Free Murder in the Rue St. Ann by Greg Herren

that day at my gym. At Oz, he was dancing on stage, shirtless, the black hairs on his hard torso slick were with sweat. I went out on the dance floor and we wound up dancing together. He was flying high on Ecstasy, and we ended up going back to my place. He told me he was a flight attendant for Transco Airlines, based out of their hub in Dallas. He’d just taken an apartment in Uptown and was commuting. He paid partial rent on a three bedroom house in one of the Dallas suburbs with five other flight attendants, but he wanted a place of his own to be by himself when he had time off. He’d been seeing a doctor in Dallas, but that was coming to an end.
    We clicked. The sex was phenomenal, and we started seeing each other whenever he was in town. We took a trip to South Beach. We’d decided to stop seeing other people in July, about a month after we’d met, when he transferred to ground crew at Armstrong International. He’d gotten the job with Transco when he was 20, seven years ago—when he’d dropped out of Arizona State. Apart from that, we never really talked a lot about his past, and it was weird I’d never met any of his friends.
    Maybe he’s ashamed of me.
    I sat up straight with a jolt. No, that couldn’t be it.
    Be fair , I said to myself as three young guys in their 20s walked in. They were wearing baseball caps backwards and sleeveless T-shirts. Baggy shorts hung to their knees. You never talk about your past, so why should he talk about his? Only Paige knew about the Ryan disaster in college, and we never talk about it. Paige didn’t even know any details of my pre-LSU life other then I was from a little town in east Texas.
    Then again, I’d never posed butt naked for a camera before. He should have told me about that .
    I’d never told Paul much about my past, mainly because he seemed rather uninterested in it. One time, when we were lying covered in sweat, our bodies entwined on top of the covers, still slightly out of breath from the sex, I sat up to take a drink of water. Paul reached out and touched a scar at the bottom of my left lower back. “What’s this from?” He traced it with his fingers.
    I’d winced, pulling away from his touch as though it hurt. “I’d rather not talk about it.” He just shrugged and never brought it up again. He never asked me anything about my past. It just never came up—not that there was a hell of a lot for me to tell.
    The loud music changed. It was an old Def Leppard song: “Armageddon It.” I smiled. I’d been how old when that song was a hit?  I’d been 15, in high school, already starting on the football team. My success at football had changed everything in my away- from-home life. I’d always been big for my class, so kids never picked on me, but most of the kids stayed away from me. I don’t know if they sensed somehow I lived in a trailer park, or if they picked it up from my Sears catalogue clothes that never fit right. The clothes always look okay at the start of the school year, but after a few washings they started looking ragged. My mother wasn’t big on laundry, and as she hated to iron, she never did it. She didn’t like to clean either. My fifth grade teacher once sniffed and said to me, “I can smell the oil fields on you.” My dad worked in the fields and came home every night to drink himself senseless. He usually ignored us kids, unless we got in his way or he was in one of his moods.
    That changed when I went out for football. I didn’t have much interest in it, frankly, but practice was from three-thirty to six after school, which meant I wouldn’t get home until almost seven.  I would have practiced longer. I knew enough about it from watching it on television every weekend I can remember. I’d always done well in gym class, but I took to football like I was born to play. I was fast, I could hit hard, I could catch, and I was hard to tackle. I started as a wide receiver when I was a freshman, and in our first game caught