the guy around, he propelled him toward the door.
Instead of going quietly, the guy made a furtive motion toward his boot, and a knife that could gut a pig materialized in his hand. Only, he wasn’t after pork this evening. With a curse, he made a vicious slash at Alex’s midsection.
Acting instinctively, Alex aimed a kick at the guy’s arm, sending him sprawling on the barroom floor and the knife flying.
The jerk was stupid enough to lunge for the weapon again. Alex kicked it out of the way, wondering if he was going to have to do some serious damage.
Someone in the back must have alerted Tony because he came rushing into the fray and scooped up the pork sticker. Of course, by this time, the little altercation was attracting a crowd, from both inside and outside the bar. Tony must have figured Alex could take care of the intruder, because he turned his own attention to settling down the rest of the patrons.
As a former police detective, Alex’s instinct was to call the boys in blue and let them haul this guy’s ass away. But Bourbon Street Libations had a pretty strict no-cops policy. Unless somebody got killed, you kept the law out of it.
So he frog-marched the drunk onto the street where they were instantly enveloped by the heat and humidity of the night.
“Need some help?” a voice from the crowd asked. Alex looked up to see Rich Stewart—dressed in a nicely authentic biker outfit—ambling toward him. A former navy SEAL who still kept his dark blond hair in a short military cut, he was another of the Confidential agents. With a grin, he helped Alex propel the inebriated jerk several paces down the block.
When Alex turned, he saw Tony stepping onto the street. “Thanks,” he muttered. “Sorry, I was in the can when the excitement broke loose.”
“No problem,” Alex answered. Actually he’d been enjoying the action. Standing behind a bar didn’t give him much opportunity for aerobic activity—unless you counted wielding a cocktail shaker.
Now that he was away from his post, he allowed himself a few minutes of relaxation. Dragging in a breath of the humid air, he watch the boisterous crowd parading up and down the most famous street in the French Quarter, past bars, strip joints, boutiques selling cheap souvenirs and voodoo hexes, and, of course, the all-essential condom shop up the way.
Music blared from the bars and jazz clubs, mingling with the raunchy conversation of the crowd. Bourbon Street at night was a party animal’s playground. Or a trap for the unwary.
The doctor had told Conrad that the hospital had seen several older men come in under circumstances similar to Wiley Longbottom’s. They’d all ingested an unidentified drug that stimulated the libido but had the dangerous side effect of elevating the heart rate to the extreme. Demanding answers, Conrad had contacted Police Chief Henri Courville, who’d immediately gone into defensive mode, claiming that his department was putting all the resources it could spare into tracking the source of the new designer drug.
After some initial finger-pointing, Conrad and the police chief had calmed down enough to play ball with each other. Which was why New Orleans Confidential was now running a joint operation with the P.D.
The arrangement didn’t exactly thrill Alex.
His last couple of years as a police detective had been marred by red tape and departmental screwups. The final straw had come after he’d busted his butt to get the evidence for a capital murder case—and the conviction had been thrown out due to a legal loophole.
After that, the job simply hadn’t been the same. He’d taken a leave of absence from the force, done some freelance investigative work and spent a lot of time fixing up the house he’d bought, wondering if he could support himself as a private eye. Then Conrad Burke had tracked him down and made him an offer, and he’d jumped at the chance to work for a man he respected.
Unfortunately now he was stuck having to make both Conrad Burke and Henri Courville happy.
Down the street, a man was leaning over one of the wrought-iron balconies and tossing newly minted faux “doubloons” and cheap necklaces to a rowdy crowd. Once such activity had been strictly a feature of Mardi Gras. Now you saw it all the time down here. He eyed some of the girls down below, wondering if one of them would take off her T-shirt and bra to get some loot thrown her way. When all the ladies kept their shirts on, he went back into the bar.
Jack gave him a narrow-eyed look. “Nice of you to join us. We’re pretty busy in here.”
Alex shrugged. He and Jack had a pretty prickly relationship. “The next time we get a guy with a knife, you can take care of him.”
“Not my job.”
Alex didn’t bother to answer. He already knew that Jack was pretty busy—mixing drinks and pushing drugs. A dangerous combination. It was only a matter of time before the little squirt got himself into serious trouble.
They stayed out of each other’s way for the next half hour. Then a group of five overdressed older businessmen, looking like they were out slumming, came into the bar and took a table on the right. After the scantily clad cocktail waitress wrote down their drink requests, she headed for Alex. But Jack signaled her to come to him instead.
“I owe you one,” he said to Alex as he scanned the order, then began making Hurricanes. Alex gave him a thumbs-up and went back to work on a batch of Margaritas for some wet-behind-the-ears college kids. But he kept tabs on Jack. The guy bent down below the level of the bar. When he came back up, it looked like the cuff of his long-sleeved shirt was bulging just a little. As he mixed one of the Hurricanes, a fine mist of white powder fell from underneath the cuff into the drink. Not powdered sugar, Alex thought as he watched the bartender stir the stuff into the drink.
He’d bet his nonexistent New Orleans P.D. pension that it was Category Five.
The prime targets for this deadly designer drug were older affluent men. It aroused them sexually—allowing prostitutes to prey on them—but if too much was contained they could die of heart attacks. The cop in him wanted to warn the businessmen. But, since Wiley’s heart attack, nobody else had ended up in the hospital. And giving out warnings would jeopardize the joint undercover NOC-PD operation.
So he watched the waitress swish her hips over to the table and chat with the guys while she distributed the drinks. He kept an eye on the men, seeing the symptoms develop in one of them, the same signs he’d seen in Wiley. The guy with the spiked drink got red in the face, shifted in his seat and began talking pretty loudly.
Obviously embarrassed, the others in his group tried to calm him down, but he wasn’t willing to be restrained. Over the next twenty minutes, he became increasingly obnoxious.
When a little working girl at a nearby table caught his eye, he left his friends and went over to sit with her. Probably they were glad to get rid of him.
Mentally taking notes, Alex watched the guy indiscreetly paw at her in public before they headed for the front door.
Alex wanted to find out where they were going. Since the crowd in the bar had thinned, he tossed an “I’ll be right back” in Jack’s direction.
Before the other bartender could object, he hurried down the hall toward the men’s room, then made for the back exit where he ducked into the alley, gagging at the smell of garbage bags waiting to be picked up in the morning. The couple had gone out the front door. He charged down the alley and through
