on.
Other than the employees, Rachel was the only person in the Quartermaster Deli.
Sitting at the long table, waiting for her mushroom bacon cheeseburger to cool off enough to eat, she kept watch out the plate glass window. Her cigarette burned in the metal ashtray coated with the resin of thousands of previous cigarettes. She took another drink of her Diet Pepsi. The half joint she’d smoked on her way through the Quarter had mellowed her out…although she had this eerie feeling, as she’d walked through the thick mist, that someone was following her.
Paranoia will destroy ya, she thought, her eyes still fixated on the swirling mist outside the glass. She shook her head. Stop looking for something that’s not there.
“Looking for ghosts?” the woman behind the cash register called over to her. A Marlboro dangled from her lips. Her curly black hair stood out at all crazy angles from her scalp, and she was wearing too much pancake makeup and too much black eyeliner. Her body seemed shapeless in the battered old LSU sweatshirt hanging almost down to her knees.
Rachel turned and smiled at her. “It’s a haunted night.”
The woman shrugged. “If you believe in that stuff.”
Rachel turned back to her window. She believed. The big old house on State Street that she’d grown up in was haunted. Her parents and older siblings didn’t believe her, and she eventually gave up trying to make them understand. She saw them everywhere: the old woman in black who paced the halls upstairs, the lovers who met in the gazebo in the backyard around midnight, and the young boy playing in the garden just outside the dining room windows with a ball just after sunset every day, who sometimes would smile at her and beckon to her to come and play just for a little while. They’d even sent her to a psychiatrist once, thinking she was emotionally needy, a little too desperate for attention—perhaps that was why she made up the ridiculous stories.
She’d hated her family then, for not believing her, for finding it easier to believe she was unbalanced or insane than to accept that their house was haunted.
Philip was the only one who believed her, and sometimes she wondered if he did or was just humoring her out of friendship.
At least if he doesn’t, he has the decency to pretend, she thought, picking up her burger and taking a bite.
Trust your instincts.
She spun her head, looking out the window again. The old man was standing on the opposite corner, staring at her through the glass. She forced herself to swallow, even though her stomach was turning. He nodded to her, then turned and walked up Bourbon Street, vanishing into the mist.
Trembling slightly, she stared down at the burger, appetite gone.
The radio in the cab was tuned to an R & B oldies station. Gladys Knight and the Pips. He remembered the song vaguely but couldn’t recall the name.
He looked out the window as the cab drove out of the Quarter and headed Uptown. The black jock he had on underneath his baggy jeans was pinching him slightly below the right cheek. He shifted in the seat, trying to get the strap to move down.
“You okay back there?”
He looked up. Her dark chocolate eyes were watching him in the rearview mirror. Her voice was a deep alto, without inflection or tone. Each syllable was the same note.
He shrugged. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“On your way home?”
“Work.”
“What do you do?”
How do I answer that? he wondered. Hell, she was a New Orleans cab driver. She’d seen and heard it all before. “I’m an escort.”
She nodded. “Are you careful?”
“Yeah.” He resisted the urge to say, I’m not stupid. He knew other escorts didn’t care about condoms. He saw them online all the time, peddling their bareback wares. He sometimes wondered why they didn’t care. Sure, there were drugs and stuff now, so it wasn’t a death sentence like it used to be, but you needed insurance to get the drugs, right? It wasn’t like they were passing them out for free. Why take such a risk? His friend Rory, the one who’d gotten him to place his ad in the first place, was willing to go condom-free.
“If they pay extra.” Rory shrugged, uncaring. Rory never bothered to get tested, either. He could be passing it along to his foolish customers.
Philip shuddered. The cab was rolling along St. Charles Avenue now. The streetcar clanged past them, glowing eerily in the mist. Huge oaks lined the Avenue, their thick branches arching over it like a tunnel. They stopped at the light at Napoleon, the redness glowing through the mist. He glanced out the window.
A blond man was standing on the corner, looking right at him.
He was good-looking, tall, with long white-blond hair hanging to his shoulders. He was wearing a black overcoat over tight black jeans. His eyes were an intense blue, as though shot through with lights.
The man smiled at him and waved.
Philip stared at him.
They were in bed together, the blond man’s hard body pressed against his as they kissed. It was a tender kiss, the kind that lovers share, rather than the frantic face-eating kind driven by lust for a stranger. His lips were strong, firm, yet gentle and almost sweet. Philip leaned his head back, and the blond man started kissing his chin, his outstretched neck, sending tremors through Philip’s body. The scent of lilacs and roses was heavy in the air, and Philip luxuriated in the smell as his body enjoyed the feel of the silk sheets against his back, his butt, his legs. Philip put his hands on the blond’s back, feeling the strength of the rippling muscles there, trailing them down as the back narrowed and then began to curve outward into the hard, round muscles of his ass. The blond man was now kissing the cleft in the center of Philip’s chest, while the fingers of one hand were stroking a nipple…
The light changed, and the cab started moving again.
Philip’s eyes opened. He stared at the dreadlocks hanging down over the headrest.
He turned and looked out the back window.
The man was gone, like he’d never been there in the first place.
Philip shook his head. What the fuck? He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his crumpled pack of cigarettes. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked as he shook one out.
“Just open the window.” She smiled at him in the rearview mirror, showing gold caps on her front teeth. “Don’t bother me none, but you’d be amazed at the way some people bitch.”
He cracked the window, and the cold, damp air slapped him in the face. His hand was shaking as he shook out a cigarette and lit it.
What the hell was that? he wondered, inhaling the smoke and blowing it out the window. He turned and looked back, but he couldn’t see anything through the mist other than the headlights of the car behind him, the low hanging branches of the massive oaks, and the occasional streetlamp.
New Orleans is a haunted city. Maybe it was just a ghost.
He smiled to himself. Rachel Spielman, his best friend, whose apartment was just across the hall from his, claimed to see ghosts all the time.
“So many people have died violently here,” she would say, rolling a joint. “Is it any wonder the city is full of ghosts?”
He didn’t believe in the supernatural, ghosts, werewolves, witches—any of that. Bogeymen to scare children into behaving was all it was, old stories coming down from the less-educated times, when an eclipse was a sign of God’s anger. Rachel did, so he always humored her and listened to her wild stories of the ghosts in her parents’ house. It was part of her charm, part of the reason he liked her so much. A vivid imagination.
He tossed the cigarette out the window as the cab turned onto Octavia Street. She pulled up in front of