Dark Rain: 15 Short Tales (42 page)

Max Long stars in:

Bound By Blood

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Jack Carter stars in:

Zombie Patrol

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And Samantha Moon stars in:

Moon Dance

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here’s sunshine, and there’s moonshine. Orange County, California, where I’m from, averages around two hundred seventy-eight sunny days a year, and since there isn’t that much in the way of nightlife, most business is conducted in broad daylight. But in New Orleans, no matter what your business is, the nighttime is the right time for it.

And the shadier that business, the better.

Which makes it my kind of town. Like me, the Big Easy only comes alive after dark. I could feel it the moment I walked out of the main terminal building at Louis Armstrong International Airport and stood waiting for a cab. There was something not quite right about the air, I mean, something
besides
the dark, sullen, blood-streaked sunset sky and the hot, humid mix of sulfur, swamp-grass, and river water, that let me know I was a long way from sunny Southern California.

It smelled like… voodoo weather.

The feeling got even stronger downtown at the city morgue, a one-story cement funeral home sandwiched between a pair of old brick slum buildings painted bright red and yellow. One had a big peeling sign across its front that said ‘We Cash Paychecks.’ I guess I’d been subconsciously expecting the building they’d used in
American Horror Story: Coven
when they revive Zoe’s dead boyfriend from spare body parts. This definitely wasn’t it.

Automatically, I checked the doorway and the lintel overhang for security cameras. My skin doesn’t show up on video, which was why I still wore so much foundation makeup under my Jackie O sunglasses, left over from airports and my hotel. It made travel a bitch, especially in this heat.

“Bet you’ve never set foot in a coroner’s office like this one, Miss Moon,” said the Medical Examiner, Dr. Bernardo Willard, after he unlocked the front door and I introduced myself. He was a thin gray-haired Boomer in his sixties; in Fullerton, he’d have been retired.

There was one thing I was already learning about Louisiana–nobody retired. Not peaceably, anyway. Around here, they carried you out straight from your desk chair to your grave. My cabbie had been about a hundred years old.

“It’s
Mrs.
Moon,” I told Willard, following him inside. “But please call me Samantha… or Sam.”

Speaking of graves, that was exactly how the place smelled, and I should know. My boyfriend back home, Kingsley Fulcrum, tended to rob them during full moon. Which reminded me, I needed to text the big guy and at least let him know I’d landed safely. Not that I had much to worry about in a plane crash…

“And thanks for meeting me here at this late hour.”

The morgue kept bankers’ hours, and it was long past closing.

“My pleasure, Sam. It may be after business hours, but to tell you the truth, I’m still hard at work here. Or hardly workin’. The US government recommends an office like ours only handle two hundred fifty postmortem a year–with our murder rate, we do nearly one a day, on just the one autopsy table. City Hall dumped us here after Katrina, then a fire wiped out half our records and equipment, and things got so bad we have to store our cadavers out in the back parking lot in refrigerated trailers.” He made a beckoning gesture at me. “She’s in here.”

A holstered sidearm peeked out from under his soiled white lab coat, which reminded me that New Orleans was the only major American city that still had an open carry law on the books. I hadn’t brought my Siggy with me; it would have been too much trouble to try to broker it through the airport TSA scanners–and besides, I didn’t really need it, did I?

Dr. Willard led me into the main mortuary, a room about the size of my basement that looked like Hurricane Katrina had hit maybe yesterday. The floors were slippery and wet, and there was something seriously wrong with the AC; even with my frigid body temperature, I’d felt uncomfortably damp ever since I’d stepped off the plane, and now it blossomed into a prickly sheen. A big clipboard hanging on the wall in front of me had the cleanup duty roster listed on it with the words ‘
Reminder: Dump Brains and Bowels in Hazmat Bin!’
scrawled across the top in big block letters.

“Here’s your girl!” he said, sounding cheerful.

I guess for one horrible second I thought he meant my Tammy. But the doughy dead Jane Doe on the stainless steel mortuary slab was in her early twenties. Not my daughter Tammy, thank God, who was (just barely) a teenager.

She wasn’t the missing girl I’d been hired to fly to New Orleans to find, either.