by Poppy Brite
After the cops left, she had gone straight to the bank, then scored the Tuesday morning and afternoon editions of the Times-Picayune. Now she was lying on top of seven thousand dollars reading every article and squib and photo caption, looking for more clues from Zach. Her fingers were smudged with cheap black ink. She paid special attention to the weird news, but it was midsummer in New Orleans and there was plenty of genuinely strange shit going on.
But could anyone really shoot himself five times with five different guns? Eddy frowned. It didn’t seem possible.
She picked up the paper again and reread the article, and a bell went off in her head. Zach’s mother’s maiden name had been something Cajun. She was pretty sure it was Rigaud. The other fake story had had a byline of Joseph something-or-other. Joseph was Zach’s father’s name.
Eddy thought these obscure references to the people who had spent fourteen years abusing him strange, sad, and slightly perverse, but there they were. And this improbable item had his scent all over it, from the gibe at trigger-happy rednecks to the corny patois. “Even if I should miss everything by a mile, no, cherie?” What the fuck was that supposed to mean?
No, Cherie … N … C …
She got up and pawed through the books Zach and the Secret Service had left, but of course there was no road atlas. Either Zach had never had one, or he’d taken it himself, or They had snagged it, maybe hoping he’d plotted his escape route in yellow highlighter. She should have gotten a map of North Carolina yesterday, when Zach’s first clue appeared in the paper.
Eddy pulled on a pair of denim cutoffs and selected a black T-shirt from the pile Zach had left behind. An artfully torn rag printed with the Bauhaus-like logo of Midnight Sun, a dreadful Gothic sextet that had played around the Quarter clubs last year, then disappeared into whatever void was reserved for truly bad bands. She couldn’t imagine why Zach had the shirt, unless he had fucked one of the band members. Probably he had; they’d all been beautiful and stupid.
Those faithful old twin parasites, anger and pain, tried to worm up inside her. Eddy pushed them back down. Never mind who Zach had fucked. She had put up with it and called herself his friend. If she really was his friend, then she had to stay several steps ahead of his enemies, or try anyway.
Outside, the daily cloudburst had come and gone, and the streets were still steaming. Trash piles at the back doors of bars and restaurants gave off a mélange of smells: stale beer, rotting vegetables, fishbones touched with grease and cayenne. She passed a bushel basket of oyster shells still slick with the mollusks’ gluey residue, and caught a whiff of the salty seawater odor that always made her wonder for an instant if she needed a bath.
I was going to shower before I came out, Eddy remembered. I probably smell a little like old oyster shells myself. But it didn’t matter. Nobody was going to get close enough to her to care, and she had more important business to worry about.
A few blocks up Chartres was a used-book store Eddy and Zach had often frequented together. They could spend hours in there, enveloped in the delicately dusty, dry, alluring scent of books, poring over leather-bound volumes with gilt-edged pages, stacks of ancient magazines, battered paperbacks whose corners were rounded and softened with age. The proprietor, an old Creole lady who smoked a fragrant pipe and read incessantly, never seemed to mind having them natter and browse.
But when Eddy asked for a U.S. atlas, the old lady shook her head. “Maps from the 1920s would be useless to you, no, chère? Try the Bookstar by Jax Brewery or one of the chains up on Canal.”
“Okay, I guess I will.”
Eddy turned to go, but the old lady must have seen some fleeting sadness in her face, for she put a wrinkled hand on Eddy’s arm and stopped her. The skin of her palm was cool and faintly silken, and three gaudy rings sparkled on her gnarled fingers. “Where is that handsome young man you come in with?”
“He’s, uh …” Eddy stared at the old lady’s hands, at the stacks of books on the counter. “He had to leave town.”
“Love trouble?”
“Law trouble.”
“Ahhh.” The old lady nodded sadly. “For him, burn a green candle and a yellow one. Are you in trouble too?”
“Maybe.”
“For you, take an egg and … Have you been questioned by a policeman?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Well …” Eddy tried to tally broad blue backs and sharp gray suits in her head. “Just one,” she said, reasoning that Agent Cover was the only cop who had really questioned her.
“Write his name on an egg,” the old lady advised her, “and throw the egg up on your roof. Make sure it breaks. The police will not return.”
“Okay,” said Eddy, genuinely grateful. She needed any edge she could get. “Thank you. I will.”
“Mais non. The poor boy. He is so beautiful, so full of the spirit of life.”
“Yes,” Eddy agreed. “That he is.”
“But always there will be some sort of trouble for him, I think. There is a Creole saying … he has le coeur comme un artichaud.”
Eddy fumbled for her high school French. “A heart like an artichoke?”
“Oui. He has a leaf for everyone, but makes a meal for no one.”
* * *
After a hot exhaust-choked walk up Peter Street to the bookstore, Eddy cut back through the shady, humid side streets of the Quarter, stopping at a corner market to buy a green candle, a yellow candle, and a carton of eggs. Back home, she locked the door behind her and spread out her new book of maps on the bed.
She found the state of North Carolina and began scanning it closely, paying special attention to the small towns just off the main roads, noting odd names. Here were places called Pumpkin Center, Climax … Deep Gap, Blowing Rock, Bat Cave … Silk Hope, Fuquay-Varina … Missing Mile?
Eddy looked back at the newspaper article. Even if I should miss everything by a mile, no, cherie. Missing Mile, N.C.
That had to be where he was.
But why? The first message had implied he was going on to New York. Why had he decided to stay in the South, in a town so small it must be hard to hide there? And why was he so sure of it that he had sent her a message spelling out its name?
Eddy had a sudden flash of paranoia. He’s met someone. For an instant she was sure of it; she knew it was true. He’s met someone and decided to stay with them, three days after telling me good-bye forever.
But that was silly. There was no way she could know that. And it didn’t seem very likely anyway.
Still … Missing Mile, North Carolina?
She sighed. At least now she knew where he was, or thought she did. Probably tomorrow’s paper would have an article telling her he was happily holed up in the East Village. For now, she would do what she could.
Eddy took an egg out of the carton she’d bought and inscribed AGENT COVER on it in large block letters. Then she went down to the street, took careful aim, and sent the egg hurtling toward the roof of her building.
She smiled as she heard a faint wet splat far overhead, and imagined the egg frying on the hot rooftop just as Cover’s brain must be sizzling with anger that Zach had eluded him.
This is your brain on voodoo, she thought. Any questions?
In his cheerless office on Poydras Street, Absalom Cover appeared to be sitting in his shirtsleeves paging through an old Weekly World News, but in truth he was concentrating on the Bosch case. Cover knew the kid’s file by heart, and now he had the myriad outpourings of Stefan “Phoetus” Duplessis to obsess over as well.
Unfortunately, though Duplessis had proved an extremely tender nut to crack, his concrete knowledge about Bosch didn’t go far beyond a grudging admiration for all the terrible things he had done. There was a Hacker Code of Ethics, Duplessis explained, consisting of four sacred laws: Delete nothing. Move nothing. Change nothing. Learn everything.
Zach Bosch blew the first three laws to hell every time he turned his computer on. Few others i
n his electronic circle knew the extent of Bosch’s crimes; he was careful, and didn’t brag as compulsively as most hackers. He had entrusted Stefan Duplessis with some of this information because Duplessis was a better hardware techie, and could tell him—in purely theoretical terms, of course, probably including diagrams of the theoretical modifications—how to manipulate his system to even greater heights of deviousness. (And also, Cover suspected, because Duplessis wasn’t above a little bending of the Hacker Laws himself.) Some of the exploits he credited Bosch with were so extreme that the other agents refused to believe them.
Agent Cover believed. He was beginning to understand the hacker mindset. It required nerves of steel and could generate feats of flamboyant genius, but it was flawed. It was megalomaniacal. Eventually it would slip up on its own sheer daring, and give itself away.
As if to make that very point, Duplessis had also told them about the article Bosch had supposedly planted in the Times-Picayune. “Goddess Seen in Bowl of Gumbo.” It beat anything in the Weekly World News, that was for sure. This headline, for instance: CLAM OF CATASTROPHE, bannering a story about a giant shellfish that ate deep-sea divers, or some such shit. What sort of oxygen-deprived mind came up with these things?
Cover closed the tabloid wearily, leaned back in his chair, and tugged the knot of his tie loose. At least Bosch had some imagination, if he had really planted that story in the Picayune.
The other hacker swore he had, though the reasons he gave for believing so were flimsy at best. He just “knew” Bosch, Duplessis claimed; this was just his “style.” And he swore up and down that the girl living in Bosch’s apartment, Edwina Sung, had nothing to do with any of it. Agent Cover wondered. Duplessis had obviously known Sung at least long enough to develop a sweaty-palmed, hopeless crush on her.
As of this afternoon, Sung’s records revealed a bank balance of just over three thousand dollars, not an unreasonable figure for a young Asian-American who could afford to live in the French Quarter. Most likely her parents were in some lucrative business and supported her. She had no outstanding credit card balances, owed no taxes, had no police record; her employment history was spotty. Probably she was just another scrap of bohemian flotsam, adrift on the warm alcoholic seas of New Orleans subculture.
But Zach Bosch meant something to her. That much had been plain during today’s raid. They might be accomplices, lovers, or even blood relations—in an old school ID photo they’d found overlooked in his desk, Bosch appeared extremely young, defiant, and faintly Asian. But whatever they were, Cover thought the girl cared enough about Bosch to keep track of his movements if she could. Maybe she even knew where he was now. She ought to be questioned again.
For that matter, her bank records should be examined more closely. A routine balance check wasn’t good enough when a hacker might be involved. They ought to get records of all her transactions for the past month, and see whether she had made any large deposits or withdrawals in the last couple of days.
Frank Norton, the stocky gray-haired agent who had the next cheerless office over, came in and dropped a greasy brown paper bag on his desk. “Here’s that sandwich you wanted.”
“Tuna?”
“No. Egg salad. It was all the cafeteria had left. Don’t you ever go home?”
“Sure. I stopped by a couple days ago. Thanks, Spider.” Norton had had the nickname since his days with the DEA, when he’d managed to get bitten by a tarantula during a drug raid on the docks. He claimed someone had thrown it on him. The drug runners swore the huge hairy spiders lived inside bunches of bananas; every fool knew that, and Norton shouldn’t have stuck his hand in those bananas even if there were five-pound bags of cocaine hidden in them.
Alone again, Cover unwrapped his sandwich. The sulfurous odor of boiled eggs in mayonnaise floated up to him. He hated egg salad. Eating the putrid mush anywhere was bad enough; eating it in New Orleans, where you could get some of the best food in the world, was almost unbearable. But his hands were shaking. He was half-starved.
He took a bite of the sandwich, and a generous glob of egg salad oozed out from between the slices of stale brown bread, hung precariously for a moment, then fell. It left a long curdy streak down Agent Cover’s tie and shirtfront. When he tried to scoop it up, half of it plopped onto his pants.
“Shit, shit, shit.” He crumpled the paper bag furiously, hurled it in the direction of the trash can, missed. These fancy suits he had to wear were damned expensive, and Cover had no idea whether mayonnaise would stain the pants. His wife would know. Maybe he should go home for a while, get a decent meal. He could deal with little Ms. Sung tomorrow.
Fucking eggs. He hated them anyway.
“Let’s get some sheets,” said Trevor. “That mattress is pretty dirty.”
“How about a fan?”
“Yeah, and a coffeepot.”
Zach smirked. “Gee, I feel so domestic.”
“Well, if you don’t want to …” Trevor looked sidelong at Zach, then stared at the floor in embarrassment.
“Hey, hey, joking. I’ve never set up housekeeping with anyone before, is all.”
“It makes you nervous?” A small line appeared between Trevor’s brows as he frowned. It seemed to cost him an effort to understand moods and motivations that would have been immediately obvious to most. Zach guessed Trevor was probably the most weirdly socialized person he had ever met.
“It makes me hyper.”
“Want some Excedrin?”
That was Zach’s favorite thing about weirdly socialized people: anything that popped into their heads usually made it out of their mouths. “No thanks, I’m fine,” he said, and they caught each other’s eye and started laughing.
In the giddy rush that followed waking and more fucking, they had put their clothes on and driven downtown with the idea of getting something to eat. Instead they had wound up in Potter’s Store, wandering the dim, dust-scented aisles, browsing through the shelves crammed full of junk and plunder.
Zach watched Trevor’s hands plunge into a bin of fifty-cent clothing, sorting out only the black items and quickly discarding them, finally selecting a single plain T-shirt. Zach thought of grasping those hands, of turning them over and kissing the palms.
But Potter’s Store was full of old rednecks, mostly the reformed drunks from the Salvation Army who ran the place. Zach supposed they were used to trendy kids thrift-shopping, but he had no desire to attract extra attention. Hell, these people weren’t just Christians, they were probably Republicans. If the right kind of G-man flashed a badge at them, they’d not only tell him anything he wanted to hear, they’d lick his asshole clean while they did it. Goddamn John-Wayne-loving John-Birch-worshiping good country people.
“What are you scowling about?”
“Oh.” He looked up into Trevor’s face and forgot it all. “Nothing.”
Their eyes locked on each other, and for a long moment they might as well have been back in bed, tangled in the sweaty blanket, stewing in one another’s juices. Then Trevor glanced over Zach’s shoulder. “Hey, there’s Kinsey. I bet he’d let us take a shower at his house.”
“Feed us too?”
“Maybe.”
“Go for it.”
Trevor grabbed his coffeepot and Zach his fan, and they slipped through the aisles and homed in on Kinsey’s tall form like two hungry cats who know which porch to go to.
Kinsey sat at his kitchen table and listened to the shower blasting away. It had done so for thirty minutes now, and though the bathroom was way at the other end of the hall, the kitchen windows had begun to fog up. If they went on much longer, his zucchini-mushroom lasagna would be ready to come out of the oven and he would have to eat it by himself. The house was getting unbearably hot and muggy.
He went into the hall and switched on the air-conditioning. From behind the bathroom door he could hear water hitting skin, the rattle of the shower curtain, a sound that could have been a laugh or a sob. Were they making love in the steam and
spray? Were they crying in there?
He did not even try to guess where the nasty-looking cut on Zach’s lip had come from, or why Trevor wasn’t carrying his sketchbook.
Kinsey had been surprised when they came up to him in Potter’s Store all rumpled and bright-eyed and reeking of sex, as obviously connected as if they were clutching hands. Of all the things Kinsey might have predicted for Trevor’s first week in Missing Mile, getting laid was not among them. But he had sent Zach out there, and now here they were. He wondered if he had averted something, or only made the house dangerous for two boys instead of one.
Kinsey hadn’t been feeling very good about his own judgment since yesterday, since hearing that Rima had cracked up her car and died on the highway outside of town. It must have happened right after she left the Sacred Yew. If he hadn’t been worrying about the stupid dinner special, if he’d taken the time to talk to the girl, to ask the right questions, or better yet, to listen …
(“Listen? Ask the right questions?” Terry had raged at him. “You fuckin’ hippie! You caught that bitch with her hand in the fuckin’ till!”
“But maybe if I’d given her the money—”
“THEN SHE WOULD HAVE BOUGHT MORE COKE! Give it up, Kinsey! Give it the fuck UP!”)
In his heart Kinsey knew Rima had probably been a lost cause. But her mindless, meaningless death made him wonder how far his good intentions could reach, how much he could ever do for these lost kids he wanted so much to help on their way.
Well, time would tell. This was Kinsey’s unofficial philosophy on nearly all matters that did not require his immediate attention.
He opened the oven door and poked at the lasagna with a fork. A sullen little cloud of steam rose from its pale greenish surface. It was still a bit wet, but by the time Trevor and Zach finished whatever they were doing in the bathroom, he thought it might be cooked through. Kinsey sliced a loaf of whole-grain bread, spread it with butter, opened a bottle of sweet red wine, and began to brew a pot of strong coffee.
