Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

She said circumspectly, “You’re not a jazz kind of guy.”

“Do what J.T. says. No side trips,” Broker said a little hotly. He hung up the phone without saying good-bye. Why wasn’t he a jazz kind of guy? Hell, he could be any kind of guy he wanted. And what the hell was she doing calling around to the army…He caught himself. He sensed that he and Nina were on the verge of a boy-girl dilemma complicated by who was going to run the show. And right now she was ahead on points. He could feel a fight coming. The kind of fight where you make up in bed.

At 7 P.M. Broker went out and ate frog’s legs, a bowl of turtle soup, and an enormous bread pudding. He did not check out the musical fare because Nina was essentially right. He had been kicked out of his high school band-alto sax-no sense of rhythm.

The storm stalked the edge of the city as he took his time walking an elaborate pattern back to the hotel. If anybody was following him they were better than he was. He called room service and ordered a pot of coffee.

Broker took the tray out on the gallery and watched the street lights come on. As he sipped the thick Creole java the first crooked trident of lightning branched and quivered on the rooftops.

He counted, waiting for the punch of thunder.

The sky boomed and the suffocating rain came straight down and brought no relief from the heat.

She came in a cab and she wore a loose gray trenchcoat unbuttoned in a furl of triangle lapels and buckles. Her black dress slung around her hips like a raw silk lariat. Bareheaded, she walked across Chartiers in two-inch heels that stabbed a reflected band of neon. The raindrops sizzled at her every step. She looked up and saw him standing above her.

He left the gallery and waited in the shadowed archway at the top of the stairs.

“Much better,” she said, seeing the haircut.

The dress had a low scoop neck and buttons down the front. Rain slipped down her throat and trickled from her tanned collarbones. Her perfume was homicide beaded on a razor’s edge and it slit the air. “You’re wet,” he said.

“Do we understand each other?” she asked.

“You better dry off,” he said.

“Take me to your room.”

The gumbo rain beat on the gallery as the curtains billowed through the open windows and people shouted happily, running, in the street. Across the way, loud music cranked up louder to compete with the thunder-Warren Zevon, “Roland, the Headless Thompson Gunner.”

She touched her wet hair, excused herself, and went into the bathroom. Broker sat down in an armchair and stared at the bathroom door. When it came to women, the last few years, his work had cast him, at best, in a slick beer commercial.

Lola had the complex fine detail of a David Lean epic, which is to say, of Broker’s fantasies. And he thought how Lean should have made a film about New Orleans. No need to build a set. The whole place was theater. The air itself was special effects and the brochure on the bedside table said this hotel had been built in 1847. Broker loved a good historical epic and he loved to read history, which he saw as a cold record of solved crimes…

The bathroom door opened and Lola stood for a moment fluffing her hair with a towel. She put down the towel and came over and stood in front of him.

She took off her earrings, making that nice female gesture, elbows to the front, head cocked, hands to the side of her face. “You have to tell me…what you expect.”

“I’d like you to undress,” he said.

“Okay.” Her hands were in his hair and he could almost believe she’d been five years on the shelf when she kissed him. He did not believe Cyrus LaPorte got kissed like this. She was the original frog-changer kisser. Why settle for being a jazz kind of guy when he could be a prince…

She stepped back and held him by his shoulders and stared directly into his eyes. Her hair had artfully tumbled out of place and the gliding rain shadows dabbed film noir war paint on her face. She said, “All I’m saying is, I could be in a position to do you a favor. And not just tonight.”

Slowly she stepped out of her shoes and unbuttoned the front of her dress and peeled it back and down over her shoulders. The dress shivered down in a damp little pile around her ankles.

“If I return the favor,” he said. Her back was to the mantel of a marble fireplace. There was a mirror over it but he couldn’t quite make out her bare shoulders.

She closed her eyes and shuddered when he ran his hands down her neck over her shoulder blades. Her back squirmed and he felt a lattice of raised tissue under the faint patina of perspiration. He turned her around and switched on the floor lamp next to the mantel.

“Please, Phillip…” She lurched free and flung an arm at the lamp, knocking it over. It bounced on the bed and crashed to the floor where it continued to throw a cone of light up the side of the wall.

“Show me,” said Broker.

Reluctantly she turned and bowed her head. Long raised marks started just above the waistband of her panties. They clawed diagonally from her left buttocks across her back, went under her bra straps and stopped at her right scapula. The dead welted tissue cast a quarter-inch shadow.

The scars were the first real thing he’d seen in New Orleans. Broker shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense you’d stick around after a beating like that.”

She turned and her eyes glowed under the jungle of her hair. “I intend to outlive the bastard and get his money, his house, and keep his name.”

“That simple?”

“It’s not simple. He plans to outlive me and replace me with younger suitable breeding material. There have to be more LaPortes to rape and pillage the world.”

“And you know this because Bevode told you?”

She smiled ruefully. “We’re all going to eventually wind up in Vietnam. Bevode has upstart potential. He strongly hinted at a boating accident. He has gallantly offered his services to come to my rescue and help Cyrus fall in the ocean in my place. The diving crew that runs the boat are his relatives. All I have to do is kneel at his big herpes-infected cock for the rest of my life. But then who would save me from Bevode?”

“You’re the one who chose to live with pirates all round,” said Broker.

“Not like this.” She raised her lips and expected to be kissed.

“Slow down,” said Broker.

“This ride don’t come with brakes.” She breathed in his ear and threw her arms around his neck.

She was beset by problems. And like her town, she was elaborately guarded by gates and fences and levees and potions and masks. But in the end they formed a flimsy tinsel wish against the Bad Thing that comes out in the dark cypress swamps, out of the gulf, out of the damp night air: yellow fever, cholera, flood, fire, hurricane, slave rebellion. But now that he was next to her, compared with Nina, it was like being at the gym and the idea of actually screwing her became about as inviting as being strapped into a motorized Nautilus machine. Pumping iron.

He could see Bevode doing it. Not him.

Broker pushed her onto the bed and didn’t join her. She propped herself up on her elbows and gave him a quizzical look.

He shrugged. “If I jump in the sack with you you’ll forget me by tomorrow morning. This way you just might remember me the rest of your life.”

“Honest and dumb and romantic.” She shook her head. “Cyrus and the boys will eat you alive.”

“Old fashioned,” said Broker.

“Get me that shirt,” she asked, suddenly modest, holding an arm across her bra. Broker threw her the souvenir T-shirt that was draped across the chair. It was black with a white pattern of alligator skeletons in a chorus line across the front and NEW ORLEANS , spidery in bone letters, glittered incandescent in a flash of lightning as she pulled it on.