“What about the cops?”
“Fuck the cops. I pay half those motherfuckers anyway.”
Joey drove out of the neighborhood. He hit Metairie Road for a couple miles, then made a left turn onto Pontchartrain Boulevard and headed back toward the marina. “Where do you think he’s gonna go, Shane I mean?”
Tony was thinking that he didn’t have a clue where the ex-cop might go. Then he realized how little he knew about Shane. He didn’t know if Shane had family in New Orleans. Family was always a good place to start when you were looking for a guy on the run. He didn’t know if Shane had any friends, or a new girlfriend. Maybe after so much time in prison, he had a boyfriend.
Tony slipped his cell phone out of his pocket and called the House. Someone there must know something about Ray Shane.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jenny Porter’s apartment was a one-bedroom walk-up on the third floor of a four-story building, and on mornings like this she hated those two flights of stairs with a passion.
It was 4:30 AM.
A weather front had come in late last night and it was cold, wet, and miserable. The only security was a self-locking iron door across the building’s front entrance. Behind that was a wooden door with a busted lock. Its only purpose was to keep the weather out of the foyer.
Jenny stood in front of the security door, keys in hand, when she realized it wasn’t locked. Looking more closely at the dead bolt, she saw the bolt still extended from the cylinder. The door had been pried open. The spring hinge had pulled it shut, and the protruding bolt rested against the frame, leaving a narrow gap between the door and jamb.
She dropped her keys back into her purse and pulled the iron door open. One of the hinges gave a tortured squeak. She pressed her hand against the wooden inner door and pushed it open. A wide hallway ran down the center of the building with four apartments on each side. At the far end of the hallway was the stairway leading to the second floor.
Jenny stepped inside and pushed the wooden door closed behind her. Two big windows above the door illuminated the hall during the day, but before sunrise the only light came from an old chandelier that hung from the ceiling halfway down the hall. The apartment doors were set back about three feet from the hall, leaving a small alcove in front of each.
Why was the door open? Maybe the lock was broken and the building’s maintenance man had left it unlocked. But it hadn’t been like that when Jenny left at eight o’clock last night, right after her encounter with Hiram Gordo. If the lock was broken, the maintenance man would not have pried the door open and left it unlocked all night. He would have fixed it.
She looked at the double row of alcoves, each one hidden in shadow, and wondered if there was something or someone hiding in one of them. With her heart thumping against her chest, Jenny crept toward the stairs at the back of the building, peering into each shadow as she slid past it.
At the end of the hall, Jenny stood at the foot of the stairs and gazed up toward the second floor. A single lightbulb mounted high overhead cast a dull glow along the empty stairwell. No ghosts or goblins up there. At least none she could see. She started up the stairs, inching her way to the landing above.
By the time she got to the second floor, Jenny started to relax. She told herself she was acting like a foolish girl. There was no madman, no escaped convict with a butcher’s knife waiting to cut her down. Nothing but a dimly lit, empty stairwell.
And a pried-open front door.
One flight to go. As she padded up the steps toward the third floor, she couldn’t help looking over the banister to make sure no one was moving around in the hall below her, but there was no one there. Nothing but tricks of light and shadow.
Just before reaching the third floor, Jenny paused. Her apartment was the third door on the left, the second from the front of the building. She almost felt like calling out, half expecting that if she did, she would see Hiram L. Gordo’s big fat ass come slinking out from one of the alcoves. But she didn’t call out, and she didn’t see Hiram L. Gordo.
She crept down the center of the hall, trying to stay as far away from each shadowed doorway as she could. At the first pair of apartments, Jenny checked left and right, saw nothing. Then the second pair of doors, again, just empty shadows. She was starting to feel silly, but remembered that she had slept with a night-light on until she was almost out of high school.
The bogeyman wasn’t what she had been afraid of. Maybe as a little girl it was ghosts under the bed, goblins in the closet, kid stuff, but later, just after she hit puberty, she kept the night-light on because of her stepfather. His drunken visits to her room late at night, after her mom was asleep, were what really scared her.
In the middle of the hall, she edged past the corner of the alcove in front of her door. Something moved. It was on the floor but it was big. Her heart jumped into her throat. “Who are you?” she shouted.
The shadow moved again. She backed away, ready to turn and run, or scream and hope someone would call the police.
The shadow grew. Jenny’s back bumped into the wall opposite her door. It was almost a relief when she realized it was just a man and not a monster. Admitting to herself for the first time that she still half believed in the bogeyman. But it wasn’t Gordo, not big enough by half. An ax murderer? He was on the run from the cops and had broken into the building to escape. Now she had seen him, and he would have to kill her.
Jenny’s stomach twisted into knots. Should she scream for help or run? With heels on she probably couldn’t get down the stairs fast enough to get away. As the scream built in her throat and she opened her mouth to let it out, the shadow spoke. “You gonna let me in or what?” The voice sounded a lot like Ray Shane.
“You almost gave me a fucking heart attack!” Jenny said, sitting across the kitchen table from Ray. The breakfast nook was small, but it was her favorite room in the apartment. Light, airy prints hung on the walls, creating a Mediterranean theme. The table was square, with a bleached wooden frame and the top made from Mexican tiles. Jenny’s heart still beat like a machine gun. “What happened to your face? My God, you look like you got hit by a fucking truck.”
Shane put a hand up to the cut above his eye. “I don’t think I ever heard you use the word fuck before. You just used it twice in the same sentence.”
Jenny took a deep breath to steady her nerves. “It wasn’t the same sentence. Same paragraph, maybe, but not the same sentence.” She was just glad it hadn’t been Gordo hiding in the shadows, waiting to try another run at her. Still, she was wondering why Ray had been camped out in front of her door.
“I don’t think it’s a paragraph if you say it.” Ray’s eyes were closed as he massaged his temples with the fingers of both hands.
“What?”
He looked at her across the table. “It’s not a paragraph if you say it. You write it down, then you got a paragraph. If you say it, several sentences I mean, you got a…”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know what you’ve got, but I know it’s not a paragraph.”
“You an English teacher now?”
He shook his head. “I read a lot in prison, does that count?”
“No.”
“I was just trying to make a point.”
She laid both hands on the table and leaned toward him, speaking slowly so he wouldn’t misunderstand. “You have no fucking point to make because you’re a fucking asshole for fucking scaring me like that.”
He stared at her.
Jenny held up three fingers. “Now that’s three times in one sentence, so you can quit worrying about whether or not it’s a paragraph.”
The seconds ticked by on the clock mounted beside the kitchen door, Ray just looking at her, no expression at all. Then all of a sudden his banged-up face broke into a grin.
She couldn’t help smiling back at him.