Terrified, feverish in her haste to get away, Marley reached to wake up the woman. She would take her away from this place, back to safety.
An abrupt current buoyed Marley and she floated. She couldn’t go without the woman.
This time the heartbeat she heard was her own, the pounding of blood, her own. She wanted to shout that she couldn’t leave yet, not without the other one.
“Come! Please wake up and come!”
Marley’s throat closed with the last word she uttered. Panic forced her to fight against the tide that took her farther away.
Her thrashing arms and legs met sluggish resistance. When she struggled against the tide, it only grew stronger, carried her away—back through whirling blue-green matter to the waiting portal.
Chapter 11
“This had better be good,” Gray said. He slid to face Nat in a booth at Ambrose’s, a bar and diner across from Café du Monde on Decatur Street.
“I got you coffee,” Nat said.
“And I got three hours of sleep last night. Maybe less.”
Nat had called before six and the summons to Ambrose’s didn’t fall into the friendly invitation category. Nat sounded pissed.
“Drink,” Nat said. “You aren’t the only one around here who’s sleep deprived.”
The coffee tasted burned, or old and reheated, but it was strong and that mattered to Gray. The tone of Nat’s voice on the phone had been irritating enough—and interesting enough to get Gray from his home in Faubourg Marigny to the appointed place in half an hour. The city wasn’t awake yet. Pigeons still snoozed on statues in Jackson Square. The pickings from sidewalk diners weren’t worth pooping for yet.
“Tell me what you’ve got and let me get back to bed,” Gray said. He hung over the table, hands clasped between his knees, head bowed.
Nat tapped the rim of Gray’s mug with a fork. “Shut up and drink some more coffee.”
The detective’s plate overflowed with a muffuletta big enough to roof a round shack. Olive salad and cheese spilled from inside and Nat carefully stuffed every scrap back into the sandwich. He picked it up in both hands and took a big bite.
With a mouthful of bitter coffee not wanting to go down his throat, Gray watched his buddy chew slowly and swallow.
“Hey, Ambrose,” Gray called to the establishment’s owner, who sat on a stool beside a pocked, wooden bar and took all food orders. “I’ll have what he’s got.” He pointed at Nat’s plate.
That got him a grunt, but the food would arrive quickly and be good.
“Bucky Fist’s on his way,” Nat said. “He had a short night, too.”
Gray took a swallow from Nat’s water glass. “Damn,” he said. “It’s warm.”
“You hear what I said about Bucky coming?”
“Yeah. So I’ll bite. Do you and your partner hang out in here every morning, or does Bucky have news?”
Nat paused with what was left of the muffuletta halfway to his mouth. “Maybe he’s got something interesting to tell us.”
“You don’t know?”
“Where were you late last night?” Nat asked. He’d laced his own coffee with cream and tipped down half the mug. “Don’t tell me you were interviewing another singer.”
Evidently the Bucky Fist tack was a diversion. Gray left it alone. “I wasn’t interviewing anyone,” he said. He took Nat’s lead and dumped cream in his coffee. “How come this place makes the best food and the worst coffee?” he said, not expecting a sensible answer.
He got one. “Ambrose makes money on booze, not coffee. Order a Bloody Mary and you’ll go to heaven.”
“Why am I here?” Gray said, hoping the screwing around with “niceties” was over.
“I already said. Where were you late last night?”
“When did that get to be your business?”
Nat rescued several fallen olives and put them in his mouth. “When you came into my office with some bullshit story about looking for a woman we already knew was missing. That and other things.”
He could shut up and wait, let Nat get at this when he was ready or try to hurry things. Hurrying wouldn’t work. Gray got down more coffee.
“You were at Scully’s,” Nat said. “Down at the Hotel Camille.”
“If you know, why ask me?”
“Why do you think? To see if you’d own up to it on your own.”
Gray hated cat-and-mouse conversations. And he wasn’t thrilled with Nat’s manner. “How do you know where I was last night? I wasn’t followed.”
Nat’s eyebrows arched and he set down his fork. “You don’t know that.”
“I sure as hell do,” Gray told him. “I was at Scully’s, but I wasn’t followed there.”
“Maybe you were followed when you left.”
“Not then, either,” Gray said. “The streets were empty. You could have heard a gnat swallow. You know I’d know.”
Begrudgingly, Nat nodded. Gray had been a good cop, a good detective—and more than one said, a loss to NOPD. They used to say he had a sixth sense….
Screwing up his eyes, Gray swung from the booth and bought thinking time by wandering to the bar to check on his food.
Ambrose could be sixty or ninety. His white hair curled in a tight skull cap and his face shone dark and deeply lined. Gray had come here for years and Ambrose, sitting on the same stool every time, didn’t seem to change.
“You kin carry your own plate, then,” Ambrose said, flashing a gold front tooth. “You in such a a’mighty hurry t’eat.”
The food arrived from the kitchen as Gray got to the bar. “I’ll do that,” he told Ambrose. “Thanks.”
“Good to see you back on the beat,” Ambrose said. “Don’t be a stranger no more.”
Gray didn’t set him straight. “Thanks, Ambrose.” Loaded plate in hand, he made his way back to the booth, passing a few early customers and a few really late all-nighters on the way. The late ones had the fixed stares and disconnected hand-eye coordination of the past-drunk, legally comatose brigade.
He wondered how long Nat would take to get to the point and whether his ex-colleague was waiting for his partner before dropping some bombshell. If he had to guess, Fist either wouldn’t show, or didn’t have much to drop.
Nat waited until Gray’s mouth was full to say, “That nutty little redhead was with you at Scully’s, right?”
Two could play games. Gray kept his face in neutral and chewed. He pointed at his mouth to indicate he couldn’t talk yet and considered his response.
After a swig from his mug, he said, “I don’t know any nutty redheads.”
That brought Nat’s battered notebook from the pocket of his shirt. He slid a stubby pencil from the wire spiral and flipped a page over. “Marley Millet,” he said, looking down as if Gray would believe his ex-colleague would forget a name that fast. The kind of name that belonged to the kind of owner it had.
“Nice woman,” Gray commented.
“You were at Scully’s with her last night. The two of you talked to Danny Summit, the bartender.”
The picture got clearer for Gray. “How is Danny doing this morning?” Somehow he hadn’t expected Danny to follow through with his threat to call the cops.
Nat straightened against the back of the banquette. He indicated to a waitress that he wanted more coffee and Gray sat silent until the woman had come and gone.
This wasn’t going to work the way Nat wanted, which was for Gray to start saying things Nat might not
