by Don Winslow
That may or may not be true.
What is known is that after that night she never again spoke above a hoarse whisper.
Jimmy goes berserk.
Swinging his head like a club, he knocks Angelo away from him, then swings the other way and hits Wilmer. He kicks behind like a mule, sending a uniform sprawling.
Then Jimmy starts to bang his head into the bar.
Once, twice.
A third time.
Hard.
Angelo tries to grab his shoulders, but Jimmy, his head streaming blood, pushes up, turns, and bull-rushes him back over a table. Bottles and glasses fly as Angelo crashes to the floor.
Jimmy whirls and kicks one cop in the gut.
Turns and back-kicks another in the knee.
Another cop runs up to grab him, but Jimmy head-butts him across the bridge of the nose and the cop lets go.
Harold bear-hugs Jimmy from behind, traps his arms, and lifts him off his feet. Jimmy wraps his left foot around Harold’s ankle and then brings his right heel up into Harold’s crotch. Harold doesn’t let go, but it does loosen his grip enough for Jimmy to twist his right arm out, stick his palm under Harold’s chin, and push. Most guys would give it up before their neck snaps, but Harold isn’t most guys. His neck is like a bull’s, and he holds on. “I don’t want to hurt you, Jimmy.”
Jimmy knees him twice in the balls.
No muscles there.
Harold lets go.
Jimmy kicks another table over, two more chairs, runs against a wall, slams his head into it, then knees it, knocking a hole in the plaster.
Angelo taps him in the back of the head with a borrowed baton.
A deft, expert blow.
Jimmy slides down the wall unconscious.
Four guys carry him out and shove him into the back of a cruiser.
They drive him to the 6th and put him in a holding cell.
Captain Landreau doesn’t like Jimmy McNabb, but he doesn’t like seeing one of his guys sitting on the floor of a cell with his back against the wall either.
“Get him the hell out of there,” Landreau says. “Now.”
They open the door, Jimmy gets up and walks out.
His team’s waiting for him, but Jimmy sees two uniforms looking at a cell phone, their faces ashen. They stop and put it down when they spot Jimmy.
“What?” Jimmy asks. “What are they looking at?”
“You don’t want to see it,” Angelo says.
“What are you looking at?” Jimmy asks one of the uniforms, a scared rookie.
The rookie doesn’t answer.
“I said what the fuck you looking at?”
The rookie turns to Angelo, like, What should I do? This is Jimmy freaking McNabb.
“What are you looking at him for?” Jimmy asks. “I’m talking to you. Give me that fucking phone.”
“You don’t want to see it, Jimmy,” Angelo says.
“I’ll decide what I want to see,” Jimmy says. He turns back to the rookie. “Hand it the fuck over.”
The rookie hands it over.
Jimmy sees the vid-clip and hits Play.
Sees—
Danny screaming his throat out.
The chair jumping like a windup-toy rabbit.
“Look at him hop!” a voice says.
Another voice: “Fire it up again.”
“He might die.” A third voice.
“Don’t let him,” the second man says. “Not yet.”
A gap in the clip. A cut, then—
Danny’s chin drops.
His body is burned.
And broken.
Every major bone.
“You got all this?” the second man asks.
“It will go viral,” a new voice says.
“Get this, too,” the second guy says. “T-Ball.”
A ball bat swings at Danny’s head.
Another cut, then—
Danny’s charred body, fetal, his clenched hands reaching toward his face like black claws, lying in tall grass and garbage along the river.
A chyron rolls across the bottom of the screen:
OSCAR SAYS HELLO.
Jimmy McNabb always thought the word “heartbreak” was a metaphor.
Now he knows better.
His heart is broken.
He is broken.
They bury Danny among the tombs in Lafayette Cemetery Number 1 up in the Garden District.
The calling hours were brutal, the coffin closed.
There will be no Irish wake. No one wants to laugh and tell stories. There’s no cause for laughter, and Danny’s life was too short for many stories. And John McNabb is already drunk—it’s business as usual—just angrier, more sodden, more bitter, even more silent.
He is no comfort to his wife or surviving son.
Then again there is no comfort.
Police in full dress uniform and white gloves—Jimmy is one of them—carry the coffin to the grave.
The rifles sound, the bagpipe plays “Amazing Grace.”
Eva doesn’t cry.
A small woman, smaller now, dressed in black, she sits in the folding chair and stares straight ahead.
Accepts the folded flag and lays it on her lap.
Jolene does cry—shoulders shaking, she sobs as her mother and father hold her.
The bagpipe plays “Danny Boy.”
The house is a classic New Orleans shotgun close to Annunciation Street off Second Avenue. A small front yard, scrawny grass and dirt, sits behind a chain-link fence that runs along the cracked sidewalk.
Jimmy enters through the front door into the sitting room.
His old man sits in an easy chair.
A glass in his left hand, he stares out the window and doesn’t acknowledge Jimmy.
They ain’t had a lot to say to each other since Jimmy was about eighteen, finally bigger than Big John, and he shoved his shit-faced old man against the kitchen wall and said, “You ever hit Mom again, I’ll kill you.”
And Big John, he laughed and said, “You ain’t gotta worry about that. I ever hit her again, she’ll kill me.”
Turns out Eva had bought herself a little Glock 19 and told Big John exactly that—“You raise a fist to me again, I’ll send you to meet your Maker.”
Big John believed her.
Only hit walls and doors after that.
Now Jimmy walks past him, through his parents’ bedroom, then through the room that him and Danny shared.
Fuckin’ painful, being in that room.
Remembers how he used to clamp his hands over Danny’s ears when Big John and Eva was goin’ at it. And Danny, he’d ask, “John’s hitting Eva again, isn’t he?”
“No,” Jimmy would say. “They’re just playin’.”
But Danny knew.
Jimmy was trying to protect him, like he always did, but he couldn’t protect him from that.
And you couldn’t protect him when he needed you the most, Jimmy thinks as he looks around the room—the old ball gloves, the Jessica Alba poster with the corner peeling down showing the yellow masking tape, the window him and Danny used to go through to sneak out at night and drink beers Jimmy had hidden in the park.
Jimmy walks into the kitchen, where Eva stands at the counter pouring her strong, chicory-laced coffee into a mug.
A pot of chicken gumbo simmers on the stove.
Jimmy always swore that the same pot of gumbo sat on the stove for as long as he could remember and that Eva would just come in from time to time and dump in more water and new ingredients.
She’s changed out of the black dress into a dark blue blouse and jeans. Now she holds the coffeepot up to Jimmy, and he shakes his head.
“A drink, then?”
“No.”
“You need to check in on Jolene,” Eva says. “She’s taking it hard.”
“I will.”
She looks him up and down, a long evaluation. Then she says, “You’re an angry man, Jimmy. You were an angry boy.”
Eva is right.
“You hate for the sake of hating,” she says.
Again, Jimmy thinks.
“I tried to love the hate out of you,” Eva says, “but you were consumed with it. Maybe it was your father, maybe it was me, maybe it was just your nature, but I couldn’t reach you.”
Jimmy doesn’t say anything.
He knows Eva well enough to know she’s not done.
“Danny wasn’t that way,” she says. “He was a loving little boy, a loving man. He was the best of us.”
“I know.”
Another long look, another appraisal. Then Eva takes his wrists in her hands. “I want you to embrace everything I tried to love out of you. I want you to embrace your hate. I want you to avenge your brother.”
She looks up into his bruised, cut face.
Into his black, swollen eyes.
“You do that for me?” Eva asks. “You do that for me. You think of Danny. You think of your baby brother.”
Jimmy nods.
“And you kill them all,” Eva says. “You kill all the men who killed my Danny.”
“I will.”
Eva lets go of his wrists.
“And you make it hurt,” she says.
The crash pad is in the Quarter, on the second floor of an old building on Dauphine Street.
The apartment belongs to a major weed slinger doing eight years in Avoyelles. He’s doing his time there instead of in Angola because McNabb put in a word with the sentencing judge, who owed him a favor.
So the team gets to house-sit a place in the French Quarter, near the clubs, the bars, and the streams of tourist women. They took full advantage of all that.
But those were better times.
Now Jimmy stands in the middle of the living room.
“There were four voices on that tape,” he says. “One of them was obviously Oscar Diaz. We don’t have an ID on the other three.”
“The boy you tossed in the river showed up dead,” Angelo says. “Bullet in the back of the head. So no help there.”
“What about the others we arrested?” Jimmy asks.
Wilmer takes over. He’s the Honduran.
“One got shanked in Orleans,” he says, referring to the city’s central jail. “He bled out before the COs got there. The other two made bail.”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“They’re in the wind,” Wilmer says. “Probably running from Oscar harder than they are from us.”
“What about Oscar?”
“I’ve been all over Barrio Lempira,” Wilmer says, citing the biggest Honduran neighborhood. “I’ve been to St. Teresa’s. No one knows where he holes up.”
“Or they know and they’re not giving him up,” Angelo says.
Wilmer shakes his head. “No. I went to friends, cousins, family. The whole community is angry about what happened to Danny. This Oscar asshole is new. No family, nothing. No one really knows him.”
“Someone does,” Jimmy says. “Someone knows someone. Go back to the neighborhood. Shake it hard.”
“It’s going to be next to impossible,” Harold says, “to find all four of these guys.”
“I don’t have to find all four,” Jimmy says. “I just have to find the first.”
Jimmy and Angelo drive out to Metairie, across Highway 61 over in Jefferson Parish.
A green, leafy suburb.
“They didn’t used to let brothers buy out here,” Angelo says. “You came to Metairie, you came to clean toilets.”
“What changed?” Jimmy asks.
“Katrina,” Angelo says. “People needed houses, the market couldn’t resist.”
“Did you want to live out here?” Jimmy asks.
“Hell no.”
“So why do you care?”
“I don’t,” Angelo says. “Just making conversation.”
Angelo takes Northline to Nassau Drive, an arc of mansions with big lawns and swimming pools abutted by the country club.
Charlie Corello’s red-tile-roofed house is set off the sixth tee. Angelo parks in the curved driveway, and they walk up to the door and ring the bell. A maid answers and leads them out to the swimming pool in a walled courtyard.
Bare-chested, deeply tanned, and slathered in sunblock, Corello sits under an umbrella at a wrought-iron table, sipping an iced tea and looking at his laptop. He gets up and puts a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “I’m sorry for your loss, Jimmy.”
“Thank you.”
“Sit down.” He gestures to two chairs. “Good to see you, Angelo. You guys want anything?”
“No thanks.”
The thick hair on Charlie’s head and chest is snow white, and he’s put on a few pounds since Jimmy last saw him—what, maybe five years ago. Charlie’s grandfather used to run all of New Orleans. Hell, he ran all of Louisiana. Truth be told, he ran a lot of the United States.
Some people say that Charlie’s grandfather had the president assassinated.
The Corello family ain’t what it used to be, but Charlie still wields a lot of influence in New Orleans. Drugs, prostitution, extortion, protection—the usual mob franchises.
They all pay for Charlie to sit under an umbrella by the country club.
“How’s Eva taking this?” Charlie asks.
“Like you’d expect.”
“Give her my regards.”
“I will.”
“What can I do to help?” Charlie asks.
“You do business with any Hondurans?” Jimmy asks.
“We’re off the record here?” Charlie says. “I don’t have to pat you down for any wires?”
“You know me better.”
Charlie does. Him and Jimmy have done business, back in the day when Jimmy was a street cop, later when he was a plainclothes in Vice. Jimmy got an envelope at Christmas, Charlie ensured that his people didn’t get violent with the girls or sell dope to kids.
They each kept their word.
Jimmy ain’t taken an envelope since he moved to Narcotics, and he’s busted a few of Charlie’s associates but never worked the case back to Metairie.
“I buy product from some Hondurans,” Charlie says, “but not from this cocksucker Diaz.”
“So you don’t know how to find him.”
“I’ll put my people on it,” Charlie says, “and if they come up with anything, you’ll be the first to know.”
“I appreciate that,” Jimmy says. “Here’s something you should know. I’m going to put serious pressure on the dope-slinging community, and this time I’m going to follow it wherever it leads me, even if that’s to Jeff Parish. Capisce, Carlo?”
“Don’t threaten me, Jimmy,” Charlie says. “We go way back, our fathers before us. Come to me as a friend.”
“As a friend,” Jimmy says, “there were four men in that room. I’ll take any one of them.”
Charlie sips his tea and takes a long look out at the golf course, where a foursome of drunk bubbas jack up the sixth green. He turns back to Jimmy and says, “I’ll get you a name.”
Wilmer and Harold walk into the little club in Barrio Lempira with their badges held out in front of them.
About a dozen people sit at the bar or at tables in the middle of the day. Most are men, all of them Hondurans, none of them happy to see the police.
“Good afternoon!” Wilmer says. “This is a friendly visit from your New Orleans Police Department!”
Groans, curses.
One man bolts for the rear door, but Harold is fast for a big man. He catches him by the back of the shirt, grabs him, and throws him against the wall.
“Empty your pockets!” Wilmer says. “Put everything on the bar or a table! If we find anything in your pockets, that item or items will go down your throat or up your ass, depending on my always mercurial mood! Hazlo!”
Hands go into pockets, come out with crumpled bills, change, keys, phones, little bags of weed, pills, a needle, a spoon.
Harold pats down his man
, comes out with a flip knife and a bag of marijuana, a roll of bills and some crystal. “Well, well, well, what have we here?”
“It’s not mine.”
“And that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that.” He rips a wallet from his back pocket and finds a driver’s license. “If I run you, Mendez, Mauricio, am I going to find an outstanding warrant? Don’t lie to me.”
“No.”
“I said don’t lie to me.”
The owner behind the bar gives Wilmer an ugly look.
Wilmer sees it. “Are you eye-fucking me, cabrón? You got something you want to say?”
The owner mutters something about “your own people.”
Wilmer walks over, grabs him by the front of the shirt, and pulls him half over the bar. “Let’s get something straight. You’re not my people. My people have jobs. They’re out working instead of drinking in a shithole bar in the middle of the afternoon.”
He pulls the owner in closer. “You want to mumble at me some more, boss, or do you want to keep your teeth in your mouth?”
The owner looks down at the bar top.
Wilmer leans in and whispers, “Every day, cabrón. I’m coming back every day until these cucarachas stop coming in here. The fire inspector, the health inspector, they’ll be here every day, too, and a twenty ain’t going to stop them from finding violations.”
“What do you want, money?”
“You want a slap, don’t you?” Wilmer says. “I don’t want money, cabrón, I want names. I want names of anyone who knows Oscar Diaz or anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone who knows him.”
He lets the owner go and turns to a young guy sitting on a stool. “I’m going to pat you down, m’ijo.”
“I’m not your son.”
“You don’t know that,” Wilmer says. “I get around. Hands on the bar.”
The guy puts his hands on the bar. Wilmer pats him down and finds a bag of weed in his jeans pocket. “What did I tell you? Huh? What did I tell you?”
Wilmer rips the weed out of the bag and holds it up to the kid’s mouth. “Bon appétit.”
The guy shakes his head and clamps his mouth shut.
“You want it up your culo instead?” Wilmer asks. “Because I will do that. Then I’ll take you in. Now eat.”
The guy shoves the weed into his mouth.
Wilmer addresses the rest of them. “Put your keys and your money back in your pockets! Everything else now belongs to me. You all heard what happened to that young officer. It brings shame on my community. Someone better come to me with names. Or you will have no place to be in the middle of the afternoon. Everywhere you go, there I will be!”
