19 Headed for Trouble Read Free Page B

then there was that old woman—probably just an actress wrapped in rags and wearing stage-makeup warts—who’d first enticed Frank closer, offering to read his palm, and then, after only one brief look, had bluntly refused.
    She’d shaken her head at him, backing away in alarm.
    Which didn’t mean a goddamn thing.
    Like anyone with eyes in their head and a lick of sense couldn’t tell from looking at him that he lived a dangerous life …?
    Frank glanced at his watch. If he knew Sam Starrett, the meal would have long since been replaced by a deck of cards and a pile of poker chips. There’d be plenty more beer, lots of laughter, and music on the boom box—although nothing that could compare to this solo voice, the owner of which still eluded him.
    Silent Night
segued into an
Ave Maria
as sung by an angel who’d done his share of hard time on this earth.
    Frank rounded the corner, and there the street singerstood. He was a wiry black man in his late fifties, although, on second glance, he might’ve been younger. Hard living could’ve given him that antique veneer a decade or two early. He was standing in a storefront, the windows creating a makeshift acoustical shell that amplified his magical, youthful voice.
    Only a few people had gathered to listen to him sing. A group of older folks—three sets of couples, clearly tourists, laden with Mardi Gras beads—used their cameras to snap his picture. A bedraggled young woman stood slightly apart from them, in a sequin top and a tight-fitting black skirt, looking like sex for sale.
    The singer’s voice faltered, and Frank slowed his steps, shortening his stride as the eight of them turned almost at once to look at him. They shrank away as if they all were fortune-tellers and knew that an anvil was on the verge of falling on top of him, out of the clear blue sky.
    Cloudy sky, actually. It was definitely going to rain again tonight.
    And not all of them shrank from him. The girl—she didn’t look more than seventeen—didn’t seem too afraid. Probably because she hadn’t yet met her pimp’s quota for the night, and saw him as a potential john.
    She had to be relatively new to the city, new at her distasteful job. She was still pretty, with long, dark hair and deep brown eyes. Her skin hadn’t yet acquired that unmistakable gray pallor caused by substance abuse and nocturnal living. She gave her top a hike northward as she met his gaze and smiled a greeting.
    The Red Hat Club and their spouses weren’t quite as friendly. They quickly scurried off down the street.
    “Sorry, man,” Frank told the singer, taking out his wallet and extracting a twenty. “Didn’t mean to chase ’em away.”
    He dropped the bill in the cardboard shoebox beingused in lieu of a hat. The man clearly couldn’t afford headwear, dressed as he was in Salvation Army castoffs, T-shirt dirty and torn, feet shoved into sneakers with the toes cut away.
    “S’okay,” the singer said, still eyeing him warily. “They were twenty-five-centers. It’s been that kind of night. Aside from your twenty, I ain’t got mor’n a buck seventy-five.”
    Did he really think …? “I ain’t gon’ rob you, man,” Frank said, slipping easily into the molasses-thick accent of his childhood.
    The singer nodded, but didn’t seem convinced. “If you did, you wouldn’t be the first. Like I said, it’s been that kind of night.”
    “You take requests?” Frank asked.
    “For twenty bucks?” The man’s lips twisted in what might’ve passed for a smile. “Son, I’ll perform unnatural acts.”
    Jesus, he wasn’t kidding.
“Amazing Grace,”
Frank said, “is what I’m hoping for.”
    The singer’s eyes were dark with understanding as he looked up from his crouch beside his box. His hands were shaking as he slipped the twenty beneath the newspaper that lined the bottom of his container, and Frank knew the man wasn’t going to spend that cash on either food or shelter, and wasn’t that a crying