“You want us to mess ’em up a little?” Tiger asked, hopefully.
“Not right away,” Boo said. “We need to know who hired ’em.”
Tiger crossed his huge arms. “We’ll find out for you. Least we can do.”
“In the meanwhile,” Liz said, “we’d better resume our search for Robbie. Time is running out.”
Chapter 15
Ken Lewis followed the pointing fork attached to the top of his direction finder as he trudged slowly along Bourbon Street. This stupid city smelled. He was tired of the pervading odors of mold and spice and old paint. The river behind him was a power presence in its own right he couldn’t ignore, and far too big for him to deal with. His feet were so hot and sore he wanted to go soak them in the Mississippi and tell Mr. Kingston to hell with him and his project. Trouble was, he knew it would be to Hell with him if he failed. Kingston wasn’t the only person who had a vested interest in its success. Ken was part of only a distant outer circle of the Council, but he, too, had hopes of ascendance one day. If he didn’t make this work, he was cooked.
He’d run up and down half the crumbling streets in that section of the French Quarter, only to find every track he followed belonged to a total stranger, and some pretty weird strangers at that. Who the hell knew there were so many people in this city giving off magical vibes? Voodoo priests, shamans, witches, clairvoyants—the place was full of practitioners and talents. Why did he have to lose a sensitive in the middle of all this? Why couldn’t Green Fire have had its all-important concert in, say, Cleveland, Ohio?
He’d had a heck of a time extracting himself from the last place, the sitting room in a private home on a little side street. The green-robed woman with the long henna-dyed hair had closed her door behind him and didn’t want him to go. Only by promising to come back after dark did he persuade her to open the door. He had no intention of keeping that promise. If he managed to pull this job out of the toilet, he intended to spend the hours after midnight getting very drunk in a hotel room. He was still sneezing sandalwood incense out of his nostrils.
This Halloween town had some advantages. The sight of a man walking down the street with a dowsing rod should have had people following him, or calling the cops. Here, nobody stopped him or asked what he was doing. That one big, old, black man in the pressed shirt and trousers back there around the corner had shown some knowledge, and wanted to talk about the device. Ken put him off, too. He ought to send his father down here for a vacation. These were his kind of people: total weirdos.
He turned off the main street just west of the river and headed inland again towards Bourbon Street. It was a long shot, trying an area so far from the Superdome, but he’d covered nearly every street from Poydras to the Quarter without finding a trace of Robbie. He had no choice but to keep trying. She was the linchpin in the whole system. He couldn’t run it without her. How he’d get her into the Superdome again later was a problem he’d figure out when he had her back.
The little hazel fork rotated on its spindle and pointed toward the storefronts on his right. By the strength of the reaction, Ken was pretty sure he had found the right trace at last. It took a little backtracking to figure out which doorway was the right one. He was in luck. It was a bar. He’d found her.
He peered into the dim room, lit only by a television set and some track lights over the mirror behind the varnished serving counter. Sure enough, the slender figure of the special effects engineer was hunched up on a stool with her elbows on the bar all the way in the back.
Ken switched off the electronic dowser and put it into his pocket. It had worked like a charm. Well, the rest of his act had better work, or he might be finished. He sidled up and sat down next to his quarry.
She’d been drowning her troubles. Pretty understandable, considering she’d been humiliated in front of everyone in the building. A tall, stemmed glass stood in front of her, half-emptied, but it couldn’t have been the first one. Drying rings of neon-colored liquid glistened on the honey-colored wood in the muted light.
“Hi, Robbie,” he said, gently. The television audio warred with some good jazz music coming from an overhead speaker. “Where’d you go so suddenly?”
Robbie Unterburger started, but she didn’t look at him right away. The bartender, a white woman in her early fifties, appeared only a few feet away. She gave him a wary glance. Ken guessed she wondered if he was the cause of her customer’s misery, and if she’d have to throw him out. He smiled at her, and she returned it, friendly but businesslike. Carefully, but not ostentatiously, she drew a Louisville slugger baseball bat out from underneath the bar so he could see it, nodded meaningfully at him, then put it back again. Ken gulped. Message received.
“I’ll have whatever she’s having.”
“All right, sir,” the bartender said, in a musical voice. “One Hurricane, coming up.”
Unhesitatingly, she moved to an array of bottles on the back counter, and started to mix the drink. Ken noticed she kept a close eye on him, either directly or in the mirror on the wall. Long experience enabled her to prepare his order and serve it without looking at it, but not missing an ingredient or spilling a drop. The tall glass she set down in front of him was filled to the brim with Day-Glo red liquid and had a toothpick with a cherry and a slice of orange in it. Ken blanched, but he put ten dollars down on the bar and pushed it toward the server. He hated sweet drinks. The bartender left him his change, still wearing a warning expression. Robbie was watching him now, so he took a good sip, and smiled at her.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You took off out of there so quickly.”
“I got fired, remember?” Robbie said, bitterly. She drained her glass and held up her finger for another one. With a glance at Ken to make sure he was watching, the bartender poured another Hurricane and set it down in front of the young woman. “What did I have to stay around for?”
Ken almost said, “to see the fireworks.” He patted her on the shoulder.
“You didn’t have to take off like that. Nigel’s not such a bad guy. He knows you’re a stranger in this city. He was going to arrange for you to get home again. He was going to exchange your ticket.”
“He was?” Robbie asked, amazed.
“Yeah! Swear to God,” Ken said, hoping she wouldn’t notice that he stuck his hand into his pocket so he could cross his fingers. No sense in giving the Other Side anything it could use against him. He might practice black magic, but he was honest about it.
“Oh, Ken,” Robbie said. Her hazel eyes, slightly rimmed with red, fixed on him. They filled with tears. “You’re so nice.”
“I’m your friend,” he said. Robbie drained her glass in a few gulps. This time Ken signaled for the next one. “Come on, everybody gets fired a few times in their life. There’s more bothering you than that. You want to tell me about it?”
“It’s nothing,” Robbie said, hunching over her drink.
“It’s Preston, isn’t it?” Ken said gently, patting her wrist in a fatherly way. Robbie nodded. “Oh, come on, you could do better than him.”
“No, I couldn’t,” Robbie muttered. “He’s the one I want. No offense, Ken, because you’re really a great guy.” She regarded him blearily. “And you’re good-looking, too. But Lloyd’s the sexiest man I’ve ever seen. I feel so . . . It’s like lightning running through . . .” She began again, blushing more than ever. “When I’m near him, I just want to throw myself at him. But I can’t.”
“And he’d like you, too, if it wasn’t for . . . Fionna.” Ken put all the scorn he could into the name, and was pleased to see the young woman straighten her spine and glare at nothing.
“Oh, yes,” she said, decidedly. “I wish the bitch would fall on her face.”
“Maybe she will. Have another drink?” Ken said. They had the back corner of the bar to themselves. The bartender had other customers to look after, and no one could hear them over the combined noise from the speakers. “C’mon, you can tell me all about it.”