Free Burn- pigeon 16 by Nevada Barr Page B

the stairs and out into the courtyard. She hadn't seen Jordan this morning and wondered if he was back at the river walk playing punk with his tattooed pals.
    Geneva's tenant was a study in misconnections. He hung with the gutter punks--or had been with them when Anna'd first noticed him--but wasn't homeless and, according to Geneva, paid his rent on time, so he wasn't without an income. His personal hygiene was such that a person of taste and discernment wouldn't choose to be downwind of him, yet his mutt was shampooed and brushed to scented softness. He'd nearly taken Anna down for trying to keep his dog from running away, viciousness boiling off of him till she'd been surprised it hadn't manifested in frothing at the mouth or a heat mirage radiating from his dusky skin, but was charming and gentle with Geneva and Sammy.
    The man's peculiarities on her mind, Anna stopped at the trash bin intent on retrieving the sacrificed pigeon. In the dark and drizzle she hadn't studied it properly.
    The French Quarter's new garbage czar, a handsome young man who'd managed to make hauling trash a glamorous profession, was too efficient. The bin was empty.
    "Rats," Anna muttered and, letting herself out onto Ursulines, tried to remember the disposition of the little avian corpse and, most particularly, the symbols or diagrams that had been sketched in blood on its shroud.
    Across Dumaine, a block from New Orleans's Historic Voodoo Museum, was the magic shop Vieux Dieux. The museum might have provided more scholarly observations but, when dealing with the bizarre, Anna's instinct told her to go with the practitioners of the bizarre. She didn't want an intellectual; she wanted a witch.
    Vieux Dieux's door was open and, beside it, a strange sculpture of a many-armed creature sitting in what had, at one time, been a birdbath. To the right of the door was a large picture window, sans glass, shutters folded to either side and used as display boards, one for T-shirts printed in a pastiche of skulls and other sinister cliches, the other supporting a black signboard as long and thin as the shutter it leaned against. Hand lettered in white was a menu of the shop's specials: Magiks, Spells, Curses, Psychic Self-Defense, Tarot, Love Potions, and, at the bottom but written with no less respect, Souvenirs.
    Anna left the bright sunlit street and entered the dim confines. The shop felt witchy enough--a little kitschy as well, but even practitioners of the occult needed to make a living. It was deserted: no customers, no salespeople, not even a black cat lounging amid the esoterica. Nobody.
    At least nobody visible, Anna thought with a smile.
    The tiny shop was stuffed with the necessities of a well-maintained occult life. The center had been given over to an island covered with tiers of gargoyles, demons, crosses, headstones, tiny tombs and zombies to go with them, sarcophagi and coffins, Barbie-sized skeletons, and rocks--with some arcane powers, Anna presumed. On a wire rack thrusting up from this macabre landscape was the solution to the world's problems just a shake away, vials filled with different colored powders and identified by neat hand-lettered instructions tied around the necks with bits of string. One could sprinkle bad luck or good luck, sprinkle away a bad boss, a sloppy neighbor, an abusive lover, or simply sprinkle general all-purpose Evil Repellent around the house. What the powders were comprised of was not disclosed. They varied in color and texture. To Anna they looked to be filled with Comet, colored sand, dried ground herbs, talcum powder mixed with blue glass beads, and a dozen other creative combinations.
    Another rack held "witch bottles," square-ish glass bottles about the size of Anna's palm with bits of stone and fabric and other magical ingredients inside. These Anna rather liked. They went one notch higher on the continuum of force. The powders fended off evil. The witch bottles actually caught the wickedness sent by the