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one message left for him.
    Verlaine took the piece of paper and turned it over.
    Always
. A single word printed in the duty sergeant’s neat script.
    Verlaine looked at the sergeant.
    The sergeant shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘Some guy called up, asked for you, I told him you were out and about someplace. He was quiet for a moment, I asked him if there was any message and he said that. Just one word. “Always”. And then he hung up before I had a chance to ask him who he was.’
    ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ Verlaine asked.
    ‘If you wanna go there that’s your choice, John.’
    ‘Seems to me I don’t have a choice, right?’
    The sergeant shrugged his shoulders again.
    ‘Can you call Prints and ask if they have a make on my trunk vic?’
    The sergeant lifted the receiver and phoned through. He asked if they had an ID, and then nodded and held out the receiver towards Verlaine. ‘They wanna speak to you.’
    Verlaine took the handset. ‘Yes?’
    He was silent for a moment, and then ‘Okay. Let me know if anything comes up.’
    The duty sergeant took the receiver and replaced it in its cradle.
    ‘Security tagged,’ Verlaine said.
    ‘Your prints?’
    Verlaine nodded. ‘It’s come up as a security tagged print.’
    ‘No shit! So it’s a cop or somesuch?’
    ‘Or federal or military or CIA or National Security Agency, who the fuck knows.’
    ‘Christ, you got yourself into a wild one there, John Verlaine.’
    ‘Verlaine said nothing. He looked at the sergeant and then turned back towards the rear exit of the building.
    ‘You gonna head down to Evangeline, gonna go see Always and find out if he knows anything?’
    Verlaine slowed and hesitated. He shook his head. ‘Right now seems the only direction to take.’
    ‘Suit yourself, but take care, eh?’
    ‘Call me on the cellphone if Prints come back to you with anything more, would you?’
    ‘Sure John, sure. You figure you should take someone with you?’
    ‘It’ll be alright,’ Verlaine said. ‘Me an’ Daddy Always haven’t crossed paths for a few years.’
    ‘Don’t mean he’ll have forgotten you.’
    ‘Thanks,’ Verlaine said. ‘That’s very reassuring.’ He walked on to the rear door and returned to his car.
    The rain came as he pulled away from the car lot. By the time he reached the junction it was flooding down in torrents. Verlaine drew to the edge of the road beneath the overhang of a tree and prepared himself to wait until the worst had passed. Down across the sidewalks, petals of wisteria and magnolia, mimosa and Mexican plum littered the way like confetti, scattered pockets of white and cream, yellow and lilac-blue.
    When the rain lessened he began moving again. He took the longest route out of Orleans, left across the south-west limits, noticed a highway sign jutting from the ground –
Don’t Take A Curve – At Sixty Per – We Hate To Lose – A Customer – BURMA-SHAVE
– an artefact from some bygone age. The further he drove the more the city dissolved away into nothing. The colors were vague and deep, shades of bruising, of bloodshot eyes and wounded flesh. Where he was headed, a small town called Evangeline, was a place to leave, never a place to arrive in or be born into, but to escape from as soon as age and ability permitted. There were dreams, there were nightmares, and somewhere in between was reality, the truly real existence one found not by listening but by looking, by following these strange-colored threads, vague lines that ran from circumstance to coincidence, and from there into the indelible effects of brutal humanity in its most merciless forms. People like the heart-killer were everywhere: standing in stores, waiting for trains, leaving for work, looking no less human, no less real than ourselves, carrying with them the perfect privacy of who they
really
were, their imaginations running riot with the colors and sounds of death and sacrifice, of some urgent necessity to