John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

“Feds?” asked Rachel.

“Maybe. Could be locals. This is donkey work.”

We watched them for a while. Rachel turned on the radio and we listened to an AOR station: Rush, Styx, Richard Marx. Suddenly, the middle of the road seemed to be running straight through the car, musically speaking.

“Are you going in?” asked Rachel.

“May not have to,” I replied, nodding at the house.

Stacey Byron, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail and her body encased in a short white cotton dress, emerged from the house and walked straight toward us, a straw shopping basket over her left arm. She nodded at the two guys in the car. They tossed a coin and the one in the passenger seat, a medium-sized man with a small belly protruding through his jacket, got out of the car, stretched his legs, and followed her toward the mall.

She was a good-looking woman, although the short dress was a little too tight at the thighs and dug slightly into the fat below her buttocks. Her arms were strong and lean, her skin tanned. There was a grace to her as she walked: when an elderly man almost collided with her as she entered the supermarket, she spun lightly on her right foot to avoid him.

I felt something soft on my cheek and turned to find Rachel blowing on it.

“Hey,” she said, and for the first time since we left New Orleans there was a tiny smile on her lips. “It’s rude to lech when you’re with another woman.”

“It’s not leching,” I said, as we climbed from the car, “it’s surveillance.”

I wasn’t sure why I had come here, but Woolrich’s remarks about Stacey Byron and her interest in art made me want to see her for myself, and I wanted Rachel to see her as well. I didn’t know how we might get to talk to her but I figured that these things had a habit of working themselves out.

Stacey took her time browsing in the aisles. There was an aimlessness about her shopping as she picked up items, glanced at the labels, and then discarded them. The cop followed about ten feet behind her, then fifteen, before his attention was distracted by some magazines. He moved to the checkout and took up a position where he could see down two aisles at once, limiting his care of Stacey Byron to the occasional glance in her direction.

I watched a young black man in a white coat and a white hat with a green band stacking prepackaged meat. When he had emptied the tray and marked off its contents on a clipboard, he left the shop floor through a door marked Staff Only. I left Rachel to watch Byron and followed him. I almost hit him with the door as I went through, since he was squatting to pick up another plastic tray of meat. He looked at me curiously.

“Hey, man,” he said, “you can’t come in here.”

“How much do you earn an hour?” I asked.

“Five twenty-five. What’s it to you?”

“I’ll give you fifty bucks if you lend me your coat and that clipboard for ten minutes.”

He thought it over for a few seconds, then said: “Sixty, and anyone asks I’ll say you stole it.”

“Done,” I said, and counted out three twenties as he took off the coat. It fitted a bit tightly across the shoulders, but no one would notice as long as I left it unbuttoned. I was stepping back onto the shop floor when the young guy called me.

“Hey, man, ’nother twenty, you can have the hat.”

“For twenty bucks, I could go into the hat business myself,” I replied. “Go hide in the men’s room.”

I found Stacey Byron by the toiletries, Rachel close by.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said, as I approached, “can I ask you some questions?”

Up close, she looked older. There was a network of broken veins beneath her cheekbones and a fine tracery of lines surrounded her eyes. There were tight lines, too, around her mouth, and her cheeks were sunken and stretched. She looked tired and something else: she looked threatened, maybe even scared.

“I don’t think so,” she said, with a false smile, and started to step around me.

“It’s about your ex-husband.”

She stopped then and turned back, her eyes searching for her police escort. “Who are you?”

“An investigator. What do you know about Renaissance art, Mrs. Byron?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“You studied it in college, didn’t you? Does the name Valverde mean anything to you? Did your husband ever use it? Did you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please, leave me alone.” She backed away, knocking some cans of deodorant to the floor.

“Mrs. Byron, have you ever heard of the Traveling Man?”

Something flashed in her eyes and behind me I heard a low whistle. I turned to see the fat cop moving down the aisle in my direction. He passed Rachel without noticing her and she began moving toward the door and the safety of the car, but by then I was already heading back to the staff area. I dumped the coat and walked straight through and on to the back lot, which was crowded with trucks making deliveries, before slipping around the side of the mall where Rachel already had the car started. I stayed low as we drove off, turning right instead of passing Stacey Byron’s house again. In the side mirror I could see the fat cop looking around and talking into his radio, Byron beside him.

“And what did we achieve there?” asked Rachel.

“Did you see her eyes when I mentioned the Traveling Man? She knew the name.”

“She knows something,” agreed Rachel. “But she could have heard it from the cops. She looked scared, Bird.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But scared of what?”

That evening, Angel removed the door panels of the Taurus and we strapped the Calicos and the magazines into the space behind them, then replaced the panels. I cleaned and loaded my Smith & Wesson in the hotel room while Rachel watched.

I put the gun in my shoulder holster and wore a black Alpha Industries bomber jacket over my black T-shirt and black jeans. With my black Timberlands, I looked like the doorman at a nightclub.

“Joe Bones is living on borrowed time. I couldn’t save him if I wanted to,” I told her. “He was dead from the moment the Metairie hit went wrong.”

Rachel spoke. “I’ve decided. I’m leaving in a day or two. I don’t think I can be part of this any longer, the things you’re doing, the things I’ve done.” She wouldn’t look at me and there was nothing that I could say. She was right, but she wasn’t simply preaching. I could see her own pain in her eyes. I could feel it every time we made love.

Louis was waiting by the car, dressed in a black sweat top and black denim jacket over dark jeans and Ecco boots. Angel checked the door panels one last time to make sure they slipped off without any trouble, then stood beside Louis.

“You don’t hear anything from us by three A.M., you take Rachel and clear out of the hotel. Book into the Pontchartrain and get the first plane out in the morning,” I said. “I don’t want Joe Bones trying to even up scores if this turns bad. Handle the cops whatever way you think is best.”

He nodded, exchanged a look with Louis, and went back into the Flaisance. Louis put an Isaac Hayes tape into the stereo and we rolled out of New Orleans to the strains of “Walk On By.”

“Dramatic,” I said.

He nodded. “We the men.”

Leon lounged by a gnarled oak, its trunk knotted and worn, as we reached the Starhill intersection. Louis’s left hand was hanging loosely by his side, the butt of the SIG jutting from beneath the passenger seat. I had slipped the Smith & Wesson into the map compartment on the driver’s door as we approached the meeting place. Seeing Leon alone against the tree didn’t make me feel any better.

We slowed and turned onto a small side road that ran past the oak tree. Leon didn’t seem to register our presence. I killed the engine and we sat in the car, waiting for him to make a move. Louis had his hand on the SIG now and drew it up so that it lay along his thigh.