Wages of Sin

by Penelope Williamson

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

* Penn Williamson's previous hardcover, Mortal Sins (Mysterious Press, 6/00), grossed nearly 50,000 copies. The paperback edition will be released simultaneously with, and contain a teaser chapter from, The Crucible Of Death. * The author's novels are extremely popular in Europe, especially France and Germany, where they are best-sellers. * The Crucible Of Death continues Williamson's successful departure from her earlier women's fiction titles, written under the name Penelope Williamson. Here, in this stand-alone novel, she picks up where Mortal Sins left off in a riveting story of murder, desire, and intrigue that will further establish her as a mainstream author in the same vein as Sandra Brown.

Release date: December 4, 2008

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 426

Sample

Chapter One

New Orleans, 1927

Tonight, he would write to her with his own blood.

He'd been planning the letter for some time now, ever since this one movie that he'd seen: a spectacle film where a Russian peasant girl lay dying and they brought in the doctor to bleed her. The director had shot a decent close-up of the lancing blade piercing flesh, opening up a vein into a bowl, and then the optical effects guy had doused the camera lens with blood. They'd probably used pig's blood, but on the par speed film it had looked like ink and that was when the idea first came to him. About how he could warn her by writing to her with his blood.

Not that he had bothered with giving much of a warning to the others, hadn't really given them a chance to save themselves. Fuck 'em. They wouldn't have listened anyway. Always, when a new one was first chosen, he'd feel some hope that this time it would be different. But after he had watched them for a while, after he'd looked into their hearts and seen the real them, he always came around to accepting the inevitable: that even death couldn't redeem the hopelessly lost.

And yeah, okay, okay, sometimes he did go ahead and fuck them anyway before he killed them. It was only sex, after all, and he was never selfish about it. He always tried to make it good for them, too. To give them a few moments of sweet pleasure, however fleeting, before that big postcoital sleep.

Anyway, the others…call them small sacrifices of appeasement, if you will, because ultimately she was the only one truly worthy of salvation. She wasn't a chosen one, she was the chosen one, but she was also his one. She was his love, his destiny, the only reason he had for drawing breath. So it followed, ipso frigging facto, that if killing her was the only way to save her, then he'd have to kill himself as well. They'd have to die together, just like Juliet and her Romeo.

“Romeo,” he said aloud and tried to laugh, but the noise he made sounded too much like a sob. “Yeah, that's what I am to you, baby. I'm your fuckin' Romeo, so don't you make me do it. What do you say, huh? Don't you make me do it…”

Christ, but he hated sad endings. He was always the poor sap sitting way in the back, in the dark, holding out hope until the bitter end that Juliet would wake up before Romeo swallowed the poison and died.

When the idea had first come to Romeo—to sacrifice a little of his own blood in the pursuit of his true love's salvation—he had tried pricking himself with a pocketknife and writing to her with his bleeding fingertip. The letters came out all smudgy and smeared, though, and he'd snatched up the paper, crumpling it in his fist, and thrown it against the wall.

The walls were plastered with her face: glossy publicity stills and pages torn from fan magazines. Grainy tabloid shots and candid ones he'd taken himself. He'd surrounded himself with her image because she was beautiful and she was his, but the special keepsake, the one that mattered, he'd put into a silver frame next to their bed. In it her head is tilted back and her wide, scornful mouth is laughing, and she is pushing her fingers through her dark, shingled hair. The whole world had seen her do that a thousand times, but only he knew what it meant.

“Hey, never mind, baby,” he had said to her that day, kissing her, and the glass that covered her face was cool against his lips. “We don't want to rush into this anyway, 'cause when we do it, we want it to be right.”

What he needed, he had told her, was a set of bleeding knives.

You couldn't just walk on down to the drugstore, though, and ask the guy behind the counter for such a thing, and maybe the truth was he hadn't even been looking so hard. Then this morning he'd been strolling along Rampart Street and not even thinking about her for a change, when his eye had been caught by something in the window of a curiosity shop. It had a thick tortoiseshell handle and its three knives were spread out in a fan for display, and he recognized it instantly as the instrument that the doctor had used on the Russian peasant girl.

The shop owner was wrinkled like a dried seed pod and had eyeglasses the size of thumbprints perched on the end of his nose. He peered at Romeo through those funny little glasses as if he knew all and he approved. “These are lovely knives,” he said, as he polished the blades with an oily rag. “Lovely, lovely. In our modern day we think of bloodletting as barbaric, but in truth it often did more good than harm. Lowering the patient's temperature and inducing a calm state of mind. And in some ancient societies bloodletting was a rite of purification.”

“No kidding?” Romeo smiled. He didn't give a shit about ancient societies, but the love he felt for her was so rare and beautiful and pure that surely it deserved its own ritual.

He walked home slowly with the knives in his pocket. He relished their weight, anticipating what he would do with them. He rounded the corner onto Canal Street and walked into the back of a crowd that had gathered to watch a couple of paper hangers glue sheets to an enormous billboard on the roof of the new Saenger Theatre. He stopped to watch the men at work, as first her eyes appeared and her mouth and then her neck. Eventually all of her was spread out on the board, and he saw that she was lying crossways on a bed like a spent lover—her head hanging down over the side, her arms flung out wide—to advertise her latest flick, Lost Souls. It was a wildly innovative and truly scary movie about a dead woman whose haunted, restless soul leaves her grave at night and takes the form of a vampire bat to suck the blood out of the living, and only a star like her could ever have pulled it off.

Romeo laughed out loud so that a few in the crowd left off staring at her to stare at him. He didn't care; they were fools, especially the women. They'd all be wearing bloodred lips and bat-wing capes by the end of the week. They tried so hard to look like her: bobbing their hair like hers, trying to paint her exotic face on top of their own, even trying to copy that smooth and languorous way she had of moving. Believing that their flattery and worship gave them ownership over her, when she would never belong to anyone but him.

He'd shot enough junk into himself to know how to apply a tourniquet and pump up a vein, but the oddity of the bleeding knives had him nervous. Each of the set's three knives had two blades, a long one on the bottom that ended in a hooked point and a smaller, triangular-shaped blade on top. He had no idea which to use and that worried him. He didn't want to butcher himself and end up bleeding to death. Christ, he thought, but wouldn't that be just too fucking much, if he ended up leaving this vale of tears without her.

He tested the edge of one of the hooked blades and he smiled. Sharp enough to cut through skin and flesh and bleeding veins.

He hummed to himself as he brought his shooter's kit from out of its hiding place and took a soup bowl from out of the kitchen cupboard. He was flying high, but it was a pure high, coming from the moment. He wrapped a length of thin rubber tubing around his arm and tied it tight with one hand and his teeth. He made a fist. The veins in the crook of his elbow bulged blue against his skin.

He stared at the knife and his high trembled a little as it slid toward the edge of fear, then he thought, Fuck it, and he picked up the knife and pressed the point of the top blade into the pulsing vein.

He let out a little yelp of pain, and dropped the knife as blood spurted bright red jets into the air. His blood. The thought frightened and exhilarated him, and he stared at it, red and thick and pulsating out of his flesh in an arc, until he remembered to hold his arm over the bowl.

The blood was so beautiful. He almost left it until too late to release the tourniquet.

He pressed the heel of his hand into the cut he'd made. He blinked, swaying on his feet. His head felt thick, his body heavy, as if he was just coming down off a nod. He looked around, bemused, at the splatters of blood on the primrose yellow wallpaper, the pools of it on the brown linoleum floor, but his imagination was already leaping ahead to the moment when she would read his words and understand how she had to wise up and save herself, had to save them before it was too late. No more other men, no more other loves. Just Juliet and her Romeo.

He wouldn't make the mistake of sending the letter through the mail. She got twenty thousand letters a week from her fans, each one carefully answered by studio secretaries who typed out the same reply over and over and rubber-stamped her signature. He wanted her, and only her, to see these words, written in his blood, and so he would have to deliver it himself to a place where only she would find it.

He picked up the fountain pen that he'd bought for just this moment—an automatic shading pen used, the young woman in the stationery store had told him, for fancy lettering and show card writing. He'd already spent hours planning what he would write: the single, perfect sentence that would make her understand how desperate the situation was, how she had to change things before it was too late.

He filled the pen's pearl barrel with his blood. He held the fat gold nib poised for a moment over the pristine sheet of paper, and then he wrote.

Are you scared yet, Remy?

Chapter Two

Carlos Kelly stood at the pier's end, with the muzzle of a big ol' revolver pressing into the bone behind his left ear. River water, black and oily, slopped against the wooden pilings beneath his feet, and the wind stank of dead fish, sour mud, and fermenting boiled potatoes from the stills in the gin mills along the wharf. It was still a sweet, sweet world, though, and he didn't want to die.

“Aw, Jesus,” he said. “Don't do this.”

The goon with the hog's leg only laughed and ground the bore deeper into Carlos Kelly's head.

Carlos Kelly drew in a sobbing breath and closed his eyes. “Just give me a day, okay? One day, and I'll make things square with Tony.”

“Yeah, sure you will.” The goon had a laugh raspy as a dull saw ripping through green wood. “Man, you've had all the days you're gonna get.”

“Please. I got a mother, a sister.” He was crying now, his face slimed with tears, snot dripping out his nose. “Aw, Jesus, aw, Jesus, you can't do this. You can't.”

Carlos Kelly was only seventeen and up until this moment he'd held the conviction that he would live forever. He still couldn't get his mind around the idea of dying, but he sure enough had a firm grasp that he was now in the worst trouble of his life.

It was all the fault of the cards, but a guy couldn't play without paying and who would've ever thought a losing streak could last a fucking month. So he'd borrowed a little off the bag money he'd been carrying for Tony the Rat, and somehow the man had found out and now he was playing hardball. Only Tony the Rat didn't mess with brass knuckles or blackjacks, breaking jaws and kneecaps being too subtle for a guy like him. When he sent his goon to see you, you ended up waltzing through eternity with the catfish.

The wind died. Carlos Kelly heard the click of a hammer cocking.

Aw, Jesus.

The crack of a gunshot smacked off the water and Carlos Kelly fell to his hands and knees. His palms burned and his nostrils filled with the acrid odor of urine and in the next instant he realized that if he was pissing all over himself, then he wasn't dead.

The goon realized it, too. He had whirled at the firing of a gun and the screaming going on behind them, but already he was spinning back around and pointing the big-bore revolver at Carlos Kelly's face.

The boy rolled and lashed out with his legs just as the goon pulled the trigger, and for the first time in his young life Carlos Kelly got lucky. His heavy brogan clipped the goon in the back of the knee, knocking his right leg out from under him. The goon's arm had flailed as he fired, and the bullet went wide. Carlos Kelly kicked again.

The goon staggered, catching his heel on a gap in the warped boards. He teetered a moment, then pancaked backward off the pier and into the river.

Carlos Kelly didn't even hear the splash. He had already scrambled to his feet and was off and running, away from the open waterfront and toward the crosshatch of narrow, broken-down streets that was the Quarter.

Even at past two o'clock in the morning the Quarter wasn't asleep, but all the action was happening behind the bolted doors and boarded-up windows of the speakeasies. Those working girls and boozers who still walked the streets were past helping anyone.

Carlos Kelly ducked into the shadows of the wide arched stone portico to an abandoned macaroni factory. He strained his ears for the patter of following footsteps, but his breath sawed too loudly in his throat and his heart beat too hard for him to hear anything but his own fear. His legs trembled so badly he could barely hold himself up.

The brick wall he sagged against was papered with peeling posters advertising a long ago boxing match. The broken glass panes in the fan light above his head rattled and moaned in the wind. The double barnlike doors of the factory were padlocked together, but he saw where the hasp had busted loose. The weathered wood had been scrawled with hobo graffiti: two parallel wavy lines slashed through with five hash marks. He didn't know what it meant and he didn't care. All he wanted was a place to hide.

The wind gusted around the corner, and Carlos Kelly shuddered with the sudden chill of it on his damp skin. Jesus, he had been sweating scared. He was still scared but he was beginning to feel some shame now in the way he'd behaved, the begging noises and the tears. He stank of his own piss; his trousers were wet with it.

A trash can clattered nearby, followed by glass smashing on cobblestone and a snarled curse, and Carlos Kelly nearly pissed himself again.

His feet twitched, wanting to take off running, but the street was empty and harshly exposed in the white light of the incandescent lamps. He pressed deeper beneath the arched portico, his hands feeling the door behind him for the broken hasp.

He pried it free of the rotting wood and then eased the door open carefully, praying that the hinges wouldn't squeak.

It was dark inside, with the barest of light coming in through the cracks in the boarded-up windows. He heard a rustling noise and he looked up through the grated catwalk above his head, and nearly jumped out of his skin as he caught the flapping of dark wings out of the corner of his eye. A high-pitched squeal echoed in the rafters of the deep, pitched ceiling.

Aw, Jesus, bats.

His blood pounded in his ears and a scream clawed at his throat, but he wouldn't let it out. He hated bats, really hated them, but at the moment their company was preferable to another do-si-do on a river pier with Tony the Rat's goon.

He stood unmoving for a long while, hardly daring to breathe as his eyes got used to the darkness. Slowly, he craned his head back and peered up through the latticed metal of the catwalk again. The bats, thank God, were gone.

Where he was, on the floor of the macaroni factory, strange machinery cast hulking shadows on the walls: cement vats and long wooden troughs and huge wheels and pulleys connected together by thick fan belts, like giant slingshots. Then he saw, deep in the farthest corner, the flicker of a fire.

Tramps, he thought, but unlike the bats they didn't scare him. Their company would be a good thing right now, and maybe he could join them in the morning when they hopped a train. What Carlos Kelly really needed to do was get his sorry ass out of town.

Hobos who rode the rails didn't travel unarmed, though, and so he made some deliberate noise as he walked down the length of the cavernous factory. “Hey, there,” he called out, nice and friendly. He could smell meat cooking, but as he got closer he realized that it wasn't a fire he had seen. It was a cluster of burning votive candles, and above the burning candles something was hanging from the crossbeam of a large drying rack.

Something that whimpered and then made a horrible noise as he came up to it. It was a noise he'd heard only once before, but once was enough for him never to have forgotten it—the wet, popping gargle of a man strangling on his own blood.

Then he got close enough to see it all, and for the second time that night Carlos Kelly fell to his knees, sobbing.

“Aw, Jesus.”

Chapter Three

They'd run out of the labeled stuff an hour ago and the champagne that homicide detective Daman Rourke now drank tasted like sugarcoated paint thinner. It was melting his teeth and making his lips go numb.

Like almost everyone else in the crowded front parlor of the elegant plantation house, he was watching Remy Lelourie be Remy Lelourie. Beneath the blaze of the crystal chandeliers, her bare arms and legs were the same pale gold as her silky slip of a dress, and the dress was all that she was wearing. No headband or jewelry, no stockings, not even any shoes. Just the silky dress and that incredible, breath-stopping face.

The tabloids called her the most beautiful woman in the world. It might have been the truth.

It was deep into that cool October Friday night and in the old French colonial house overlooking the Bayou St. John, Remy Lelourie was throwing what the newspapers were calling the Party of the Century, even though the century was only twenty-eight years old. New Orleans had always been a city that relished its balls and parades, but this was something special, for Remy Lelourie was one of the world's brightest stars and yet she was theirs. A hometown girl.

It was all happening at the film idol's ancestral home of Sans Souci, a bygone confection of white colonnettes and broad galleries that had been part of a sugar plantation a century ago, and the scene of a scandalous and brutal murder only last summer. Bright Lights Studios didn't care about that, though. Publicity, whether good or bad, was still publicity and publicity was good for business.

Most of the guests at the party were in some way connected with the studio. For three weeks they had been shooting on location in the swampland east of New Orleans—a swashbuckling boudoir intrigue called Cutlass about a Southern belle turned swamp pirate who sailed the Caribbean searching for her lost love. Tonight they were celebrating life and love with all the extravagance and flamboyance of the movies they made.

Chandeliers blazed in the front parlor, where a five-piece jazz band was playing “Three O'Clock in the Morning” even though it was only half past two. Negro waiters in white tuxedos served bootlegged champagne in glasses bigger than finger bowls, and the air had the crackle of a live wire, as if everyone was still waiting for the party to turn wild. So far the most exciting thing to happen had been around midnight, when a budding starlet had thrown off her clothes and danced naked on top of the grand piano before passing out underneath it.

Daman Rourke leaned against the wall near the French doors that opened onto the upstairs gallery. He watched Remy Lelourie flirt with a skinny guy who was supposed to be some kind of writer for the studio. A scenario writer. He had patent leather hair and a little black mole on the right side of his upper lip that looked inked on with a fountain pen, and maybe was. The trousers he had on were wide enough to fit an elephant's legs. What the college kids nowadays were calling Oxford bags.

Remy Lelourie had a reputation that was mostly sin and trouble, but this time she was playing it soft and sweet. Still, after only two minutes of her company, the writer in the Oxford bags already had the look: like he'd been smacked in the face with a ball peen hammer. Even when she wasn't trying all that hard, even when she didn't care, Remy Lelourie could do anything with any man she wanted to.

As Rourke watched, she laughed at something the writer said, letting her head fall back so that the light of the chandelier fell full on her exposed throat. She bit her lower lip to stop another laugh and pushed her fingers through her hair, and Rourke felt a pang of pure lust laced with a little jealousy.

“Do I look like I got a sex complex?” said a young female voice close to his ear.

He turned, and the girl who had spoken raised a cigarette in a long silver holder up to her lips for him to light. She held his gaze a moment after he had obliged her, then averted her face, pursed her lips, and blew out smoke.

Her mouth looked like the bow on a candy box, and her eyelids had been greased to make them shiny. The dress she wore seemed to be mostly swaying fringe with nothing underneath it. The effect was mesmerizing.

“You look fine to me,” Rourke said.

She blew more smoke out in one long sigh and then sucked down a long drink from the gin rickey she had in her other hand, striking just the right pose between boredom and amusement. The epitome of razz-ma-tazz.

“Freddy told me I got a sex complex,” she said. Her voice had a bit of a pout in it that was as intriguing as her fringed dress. “But he's only sore because I wouldn't go to bed with him. I told him a girl wants a fella's full attention on her. Know what I mean?”

From the direction of her yearning look, Rourke figured the Freddy with the wandering eye must be Alfredo Ramon, the silver screen's latest Latin lover sensation. At the moment Freddy was having something of an argument with Cutlass's director, although most of his attention was on his own reflection in the gilt mirror above the yellow Italian marble fireplace.

“She's the biggest box office draw the studio has,” the director was saying. He wore a monocle in his left eye and had a reckless taste in old-fashioned spats. His beard, clipped to a dagger's point, jabbed the air, punctuating his words. “Without me you wouldn't even be in this picture, so quit giving me grief.”

For an answer, Freddy pushed out his sensuous lower lip and flared his nostrils in a Rudolph Valentino moue. His hair, hard and shiny with brilliantine, glistened like lacquer in the refracted light of the mirror.

“Freddy thinks he wants Remy,” the girl was saying. “But then everybody thinks he wants Remy.”

The big bangles on her arms jangled as she took another long pull on her gin rickey. Ice clicked in her now empty glass. She turned and searched Rourke's face with drooping, glazed eyes. “Are you somebody famous?” she said.

Suddenly the razz-ma-tazz was gone, and Rourke saw that she was even younger than he'd thought. Young and hard and naive and hungry, and he felt sorry for her. “No, I'm just a cop,” he said.

Her gaze moved up and down the length of him, from his black suede-topped shoes back to his mouth, and stopped. “You look like you ought to be famous.”

Rourke laughed and shook his head. “I think Freddy just glanced your way.”

It was only after she had walked away from him without another word that he realized he'd never learned her name.

The musicians had been passing reefers back and forth among themselves all night, and their horns were now hitting some wild and ragged notes that burst through the open door in shards of sound.

She stood alone on the upstairs gallery, with her back partly to him and her hands resting on the balustrade, looking out at the vanishing night where a wafer of a moon seemed to be jittering over the bayou and the black sky was popping with stars. He could just make out the line of her jaw curving out from beneath her ear, limned by the light spilling out of the house. Her short-cropped hair exposed the white nape of her neck and that delicate protrusion of bone that always made a woman seem so vulnerable, and Daman Rourke thought, Jesus, I've got it bad.

“Do you want something, Detective?” Speaking into the night, she'd kept her back to him.

“Uh huh.” He'd brought a fresh glass of champagne out with him and he swallowed down a big swig of it. “I've been thinking about your behavior earlier this evenin', before the party, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to arrest you for soliciting sex from a cop.” He took a couple of steps, coming up behind her, close enough to touch her now, although he didn't. “Drag you downtown,” he said, “and give you the third degree.”

She turned around and leaned back, resting her elbows on the balustrade while she looked him over. A smile touched her mouth, and she did something with her eyes. Made them go hot and droopy. She wasn't sweet Remy anymore, but the red-lipped, black-souled vamp who picked up men, bled them dry, and threw them away.

She did a little shiver. “Oooh. The big, tough cop. Should I be scared?”

“Very scared.”

“Tell me again what you're arresting me for, Detective,” she said in a whisper. “I just love to hear you say the words. They make me shiver.”

“What words?”

She made him wait for two beats and then she said it, low and sultry, “Soliciting sex.”

“Lord, if you aren't at it again. You're a one-woman crime wave.”

He'd gestured with his hand to make his point, and the champagne sloshed over the rim of the glass. She took his hand and licked the drops off his fingers. “You shouldn't waste it like that,” she said.

“It's awful stuff. It deserves to be wasted.”

She laughed, and he felt the warmth of her breath on the wet skin of his hand. “You're swacked on it, though.”

“No, I'm not,” he said, although maybe he was. A little.

She let go of his hand and reached up, wrapping her arms around his neck to pull his mouth down to hers. “I do love you, Day Rourke,” she said, and she kissed him.

“Let's get out of here,” he said a bit later, when she let him.

She shook her head, her lips brushing back and forth across his. “Can't. It may not look like it, but I'm working.”

She kissed him again, though, and she seemed to be swooning, to be singing into his mouth, and he let himself go with it, even though with Remy Lelourie the fall was always so long and so hard.

A camera's flash lamp exploded in their faces, and they jerked apart, blinking in the sudden intense wash of light.

“Hey, you two lovebirds,” the reporter said, raising his camera again as he sidled back toward the gallery's outside stairs, from where he'd come. He popped another bulb into the lamp, slid a new plate into the box, and put his finger on the shutter. “Smile for The Movies.”

“Wait,” Rourke said. He smiled like the guy had asked, and the smile was easy. “How about a scoop to go along with that shot?”

The reporter stopped, lowering his camera. “Really?” He was coming back now. He was a scrawny fellow with a big nose and ears, and front teeth square and yellow like kernels of corn. He had a deep hitch in his stride, as if one leg was shorter than the other. “Say, did you two kids just get engaged?”

Rourke was still smiling when he grabbed the camera out of the man's hands and swung around, smashing it against the hard cypress wall of the house. The bellows tore and the wooden box shattered open. Rourke smacked it against the house one more time for good measure, and the flash lamp attachment bent like a pretzel.

He handed the mess back to the reporter. He was still smiling. “Next time you'll leave wearing it around your neck. Now, get lost.”

“Aw, jeez,” came a rough voice from behind him. “I swear I can't leave you alone for a minute.”

A big, lumbering man in a rumpled pongee suit stood filling the doorway from the front parlor. Fiorello Prankowski, Rourke's partner in homicide detection. They were catching tonight, which meant that if Fio was here then somebody somewhere in New Orleans had been murdered.

Fio raised his eyebrows at Rourke, but he didn't say anything more. His face had its perpetually tired look, deep creases lining it like the rings of a seasoned tree.

He lifted his hat to Remy. “Miss Lelourie,” he said, but his voice was flat, his eyes hard and flat as well. Fio remained convinced that the most beautiful woman in the world had slashed her husband to death with a cane knife last summer and had gotten away with it.

The reporter was still hovering at the top of the stairs. Rourke gave him his mean cop look. “Aren't you lost yet?”

“Say, Day, can I see you for a while?” Fio said, stepping between Rourke and the reporter, serious now, and Rourke sensed the tension in him. Whatever had happened, it must be bad, if Fio didn't want anyone else to hear about it.

Rourke turned to Remy. He touched her cheek with his fingertips. “I got to go, darlin'.”

“I know. You're working, too,” she said, and she seemed all right with it. Her eyes might have looked haunted a little, but then they always did. It was what the camera caught and was part of her appeal. Her seduction.

He and Fio left the gallery by the outside stairs. The wind was tossing the moss-laden branches of the huge live oaks and rattling the fronds of the tall palms. Rourke looked back up at the house, where the party went on in flashes of jazz and light. Remy Lelourie still stood where he'd left her, and he was thinking now that there had been something in her kiss, something that would worry him if he poked at it hard enough, and so he probably ought to just let it lie.

For one sweet summer eleven years ago they had been lovers, until she'd left both him and New Orleans and gone off to make herself rich and famous. Four months ago they'd gotten back together and ever since then he'd been waiting for the day when she would leave him again, looking for signs of it in