."

  He stowed them in the pocket of his pants. "Come on, Mackie. Inside."

  The little dog, usually friendly and obedient, was so anxious Anna could see the whites of his eyes gleaming around the brown irises as he skittered sideways and, tail down, ran away from Jordan's reaching hands.

  "Come on, guy." A touch of Clare's sweetness softened Jordan's voice, but the dog wouldn't come. Jordan straightened up. "He'll be okay in the yard. Let's beat it."

  Anna didn't argue. The yard was dog-proof and the night cool and pleasant. There was even drinking water if Mackie didn't mind turtles swimming in it.

  Jordan preceded her down the narrow overgrown walk and, with a rusty clanking, unlocked the gate. "God damn it!" he hissed as Mackie darted past Anna, between his feet, and out into the street. He made a grab for the animal, but Mackie was having none of it. He looked as if it pained him to run and disobey, and the angrier Jordan got, the more tragic the little dog's face, but he wouldn't be caught, and he wouldn't go back into the safety of the yard.

  "So be it," Jordan snarled. "You're on your own."

  Anna could tell Mackie was not going to give in, not for Jordan and not for her.

  They walked down Ursulines toward Rampart looking for a cab
. Mackie followed, but never close enough to risk capture. Anna wondered if he sensed danger or the nearness of his children or the pain of Clare hidden beneath the carapace of Jordan or if he was simply scared and didn't want to be left alone. "Phone," she demanded of Jordan.

  "What--"

  "Just give me the damn phone," Anna said exasperatedly. She punched the speed dial. Geneva answered, hoarse and cranky with sleep. Anna told her about Mackie, and the crankiness vanished.

  "I'll try and get him," Geneva promised.

  Past Dauphine, Jordan flagged down a cab. He didn't hold the door open for Anna, and she didn't expect him to. "Where to?" the driver asked.

  Jordan told him.

  If he knew it was a sex club, he didn't make any of the cracks.

  "That your dog?" he asked after they'd driven half a block.

  Anna turned in the seat, aware that her dress hiked up nearly to her crotch when she did, and looked out the back window. Mackie was chasing the taxi.

  Anna started to tell the cabbie to stop. "No!" Jordan barked. He grabbed her wrist hard and muttered, "He'll go home on his own."

  But he didn't. Stop signs at most corners in the residential area kept the cab from getting up any serious speed, and, whenever Anna turned, the dog was determinedly running after the car, sometimes a block behind, sometimes two. Finally they lost him.

  Minutes afterward the driver stopped on a street that looked more industrial than anything else, the buildings high and without redeeming features.

  "There." The driver pointed to a nice-looking young man sitting on a tall stool in front of a nondescript door into a windowless wall. The door was open, and faint light shone onto the sidewalk. There was no sign reading BONNE CHANCE, just the number 69 in silver on the side of the building.

  Jordan paid the driver. Anna stepped out of the cab, flashing more leg than she was accustomed to, and oriented herself with difficulty. Spending the short ride looking over her shoulder worrying about a Lhasa apso, she'd lost her sense of direction.

  "I think this is the front of the back where Geneva and I were," she said as Jordan came to the sidewalk.