“Did you see her leave?” Nick asked.
The bouncer shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “I didn’t see nothing.”
“Okay,” Nick said. “We can ask the police to review the video. Might make a difference, you letting a minor in and all.”
“Come on, dude,” he said. “Why you got to be like that?”
“I only know one way to be,” Nick said. “How about you?”
“Fuck me,” he said. “Okay. Okay. She left with Matt.”
“And who the hell is Matt?” Kendall asked.
“One of our bartenders,” he said. “They said they were headed to the Marigny to get a tattoo.”
“Perfect,” Kendall said. “Just goddamn perfect.”
The bartender shrugged and held out his hand in the tip-me gesture that seemed like a natural reflex. Nick kept on moving right past him, Kendall following, complaining of blisters wearing on her heels. “Six hundred dollars,” she said. “Jimmy Choos. Italian leather. Can you believe that?”
“You want me to call you a cab?” he said. “I’ll call you when I find her.”
“Not a chance,” she said. “About time I do one thing right.”
“What all did you do wrong?”
“Since college?”
Nick nodded, hands in his jacket as they kept walking toward Esplanade.
“How ’bout everything?”
* * *
—
There was only one tattoo shop that catered to all-night walk-ins in the Marigny. Kaitlyn had been there, a fresh Polaroid of the girl and her new tattoo pinned on a wall of thousands. The artist, a heavyset woman with sleeve tats and short hair dyed blue, said she’d left two hours back.
“Who was with her?”
“Some bartender,” she said. “Can’t remember his name. Real sleaze. He does work for some real creeps in the Quarter.”
“Who?”
“Oh,” she said. “I don’t know names, but you know…drug dealers, pimps, and bookies.”
Kendall’s face seemed to drain of color, her mouth hanging open, not sure what to say. The room was dark and smelled of weed and incense. Thick look-books of tattoo designs sat atop a long counter.
“What is that?” Kendall asked, ripping the Polaroid from the wall. “What did you scrawl on her rib cage?”
The tattoo artist leaned back into a worn-out sofa, smoking a cigarette. She grinned. “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Kendall asked, arms crossed over her chest.
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” Nick said.
The artist grinned wider, nodding, and pointed the lit end of her cigarette at him.
“Great,” Kendall said. “Just fucking great.”
Nick looked down at the worn checkerboard floor and up at the tattoo artist. “You don’t happen to know where they went next?”
“No,” the woman said. “But I saw how they left.”
* * *
—
“Do you think that woman was lying?” Kendall asked. “A candy van? That sounds almost made up. Like an evil Willy Wonka. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“I have,” Nick said. “They’re all over the Quarter. They sell weed in lollypops and cookies. They claim they don’t have THC, but they get busted by the cops all the damn time. It’s just a mobile front for selling dope. Sometimes it’s real dope, and sometimes it’s just candy.”
“I am a parental failure,” she said. “My daughter got into a stranger’s van for candy.”
“Weed candy.”
“And how does that make it better?”
“Weed isn’t heroin,” Nick said. “And weed does have some medicinal benefits.”
“Did you miss the part about a stranger in New Orleans,” she said. “At what time?”
“Nearly three.”
“And what time is it now?”
“About five,” Nick said.
“Jesus,” she said. “Can we sit down? My feet are killing me.”
They found a little bench outside The Spotted Cat. The jazz bar was closed now, just a smattering of cabs and Ubers running down Frenchman Street. A few clubs still playing music, people dancing or walking crooked down the sidewalks. The Marigny before The Storm had been a quiet little pocket of good clubs and bars away from the Quarter. Now the Marigny was worse than the Quarter, loud and obnoxious with the chug-and-vomit crowd. He wished they’d all just stayed on Bourbon Street where they belonged.
“So,” she said. “This can’t be it? This can’t be your job.”
“No,” he said. “I’m in a band called The Revelators, and I have a prewar blues radio show on WWOZ.”
“I mean a real job,” she said. “What do you really do?”
“I loaf,” Nick said. “I pick up some money when I need it. I like to play music. I like to relax. I like to have a good time.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all.”
“Do you have a trust fund?”
Nick laughed and pulled out a pack of Marlboros, firing up a smoke. He liked New Orleans best early in the morning, just before dawn, when everything was starting to grow still and quiet. He remembered being here a few days after the city flooded while everyone was evacuated. You could stand on Rampart Street and hear the wind shooting down the streets and around the buildings. As still as it had been since the city began three hundred years ago.
“Are you married?”
“Nope.”
“Divorced?”
“Nope.”
“Gay?”
“You mean extremely happy?”
“Are you a homosexual?” she asked.
“Is it the boots?” he said. “Too Village People?”
“No,” she said. “Where I’m from, there aren’t too many unmarried straight men. Unless they’ve been divorced. I got married at twenty-two. I had fourteen fucking bridesmaids. Brantley was Colonel Reb at Ole Miss. So much fun. The life of the party.”
“I got my master’s in Southern Studies at Ole Miss,” Nick said. “My thesis was on Sonny Boy Williamson.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“His real name was Alex Miller,” Nick said. “Recorded for Chess Records in the ’50s. You know the song ‘Nine Below Zero’?”
She shrugged. “You probably didn’t attend too many Greek philanthropy events.”
Nick shook his head, tapping the ash from the cigarette on his boot heel. “What’s your husband like now?”
“Still the life of the party.”
“Where’s the party?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “It seems to have ended several years ago. The dumb bastard didn’t get the memo.”
Nick smoked the cigarette, watching a man and woman leaving a corner bar. They walked hand-in-hand back toward Esplanade as the light just started to go from black to gray. The girl’s shoulder blades looked sharp and dangerous, bony as hell under an open-back silk top. Nick leaned back on the bench and stretched his arms out wide, the old football injuries cracking and popping under his jacket.
“My tattooed daughter is lost in a weed van.”
Nick looked down at his cellphone, scrolling through some numbers, endless contacts and names and addresses. He knew some folks who knew some folks who knew where those weed drivers set up shop.
“So, what now…we just wait?” Kendall asked.
“How are your feet?”
“They hurt like hell.”
“Can you go one more mile?”
Kendall leaned down and unstrapped her heels, standing up and tossing them into the nearby garbage. Nick watched her and tossed his spent cigarette down to the sidewalk, crushing it under his boot. He recalled a night a long time ago, maybe twenty ye
ars back, watching the sunrise through the windows at Café Brasil as the Iguanas played an endless set. Full of Dixie with a young girl at his side. Now the bar was gone, the girl was married, and the Iguanas had all but broken up.
“I admire your style,” he said. “But around here, you better watch where you step.”
* * *
—
“What is she trying to do?” Kendall asked. “What is she trying to prove?”
“She’s a teenager,” Nick said. “What were you trying to prove as a teenager?”
“I knew you’d ask that,” Kendall said. “Damn you. My daughter is nothing like me.”
They’d followed Royal Street back the way they’d come, all the way to Canal Street, where Nick spotted the van painted up in a tableau of tokers: Cheech and Chong, Willie Nelson, Bob Marley, Shaggy and Scooby.
A bone-skinny white dude with dreads sat behind the wheel listening to some Peter Tosh, dark sunglasses on, looking as if he might be asleep. Nick tapped the window and the man let down the glass. “Yeah?”
“You pick up some parties in the Marigny a few hours ago?”
“Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t.”
Nick looked both ways on Canal, the street empty besides some homeless folks lying against the storefronts. He grabbed the man’s hair and knocked his face against the wheel, honking it twice. The stoner’s sunglasses cracked and remained crazy across his sweating face.
“You want to get killed?” the man said.
“By a guy who sells candy to kids?”
“You know who I am?” he said, trying to look tough.
Nick reached through the window and took off the man’s busted sunglasses and tossed them to the pavement. He held out his hand for Kendall’s phone and she handed it to him. He showed the lollypop man the pic. “You know her?”
“That girl was wild,” he said. “Making out with her boyfriend in the van, doing a little striptease for the rest of the kiddies.”
“Where is she?”
“She paid,” he said. “And I put her ass out.”
“Where?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Nick snatched up the man’s dreads and opened up the door to drag him out. He put his hands to his face and said, “Rampart Street.”
“Where?” Nick said, looking up at Kendall as he dragged the man half out of the van.
As Nick got him down on the pavement, the stoner gave him the cross streets, near Conti, and right near the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.
“I should kick you right in the tail bone,” Nick said.
“I never touched her.”
“Maybe not.” Nick pointed to the tableau on the side of the van and the drawing of a red-eyed Shaggy and Scooby. “But you just ruined my childhood.”
* * *
—
They stood on the corner of Conti and Rampart, nothing around them. Nick picked up a pair of flip-flops for Kendall at an all-night grocery on Canal. She’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail and stood, arms akimbo, by the steps of Our Lady of Guadalupe Chapel. She’d washed her face in a bathroom, and looked much younger in the first light.
“What now?”
“Maybe she’s trying to make Sunday Mass,” Nick said.
Kendall didn’t laugh. She looked down at the phone, a few cars passing along Rampart and over on Basin Street. Rampart had cleaned up a good bit in the last few years, nice iron streetlamps, streetcars running, a few boutique hotels. Back in the day, this had been crack alley central. You didn’t get down this way unless you planned on getting mugged or stabbed. Many of the decrepit buildings and drug dens had been cleared, replaced by neat vacant lots and big commercial real estate signs. New condos and gas stations all around the side streets leading up to the old above-ground cemetery. Nick kind of missed the old sleaze. The sleaze had character.
“What did that woman mean by creeps?” she asked. “Are these some really bad people?”
“Maybe,” Nick said. “Maybe not. In the Quarter, being a creep is a kind of profession. Don’t take it too literally.”
Kendall’s phone rang. She snatched it from her purse and turned from Nick, talking in hushed tones. Nick stood by, watching the street, looking on at all the changes, trying to imagine what it had looked like back in Louis Armstrong’s time: jazz clubs, brothels, all-night gambling houses in the red-light district.
“That was Brantley.”
“She’s back at The Roosevelt?” Nick said.
“No,” Kendall said, her face drained of color. “Someone has Kaitlyn and they want us to pay to get her back. They want to meet.”
Nick nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Just tell me where.”
* * *
—
Brantley was even worse than Luther Jones promised, a weak-chinned, schlubby-looking dude in a wrinkled Polo shirt that stretched down low over a pair of khaki shorts embroidered with little blue whales. He wore a pair of Docksiders on his little feet.
When he saw them, Brantley bowed up his chest and tried to suck in his gut, hands on hips, trying to look like a man in charge. His eyes were red and pouchy, and he was in bad need of a shave and shower.
“So glad you decided to join us, Brantley,” Kendall said. “Now that you’ve slept it off.”
They’d met up at the Riverwalk by the Aquarium. It was past six, the sun rising over the city, casting the concrete paths and the Mississippi River in a cool, gray light.
“Who the hell is this?” Brantley asked.
“This is Mr. Travers,” Kendall said. “The hotel asked for him to help us.”
“Doesn’t look like a security guard to me,” he said, eyeing Nick. “What exactly are you?”
“A sentient being,” Nick said. “With an occasional mean streak.”
Brantley snorted. Nick noticed the pockets of his shorts bulged from his bony legs. Brantley noticed the staring and turned to Kendall. “I did exactly as they asked,” he said. “Five thousand dollars. The hotel got it for me this morning. They wanted to involve the police and I told them no thanks. This isn’t the first shakedown I’ve gone through. This fucking place. Everyone with their goddamn hand out. I expect after all this is over, this guy will want something, too. Won’t you?”
“My deal is with the hotel,” Nick said. “I keep the tip jar in my underwear.”
“He’s making jokes,” Brantley said. “Everything is funny when it’s not your goddamn daughter.”
A cool iron-smelling wind blew up off the rocks along the waterfront. The big paddle wheelers were moored along the docks, lightly rocking against the pilings, a few early morning joggers starting to run past. Nick was starting to feel the lack of sleep, stomach rumbling, knowing that somewhere nearby, someone was frying beignets and making hot coffee.
“What did this guy say?” Nick asked.
“He said ‘we want five thousand bucks,’ ” Brantley said.
“Or what?”
“Or they’d keep Kaitlyn.”
“Did they say they’d hurt her?” Kendall said. “God.”
“No,” Brantley said. “It was strange. The whole thing was weird as hell.”
Nick waited, wind ruffling his hair, standing there searching for the last cigarette in his jacket. He looked over at Kendall as she stared at her husband, hands still on his hips, pockets bulging with cash.
“It was like the guy couldn’t stop laughing,” Brantley said. “Acting like me and him were friends or something.”
* * *
—
They showed twenty minutes later. A young girl in a green flowery crop top, matching short skirt, and very tall white heels and a young guy, who didn’t look much older, in a black T-shirt and jeans. Kaitlyn looked a lot like her mother, thankfully, but shorter and thinner, with an upturned nose and a pixie haircut. The boy had a
buzz cut and a lot of tattoos on his skinny arms. He kept his hand on Kaitlyn’s back and nodded at Brantley, which threw the man a bit. Brantley, his puffy face drawn and haggard, let his arms drop to his sides. He kept eye contact and nodded at the younger man.
“What’s all this shit?” the kid asked. “This looks like a party.”
“This is my wife,” Brantley said. “I don’t know this other man. He wasn’t invited.”
The kid looked up at Nick, smirking, and shrugged a little. “Tell him to get the fuck out of here.”
“Or,” Nick said. “How about I pick you up and toss your narrow little ass into the river?”
“Do I look stupid?” the kid asked.
Nick looked to Kendall and he saw a slight smile on her face. She’d moved up to her daughter and reached out and offered her hand. The daughter, who didn’t seem scared or worried, didn’t take it. She just clenched her jaw and stared at her parents.
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “You look a little stupid. And you’re not getting a dime from these people.”
“I may be young, but I got friends,” he said. “See that guy standing on the levee? You want to fuck with him?”
Nick looked at the long, grassy levee and saw a fat white guy in a tank top. He had on blocky jean shorts and sunglasses. He looked about as scary as a toothless bulldog.
“Sure,” Nick said. “Why not?”
Brantley hadn’t said a word. He just stood there, not making a move to grab his daughter or confront the man. The kid and the older man just stared at each other, wordless, seeming a hell of a lot like two people who’d met before.
“Pay up, Brantley,” the kid said. “We tried to be nice about it.”
“Sure, sure,” Brantley said, reaching into his pockets, pulling out bundles of bills right there on the Riverwalk. Nick wondered if all of them wouldn’t be mugged by someone else before the transaction was over.
“You son of a bitch,” Kendall said.
“What is this, Matt?” Kaitlyn said, looking over at the kid. “What’s going on?”
“Your dad is a loser,” he said. “Just like you said. What kind of moron always bets on the fucking Saints? Those guys are all heart, but they let you down every damn time.”
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