Lousiana Hotshot

didn’t even know what the girl was wearing. With two of them, though, they’d have a good chance— and they’d almost certainly be able to see it if Baron Tujague’s brother approached her.
    When the bell rang, Eddie still hadn’t shown. Talba thought,
Must have got sloshed.
    Shaneel was a big girl and fortunately, she’d picked today to wear a sweater of bright orange— the color hunters wear so they can see each other. Talba’s eye was drawn to it.
A break,
she thought.
Maybe this’ll go right.
    “Shaneel! Hey, Shaneel— can I talk to you?”
    The girl waved, even, under the circumstances, seemed happy to see her. “Hello, James Bond. ‘Zat who you are? Or ya Jessica Fletcher?”
    “Neither one, exactly.” Talba thought what a shame it was, there wasn’t a female analogy in popular culture. She forbore to mention Nancy Drew. “Got a minute?”
    Shaneel waved good-bye to the kids she was walking with. “Sure. I got a minute.”
    “You know about Cassandra’s mother?”
    “Oh, yeah. She didn’t come home from her date or something.”
    “Her date?”
    “I don’t know. She’s always out on a date.”
    “Shaneel. She still hasn’t come home.”
    Alarm flooded the girl’s plump, carefree features. “She gone the whole weekend?”
    “You haven’t talked to Cassandra about this?”
    She shook her head vigorously. “No. Haven’t talked to Cassandra.” And then she got a sort of stupefied look, as something came back to her. “Didn’t talk to her
today.
I talked to her; sure I talked to her.”
    “Talk to
me,
Shaneel.”
    When the girl turned her face up to Talba’s, it was like a lovely dark moon, wide and innocent, not overbuilt with suburbs and subdivisions; a small place in the universe that hadn’t yet been wrecked. “Whassup?” she said. “You look kind of funny.”
    “I think Toes got her. Kidnapped her.” She said it for shock value, didn’t really expect it to have any resonance, but to her surprise, Shaneel’s eyes grew into cookies, a dark raisin punctuating the center of each.
    “Why you say that?” she asked.
    “Shaneel, you know something. Tell me. We don’t have any time to waste.”
    The girl took a step back, horror smeared like mud on her face. “Her mama called him. Her mama talked to him.”
    “Aziza called Toes?”
    “Yes’m. She called Toes.”
    “Come on, honey. Keep talking.”
    “She told Cassandra they could get money from him— she said he owed it to her for what he did to her.”
    “So he was one of the men in the photos.”
    “Yes’m. But Pammie said he was a friend of Baron Tujague. You come in, sayin’ he’s the Baron’s brother, well, Cassandra’s mama smells money. She called the Baron’s office and made a stink— Cassandra heard her do it, right on the telephone. Finally, she got Toes and made an even bigger stink, and Toes said she was right, he did owe her money behind it. He was gon’ pay her the next day.”
    Talba suddenly felt steely and hard inside, for once calm and capable. She found that, often, with her worst fears confirmed, a great calm descended, and she was feeling that now.
    “See, Cassandra…”
    But Talba interrupted her. There was something she wanted to make completely clear. “That was the day she disappeared, Shaneel.”
    The girl wouldn’t stop. “See, Cassandra wasn’t like— like you think. Cassandra loves to sing more than anything in the whole world— me and Cassandra both; Pammie too. Well, Pammie’s sister Rhonda knew this dude who knew the Baron and Pammie said maybe he could help us get started. You know, the Baron’s got his own recording studio.”
    “Ah. The light dawns.” Shaneel looked at her like she was speaking French, but she couldn’t really help the outburst. She realized she’d just gotten a piece of the puzzle that had been eluding her— exactly what flavor of toe jam she was dealing with. “Go on, honey.”
    “We thought maybe we could make a CD— the three of us, you know? Maybe we’d get high with this guy and he’d listen to us sing. Only, Cassandra… I don’t know… he said he had something special to talk to her about.”
    “Okay, Shaneel. This is not a nice man we’re talking about.”
    “You got that right.”
    “A man who would have sex with a young girl isn’t nice. But Rhonda’s dead and Aziza’s disappeared. This is way beyond ‘not nice.’”
    Shaneel wouldn’t meet Talba’s eyes. “Pammie’s gone too.”
    “Her parents sent her