Milo frowned, sighed.

“There’s a Shoney’s just down the street that way, and an all-night coffee place a couple of blocks over on Morris. But I recommend the Shoney’s. Nobody much goes in that other place except fruits and weirdos.” He stared at her then, and she could feel the track of his eyes like disapproving lasers, their slow head-to-toe inventory.

“’Course, I don’t suppose some folks much mind that sort’a crowd,” he said and turned back to the TV.

Without a word, Niki picked up her bag and pushed open the plate-glass door. The jealous cold rushed around her instantly, but this time she didn’t fight it. The chill felt good, felt cleaner, healthier, than the stale heat inside the station. Her breath came out in a white cloud that the wind picked apart, and she felt the fresh air working its way in through her lungs and throat, into her cells, burning like an icy shot of vodka. Waking her up, cooling the sudden anger.

Come home, Niki. Home, where it’s not so cold, but the mother voice wasn’t really trying now, just muttering habit, easy enough to ignore. The important thing was not to let herself start thinking about the warm fall nights in the French Quarter, the heady smell of chicory coffee and hot beignets drifting from Café du Monde, the familiar faces and sounds of Jackson Square. The things she missed so much that sometimes she thought the pain of their absence would draw blood from her skin like the sweat of saints.

Niki stomped around on the concrete in her raggedy black high-tops, stirring circulation, driving back the phantoms in her head, the threat of homesickness. On her way out of the Texaco’s lot, she stopped and checked the Vega’s doors one more time, then set off down the street in the direction Milo had pointed.

Whenever Niki thought about the days immediately after she’d run from New Orleans, run from Danny and the things he’d confessed, the day she’d called home from a motel room, his apartment but his sister picking up the phone, it felt like a dream. As insubstantial, as outside the normal flow of time and waking consciousness. Better not to think about it at all, any more than necessary.

She’d known Danny Boudreaux since her freshman year of high school, hadn’t started sleeping with him until a couple of years ago, though; one summer night after a rave, sweaty warehouse district chaos and both of them fucked-up on ecstasy, but it hadn’t been an embarrassment the next morning. Had seemed natural, something that should have happened, even though Danny had always gone mainly for boys. He worked drag at a couple of bars in the Quarter, was good enough that sometimes he talked about going to Las Vegas and making real money. Tall boy, trace of a Cajun accent and wispy frail. A lot of foam rubber padding for his shows so no one would see the way his hip bones jutted beneath the sequins.

And then, late July and she’d met Danny for a beer at Coop’s after work, early Saturday morning and after work for both of them, the bar crammed full of punks and tourists. They’d gone back to his place on Ursu-lines because it was closer, had raced sunrise across the cobblestones, raced the stifling heat of morning, running sleepydrunk and laughing like a couple of tardy vampires, and before bed, cold cereal and cartoons. And then Danny had started talking, had dropped the bomb he’d carried all his life, waiting for the right moment or the right ear, or simply the day he couldn’t carry it any longer. More than drag, a lot more than that, and she listened, stared silently down at the Trix going soggy in her bowl while Scooby Doo blared from Danny’s television.

“I’ve been seeing a doctor,” he said. “I started taking hormones a couple of months ago, Niki.”

And when he was done, there’d still been nothing for her to say, nothing to make it real enough to answer, and finally he’d broken the silence for her, asked, “Niki? Are you all right? I’m sorry…”

Not looking at him, speaking to the safe TV instead, black-and-white security, and she shrugged like it was no big shit, like he’d asked if she wanted to go to a movie tonight or if she wanted another cup of coffee. “I’m fucking wasted, Danny,” she said. “We’ll talk about it after I get some sleep, okay?”

“Yeah,” and another apology she hadn’t asked for before she’d lain awake beside him, staring at the summer day blazing away behind the curtains, one bright slice getting into the apartment. Concentrating on the clunking wet noises from his old air conditioner, the uneven rhythm of his breath until she was sure he was asleep, and Danny Boudreaux always slept like the dead. And she’d gotten dressed, scrawled a note to leave beside the bed: Danny, I have to figure this out. I just don’t know. Love, Niki. Then she’d walked back to her apartment, sweatdrenched and sundazed by the time she reached the other end of Decatur Street.

She’d packed one bag and left the city on I-10, just driving, driving east and the radio and her tapes and towns that all ran together until she’d finally reached North Carolina sometime the next day. A room at a Motel 6 in Raleigh, and she’d slept for twelve hours straight. Sleep that left her groggy and disoriented, guilt eating her like an ulcer, a coward to have run out on Danny like that, crazy driving all this way, and she’d called and his sister had answered the phone.

And after Niki hung up, easier just hanging up than trying to answer the questions, she’d sat on the stiff motel bed watching herself in the mirror across the room until the images of Danny were more than she could stand: stepping off the chair, whatever he’d used for a rope cutting into his skinny neck, his feet dangling like a pendulum above the floor. More than her head could hold, and she’d left Raleigh, driving northeast toward the ocean, following something inside her, a primal inner compass, instinctual drive toward a mother older and entirely more comforting than the nervous woman who’d given her birth.

The Carolina countryside had slipped past like pages in a pop-up picture book, the last fields and tobacco barns giving way to pines and cypress stands, the first hints of the vast swamplands that spread themselves out a little farther along. No more real than cardboard cutouts, and the sun setting in her rearview mirror too brilliant for anything but gaudy acrylic. Nothing real inside her head except the casual absurdity of his death, her part in it, and for the first time in her life the tears that had always seemed to flow so easily, had always been there, eager to soothe any ache or loss, had refused to come, and somehow that had been the most frightening thing of all.

Used ’em all up on trifling shit, and now there’s nothing left to cry. Like something her mother or maybe a schoolteacher had said a long time ago. Stop bawling or someday you won’t be able to cry, someone you love will die: and you won’t ever be able to stop hurting. Stop it, Niki, or your face will stick that way.

She’d fumbled through the scatter of cassettes and empty plastic cases on the dashboard and front seat. They were almost all ambient goth, darkwave driving music, nothing she’d wanted to hear now, nothing hard and sharp enough to drive away the storm, the whir like locust wings behind her eyes. Finally, she’d lucked onto a Jimi Hendrix compilation she’d dubbed as a Christmas present two years before and never given away; the tape had kicked in halfway through “All Along the Watchtower,” and she’d turned up the volume until the speakers had begun to whine and distort.

An hour after nightfall, dry-eyed and empty, Niki had crossed the dark and brackish waters of the Alligator River, secret black flowing beneath the causeway’s three-mile span. Beyond that, the road signs had history-book names- Kitty Hawk, Nag’s Head, Kill Devil Hills-and the air roaring in through the open window had begun to smell salty.