Vieux Carré Voodoo (6 page)

“I have money.” He took a deep breath. “The reason I came to
New Orleans—” He hesitated. “My grandfather—he was all I had, you know? He
raised me after my parents were killed in a car accident when I was a kid.” He
paused again, gathering his thoughts. He emptied the beer and put the bottle
down on the coffee table, covering his mouth to mask a burp. “Excuse me.”

I took another hit. I was starting to feel a lot more
mellow—it was very good pot. “I’m sorry about your parents,” I said, waiting for
him to go on. “That must have been very rough on you.”

“Thanks. My grandmother—his wife—died before I was born, so
I never knew her. He was all I had.” He hesitated again. “A couple of months
ago, my grandfather was—was—well, he was
murdered
.” His eyes swam with
tears. “I was supposed to go home that weekend, but I was behind on a paper. I
should have been there!” Angrily he drove one fist into the palm of his other
hand.

“You might not have been able to save him,” I said gently.
“You might be dead, too.”

“That’s what the police said. I still should have been
there.” He closed his eyes. “They called me on Sunday night to tell me. The
police said—” He closed his eyes, and a tear came out of his right eye. He wiped
at his eyes. “The police said he’d been
tortured.
I had to—I had to
identify the body
.”
He shuddered again. “I could barely recognize him.”

I take a great deal of pride in my ability to find the right
thing to say in any situation, but in that moment I couldn’t think of anything.
I just sat there and stared at him. I couldn’t begin to imagine how awful that
must have been. I’ve stumbled over any number of dead bodies in my life, and
it’s not something you ever get used to. I couldn’t imagine how awful it would
be to have to identify the body of a relative—especially if it was your
only
relative—and one that had been tortured. Gruesome images filled my mind,
and I forced them back out.

He swallowed, and visibly pulled himself together. “Anyway.”
He reached into his shorts pocket. “He’d written me a letter—I got it when I
went back to school to clean out my dorm room.” He wiped at his eyes. “I should
have gone home. I mean, I’d called him earlier that week to tell him I wasn’t
going to be able to come home, and there was—I could tell there was something
wrong. He said everything was fine”—he swallowed—“and I had that paper due, so
I…” He closed his eyes and shuddered.

“You poor, poor kid,” I replied, finally finding my voice,
and wincing at how lame my words sounded. “You can’t beat yourself up about it,
Levi. I’m sure your grandfather is glad you weren’t there. He wouldn’t want
anything bad to happen to you. Do the police have any leads?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Do you want me to find your grandfather’s killer…” I left
my voice trail off. He was a nice kid, but I wasn’t about to go looking for
criminals that tortured people before killing them. “That’s best left for the
police. They have a lot more resources than I do.”

He shook his head as he unfolded the letter and passed it
over to me. “No, that’s not what I need you to do.” He wiped at his eyes. “Just
read this. This is the last letter he wrote me.”

I took it from him. It was a piece of notebook paper, with
three holes on the left side. It was wide-ruled, and the folds were deep. The
handwriting was a barely legible scrawl. I started reading.

Dearest Levi:

I fear that when you read this letter, I will most
likely be dead. The past has come back to haunt me—a past that would be better
off left in the past. The thing I have always feared the most—the actions of
three foolish young men in a time of war are now coming home to roost. I always
believed that somehow we’d escaped, and that the past would never come back to
affect us in the present. But pretending something didn’t happen doesn’t mean
that it didn’t, and actions always have consequences.

I won’t tell you any more than that—because the less you
know, the better off you will be. But I have to warn you. You have always been a
son to me, and I couldn’t be prouder of you than if you were my son. Of the
three young men in the picture, you are the only descendant. The first died over
there. The other now lives in New Orleans, and has no children. The consequences
of what we did—well, I don’t believe that you will come to any harm if you don’t
know anything. But if I am indeed dead when you read this letter, you need to go
to New Orleans and find Moonie. Moonie has what they are looking for, and he is
the only one who can save you from their wrath by returning it.

It has to be returned before more blood is spilled.

I love you, my grandson.

Marty Gretsch

“Moonie? He couldn’t tell you his name?” I shook my head as
I put the letter down on the coffee table. “That’s no help at all.” My mind was
racing. “But your grandfather seemed to know what was going to happen to him. Do
you have any idea what it is that Moonie supposedly has? Or what it is they did
over there?” I got up and walked over to the big windows that opened out onto my
balcony. Had they committed war crimes, like what’s his name, which’d massacred
those people—what was the name of the place? I wracked my brain. It was My
something… I shook my head and turned back to face him, figuring I could just
Google it later. “And after you got the letter, you came down here?”

“Scotty, I’m
scared
.”
His lower lip
started quivering again. “I mean—I don’t know what these people
want—
and
what they did to my grandfather—” He started choking up again.

“Have you gotten any weird phone calls or letters?” I
watched his face. “Noticed people following you?”

He took a deep breath. “No, nothing like that. But that
doesn’t mean—” his voice trailed off. After a moment, his body shook as he tried
to keep control of himself.

What else could I do? I walked over, sat on the arm of his
chair, and put my arm around him. “We’ll figure it out, and I’d be happy to help
you find Moonie,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t regret the words later, and
suspecting it was likely. “Was there anything else?”

“I also have this.”

He pulled an old photograph out of his pocket and handed it
over to me. It was of three young GIs standing in front of what looked like a
jungle base camp. It looked like Vietnam, but all I knew of that war was from
movies and television shows. It could have been any jungle, anywhere in the
world.

The three young men were all smiling, holding cigarettes in
one hand and rifles in the other. Jungle camouflage helmets were low on their
foreheads. They were wearing jungle camouflage shirts, open to reveal white
T-shirts underneath and dog tags hanging from their necks. Their camouflage
pants were tucked into black boots. The picture had faded and yellowed with age.
The one on the left looked older than the other two, but not by much. A white
margin framed the picture, and across the bottom was printed the date it was
developed: 06/07/66.

Over forty years ago.

I turned the picture over. On the back were written three
names:
Marty, Moonie, Mattie.
It was in the same scrawled handwriting
as the letter.

I turned it back over and looked at their faces more
closely. “Your grandfather is the one on the left?” There was a slight
resemblance to Levi in the shape of the face and the square jawline. The one on
the right rang no bells in my memory.

The one in the middle, however, looked slightly familiar.

Well, according to the letter, he lived in New Orleans.
Maybe I’d seen him around somewhere. It was possible. New Orleans was really
nothing more than a big small town—everyone was one degree of separation from
everyone else. But I couldn’t recall ever meeting or hearing about someone who
went by Moonie.

He nodded. “I don’t know what to do,” Levi went on. “I have
no idea how to find this Moonie guy. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do
when I
find
him. I mean, the only people I know in New Orleans are Millie and Velma.
And you.” He finished the beer and put it down. “Do you think you could help me
find him?”

I stared at the picture. That middle face—I was sure I
recognized it.
Shouldn’t have smoked the damned pot,
I cursed at
myself. “How do you know them, anyway?”

“I really don’t know them. When I decided to come down here,
to try to find Moonie, I went on craigslist and found this apartment listed.
When I called, it turned out that Millie went to school with my grandmother. She
was from New Orleans.” He hesitated again. “Millie doesn’t know about any of
this, by the way. I didn’t know if I should tell her—about the letter. I mean,
she knows Grandpa was murdered, and then she mentioned one day you were a
private eye”—he swallowed—“so I thought I would come to you. I have some money—”

I cut him off. “We’ll worry about that later.” My curiosity
was aroused. Turning the picture over in my hands again, I looked at the names
written on the back. I flipped it back and stared at the faces again.

I
knew
I’d seen Moonie before, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on where.

And as I stared at the picture, it started to swim out of
focus.

Everything started going dark around the edges of my vision,
and my mind started slipping down into darkness.

I had time to think
crap
before everything went
dark.

It was hot. The air hung thick and damp, making my skin
damp. I could feel sweat running down my back into my already soaked underwear.
My armpits were dripping, and I wiped my hand across my face to keep the sweat
from running into my eyes. I was in a jungle, in the middle of the afternoon,
but everything was still and quiet. No insects were humming, no birds were
singing, and nothing was moving anywhere. I could hear the sound of a river off
to my right as I crept along the path. I was carrying a machine gun, and the
ground was a little muddy underneath my feet.

The silence was strange, oppressive, and not right. It
shouldn’t be so quiet. The jungle was always alive with sound. Usually, such
silence meant they were out there. Moving silently through the underbrush. Maybe
even now I was being sighted, a gun aimed into the center of my back.

I could feel dread rising inside me, but I fought it
back down. They were out there somewhere. I had to find them before they found
me. I felt like I was being watched, but even though I kept scanning my eyes
back and forth across the thick foliage, I saw—and heard—nothing. It might just
be my imagination, but the silence—that wasn’t, and that meant they were out
there somewhere. Maybe they were afraid, like I was. Maybe they were afraid I
would spot them before they spotted me. I stopped moving and wiped my hand
across my eyes again.

That was the worst part of it, really—how silent the
enemy was. They slipped through the jungles like wraiths, soundlessly, and you
never knew where they were until they opened fire.

I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being watched.

“Mattie?” someone whispered from my right. It was Marty.
I heard a branch snap underneath my feet. It sounded like a gunshot in the
silence.

We just had to get through this mission, and then we
could go on leave. Two glorious weeks away from the jungle…and then we would be
set. For life.

I heard a rustling in the bushes ahead of me.

“Scotty! Are you all right?”

I opened my eyes. I was lying on the couch, and Levi was
hovering over me, his face pale. “I’m fine,” I said, struggling to sit up. My
mind was still foggy. He started to say something else, but I held up my hand to
silence him. The vision was fading, and I needed to remember as much of it as I
could.

It was gone.

I cursed to myself and reached for my beer. I took a long
pull on the bottle and glanced back over at Levi. He was still standing, his
face white, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he watched me. His
Adam’s apple bobbed in his neck as he dry swallowed. I put my beer back down and
gave him a weak smile. “Levi, I don’t know if Millie or Velma said anything, but
I’m a little psychic.”

His eyes widened and he licked his lower lip. “No, they
didn’t say anything about it.”

“Please. Sit down. You’re making me nervous.” I waved him
into one of the wingback chairs. “It’s nothing to worry about, and really, it’s
been such a long time since I’ve had anything, I’d really thought it had gone
away.” I hesitated. “Sometimes I have visions—and when that happens, I guess the
best way to describe what happens is I kind of pass out, in a way.” I shrugged.
“I’m sorry—I would have warned you, but when it happens it’s very sudden. And
like I said, it hasn’t happened in a long time.” I crossed my arms.

As a rule, I didn’t like to tell people about the gift. But
I didn’t have much choice in this instance. I waited for him to say something,
bracing myself to be asked for the Powerball numbers, or something equally
stupid.

Instead, he leaned forward, his face curious. The color was
coming back into his face. “What did you see?”

I shook my head. “Sometimes I remember, sometimes I don’t.
This time I don’t. That’s why I shushed you—I wanted to try to remember what I
saw, in case it was important.” I noticed the picture had fallen out of my hands
and was lying on the floor. I reached down and picked it up. “All I really
remember was being in a jungle.” I looked at the picture again. “This is
Vietnam, right?”

He nodded. “My grandpa didn’t really like to talk about it,
but I knew he served.” He shook his head. “He got a Purple Heart, there were
pictures of him in uniform in his den—but whenever I asked him about it he
didn’t want to talk about it. I guess that’s normal with war veterans.”