a priest, like it was kind of a holy calling from God, and so you walked a tightrope between the way the world was and the way you wanted it to be and you saw nothing but darkness beneath you and no end in sight. Now, my daughter, she thought the greatest act of courage she could imagine was that your honor kept you clinging to that rope, when anyone else would’ve just let go long ago.”
Weldon Carrigan looked back up and his mouth curled into something that was definitely not a smile, and Rourke knew he was about to be asked for something he wouldn’t be able to give. “Me, I told her that martyrs usually ended up burning at the stake. I want you to bury this Vinny what’s his name—this two-bit goon—and forget about him. Meanwhile, the city of New Orleans would also be very grateful if you could find some way to clean up the murder of Charlie St. Claire without us having to hold a goldamned Trial of the Century. You can start by running down this nigger gal he was supposed to have been banging.”
“And to hell with truth and justice,” Rourke said, and immediately wanted to kick himself. Honor, truth, and justice. Shit.
The smile Rourke gave to himself was full of self-derision as he stretched to his feet. He picked up his straw boater and sauntered from the room, singing under his breath just loud enough for the super to hear, “In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun?”
She came toward him out of the shadowed, trash-littered alley, a mystery woman in black silk.
“I have a quarrel to pick with you, Lieutenant Daman Rourke,” she was saying, her voice as breathless and broken as he felt. “Your captain says you played a lyin’, sneaky, dirty trick on me. It seems there is no law that says I had to come down here just on your sayso and roll my fingers on that inky pad. And now you’re going to try and hang me with that nasty ol’ bloody thumbprint.”
He smiled. “Electrocute you.”
She laughed, as he had known she would. She had never been afraid of either sinning or dying.
“Dead is dead, and hell is hell, and it doesn’t much matter how you get there,” she said, her mouth almost singing the words. Her mouth was unforgettable. He had never forgotten the taste of her mouth. “But you shouldn’t try and send me there ahead of you, Day.”
She had come all the way up to him, to where he leaned against the rakish fender of his Stutz Bearcat Roadster, came up to him so close their bellies almost brushed, and she put her hand to his throat as though she was going to choke him, but gently. “That isn’t fair.”
“You know what they say about all being fair.”
“But which game are we playing at this time, darlin’—love or war?”
He could feel his pulse pounding against her hand. Once, they hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other.
“War for now,” he said. “Although we can have a go at love again, if you’ve the guts for it.”
Her fingers followed a sinew in his neck down to the hollow in his throat and paused there, pressing a little. “Is that a dare?”
Jesus, oh, Jesus.
Her hand fell to her side and she took a step back. “I bet you call her ‘baby,’” she said.
“What?” he said. He could still feel the pounding of his own pulse in his throat.
She walked away from him, trailing her hand over the automobile’s long and sexy hood, softly stroking the canary yellow paint job with those red-lacquered nails.
She laughed at the look on his face. “You do call her ‘baby.’ I bet you take her out on the Old Shell Road and say, ‘Come on, baby. Let’s see how fast you can go.’”
Rourke couldn’t help laughing with her, because she was right. He’d paid the Bearcat’s exorbitant thirty-five-hundred-dollar price tag with bourré winnings, and he thought that putting the six-cylinder, air-cooled Franklin engine through its paces was almost as good as sex.
Remy had come back to him, close enough to touch him, although this time she didn’t. “So take me for a ride in her, Day. And make her go fast.”
He had intended all along to take her for a ride. It was why he’d had the desk sergeant bring her out this back way, away from the crush of reporters and her adoring fans. He wanted to take her to a place where he could see how much, if any, she had changed.
He opened the passenger door and watched her climb in, flashing her long legs. As she settled into the Bearcat’s low-slung, hand-buffed Spanish leather seat, her black sheath dress rode up to reveal the roll of her stockings and shocking pink knees. Painted nails and rouged knees—she was sure one hot little tomato.
“Mourning becomes you,” he said.
She looked up at him, her eyes wide and guileless. “Am I being too subtle, do you think? Should I have wrapped myself up in long black taffeta skirts and a veil?”
He could feel an energy pulsing off her like heat lightning. He knew where that had come from. Even in the little bit of time he’d spent with her there in the squad room, he’d watched her come to possess them all, one by one. Seasoned, jaded cops who’d seen everything and should have known better had fallen into those big, cat-like tilted eyes, and their souls had become electrified.
And she had fed off them, was feeding off them still.
Rourke got behind the wheel and started the engine, but before he put the Bearcat in gear, he pulled a hip flask of scotch out of his pocket and held it out to her. “To soothe the grieving widow’s shattered nerves.”
“To love and war,” she said, taking the flask, touching just the back of his hand, and he despised himself for it, but he felt the burn of her touch low and deep in his belly.
Rourke sent the Bearcat shooting out of the alley in a cloud of dust and a scattering of oiled gravel.
He took Tulane Avenue to Claiborne and turned east. She didn’t ask where they were going, not even when they headed toward the river and open country on the St. Bernard Highway. He opened the Bearcat up, coaxing the speedometer up to eighty miles per hour, which was twice as fast as any sane man would drive on that road.
She was drinking steadily from the flask, probably more than was wise for someone about to be grilled by a homicide detective. “You are so mean, Daman Rourke,” she said after a time.
“Am I?”
“I walked into that police station of yours scared to death, and you give me this look. Just like some nasty ol’ monster would do, before he goes chasing after the girl and growling ‘I’m gonna get yooou.’”
He laughed, and she smiled back at him. She had to hold down her hat against the wind they made, and he could see the blue veins on the inside of her arm. Her face shone like a white rose.
This was like a scene in one of her movies, he thought. Drinking bootleg whiskey in a fast car, with the wind in their hair. The gay, irresponsible, tomorrow-we-die celluloid life.
Last night, covered head to toe in her murdered husband’s blood, still she had seemed
