“By the ice-cream truck,” anot
her woman said.
“Was anyone with them?”
“I wasn’t paying attention,” she replied.
The room smelled of perfume and urinated beer. Toilets were flushing. Everyone in the room was staring at me, the frivolous moment gone, a deadness in every person’s face, as though a cold wind had blown through the windows high up on the wall. “Thanks for your help, ladies. We apologize for bothering y’all,” I said.
We went back out in the concourse and climbed the stairs to the balcony and then went back downstairs and through the crowd again. The orchestra had just finished pounding out Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” No one I recognized or spoke to had seen Alafair or Julie Ardoin, at least not in the last twenty minutes. I saw Clete opening and closing his hands at his sides, a bone flexing in his cheek. “This is a pile of shit,” he said.
“They weren’t abducted by a UFO. Somebody saw them,” I said.
“Except we can’t find that somebody,” he said.
“Where haven’t we looked?”
“Behind the stage?” he said.
“It’s Grand Central Station back there,” I said.
“No, I chased a bail skip in there once. He was at a picnic and tried to hide in a room full of paint buckets and stage costumes.”
“How do we get in?”
He thought about it. “There’s a back door.”
We went back outside into the cold and the damp, musky smell of leaves that had turned from green to yellow and black inside pools of water. We scraped open a heavy metal door in the back of the building just as the orchestra went into Will Bradley and Freddie Slack’s boogie-woogie composition “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar.”
“God, that gives me the willies,” Clete said.
“What does?”
“That song is on your iPod, the one you said Tee Jolie Melton gave you.”
We were inside a dark hallway, one that smelled of dust and Murphy Oil Soap. “That’s right, Tee Jolie gave it to me. You believe me now?” I said.
“I’m not sure. I got a feeling this isn’t real, Dave.”
“What isn’t?”
“Like I said before. We were supposed to die in the gig on the bayou. The real surprise is maybe we did die. We just haven’t figured it out yet. I’ve heard stories about people’s souls wandering for a long time before they’re willing to let go of the world.”
“We’ve got one issue here, Cletus: to find Alafair and Gretchen and bring them home. Come on, podna, lock and load. Let go of all this other stuff.”
His pupils were dilated, his skin stretched tight on his face. He coughed into his palm and wiped it inside his pocket. He pulled his .38 snub from his shoulder holster and let it hang loosely from his right hand. Through a curtain, we could see the orchestra kicking into overdrive. The pianist’s fingers were dancing on the keys, the double-pedal beat of two bass drums building into a throaty roar the way Louie Bellson used to do it, the sound of the saxophones slowly rising in volume like a living presence, starting to compete and blend in with the stenciled clarity of Freddie Slack’s piano score, all of it in four-four time.
“I’m going to kill every one of them, Streak,” Clete said.
I started to argue with him, but I didn’t. Though bloodlust and fear and a black flag had served us poorly in the past, sometimes the situation had not been of our choosing, and we’d had little recourse. Ethics aside, when it’s over, you’re always left with the same emotion: You’re glad you’re alive and the others are dead instead of you.
At the end of the hallway was a narrow space through which I could see people dancing in a cleared area below the stage. All of them were having a good time. A young dark-haired woman in a sequined evening dress was dancing with her eyes tightly shut, her arms pumped, the back of her neck glazed with sweat. She was drunk and her bra strap was showing, and her lipsticked mouth was partially open in an almost lascivious fashion. All of her energies seemed concentrated on a solitary thought, as though she were reaching an orgasmic peak deep inside herself, totally indifferent to her surroundings. The trombone players rose to their feet, the blare of their horns shaking the glass in the windows. I didn’t care about the band or the secret erotic pleasure of others. I wanted my daughter back.
Clete Purcel was staring at his left palm. In it was a bright scarlet star that looked like it had been freshly painted on his skin.
I thought he had coughed the blood into his hand. Then I saw him raise his eyes to the plank ceiling above our heads. I slipped my army-issue 1911-model .45 automatic from the leather holster clipped onto my belt. I heard the members of the orchestra pause in the middle of the melody and shout in unison:
When he jams with the bass and guitar,