Convincing Jamey Page 3

  He did so after a moment, removing the toothpick from his mouth. “Rule number three: stay locked up tight at night.”

  “Your customers come out.”

  “No one’s interested in messing with my customers, not even Ryan Morgan.”

  She moved, getting comfortable on the vinyl seat, making her hair sway and shimmer. It was long and heavy, falling past her shoulders in corkscrew curls, and about the same color as a dirty new penny. He wondered if either the curls gone wild or the coppery color were for real. She definitely had the coloring for a natural redhead—all pale, from her forehead across her face, down her throat and all the way into the deep V of her T-shirt. Of course, there was only one way to tell for sure: get rid of those jeans that fit too snugly and whatever little bit she might be wearing underneath them.

  His smile was tight and humorless. Strip her down naked, and he wouldn’t care if her natural hair color was red, green, purple or yellow. No man would.

  “Ryan Morgan is the tall, dark kid, right?”

  “He’s tall and dark,” Jamey allowed. “But he was never a kid, not from the time he was born.”

  “I take it he’s the man to fear around here.”

  “You got it.”

  “And the blond kid beside him this afternoon?”

  The muscles in Jamey’s jaw tightened. “That’s Reid. Stay away from him, too.”

  “Is he dangerous?”

  “He’s a punk.” The explosive beginning and ending of his last word were emphasized by his disgust. All of them, from Morgan on down, could have turned out better than they had. Even if they’d fallen in with the wrong people, at some point they could have made a conscious decision to go straight, to learn the meaning of “law-abiding,” to not make the whole world suffer just because their little corner of it stunk. Reid could have made that decision, and might have if he’d had a decent influence in his life somewhere along the way. If he hadn’t been raised by a mother undeserving of the name, if he hadn’t been abandoned by a father who knew better.

  “And the others?”

  “The ugly little bastard is named Marino. The driver is Morgan’s kid brother.”

  “So Ryan Morgan is the person I should watch out for.”

  “He’s the worst of the bunch, but any one of them would hurt you. Any one of them wouldn’t think twice about raping you or beating you. Marino wouldn’t feel a moment’s regret about setting you on fire and listening to you scream while you burned.” He waited a moment, then softened his voice. “He’s done it before.”

  She didn’t blink, didn’t reveal a hint of fear or revulsion. “Then why isn’t he in jail?”

  “And who’s going to testify against him? Marino works for Morgan. Morgan works for Jimmy Falcone. You ever hear of Falcone up there in Landry?”

  “I lived in New Orleans for nine years. My husband was a cop. Narcotics.” She offered that cool smile of hers. “I’ve heard of Falcone.”

  Her husband, she’d said. Not ex, but simply husband, as in current. So where was he? What was he doing letting her move onto Serenity? What the hell was he doing letting her spend one night down here alone?

  Drawing back, he opened the cooler and pulled out an icy can of soda, setting it on the counter in front of her. She looked at it for a moment, then smiled. “I’d rather have a beer.”

  “It’s on the house. Take it.”

  “If I pay, can I have a beer instead?” But she reached for the can, popping the tab with one neatly manicured, pale peach nail and taking a long swallow. “Thanks.”

  “So where is he?”

  “Who?”

  Damn it, he hadn’t meant to ask that. It wasn’t as if it was any of his business, wasn’t as if he cared. “Your husband.”

  For a moment the light disappeared from her eyes. When the moment passed, she was quieter, more subdued, less...vibrant. Yeah, that was a good word. “He’s dead,” she said flatly.

  He considered asking how it had happened, but decided against it. Cops got killed. People got killed. It might have been something as innocent as a heart attack or an auto accident—or, considering New Orleans’s more-than-one-a day homicide rate in the last few years, it could have been as sinister as murder. Either way, she obviously didn’t want to talk about it, and he didn’t want to know. “Sorry,” he remarked with little emotion.

  “So am I,” she responded with just as little—which meant, he suspected, that she felt more sorrow than she knew what to do with. She took another long drink, then glanced around the room. “Are these your regulars?”

  He nodded.

  “Tell me about them.”

  “Why? So you can learn their problems and come up with neat, easy solutions that they’re not capable of seeing for themselves? So you can save them from themselves?”

  Her gaze was chastening, but he didn’t feel chastened. “So I can get to know my neighbors.”

  He stubbornly shook his head. “You do that on your own. I’m not helping you screw up anyone’s lives more than they already are.”

  For a long time she studied him, her expression thoughtful enough to make him want to squirm; then she sighed. “You really don’t want me here, do you?”

  “People like you come in here and stir up trouble. They disrupt everyone’s lives. They might even create a little hope. But when the going gets tough, they get going, and for a while, things are worse than before they came. These people already have enough trouble and disruption in their lives. They don’t have much hope to lose. They don’t need your Band-Aid solution to their life-threatening problems.”

  “You know, there’s a variation on that saying. When the going gets tough, the tough get rough.”

  “That’s right, darlin’, and you haven’t seen tough or rough until you’ve seen Ryan Morgan. You interfere with him or his business, and he’ll have you for breakfast.”

  For another long, uncomfortable moment, she simply looked at him; then she slid off the stool to the floor. “All right, Jamey. You’ve done your duty. You’ve warned me. You’ve scared me. Now can we get past that to whatever comes after?”

  Whatever comes after. And what might that be? Exactly what was it she thought she wanted from him? Assistance? When New Orleans’s finest and richest claimed Serenity for their own. Friendship? He wasn’t much interested in friendship or anything else with a naive, idealistic, sure-to-be-disillusioned social worker—not even if she was pretty and slender, with hair so fiery that a touch might burn. Protection? He had enough people to look out for already, people who truly needed him. If she felt the need for protection, let her go someplace else, someplace safe. Let someone else take care of her.

  When he didn’t answer, she gave a little sigh, then stiffened her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Thanks for the hospitality,” she said, her tone not quite icy enough to create a chill but close. “I’ll see you around.”

  She left the bar, drawing no one’s notice but his own. She crossed the street, slipped through the wide, creaky gate and, a moment later, went inside. A moment after that, the downstairs lights went off, then all but one or two lights upstairs.

  Crumpling her empty can, he tossed it into the trash, then yanked the towel from his shoulder and wiped the ring it had left on the bar. He didn’t need this, he thought with a scowl. He didn’t need one more person to look out for, didn’t need to feel responsible for one more person who was ill-suited to life on Serenity Street. Let her go back to Landry, back to her home and her family and her husband’s memory, and let her go soon.

  Before it was too late.

  Karen lay awake in bed the next morning, gazing out the window at the brick wall of the house behind hers that formed the rear property line. That house, like so many on and around Serenity, was empty, long ago abandoned by anyone who cared. In the wildest of her dreams, she envisioned all the houses cleaned up and fixed up, providing not just shelter but real, welcoming, loving homes to their residents. She imagined the neighborhood an inviting place to
live, once again with schools, churches and businesses of its own. She pictured children playing, watched over with nothing more than the average mother’s concern, with no fear, no threat of death, no risk of injury more serious than a skinned knee.

  Jamey O’Shea would call her a dreamer, and he would do it in that tone that made clear the word’s insult. For an Irishman, he was surprisingly down-to-earth. she would bet he’d done little, if any, dreaming in his years on Serenity Street. Of course, the street as he knew it wasn’t conducive to dreams, only nightmares.

  She’d had more than a few of those herself. She hadn’t slept well last night. Every sound had been new and out of the ordinary, worthy of awakening to determine if it signaled danger. She had heard that old Impala drive by a time or two, had fancied the second time that it had stopped out front again, just as it had yesterday afternoon, although she couldn’t say so for a fact. She hadn’t found the courage to leave her bed and creep across the hall to the living room to look out the window. Instead, she had lain there and thought about the young men who had subjected her house—and her—to such hostile scrutiny a dozen hours earlier. Ryan Morgan, tall, dark and dangerous, never an innocent child, now, no older than twenty-five, a name to frighten an entire neighborhood. Reid, a punk who wouldn’t think twice about hurting a woman, and Marino, who had hurt someone before—a woman, no doubt, though Jamey hadn’t said. Men like that were always more likely to prey on women, who were physically weaker and less able to defend themselves. Maybe she was weaker, but she would fight back. The sooner Morgan and his flunkies understood that, the better. The sooner Jamey understood it, the better.

  By the time she’d gotten the resident thugs out of her mind, the street had been quiet again. Had the car driven on while she was otherwise preoccupied? Or had she only imagined it stopping in the first place?

  With a sigh, she leaned over and shut off the alarm before it could go off, then sat up, swinging her feet to the floor. All in all, it hadn’t been a bad night, considering that it was her first night alone in a new house, in a new neighborhood. The house made lots of noises, but she would grow accustomed to them. She would learn which creaks and groans were normal and which were cause for concern. She would become comfortable with the night sounds and the night disturbances. She would learn to belong.

  Leaving the bedroom, she shuffled down the dusty hall to the bathroom. Seven bedrooms on the second floor—with room for three more in the attic—and only one bathroom to serve them. It was a big one, though, easily the size of her and Evan’s bedroom in their first small apartment, with plenty of room for cozying up the large space. Fortunately, the plumbing had been updated in recent memory—about forty years ago, as far as the former owner could recall—but it still had no shower, only a pedestal sink and a great old claw-foot tub. Both had been layered with dirt and littered with leaves and trash that had blown in through the broken window, and the toilet had been enough to make a person shudder. Wearing rubber gloves and armed with ammonia, cleanser and bleach, she had spent nearly three hours yesterday scrubbing cast iron, tile and wainscoting to meet her standards of cleanliness. Today she intended to repair the broken window—all the broken windows—and paint the bathroom walls the brightest shade of white she could buy. Then she would tackle the kitchen and her bedroom, the living room, the other five bedrooms and all those rooms downstairs, plus the exterior of the house, the veranda, the fence, the outbuildings and the yard....

  Just thinking about all the work that awaited her before Kathy’s House could open for business was enough to make her tired.

  So she wouldn’t think about all of it. She would take it one step at a time, one job at a time. She would get dressed, grab some breakfast out, then head for the nearest building supply center. She had already measured all the windows that needed fixing. She would buy panes of glass and caulk and make herself visible and approachable to any and all neighbors while she worked. Maybe curiosity would accomplish what hot weather hadn’t: getting them out of their apartments and out on the street.

  She was planning a fast-food breakfast, but, seeing a rare empty parking space across from the Café du Monde, she grabbed it. Why not celebrate her first morning on Serenity with something special?

  She was looking for a table when a steady gaze caught her attention. Her neighbor and devil’s advocate, Jamey O’Shea, was sitting at a table next to the iron railing, a cup of coffee and a plate of beignets in front of him, a newspaper opened but going unread while he watched her instead. His gaze wasn’t friendly, unfriendly or even the slightest bit personal. For all the expression he showed, he could be looking at a total stranger.

  Finding no tables available and unwilling to wait, she made her way along the narrow aisle, stopping at the empty chair across from him. “Mind if I join you?”

  He answered with the slightest of shrugs. He did, at least, fold the newspaper and set it aside as she seated herself. After she placed an order with the passing waiter, she covered the sticky rim of the table with napkins, rested her arms there and spoke. “You’re up bright and early.” She would have assumed that his business required late hours, that he probably slept much of the day away, but obviously she was wrong.

  “So are you. I don’t imagine it’s in preparation for the long drive back to Landry.”

  Forcing back a smile, she shook her head.

  “I didn’t think we could be so lucky. How was your first night on Serenity Street?”

  “Peaceful.”

  He snorted. “Serenity Street has been many things over the years, but ‘peaceful’ has never been one of them.”

  She acknowledged her lie with a shrug. “So I didn’t sleep well. That’s to be expected in a new place. I’ll get used to it. I’ll adjust.”

  “Or you could go back home where there are no adjustments to make.”

  That was certainly true. Everything was familiar in Landry. She knew practically everyone in town, and they knew everything about her. Her and Evan’s efforts at having a baby, his death, her return, the whole nightmare with Kathy and now this foolish scheme of hers... none of it was secret in Landry. There was a certain comfort in such familiarity—and a certain discomfort, too. Sometimes she had felt as if she were slowly suffocating, strangled by all the sympathy, the concern and the well-meant advice. In the last year she had begun dreaming of a place where she could put Evan’s insurance money to good use, where she could help save other women from Kathy’s fate, where she could be just plain Karen Montez and not the Taylors’ poor daughter or the Montezes’ sweet daughter-in-law, not Evan’s grieving widow or Kathy’s grieving sister. She hoped she’d found that place on Serenity Street.

  “How long do I have to stick around before you quit trying to convince me that I should leave?”

  Jamey shrugged. “I don’t believe any of the others like you have lasted more than six months.”

  “It’s going to be a boring six months if we have to have this conversation every time we meet.” She pulled some money from her purse to pay for the breakfast the waiter delivered, uncovered one square pastry from a mountain of powdered sugar and leaned forward to minimize the white fallout as she took a bite. In spite of her precautions, some sugar drifted onto her blue T-shirt anyway. She didn’t worry about it. The Café du Monde’s beignets were well worth the telltale sprinkling on her clothing. “All right,” she said once she was able to speak. “If I’m still here six months from today, you’ll give up your efforts to drive me away. Deal?”

  “Make it one day less. I’ll give you credit for yesterday.”

  “You’re so generous,” she said dryly. Turning from him and the subject, she gazed across the street to the Pontalba Apartments, Jackson Square and, rising tall against the summer sky, the St. Louis Cathedral. “I love the French Quarter,” she said with a sigh. “Evan and I used to come down here all the time. He and his partner shared an apartment here before we got married, then after we did, Michael moved into that top-floor apartment.” She ge
stured with a beignet across the street to an apartment where the French doors were open and white curtains fluttered in the lazy breeze. “He finally got married himself a few years ago and moved into a house with a yard for the kids. They have two now, both girls.”

  “Why didn’t you and Evan have kids?”

  It seemed that the muscles in her face went rigid, freezing her smile in place before slowly letting it slide away. “We tried,” she said with a carefully careless shrug. “It just didn’t work out.” Then, before he could say anything else—a quick glance his way revealed that an uncomfortable apology was surely on its way—she went on. “I bet we have a mutual friend.”

  The regret was replaced with a now familiar scowl. “I seriously doubt it.”

  “Why do you find that hard to believe?”

  “Let’s see...a middle-class social worker from Landry, Louisiana, knowing anyone in common with the owner of a run-down bar in the sleaziest, shabbiest section of the Quarter. Why would I find that hard to believe?”

  “You grew up on Serenity. So did my friend. She went away to college, though, and didn’t go back.”

  He settled more comfortably in his chair, leaning back, propping one ankle on the other knee. “So how do you know Jolie?”

  “She was a friend of Evan’s from work. How did you know I meant her?”

  “Not too many people from Serenity Street make it to college. Of my friends, Jolie and Nicky were the only ones.”

  Nicky. Like Jamey, it was a sweet name for a grown man. Unlike Jamey—who looked every bit a Jamey and not a James, Jim or Jimmy—Nicholas Carlucci hardly deserved a sweet name. Because she’d known so many of the people involved in the Falcone case—Michael, Remy, Smith and Jolie—and because of Evan’s interest in the man, Karen had followed the trial with interest. Nicholas Carlucci had been the government’s most damning witness against his boss and had drawn the lion’s share of the media attention. Dark, as befitted his Italian heritage, handsome as the devil and twice as wicked, he was tough enough, dangerous enough and cold enough to make Ryan Morgan look like a little boy playing little boys’ games. And he was a friend of Jamey’s.