Jax was cleaning his gun at the table by the window overlooking the city when the call came through on the hotel telephone.
Setting aside the newly oiled Beretta, he hit the Mute button on the remote, silencing the perky blond Channel 4 reporter standing in front of what was left of October Guinness’s yellow VW Bug. He reached for the receiver. “Hello?”
The woman’s voice at the other end of the line was so tight it cracked. “Why should I trust you?”
Jax’s gaze focused on the television screen, where paramedics were loading a zipped black body bag into a waiting ambulance. The car bomb had obviously been intended for her. So what had gone wrong for the guys in the body bags?
“You need to meet me,” he said. “This is something we really can’t talk about on the phone.”
“Why should I trust you?” she said again.
“My guess is you’ve just about run out of options.”
There was a long silence.
He said, “Listen to me. I can help you.”
“Or you could kill me yourself.”
“I could have killed you this afternoon.”
There was another pause. He could feel the tension crackling over the line. Then she said, “Meet me at Joe’s Crab Shack, on Lakeshore Drive at the West End. Can you be there in half an hour?”
“Yes.”
“Come alone.”
Jax reached for his Beretta. “I’ll be there.”
The Circle Bar at the corner of St. Charles and Lee Circle was a disreputable dive that reeked of spilled beer and urine and decay. Barid Hafezi had never been in such a place. Once a grand, three-story house with a turret and wraparound balcony, it had long ago degenerated into a haunt for winos and addicts and washed-up hookers.
Glancing around nervously, Barid chose a table in a dark corner and ordered two drinks. The first he dumped in the pot of a nearby dead palm. But the second one he drank. It might have offered him a form of false courage, but he’d take any kind of courage he could get at the moment.
He’d spent the afternoon taking care of some pesky tasks he’d let slide and assembling all the papers his wife, Nadia, would need in a file he’d labeled Death and left in the bottom drawer of his desk at home for her to find. Then he took her and the kids out to dinner, and there’d even been time to stop by the old snowball stand on Metairie Road.
Jasmina’s snowball had turned her mouth blue, and she opened her eyes wide and stuck out her tongue in fun, and Barid laughed so hard he’d cried.
“What is it?” Nadia had asked him, her soft brown eyes anxious as she searched his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he’d said, looping an arm around her shoulders to draw her to him. “I just realize how blessed I am.”
Before he left the house that night, he’d hugged and kissed each of them in turn—Nadia, Jasmina, and Faraj—and he’d told them he loved them. Draining his second glass, now, he found some solace in the thought. They would have that to remember.
He left the credit card receipt on the table as instructed and dropped the book Fitzgerald had sent him on the bench. He’d often thought about that improbable string of Korans that Mohammed Atta had left behind him in the bar he’d patronized so noisily the Friday before September 11, on the dashboard of his rental car, and in his apartment. It reminded Barid of that European fairy tale about Hansel and Gretel, stringing a trail of bread crumbs to be followed. Now, he wondered where his own false trail would lead.
Nadia would know he hadn’t done it, whatever it was. She would remember the way he had hugged and kissed his children. And she would understand why he had cooperated, so that they might live, even if he could not.
The crowds were already beginning to disperse by the time Homicide Detective William P. Ahearn and his sergeant reached the Orleans Marina.
Ahearn stood on a patch of scorched grass, his arms folded at his chest, and studied the blackened, twisted skeleton of what had once been a classic VW Beetle. According to their records, October Guinness drove a 1979 VW Beetle.
“Jesus Christ,” said Trish. “What did this? A car bomb? We turning into Baghdad or something?”
Ahearn nodded to the detective, Eddie Jackson, a slim, wiry man with gleaming ebony skin and a neat goatee. “Whatcha got so far?”
“It took us a while,” said Jackson, “but we finally got the car’s VIN number.”
“You’re kidding? Off of what?”
“One of the doors blew over to the other side of the seawall.”
“And?”
“It’s registered to October Guinness.”
“But she’s not one of the bodies?”
“We don’t think so. They’re in such bad shape it’s impossible to be sure yet, but according to witnesses, there were two men near the car when it blew. A tall young black guy and a cop.”
“Who’s the cop?”
“Martie Driscole.”
“Martie?” Trish’s forehead puckered with distress. “Aw, hell.” Martie Driscole had three kids under five.
“So who’s the black dude?” asked Ahearn.
“That’s anybody’s guess. We haven’t found anyone yet who recognized him, and whatever ID he was carrying probably beat him to hell. Maybe the autopsy will come up with something.”
Ahearn nodded, his gaze lifting to stare across the top of the seawall to where the masts of the sailboats in the marina stood out stark against the darkening sky. “I’ve got two Tulane professors dead in less than twenty-four hours. I’ve got the first prof’s house trashed. I’ve got his research assistant’s house trashed. And now I’ve got her car blown to bits right next to the marina where the second prof parked her friggin’ boat. You think I’m going out on a limb here if I suspect the girl seen running away from the floating morgue we found at Pontchartrain Beach was October Guinness?”
Trish and Jackson exchanged looks, but neither said a word.
Ahearn hunched his shoulders, trying to ease a worsening kink in his neck. “I want her picture in the hands of every cop on the street. I want it on the ten o’clock news. And I want it on the front page of tomorrow morning’s Times-Picayune.”
Trish nodded. “You think she’s doing all this?”
“Hell. I don’t know. But I’d bet the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that she knows a heckuva lot more about what’s going on around here than I do. The woman’s a goddamn walking crime wave. I want her off the streets.”