The white-top cab hummed unfettered along the rain-slicked avenues of New Orleans, traffic non-existent on the streets of the warehouse district at three in the morning. On occasion, in the periphery of its headlights, a scenester or two could be seen staggering along the sidewalks, headed home from points unknown, trickling out of converted warehouse nightclubs or hastily arranged raves in long-abandoned centers of industry. The driver eyed them each as he passed, but in the end paid them no mind, and no regard, smirking as he swerved to douse them with torrents of water kicked up from the gutters by his tires, laughing at their feeble cries and gestures of protest in his rear view mirror.

To him, they deserved no less than his disdain, empty shells of human beings aimlessly scurrying through the pre-dawn hours, drunk or strung out on god only knows what. Racing the sun, he thought to himself, as a roach would race against the flicking on of a kitchen light, returning to the scummy baseboards of society so they could do it all again tomorrow. He had no use for people who had no direction, when his own was so very clear. Like their insect brethren, they, too, would each know the crushing judgment of his boot one day. And of one much greater than he. It was, after all, a perk of the job.

Finally, out of the darkness, he spotted a figure slumped beside a corner telephone booth. Checking his fare slip against the intersection, he pulled his cab up against the curb, the only sounds in the night the rhythmic pulsing of his windshield wipers and the slow hiss of rubber on pavement as his tires slowed and stopped.

An arm came across the front seat to roll down the passenger side window, its sleeve sliding back enough to reveal, in the muted, dead yellow light of the street lamp, flesh marred by a series of seven vertical and deliberate-looking scars. Each bisected a veritable mural of intricate tattoos. All along his forearm, angels were locked in battle with horned imps, and graphic depictions of the bible's more brutal scenes played out past the shadows and into his shirt. The quality of the driver's art did not speak of having been done professionally, their edges raised with scar tissue and the aftermath of infection, their washed-out colors running and flaked in places where a needle had not gone deep enough, or too deep altogether.

If his potential passenger noticed, he did not seem to mind. The cabbie estimated, judging by the way the young man's head lolled back and forth while he tried to focus on the vehicle in front of him, that this kid wasn't up for noticing much of anything. They never were.

"You call a cab?" a gravelly, baritone voice asked.

His fare, a brown-haired twenty-something in a ratty denim jacket and torn blue jeans, only nodded. He scrunched his face into a look of intense concentration and pushed off the phone booth, letting inertia alone slam his body into the rear passenger door of the cab. From there it was a battle of wills with the door handle, and another test of endurance with the seatbelt. Nearly five minutes later, the pair rolled off into the night once more. The rain had begun picking up again, providing a hollow, metallic percussion accompaniment to the wipers' dull timpani beat.

"Where to, kid?"

"The airport...plane catch...morning..."

The words were muffled and mumbled, coming from some far off place within the junky's mind where his senses struggled to spark the proper neurons in a sea of foreign substances. The driver just grinned and drove purposefully on. It wasn't until several miles had rolled by beneath them, and the turn-off for Airline Highway had slid past into the darkness behind leaving only largely unused by-roads before them, that realization began to dawn slowly in his passenger's mind. Unease seemed to break through his chemical haze like the slow ascension of the sun over the horizon, a sight he'd likely never see again.

"This isn't the way to the airport man."

The scarred, tattooed arm came over the back of the seat. Its gnarled, calloused hand brought a .45 along for the ride. A single shot rang out, flashing brilliantly in the night, and the denim around the young man's chest shredded. He slumped over in the seat, his limp body sliding gracelessly into the floorboard the next time the cab decelerated for a stoplight. The cold, rainy night closed back in, the only silent witness to the scene unfolding.

Just like the last seven.

The cabbie didn't even bother looking back.

Moments later, his deep, baritone voice began bellowing hymns at the top of his lungs, filling the car, drowning out the rain, somehow louder and darker and more menacing than the gunshot in the confines of the cab. His makeshift revival was interrupted only momentarily for a series of ecstatic, rapturous gasps, when a knife produced from his shirt pocket sliced a vertical gash into the skin of his right forearm, directly behind the other scars -- this one cleaving in two a depiction of a lion savaging the prone form of a missionary.

The rush faded. The blood was staunched by a dingy, brown-stained roll of cloth stashed in the glove box. The thunderous singing rolled forth once more.