Blues Highway Blues (A Crossroads Thriller Book 1) Read online

  “Tina.” The old man closed his eyes. The name obviously brought back a memory or two he wanted to savor for a second. “Man, that ol’ girl could fix whatever ailed ya’.”

  “And the ‘tipi’ part?”

  “Ol’ Tina sold the meanest reefer in the whole damn city.” Mr. Atibon laughed to himself, like he knew that to be the God’s honest truth. “One day she’s done gone into town just as high as she could get, bumbling and stumbling along. And goddamn if a streetcar don’t run over both her feet. Slices ’em both clean off like they was a roasted beef on the cutting board at Mother’s.” He shook his head with disbelief.

  If there was a connection between story and song, it had eluded Daniel. “And…”

  “You really gotta learn to listen, son.” Mr. Atibon adjusted his porkpie hat and rolled his eyes to the starry sky above. “Girl had no damn feet. Weren’t ya’ payin’ attention to that part? No feet. From then on in, she had to go tippy-toeing all over town.” He paused for effect. “Tippy-Tina.”

  Daniel had grown jaded. “Is that true?”

  “If it ain’t, it oughta be.” The old man snorted, too pleased with himself.

  Before Daniel could ask him any more about it, Mr. Atibon turned his attention to the sign on the side of the building’s façade. “Why the hell there a banana up there? You ain’t dragged me to one of those—”

  “No, no,” Daniel laughed dismissively. “When the place opened they used to have a juice bar.” It wasn’t the long-lost origin of one of New Orleans’s most treasured musical classics, but Daniel was proud of his own bit of trivia he’d just found in a Wikipedia search.

  Mr. Atibon looked up, entirely unimpressed. “Well, the last time I was here this place weren’t no juice bar.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “No, sir.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “Son, I’ve been everywhere before.” He nodded up at the building with his whisker-covered chin. “This here was a juke house in the day.”

  “A jukebox?” Daniel tried to clarify.

  “Juke house,” the old man corrected. “A place to get a little jelly roll.”

  “Like Jelly Roll Morton?” Daniel wondered.

  “That’s what he woulda had you believe.” Mr. Atibon laughed to himself, without any intent to share the joke. “Now, we goin’ into your lil’ fruity factory here or not?”

  As they approached the bar’s front door, they noticed there was a young man on a folding chair with a guitar in his lap and an open case at his feet off to the side.

  “See that,” Mr. Atibon said, pointing to the busker. “That’s how it oughta be. That’s Today music.”

  Daniel didn’t recognize the tune as anything currently making its way up the charts. “I never heard of—”

  “Tooooo-daaaay music,” the old man repeated more emphatically. “Music just being played for the here and now. That’s how it used to be. You think any those ol’ boys left a life of sharecroppin’ and their momma’s supper table to head out on the open road with a guitar slung ’cross their back thinkin’ ’bout anything more than today?” Mr. Atibon flashed a fiery look that dared Daniel to answer.

  He didn’t.

  “Hell, no!” the old man continued. “Ain’t no future in bein’ a bluesman. Today is all a real bluesman ever has. It’s all he’ll ever have. They didn’t pick up a guitar thinkin’ they’d get rich. And none of ’em did. Po-lice’d bust ’em ’cause they was easy to pin with what blame needed takin’. Juke joint owners’d cheat ’em. Women’d roll ’em. Shit, none of ’em had nuthin’. No expectations. So every time they set down to play, they went at it like there weren’t no tomorrow—because there weren’t. Just today.”

  The old man folded his arms against his chest. “These folks nowadays ain’t playin’ for Today. They all playin’ for Someday: ‘Someday I’m gonna get me a big car.’ ‘Someday I’m gonna get me a big house.’ They thinkin’ ’bout Someday when they playin’ and that’s what strips the soul right out of it.”

  Daniel had never thought that way, but he couldn’t disagree. And he felt a little twinge of guilt about all the Someday music he’d created over the years, like so much litter he scattered along life’s highway.

  “But you listen to this boy.” Mr. Atibon held out his hand like he was offering the young man as a gift.

  The player was in his early twenties, half as old as the road-worn Epiphone acoustic on his lap. He closed his eyes as he sang in a voice that still held the purity of youth but had gained a smoky edge that more than hinted at heartache and lost innocence.

  No woman leaves you all at once

  No, they leave you by degrees

  And if you want to keep yours, son

  You better listen up to me

  “See, what I tell you?” Mr. Atibon boasted, as if he’d had anything to do with the performance.

  The busker accompanied himself in seventh chords, slowly dragging his right thumb across the guitar strings. It was all much smoother than the combustible good-time tunes Daniel thought of as typifying the New Orleans style.

  Now the first time that she leaves you

  It might seem like nothing at all

  Just a harsh word that you gave her

  Or a late night, you didn’t call

  Second time that she leaves you

  Is the first time that she cries

  Third time’s when she looks at you

  Without that love light in her eyes

  You know she’s going

  Gonna set herself free

  She’s leaving

  By degrees

  Mr. Atibon elbowed Daniel. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Daniel nodded, but he felt like he’d been gut-punched.

  Next time that she leaves you

  She cries herself to sleep

  She pretends she still loves you

  But she knows it ain’t as deep

  Then comes the end

  One fateful day

  Some stranger looks in her eyes

  And she don’t look away

  You know she’s going

  Gonna set herself free

  She’s leaving

  By degrees

  Daniel stood, his arms folded across his chest, and let the music wash over him like a baptismal font. There were no A&R guys. No corporate types who read balance sheets, not sheet music. No one at all like the man he used to be, no scammers or hustlers. No overdubs or Auto-Tune. There was just a man and his guitar, making music together for no other reason than there was a song stuck inside and it wanted out. It was Today music.

  And then comes the times

  She goes out for the night

  She’s just about gone

  When she won’t even fight

  The last time she leaves you

  She’s immune to your charms

  She won’t heed your begging

  She runs straight into his arms

  And she won’t come back

  To see me no more

  She won’t ever come back

  926 East McLemore

  You know she’s gone

  Gone and set herself free

  She’s left you

  Left you by degrees

  Daniel reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a wad of bills he’d accumulated over the course of his trip. He’d been too frazzled or distracted to take the time to smooth and sort them out. Without knowing its worth—and without hesitation—he tossed it all into the open case. The best money he’d spent in a long, long time.

  “Come on,” he told his friend. “We gotta go.”

  “Doncha’ wanna hear him play?”

  “I do. But I have to get that money.” Daniel thought he detected a glint of mercenary expectation in the old man’s ebony eyes and he felt the need to extinguish it quickly. “For my son,” he said with emphasis.

  “’Course,” the old man agreed. “For your boy.”

  They turned away, but behind them the busker kept
up his show—with no other audience but the sky above.

  Leaving by degrees

  Leaving by degrees

  And she won’t come back

  To see me no more

  She won’t ever come back

  Daniel opened the club’s door and they both stepped inside.

  Though it wasn’t yet midnight—still early by New Orleans’s standard time—the main room was already packed with the usual assortment of tourists on Mission: Inebriated, and a healthy cross section of locals, from NOLA’s stylized nonconformists to those still-clinging-to-the-whole-preppy-thing LSU alums out for a night.

  Up on the main stage, a four-piece band was being led through its paces by a hobbit of a guy with a mop of shaggy gray hair and an even shaggier beard. His mumbled vocals and lazy manner made him sound like he wished he was home watching TV. The guitars were a muddied mess of reverb and the drummer was hitting the skins like they were misbehaving kids, but the crowd that enthusiastically bobbed up and down (mostly) in time to the beat seemed to think it was a sufficient soundtrack for a night of mindless drinking.

  Mr. Atibon was unimpressed. “Now what?”

  Daniel didn’t have a clue. “I guess we’ll just know.”

  “This a goddamn waste of time,” the old man groused over the sound the band was trying its best to conjure. It was a soulless cacophony, cynically contrived for a roomful of misguided, middle-aged posers—something like a Jimmy Buffett tribute band trying its hand at Elmore James. Atibon pointed up at the stage toward the leader of the band. “And that damn fool up there looks like a goddamn mud-puppet.”

  Daniel wasn’t sure what he’d heard. “A what?”

  “Mud-puppet,” he repeated. “You know, like the frog and pig on the TV.”

  Daniel shook his head, confused by the reference. “You mean a Muppet?”

  “That’s right. Whenever a fool like this one here tries a hand at the blues, it always ends up soundin’ like what they think the blues should sound like. But you can’t no way think the blues. Hell, you can’t play the blues, ’less you fucked the blues, fought the blues, and lost to the blues. You can’t play the blues till you get so that when you pick up a guitar that’s the only goddamn thing that’ll come out.” He looked back at the band and shook his head with disgust.

  “Ignore the Muppet,” Daniel said, trying to redirect the old man’s attention to the matter at hand. “The clue was about Professor Longhair. This is a club devoted to him. There’s got to be something here. This has to be the ‘altar’ the lyric was talking about.”

  “Well, son, this ain’t no altar. Not to Fess, it ain’t. And even if it was, that song of yours said it was at the entrance.”

  “The entrance!” The tumblers in Daniel’s mind all clicked. “The busker we passed coming in!”

  “He’s a hell of a lot better than this damn Mud-puppet,” Mr. Atibon agreed.

  “No,” Daniel shouted frantically. “He must have been the clue.”

  “Isn’t that what I said?” the old man revised. “You really got to listen, son.”

  Daniel ignored what the old man was saying and began to clear a path through the crowd. “Come on.” He gingerly pressed past frat boys and slid between groups of Bohemian girls. Mr. Atibon followed and together they pushed their way through the swelling crowd and back out of the club.

  The busker was gone.

  “Goddamn it!” Daniel threw his hands up in the air in frustration and let them fall to his hips. “Goddamn it!”

  “I told ya’ we shoulda listened to him,” Mr. Atibon reminded him.

  “You know, this is really not helping right now,” Daniel snapped, so sharply that the seemingly indefatigable Mr. Atibon was momentarily stunned.

  Unsure how to make an apology, Daniel turned from the old man and saw a group of four soon-to-be-partiers approaching down Napoleon. An attractive couple, arm in arm, and two women. One pretty, brunette, and petite. The other beautiful, blonde, and impossibly tall.

  “Excuse me,” Daniel prefaced as he approached. “There was a guy with a guitar playing here.” He gestured toward the spot in the empty shadows beside the door. “Did you pass a guy with a guitar coming down the street?”

  “Dude,” the guy with the shaved head smiled. “This is Nawlins. There’s a guy with a guitar on every street.”

  It was hopeless. Daniel nodded and rubbed his temples, hoping it might stave off the aneurysm he was certain he felt coming. “It’s just that we were supposed to meet this guitar player right here.” He pointed back to the spot. “Right outside the door at Tipitina’s.”

  “Maybe it’s the other Tipitina’s,” the brunette offered.

  A sinking feeling washed over Daniel. “The other—”

  “There’s a Tip’s down in the Quarter,” the beautiful blonde told him, her honey voice spiced with contempt. “Everyone knows that.”

  Daniel didn’t. “There is?”

  Mr. Atibon shook his head mournfully. “King o’ the dummies.”

  A minute later Daniel had directions. He turned to his friend, “You coming?”

  “You the man with the singing treasure map.” Mr. Atibon adjusted his porkpie hat. “Lead on, mi key.”

  For more than three hundred years, New Orleans’s French Quarter has enjoyed a hard-won reputation as the ultimate destination for those wishing to demonstrate a complete lack of self-control. Over any given weekend, the tight colonial streets originally laid out as a military encampment come alive as a single throbbing mass of humanity: one drunken, screaming, flashing, fighting, groping, puking entity that stretches shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder from daiquiri bar to oyster bar, from leather bar to biker bar and back again.

  On Lundi Gras—the last full party night of the annual bacchanal that is Mardi Gras—the Quarter is transformed into something much more depraved. On that particular night, those seventy-eight square blocks become an inter-dimensional portal through space and time to some alternate, thoroughly debauched reality—Disneyland reimagined by Charlie Sheen.

  Although they’d been at it for the better part of an hour, Daniel and Mr. Atibon had managed to move only a block and a half through the sweaty mess. There were more people than there was space for people and so simply walking from one point to another was almost impossible.

  “You can tell everythin’ ’bout a soul by what they think of the Quarter at Mardi Gras,” Mr. Atibon shouted into Daniel’s ear loudly enough to be heard above the deafening rumble of revelry. “It’s either your heaven or your hell. But it ain’t nobody’s purgatory.”

  Buried alive in a living, breathing grave of partiers, Daniel felt too dizzy and nauseated to try to respond. If he could have taken a free breath, he would have answered, “What’s worse than hell?”

  “Y’all right?” the old man yelled, with something approaching genuine concern.

  “I’m fine,” Daniel assured him, though the heat, smell, and impossibly close quarters of the crowd had completely overwhelmed his senses. He couldn’t breathe or hear much more than a high-pitched whine in his ears. All he could do was concentrate on not passing out and falling into the crowd. He kept pushing on like a modern-day Mr. Stanley, cutting a path through a jungle of drunkards, hoping it would lead to his Dr. Livingstone—a kid with a guitar and a very important song.

  And then suddenly, no more than ten yards ahead of them, the solid wall of humanity divided like Moses separating an inebriated Red Sea. At the very point where the crowd broke, an oversized man moved through the masses like an Arctic icebreaker in an Alexander Amosu suit. Behind him, a diminutive demon strutted as proudly as if he were the unstoppable force shoving drunken tourists out of the way.

  Without thought or hesitation, Daniel turned as instinctively as a rabbit with the smell of wet dog suddenly in the air. “Come on.”

  “What’s wrong now?” Mr. Atibon asked, struggling to follow Daniel’s abrupt change in direction.

  “Let’s just go this way,” Daniel shouted.
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  Mr. Atibon turned to follow but looked back over his shoulder. It didn’t take him long to find the reason for their detour. He saw the big man pushing his way through the crowd and realized immediately what was happening: the finger-takers were closing in.

  Between Daniel’s detour and the streets clogged with inebriated revelers, by the time they reached the front door of Tipitina’s French Quarter branch it was well past two in the morning. If there had ever been a busker outside the door—and it seemed doubtful a man could’ve ever played a guitar in the midst of such madness—he was gone now.

  “Goddamn it!” Daniel yelled, though nobody but his friend heard. “We’re too late.”

  Mr. Atibon put an uncharacteristically reassuring hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “Maybe he’s inside.”

  Daniel nodded brightly. “Right.” He moved toward the front door with his hopes momentarily restored. He managed only a step or two before he ran straight into a wall of muscle, four sides of beef in tight, black T-shirts.

  The meanest looking one put his hand on Daniel’s chest and stopped him dead. “We’re closed, Chief.”

  Daniel didn’t resist the manhandling man. He raised his hands as a plea for just a moment in which to plead his case. “I’ve got to get inside—”

  “Not gonna happen,” Meanie assured him. The three other bouncers crossed their bulging arms and glared in solidarity. “Why don’t you take yourself home, Ace.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I’m supposed to meet someone in there,” Daniel continued to protest. What he’d failed to factor into the equation was that guys like that don’t do anything they’re not paid to do and Meanie wasn’t paid to understand. Or care.

  “Well, then you fucking missed him,” Meanie informed him. “You can wait for him over there.” The hand that wasn’t implanted in Daniel’s chest pointed in the general direction of the corner of Iberville and North Peters. “But you ain’t gettin’ in and you ain’t waitin’ here.”

  He couldn’t have come all this way just to be turned away at the door. “I have to get in there!” He couldn’t let the clue slip through his hands. He had to save his son.

  In a moment of paternal desperation, Daniel tried to make an end-run around Meanie. He got about a step, but no farther. He was intercepted almost immediately by Almost As Meanie, who grabbed Daniel and then pushed him back as hard as he could.