We flagged down a cab to take Neil, Dash and me to the intersection nearest Charity Cemetery. Dash and I sat in the back, Neil up front, and I read up on the memorial as we motored to Canal Street.
“Have you received any other notes?” Neil asked Dash.
“No! Honestly, I was hoping this was over.”
“Maybe it will be after tonight,” I said, expressing optimism I didn’t really feel.
We didn’t say much else for the rest of the ride, but my tummy was not entirely happy, and I was wishing I’d had some snackery with my snaiquiri so I wouldn’t feel quite so tipsy. Dash seemed a little fuzzy, mostly anxious, and Neil was a rock. Heck, when wasn’t he a rock?
“Um, is it just me, or are there a lot of dead people around here?” Dash whispered after the cab dropped us in front of a dilapidated white structure with a gate at Canal Street and City Park Avenue. The car peeled rubber getting out of there. This was a weird, not-quite-square three-way intersection, and the traffic lights and occasional headlights weren’t bright enough for me.
“This is kind of the nexus of dead people here,” I said. “This is the gate for Odd Fellows Rest, an old secret society cemetery. Lots of tombs. And there are people buried in the walls.”
“Atmospheric,” Neil said with grim humor.
I pointed out Cypress Grove across Canal Street and Greenwood in the opposite direction.
“What the hell is that?” Dash asked in alarm as a car’s headlights caught a bizarre shape atop a small hill in Greenwood.
I suppressed a semi-hysterical giggle that was half fear. “I think that’s the Elks mausoleum. That’s an elk. I saw it on a field trip when I was a kid.”
“Well fuck me and fuck their elk,” Dash said, and I laughed for real this time at the unexpected vitriol.
“We might want to take it down a notch,” Neil said quietly, tapping his phone, probably sending his text to Luke. “How far away is this place?”
I whispered this time. “Just up Canal.” We walked in the direction I indicated, side by side like Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. Only we weren’t worried about lions, tigers and bears. It was more like muggers, ghosts and killers. I clutched my messenger bag tightly and tried to look fierce.
“But everything’s closed,” Dash said.
“So maybe we meet at the gate,” I said.
Dash sounded hoarse. “I hear voices.”
“Is that a—bus?” Neil asked.
A short, white bus was parked just up and across the street. We crept across the streetcar tracks and behind it, then peered around its bumper.
About ten people were passing through a black iron gate topped by the words “Charity Hospital Cemetery.”
“It’s open!” I said.
“For a tour,” Neil said. “Let’s follow them in.”
“Maybe our source is one of the tourists,” Dash murmured as we strolled in behind them like we owned the place.
Neil didn’t say anything, just led us up the path and then off to the side and behind a chunky white structure faced in shiny black panels. The voice of the tour guide drifted back to us from where the group had stopped in the center—the eye of the hurricane, according to what I’d read online. I only heard a few words, but I knew the story all too well.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Dash asked as he clung to the wall, out of sight, looking around at more blocky structures set in a rough circle and an expanse of grass that rolled away into the darkness. “This doesn’t look like a cemetery. I don’t see any graves.”
“It was basically a potter’s field,” I said. “Poor people were buried here. Victims of yellow fever and flu epidemics. And then they built this memorial. You’re leaning on a grave.”
Dash jumped back, and Neil’s mouth twitched.
“There are dozens of victims of Hurricane Katrina buried in here, including some who were never identified.” I’d known only a few of the fourteen-hundred people killed in the storm, but I never got to mourn them. Once my parents sent me to Aunt Celestine, I came back only for short visits, much later. My aunt and I stayed in a hotel every time, and my parents were too busy talking about all the good work they were doing with their church and hurricane victims and their missions to Central America to discuss all that we’d really lost. For them, the hurricane was like crack. It gave their needy souls a focus they’d been unable to find in me.
“OK, now I’m creeped out,” Dash said.
“You should be,” I agreed.
“Maybe hiding isn’t the right thing to do.” Neil glanced at his phone and pocketed it again. “It’s midnight. Let’s give them a chance to contact us.” The tour guide’s spiel had ended, and now the tourists were wandering through the memorial. Following Neil’s lead, we also wandered for several minutes, but we stuck together.
No one came up to us. Couldn’t our informant see us? The dead seemed like they were crowding in. And now the tourists were gathering back at the gate, getting on the bus. If we didn’t get out of here soon, we might be locked in, and the last thing I wanted was to spend the night with Katrina’s glorious dead.
We got to the large black plaque in the middle and pretended to read it, but all of us were looking around, knowing our time had run out.
And then I heard a whoosh and a clatter.
I jumped back instinctively and looked up at Dash. He held a hand to his forehead. Crimson rivulets of blood trickled through his fingers.
“What the—?” I sputtered.
“We’re leaving now.” Neil yanked on the stunned Dash’s arm and pulled him toward the entrance. I walked quickly behind them, then heard another whoosh past my ear.
“What the hell is it?” I asked, finishing my sentence this time as we broke into a run. I spied Dash’s hat caught in a bush in a strip of vegetation. I grabbed it and kept going, then saw another hat lying on the grass. Maybe that was his? Without thinking, I grasped the brim and had to give it an extra yank to free it—from the arrow that had pinned it to the ground. Another whoosh by my head as I bent to grab the arrow told me I didn’t have time to extract the shaft from the ground, so I leapt up and stumbled after the others as we made a run for the front gate. We got a funny look from the rosy-cheeked tour leader, who was hovering there looking for the rest of his tourists.
“Do you have room on that bus?” Neil asked him.
I shot Neil an Are you crazy? look. “I don’t care if there’s room. We’re getting on it!”
Neil shrugged his assent, caving to my panic, and we both pushed Dash forward and onto the bus. The tour leader apparently grokked our urgency, because he boarded right behind us and plopped into the driver’s seat. He cranked up the motor as the three of us stood in the middle of the packed bus, Neil and I steadying Dash between us.
There was a loud crack as something hit one of the side windows, greeted by screams from the tourists. The glass cracked but didn’t break.
Neil didn’t look especially concerned. “Oblique hit, maybe?”
“Your play-by-play for tonight’s Hunger Games provided by Neil Rockaway,” I quipped, and Neil quirked his mouth at me. OK, so stress made me sarcastic.
“Hang on, everyone!” the leader-driver said. The bus jumped away from the curb and hurtled down the street. “Everyone OK? As you can see, we go all out on our ghost tours, and so do the ghosts!”
There was nervous laughter. A few people stared at us, since it was kind of obvious we weren’t part of the tour. Others pulled out the cocktails and flasks they’d stowed on the bus and took generous swigs.
“We’re taking a slight detour, but we’ll return to our BYOB Midnight Ghost Tour in just a few minutes,” the driver said. I caught his eye in the rearview mirror. He didn’t look happy.
Hey, it wasn’t our fault some maniac with a bow and arrow shot up his bus. Probably.
I plucked the handkerchief poking up from Dash’s jacket pocket, pushed his hand away from his forehead and pressed the cloth against his skin. The white fabric blossomed scarlet, but even minor head wounds were big bleeders. At least that’s what I told myself.
“I can hold it,” Dash said softly, taking over and putting pressure on his wound. “I should’ve thought of the handkerchief.”
“You had other things on your mind. How do you feel?” I asked.
“Stupid,” Dash said, and a rush of empathy warmed my heart. “You got my hat?”
“Um, yeah. I think.” I held up both of the hats and picked the most familiar one. “This is yours?”
“Yes,” he said, his eyes widening.
There were two holes in the fine straw mesh, one in the front, one in the back.
“That ventilation should come in handy back in Bohemia,” Neil said.
I raised an eyebrow at him and couldn’t suppress a smile. “I’ll tell you more when we stop,” I murmured. There were too many interested parties on board. For a second, I wondered if maybe one of them was the archer—but then, that last arrow had struck the bus as we were leaving, so that didn’t make sense.
“Anybody missing a hat?” I called out, waving the one that wasn’t Dash’s, a natural straw fedora-style hat with a band in an alternating gray and white triangle pattern. No one bit.
The driver ended up dropping us off at the same hospital where Barnie was staying. The guys got off first, and I leaned over to the driver and whispered, “You didn’t leave anybody behind back there, did you?”
The driver turned as pale as one of his ghosts and snapped his gaze up to his mirror. He mouthed numbers as he counted, and then his face relaxed. “All here. I hope your friend’s going to be OK. I’m going to report this to the cops when the tour’s over. You should call in your report, too.”
“Great idea. Thanks a lot.” I grabbed one of his tour brochures from a holder on the dash and stepped down to the street. At least if the driver reported what happened, we had the option of not being involved at all. I wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was anymore. There was more at stake than some bad whiskey now.
Neil had already taken Dash through the doors of the hospital, and I followed, wondering if someone had really been trying to kill Dash. Or maybe all of us.