Voodoo Heart by Scott Snyder Page B

the table and then got up and headed toward the door. She was even taller than I’d thought, over six feet.
    When she approached our booth, Gay said, “That’s a lovely bag, miss.”
    She glanced at him but kept walking.
    “I’d love to hear you sing sometime,” Gay called after her.
    Once she was gone, Gay shifted his gaze to me. “Why didn’t you help me, L.J.?”
    “I didn’t hear you. I was thinking about Nancy.”
    “You should have turned me around,” said Gay. “She’s obviously in need of some kind of help.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said, ashamed and eager for the incident to be over.
    Gay sighed. “That’s all right, L.J.,” he said. But there was a sadness in his voice, a tiredness. He asked me to help him into his chair, which I did.
    “Now, where were we?” he said as I unlocked the brake.
    I tried to remember what I’d just told him about Nancy. My mind scrambled to come up with something, but I couldn’t bring myself to say one more word about her.
    I glanced at Gay. He was watching me, his gaze sympathetic but also strangely appraising, almost judicious. I had the sinking feeling that this would be my last chance to tell him the truth about my family. I reached into my shirt, but just as my fingers closed around the earrings, the sun came out from behind a cloud and light poured in through the window, bringing Gay’s face into harsh relief—the pits, the knots and whorls of scar tissue—and my fears returned. The earrings felt warm in my fingers. I had them pinched all the way up at my shirt collar, dangling right there at the base of my neck. “I have an idea,” I said. “Let’s go up to the overpass and have a drink.”
    Gay sucked air through his teeth. “I wish I could, L.J., but I should get some rest soon. I have time to talk a bit, though. Were you about to say something?”
    “You’re heading to bed? It’s only six o’clock.”
    “What I meant was that I have to practice my speaking a little, in my room. I should lecture the mirror for a bit. Unless there’s something else you want to tell me about?”
    I was still holding the earrings. “No. I was all done.”
    As we left the restaurant I took the earrings from around my neck and slipped them into the pouch on the side of his wheelchair. I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish. Maybe I thought he would find them and it would force the issue. Maybe I wanted to give him something, a gift to keep him my friend. “Gay, listen,” I said, but he was already pulling away from me and heading toward the elevators.
    After he’d gone up to his room, I sat alone in the lobby for a long while. I watched people check in, check out. I know I might have made it seem that only strange people lived in this area of Florida, but it wasn’t so. There were plenty of plain men and women, children too, living and visiting. But detectives are very plain people, the plainest of all. You might imagine them hunching around in rumpled trench coats, their faces always surfacing through cigarette smoke, but they are dull almost to being invisible. They look like your mother with no makeup, or your uncle.

    Gay started spending less and less time in and near Orlando; he left to speak at places farther away, in Velusia or Delans, and he wouldn’t come back for days at a time. More and more often, I’d return from the Home Wrecker and find his room locked, find it dark. My fear was that I’d return one afternoon and see it being vacuumed out, or even worse, rented to someone new. One evening, as I drove toward the Shores, I spied Gay up on the overpass with that girl, the one from the a capella troupe. He was beaming at her from his chair, smiling as widely as I’d ever seen him smile. I pulled to the side of the road and watched. Even from far away I could hear her singing. Her voice sounded beautiful and deep; so deep in fact that it seemed more like a low vibration than an actual voice, the kind of voice that moves beneath the other voices