Authors: Ace Atkins
“We ain’t gonna get arrested, are we?” Felix asked, suddenly pulling his hand back as if the walls were hot. “JoJo sold this place.”
“I got it back.”
He nodded with understanding and stood in the back of the room. “Too bad ole Rolande ain’t around. He could wire the stage back up in about two seconds.”
His words hung in the air, the thought of old Rolande and his scrunched Jack Daniel’s hat. I kicked some of the Sheetrock into a pile and added my completed Dixie.
“I need some music in here while I work.”
“I seen a jukebox for sale over at some place on Esplanade. Look like that ole one we had, only it loaded with stuff I never heard.”
“I can replace the music.”
Felix stood framed by the doorway, a wide swath of light from outside against his head. He stared up at the ceiling. “JoJo had a lot of friends might want to help.”
“He’s in New Orleans,” I said. “But he doesn’t want any part of this.”
Felix looked at his watch and then added the Indian headdress to the trash heap. “Some little Italian man with one of those cell phones been tellin’ me I work too slow. Pour the drinks too hard.”
I smiled.
“You put me back on?”
I nodded. He didn’t ask about his salary.
“I’ll see you Monday morning,” Felix said, and walked back into the street.
I found a cardboard box behind the bar and borrowed a pen from the dude at the used bookstore. I wrote in huge cap letters.
JOJO’S BLUES BAR IS BACK. THE ORIGINAL WILL REOPEN SOON
.
I hung the sign in the window and stood in the street admiring the work, my boots stuck in a big puddle of storm water. I even crudely drew some musical notes on each side of JoJo’s name.
I smiled and stood back.
The rain began to fall again when I saw him. Just a blur of brown about a block away. His face just a blackened oval in some sort of hood. The night turned the sky purple and gray. A hard wind ripped down Conti smelling of the Mississippi River.
I walked toward the corner.
He turned.
Rain ran down his coat, sluicing from his body, as if made from oil. The man who’d broken into my warehouse.
He buried his head deep into the folds of the wet brown coat as if it made him invisible. He turned a corner.
I followed.
“WHAT YOU DOIN’, MAN?” ALIAS yelled to me.
“I’ll be right back.”
“No, you ain’t. What’s up?”
“Stay here.”
The man in the brown coat disappeared into a group of tourists walking down Chartres by the Fisheries building and across from the Napoleon House. Gold electric light leaked out of the glass doors from the bar as the man’s walk turned into a jog.
He was running, his brown hood tattered and worn, toward Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral. My boots clacked on the flagstone, most of the stores now closed. Antique weapons. Haitian art. High-dollar lingerie. Only two men running on an empty street. I could hear the breath inside my ears as he ran toward the steps of the great church and turned into Pirate’s Alley.
A few gas lamps burned in the narrow shot once used as an avenue for smugglers and thieves. The gap narrowed. He passed over Royal.
I hung back. Letting him run out.
I walked behind two women in yellow ponchos drinking Hurricanes.
When I looked again, he was gone.
I passed the women, running for a few blocks.
At Dauphine, I stopped in the middle of the street and turned in all directions. Dance music pulsed from the clubs on Bourbon. Crooked iron hitching posts with horse heads lined the now paved street. The dance music kept pumping.
I ran down St. Peter back toward the church, passing five college girls staggering in the street and holding a young girl up as her head lolled to the side.
I heard scraping.
I looked back down St. Peter toward Rampart.
I saw the hooded figure scaling an old broken drainpipe running along a brick wall. Moss and ferns grew wildly in cracks that he used for footholds.
He was almost to a fire escape that hung uselessly, headed nowhere.
I ran into the building, some kind of anonymous pool hall, and past a grizzled bartender slicing lemons. I moved toward a landing and ran up some beaten wooden stairs. The bartender yelled after me but I pushed through empty liquor boxes and crates of bottles to a door opening into an empty second floor. The dull light of a Falstaff beer sign out front lit half of the room.
I could hear the man’s hands scraping the outside wall. Climbing.
I followed the sound, my eyes adjusting in the light, slowly walking to the window. The dark figure emerged on the landing. I could see his back turned to me.
I grabbed a stray Barq’s bottle from the floor.
Someone ran after me from the steps below, yelling they were going to call the cops.
The yelling grew louder.
I squinted into the dark light.
The man in the hooded coat pressed his face to the glass.
I could not breathe.
His fingernails touched the dirty glass in sharp, long claws. Thick and hardened. His face was gray as a corpse, his eyes yellowed and narrow. Small broken teeth.
I stepped back, my breath caught halfway in my throat.
The face contorted into something someone might think was a smile as he pushed a foot against the sill and began to climb, almost arachnid in his movements. His legs disappeared upward by the time I tried the window, caked and frozen with paint.
I threw the bottle into the glass and kicked out the shards with my boot.
I found my way onto the landing and looking for a foothold to follow.
I heard sirens at the far edge of the Quarter. And when I reached another rusted ladder of a fire escape, I could see NOPD patrol cars stopping by the pool hall and the bartender pointing upstairs.
I climbed.
I pulled myself onto the sloped roof, the figure crawling over the peaked edge of the old metal. My hands shook and I felt with my knees and palms for something solid on the slant. Nothing but moss and mold and metal eaten with rust.
At the peak, I could see deep into Congo Square and the white-lighted marquee of Louis Armstrong Park. I lifted my leg over the peak and the wetness of the metal roof and slid on a steady slope toward the road below the three-story building.
I clawed at the wet metal, trying to stop, but only sliding more. A metal sheet dropped into the air, pinwheeling down.
I picked up speed, the ground below getting closer, and stopped just short of careening off the edge.
The heel of my boot caught in a groaning drainpipe. I held myself there, foot cocked into the mouth of the pipe, supporting all my weight. Three stories of air waited below.
Above me, the man in the coat turned back and then jumped over a narrow crevice onto another rooftop, maybe only three feet away.
More yelling from the broken window on the other side of the street.
Wind ruffled my hair and I smelled the tired beer and urine of Bourbon Street. My hands coated in rust and dirt.
I scrambled upward and made the jump.
A moon hung over the river, the peaks of the old district’s rooftops shining silver in the early light of the summer. My T-shirt covered in rust and mud, sweat soaking my face.
I made two more jumps over narrow alleys.
Then the sound of his scattering feet stopped.
I edged onto my butt, taking a seat. I saw muddy shoe prints running off the roof.
I slid close to the edge and peered into a little banquette.
I turned to my stomach, feetfirst, and left my legs hanging until I dropped onto a second-floor wooden balcony overlooking a little garden. Red, blue, and yellow light scattered in a large open fountain and upon palm and banana trees. Thick asparagus ferns grew from clay pots.
I ran down a creaking wooden staircase and down through a little alley. At the end, a huge metal gate swung open.
Rampart Street. A couple of homeless men on the corner. A crack pusher running for me to make a deal.
“Hey, man. I bet you I know where you got them boots,” he said.
I heard a horn honking from a car heading toward Canal, a hard thud on the other side of the grassless neutral ground, and saw the man I was following roll from the hood of a Buick.
I ran after him but he moved fast, dragging a leg behind him to the wall of the St. Louis Cemetery. He disappeared.
Two cop cars converged on me and shone lights into my face. I stopped.
One of them threw me on the asphalt and pushed a gun into my spine.
“I’m following—”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“Listen to me, man.”
“Shut up before I kick you in the head.”
I heard the handcuffs clamp hard onto my wrists as the two cops yanked me to my feet and pulled me to the back of a patrol car.
“Stop.”
They did.
“What?” asked some twenty-something steroid freak as he gripped my arm tighter.
“That noise,” I said. “Can’t you hear it? He’s hiding in one of those mausoleums. He’s moving stones.”
“Drugs,” the cop said. “It’ll fry your mind.”
JAY MEDEAUX STOOD over me in the NOPD homicide bureau in a red-and-white softball uniform complete with cleats and scrunched cotton cap. He was popping a ball into his glove pocket and chomping on Big League Chew while he waited for me to finish my story. Two other detectives scribbled on reports in the pooled desk space, their heads down near banker’s lights glowing green.
“You told two officers in the First District you’d seen a ghost,” Jay said. “They thought you was juiced up.”
Anytime Jay was mad he reverted back to his y’at Irish Channel accent, even though he’d graduated from Tulane with a 4.0. When we were roommates in college, he would rarely go beyond the Boot to drink beer because he was studying history and criminology. But when he was pissed, he went back home.
He tossed me the ball.
“You seen that movie
Lord of the Rings
?”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds like you been chased by some of those goblins.”
“I know what I saw.”
Jay was a big guy with sandy-blond hair cut down to the millimeter. In the last couple of years, his linemen’s gut flattened out and his face had grown more hardened.
“Nick, it’s Friday night,” he said. “Why’d you have to pick Friday freakin’ night? We were winning. My wife was there showin’ off her new ta-tas in this sweet tank top.”
“New?”
“They were runnin’ a sale in the paper. You believe that? Like they were selling used cars.”
“Vroom. Vroom.”
“You find JoJo?” he asked.
“Yeah, he picked up the kid.”
“Come on.”
Jay took me into a room where a large woman in blue uniform laid out some plastic binders filled with mug shots. I spent more than an hour flipping the sheets, looking at some wonderful freaks that could make only P. T. Barnum smile. But nothing matched the gray face with the yellow eyes in the window.
Jay walked me to a break room on the eighth floor, where he made some coffee and we sat near a window overlooking the tall Gothic-looking Dixie Brewery. Small mushroom patterns of crime lights shone for miles, seeming to spawn from the brightness of the parish jail. Everything in New Orleans worked from pockets of darkness.
“You really going to open the bar?”
“Why not?” I settled into my seat and used a napkin to clean the gutter grime off my boots.
“What about teaching?”
“I only teach two classes a year.”
“What about all your research in Mississippi?”
“Do you want to be the devil’s advocate or are you just trying to yank my chain?”
“Mainly yanking your chain,” he said. “But I don’t think you know what you’re in for. Bills, loans, payroll. Out of your league.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “I have JoJo for advice. He knows a few things about running a bar.”
“True,” he said.
I looked over at Jay in his red-and-white baseball outfit and started to laugh.
“What?”
“You look like a big candy cane.”
He didn’t laugh.
“Nick?”
“Yeah.”
“You’d tell me, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s all twisted and incestuous, man. Just give me a few days.”
“It’s not my case,” he said. “I just hear things. They just took a bunch of files and shit from that record company in the Ninth Ward.”
“What do they think?”
Jay shrugged.
“I understand,” I said. “Any forensic stuff? DNA, fingerprints?”
“It’s all being run,” he said. “But right now, I don’t see a lot of work being done.”
“Why’s that?”
“It’s New Orleans, man,” Jay said. “The dead need to wait in line.”
Just as I began to stand, the officer who’d shown me the photopacks walked into the room and opened a binder to a new page.
“That him?”
I stood and flattened my hands on each side of the book. I began to nod slowly and didn’t say anything. I looked at the dirt on my hands and wiped them on my leg.
“Who is he?” Jay asked.
“Some freak grave robber,” she said. “Remember all those tombs in Metairie that got busted into a few years back? He stole old battle flags and Civil War uniforms. Guys in robbery been looking for him ever since.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“People call him Redbone. The name he gave when he was booked went back to some man he killed. Oh yeah, he kills people for money too. Sounds like a sweet man.”
“Never convicted?”
“This guy in robbery suspects he kills people and lays them in old tombs. How we ever gonna find those bodies?”
Jay whistled low. “I got a couch,” he said to me. “Stay a few.”
“I’ve got the kid.”
“Bring him too.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m used to looking out for myself.”
“Listen, I know they’re looking at this Cash guy hard,” Jay said, exchanging looks with the officer and then back at me. “How ’bout we send a little warning to him?”
“It’s not him.”
“Right.”
“Just give me a few days,” I said.
“You still have that Browning?”
“I have a Glock I picked up in Memphis,” I said. “Holds seventeen rounds. Very handy.”