Kelvin Welch leaned against a lamppost at the intersection of Dauphine and St. Peter, taking a moment to stop and admire the mayhem. A juggler costumed as the top-hatted voodoo spirit Baron Samedi swerved his six-foot-tall unicycle around a jazz quartet in the middle of the street, avoiding collision by a cat’s whisker. The combo’s double bass boomed applause. The reverb seemed to shake the plastic beads dangling from the necks of stragglers at the end of a second-line parade disappearing around the corner. A gal in a straw cowboy hat and a lacy sundress caught Welch looking. She shot him a big ol’ inviting grin before the endless river of tourists swept her away. The band caught the chatter and the drunken laughs and the occasional shriek that floated by and mixed them right into the jam, the crowd just one more instrument.
Welch smiled around the foot-long straw of his brandy milk punch. This trip had been a long time coming. So far it was meeting all expectations.
Then he saw the dude with the red mask. Again. His smile vanished.
The dude wasn’t looking at him. Not this time. He seemed to be ogling a couple of honeys in jean shorts and halter tops making their unsteady way up the block. But this was the third time Welch had spotted that same mask in as many hours.
Two times too many, he thought.
Welch had been sliding up one block and down the next since nine o’clock that night. Long enough after sundown that being outside was bearable. The heat now was from the people. Surging, jostling, the tourists like himself so easy to spot that they might as well have state license plates hung around their necks as jewelry. You had to stay sharp. A husband and wife with matching OK State T-shirts tripped off the curb, recovered, stumbled back onto the redbrick sidewalk, arms still draped around one another like a team in some boozy three-legged race. Welch had toasted their success with his plastic flute of frappé. As he raised the glass, he’d met the eyes of the guy in the red mask across the street.
The guy had looked away and Welch had done the same, barely registering the moment. Masks were common enough, even after the vaccine, even in the crush of the French Quarter where people tossed away all inhibitions along with their plastic doubloons.
An hour and three blocks later, Welch saw the man again. He’d swung through a cypress-paneled joint for another drink, becoming momentarily distracted by a waitress with a skirt so tight that Welch had been trying to make out which cheek had the tattoo. Red Mask had been outside, walking slowly up the sidewalk across the way. Welch had gotten a better look at the dude that time. White, medium height, brown hair slicked down by either gel or the heat. A black polo shirt and jeans. Nothing weird. But Welch had watched from the corner of his eye until the dude was out of sight.
He knew to pay attention to those negative vibes. Coming off three tense months in Dallas, Welch’s radar was extra sensitive to any shift in the patterns around him. Any sign that his cover might be in jeopardy, and his safety along with it.
Not that the Dallas assignment had been dangerous. Playing the fool during the day, pretending to be interested in whatever idiot TV show the other guys in Data Services had watched the evening before. Welch had been too busy probing the company’s internal safeguards and network traps every night to watch shit. Even after he’d cracked their system and stripped the intel he’d been sent to get, he’d had to stick around for two more anxious weeks until the contract was up and he could do the So Sorry, Got Another Offer jig before catching the next plane.
Now, with a thick roll in his pocket and a hundred times that much money coming soon for a job well done, Welch had been more than ready to relax and enjoy his vacation in New Orleans.
And if it weren’t for the guy in the mask, he would be. He resented the man for spoiling his fun.
Could be a mugger, he reflected as he sauntered down Toulouse. A scavenger who had flagged him for carrying cash earlier in the night. Welch felt he could handle a robber, or at least give the asshole the slip. He kept track of the people behind him as he strolled seemingly without care. Using the windows, car windshields, his phone screen to see if the man in the mask was on his tail. Welch turned one corner, then another. The guy didn’t reappear.
After ten blocks of trolling without a bite, Welch shook his head in frustration. Twitchy. That’s what he was. Three months of guarding his every move and utterance had worn him raw. The booze and the humidity probably didn’t help.
Crossing paths with another tourist a few times didn’t even qualify as unusual. Welch knew how the bon temps rolled around here. Everyone seeing the same sights, the same bars and their signature drinks from the guidebooks. Look, there was the cowgirl who’d smiled at him back on St. Pete. She was shimmying her way into a saloon with purple neon and fake Spanish moss on every wall. Hot zydeco—from a jukebox, not the sweet live stuff—pulsed from the open doorway.
Welch followed, sidestepping a voodoo crone and her sidewalk table strewn with cards and fetishes. The old woman’s outstretched claw brushed Welch’s wrist as he passed. He ignored her sales pitch disguised as an urgent plea. He’d make his own fortune, thank you very kindly.
The cowgirl had disappeared into the crowd somehow. Welch looked for her while waiting in the crush at the bar for a replacement beverage. Something with rum and pineapple bits on a skewer. By the time he had the drink in his hand, he needed relief. He went looking for the men’s room. The first door was the kitchen and the second—
Shit, he was outside. From the smell, plenty of dudes had made the same mistake and decided the alley would do just fine for their urgent appointment. The door had locked behind him. Welch edged around the Dumpster and wandered toward the fence at the end of the alley. Had to be a gate somewhere.
He heard the door to the bar open again and turned around. His eyes widened in recognition and he began to return the warm smile, an instant before a sound like a celery stalk snapping coincided with a massive blow to his chest. The drink dropped from his hand, the plastic cup bouncing and splashing pink rum over his shoes and shins. He tried to speak. There was no breath to carry the words. A second explosion of pain knocked him to his knees. Welch looked down toward the agony in his body, way down, sinking until he was lying on his side on the reeking bricks.
Hands were going over him, through his pockets. His body shivered despite a warmth that had spread all down his chest and stomach. He heard steps running until they faded into the brass blare of the trumpeter on the street beyond.
Kelvin Welch listened as the note rose, fell, smoothed into a drawn-out wail.
Long time coming, this trip, he thought.
He closed his eyes and let the music take him.