“It’s not great in a firefight,” she said. “Too many windows. And there’s no back way off the property except by foot.”
“If it gets to a firefight, we’ll already have screwed the pooch,” I said. “The whole idea is to not get seen.”
She nodded, giving me the point. Chogyi Jake came in the back as Aubrey and Ex, black wooden chest between them, came in the front. The chest had arrived at the hotel that morning. Ex and Aubrey put it down, and Aubrey stretched his back with a grunt.
“We’re going to need to get some things,” Chogyi Jake said. “Fresh salt. Charcoal and oak for ashes. Local honey.”
I nodded.
“Can you pick up a couch and refrigerator while you’re at it?” Aubrey asked.
“And groceries,” Ex said. “Lots of them.”
“DVD player and TV,” I said. “I don’t guess the place has Internet access?”
“The order’s in,” Aubrey said. “It probably won’t be up for a week, though. No phone service either.”
“And again with the suck,” I said.
We had all spent time in hiding before. The long days besieged in a warded house had taught all of us what we needed. Karen caught the mood. She was wearing dark silk slacks and a pale yellow blouse, but she shoved her hands in her pockets like they were blue jeans.
“I don’t think we’ll need to stay underground too long,” she said. “A week. Ten days at the most. Once the rider’s lost its victim, it should be more vulnerable. All this is more for Sabine than for us.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It seemed pretty butch when it came after me.”
“We can take it,” Karen said. I bristled a little at her dismissive tone, but I let it pass. She knew what we were up against better than I did.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s the next step.”
Karen leaned against the wall, her hands still in her pockets and twitching restlessly. The rest of us gathered. Aubrey sat on the chest, Chogyi Jake on the floor beside him. Ex stood by the front window, his posture unconsciously mirroring Karen’s. I put down the champagne.
“We have to find the girl,” Karen said. “The rider knows we’re here, and it knows its own vulnerabilities. It’s kept Sabine well hidden.”
“You got to the little sister through her school,” Ex said. “What about trying that with Sabine?”
“She doesn’t go to school,” Karen said. “Dropped out three years ago. After the hurricane, it was easy to fall between the cracks. As far as the system knows, she might be one of the people that evacuated and never came back. Or she might have died. There were thousands of people reported missing after the storm. No one knows how many were unreported. If the bodies got washed out to sea…” She shrugged.
“But someone must be checking up,” Aubrey said, though his voice didn’t have the weight of conviction. Ex coughed.
“Okay,” I said. “How do we find her?”
“We follow her grandmother or the little sister,” Karen said. “Daria is still in school, and I’ve met her so I know what she looks like. The downside of that is that she’s precognitive, and the things that affect her directly are going to be easier for her to foresee.”
“So the closer we get to her…” I said.
“The more likely we are to walk into an ambush,” Karen said. “Which leaves the grandmother.”
“Hanging out with the evil serial killer lady seems a little problematic,” I said.
“It is,” Karen said. “But there are advantages. For one thing, we know that in a showdown, the two of us together can beat her. We already have.”
“I had a question about that,” Chogyi Jake said. His smile might have been apology or accusation or anything in between. “From what Jayné said, I’m not perfectly clear on how the attack at the hotel happened. Or how it was turned aside.”
Karen nodded.
“I’ll admit that I was surprised at how well Jayné fought,” she said.
“Eric put some sort of juju on me,” I said. “We haven’t found his notes to know all the details.”
“But the way the rider seemed to stop time…” Chogyi Jake said.
Karen took her hands out of her pockets. Her eyes were focused on the back wall, as if she were reading something there.
“The rider we’re fighting is the god of the crossroads,” Karen said.
“Legba. Opener of ways,” I said. “I’ve been reading up. It’s supposed to belong to a bunch of relatively benevolent spirits. Radha?”
Karen shook her head.
“Radha, Petro, Ghede. Who’s benevolent and who’s evil just depends on who was winning when the propaganda was written,” she said. “But what I was coming to was the way Legba gets between things. Between places, between moments. It brought Jayné into that place because it thought they wouldn’t be interrupted. I’ve been working for years to find a way to break through that protection. I can do it again.”
“Let’s hope you won’t need to,” Ex said.
“Crossroads,” Chogyi Jake said. “I’ve read something about that. But it wasn’t Legba, I thought. Carrefour…”
“Carrefour is another loa with very similar attributes,” Karen said, a little sharply. “Sometimes they’re mistaken for each other, but they’re different. Legba is Radha, Carrefour is Petro. They aren’t on the same team.”
“I don’t understand,” Chogyi Jake said. “They can do the same things…”
“It could be like two competitors in the same ecological niche,” Aubrey said. “Wolves and hunting cats can have the same prey, and even use the same strategies, but they hate each other. Maybe these Radha and Petro gangs are the same.”
Karen blinked, her brow furrowed. She looked at Aubrey and smiled.
“That’s a really good metaphor,” she said.
“Let’s get back to the part where we’re following the bad guy,” I said.
“Right,” Karen said. “My first point was that we can beat her in a fight. The second is that Amelie Glapion is a living woman, and she needs to eat. She’s got her voodoo cult, and they have meetings and ceremonies that require her to be out in public. We know where she’ll be. And we know that Sabine will be close to her. We do our reconnaissance, find where the girl is, and then we can make a more detailed plan for getting her out.”
“But sooner is better than later,” I said.
“Absolutely,” Karen said. “Time is an issue.”
“So how quickly can we do the thing?”
She smiled. The gleam in her eye looked like complicity.
“Funny you should ask,” she said.
BETWEEN THE near-apocalypse of places like Lakeview and the Ninth Ward and the undamaged icon of the Vieux Carré, there was a middle ground with no tall grass, no bare foundations. The corpses of the buildings hadn’t been washed away in part because they were too large to dispose of. Even if they weren’t too big to kill.
Aubrey and Karen and I stood in the empty fourth story of the parking structure as the twilight around us deepened into true night. Across Tulane Avenue, Charity Hospital still towered, but the hundreds of windows were all dark. Pigeons rose in the dim light, whirled above the street and the traffic and us, and then settled again. We weren’t more than ten minutes’ drive from the hotel and the restaurants, the music and the tourists, and the life of the French Quarter, and we were in the ruins.
“It’s better now,” Karen said softly. “Not fixed, better. And not Charity. That’s… that’s never coming back. But the city is better than it was right after.”
“I can’t believe that,” Aubrey said.
“No,” Karen said. “What you can’t believe is how bad it really was. Come on, kids. Let’s suit up.”
We turned back to the minivan. Karen had known where to get the things we needed. The right props and clothes were as important to what we were doing here as the ritual unguents and incense that Chogyi Jake and Ex were using back at the house were to their work. Only instead of looking like weird occult freaks in the suburbs, we looked like weird ninja wannabes in the city. I pulled black surgical scrubs over my jeans, a soft black wind-breaker over my T-shirt. Karen stuffed her pale hair into a tight black cap.