The Map of Moments (27 page)

“Three.”

The man stared at him blankly now, chest still clicking every time he took in a breath. His eye was watering. Blood bubbled at his mouth.

“Four.”

Max moved the knife from the man's eye and pressed it to his throat. His own heart was racing, perhaps fooled into the possibility that he might actually go through with this. He tried reassuring himself that this was a bluff, but something inside didn't quite believe.

“Five.” He stared at the man's eye, seeing nothing. “Last chance.”

Fat Man closed his eyes, shutting out the world.

Max pressed the knife forward, his thoughts manic, searching for something that would rescue him from this failed situation, and all he could come up with was a name, dredged up from his memory of Charlie's ranting.

“Seddicus will laugh at you, Fat Man.”

The man's eye opened again, with a soft
pop.
It went wider than it had before, and even swollen so badly, the other eye opened as well. The man pushed with his feet,
struggling to back away from Max, and the fear on his face could not be feigned. He was moaning, and his good arm came up to wipe a sheen of blood from his face.

Max leaned forward, taking advantage of the man's state, and he felt a smile split his own face. “And after he laughs, Seddicus will want you.”

The man's good arm lifted and slapped the wall behind him, fingers twitching.

“Tell me about Coco and the Tordu!”

“You know. You already
know
!”

Max heard voices behind him. He glanced back at the open doorway. Two people stood there now, the man who had first opened the door and another, bigger man.

“Cops on their way,” the big man said.

“Fuck off and mind your own business,” Max said.

The big man shrugged and the two faces disappeared again.

Max bent to the Fat Man and snatched the map from his jacket pocket. “Be seeing you,” he said. When he stood up again, he saw a vague shape on the pale brick wall, drawn in blood. It was a circle with three lines through it, forming a triangle within the circle, each line trailing beyond its edge.

“Don't think that will help,” he said.

Fat Man stopped breathing. His body froze in a moment, his hand raised, a blood bubble forming at the corner of his mouth and popping.

Max took one more look at the marking on the wall, then turned and sprinted away along the alley. For as long as the street light filtered in and lit his way, he felt Fat Man's eyes on his back, watching him go.

He reached the end of the alley and hit the street. He walked quickly, turning left and then right, working his way west, away from the Beauregard-Keyes House and what had happened there. Eventually he realized that being out on the street, bloodied as he was, would be more dangerous than holing up somewhere. Besides, he was thirsty, and he needed a place to look at the map.

Time was of the essence. However many Moments there were left for him to view, the faster he did so, the better.

He ducked into a café and went into the bathroom to wash the blood from his hands and arm and face—carefully, biting back groans of pain when his fingers touched his bruised nose and cut cheek. He looked in the mirror. In the dark café, and wearing dark clothes, the tacky drying blood would not be too noticeable. That was good. Using a wet paper towel he dabbed at the slash on his cheek. It was already clotting. He looked like a mugging victim, but little could change that.

When he came out, he took a table at the back and ordered a jug of coffee and a chicken po'boy. He was not really hungry anymore, but did not want to look too out of place.

The café was about a third full, most tables taken by couples or small groups. There were a few solo diners, some of them evidently self-conscious, the others quite comfortable in their own company. They read, or drank, or just looked into a distance that Max could never really know. He guessed that the ones not used to eating or drinking
alone were from out of town, brought in to help with the cleanup.

He tucked a paper napkin into his collar, trying to hide the blood on his shirt.

No one looked too threatening. The waitress took no notice of Max's clothes. His nose hurt, so he breathed through his mouth.

A car swept by, a black-and-white with no blues flashing.

Coffee poured, waiting for his food to come, Max opened up the map and spread it across the table. He scanned it quickly, but the Sixth Moment did not leap out at him. Frowning, he fixed the location of the Moment he'd just visited, pleased that the boxed words had faded, but still confused.
Where is it?
he thought.
Just where the hell …?

“Didn't mark you for a tourist,” the waitress said, standing beside him and pouring more coffee. She was a short white woman, very trim and athletic, her long hair tied back and hanging over one shoulder. She smiled at him and glanced down at the map.

“Visitor, not tourist,” he said.

“There's a difference?”

“Tourists are happy to be here.” He winced inwardly, hoping he hadn't caused offense.
Is she really flirting with me?

But the waitress laughed. “Sure,
you
don't look like you're having too much fun. And I never met a tourist found what they expected here. ’Specially now.”

“Yeah,” Max said. “It's quite a place.”

“Sure is that. Be quite a place again, too, just you see.”

Max was moved by her confidence, and he felt a lump in
his throat. Senses heightened, his emotions had followed suit, and much as he knew he was in mortal danger, he still felt incredibly alive.

“Good to hear some optimism,” he said.

The waitress leaned on his table across from him, looking him in the eye. “You tell everyone,” she said. “When you go back to wherever you came from, you tell everyone that we're still here, and we'll survive.”

Max smiled and nodded, and the waitress turned and went to wait on a neighboring table. He had the sense that he'd been honored somehow, and he watched her for a few minutes to see whether she repeated the performance. She did not. She had seen something in Max that drew that out of her.

Must have more of New Orleans in me than I realized,
he thought. And terrible though the city was to him right now, he could not help liking that idea. The Tordu might have been tormenting the city for generations, tainting it with whatever dark magic they performed, but he recalled clearly the wondrous magic he had seen at the moment of the city's founding. The Tordu were a stain upon New Orleans, but they weren't the city. It had a powerful heart that had nothing to do with their darkness, and a sense of joy and hope that was unlike anywhere else in the world. New Orleans was hurting now, teetering, and maybe it would never fully recover. But the Tordu were like rats, infecting the city and feeding off its garbage.

He went back to the map, sipping his coffee, scanning the streets and districts, and then he saw the Sixth Moment. He'd not spotted it before because the blocked square fit so well into the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward.

Lower Ninth Ward. He knew that had been hit hard during the storm, with the Industrial Canal flood walls being breached and sending billions of gallons of water raging through the streets. Then Hurricane Rita had flooded much of the neighborhood—and Gentilly as well—only a few weeks after Katrina. And he had read about Hurricane Betsy forty years ago, when the ward had suffered a similar fate. But what did “Under cover of Betsy” mean? What had the Tordu done during that hurricane?

Right now, the Lower Ninth would be a bad place to visit, and it was maybe two miles from where he sat. It was dark, he'd lost his rental car, and the city streets were not a safe place at night.

For him, they weren't a safe place by day, either.

But he
had
to get there. There was no mention of the Tordu for this Sixth Moment, but that did not mean they had not been involved. And then the sobering thought hit him that Coco might actually figure out the trail he was following, and why.

Max shook his head. He could not let suspicions like that derail him. He drank some more coffee, then the waitress returned with his food. She smiled a dazzling smile, and for a beat he even thought she was going to join him. She glanced at the map, then up at him again.

“You looking for someone?”

“Yes,” Max said, without thinking. “Is it that obvious?”

“Yeah. Seen a lot like you, over the past few weeks.”

“And you?” Max asked. The woman's smile faltered, and he silently berated himself for being too forward.

“We done okay,” she said. “My family, at least. Lost an old friend from school, though. And my boyfriend …he's just gone.”

“I'm sorry,” Max said, thinking of stinking attics and houses lifted from their footings, and that warehouse by the Superdome where hundreds of unclaimed bodies still lay.

“Hope you find her,” the waitress said. And with a smile, she turned to leave.

“Wait!” Max said. She glanced back, raising an eyebrow. “Can I ask you …a couple of questions?”

The waitress glanced around the café with a professional eye, then smiled. “Shoot.”

“Who's Seddicus?” He did not know what to expect: fear? Disbelief? But the waitress frowned at first, then half smiled, as though trying to figure whether he was taking her for a ride.

“You yankin’ my chain?”

Max shook his head. “It's a name I heard …”

The waitress laughed then, shaking her head and running her fingers down her neck. “Baby, someone's been fooling with you.” She leaned on the table again. “Seddicus is a demon of the swamps.”

What the fuck …?
Max thought. “A demon?”

“It's an old folk tale, the kind of stuff you hear on those Haunted New Orleans tours. Well, maybe you wouldn't
hear that one, but you talk to Cajuns and the fishermen on Lake Pontchartrain, or any of them fake mojo women run the voodoo shops on Bourbon Street, and they'll tell you the story.”

Max arched an eyebrow, showing her a smile he did not feel. “Which is?”

She glanced around again, making sure none of her customers needed tending to, then looked at him like she was sizing him up, seeing if he might be a little crazy, or just curious. The waitress shrugged.

“They say he arrived here long ago, in New Orleans’ early days. No one knows where he came from. For a while he stalked the city, but he's banished from here now, livin’ out in the bayou. My ol’ gran used to say Seddicus was well fed when New Orleans was young, and here an’ there you can read accounts of bodies that were found. Torn up, shredded, like they'd been eaten an’ spat out again.”

“A bogeyman story?” Max said.

“For the tourists, yeah. But it's said he only fed on bad folk. So maybe he ain't a bogeyman at all.” Her eyes twinkled.

“A demon,” he muttered, shaking his head as though they were on the same page about the foolishness of such superstition. And with that came total recall of what Charlie had said, and how he'd said it:
The only thing they're scared of is Seddicus.
The only
thing.
Not the only
man.

“That help?” the waitress asked.

“Maybe,” Max said. “So you don't believe the story?”

The waitress’ smile hardened a little. Someone from another table signaled her. She nodded at them, then looked
back at Max. “We're not all voodoo people down here, you know.”

“No, I—” Max began, but the woman was already walking away.

He folded the map, ate a few mouthfuls of food, drained his coffee. He left thirty dollars on the table, then stood, and on his way out he looked for the waitress. She'd disappeared.
On the phone?
he wondered.
Calling Coco right now?
Paranoia grabbed him again, he looked around at the other diners, locking gazes with one of the other single customers and both of them looking away, embarrassed. Outside he sucked in a heavy breath, and jumped when a voice spoke next to him.

“Sorry,” the waitress said. She was leaning against the café's front window, smoking.

Max shook his head. “I didn't mean—”

“No, I know you didn't. I know. And that's what frightened me, a little.”

“I frightened you?”

“Your eyes, when you asked if I believed. Because
you
do.”

Max didn't know what to say. She finished her cigarette, threw it into the gutter, and gave him a final smile.

“I hope you find who you're looking for,” she said.

“I hope so, too,” Max said. And turning around to head back into the café, she could have been Gabrielle, walking away from him all over again.

He knew that he should get a taxi, but the paranoia was still there, and he wanted to at least get out of the Quarter be-

fore stopping to call a cab. So he walked, and the streets were nowhere near as alive as they had once been. One night, amongst many he had spent on the streets with Gabrielle, they had come just to see the life and listen to the bustle. They had stopped in the occasional bar for a drink or some food, and it was not until early the next morning that they had hailed a cab and gone back to that house where she had died. They had snuggled in the back of the vehicle, and Gabrielle had smiled sweetly while unzipping him and slipping her hand into his trousers. She had stroked him, and agreed with the driver that there were so many things the tourists could never know.