VenCo(92)

She threw herself back onto the couch, her heart beating hard. Wait—if the hunter was the one who dropped this on her doorstep, that meant he must still be close by! She sprang up, grabbed her phone, and took off.

On the street, she searched in both directions. She spotted a man a few blocks ahead on Toulouse: hard to miss, as he was twirling a walking stick and wearing a cream hat at a rather jaunty angle on his dark head. She ran without thinking, without a plan, and almost got run over by a bike courier on Bourbon.

“Watch it, lady,” the cyclist cried out, swerving at the last second.

“Sorry,” she shouted, slowing a little to look back at him. When she turned, the man in the hat was gone.

“Shit!” She stopped at Royal and looked up and down the street. There! Two blocks ahead of her. She took off, weaving through tourists window-shopping at antique stores and buskers hoping for spare dollars. She was just half a block away from him when a policeman on horseback cut in front of her and stopped. She tried to get around him, but the horse reared.

“Whoa, whoa there,” the officer soothed, as his mount danced. “What’s gotten into you?” Blocked by the big animal, Lucky had to cut behind him.

She was starting to realize that the bike, the horse: neither of them was an accident. When her way was clear again, she searched the crowd. Nothing. “Dammit!”

On Canal Street now, she caught sight of him far ahead. This street was wider and louder than in the Quarter. It almost could have been a main street in any city, except for the tall palm trees and the zydeco music blaring from open storefronts. How did he move so fast? He was crossing the street a few blocks up. She tried to cross over to be on the same side, but the traffic was heavy and erratic, so she kept to her side and ran. She muscled her way through walking groups and lost stragglers and made it to the lights. She was stuck waiting for them to turn green while keeping an eye on the cream hat, a foot above the other pedestrians.

Then the St. Charles streetcar showed up, and the hat climbed on board.

“No!” She broke into a full sprint. Just then, he paused on the stairs and, looking right at her, touched his brim in a salute.

“Motherfucker!”

The streetcar moved on, headed towards Midtown, the Garden District, Audubon Park . . . a thousand places out of her reach. She stopped, bent over, put her hands on her knees, and caught her breath. She’d lost him. She was sure it was him, and she had lost him. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she pulled it out.

The text was from Meena:

Plan’s off. Rattler Ricky’s body was found on the side of the road near where you met her. It’s too dangerous. Come home.



She stumbled back from the corner and leaned against the brick wall of a shoe store. It smelled like piss and beer. The news about Ricky, it felt familiar, as if she were remembering instead of reading it for the first time.

Ricky was really gone, cut down on the side of the road, nothing left but her strange hat. That was it . . . her dream. She closed her eyes and pictured it, the hat in the gravel, the snake curled up dead inside of it. The car lights coming straight for her.

She opened her eyes and breathed in the urine-soaked air. Things felt different now. She was calm inside this new anger. She stood straight, felt the concrete under her feet, and squared her shoulders. She knew what she had to do. She knew where she was going. But first, she sent a text back to Meena:

Keep looking for the witch. I am going to get the spoon.



She opened her web browser and looked up the number for the Moon Over Marigny.





29

Mapping Out the Game




For the second time that day, Lucky stood in front of the Burial Grounds Café. She kept a low profile, observing from the opposite side of the street so that she wouldn’t attract undue attention. Someone had spray-painted Sorry, y’all. We reopen Friday! on the sheet of plywood covering the window.

She pulled out her phone and switched it off; she didn’t want to deal with Meena yelling at her to get back to Salem. Then she checked up and down the street—no one was coming—and crossed over. She went right up to the front door and pretended to study the menu posted there, as she checked to see if anyone was inside. The lights were off, and the room was empty. The tables and chairs had been pushed against the wall, and the floor was swept. She pulled a pair of newly purchased toenail clippers from her pocket and set to work prying slivers of wood from the doorframe. She gathered three long slivers and then quickly walked away. No use in getting caught further vandalizing the café. No doubt Slippers was now in full patrol mode.

Along the wall that separated the cemetery from the quiet street, she found a dark nook between two flowering trees that were throwing lacy shadows down the whitewashed concrete onto the cracked sidewalk.

“Okay, Ricky,” she whispered, “remind me how to do this . . .”

She held the slivers in her right hand and breathed in deep, focusing so hard she could make out the texture and weight of the wood with her palm, until soon they became all she was aware of. And then she turned her mind to the spoon, sitting in a drawer with other cutlery—to its texture and weight. She thought about it as hers, because it was intended to be hers—it was intended to sit in her hand the way this wood was. It was hers, and it had been taken from her. Then she imagined the man in the cream hat slipping into the darkened café and sliding the drawer open, emptying its contents into the muslin bag he’d left on her doorstep. She pictured the thief’s face, remembering the details of Morris, from the Yarb Witch’s cabin, sleek and pale, with black eyebrows and an angular jaw, delicate and pronounced at the same time. The Benandanti.