I thought about texting my cousin, Camille. She owned a café in the Bywater and had a talent for making things feel roughly proportionate. But it was late, and the rain would have emptied the streets, and I didn’t have the shape of the thing yet clearly enough to hand it to someone else.
After securing plastic over the broken pane, it was time for bed. I turned off the kitchen lights and went back through the parlor.
The gas lanterns were burning low. The felt cloth covered the Steinway. Following Dominic’s directions, the glass remained strewn across the floor. I’d checked again that the front door was locked, and the bullet hole was a shadow in the plaster above the podium mark, barely visible in the low light.
I went upstairs and did not sleep well. I spent a long time in the dark replaying the moments before the shot, working backward through the evening, looking for what I’d stood beside and missed.
Chapter two
Thiago
My phone rang. Eamon Price calling at 6:04 am.
I woke at once. I’d been in New Orleans for a week, and the air hung still and damp.
After the third ring, I picked up. He didn’t call someone on leave for trivial matters. It was against policy.
“Still in the city,” he said.
“Through next Sunday.”
“New client. Dominic St. Clair. Conductor. St. Charles Avenue.”
“Tell me more,” I said.
He did. There had been gunfire inside the residence the night before. Single shot, high placement, not aiming for assassination. Sheet music left behind and an anniversary date circled in red.
“Patron named Celeste Boudreaux Hargrove made the contact,” Eamon said. “We handled a family situation for her two years ago. She’s authorizing a substantial bonus for immediate deployment.”
I knew I’d accept the job before he told me the number. I had old debts from my dead-end job days and family that needed help. As he delivered the details, I watched the ceiling fan complete a slow circuit.
“The client’s parameters?”
“He refuses to be caged.”
A hint of skepticism gnawed at the back of my brain. I’d watched clients demand protection and then resist every measure that actually provided it.
“Concert series,” Eamon continued. “Culminates at the Orpheum in eleven days. He won’t cancel.”
“Of course not.”
“Seventy-two years old. Fifty years in this city. Whoever is behind this knows his world from the inside. This isn’t random hostility.”
“It’s a relationship,” I said.
A pause. “Yes. Exactly that.”
“I’m on it.”
In minutes, I was in the shower, only slightly more humid than the surrounding air. I’d lived through Manhattan in August, when the subway platforms at rush hour were a collective act of suffering.
New Orleans was next-level. The air settled on your skin, and a ceiling fan didn’t help.
My apartment for a two-week leave was a short-term rental two blocks from the edge of the French Quarter, with tired furniture and laminate floors beginning to peel upward. I’d put my go-bag in the closet and told myself to rest.
I dressed and left in eleven minutes. The street was still mostly dark, gas lamps glowing in the pre-dawn murk.
As I reached St. Charles Avenue, I slowed the SUV, examining the broad pavement and distinguished mansions. The streetcar tracks ran alongside me for several blocks, rails laid into theasphalt. The live oaks lining the median were old enough that their canopies had closed overhead into something close to a ceiling. A man walked on the opposite sidewalk with a dog. I watched him until he turned the corner.
