The rain in New Orleans doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the grime slicker. I know, I've been drinking on this porch long enough to understand that about the city.

My name is Jack Morin. I used to wear a badge. Now I wear a trench coat and carry a .38 in my inside pocket and ask questions that make people uncomfortable. The transition wasn't as dramatic as you'd think. Both jobs involve listening to liars.

The case that brought me to the hunting shop on Royal Street came on a Thursday, which in New Orleans is basically a weekend. A woman walked in wearing green silk and a hat wide enough to land a plane in. She had a scar on her left cheek that looked like it had been done with a knife instead of accidentally. I respected her for that.

"I need to know something," she said. Her voice was the colour of expensive whiskey.

"Everyone needs me to know something," I said. "Usually their husband's whereabouts. Usually alive. Usually disappointed."

"This one might not be."

I put down my glass. "Now you're talking."

She gave me a name: Miss Luna. That was it. No last name, no address, no photograph. Just two syllables that sounded like wind through cracked glass. She paid me five dollars upfront and told me to start in the French Quarter.

The French Quarter at midnight is a different city from the French Quarter at noon. By day it's tourists and jazz and beignets dusted with enough sugar to kill a horse. By night it's shadows and secrets and the kind of places where you learn to check your reflection before you enter.

I started at a shop called The Golden Pack, which was either ironic or prophetic depending on who was buying. The hunter was a man named Giovanni who had the face of someone who had seen everything and the memory of someone who had forgotten most of it.

"Miss Luna," I said, sliding a nickel across the counter. "You see her around?"

Giovanni poured me a drink without asking. "She comes here. Once a month. Always sits in the corner. Always orders absinthe. Never drinks it."

"Who is she?"

Giovanni looked at me the way a man looks at a storm he can't outrun. "That's the wrong question, partner. The right question is what she wants."

I drank the absinthe. It tasted like regret and anise.

The woman appeared on my second night in the Quarter. I was sitting on the steps of an abandoned Spanish colonial building on Royal Street, thinking about nothing in particular, which is how trouble finds you in this city.

She came out of the shadows the way a good lie comes out of a politician: smoothly, confidently, and with no regard for the truth. A woman, wrapped in green mourning clothes, with a scar on her left cheek and eyes the colour of old money. She sat three feet from me and cleared her throat.

"Evening, detective," she said.

I did not scream. I have been shot at, stabbed, thrown out of windows, and once punched by a man twice my size for wearing the wrong hat. A woman in green mourning clothes is surprising but not unprecedented in New Orleans.

"You're the first," I said.

"Of what?"

"Of anything reasonable."

The woman smiled. It was not a comforting smile. "Miss Luna sent me. She's in trouble. She was in trouble from the start, actually, but now it's worse."

"Why should I help her?"

"Because she saved me. And because she's greedy, and greed always ends badly, and you're the kind of man who shows up at the end."

I should have known better. In New Orleans, when a woman in green mourning clothes offers you a case, it's either a trap or a tragedy. Usually both.

Miss Luna was in the Spanish colonial building on Royal Street, which turned out to be a former warehouse that had been empty since the thirties. The door was locked. The woman scratched at it three times, and it opened.

Inside, the building was a cathedral of shadows. Moonlight came through holes in the roof and painted the floor in silver. And in the centre of the room, sitting on an overturned crate like a queen on a broken throne, was Miss Luna.

She was not what I expected. She was younger than I thought—twenties, maybe—beautiful in the way a broken thing is beautiful. She wore a green silk dress that had seen better days and a hat that was still expensive. The scar on her cheek caught the moonlight and turned it into something almost pretty.

"Jack Morin," she said. "The woman talked."

"She does that."

She laughed, and it sounded like glass breaking in slow motion. "She's not entirely wrong about me. I am greedy. I wanted something impossible."

"What did you want?"

She looked at the woman. The woman looked at me. And in that moment, I understood the geometry of this particular tragedy.

"I wanted to control power," she said. "I found a woman that could talk, and I thought—foolishly, I admit—if I could control that, I could control everything. The underworld, the politicians, the whole rotten machine. I thought I could be the queen of New Orleans."

"And you couldn't?"

She shook her head. "The woman isn't a tool, Mr. Morin. She's a mirror. She showed me what I wanted, and I wanted too much. So she set a trap. Not to hurt me. To teach me."

"What kind of trap?"

"The kind where you're stuck in an empty building with nothing but your thoughts and a woman who doesn't mince words."

I should have known better. In New Orleans, when a woman in green mourning clothes offers you a case, it's either a trap or a tragedy. Usually both.

I sat down on the floor beside her. The wood was cold and smelled of old rain. "How long you been in here?"

"Three weeks. Maybe four. Time is... difficult in a place like this."

The woman paced between us like a lawyer considering her next question. "She tried to cage me," it said. "Not physically. Metaphysically. She wanted to bind my nature to her will. That's not something you do to a creature and expect to walk away clean."

I looked at Miss Luna. She was crying, but quietly, the way a woman cries when she has learned that tears solve nothing.

"What happens now?" I asked.

"Now you take me home," she said. "And you tell my story. And you never, ever try to control anything again."

I helped her out of the building. She was lighter than I expected, like a woman who had been carrying nothing but air for weeks. The woman followed us out and sat on the steps, watching us go.

"Jack," it said as we reached the street.

I stopped.

"Next time you're looking for a case," the woman said, "start with something simple. A missing husband. A stolen watch. Something with a clean ending."

"Is that a warning?"

"It's advice. From someone who has seen what happens when people try to hold onto things that were never meant to be held."

It disappeared into the shadows the way a good story disappears from memory: gradually, reluctantly, and with more left unsaid than told.

I drove Miss Luna to her sister's house in the Garden District. Her sister opened the door, saw her face, and understood everything without a word being spoken. That's how sisters work.

On the way home, I stopped at The Golden Pack and ordered a drink. Giovanni poured it without asking.

"Find her?" he said.

"Yeah."

"Is she alright?"

I thought about that. "No. But she will be. Eventually."

I drank my whiskey and watched the rain make the streets of New Orleans shine like a promise they couldn't keep. And somewhere in the Quarter, a woman in green mourning clothes sat on a windowsill and watched the rain with eyes that had seen too much and said nothing about it at all.

The case was closed. The ending was clean. Which in New Orleans is the most unusual thing of all.