The Heavens Rise by Christopher Rice Page B

room, or allowing to take a seat on your bench. Allen Shire was that guy—unattractive,unremarkable, quiet; that’s why Cypress Bank & Trust gave him their most sensitive cases.
    He kept his mouth shut, hoping the woman would get lost in her thoughts again so he could catch her off guard when he finally did speak. New town homes were sprouting up across the street, and beyond them, downtown’s shiny skyline etched a clear blue sky. Something about Atlanta always got him a little; as if the city had become everything his hometown of New Orleans might have been if it was just a little less corrupt, a little more above sea level, a little less easy .
    “You a cop?” Arthelle Williams asked him. Her gaze was focused on two young female joggers as they passed in a burst of excited chatter. “You been followin’ me for four hours and you haven’t shot at me yet, so you must be somethin’. ”
    “I’m not a cop.”
    “Reporter?”
    “Nope.”
    “You lookin’ for somebody?”
    “You’ve been on to me all day and you haven’t called the police? Brave woman.”
    She shrugged, as if she wasn’t brave because he wasn’t all that scary.
    “Figure this has got something to do with Marshall Ferriot, right?”
    “That’s correct,” Shire answered.
    “Well, if you’re lookin’ for the woman who tried to kill him, I’m not sure why you’re botherin’ the one who saved his life.”
    “I’m not looking for Emily Watkins. I know where she is.”
    “Jail, I hope.”
    When he didn’t answer, she looked at him for the first time, adjusted her giant purse on her lap, craned her neck a little as if his silence had caused him to double in size. “ No. Come on, now—”
    “You sure hightailed it out of Lenox Hill fast, Ms. Williams.”
    “They didn’t charge that girl with anything .”
    “There was no one around to.”
    “What are you— What do you mean ?”
    “I mean the person I’m looking for is Marshall Ferriot.”
    The confusion passed over the woman’s deeply lined, jowly face, leaving behind a look of mild satisfied surprise. Then she laughed, the kind of bitter, sarcastic laugh people picked up from characters in movies. “Well, good for her, then.”
    “Good for who?”
    “Marshall’s sister. She took my advice, it looks like.”
    “And that was?”
    “To get her brother the hell out of town before another crazy nurse tried to kill him.”
    •   •   •
    “Mind control?” Danny Stevens asked for the third time since they’d started their phone call.
    “I’m not trying to argue that it’s a thing here, I’m just telling you what the woman told me today, okay? And she didn’t believe it either. She thought the other nurses were all nuts, which is why she quit.”
    The two men had been frat brothers back at LSU, and Danny had been Shire’s entrée into Cypress Bank & Trust back when Danny started his own one-man firm. But most of the jobs they’d worked on up until now had been extensive background checks on high-profile new hires. This was the first real headache they had ever suffered together.
    Before she had died the year before, Heidi Ferriot, grande dame of Uptown society turned tragic widow and bitter, shut-in nursemaid, had drawn up a will that shuttled most of her estate into a fat trust fund intended to provide medical care for her son, who had, according to the file the bank had given Shire, made one of the stupidest suicide attempts known to man and landed in a permanent vegetative state.
    Heidi Ferriot and her son had evacuated New Orleans during Katrina’s approach, never to return. But as penance for abandoning the city that had made her family a small fortune, the woman had kept hermoney in one of the last locally owned banks in Louisiana. The only problem? Because her son had not spoken a word or responded to stimulus in almost eight years, the job of caring for him, and of receiving the hefty checks that came from the trust each month, had passed to his older