Dagger Key and Other Stories

I could hear laughter in the background and I hesitated, picturing him hunched over the phone in his den, a skinny, balding white man whom you might mistake for an insurance salesman or a CPA, no doubt clad in one of his neon-colored smoking jackets.

“Jack, you better have something good,” Billy said. “Hair’s starting to sprout from my palms.”

“I’m not sure how good it is, but…”

“I’m missing the immunity challenge. The penultimate moment of the entire season. And I got people over, you hear?”

Billy was the only person I knew who could pronounce vowels with a hiss. I gave him the gist of it, trying not to omit any significant details, but speeding it along as best I could.

“Interesting,” he said. “Tell me again what she said when you spoke to her.”

I repeated the conversation.

“It would seem that Miz Verret’s agenda is somewhat different from that of the Darden Corporation,” Billy said. “Otherwise, she’d have no compunction about reporting your conversation.”

“That was my take.”

“Voodoo business,” he said musingly.

“I can’t be sure it’s got anything to do with voodoo.”

“Naw, this here is voodoo business. It has a certain taint.” Billy made a clicking noise. “I’ll get back to you in the morning.”

“I was just trying to do you a favor, Billy. I don’t need to be involved.”

“Honey, I know how it’s supposed to work, but you’re involved. I got too many eggs in my basket to be dealing with anything else right now. This pans out, I’m putting you in charge.”

The last thing I had wanted was to be in business with Billy Pitch. It wasn’t that you couldn’t make a ton of money with Billy, but he was a supremely dangerous and unpleasant human being, and he tended to be hard on his associates. Often he acted precipitately and there were more than a few widows who had received a boatload of flowers and a card containing Billy’s apologies and a fat check designed to compensate for their loss and his lamentable error in judgment. In most cases, this unexpected death benefit served to expunge the ladies’ grief, but Alice Delvecchio, the common-law wife of Danny “Little Man” Prideau, accused Billy of killing her man and, shortly after the police investigation hit a dead end, she and her children disappeared. It was rumored that Billy had raised her two sons himself and that, with his guidance, hormone treatments, and the appropriate surgery, they had blossomed into lovely teenage girls, both of whom earned their keep in a brothel catering to oil workers.

Much to my relief, no call came the following morning. I thought that Billy must have checked out Pellerin and Verret, found nothing to benefit him, and hadn’t bothered getting back to me. But around ten o’clock that evening, I fielded a call from Huey Rafael, one of Billy’s people. He said that Billy wanted me to run on out to an address in Abundance Square and take charge of a situation.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Billy says for you to get your butt over here.”

Abundance Square was in the Ninth Ward, a few blocks from the levee, and was, as far as I knew, utterly abandoned. That made me nervous.

“I’m coming,” I said. “But I’d like to know something about the situation. So I can prepare for it, you understand.”

“You ain’t need nothing to prepare you for this.” Huey’s laugh was a baritone hiccup. “Got some people want watching over. Billy say you the man for the job.”

“Who are these people?” I asked, but Huey had ended the call.

I was angry. In the past, Billy had kept a close eye on every strand of his web, but nowadays he tended to delegate authority and spent much of his time indulging his passion for reality TV. He knew more about The Amazing Race and The Runway Project than he did about his business. Sooner or later, I thought, this practice was going to jump up and bite him in the ass. But as I drove toward the Ninth Ward, my natural paranoia kicked in and I began to question the wisdom of traipsing off into the middle of nowhere to hook up with a violent criminal.

Prior to Katrina, Abundance Square had been a housing project of old-style New Orleans town homes, with courtyards and balconies all painted in pastel shades. It had been completed not long before the hurricane struck. Now it was a waste of boarded-up homes and streets lined with people’s possessions. Cars, beds, lamps, bureaus, TV sets, pianos, toys, and so on, every inch of them caked with dried mud. Though I was accustomed to such sights, that night it didn’t look real. My headlights threw up bizarre images that made it appear I was driving through a post-apocalyptic version of Claymation Country. I found the address, parked a couple of blocks away, and walked back to the house. A drowned stink clotted my nostrils. In the distance, I heard sirens and industrial noise, but close at hand, it was so quiet you could hear a bug jump.