EQMM, November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Hey,” called out Joe. “I hear they're gonna put y'all up on a cruise ship."

  "Not us,” Beau called back. No need explaining that they were stationed at the airport, which was dry, living in the main terminal with doctors, nurses, National Guardsmen, and a platoon of Royal Canadian Mounties, the same Mounties who were the first ones to go into St. Bernard when no one else bothered. Beau could imagine the people on their roofs getting rescued and asking, Who are you guys?

  Mounties. From Canada.

  Back up on deck, he found Joe sitting in a lawn chair he didn't recognize. “You're coming with us?"

  "No. No. It's peaceful here.” Joe raised the beer can. “Got five more cases. Could use some grub, though."

  They had three dozen MREs in the pirogue and twelve gallons of water, figuring they'd find people on roofs, so they left nearly all with Joe.

  "You want my off-duty piece?” Beau asked.

  Joe lifted his T-shirt to show a revolver tucked into his shorts. “My trusty Colt'll do the trick."

  Beau went into the tool chest and brought out a can of red spray paint. On the blue tarp covering the blown-out windows of Sad Lisa he printed NOPD. Then he went down and took out one of his uniform shirts.

  "When the Coast Guard or National Guard come around, put this on and tell them you're my uncle or something."

  "This is still my boatyard.” Joe belched again.

  "This is also a mandatory evacuation area."

  Cruz climbed back into the pirogue, sitting up front again. Beau went to the motor.

  "Thanks for the grub,” Joe called out.

  "We'll be back in a few days."

  "I'll be here."

  Beau took his time maneuvering out of the boatyard back across what once was West End Park. A huge black helicopter carrying three large sandbags passed overhead, heading for the levee break. The hot air was thick with the stench of burnt wood as they passed the shell of the Southern Yacht Club, which had burned to the ground, the waterline actually, just after the storm hit. Beau had heard about it as he tried to get back into the city from his vacation. He'd gone back home to Vermilion Parish. Stopped at a roadblock on I-10, he was eventually brought to the airport, where he linked up with his lieutenant, who was surprised to see him back in town.

  "I got an assignment for you,” Lieutenant Merten had said, sweat glistening on his dark brown face. They were outside the main terminal of Armstrong International Airport in Kenner. “I want you and the rookie to stay out here and log in the bodies."

  "What?” Beau had come back to rescue people.

  "You and the rookie.” Merten actually tapped Cruz atop the head. “Log the bodies they bring out of the city. I need a homicide team to check for 30-victims. Get all you can on them before they whisk them away to St. Gabriel. IDs if you can ID them, describe wounds, anything. I want someone who knows a murder victim to spot them. Before these military doctors get around to posting the bodies. We need to know how many murders we got. I want you to stay here. So don't argue with me."

  Beau wasn't arguing.

  Merten wiped the sweat from his face. “We got snipers shooting at the Corps of Engineers who're trying to get to the holes in the levees, got looters all over the city. We need the army, a couple of airborne divisions."

  "The navy,” Beau said. “They have the boats."

  "Freakin’ A.” Merten wiped his face again.

  It made sense to Beau, an experienced homicide team at the airport, but he didn't like it. In the first thirty-six hours, he and Cruz confirmed only one murder victim, a street punk he recognized immediately. Jimmy Bigelow, a.k.a. Killboy, was on NOPD's top-ten wanted list, a drug-dealing murderer from the lower ninth ward. Arrested twice for first-degree murder, Killboy never went to trial. The ever-inefficient D.A.'s office nol-prossed each charge, claiming they couldn't get witnesses to testify. Beau was the investigating officer in one case and didn't need witnesses, he'd recovered the murder weapon with Killboy's fingerprints on it next to a body lying inside Cassandra's Social and Pleasure Club on St. Claude Avenue, but the D.A. didn't feel it was enough.

  Beau had to admit, seeing Killboy with a neat hole in his forehead made up for not bringing him to trial. Only he wondered how many crimes Killboy had perpetrated in the two years since the Cassandra case.

  Merten had pulled Beau aside before he led the rest of the assembled NOPD back into the city. “We got a buncha people AWOL. Glad you came back.” Beau, on a three-week vacation, certainly didn't have to return, but how could he do anything but? As Merten backpedaled away he added, “Take care of the rookie."

  That was Saturday, September third, and this was Monday, and instead of turning back to the lake to return to Bucktown, Beau guided the pirogue away from the levee breach into Lakeview. The water was nearly to the roofs of the houses and probably still rising in this brown-water world. He waited for Cruz to ask what they were doing now, but she just faced straight ahead, probably seeing nothing but the memory of her apartment.

  The smells were even stronger away from the levee, a rotting, mildew stench, oil floating on the water. They moved through patches reeking of sewerage. Cruz waved at a patch of churning water to their right. “What's that?"

  "Gas main. Natural gas.” That particular stench was added to the rest as Beau maneuvered away from the bubbling water.

  Eventually Cruz turned her head and asked, “Where are we going now?"

  "Looking for someone to rescue. I'm tired of waiting around for bodies."

  She nodded and said, almost under her breath, “We should get back."

  This was their off time. Rest time. Sleep time. Their twelve-hour shift was approaching. Another team, two homicide detectives from Eugene, Oregon, was covering the day watch. Young, both in their late twenties, they'd handled exactly one murder in their careers. Eugene wasn't a hotbed of crime. Back at the airport, cops were still arriving from all over, volunteers trying to help with the greatest natural disaster in American history. Beau had never seen so many different badges.

  The strong sun was hot on Beau's head and he wished he'd taken the green baseball cap offered by the Eugene cops. A University of Oregon Fighting Ducks cap. The logo looked like a pissed-off Donald Duck. When he was at LSU they played the Ducks his freshman year. He got in a couple plays, ran a quarterback bootleg for fifty-six yards and a touchdown. Headline the next day in the Baton Rouge paper read: Tigers Feast on Duck 47-0.

  "Seriously, Raven, we should be getting back.” She'd turned to face him and tapped down her sunglasses to glom him over the top. He saw Cruz was back. Those chocolate-colored eyes were focused now, serious again.

  He glommed her back. “Don't call me Raven."

  She thought it was cute, a joke between the two of them. He didn't like it. She'd started it back when she'd worked with him on a case where Beau tracked down a cop killer who called himself The Wolf. Ran the man to ground and watched him commit suicide.

  Beau was half Cajun, half Sioux. At six-two he towered over Cruz. He was lean at one-eighty pounds, with dark brown hair in need of a haircut and a square jaw. He'd been told he had the look of a predator with sharp, light-brown eyes and hooded brow—a hawk, actually, with his thin nose. Not shaving regularly gave his normal five o'clock shadow a deeper hue.

  It began to smell a little like the swamp around Vermilion Bay and for a moment Beau was taken back to the pirogue he'd paddled with his father when he was little and the world seemed a magical place to fish, hunt, and explore. That was until he went to school and was called a swamp rat by the other kids.

  Cruz turned around again. “You never told me how your mother and father met. How did a Sioux woman from North Dakota meet a Cajun from south Louisiana?” Since partnering with Beau, Cruz had asked more about his background than any partner he'd known. Maybe because she was Hispanic and big on her heritage, part Cuban, part Costa Rican.

  "South Dakota,” he corrected her.

  "Okay, South Dakota. How'd they link up?"


  Jesus. The questions never stopped. Beau took in a deep breath of sticky air. “My mother was a mail-order bride from the reservation."

  "Really?"

  "No."

  "Raven!"

  "Don't call me that."

  Her eyes went wide with impatience. Beau almost smiled.

  "They met at a USO show. He was in the army and she was a singer."

  He could almost hear his mother's soft voice singing him to sleep in that old Cajun daubed cabin they'd lived in back on Vermilion Bay. Built by Beau's great-grandfather, its walls filled with swamp mud to keep the house almost cool in summer and warm in winter, it was unpainted and the greatest place for a boy to grow up.

  Cruz was more interested in his Sioux half, asking to see the obsidian knife he carried in a sheath at the small of his back. Why was it sharp on only one side? Why a rock knife? Why the bone handle? He told her it was the way of the plains warrior, the Lakota, called Sioux by the white-eyes and their enemies the Crow and Pawnee.

  Another withering stare from Cruz had Beau turn the pirogue around and head back toward West End. Sticking to the center of the streets to keep from running into the roofs of cars, they passed the carcasses of two dead dogs as they eased through an intersection, the street signs indicating they were at the corner of Colbert and Chapelle. A meow turned them both to the right. An orange-striped cat atop a roof meowed again and took a hesitant step their way.

  "Over there,” Cruz called out.

  "I see it.” Beau turned the pirogue and cut the engine as they neared a one-story brick home. Cruz grabbed the roof's gutter and called up to the cat, which just meowed back.

  "You might have to snatch it,” Beau said just before the cat lowered its ears and crept close enough for Cruz to stand and grab it by the scruff of its neck.

  "It's only a juvenile,” she said. It looked skinny to Beau, whose Catahoula hound dog was thankfully safe back at his uncle's cabin on Bayou Brunet. He eased the pirogue away from the house.

  "There aren't any people to rescue here."

  "They evacuated early."

  "It's the people in the Ninth Ward, Lower Ninth, Mid-City, Hollygrove,” Cruz said, petting the cat which she held tightly in her arms. “They don't have cars."

  That Beau knew; some made it to the Superdome and Convention Center but some of the old ones, young stubborn ones, others who didn't believe the weathermen, just stayed home. Beau couldn't blame them. He was tired of hearing the gloom-and-doom from the weathermen. Hadn't the city evacuated for Hurricanes Georges and Ivan for no reason? Sixteen hours in gridlocked traffic just to turn around. Every time a tropical storm inched into the Gulf, the weathermen came on the air with special reports, each network trying to outdo the other, scaring everyone with bulletins crying Wolf—wolf; The sky is falling, the sky is falling. They were bound to be right once and Katrina was it.

  Beau looked around at the devastation and his heart sank even further.

  "I heard the Quarter hasn't flooded,” Cruz called out. “Yet."

  To illustrate her point, another chopper flew overhead with big sandbags for the levee break. Beau thought of the French Quarter. Hopefully, it wouldn't flood. It was the first dry place the French discovered when they came up the Mississippi. Too bad the city had expanded away from the river into the marshland. If the Quarter was destroyed, New Orleans was gone.

  Cruz called the cat Lucky—a female not a year old, according to a veterinarian at the airport. They wanted to put Lucky in a cage but Cruz would have no part of it. She took the cat to her room, little more than a closet along Concourse A. She scored some cat food from the vet, went in with the cat, and didn't come out until shift change.

  Three bodies were brought in at the beginning of their shift, two bloated from being in water, the third fresh. Beau stepped into the hangar serving as a temporary morgue and watched an army pathologist examine the corpses as the black body bags were un-zipped. The floaters appeared to have drowned. Unzipping the third body bag, the pathologist turned to Beau and said, “This'll be for you."

  Another young African-American male, slim, light-skinned, clean-shaven, with a bullet hole in his forehead, dead center like Killboy, and like Killboy there was also a neat hole in the back of the head. Through-and-through with no sign of scorching or burn marks. Shot from a distance and the trajectory of the bullet was straight, too straight. It certainly wasn't a hollow-point round, like Beau carried, which would mushroom and blow a huge hole out the back of the head.

  "Armor-piercing round,” said the pathologist. “Saw a lot of this in Iraq."

  Beau glanced at the man's nametag: Sumner.

  "Gordon Sumner,” the man said as Beau jotted down his name. Beau narrowed his eyes, the name sounding familiar, which drew a nod from the pathologist. “Same name as Sting, but I had it first.” Beau stepped back to let the doc at the body.

  "Find an ID, let me know.” Beau moved to the two state troopers and NOPD sergeant who'd brought in the bodies. He knew the sergeant from the Second District. Stu Copeland had a beer belly and short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, his face red from exertion as he took a hit of an icy Mountain Dew.

  "Where'd you find the fresh one?"

  "Levee. Hayne Boulevard. Levee's still holding up there but the Intracoastal Waterway's got the east under water, man. Did you hear Notre Dame Seminary burned down?"

  "The whole place?"

  "Probably arson, former altar boys getting back at the priests."

  Jesus Christ.

  As Beau moved back toward the pathologist, Copeland waved at the body with his Dew. “It was only about a mile from where we found the other one with the hole in the head."

  "Killboy?” Beau remembered the notes on Killboy. He'd been found atop a house on Mayo Road.

  "Yeah,” Copeland confirmed. “Mayo and the levee. It's right near South Shore Harbor. Where the casino used to be, the one capsized in the lake.” Copeland took another sip of drink. “I know I'm no homicide man, but that first body had been moved. Looked like it was dropped on that roof."

  "Moved?"

  "Postmortem lividity was all wrong. You know. Blood settled on his backside but we found him facedown."

  "Maybe somebody rolled him over to check for vitals before y'all came around."

  "Could be."

  Dr. Sumner pulled a brown wallet from the victim's pants pocket. Beau put on a pair of surgical gloves as Cruz stepped up. They used the hood of a blue police car from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to lay out and inspect the contents. There was a Blockbuster card in the wallet, pictures of three different women, one with a baby in her arms, a wrapped condom, four pieces of paper with writing on them, but the papers had been in water and the ink ran, and an expired Louisiana driver's license with the victim's picture on it. Freddie London, twenty-one years old, of 9111 Tricou Street. Beau took down his date of birth and social-security number.

  "Lower Ninth Ward."

  Beau dropped the wallet and contents in a brown paper bag, writing his name and unit number on the outside, along with Freddie London's name, and passed it back to the pathologist, who would send it along with the cadaver.

  Cruz followed Beau into an office where a computer actually worked. The NOPD and Louisiana State Police computers were down, but the FBI was up. Freddie London, same DOB and SSN, had fourteen arrests, from rape to armed robbery, extortion, burglary, and two heroin busts.

  "Jesus, what's he doing on the street?” Cruz said as Beau reached into the small NOPD file on the desk to pull out a printout of NOPD's Most Wanted. Freddie London was number twelve on the list.

  Beau sat in the gray metal chair behind the gray metal desk and looked out the small window at the bright sky outside. He pulled his shirt away from his chest and fanned it. There was some sort of air conditioner working in the hangar at least.

  "What are the mathematical probabilities?” he said. “Two of our most-wanted stone-freakin’ criminals are found a short distance from one another with h
oles in their heads, bullet trajectories nearly identical, through-and-through wounds so we can't compare bullets."

  Cruz shrugged.

  "Who is Sting?"

  "You gotta be kiddin'."

  Beau shrugged.

  "You didn't have MTV in that cabin?"

  Copeland peeked in and said, “They're bringing in six more."

  Floaters. Three black, two white, one Asian, a teenager. Beau and Cruz watched Dr. Sumner examine them, keeping as far away from the stench as possible.

  Beau found Copeland later, napping on a cot.

  "You awake?"

  "Huh?” Copeland blinked open his eyes and yawned. “I am now."

  Beau pulled up a folding chair and took out his notepad. “Describe everything, will ya? The area, how the bodies were lying, everything.” He handed Copeland a fresh Mountain Dew.

  * * * *

  Juanita Cruz found a CD player and a Led Zeppelin CD and began playing one particular song over and over again, letting it reverberate through the hangar. After the first fifty times, Beau'd had enough of the little ditty called “When the Levee Breaks.” He hoped someone would complain. No way he could tell a partner who had lost everything that the high-pitched male voice bemoaning that when the levee breaks he'll have no place to stay was gettting to be too much. The electric guitars just kept groaning and the man kept singing about how crying won't help you, praying won't do you no good, ending with the refrain “going down, going down.” He watched Cruz and knew she was listening intently, but her face revealed no emotion. It was creepy.

  During that shift nine bodies were brought in, all natural deaths. Drownings, classified accordingly by the pathologists, using the NASH classification system. Humans died a natural death, accidental death, suicide, or homicide. In New Orleans, where things were done differently on purpose, Beau had seen deaths listed beyond the NASH system. “Death by Misadventure” was the most common. Nearly everyone in Louisiana knew someone who'd died that way. Usually it was preceded by the victim calling out to friends, “Hey, y'all, watch this.” The victim would then jump off a roof or dive into a sluggish bayou that looked deeper than it was.