Kiss of Noir by Clara Nipper Page B

what are y’all gonna eat?” Payne asked.
    “Chicken,” Cleo said. Drew shrugged his assent.
    “Chicken for three, then.” Payne stood and towered over me. “Nothing for the hero?” she said. I glanced up, my eyes narrowed. The men watched us.
    “You got a problem with me?” I asked. Johnny shook his head at Payne, who glowered at him.
    “Let’s keep it friendly, y’all,” Cleo rasped gently.
    Payne said, “Cleo is right.” Everyone relaxed. “But I know that woman and she’s a worthless waste of skin. She—”
    I stood, savoring my height. My muscles were tense. “Rather like yourself?”
    Chairs scooted as the men cleared the area, going to stand by Cleo behind the counter. Cleo dropped his pen and walked to us. Payne and I were glaring at each other.
    “Come on now.” Cleo gripped our necks. “Snap out of it. No one has anything to prove here. If y’all can’t find a way to be civil and easy, I’ve gotta ban Payne from the store. I can’t ban Nora, so that’s how it is. Be bigger than that.” Cleo let go and walked back to the counter.
    Payne grinned and slapped my shoulder. “Hey, sorry. Let’s start over.”
    “Sure, it ain’t no thing.” I slugged Payne on the arm.
    “You did a good deed,” Payne said.
    “Thanks.”
    “It was a mistake,” Cleo said, sitting at the table.
    “What?” I felt punched in the stomach. Drew pulled up a chair and Johnny sat cross-legged on the speaker.
    “We ain’t a charity,” Cleo explained. “Now maybe word will get around. Can’t be doing that. Everyone who comes in is a hard-luck case. Maybe they all deserve a break, but this is a business. And they understand that when they come in. Now, maybe the husband hears about this and comes after us with a shotgun. Or maybe just you.”
    “My man is right on,” Drew said, his eyes shining as he looked at Cleo.
    “We can’t afford to for lots of reasons,” Cleo continued. “And I know you can’t afford to. So don’t play that.”
    “Ha,” Payne whispered.
    I threw up my hands. “I can’t afford not to! Are you all crazy? Did you see her?”
    “Are you gonna save all of them?” Cleo asked. There was a hushed pause.
    “No, maybe just one,” I replied.
    “All right then,” Cleo said. “What’s done is done. Let’s play. Why don’t you two both go for lunch?”
    Payne and I stared at each other. Steel met steel.
    “What the hell,” I said.
    “I’ll drive,” Payne said.

Chapter Twelve
     
    In Payne’s SUV, I watched the scenery pass. Louisiana was flat and marshy, as if the whole state were hanging by a thread, ready to snap off and plunge to the ocean floor. The humidity was like Oklahoma—you needed to grow gills to breathe and somewhere on my body was always sweating. The insects had already taken over Louisiana as if it were a corpse they were eager to clean. Everything came bigger—ants the size of grapes, slugs as big as snakes, mosquitoes like little anti-human aircraft, and the cockroaches! I shuddered as I remembered Ellis’s stories about them. Armored tanks they were, and big enough to be considered meat. And they flew . But Louisiana was also viciously green. As fecund and fertile as the valley Nile. There were oak and cypress trees with ladles of Spanish moss dripping from them, but there were also poisonous things twirling seductively around anything they could climb. And I had heard the jokes about the kudzu growing so fast that it twined around your ankles and choked off your screams as you tried to outrun it. I tried not to believe these stories. What did I know of the South? Everything in Louisiana was perpetually springing into bloom and exploding outward and upward, and the dark, dank swamps seemed like primordial soup from which life itself oozed. Anywhere there was a speck of dust, there was a seed on it bursting into life. And Bayou La Belle D’eau was mostly coastline, so to get anywhere, I had to drive past the swamps, thick with gnarled and twisted