The Shoal of Time Read online

  I glanced at my watch. It was close to one p.m. I was starting to get hungry.

  “What would you like?” I asked the cell phone.

  A garbled mishmash of replies came back, ranging from hamburgers to alligator. In other words, unless they were serious about the alligator, it was up to me to pick a place that would satisfy everyone. I looked at Ashley for guidance.

  She looked at the phone. Asked them to repeat. Same answers with some elaborations that ran from “not where we ate before” to “not too hot” to “something local.” Helpful. Not.

  She shrugged at me.

  “Parking is a pain in this part of town, so let’s head downtown. About ten minutes,” I added for the starving masses.

  Not that it mattered, but I explained why I was going around the French Quarter instead of through. Ashley nodded and even laughed at my comments about slow donkey carriages, one-way streets, drunk tourists who weren’t sure where the sidewalk ended and the street began, sober tourists who seemed to think a historic district like the French Quarter shouldn’t allow cars (bet they’d be upset if the beer truck didn’t get through). “And don’t get me started on frat boys.”

  Then it was time to point out another sex-work area, the Quarter edge of Rampart Street. It’s the dividing line between Treme and the Quarter, with a fair number of bars and some brisk business between the blocks. It would be busy later, but a rainy day wasn’t prime stroll time.

  We headed downtown to a place in the Bywater, away from the hordes of tourists and the concentration of workers in the CBD. It had praline bacon; that should make everyone happy.

  As we parked, Ashley briefly put her hand on my knee and said, “This is the real reason we hired you, to steer us away from the usual tourist traps.” It was a light, quick touch. The big SUV pulled in behind us. It was after one p.m., so late enough that the restaurant wasn’t packed.

  Other than the hurried moment in the park, when Ashley got out, this was the first time I was able to see who had been listening to my narrative. The older woman, a much younger woman I hadn’t seen before, and two of the three men from the pizza place.

  The rain and the chill pushed us inside before anyone said anything.

  As we waited to be seated, I said, “Hi, I’m Micky,” mostly to the young woman, since she was the one person I’d never seen before.

  She glanced at the younger man before answering, “I’m Sandy.” Then she looked at him again.

  “I forgot we haven’t been properly introduced,” Ashley said. “Micky, this is Cara, John, and Jack. Everyone, Micky Knight, the person saving us from lunch at the boring tourist places.”

  They all spoke at once, a mumble of “pleased to meet you” (the older woman, I think), “hi, howya doin’,” to a slurred murmur that could have been anything from “great to meet you” to “I know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.” It seemed to be a habit of theirs, no hierarchy in replies.

  The waitress led us to the table.

  I’d been there before so I knew what I was going to get, but the others were perusing their menus. I observed them as they did. They were a motley bunch for law enforcement. The older woman was probably in her mid-fifties and looked every day of it. Her hair was ash blond, a dye job needing a touch-up. She had sad, brown hound-dog eyes, almost lost in her crow’s feet and under-eye bags. Her waist had thickened, and she didn’t move as if she did more than sit at a desk in the day and in front of the TV at night. Her voice was low and raspy, either a bad cold or years of smoking. I was guessing that field work wasn’t her usual assignment, so maybe she had some expertise that made it useful for her to come along. Or maybe she was high up enough that she could tag along on places she wanted to go, like New Orleans.

  The older man would probably be her in about fifteen years. I put him as early to mid-forties, and again, he looked like someone who needed to eat a lot more broccoli and a lot fewer burgers and fries. The muscle was starting to turn to flab, but he was still a big, imposing man, like a linebacker who played his last game ten years ago and has spent too much time in bars with his former teammates. His crew-cut hair was brown, peppered with gray flecks. His eyes were dark, small and hidden under his ridge of a brow. His voice was a low rumble, an accent that slurred and could have been anything from Philly to New Jersey. If this was a gang, he’d be the muscle.

  The younger two bothered me. They almost read as a couple. Sandy was looking over the same menu as Jack (or was it John?) instead of perusing her own. Even if they were dating, they should keep it out of the workplace.

  Or maybe I was just turning into the kind of person who was going to start yelling at kids to stay off my lawn any day now.

  Jack (John?) was good-looking. Thick, wavy brown hair, worn a tad long and in the spiky style that takes work to achieve unless you happen to wake up looking like that. His eyes were a gray-blue, set in a face with a strong jaw and high cheekbones. He verged on being pretty. He was either a well-preserved late twenties or early thirties. I was leaning to the former because Sandy was early twenties and read as even younger. Her name matched her hair, a light, sandy brown. She was conventionally pretty, and would have been even prettier if she wasn’t trying so hard at it, too much makeup, her eyes almost a black ring of mascara, hair teased and blown out in a way that didn’t do well in wind and rain. Her eyebrows were too tweezed; they looked plucked, not shaped. There wasn’t a single wrinkle in her face, a little baby fat still in her cheeks.

  As I suspected, the praline bacon was a hit. Ashley and I were the only ones who skipped ordering it, although Sandy was just sharing an order with Jack.

  Cara, the older woman, ordered a salad. And the bacon. As if she knew she needed to be better with her diet, but couldn’t quite get there. John, as if to type, ordered a hamburger with fries. And a beer.

  Jack ordered a couple of appetizers, oysters and fried green tomatoes in addition to the bacon. Sandy ordered a veggie sandwich, as if to prove that she would always be skinny and beautiful. Or maybe she just liked veggies.

  Ashley ordered gumbo and a salad with shrimp.

  I went with the oyster po-boy. I do salads at home and save the fried stuff for eating out.

  I hoped they would talk about their work down here, but the conversation drifted from the weather to sports. Mostly Jack and John talked, with Sandy listening intently, while Cara checked messages on her phone. I was seated between her and Sandy and neither of them seemed inclined to chat me up.

  Ashley was across the table on the other side of John. He spoke the most and the loudest, so she only managed a few comments to me, mostly about the food. Our most sustained conversation was about the weather and when it might warm up.

  I reminded myself this wasn’t a lunch with friends; I was getting paid. I also reminded myself I was seeing more of the social side than the professional side of these people. Maybe they were experts at what they did and quite competent when they needed to be. So far I wasn’t impressed, but then it hardly mattered what I thought.

  I liked Ashley. She seemed smart and personable. It was possible she was making her confederates seem dim in contrast. And it was possible that because I liked her, I wanted to be doing something besides being chaperoned by four other coworkers. I wanted to ask more questions about who they were and what their purpose was here but understood that banal talk of weather and sports might be more appropriate in a public place.

  And I had to admit, I wanted to talk shop to prove I knew what I was doing, to show off. To prove Ashley had been right to hire me. Work was what sustained me, the small triumphs of solving a case, finding a person others hadn’t, the compliments from my clients. I wanted to see admiration in her eyes. I chastised myself, not to care so much, to need so much. But other than the Saints, I don’t much keep up on sports and we had long exhausted the weather. It was likely to rain tomorrow as well, but get drier and warmer for the weekend.

  Cara picked up the check, using cash. I remembered to grab the receipt for her;
she was already halfway to the SUV when I caught up to hand it to her.

  She and John decided they had enough of the touring and wanted to head back to the hotel. Jack, and therefore Sandy, still wanted to see more of the city. So they and Ashley piled in my car. Given how small the backseat was, it was a good thing they were friendly.

  Since we were already pretty far downtown, I took them to the Lower Ninth Ward. It’s below the Industrial Canal. Their side of the levee failed during Katrina and the water from other canals lower down also flowed in, making it one of the most destroyed areas in the city. Houses weren’t just washed off their foundations but flung down the street and left stewing in rooftop-deep waters for weeks.

  It wasn’t a sex-trafficking area, had been a working-class neighborhood before the storm, and it was still struggling to come back. I drove them there because people should see and know what happened; know that it takes years and years after the cameras have gone for things to recover.

  I again played tour guide, explaining where we were, what we were seeing. Jack seemed interested, and both he and Ashley asked intelligent questions.

  I did catch in the rearview mirror that he and Sandy were holding hands. Rather, Sandy was clutching his and he was letting her.

  After the Ninth Ward, I took them back through Bywater into the Marigny. We drove slowly along Frenchmen Street, a drag with a lot of bars and restaurants, teeming with people on any given weekend night. It’s more a local than tourist area, but even the locals have been known to buy their sex.

  Then we drove through the French Quarter and Ashley got to see that I wasn’t exaggerating (much) about the slow donkey carts and the drunken tourists. Sandy even started asking about the shops and bars on Decatur Street. She asked if we could drive down Bourbon and I had to say that even if it wasn’t blocked to traffic, there were so many people ambling—and stumbling drunk—that it was much slower to drive than to walk.

  Jack promised to take her there that evening.

  They were staying at one of the hotels near Canal Street. Traffic was heavy. I had to impolitely nose my car between two taxis to be able to let them out.

  “I’ll call you,” Ashley said as she got out. Then the taxi horn blared and words were useless.

  Chapter Six

  It was late enough in the day that I didn’t bother going back to my office and just headed home. It was closer anyway.

  After I let myself in, I looked at my phone. She said she’d call me. We hadn’t mentioned anything about working again. Maybe this tour was all they wanted, although I hadn’t been paid for it yet. I stuffed the phone in my pocket and went upstairs to the bedroom to change into sweatpants and a T-shirt—and more importantly, no bra or shoes.

  I kept the phone with me, something I don’t usually do. I have both a cell and home phone. My friends know me well enough to know that, unlike the younger generation, I don’t keep my cell attached to my hip and they can call on the real phone. However, Ashley only had my cell number.

  I wandered to the kitchen. I should start dinner, but dawdled. Maybe she would call and want to go out to eat.

  No, I told myself, you don’t know her well enough to worry like this. If she calls, she calls. I realized it wasn’t about her; it was about me. Ashley was a pleasant enough woman, but so far there was nothing outstanding or interesting about her beyond a mild flirtation. And mild flirtations are, to paraphrase, just mild flirtations.

  This was me. I was between times, adrift in change, so much so that anything floating by was something to cling to. The real interest in Ashley was that she was someone new, someone with whom I could leave the past behind and pretend it hadn’t happened.

  If only I could pretend that with myself.

  The blizzard wasn’t my fault.

  The alcohol and forgetting to set my alarm the night before was.

  Cordelia, the woman I thought I’d be with forever, had cancer. New Orleans was still, even this many years out, recovering from Katrina. One of the areas hardest hit was medical care. We made the hard decision that she couldn’t get the best treatment here, so she transferred to Houston.

  When did it change? I couldn’t tell; it seemed a blur.

  She had inherited money, but the treatment and distance quickly cut into it. I tried to hold on, balancing my work and traveling to be with her. She was a doctor, though never interested in being a high-paid one; she still made a decent wage when she was working. But she wasn’t working, and I had to cut back on the cases I could take. Being in Houston every weekend made it impossible to take anything that couldn’t be wrapped up on a nine-to-five schedule. That cut into my income.

  It seems so trivial now, the money. But the truth was there wasn’t quite enough to stretch to meet all our needs. The most important, getting her the best treatment, was covered. But that left the daily expenses of life, from the mortgage to cat food to flying to Houston every week. I wasn’t making quite enough to cover all of those and I was loath to ask Cordelia for help because she needed her inheritance money to cover medical expenses. We were lucky, even had about a hundred thousand in the bank, our rainy day fund, but I was loath to touch that once I saw how quickly the bills added up, and the unexpected extra costs. Between my travel and her medical costs, we could easily spend ten thousand above our normal bills in a month.

  I tried driving instead of flying, but that just cut into time I could be earning money and in the end saved little or nothing. I’d have to either cut my Friday hours or leave in the late afternoon for the six-hour drive to Houston, It was the same coming back, leave Sunday afternoon or very early Monday morning. Either way it was twelve hours in a car in three days. One late Sunday night I almost went off the road because I was too tired. I didn’t get in until after midnight because I had to stop every hour or so to drink coffee.

  The weeks and months became an exhausted blur. I worked as many hours as I could cram in while in New Orleans, often getting in at midnight and starting again at six in the morning, hustled to the airport for a late Friday or early Saturday flight, constantly searching for hotel deals to save money, eating cheap, bad food, to save money. Then on the plane again late Sunday or early Monday, making phone calls and doing paperwork in the airport because it was the only way I could keep up.

  Time fled as if chased by a banshee. Cordelia had started there in a broiling July and suddenly I was in the airport shivering because the earth had turned, it was October, and the cold had come.

  And now I was here. Soon it would be spring again, as if warmth and the new green of budding leaves could make a difference. It seemed impossible to have so quickly gone from scrabbling for one minute of stillness, wanting a place of rest where nothing was demanded of me, to this numb place of going through the routines of the day because what else could I do? I had savagely gotten what I wanted—everything stopped, no one needing or wanting me, no demand after demand piling up to exhaustion.

  A few weeks, now a month, two, stretching into days of getting up, going to my office. It didn’t matter if I had a case or not, it was the semblance of motion. Doing the work that needed to be done or finding ways to make the time pass. Winter to spring. Then spring to summer.

  Ashley broke the routine and gave me something to think about other than how much I’d screwed up my life, in ways I’d never be able to fix.

  It led me being a forty-something woman, with nothing more important than wondering if another woman I barely knew was going to call me.

  She didn’t.

  A day passed. And another.

  I’d given up on her, just knowing she wouldn’t call with another morning staring me in my uncaffeinated eyes. I’d gotten up, again moved through the routines of breakfast, gone to my office. At this time of the morning phone calls are about business.

  I was on my third cup of coffee when the phone rang.

  “Hey, Micky, thanks for the tour. It gave us good insight into the city.”

  “You’re kind. You probably could have
gotten the same info from the usual tour guides for a lot cheaper.”

  “I doubt that. Don’t think too many tours cruise down Tulane Avenue and point out the hooker hotels.”

  “I’m sure there are some that do, but admittedly not the ones you can book through the usual channels. How are things going?”

  “Boring. Catching up on paperwork with room service. Necessary, but not my first choice in how I’d spend my time in New Orleans.”

  “I certainly hope you get a chance to spend time on higher choices before you leave.” There, that was as much flirting as I was going to do.

  “Me, too. I’m calling because we’d like your services again. I know this is late notice, but we could use you today. Something just came up.”

  “What do you need?” Truth was I didn’t have much going on and a distraction would be welcome, but I knew better than to sound needy or as if nothing else was going on in my life.

  “Mostly navigation. We got a tip about a location where some stuff is going on and we’d like to check it out.”

  “Shouldn’t you bring in the big guns for this?”

  “Hey, we are the big guns, remember? But yeah, if we thought it was active, we’d get backup. But this tip is about where they used to be. We want to take a look and see if we can get any clues that might lead us to where they really are.”

  “What if your tip is wrong and they’re still around?”

  “We can handle it. If you’re concerned, we can do it on our own, just be nicer to have someone who knows which way to go.”

  When did I get old and cautious, I wondered. I was worried about a few bad guys with a bunch of Feds around me. And I didn’t want Ashley to think I was scared. “Let me take a look and see what I have going,” I said, although I pretty well knew the calendar I pulled up was empty. “Your lucky day. I need to wrap up a few things and I can be ready in an hour.” I was too vain to let her know I could actually walk out the door right now—unwanted is not attractive.