The Dead Play On

Out of nowhere, he realized, he’d started playing The Call’s “I Still Believe,” which had enjoyed a moment of glory in the vampire film The Lost Boys. It was a good song—a great song for a sax player, with a challenging arrangement. Arnie had loved to play it.

But he had never played the song himself. Didn’t know it.

But he did now. It was as if the damned sax was playing itself.

And as he played, Tyler felt as if the room was drifting away in a strange fog. And suddenly he was seeing things that Arnie might have seen. Sand and mountains and withered shrubs. He heard explosions and men shouting. There was blood.

But...

Arnie had returned from Afghanistan. He’d gone “down range” from his base in Kuwait three times, but he’d come back.

Then the sounds of the explosions dimmed and he saw a New Orleans street.

Rampart Street.

Where Arnie had died.

They’d estimated his time of death at about 5:00 a.m. There should still have been a few people about. Rampart was the edge of the Quarter; Treme was across the street, and while not the best part of town, it had been all right since the summer of storms and the television series. Yeah, there should have been plenty of people around. While a certain song might claim that New York was the city that never slept, everyone knew that title really belonged to New Orleans.

In the wake of his vision, Tyler felt as if he were being physically assaulted, and he found himself gripping the sax as he played as if it were his lifeline. And as he played, the club began to fade again.

He felt as if he were with his old childhood friend, walking down Rampart. They knew it well, having grown up in the Treme area. Not far from St. Louis #1. And churches! Hell, there were churches everywhere around here.

But Arnie was scared, and Tyler could feel it.

Arnie started to run.

It was the oddest damned thing. Tyler could vaguely see reality—the crowd in the Bourbon Street bar. And he could see somewhere else deep in his mind, where Arnie was. It was almost as if he were Arnie.

Beneath the sound of the music he heard a rumble...and a whisper.

“You’re dead, buddy. You’re dead.”

Cold. Cold filled him. Cold like...death.

Then, suddenly, he wasn’t playing anymore. The night was alive with the sound of applause. He blinked—and he was back at La Porte Rouge. His fellow band members were staring at him as if he’d turned pink.

The room was full, and people were pushing one another, trying to get a better look at what was going on. Jessica Tate, one of the waitresses and a good friend, was staring at him as if he’d just changed water into wine, and Eric Lyons, the head bartender, was clapping loudly and—most important—looking pleased, because happy people tended to tip better. His performance had been good for business, Tyler realized.

He lowered his head, lifted the sax and waved to the crowd. And then, with his bandmates Gus, Blake and Shamus looking on, he turned and left the stage—ran from the stage. He had to get out. He had to get the hell out of there.

He ran down Bourbon to the first crossroad and headed toward Rampart. He made a right and came to the place where they’d found Arnie.

The needle still in his arm.

He fell against the wall of an appliance store and sank down, tears in his eyes.

Arnie hadn’t been a junkie. Arnie hadn’t even smoked weed. He’d been doing some heavy drinking since he’d come home, but that was all. His kneecap still pained him from the shrapnel he’d taken on his third tour.

Arnie’s death had been hard—so hard—on everyone. The cops had been sorry, but Tyler had seen the look in their eyes when they’d talked to Arnie’s mother. They’d seen it before when vets came home. They survived bullets and bombs and land mines, but then, away from the war zone, they were unable to adjust. Maybe they lived with too many nightmares. Whatever the reason, the result was that their bodies might have returned, but their minds had been permanently damaged and never came home from the war. They had all tried to assure his mother that Arnie had been a good man. That he hadn’t really been a junkie but had only used the heroin to enter a dream world where he could forget his pain—and then the dream had taken him on to eternal peace.

Tyler sat against the wall, the tears still glistening in his eyes. He slammed his fist against the ground. He cried out loud, sobbing for long minutes. He looked at the sax he was still holding.

And then he knew—somehow, he just knew.

Arnie hadn’t ridden any dream into eternal peace.

He’d been murdered. And whatever the hell it took to prove it, Tyler was going to see that his friend got justice.

Chapter 1 (#ulink_cf4d5ba9-2240-5bc6-852b-715bfb9f5625)

MICHAEL QUINN PARKED his car on the street in the Irish Channel section of the city of New Orleans.

There were several police cars already parked in front of the 1920s-era duplex to which he’d been summoned.

He headed up a flight of steep steps. The door to “A” stood open; an officer in uniform waited just outside on the porch.

“Quinn?” the man asked.

Quinn nodded. He didn’t know the young officer, but the officer seemed to know him. He had to admit, being recognized was kind of nice.

“He’s been waiting for you, but he wants gloves and booties on everyone who goes in. There’s a set over there.” He pointed.

“Thanks,” Quinn said. He looked in the direction the officer indicated and saw a comfortable-looking but slightly rusted porch chair on the far side of the door. He slid on the protective gloves and paper booties.

“You’re good to go,” the officer said.

Quinn thanked him again then entered a pleasant living area that stretched back to an open kitchen. The duplex had been built along the lines of a “shotgun”-style house. It was essentially a railroad apartment; the right side of the room was a hallway that stretched all the way to the back door, with rooms opening off it on the left. He’d never been inside this particular building, but he’d seen enough similar houses to assume the second half of the duplex would be a mirror image, hallway on the left, rooms opening off to the right.

Crime scene markers already littered the floor, and several members of the crime scene unit were at work, carefully moving around the body.

Quinn noticed that one marker denoted the position of a beer can. Another, the contents of a spilled ashtray.

A third indicated a curious splotch of blood.

In the midst of everything, in a plump armchair with padded wooden arms and a pool of dried blood underneath it, was the reason for Quinn’s presence. Dr. Ron Hubert, the medical examiner, was down on one knee in front of the chair, his black medical bag at his side, performing the preliminary work on the victim.

The remnants of what had once been a man sagged against the cushions. His throat had—at the end of the killer’s torture spree—been slit ear to ear. A gag—created from a belt and what had probably been the man’s own socks—remained strapped around the mouth. A drapery cord bound his left wrist, while the right had been tied to the chair with a lamp cord.

Both of the victim’s arms had been burned—with lit cigarettes, Quinn thought. The man’s face had been so bashed in, it wasn’t possible to determine much about what he had looked like in life.

He had been struck savagely, making it look like a rage killing. But a rage killing was usually personal. The addition of torture suggested that the killer was mentally deranged, someone who reveled in what he was doing—and had probably done it before.

And torture wasn’t carried out in a red haze of fury.

“Come around and stick close to the wall, Quinn,” Detective Jake Larue said. He was standing behind the couch, his ever-present notepad in hand, slowly looking around the room as the crime scene techs carefully went through it and the ME examined the corpse. Quinn was surprised at Larue’s directive; the detective knew damned well that Quinn was aware he needed to avoid contaminating the scene.

But this kind of scene unnerved everyone—even a jaded pro like Larue. Most cops agreed that when crime scenes stopped bothering you, it was time to seek new work.