Remy thought that was hilarious, but Triana wasn’t joking. Her mother had never taken kindly to Coach Saban leaving LSU, and then coming back into the college ranks and coaching for rival Alabama was an unforgivable crime.
“So you’re in town visiting your mom?” he asked as they passed by a trio of musicians playing jazz on the sidewalk. There was a crowd gathered around listening, and Remy leaned over to toss a five-dollar bill in the hat sitting on the curb, giving a wave to the performers in passing.
“Yeah,” Triana said. “I try to come back and spend time with Mom as often as I can. I don’t like her being by herself so much in that big apartment above the shop now that Dad is gone.”
Remy was silent for a while. “I was sorry to hear about your father. Sorry I didn’t make it to the funeral, too. I only heard about it through the grapevine months after the fact.”
Triana nodded, having to take a breath before answering. It had been over two years since her father had been murdered, but sometimes it still felt like yesterday.
“You don’t need to apologize. Mom was amazing, pulling everything together as fast as she did, but there were a lot of people she couldn’t reach. I wish I could have been more help to her, but I was a complete mess.”
Remy stopped and tugged her close, wrapping his arms around her right there in the middle of a throng of passing people. “Hey, you had every right to be a complete mess. You’d just lost your dad. I know how close you two always were.”
Triana rested her cheek against Remy’s muscular chest and closed her eyes. The warmth from his body seeped into her, comforting her down to her very soul. She had gotten most of the tears out a while ago, but his touch had a few more leaking out. Remy was right. She’d had a special relationship with her dad. He was so big and gruff that he’d frightened a lot of people. And yeah, he’d been known on more than one occasion to wade into brawls at his club and break them up all by himself, whether the people involved were armed or not. But he’d always been a gentle giant to her. She missed him like crazy.
Triana could have stayed in Remy’s arms just like that for the rest of the night, and reluctantly pulled away with a small smile. If Remy noticed she had to wipe a few tears from her face, he didn’t call her on it.
They started walking again, and she squeezed his hand a little tighter now than she had before. They strolled along in comfortable silence for a bit before Remy got around to asking the question most people usually brought up at some point.
“Did they ever catch the person who did it?” he asked tentatively, as if he dreaded continuing to talk about the subject. “Or even come up with a motive?”
“No. To both questions,” she said with a shake of her head. “At first the police thought it was a robbery gone wrong, since they found him on the floor in the middle of his club, but there was still money in the register behind the bar and in his office. They didn’t even touch his wallet.”
“I talked to one of my friends at the JPSO shortly after I got the news,” Remy said softly. “They didn’t want to get into the details, but they implied the attack had been very…violent. Was there any thought that maybe it was personal?”
Her dad had been shot multiple times, so yeah, violent was one way to put it. “That’s the current theory, not that it has helped much. Dad came from a rough background before he met Mom. There were probably quite a few people who didn’t like him. The police found a lot of blood at the club that wasn’t Dad’s, too, but they were never able to figure out whose it was.”
Remy looked at her in surprise. “They’re not working on it anymore?”
She shook her head. “One of the detectives calls my mom every once in a while and tells her they’re still trying, but I don’t expect much now.”
Which was why Triana had been paying a private investigator to look into the case for the past five months on the off chance he could find something to jump-start the investigation. She was tempted to mention it to Remy but decided against it. In her experience, most cops didn’t think much of private detectives, and she really didn’t want to get into an argument with Remy.
“Well, for what it’s worth,” he said, “I always liked your father. He loved you and your mother, and he didn’t take crap from anyone.”
She laughed, putting thoughts of the PI away for now. “That he didn’t.”
“How’s your mom doing?”
“She focuses on the business,” Triana said. “The shop is doing as well as ever, maybe even better than it’s done in years. I’m sometimes shocked at how much money people will spend on this voodoo stuff, but it seems to make her and her customers happy, so who am I to say anything about it?”
They were about to turn off Bourbon and onto Ursulines Avenue, which would ultimately lead them to her mom’s shop, when they came upon another scene that was unfortunately all too common in New Orleans and displayed the dark side of the city. Paramedics were pushing a skinny, young girl of about seventeen out of a club on a gurney toward an ambulance parked along a side street. There was an oxygen mask covering the girl’s face, so it was hard to see much in the way of features, but she looked drawn and gaunt, and her skin was unusually pale.
“What happened?” Remy softly asked someone in the crowd.
Triana didn’t need to hear the answer. She’d seen it often enough here and in Houston to have a pretty good idea.
“Drug overdose,” a woman told Remy. “Meth. The stuff going around lately is a lot stronger than some people are used to.”
Before she and Remy left, Triana heard three other bystanders talking about how dangerous the new crystal meth that had been flooding the streets lately was.
“The stuff used to be cooked up in bathtubs by mom-and-pop labs,” Remy said as they continued down the street. “But now the Mexican cartels have gotten involved with large-scale operations selling crap that’s ten times as pure. People don’t recognize the difference and end up overdosing. We’re seeing a lot of people winding up in the hospitals in Dallas from this stuff.”
“Houston too,” Triana agreed. “Between this new meth and the recent influx of heroin overdoses, it’s driving a complete shift in how our department is handling drug users. We’re finally doing more to get them into treatment, instead of just tossing them in jail. But sometimes it seems like it’s a losing battle, when there’s so much of the stuff flowing in.”
They walked in silence for a while, the mood somber after what they’d just seen on top of the earlier conversation about her father. This part of the street didn’t have as many lights as where they’d just been, and Triana subconsciously moved closer to Remy. If she’d been alone, she would have quickened her step, but she felt safe with him.
“What happened with your parents?” she asked, glancing at him. “They came to Dad’s funeral, but they weren’t together.”
