19 Headed for Trouble Read Free Page A

show,
Shadowland
, and he and Jules decide it’s time to make some changes in their lives.

W HEN F RANK M ET R OSIE
November 25, 1999
New Orleans, Louisiana
    The music made him stop and turn around.
    It was just a solo voice—a man singing the richest, bluesiest version of
Silent Night
that Frank O’Leary had ever heard. It drew him closer when he should have headed away from the French Quarter and back toward his hotel.
    Where his damn fool of a half brother was no doubt still holding court in the lobby bar. Lord Jesus save him from imbeciles. Of course, he himself could be included in that subset, considering he’d agreed to come to New Orleans for the holiday.
    It was their mother who’d been the glue that kept them connected, Frank and Casey. Her constant smile and teasing words lightened the years of bad feelings between brothers who’d been born more than a decade apart. Now, though, they had less than nothing in common.
    And yet Frank had come all the way from California on one of the busiest travel days of the year at Casey’s request.
    Because he’d thought his mother would’ve wanted him to. Because she’d valued her precious family—her two such different sons—so highly.
    Despite being just a few blocks down from the whorehouse-on-heavy-stun dementia of past-midnightBourbon Street, this narrow road was deserted. A right turn revealed a street just as empty of tourists, but it definitely brought him closer to that angelic voice. Not like Frank was in any danger from the flesh-and-blood demons who crept out of the rotting woodwork of this city at night, no sir.
    With his thrice-broken nose, his hair grown out from his usual no-frills tight and square cut, and his PT-hardened body, he knew he looked like the type most folks crossed the street to avoid.
    He looked—as Casey had so often scornfully told him throughout his teenage years—as if he had barely a dime in his jeans pocket. Like a drifter. Like lowlife loser scum. Like his father, who’d cleaned out their mother’s bank account when he’d left, back when Frank was nine and Casey was twenty.
    The joke was that Casey had asked Frank to today’s Thanksgiving dinner to borrow money. He’d lost nearly everything in bad investments. And since he knew that Frank still had his share from the recent sale of their mother’s house …
    And here Frank had thought Casey wanted his company during this difficult holiday season, the first since their mother had passed.
    Happy fucking Thanksgiving to you, too, bro. Yeah, the real joke here was that Frank had left his true brothers behind in San Diego. His SEAL teammate Sam Starrett was hosting a dinner in the apartment he shared with Johnny Nilsson. He’d even roasted a turkey. Nils and the Card were in charge of the vegetables. Jenkins was handling dessert. Everyone else brought beer.
    Instead of settling in for a day of food, friends, and football, Frank had shared a grim meal with Casey and his current wife (was Loreen number three or four?) up in their hotel suite. He’d escaped as quickly as possible after letting Casey know he’d already earmarked theirmama’s money—all of it—for something special. A down payment on a condo or maybe even a boat.
    Still, it didn’t take Casey long to join him in the bar. Could Frank maybe cosign a loan? Or let him borrow just a bit off that down payment …?
No, no, no, don’t answer right away, bro. Just think about it …
    Fifteen minutes of listening to his brother regaling the waitresses with tales of his own magnificence was all he could endure, and Frank escaped from the hotel bar as well.
    But wandering Bourbon Street had been mildly amusing for only a very short time. Preservation Hall was already closed up tight and silent, and the bands playing in the various bars were entertaining only to inebriated ears. Watching grown men acting like frat boys drinking in the street and gazing with calf eyes at the teenage whores was flat-out creepy. And