The Map of Moments (33 page)

“It's a hard lesson to learn,” Max said. “But it means a lot. I won't forget.”

“See you don't,” Artie said.

As Beth reappeared, so did Artie's smile. She delivered their Coronas, then went behind the bar and returned with a blue T-shirt and a pale red sweatshirt, both neatly folded, and promised to be right back. Hurrying away, she vanished into the kitchen.

Good as her word, she came back less than a minute later with two dishes for the guys at the next booth, then whipped out her order pad and stood with her pencil poised.

“Okay, shoot.”

“Crab cakes and dirty rice,” Artie said.

Max pointed at him. “Times two.”

“You boys make it easy,” Beth said, gliding away again.

Max sat back, sinking into the cushioned seat of the booth, and tipped back the bottle of Corona. No one had asked if he wanted a glass, but he didn't mind at all. The bottle was cold and the beer quenched his thirst.

Artie took a couple of pulls from his own beer. Max leaned forward and clinked the bottles together.

“Thank you, Artie. Samaritan in a pickup truck.”

Behind his beard, Artie's grin made him look like Santa. “I am my brother's keeper.”

Max took another sip, then slid out of the booth. “And now it's my turn to disappear.”

He took the T-shirt and sweatshirt off the table and headed for the bathroom. The fluorescent lights within were grimly unforgiving, giving the tiled room the feel of a morgue. Max tried to avoid looking too closely at the floor, which felt sticky underfoot. Walking through the woods
he'd gotten his feet muddy and scratched, and the instep of his left foot had a little slice in it. But he was more worried about it getting infected standing on the bathroom floor than from anything he'd stepped in outside in the woods. Dirty was one thing, but filthy was another entirely.

Balancing first on one foot and then the other, Max washed his feet in the sink, grateful that no one came in during the operation. He stripped off his shirt and threw it in the trash, washed his face delicately around the cut, and then put on the soft, dry T-shirt and sweatshirt, admiring their identical Mattie's Crab Shack logos.

Hating the way his underpants chafed and clung, he was tempted to go into a stall and strip them off, leaving just his stiff but drying jeans. But that would have meant walking barefoot into the stall. Treading on twelve brands of piss did not appeal to him, and he decided to live with the discomfort.

His stomach rumbled again and he realized how ravenous he was. The rest of his beer was calling to him, too, so he ran fingers through his hair and went out the door, returning to his booth.

By the time he got there, Artie had started on his second beer. On the floor just beside Max's seat were a pair of grimy, grease-and-paint-spotted men's work boots with frayed laces and deeper creases than his grandfather's forehead.

Max stared stupidly down at the boots. “I don't get it. The shoe fairy came by?”

“Drink your beer,” Artie said.

Max slid into the booth. “So?”

“Beth told the guys in the kitchen about the poor S.O.B. who lost his shoes. I guess the fry cook's some kinda snappy dresser, keeps these in back for when he works and changes into street shoes when he goes home.”

“So he was just wearing them?”

Artie tipped back his beer. Max noticed a lime floating in the bottle and envied him.

“You gonna get picky now, man with no shoes? Only, the cook ain't as sweet as Beth. He's takin’ advantage of the situation.”

“How's that?” Max asked.

Artie smiled. “He wants fifty bucks for the boots.”

Max laughed. “You've gotta be shitting me.”

But Artie wasn't. Max sighed, ran a hand over his face, and then looked down at the boots. He swung sideways in the booth and lined one up next to his right foot. They were going to be a couple of sizes too large, but at least he couldn't smell them from three feet up.

He pushed his bare feet in, upper lip curling at the touch of damp leather and rubber. The cook had sweaty feet.

“Too bad the sock fairy couldn't have dropped by, too.”

“I recommend you keep drinking. Good advice on the best and worst of days.”

Max took that advice and tipped back his beer, trying not to think about his feet, the sweaty cook, or the tight hunger in his stomach.

When he put the bottle down, he noticed the condensation ring that had appeared on the paper place mat. The mat had that familiar happy crab logo and a picture of what the place must look like in the daytime, plus the history of

Mattie's All-Night Crab Shack. But his focus was on that damp circle. Up in Maine, he'd been to plenty of dives where the place mats had maps of the local area on them, maybe with little box advertisements around the perimeter.

Too bad they don't use those sort here,
he thought.

Then he frowned, staring at the circle. He pressed the bottle partway down, making a semi-circle that looked roughly similar to the arc the Mississippi made as it snaked past the French Quarter. He could picture it in his mind. In fact, staring at that paper, he came to realize that he'd looked at the city map so often in the past few days that he could picture the basic outline of New Orleans in his head; the main thoroughfares, the river, the parks, the neighborhoods. Not many individual streets, but a general sketch.

“What's the matter with you, Max?”

As he glanced up at Artie, Beth arrived with their crab cakes. The smell practically had him salivating, but he needed to keep his mind clear another minute.

“Thanks for all your help,” he told the waitress. “Can I put an extra fifty on my credit card for the cook? Call it a tip, for the boots.”

“That'd be fine, darlin’.”

Artie dug in the second his plate hit the table.

“Do you have a pen I could borrow?” Max asked.

Beth pulled one from her apron and laid it on the table. “Anything else I can get you boys?”

Max didn't even reply. He slid his plate aside, turned over the place mat, and stared at the drying marks from his beer bottle, trying to keep the map image in his mind. He started to sketch with the pen, marring the plain white
paper, drawing in the turn of the Mississippi, the spokes of Esplanade and Canal and other streets that jutted off from it, the rough shapes of Treme and the Quarter, Gentilly and the Garden District, and half a dozen others.

Artie and Beth only watched, and in their silence Max became aware that he wasn't really the one creating the map on the back of that place mat. It had started out that way, with an image in his mind, but the details were too fine, the distances too exact, to ever have been drawn by him. He could barely draw stick figures in correct proportion, and would have made a shitty cartographer.

Max wasn't drawing. The map was in him, whenever he wanted it. Whenever he
needed
it. Like now.

“I guess we've got everything we need,” Ar tie said, more than a little mystified.

Max looked up in time to see Beth giving Artie a peculiar look, a stay-away-from-this-flake sort of look, then she headed back toward the kitchen.

But he only let his gaze wander from the map for a few seconds, and then his right hand moved again, adding detail, and moving out toward the limits of what he now understood was Tordu territory.

At last he took a breath.

“Max,” Artie said. And then again, “Max.”

“Huh? Yeah, sorry. Just a little carried away. It's …kind of a hobby of mine.”

Artie's smile had the same quality as that look Beth had given him. “Okay. But aren't you hungry, man? You don't want those crab cakes, they're callin’ to me.”

“No, no, I'm starved. But get more if you like.”

Artie shrugged. “I'm good. Maybe another beer, though.”

Max's attention returned to the map. He couldn't have looked away now if he tried, not while the small box gradually appeared with an arrow pointing to an intersection in Gentilly.

“The Hollow Man?” Max whispered to himself, trying to interpret the riddle.

“What's that?” Artie asked.

Idly, Max cut into a crab cake with his fork and started to eat. Chewing, he pointed with his fork at the map.

“Do you know this part of New Orleans?” Max asked. “Could you figure out where this was, even without the street names?”

Artie reached out and turned the small map toward him. He shook his head in amazement. “Pretty damn good work for a hobby, son. Might not be able to find the right corner, but in the ballpark for sure, if the map's accurate.”

“It is,” Max said. He knew it was. The details hadn't come from him; they'd been given
to
him by old Ray and that stone bottle drink. He looked over at Artie. “Any way I can persuade you to run me back into the city? Dinner and drinks are already on me, but I'll get cash from a money machine if you can find one.”

Artie frowned. “It ain't like that, son. I told you. We're all in it together. Course, gas isn't cheap, and I've always wanted one of them Maggie's Crab Shack T-shirts.”

“Take your pick,” Max said. “On me. Only one condition, though.”

Artie didn't seem to like the idea of conditions. “What's that?”

“This time, I get to ride up front.”

The wards would have been placed where they could be hidden, and where they would have the most power. The one on the river beside that old fort seemed to have been chosen because it put up a barrier on the narrow strip of land that ran between Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf. Maybe the water made a natural boundary, but after what had happened to Lamar, Max doubted that.

And so, as Artie's rusty Ford pickup rolled along Chef Menteur Highway back toward New Orleans, Max could not pinpoint the exact moment when he passed back into the realm of Mireault's dark influence. Several times he shivered a little. And once he slid lower in the seat, wondering if the Tordu would be watching for him.

That seemed unlikely. Anyone with half a brain would have been heading back to Boston by now, and since the last glimpse the Tordu had of Max had been of him rabbiting into the woods, Coco probably thought they'd seen the last of him. So no, they probably weren't expecting him to return.

But maybe they'll
feel
me,
he thought, studying the shadows beneath the trees along the side of the road. That seemed plausible enough to give him the shivers. They had managed to find him several times in the city. Some of those occasions could be explained away as whispers, nervous phone calls from frightened people who'd heard him asking around about Coco. But a couple of times it had certainly felt as though they were tracking him, could sense him. Once, that would have seemed far-fetched, but not now.

From the moment he had jumped into the truck with Artie and started back, the clock had been ticking.

“You're awful quiet,” Artie said.

Max glanced at him, teeth rattling as the Ford juddered along the road on long-dead shock absorbers. “Contemplating the glories of Mattie's crab cakes.”

Artie didn't smile. “You don't want to talk about it, okay. But I been real good about not askin’ questions, and now I'm gonna dump you off in the middle of a neighborhood that's still halfway abandoned since Katrina came knockin’. So you can't blame me for wonderin’.”

“I don't blame you.”

“That's good. But you're still too quiet. Maybe you need some help, Max. I'm not necessarily offerin’. I'd have to hear what kind of trouble you're in before I decided it's worth putting my own ass on the line. But…”

Max looked out through the windshield and saw the edges of the city ahead, dark silhouettes of buildings, some of them illuminated but others just silent shadows.

For the first time, it occurred to him that he'd put Artie
in danger, that he could get his Good Samaritan killed, and he didn't like that idea one bit.

“I used to live here,” Max said, surprising himself by speaking. “I came back to New Orleans for the funeral of an old girlfriend.”

Artie's eyes narrowed and he gave a slow nod. It wasn't sympathy so much as empathy. This made sense to him.

“I ran into some trouble with another guy she used to see.”

“There you go.” Artie smiled. “And where I'm dumpin’ you? You gonna need any help?”

Max didn't hesitate. “I'll be all right. I appreciate it. I mean, you don't know me from Adam and here you're coming to my rescue—”

“Hey, I got beers and some damn fine crab cakes out of it.”

The smile this brought to Max's face was entirely genuine. “And a T-shirt, don't forget that.” The Mattie's Crab Shack shirt he'd bought for Artie lay folded up in the tight space behind the driver's seat. “Seriously, I'm good. I just need to take care of some unfinished business and then I'm putting the Big Easy behind me.”

Artie sniffed. “The Big Easy. I got a feelin’ nobody's gonna be callin’ it that anymore.”

They fell quiet again. Max watched as the outskirts of New Orleans evolved into neighborhoods of houses and bars, restaurants and stores. A fish market on one corner remained open, despite the lateness of the hour. A man in baggy shorts and a pink, hooded jacket more suited to a teenaged girl leaned against the metal grated windows at the front of a liquor store.