Phantom of the French Quarter

As devastated as she’d been, when she tried to picture Tony’s face now, all she could see was Marcus, looking at her the way a lion looks at a gazelle. At the thought, her stomach quivered, though less with the fear she should be feeling than with the longing to call him back and offer herself up for his dinner.

Scowling at her own foolishness, she shook it off and moved on. As she crept back toward the streetlight, her head ached and her nausea reawakened.

A door swung open just ahead of her, blocking her escape from the alley. Loud music and cigarette smoke poured out of what she supposed must be a bar. An instant later, three men followed, each one bigger and louder than the last. With nothing taller than a small forest of discarded beer bottles for cover, she pressed her back against the wall and trusted to the shadows, her instincts warning her that she mustn’t make a sound.

“Come on, how ’bout a taste here?” a jumpy outline wheedled. “Hook me up, bro—c’mon.”

“Screw that,” said a hulking figure. “You show the green and we’ll deal.”

“Ain’t jerkin’ us around, are you?” a third voice demanded. “’Cause if you’re wastin’ our time…”

A palpable threat hung in the air, and Caitlyn winced at the realization that she’d stumbled onto a drug deal. Icy terror twisting in her belly, she waited, holding her breath and praying they would finish their transaction quickly and ooze back inside. Oblivious as they were, it might have happened that way. And probably would have, had the edge of her skirt not caught a standing longneck and tipped the bottle over.

In the narrow space, the clatter of glass echoed loudly.

Caitlyn turned and raced toward the alley’s opposite—and mercifully open—entrance.

Almost immediately, footsteps followed, accompanied by a man yelling, “Hey, sweetie! Come to Papa!” and a roar of coarse laughter.

And then more footsteps, hard on her heels, closing in with every step.

SWEAT WAS STREAMING down Marcus’s face by the time he heard raised voices and men’s shouts of excitement.

Tell me it’s not Caitlyn. But he didn’t allow the wish to slow him as he rushed toward the disturbance.

He was quick to realize he wasn’t the only one hurrying to find out what was happening. In this seamy collection of strip clubs, last-call dives and liquor, lottery and po’boy sandwich shops with bars on every window, young men, transvestites and a few hard-looking women tended to mill around at midnight, many of them up for anything to ease their squalid boredom.

Especially the kind of “anything” involving a fresh-faced, beautiful young woman who clearly didn’t belong.

By the lurid glow of a neon sign alternately flashing the messages Girls, Hell Yes! and Clothes, Hell No! he spotted at least a dozen lowlifes stumbling in the same direction. Not caring who he pissed off, Marcus pushed his way through oily clumps of humanity, parting them with such speed that only a handful of curses and one fist caught him—a glancing blow he barely felt.

His thrumming heart in his throat, he finally spotted Caitlyn as she threw open the door of an older silver car and called to the driver, “Oh, thank God it’s you.”

Marcus wanted to shout to her but didn’t, deciding she was safer with a friend—even her damned pit bull—than she could ever be with him. The door closed and the car zoomed off, leaving him standing there alone, staring after her.

At least for the few seconds before the drunken bikers he’d shoved caught up.

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