“I will,” she said. And I believed her.
Yet I didn’t see her much after that night. I was trying to cope with my grief but my true feelings for Kacey kept getting in the way. How do you console a woman over the loss of her man when you wished—with every particle of your body—she’d someday feel that deeply about you?
The fact that her man had been my brother made the tangle of fucked up-emotions snarl into something I didn’t need or want.
I dropped by her apartment one night after work and found her writing songs. On the couch with her guitar, a notebook open beside her.
“The words arepouringout, Teddy,” she said.
But I should’ve heard how her voice trembled at the edges and how her eyes were shining and bright. Not for excitement or joy. But in the way you look when you’re scared to death and that fear is lighting up your nerves like a switchboard.
Two weeks later, she was gone, leaving me with only a simple truth: I needed her. Maybe more than she needed me.
CHAPTER
FOUR
New Orleans was a city as green and old as Vegas was brown. In April, the heat wasn’t bad, but the air was filled with water.
The GPS on my rental car guided me to the French Quarter and the Le Chacal club. It was almost noon. Mike said he wouldn’t be there until six, and he wouldn’t give me Kacey’s home address or any other personal information until he met me in person. I appreciated the caution, although it left me impatient as hell.
I checked into a small hotel on the fringes of the French Quarter and took a nap to recover from the sleepless night on a cramped airplane. I had a quick bite at a café, then took a walk up and down Canal Street, searching faces. Every blond-haired woman I passed made my heart leap. None were Kacey.
Time crawled by until six, when I went back to Le Chacal. It was a small, dim club with a cartoon jackal in pink and green neon buzzing over the front entrance. A small stage area was on the left, a smattering of thin wooden chairs and tables facing it. The bar was tucked into the back right corner, where a huge guy with a rust-colored beard was getting ready for the night. Backlit shelves of glasses provided the most illumination. A jazzy song played from a sound-system and a few patrons were already there, talking and drinking in low voices.
I stepped up to the bar. “Mike Budny?”
The big guy sized me up. “Yeah?”
I offered my hand. “Theo Fletcher. Teddy.”
He shook my hand, then planted both palms on the bar, his expression tight. “Call me Big E. Everyone else does.”
“Sure.”
“You weren’t kidding about getting here quick,” he said. “Still, I can’t be giving out her personal info until I know the whole story. Are you the reason she split Vegas to drink herself into a stupor every night?”
“No,” I said. “It was my brother, Jonah. Kacey was his girlfriend, and they were real close. But he…”
“Dumped her?”
Shit, one of the perks of shutting down my social life was I hadn’t had to explain this situation to anyone in six months. My chest tightened as I said, “He died.”
Big E nodded. “Sorry to hear that, man. But it explains a lot. I can hear it in her songs, you know?”
“I’ll bet.”
He rubbed his beard and sighed. “Beer?”
“Sure.”
The bartender popped the tops off two bottles of something dark, handed one to me. He clinked it to mine, and we both drank. I took a long pull of the cold, bitter ale, as if I could wash the wordshe diedout of my mouth.
“So what’s your plan, Theo?”
“See her,” I said. “Help her. Whatever she needs.”
Big E kept nodding over his beer. His blasé attitude was starting to irritate me.
