“Nasty snake man and Trish? Yeah. What about them?”

She peered up at Danyon, praying he wouldn’t think she was crazy. “Can you…uh…can you hear anything they’re saying?”

“Hear them? There’s so much noise out here, I can hardly hear you. Wait…don’t tell me you can hear what those two are saying from here. Over all this noise?”

“Well—”

“Hey, lookee here, Joe, I found us ’nother one!” A short, skinny, drunk guy, wearing a camouflage T-shirt with GET ’ER DONE! stenciled across the front, suddenly stepped up to Shauna. Even in the glow of the street lights, she could see the red spider veins that covered his cheeks and the end of his bulbous nose.

“Excuse me,” Shauna said, and peered over his left shoulder. She didn’t want whatever sound connection she had picked up with Gris Gris and Trish to get lost.

The drunk laughed until he nearly fell backwards, then he held a fistful of Mardi Gras beads up to her face. “Hey, you, purty lady—”

“Time to move on, friend,” Danyon said to him.

With his timing off a few beats, the drunk looked over and up at Danyon. “Damn, you a big boy, ain’t ya?”

Danyon glowered at him. “I said you need to go.”

The drunk’s brain was either two Gherkins over-pickled or he was just plain stupid, because he turned back to Shauna and dangled the beads in her face again.

“Hey, you, purty lady. You want you some of these here Murdi Gass beads? ’Cause you can have ’em if ya show me them there purty little boobies of yours.”

Before she had a chance to respond, Danyon grabbed the guy by the scruff of the neck and literally yanked him up off his feet. He jerked the guy up close, nearly nose to nose.

“I want you to apologize to the lady for what you said,” Danyon said.

The drunk blinked, looked around, obviously confused. “Where’s Joe?”

Danyon shook the little man, and the guy appeared to suddenly wake up. Fear widened his eyes.

Shauna saw the muscles in Danyon’s arm begin to ripple. She reached out to him. “Please, don’t. It’s okay.”

Not breaking eye contact with the drunk, Danyon said, “No, it’s not okay.” He gave the guy another little shake. “Is it, buddy? Now apologize to the lady.”

“I’m sorry,” the drunk cried. “Sorry, sorry, sorryer’n I can be!”

“Danyon…” Shauna touched his arm. “Please.”

His jaw muscles tightened, then relaxed. Then he opened his hand and let the drunk drop to the ground. The guy landed on all fours, and he stayed that way, scrambling away like a crab.

“What’s wrong with you?” Shauna said. “You could have really hurt that guy.”

“He’s lucky I didn’t kill him for talking to you like that.”

“He was just drunk. I could’ve handled him.”

“I don’t care if he was drunk. I’m not going to have anybody disrespect you that way, especially when I’m around.”

Suddenly remembering Gris Gris and Trish, Shauna stood on tiptoe and scanned the crowds until she spotted them again. The weird sound tunnel that had connected her to them earlier was no longer there. All she heard was street noise.

Shauna squinted and was about to concentrate on Gris Gris and Trish’s mouth like she had before, when she felt Danyon’s hand on her shoulder and his breath against her left cheek.

“You never got a chance to answer my question,” he said. “Can you really hear those two over all this noise?”

“Right now? No. But earlier…I don’t know if it had something to do with the direction of the wind and where I was standing, but…” She peered up at him. “Yes, I heard a little of what they were saying.”

Danyon arched a brow, evidently impressed. Then he looked in Gris Gris and Trish’s direction, cocked his head, and squinted as though to get a bead on their voices. Shauna found it curious that he did the very same thing she did whenever she wanted to identify a particular sound or find its origin. She couldn’t help but wonder if he too experienced the emotional pleasures and pain that came from acute hearing.

Shauna had discovered young that most sound carried an emotion to the listener in some form or fashion. Fear—curiosity—comfort—heartache—joy—relief—panic.

Being a kid with overactive myringi and living in a never silent world, she’d had a hard time figuring out what to do with the constant influx of sound and emotion. Each seemed to beg so many questions. Should she keep this emotion that came with that sound? Or should she shelve it? Was there something to learn from that sound or this emotion? Or should she sweep it under a rug and hope she’d never have to hear it and feel it again? Was that sound and that emotion supposed to spur her to action? Or was it calling for inaction and silence?

As she grew older, Shauna learned that the noise of the fast paced world in which she lived often evoked more negative emotions than positive ones. She had discovered ways to temper the onslaught, but still, even now, it wasn’t always easy to keep them balanced. More times than not, she had to search for the sounds that gave her peace and comfort. Like a soft giggle hidden behind the hand of a small, shy child—the gentle purring from a contented cat as it threaded its way around her legs—the sound of a breeze heading her way to cool the heat of the day. Whenever she found these treasures, she stored them in memory and pulled them out whenever the bad became too much to handle, which seemed to be too often. Sounds like—the last, ragged breath of the dying—the crunch of metal and the snap of bones that came from a car accident too far away to be seen—the cry of a heartache muffled in a pillow by someone who had been taught that the strong don’t cry—the whimper of a sick child too pained to move—the keening of a dying, mourning wolven.

“Hearing anything?” Shauna asked Danyon.

He shook his head hesitantly. “Maybe a word or two, but I can’t really tell for sure if it’s coming from them. With all this noise, the couple of words I think I’m picking up are garbled and don’t make sense. As far as I can tell, it’s just a fat guy being hit on by a junkie who’s looking for either money or a fix. I don’t get why that’s such a big deal. What am I missing?”

Suddenly, a pot-bellied man wearing an oversized diaper fastened at the hips with ridiculously large safety pins stumbled by. He was sucking on a huge pacifier when he bumped into Danyon. The pacifier popped out of his mouth and hit the street. “S’cuse me,” he said, and a plume of whiskey and onion breath hit Shauna full in the face. She gagged and quickly turned her head away. The guy leaned over to pick up the pacifier and stumbled sideways. The dozen or more Mardi Gras beads he had hanging around his neck slapped against his hairy chest.

Shauna gave Danyon a “take it easy on this one, will you?” look.

He responded with a half-smile, then helped the guy stand upright. “Careful, buddy.”

After sending the drunk on his way, he asked Shauna, “Has your hearing always been that sensitive?”

She shrugged. “Ever since I can remember.”

He studied her for a moment, and Shauna saw wonder in his eyes. She looked away, suddenly embarrassed. “It’s no big deal. More a pain in the rear than anything. You should try being in the Superdome during a Saints’ football game with ears like mine. All those people cheering and screaming…”

“Can you make out what snake man and his girlfriend are saying now?” Danyon asked.

Shauna turned toward Gris Gris and Trish. Since she didn’t know how the sound tunnel was formed the first time, she didn’t know how to recreate it. So, she did what she always did when zeroing in on a sound—Shauna tilted her head, squinted, and concentrated. She watched the movement of their mouths.

Trish Deveraux’s voice came through almost immediately, but, as before, her words were choppy, disjointed.

“—give you—money. I…it, honey.”

Trish rubbed up against Gris Gris provocatively. It didn’t take someone with great hearing to know she was hitting on the man.

“Anything?” Danyon asked.

“Sounds like a drug deal’s going down.”

“That’s no surprise. Lurnell told us she was a user. We really don’t have time to bother with those two right now, anyway.”

“I know, but Gris Gris is talking about some weird stuff.”

“Maybe so, but from what you said about Banjo, how he acted in the shop, smelling the cookies from across the street, then the whole thing with Mattie—I think he’s our best lead so far. Let’s—”

Shauna held up a hand. “Wait. Gris Gris just said… ‘Gonna make you feel—you God—makes you God—it does—ain’t got—but I can.’ Now Trish is saying, ‘Gotta have…bad.’ Gris Gris again—he’s saying, ‘Thousand dollars—ounce—clean—pure—fresh ground.’ Now Trish is saying, ‘Ain’t got thousand—give blow—for it.’ Okay, Gris Gris again, ‘Only me.’”

Then their conversation was interrupted by a couple who stopped to coo over the snake. She saw Trish begin to fidget, pace, evidently agitated that the couple had stolen Gris Gris’ attention.

Oddly enough, Shauna heard the couple talking about the snake so clearly, they might as well have been standing two feet away. The woman was doing most of the talking. Her accent had a twangy, southern lilt to it, very different from the Creole and Cajun accents from south Louisiana.

“I swear, I ain’t never seen a snake that big,” the woman said. “Back home, in Valdosta, my PawPaw always taught me not to touch snakes ’cause you never know which of ’em is poisonous and which of ’ems not. And you know, back home in Valdosta, we have these here kinda snakes we call egg-suckers. They ain’t big like your snake, but they’ll crawl right on up the fence of the coop and help themselves. They take them baby chick eggs right out from under the mama chicken. She can peck ’im and peck ’im and squawk ’til the cows come home, but that don’t bother that ol’ snake none. Can I touch your snake?”