Every Dead Thing

“Very witty for a man screwing a psychologist. Why don’t you just pay your eighty bucks an hour like everyone else?”

Louis gave us both bored looks over the top of his newspaper. Maybe Leon and Louis were related way back.

“Lionel Fontenot’s boy just paid me a visit,” I said.

“The beauty queen?” asked Louis.

“None other.”

“We on?”

“Tonight at ten. Better get your stuff out of hock.”

“I’ll send my boy.” He kicked Angel in the leg from beneath the sheets.

“The ugly queen?”

“None other,” said Louis.

Angel continued to watch his game show. “It’s beneath my dignity to comment.”

Louis returned to his paper. “You got a lot of dignity for a guy with a towel on his dick.”

“It’s a big towel,” sniffed Angel.

“Waste of a lot of good towel space, you ask me.”

I left them to it. Back in my room, Rachel was standing by the wall, her arms folded and a fierce expression on her face.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“We go back to Joe Bones,” I said.

“And Lionel Fontenot kills him,” she spat. “He’s no better than Joe Bones. You’re only siding with him out of expediency. What will happen when Fontenot kills him? Will things be any better?”

I didn’t answer. I knew what would happen. There would be a brief disturbance in the drug trade, as Fontenot renegotiated existing deals or ended them entirely. Prices would go up and there would be some killing, as those who felt strong enough to challenge him for Joe Bones’s turf made their play. Lionel Fontenot would kill them; of that I had no doubt.

Rachel was right. It was only expediency that made me side with Lionel. Joe Bones knew something about what had happened the night Tante Marie died, something that could bring me a step closer to the man who had killed my wife and child. If it took Lionel Fontenot’s guns to find out what that was, then I would side with the Fontenots.

“And Louis will stand beside you,” said Rachel quietly. “My God, what have you become?”

Later, I drove to Baton Rouge, Rachel accompanying me at my insistence. We were uneasy together, and no words were exchanged. Rachel contented herself with looking out of the window, her elbow resting against the door, her right hand supporting her cheek. The silence between us remained unbroken until we reached exit 166, heading for LSU and the home of Stacey Byron. Then I spoke, anxious that we should at least try to clear the air between us.

“Rachel, I’ll do what I have to do to find whoever killed Susan and Jennifer,” I said. “I need this, else I’m dead inside.”

She did not reply immediately. For a while, I thought she was not going to reply at all.

“You’re already dying inside,” she said at last, still staring out the window. I could see her eyes, reflected in the glass, following the landscape. “The fact that you’re prepared to do these things is an indication of that.”

She looked at me for the first time. “I’m not your moral arbiter, Bird, and I’m not the voice of your conscience. But I am someone who cares about you, and I’m not sure how to deal with these feelings right now. Part of me wants to walk away and never look back, but another part of me wants, needs, to stay with you. I want to stop this thing, all of it. I want it all to end, for everybody’s sake.” Then she turned away again and left me to deal with what she had said.

Stacey Byron lived in a small white clapboard house with a red door and peeling paint, close to a small mall with a big supermarket, a photo shop, and a twenty-four-hour pizzeria. This area by the LSU campus was populated mainly by students, and some of the houses now had stores on their first floor, selling used CDs and books or long hippie dresses and overwide straw hats. As we drove by Stacey Byron’s house and pulled into a parking space in front of the photo shop, I spotted a blue Probe parked close by. The two guys sitting in the front seats looked bored beyond belief. The driver had a newspaper folded in four resting on the wheel and was sucking on a pencil as he tried to do the crossword. His partner tapped a rhythm on the dashboard as he watched the front door of Stacey Byron’s house.

“Feds?” asked Rachel.

“Maybe. Could be locals. This is donkey work.”

We watched them for a while. Rachel turned on the radio and we listened to an AOR station: Rush, Styx, Richard Marx. Suddenly, the middle of the road seemed to be running straight through the car, musically speaking.

“Are you going in?” asked Rachel.

“May not have to,” I replied, nodding at the house.

Stacey Byron, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail and her body encased in a short white cotton dress, emerged from the house and walked straight toward us, a straw shopping basket over her left arm. She nodded at the two guys in the car. They tossed a coin and the one in the passenger seat, a medium-sized man with a small belly protruding through his jacket, got out of the car, stretched his legs, and followed her toward the mall.