Excerpt of Submission by Tori Carrington

A SOUND AS GRATING AS A woman's fingernails

scratching against a chalkboard wrenched me from sleep. I pulled my pillow over my head and tried to ignore it. But like my ex-wife, it refused to go away.

I snaked a hand out from under the pillow, then dragged the telephone receiver to my ear. "What?"

"Detective Alan Chevalier, please."

"That would be me."

"Sir, we have a possible three-zero." The dispatcher stated the address of the homicide.

I mumbled something that she must have taken as an okay because she hung up. On my end, it took three tries before I finally got the receiver back into the cradle. In one move I hauled the pillow from my face and sat up, then stared blearily at the closed shades drawn tight against the windows, the edges ablaze with the morning sunlight slamming against them. I squinted at the digital clock half turned away from me on the nightstand. Just after eight in the morning.

Damn.

I was late starting my normal weekday. Although the definition of normal was up for grabs.

Sometimes being a homicide detective in New Orleans's Eighth Precinct, French Quarter, wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Sometimes? Lately I'd come to view my job as a necessary evil. Necessary because, since I presently lacked the pleasure of a big-busted blonde to wake me up in the middle of the night, what else would I do with my time? Evil because lately I didn't look much better than the victims of a killer who didn't want to be found.

I stared at my morning erection, feeling part of yet separate from the organ that had gotten me into more trouble than it was worth. I covered it by putting on the slacks lying on the floor and then I moved into the bathroom on autopilot. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I wasn't entirely certain what was to blame for the blurriness — the grimy mirror or the half bottle of bourbon I'd downed last night. I flicked on the light, winced at the ice pick it stuck into my skull, then switched it back off, relying on the bedside lamp in the other room to cast enough light for me to do what I had to. Which, admittedly, wasn't much. A quick splash of water over a face that women called full of character but never handsome (although recently they hadn't called it much of anything at all because women didn't much factor into my life as of late): green eyes that were often mistaken for brown, sandy brown hair a month overdue for a cut and lines that may have once been laugh lines but were now just wear and tear.

I scraped my palm against the stubble on my jaw. I could get away with another day of not shaving. Anyway, a dead body waited. And while it wouldn't be going anywhere anytime soon, there would be others waiting for me to do my job so they could do theirs. And while my appearance wasn't much of a priority for me, my job was. Simply because I wanted to keep it.

Shortly thereafter I walked down the two flights of stairs to the street and stood fighting against the bright morning sunlight to keep my eyes open. An interesting percentage of the Quarter's denizens — and an even bigger chunk of visitors — liked to think of themselves as vampires. With my present aversion to sunlight, I could have been bitten by one last night.

But I knew the only thing I was cursed with was a wicked hangover.

I stepped toward my twelve-year-old navy blue Chevy Caprice, a solid car, if unsightly. A bit like me, I supposed.

Only this morning it bore a hood ornament I wasn't used to seeing. Well, at least not without a price tag attached. And I was pretty sure that the attractive woman leaning against the front of my car wasn't a streetwalker, if only because her clothes revealed she was from a place where autumn required a change in wardrobe. A wool suit in New Orleans in October would immediately peg anyone as an outsider. And this girl, no matter how hot, was definitely an outsider.

She spotted me when I took my keys out of my pocket and unlocked the driver's-side door.

"Detective Chevalier?"

She knew me. Which usually meant bad news. A looker like this one, and I didn't recognize her? Could mean one of two things: I'd met her when I'd had too much to drink or she was associated with someone else I'd met when I'd had too much to drink.

I squinted up into her face and my stomach pitched. Because I wasn't only looking at an outsider; I was looking at a dead woman. Claire Laraway. My unsolved- murder victim from two weeks ago.

"Are you all right, Detective?" She blinked as if a thought had just occurred to her. "I'm sorry. Sometimes I forget how much my sister and I looked alike. I'm Molly Laraway, Claire's twin sister. We're fraternal, not identical, but we still always looked enough alike to... I didn't mean to startle you."

Startle me? Christ, she had me wondering if there was something to the upcoming Halloween celebration, one of the longest nights of the year in the city of the dead when it was believed that ghosts walked the earth.

"I was hoping I could talk to you," she said. The only thing that could be worse than confronting the ghost of a victim whose murder you hadn't solved was dealing with the sibling of one.

I inserted the key into the car door and opened it. "Call the office."

I climbed inside, but a cleverly positioned bag with sequins on it prevented me from closing the door. "I have called the office. Countless times. And I always get the same response — I'll hear something when there's something to hear."

I grimaced, recognizing the words as my own. It wasn't that I was a cold person. It was just that in my job nearly every victim came with well-meaning relatives attached. Wives, husbands, children, friends. And they all thought the killing of their loved ones elevated them to detective status; at best, making themselves pests; at worst, hindering my investigation.

I stared at her bag and where it was still stuck in my door. I hadn't meant to go farther than that, but I found my gaze taking in the fullness of her breasts beneath the brown wool of her jacket, the flare of her hips, the length of her legs — which looked great in heels not too high to be impractical but not too short to be sexy.

"Detective Chevalier, I need to know what's going on in the investigation of my sister's death. I want to help find her killer."

I moved her bag out of the way. "Go home, Miss Laraway, and let me do my job."

She replaced the bag with fingers I couldn't exactly slam in the door. "From what I can see, you're not doing that job very well."

Now that would get her far. Pretty much as far as she'd gotten.

"Remove your hands from my vehicle, Miss Laraway, before I remove them for you."

She stared at me as if gauging my willingness to do just that. She removed her fingers.

I closed the door and started the engine.

A knock at the window.

I pushed the button to open it a crack. "Here," she said, holding a card through the slit. "This is my contact information. I'm staying at the Ritz."

I didn't take the card.

She didn't retract it. "Detective Chevalier, I think it only fair to warn you that I'm not going anywhere. I'm here for the duration. However long it takes to find my sister's killer."

"Alan," I said automatically.

I took the card.

She smiled at me.

I wished I hadn't taken the card.

"I'd like to treat you to lunch today if you can spare the time," she said.

"I'm busy."

"Dinner, then."

I thought of the two nickels I had in my pocket and grimaced.

"Coffee?"

"Look, Miss Laraway, I don't know what you hope to accomplish by coming down here from..."

"Toledo."

Was that even a real place? I thought it was something made up on TV. "The best way you can help is by letting me do my job."

"How does coffee prevent you from doing your job?"

My hangover-dulled mind couldn't produce a response to that.

She said, "Eleven o'clock, then. At Tujague's in the French Quarter."

Tujague's happened to serve the best beef rémoulade in New Orleans, if not the whole of Louisiana. And it had been a while since I'd had it.

I knew I should refuse the invite. But damn if I could come up with a real good reason why.

"I'll be there if I have the time."

I put the car into gear and pulled away, looking into the rearview mirror at the woman with legs that went all the way up to her beautiful neck. I told myself she was nothing but trouble with a capital T.

But it had been a long time since I'd gotten myself into that kind of trouble. And so long as she wasn't married to my superior, well, maybe this kind of trouble was just what I needed....

MOLLY LARAWAY STOOD staring after the departing Chevy, feeling frustrated and defeated and intrigued all at once. Detective Alan Chevalier was everything and nothing she'd imagined him to be. Oh, the cavalier attitude she'd expected, since she'd received as much from him on the phone. But there was something more about the rumpled man, something that niggled under her too-warm jacket and her damp skin. Something that made her itch more than the worsted wool did.