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Authors: Timothy C. Phillips
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onto him.”
“Well, good riddance, I say. We’re getting nowhere so far, and all we need is some lunatic shadowing us, to boot.”
“There’s no sign of him now. This has been a strange day, for sure.”
Tiller shook his head. “I guess I’m going back to the hotel. You coming?”
I shook my head. “I think I’ll walk around a bit. I need to think over today’s developments.”
“Watch out for the crazy in the powder blue suit.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”
I wandered through the narrow streets, and everywhere I saw signs of a city on the mend—streets that had been recently resurfaced, new construction and renovation, scaffolding, fresh coats of paint. New Orleans would rise again. Something about the signs of recovery filled me with hope—as much hope as a man can have in a country where killers like Samson Fain roamed free.
I thought about some things that I didn’t feel comfortable talking to Tiller about, things that smacked of the Unexplained, the Supernatural, things that I knew Tiller would scoff at. I wasn’t really sure how I felt about such things myself, although I had wondered about them ever since I had seen Georgia Champion in the desert of Arizona. “Thought that I had seen her” might be a better way to put it. Even now, I couldn’t be certain. Surely Georgia Champion had been long dead by the time she had appeared to me out there.
The girl’s faint voice on the phone had carried me back to a very dark time and place, when I was in the back of Samson Fain’s murder van, bound and bleeding, going in and out of consciousness because of a head wound.
When I had seen Georgia Champion—if in fact I had seen her—she was not the nine-year-old who had disappeared from her birthday party four years previously; she was the thirteen-year-old that she should have been by that time. I didn’t think that I believed in ghosts, necessarily, but the idea that something inherently good in the universe existed, that there was an indelible right and wrong, that perhaps somehow something of us did survive death—that Stygian river that snaked between the world of the living and the land of the dead—and that something better lay on that other shore beyond the grave, those were comforting notions that I could not altogether discard, after that apparition in the desert.
The alternative explanation, which was that Georgia Champion was still living, simply couldn’t be true. The Arizona police had thoroughly searched the grounds of Samson Fain’s hideaways, and turned up no trace of her. They had assigned an explanation to my vision: delirium and exhaustion, brought on by a head wound I had received in my fight with Samson Fain. It was a conclusion that I had finally accepted. Georgia Champion was dead, and the whereabouts of her body still unknown.
I heard music vibrating through the night air. It emanated from a low brick building that was apparently some kind of club. As I drew closer, I could make out a clarinet, high and reedy and cultured; a tenor sax, at one moment purring with deep sensuality, the next shrieking nightmarishly; a piano emoting with quiet, stately dignity; and a bass thumping a steady mysterious rhythm, holding the whole thing together.
A jazz quartet within those four walls was ripping into Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” with passion and verve. True to the spirit of Jazz, while one of the musicians would anchor the music to its basic structure and melody, the others would explore the piece in endless variations, walking off down various musical alleys that took shape even as they played, an infinity of musical ideas presenting themselves, the song unfolding, blossoming the way Jazz was meant to be played. With the right musicians, Jazz plays itself.
I stood and listened, enraptured, and when the song began to fade, I wandered out of the touristy district of the French Quarter and found myself on a quiet avenue. I
“Well, good riddance, I say. We’re getting nowhere so far, and all we need is some lunatic shadowing us, to boot.”
“There’s no sign of him now. This has been a strange day, for sure.”
Tiller shook his head. “I guess I’m going back to the hotel. You coming?”
I shook my head. “I think I’ll walk around a bit. I need to think over today’s developments.”
“Watch out for the crazy in the powder blue suit.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”
I wandered through the narrow streets, and everywhere I saw signs of a city on the mend—streets that had been recently resurfaced, new construction and renovation, scaffolding, fresh coats of paint. New Orleans would rise again. Something about the signs of recovery filled me with hope—as much hope as a man can have in a country where killers like Samson Fain roamed free.
I thought about some things that I didn’t feel comfortable talking to Tiller about, things that smacked of the Unexplained, the Supernatural, things that I knew Tiller would scoff at. I wasn’t really sure how I felt about such things myself, although I had wondered about them ever since I had seen Georgia Champion in the desert of Arizona. “Thought that I had seen her” might be a better way to put it. Even now, I couldn’t be certain. Surely Georgia Champion had been long dead by the time she had appeared to me out there.
The girl’s faint voice on the phone had carried me back to a very dark time and place, when I was in the back of Samson Fain’s murder van, bound and bleeding, going in and out of consciousness because of a head wound.
When I had seen Georgia Champion—if in fact I had seen her—she was not the nine-year-old who had disappeared from her birthday party four years previously; she was the thirteen-year-old that she should have been by that time. I didn’t think that I believed in ghosts, necessarily, but the idea that something inherently good in the universe existed, that there was an indelible right and wrong, that perhaps somehow something of us did survive death—that Stygian river that snaked between the world of the living and the land of the dead—and that something better lay on that other shore beyond the grave, those were comforting notions that I could not altogether discard, after that apparition in the desert.
The alternative explanation, which was that Georgia Champion was still living, simply couldn’t be true. The Arizona police had thoroughly searched the grounds of Samson Fain’s hideaways, and turned up no trace of her. They had assigned an explanation to my vision: delirium and exhaustion, brought on by a head wound I had received in my fight with Samson Fain. It was a conclusion that I had finally accepted. Georgia Champion was dead, and the whereabouts of her body still unknown.
I heard music vibrating through the night air. It emanated from a low brick building that was apparently some kind of club. As I drew closer, I could make out a clarinet, high and reedy and cultured; a tenor sax, at one moment purring with deep sensuality, the next shrieking nightmarishly; a piano emoting with quiet, stately dignity; and a bass thumping a steady mysterious rhythm, holding the whole thing together.
A jazz quartet within those four walls was ripping into Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” with passion and verve. True to the spirit of Jazz, while one of the musicians would anchor the music to its basic structure and melody, the others would explore the piece in endless variations, walking off down various musical alleys that took shape even as they played, an infinity of musical ideas presenting themselves, the song unfolding, blossoming the way Jazz was meant to be played. With the right musicians, Jazz plays itself.
I stood and listened, enraptured, and when the song began to fade, I wandered out of the touristy district of the French Quarter and found myself on a quiet avenue. I
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