City of Secrets

by O'Neil De Noux

  Avery has positioned sentries away from the Humvees, machine gunners picking out Beau and his group now as they cross the levee for them. He tells the lieutenant there’s a dead one over the levee. Avery sends Garcia back to guard the body and the AK-47.

  “There’s a pedestrian bridge on the other side.” He shows Avery the cigarette. “Let’s see if the FBI can really get DNA off one of these.”

  Two guardsmen are wounded, one in the arm, one in the shoulder. Beau didn’t realize there was a medic in the third Humvee and he works on the wounded, neither wound life-threatening. Aligood bitches he didn’t get to fire a round, leads two guardsman back to see the dead guy. Beau leans against the side of Avery’s Humvee that’s dotted with bullet holes now and looks around. The spotlights have the entire area lit. The only eyes looking back at Beau are the eyes of a barred owl perched in a low branch, staring and blinking at him. A good sign. He checks his arm. There’s a burn mark where the bullet just missed and he thanks the owl.

  •

  “So who shot this mother-fucker?” Felicity Jones says as he approaches the autopsy table with Linda Pickett and Isaak. Lt. Avery nods toward Beau sitting in a folding chair while a nurse lightly wraps the burn on his arm. Felicity leans back, lets out a moan. Linda continues forward, moves up to Beau, looks at the bandage.

  “Burned by a bullet,” the nurse says. She’s in her forties, gray streaking her short brown hair. She’s in camos, no make-up, eyes Linda as she steps away.

  Linda Pickett wears a navy-blue tee-shirt with large ATF in yellow across her chest and black tactical pants. She’s so petite, her breasts appear larger than Beau suspected when not hidden by a khaki uniform with front pockets.

  Maybe she’s wearing a push-up bra. French bra. Victoria Secret.

  Beau hides the grin rising on his face. The Cajun is winning out over the Sioux warrior on this one. This woman knows how to wear make-up, never too much, but enough to accentuate what nature gave her, especially those lips, which she covers with brick-red lipstick today.

  “Were you wearing your flak vest?” Her eyes narrow.

  “No.”

  “Two of those guardsmen were struck in their flak vests, square in the chest. They got bruises.”

  Felicity peeks in. “How many shots you fire?”

  “Four. Guess I missed one.”

  “They’re cutting off his clothes. The big hole over the heart are two entry wounds. Three in the chest, one in the throat. You didn’t miss.”

  Avery steps up, says his colonel’s on the way over.

  “We’re not supposed to get into shit like this.” He looks at Linda. “It’s like the wild west out there. Two shootouts in a week.”

  Aligood approaches, calls out, “Det. Beau. There’s a reporter outside would like to speak with you.”

  Felicity head for the hanger door, “I’ll take care of this.”

  Lt. Avery asks Aligood, “You talked with the reporter?”

  “No, sir. We’re not supposed to.”

  “You’re damn right.” Avery takes off after Felicity.

  Linda and Beau are alone, as alone as they can be in a huge hanger with a post mortem exam going on a few feet away and the curious stealing peeks at the man who killed the man on the autopsy table.

  “How’d the Glock shoot?”

  “Smooth as silk,” Beau answers. “Accurate as hell, apparently.”

  Two men in ATF khakis come into the hanger, both with gray hair, one waves Linda over. Beau moves to the autopsy table as Army pathologist Dr. Richard Nelson, from Indiana, has already laid open the dead man’s torso. He watches from behind two doctors as the three bullets are dug out of the cadaver. The throat shot was a perforated wound – through and through. He takes a look at the bullets. Hydro-shock hollow-point rounds that mushroomed nicely upon impact, tearing up tissue and bone. Two of the rounds are imbedded in the rear rib-cage after lacerating the heart, the third lay next to the backbone after shattering a vertebrae, splitting the spinal cord.

  “Only wound that was not fatal,” the Dr. Nelson tells Beau, “would have turned him into a paraplegic, possibly a quad.”

  Beau finds Felicity outside.

  “Fuckin’ New Orleans reporter got wind you were involved.” Felicity nods to his left.

  Are those TV lights? Yes, a truck from CNN is parked behind Avery’s three Humvees, a cameraman filming the bullet holes, shattered windows.

  “I referred him to the PIO Officer whose aboard one of those cruise ships on the river. The Ecstasy and Sensation. Appropriate for NOPD, wouldn’t you say? Fuckin’ reporter tried to get a comment from me about the mayor of Houston.”

  They move to the Escalade, parked away from the TV camera, thankfully.

  “What’s with the mayor of Houston?”

  “Him and the mayor of Atlanta are complaining now, calling the evacuees they so generously took in – Katricians. Seems some of our homies brought their killing ways with them. Their murder rates have skyrocketed.”

  Beau nods to a group of state troopers around an LSP car attached to a tow truck.

  “What’s with them?”

  “Two ass-holes in a gray pickup burgled a pawn shop down in ‘da parish’, got some muddy guns, ammo, shot up a police car trying to catch them.” Fel nods to the jacked-up car.

  “They get a look at the shooters?”

  “Nope.”

  Interesting. “What kind of guns they get?”

  “Shotguns, AK-47s, Tec-9s, semi auto handguns.”

  “Jesus, in a pawn shop?”

  Felicity laughs. “This is America, buddy. Everybody’s got a right to bear arms.”

  What did Avery call it? The Wild West?

  Another Humvee pulls up to the loading bay and guardsmen pull out two body bags.

  Felicity explains, “Still finding bodies from the hurricane.”

  “Thought we sent them to San Gabriel?”

  “Gotta check if they’re murder victims, remember? And you ain’t the only guy shootin’ people. Fourth District shot a burglar this morning. Gretna cops shot two armed robbers. Just wounded the bastards. Trooper killed a man with a machete on Airline.”

  Beau opens the door of the Escalade. “When we get the phones up, I’ll give those mayors a call. We’ve had those thugs forever. It’s their turn now.”

  “They should just put the Katricians in camps,” Felicity says with a smart-aleck smile. “The government’s done it before. Japanese-Americans during WWII.”

  Beau climbs in. “Yeah? Little like reservations.”

  Felicity closes his eyes, “Wow. Oh, yeah.”

  “Weren’t your ancestors brought over in chains?”

  “You’d think this was a bad place.”

  They both laugh as Beau pulls away before a reporter spots him.

  •

  The heat wakes Beau and he sees its ten after four p.m. His sheets damp with perspiration and he’s all sweaty. He gets up, goes for the thermostat and turns it down and the AC starts back up.

  Where’s the kitten?

  He looks around the bed and under it, goes down to take a shower, calling out, “Kitty. Kitty. Where are you?”

  For a moment he panics. Did she get out? Everything’s locked up tight, port holes cracked maybe an inch. Screens still up.

  “Kitty? Kitty?”

  He searches the entire place, can’t find her. Starts to really worry now. Goes back up the loft and pulls off the sheets, pillow cases, gotta wash them anyway, he hadn’t rolled over and flattened the little tyke. No kitten.

  “Kitty? Kitty?”

  Damn. She was in bed with him last night, stretched out next to him and he was careful not to roll on her. He finds no squashed body anywhere upstairs.

  “Kitty? Kitty?”

  He goes back down and looks around again, hears a scratching and sees the kitten scamper down from the loft along one of the cross beams running from floor to ceiling along the wall of the cabin.

  “So that’s ho
w you’re getting up and down.”

  She jumps to the floor and he scoops her and nuzzles the little girl. She swats at him. He lays on her back in his left hand and tickles her belly and she latches on to his fingers, growling a little now, then letting out little meows.

  “OK. Time for a real name. Something you’ll answer to.”

  She lets out a high pitched squeal and it hits him. A New Orleans cat deserves a New Orleans name.

  “You’re Stella. As in Stellllaaaa! From Streetcar Named Desire.” She’s latches on to his thumb and gnaws at his fingertip. “I’ll have to show you the movie sometime.” He takes her into the bathroom, puts her on the closed toilet lid, pets her little head.

  “Stella! You’re a pretty little girl.”

  She’s still there when he gets out of the shower, watches him towel off, follows him into the kitchen where he refills her food dish, water dish, starts up breakfast.

  She’s a little cutie, climbing up on the chair next to him to watch him eat pancakes. He dabs a little cane syrup on his finger, gives it to her. She sniffs it, but that’s it. Sits back and watches with those big green eyes, her long blue gray fur all fluffy. Stella looks like a little stuffed animal. He makes sure the AC’s at a decent temperature when he locks Stella in just before six p.m.

  When the Humvee’s don’t show by six thirty, he calls Avery on the radio, gets Aligood.

  “We’re still at the airport. You coming?”

  “I gassed up last night.”

  “We have no transportation. They took our Humvees for repairs.”

  “Roger.”

  Beau gets out, puts on his flak vest. He knows he shouldn’t go out alone. He’ll miss the firepower from the Humvees. But this was the only way to find the bastards. Six holes in the Escalade and its just begun.

  •

  Ace Boody brings one of the po-boys over to Carlos as he sits propped up against the rear doorway of loading dock of the warehouse. Terez, sitting cross-legged next to her man, takes the sandwich from Ace, puts it in her lap and goes back to working on Carlos’s left eye. She has a flashlight in one hand, a pair of tweezers in the other.

  Carlos growls, lifts his bottle of tequila, takes a hit, lets her at it and Terez plucks the remaining two splinters from beneath his left eye. She presses a somewhat clean, wet towel against her man’s eye and he grimaces.

  “Fuckin’ tree bark,” Carlos says. He blinks his right eye at Terez. “Stings.”

  She opens the wrapping around the po-boy – a New Orleans specialty, roast beef with heavy gravy, lettuce, tomatoes, mayonnaise in a loaf of French bread. She puts half in her man’s right hand, takes a bite of the other half. He takes a huge bite, dark brown gravy dripping down his chin.

  Ace sits a few feet away, grabs one of the cold root beers. Axel wipes his mouth as he sits a few feet away. Donna Elena sits away from all of them, leaning her back against the other side of the loading dock doorway. She watches them carefully. Ace eyes her as she eats her po-boy delicately, like a bird. She’s a pretty one, but moody. Too fuckin’ quiet.

  Axel finally swallows the huge bite he’d stuffed into his mouth, raises his sandwich to Ace, asks, “Where the fuck you get these?”

  “Place re-opened in the quarter.”

  “This time of night?”

  “New Orleans, man. It never closes.”

  A car door slams and four men come around from the side of the warehouse, a heavy-set black man, looks to be around forty, two Latinos trying to look hard and a white man, looks to Ace like a meth-head, skinny, smiling at Donna Elena with typical meth-bad teeth.

  “Yo, Ace,” says the heavy-set black man, older than the others and named Oscar Stevens, a lower Ninth Warder just back in town. He raises a white plastic bag, says, “Hope y’all like Bud.” He hands it to one of the Latinos who starts passing out cans of Bud Light. All the new men have semi-automatic pistols in the waistbands of their jeans. All wear different color tee-shirts. The other Latino carries three boxes of pizza.

  “It ain’t that hot, but it’s good shit,” says the new white boy.

  The pizza boxes are put down and the Latino flips one open and snatches a slice of pepperoni. Papa John’s Pizza. Back in business on Rampart Street. All the men settle down with beer, pizza, po-boys. Terez grabs one of the pizza boxes, sausage pizza for her and Carlos, brings it to him as he’s finished his sandwich. He grabs a slice, takes a big bite.

  “Now,” Carlos says, “What the fuck were you sayin’ about that cop?”

  “He was there, I tell you. I seen him. In all black. Fuckin’ badge and all. He the one shot Amos, flat out. Weren’t no machine gun like that splintered you.”

  “Fuck!” Carlos takes another bite.

  “He’s been all over town,” Ace adds. “Every night in that black SUV.”

  Carlos eyes the new comers, the younger ones watching them, the older one pretending he isn’t.

  “The fucker’s gotta sleep somewhere.”

  “Probably on one of them cruise ships,” Ace says. “We can cover both, look for the black SUV, watch to see if he’s cagy, comes out in another car.”

  “You can spot him?”

  “He’s tall, always wears black. We can try to spot him.”

  Carlos nods at the newcomers, “They any good?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  The three are checking Donna out now. She faces the older one, gives him a tough look but Carlos knows she’s scared.

  “Get ‘em over here,” Carlos snarls.

  Ace comes over, lowers his voice. “Your brother sent the Latins, the white boy’s from here. He found good pizza on the way in, didn’t he?” Ace grins and Carlos hates that. This ain’t funny business.

  “The fuck are their names?”

  “The bro is Oscar, white boy is Jimmy, the others are Jose and Jose. Jimmy calls them Jose-one and Jose-two.”

  “Which is which?”

  Ace shrugs.

  •

  The humidity is so thick it’s like running through a steam bath and Beau slows down as he’s closing on the marina. The breeze atop the levee is hot, the strong sun beating down on his head. He wears a gray tee-shirt, jogging shorts and black Reeboks. He has his old gunbelt draped across his chest, like a cross-belt, the baby Glock inside the holster, badge clipped to the belt.

  Beau’s thinking – It’s steamiest just before sunset.

  The bicyclist he’s been following turns and starts heading back this way. A teen-aged girl with short brown hair and wearing a bikini top and shorts on a pink racing bike, approaching fast.

  What the fuck?

  She smiles as she approaches and he moves aside, slows and he says, “This isn’t the safest area.” She wears large sunglasses, her red lips standing out on a pretty face.

  She nods. “I know. But they’ll have to catch me.” She jacks it up on the way past and zooms on.

  Catch me? You can’t outrun a bullet, lady.

  He watches her. A hundred yards past, she zips down off the levee to the street and head back into Metairie. There’s no electricity there either. Unless she comes from one of the houses with a generator.

  Stella sits up in the center of the living room when Beau goes back in. She turns, coils her back and bounces toward him as he approaches and leaps at his hand when he reaches her, picks her up to tickle her and her paws flail and she lets out mewing noises. He puts her down, pulling out the orange golf ball he’d found on the levee, rolls it away from her and she goes right after it, swats it and follows it under the small kitchen table.

  “Shower time.”

  He skips shaving. When he comes out, Stella’s atop the closed toilet seat watching him. He flicks water at her and she swats at it. After supper, as he’s dressed for work, Stella joins Beau on the sofa and they play the tickle game again. When he lets go, she runs to the far side of the sofa, crouches and creeps toward his hand to bounce on it. Damn claws are sharp and her teeth like little needles, but she doesn’t bite ha
rd, her mewing louder. She growls too, even hisses when the fingers seem to win the wrestling but comes back for more.

  He’s getting use to her sleeping with him, worrying he’s going to roll over on her when she stretches out on the sheet next to him, purring herself to sleep. When it’s time to get up later, she wakes him just before the alarm, nuzzling his chin.

  Beau makes sure the food dish and water dishes are full, empties the litter box, checks to see the air conditioner is set to come back on if it gets too hot in the houseboat and he’s cracked a couple port holes to make sure the air’s circulated, although Sad Lisa is anything but airtight. On particularly windy days, air streams though her.

  Stella returns to stand in the same spot and watches him leave. He chuckles at her.

  He spies Ann and Stu sitting on their boat as he locks up after five-thirty. It’s finally getting dark early and maybe the long, disastrous summer of 2005 may finally give way to autumn. Stu waves and he calls out, “Y’all still have a key to my boat?”

  “Sure do, Baby,” Ann calls back.

  “If anything happens to me, take care of Stella, OK?”

  “That’s what you calling her?”

  “That’s her name. New Orleans gal. Stellllaaaa!”

  •

  As Beau finishes filling up the Escalade, Felicity Jones comes over and says, “We got hits on the bullets. Same gun used in both Lakeview murders, including yours by the lighthouse. Tec-9, same one that peppered the side of your SUV.

  “Fuckin’ Brown Ravens.”

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  “What about the prints from the pickup?”

  “FBI. Slow as molasses. LSP did the bullets up in Baton Rouge.”

  Felicity yawns, stretches. He’s trying to wear something that looks like a suit, even has a tie that’s loose around his thick neck, but it looks silly with a khaki shirt and brown, tactical pants.

  “Got more data on the Brown Ravens. They’ve muscled into San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas. M.O. is to muscle into a city, try to take over the mid-level drug supply and run the street-level dealers. There’s more of them than I suspected.”