It was a summer Saturday night in the French Quarter, hot, steamy, sultry, and packed with tourists. I was dressed in dancing clothes, which meant a flowing aqua print skirt, a tight cami under a matching top, dancing shoes, and my hair up, out of the way. It also meant stakes in the French braid, two knives strapped to my thighs, three crosses under my shirt, and my tiny derringer buried under the hair, loaded for vamp or were with silver rounds. I was going to party, but any party where I spotted Tyler Sullivan might be a dangerous one.
Going dancing in the middle of an investigation, and with Rick missing, felt stupid on the surface. But there was one bar, owned by Leo Pellissier, where Ricky Bo played with his band, and Tyler hung out, and I could kill several birds with the one club. I also needed a release from the tension between Bruiser and me and a diversion from Evangelina, who was acting downright weird—dancing all around the house, singing and drinking a lot more than I thought she usually did. I left Leo’s cell-gift on the table by my bed and carried my throwaway phone when I locked the door behind me and headed out walking to RMBC.
I took a deep breath of the night air and my head started to clear the instant I left the house, my worries spilling away as my dancing shoes tapped on the old sidewalks, and my skirts swung against my thighs and knees. It was hot out, and wet, the air feeling like it weighed a hundred pounds. But my breathing still felt freer than it had since Rick took off.
The night was redolent of bug spray, hot grease, cooking seafood, and the water that surrounds and passes through New Orleans. Most people think of the city as being along the Mississippi River, but there’s a lot more water than that, with Lake Pontchartrain spreading wide, and bayous winding through it; salty, silty, stagnant smells are everywhere. And the music. Jazzy, bluesy, Southern rock, pop-country heaven. I worked my shoulders back, rolling them to loosen up.
The crowds thickened with both tourists and locals out for the food and music and shopping, and street artists were everywhere. A four-person band played on one corner, trombone, banjo, percussion, and a guitar, a stack of CDs with the name MamaMamba in front of them. They were playing an old Negro spiritual with all the pathos of slavery and pain, and it was spectacular, the woman guitarist tearing up the vocals. I made a mental note to look them up on the Internet and buy a CD or download something.
Across the street from them was a guy in carpenter clothing, carrying a hammer and screwdriver in one hand, a length of two-by-four balancing, wobbling with the slight breeze, on one shoulder. He was perched on a ladder at an angle. Not a stepladder, not a folding ladder, but a fireman-type ladder, one length of wood. Except for the slowly moving two-by-four, he was immobile as a statue. I had no idea how he could stay so still. I dropped a five in his carpenter’s bucket and moved on.
Royal Mojo Blues Company was a thirty-something-year-old restaurant and dance hall that had an outside dining area, a bar, a grill that served great food, and a dance floor I knew as well as I knew my own house. I had danced here several times, a few for Rick as he played sax. And maybe some small part of me hoped he would be here tonight.
The smell of fried food, beer, and faintly of Leo, and the sound of live music blasted its way into the street, an Alabama-style band rocking the house. When I stepped inside, the scents were momentarily overpowering: old and new beer, fried grease, fish, beef, spices and peppers, cleansers, human and vamp scents, marijuana, sweat, and sex pheromones. The place was packed, shouted conversations merging into a background roar, and overpowered by the band.
An ethnically indeterminate, dark-skinned man crooned, shouted, and sang with a smoky voice, eyes closed, swaying his head, mike, and dreadlocks back and forth, one hand at his thigh shaking a tambourine. He was backed up by four musicians on drums, keyboard, bass, and guitar. I waved to Bascomb, the bartender tonight, ignored three men who looked my way with a sexual, predatory interest, and flowed onto the floor, into the crowd, and up to the band. As I moved, I sight-searched for Tyler or Rick. Saw neither.
Dancing alone was never frowned on at RMBC, and couples and singles were pressed together, a writhing mass of dancers. Into the heat and the beat I raised my arms over my head and started to move. One of the courses I took between children’s home/high school/teenaged misery and the freedom of adult life was a year of belly dance classes. The best thing about belly dancing was the freestyle moves it added to my repertoire. I opened with hip pops and shifted into a series of mayas, remembering Bruiser’s hands on my hips as we danced. I threw back my head and shoulders and moved with the beat. Segued into a series of circular figure eights, dropping my arms slowly in front of me, hands moving in opposing, mirrored, wavelike motions from above my head to below my hips.
I watched and sniffed for the men I was hunting, but it was vamp I smelled first, up close. The tang was sharp and astringent as wormwood and dusty like dried sage, remembered from the first time I saw her in her office. I knew who she was even before I heard the silky laugh that her kind can give, low and erotic, like vocal sex. She was close, her vamp power cutting like razors against my skin.