Free Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies by Jimmy Fox Page A

don’t miss much, do you? Your memory’s almost as good as mine.”
    “Very humble of you, boss.”
    “Nelson told me just enough to make me more confused.”
    “I think the heckler was snuffed by some crackhead, myself. They’ll never catch him. And the note? Just coincidence. Meaningless. The guy was delusional, and a pothead, I think I read.”A thought suddenly occurred to Hawty. “Don’t you come near me in those funky old rags you’re wearing, you hear? When’s the last time you washed that stuff ? … Oh, I’m going for some exercise later, too,
if
I ever finish my work here. I’ve started swimming therapy twice a week, at the Freret pool. Want to keep my girlish figure from getting to be a big brown beach ball. You ought to join me sometime.”
    Nick emerged from the bathroom in his gym shorts and tank top. This was his first spring outing without sweats. “Sounds good to me. One of these days I’ll take you up on that offer.”
    Hawty could not hold her laughter.
    “What’s so funny?” Nick asked, his fragile ego shaken.
    “Those … those bony white hairy legs!” was all she could say intelligibly through her mirth. And then, after she’d caught her breath, “Boy, I swear, I’ve never been so proud of being born black, female, and beautiful.”
    “Okay, okay, get out your Freret ID.”
    “Why? Are you going to report me to the dean for making fun of a former faculty member? They never did give you much respect when you were on the payroll, so why should they start now?”
    “I’m going to show you a valuable skill genealogists sometimes need: breaking and entering. Our office door will do nicely for a start. Come this way, my young apprentice in crime.”
    “Oh, goodness, you’re going to land
us
instead of the murderer in jail before it’s all over!”

CHAPTER 6
    N ick kept to the paved road that snaked through Audubon Park and enclosed the golf course, riding trails, and lagoons. He needed to think, to surrender his body to his mind.
    St. Charles Avenue bordered the park; sometimes the photogenic street was part of his route, and on those days he had to stay sharp. Streetcars trundled along the grassy “neutral ground” in the middle of the avenue, and the streetcar drivers, knowing they had technical right-of-way, liked to bear down on unwary joggers and scare the heck out of them with the car’s bell. Or so it seemed to him.
    Nor did he want to dodge autos racing across the neutral ground before an onrushing, clanging streetcar, or jog in place at intersections waiting for traffic gunning to beat a light—reckless driving was another hallowed tradition in New Orleans, and it wasn’t just the carjackers who were to blame.
    In the park, he could let down his guard a bit, as much as one should in a dangerous city like New Orleans.
    The mild weather had brought the annual migration of transients from all over the world. There were several clutchesof them in the park, sitting in groups, sharing food, cigarettes, joints, conversation, music. They would come for Mardi Gras, the biggest free party in North America, and stay until the cold rains of late November. Where they went during the interval of the few nearly winter-like months, Nick wasn’t sure. Farther south—Florida, Mexico, Brazil? He would do the same, he thought, were he in their mismatched shoes.
    Nick recognized some of the eternal types that hang out in the Crescent City: aging Woodstockers, bothering a guitar or a harmonica, their minds a 45-rpm record stuck on Jefferson Airplane or Hendrix; tantric contortionists, eyes seeing mystic realms; cursing snail-folk, their ragged worldly possessions in a lump on their shoulders; grifters, sitting alone, ominously observant, gestating the self-justifications of the mass murderer… .
    After getting thrown off the Freret faculty, he’d wanted to drop out of society, discover what it was like to care about nothing, to have nothing. It was a dream from his wild, idealistic,