Charlaine Harris - The Julius House

“And she never asked you why a do-gooder trying to find out if Alicia Manigault needed a ride to a senior citizens’ center would need to know that?”

“Nope,” Angel said, simply. “She just wanted someone to talk to. And she wanted to know if the bus that would take them was equipped to handle wheelchairs. I had to tell her the whole thing was still pretty much up in the air. She was disappointed.”

We looked away from each other, off into the distance.

Angel drank the last of her Coke. Spenser and Hawk we weren’t; not even Elvis Cole and Joe Pyle.

“What do you think, is it dark enough?” I asked.

“Yep. But I’ve been looking at that yard, and I don’t think there’s a single place I could get that I wouldn’t be visible from at least four other houses.”

“Um. You’re right.”

“So we better just watch for a while. Maybe he’ll come. Whoever he is.”

In the short time it had taken to collect our food, return, and eat, the character of the neighborhood had changed. More cars were home; the little street was jammed with people who’d had to park at the curb. The streetlights had come on in the deep dusk and cast sharp-contrast shadows. There were some children outside playing. Angel was right, creeping around that little property was out of the question in a neighborhood as congested as this one. It was hard to see how we could sit and observe, even. How did police stake out places like this? Surely, if we started moving and kept driving by, someone would eventually get suspicious.

We left for a minute, and pulled in down the street a little, in front of a house that was still dark and had no vehicles in the driveway. We looked at our watches and shook our heads; pantomime of people waiting impatiently. Then Angel watched in the rear-view mirror and I watched the side mirror.

“I thought you were used to this, Angel,” I said.

“How come?”

“You used to be a bodyguard.”

“Then, I was watching out for people like me. I was trying to find anyone waiting for my employer. I never waited for anyone.”

“Oh. What happened to your last client? Martin never told me.”

Angel diverted her eyes from the mirror to look at me directly. “And for good reason,” she said. “Believe me, you don’t want to know.”

I had a feeling she was right.

Sooner than we had any right to expect, our vigil was rewarded. Carl must have been persuasive or righteous over the phone. A pickup squealed up, a white one with a fancy pattern of fuchsia and green flames painted trailing down the side.

“Don’t know where he can park,” Angel muttered. “There’s only one spot left on the whole street, and that’s right in front of us… Shit, was I stupid! Get down!” The pickup did indeed maneuver into the space against the curb ahead of our rental car. The driver would have to walk right past us.

I dove down onto the floor board and compressed myself into as tiny a ball as possible. Angel, as usual, had had her hair pulled back in a ponytail; now she yanked out the band that held it, fluffed her hair quickly, and unfolded our New Orleans map with hasty fingers. She held the map up, partially obscuring her face, where the bruises were fading and there were only a few scabs left.

I heard the pickup door slam and heavy steps pass quickly by the car.

“Is he going to their house?” I whispered.

“Shut up! Yes!”

After a long moment, Angel said, “Okay, you can sit up. He’s inside.”

“Did you get a good look at him?”

“Yeah.” She had the strangest expression as she gathered up her hair and bound it back into her customary ponytail. “So?”

“It was the man who tried to kill us.”

The ax-man, somehow in league with Melba Totino and her sister Alicia? So he wasn’t in any way involved with my husband’s Latin American ventures; we could safely have called the police when he attacked us. We could be on the right side of the law, instead of Martin’s side.

“So. We follow him?” Angel asked.

“I guess so,” I said. “Can you figure this out?”

Angel shook her head. But she wasn’t unconcerned; her mouth was compressed into an even thinner line. Her hands gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. She hadn’t liked being beaten, she hadn’t liked having been so close to losing her client, she hadn’t liked having to tell Martin or her husband about what had happened, and on a personal level, I suspected she really hadn’t liked having her face messed up.

From being basically indifferent about what she considered a personal obsession of mine, Angel had graduated to being vitally interested in the Julius case. So we both watched eagerly for the man’s emergence from the little house.

“We better not be here when he comes out again,” Angel said, and she started the car. We drove around the block until we were positioned on a cross street so that when he came out, we would be able to fall in behind him unless he did something crazy, like attempting a U-turn on the narrow, crowded street.

I was able to see him for the first time when he shut the door of Alicia Manigault’s house behind him. He was tall and muscular, and he looked younger than I’d remembered him. He wore jeans and a work shirt, with the sleeves rolled up. His hair was dark and curly, and he was cleanshaven; Angel and I had been good witnesses. It was hard to square this ail-American blue-collar hunk with the maniac waving an ax who’d so nearly mowed me down a few days before.

“He’s walking a little stiff,” Angel said happily. “I think we banged him around some.”

“I hope so.”

He strode to his lurid pickup truck and started it up.

We drove out of Metairie and across the Huey E Long Bridge and went south steadily. After at least twenty miles, he turned right, and we followed him. He didn’t seem to be looking out for cars following him, or for anything else.

“An amateur,” Angel muttered. I couldn’t tell if she was pleased by our attacker’s amateurism, or disgusted, or enraged. If it was difficult following him at night, she didn’t say so.

Now we were on a narrow road with a bayou on one side, houses on the other. There were boats lining the bayou, with signs for swamp tours, promising alligators and abundant wildlife. Most of the signs featured the word “Cajun.” The lighting wasn’t good, but the white truck with the bright blazes painted on the side was fairly easy to spot. Finally it slowed and turned into one of the narrow driveways. We had to drive on past, and I stared as hard as I could in the dark to see a sort of cabin with a screened-in front porch. Ax-man had parked the truck under a carport, which the truck shared with a battered blue Chevy Nova and a tarp-covered boat.

“That’s the car he was driving in Georgia,” Angel said.

We drove on until we came to a juke joint, where Angel pulled in and parked. We looked at each other questioningly.

Neither of us knew what to do next.

“We could watch all night, or we could come back tomorrow, or we could call Shelby from a pay phone in there.” Angel nodded her head towards the bar, from which came loud zydeco music and a fairly constant flow of in-and-out traffic. I wasn’t about to go in there.

“Let’s find out more before we call Shelby,” I said. “I want to know who lives in that house.”

IT RAINED THE NEXT MORNING, steamy relentless rain that made the inside of the rental car damp and sticky despite the air-conditioner. We went from the Hyatt Regency in urban New Orleans to the cabin in rural south Louisiana, a sort of cultural leap that sat better with Angel than it did with me. By the time we got there, the truck was gone, but the old Nova was still parked where it had been the night before.