Playing The Angel [Paperback]

By day, Tiff Proulx works as a living statue, posing as the Statue of Liberty for the French Quarters tourist trade in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. By night, she descends into the darkness costumed as the Angel of Mercy, defending and protecting the storm refugees from the thugs who pock the citys wayward streets. But her acts of heroism are no accident: Tiffs days as an innocent college student came to an abrupt end after a National Guardsman, pretending to be a Good Samaritan, raped her during the height of the storms fury.

Tiffs skills as a living statue?include extraordinary stealth and an uncanny ability to render herself completely motionless. Using these powers, she transforms herself into a vigilante hero, combing the Quarter to fight evil and injustice, as well as to hunt down the man who plunged her life into despair during the storms darkest hours.

There are two of them now. I can tell by the sound of their standard-issue shoes hurtling across the cobblestones of the cemetery walk. Running breathlessly, one after the other. Two New Orleans policemen chase me through the dark recesses of St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery. And theyre after little old meor more precisely, theyre after her.

Theyre dying to get their hands on the Angel of Mercy. This place is spooky enough during the day. At night, its a whole nother kind of fright. Im standing inside the crumbling entryway to one of the above-ground cryptsabove-ground on account of the earth in these parts, swollen as it is with the ever-present waters of the New Orleans basin. And it smells in here. Why mince words? It smells like death. Im trying hard not to imagine the corpses lying in the vaults just beyond my wings. And the bones, and the demons, and God-knows-what else. Ghostly demarcations, I suppose you might call them. If you believe in that sort of thing.

I thought I had givenlC5