Roots of Misfortune

by Seth Pevey

  He put another hand in his pants pocket, debating with himself this time. It was ridiculous, wasn’t it? But surely it couldn’t hurt. A little extra bit of good luck never hurt anyone.

  “And something else, as well.”

  “Oh?”

  He placed the two balls of John the Conqueror in her hand.

  “They are a kind of…good luck charms. Though it seems like they haven’t brought so much good luck to any of these girls. But I figured…why not? It is supposed to be especially good for rebellious people. People fighting scrappy fights. Fights against forces larger than themselves.”

  Was she holding in a smirk? He couldn’t be sure. She put them in her purse, anyway.

  “I’ll take as much luck as I can get,” she finally said.

  “Luck, and those 5000 volts there,” he replied, running a quick hand along her forearm.

  When Felix got back to the office, Melancon had his chin down on his desk, staring longingly at a bottle as yet unopened.

  Felix stepped up to his desk gingerly, surveying the situation as best he could. There was no smell of liquor in the office and Melancon’s eyes were dry and focused.

  “You’re bigger than that stuff, you know,” Felix said.

  “Doesn’t feel like it, kid.”

  Felix handed the old man his coat. “Look. I want to show you something, partner. Out in the alley. Bring your pistol. Not your revolver, but that old 9mm with the silencer on it.”

  “It jams,” Melancon said, but Felix waved off his concerns.

  Pistol in hand, Melancon skeptically followed while the young man led him out into the alley between the two buildings. Felix had picked up the full whisky bottle, brought it with them down the stairs and out into the spring air.

  He placed the bottle of Wild Turkey 101 bourbon on a trashcan and stepped back from it, about ten feet.

  “Point your gun at it,” he said to his tired looking partner.

  Melancon immediately cast his eyes down onto the grimy bricks of the alley. Shame filled his old features. He kicked at a scrap of paper and said nothing.

  “Last night…in the cemetery…” Felix began, trying to say it with respect.

  “Felix, I…”

  “Point the gun partner. Point it at the bottle.”

  The old man sighed, raised the weapon in front of him in his right hand. It held true for a fraction of a second, before the hand then began to tremble. That tremble grew worse as he held it out, until finally it shook like a paint can mixer. Both detectives watched the hand as it quivered in the morning light, the barrel of the silencer tracing little circles of inaccuracy against the building’s brick backdrop.

  Felix grabbed the gun out of the old man’s outstretched hand.

  “The Melancon I used to know could knock the eraser off a pencil at ten yards.”

  “Yeah…” Melancon said. He put a hand to his face and rubbed his eyes, leaned up against the wall.

  “I need you, partner,” Felix said. “We are going out there tonight. We’ve already been shot at. It is life or death. Now, I’m willing to take that risk, but I need to know that the guy who has my back isn’t getting the delirium tremors from too much booze. I need to know that when it comes down to the moment, you can shoot true.”

  Melancon nodded.

  “I know what you are going through. But we have a girl who might not even be dead yet,” Felix said, pulling out the picture of the stunning young Asian woman and showing it to his partner. “Her name is Min Ji. She is a young girl just like Julie…Just like Julie in a lot of ways.”

  A skeptical look from Mealncon, but Felix brushed passed it.

  “And she sure as hell deserves a sober David Melancon. Because a sober David Melancon is unstoppable. He is drawn to the truth like a force of nature. He can shoot the eye out of a crow in flight. That’s the man I want watching my back out there tonight on Oyster Shell Road.”

  That drew a smile, however slight. “You’re right kid. You’re right.”

  Felix took a deep breath, quieting his nerves. In the stillness of the alley, the young man cleared his throat, raised the silenced pistol, flipped off the safety.

  “I’m younger than you. But I know this: you want to fight the Devil, partner, you have to fight dirty.”

  Felix pulled the trigger.

  The gun, despite its usual habit, did not jam. It threw a slug of lead that struck the bottle square and true, sending the amber liquid dribbling down the trashcan and onto the ground. Glass tinkled against the wall and the round imprint of the bullet could be seen in one of the bricks.

  “Jesus Christ, kid! Are you insane?” Melancon yelled.

  Felix put the gun back in his partner’s hand, gave him a curt nod, and walked towards the back door.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Seventeen

  It was past noon and the detectives blazed out beyond New Orleans East, out into swampland. Melancon’s shaky hand urged on the El Camino’s aging transmission, while The Complete Recordings of Robert Johnson again wailed from the tape deck—a hellhound in hot pursuit, crossroads at midnight, sweet home Chicago. Mile after mile the city-cement faded and wetlands took their dominion.

  They didn’t speak, but the voice from Felix’s phone punctuated Johnson’s plaintive melodies, navigating the two detectives towards Oyster Shell Road.

  They passed the old Six Flags: an amusement park that never took off, built as it was out on the edge of this swamp. The mire had never accepted the sunburned dads or their chubby children, and the investment had never been recouped. Instead the swamp that it was built in had quietly waited for The Big One to roll through, which she did in 2005, and then had happily filled back up with green water. The rollercoaster, which was to be its centerpiece, could now be seen rusting over the cypress trees, a blue and metal dragon rearing up out of the quag, protecting a treasure that had long ago shied away from this place.

  The dog stuck his head in between them, his tongue dripping on the gear shift. Big dollops of happy saliva, one after the other, landed on the back of Melancon’s hand.

  “I think it was a mistake to bring the dog, just for the record,” the old man said.

  “He saved us once before. He found the bone doll. We need him.” Felix gave the dog a few pats and gently pushed his drooling head away and into the back seat. “See, that’s why I like Scrappy so well. He trusts me. No matter what. At some point, you are going to have to start doing the same.”

  “Just remember, we aren’t going in guns blazing. We’ve got no warrant. All we have, in fact, is a hunch. We can stake out, under the radar, looking for signs of Min Ji, and that’s it.”

  “And if we see her?”

  Melancon pressed down the gas to pass a slow moving car in front of them. “I don’t think we are going to see her.”

  “You think she’s still alive?”

  Melancon shook his head and gripped the steering wheel tightly, the whites of his knuckles popping out against the old leather. “I don’t know, Felix. There’s a lot I don’t know these days.”

  The detectives were off the main highway now, weaving through a series of back roads, each of them increasingly shoddy and pot-holed.

  In one thousand feet, turn left on Oyster Shell Road.

  They looked at each other. Robert Johnson’s volume got turned way down.

  Signal lost.

  “My signal keeps going out. We are just too far from civilization,” Felix said.

  Melancon made the turn. The crunch of the oyster shells beneath their tires was loud enough to cause him to take his foot off the gas. Saw palmettos lined the right of way and they could just make out the slimy water where it broke away from the earth. Everywhere were pilings, bent and toppling, rotted and warped. The ruins of a whole elevated town. The logs jutted out over the road in some places, threatening to flatten the El Camino if they were to topple.

  They crept on through the quiet graveyard of house bones. It seemed that most of the dw
ellings had been blown away and flooded by the years of storm, by the rising waters that always came in their cycles to drown out everything from these swamps, as sure as death and taxes and…

  “Wait,” Melancon said, and stopped the car.

  “I see it. That house down there at the end. The only house on the road,” Felix said.

  It was true: at the end of the creosote forest remained a lone, stubborn dwelling. The sole survivor was big and high and black, with red hurricane shutters and a front yard that looked like one of those self-service car pulling lots. As they crept forward the oyster shells beneath them protested with a gnawing, crumbling cry.

  “We’re just too loud,” Melancon said. “We keep going and we might as well RSVP. These oyster shells are a dead giveaway on a dead end like this. We have to go on foot if we want to catch him unaware.”

  He pulled into a dry spot amidst the jungle of dead pilings.

  A few minutes later, they found themselves ankle-deep in brown water, out squishing through the grassy pasture on foot, finally reaching a decent vantage at which to survey the solitary camp house.

  A quiet thrill ran through Melancon. All roads had led them here. And here they were at last.

  They squished in closer, using saw palmettos to hide behind, Spanish moss to obscure their forms. The detectives could now observe the house across the way at their leisure.

  Melancon produced his old pair of army binoculars with the intention of doing just that. The water wicked up into his socks, and he found bugs kissing at his face and neck. Thick drops of blood fell from where a briar had torn into the back of his hand, but he didn’t care. The hunt was on. He was close to something.

  Two things, actually: a brutal alcohol withdrawal, and the truth.

  He crouched and had a closer look through the glasses. The house across the way was the showcase of an altogether strange set of decorative decisions. It soared into the air, first, its height a bit obscene. That was probably why it still existed, while the skeletons of many of its neighbors lay thrashed about and picked clean by the ravishes of the Gulf. That storm surge didn’t take any low-lying prisoners. Either you rose above her or she took everything you had with her when she left you.

  The lawn was another story. Some sort of storm had clearly hit the front yard of the place, full force. There were signs that the occupant was a hoarder—here was every kind of lawn gnome, flamingo, birdbath, dozens of statues of saints that Melancon only vaguely recognized. Here was the aftermath of a category-five aversion to throwing things out.

  In one corner of the yard, an old French Quarter mule buggy leaned into the swamp. A spoked wheel had been taken off one corner of it and never replaced. The name of the company had been covered by swamp grime and was now unreadable.

  An urgent tap of the shoulder. Felix pointing wildly, guiding the glasses upwards.

  Through the redirected binoculars, Melancon saw her.

  Not as pretty as in the church pictures, but with the same cheeky, daring features. Here she was, zoomed up close and clear in the bent lenses. She had cut her jet-black hair into a boyish crop, but it was certainly her.

  It was Min Ji.

  Melancon handed the glasses to Felix, who crouched next to the dog and took her in.

  “Son of a bitch,” Felix said.

  She did not seem alarmed. There were no cuffs or ties on her. She’d come out and was now lounging on an outdoor couch on the upstairs balcony, half lying and half sitting under the weight of what looked to be a budding belly-bump. She read a magazine and painted her toenails intermittently.

  There were no bars on her cage that the detectives could see.

  “Stockholm syndrome?” Melancon whispered to the swamp.

  The detectives took turns watching her. Ten minutes passed and she went back inside through the French doors and drew the curtains.

  “We have to get in that house,” Felix said. “We need to make a citizen’s arrest.”

  “You know that’s not how it works. Two lovers shacking up together isn’t a crime. We need something more.”

  “She might be dead by then,” Felix said, and spit into the swampy grass. “We know this guy, whoever he is, likes to kill young women when they are pregnant. Now how long do you think he is going to wait? Her belly is already showing. That’s more than a baby bump. He is probably getting ready to slit her throat and toss her in the bayou.”

  Melancon held up the binoculars again. A sudden movement caused him to move the lens to the dark space under the cabin. A black cat streaking away. But then, something else there amid the packed clay. From that corner of the house, behind the garden trailer with its stack of water-logged mattresses, a shape emerged from the chaos. For some reason it arrested Melancon, nagging at his memory and sticking out as significant amid all the refuse and tacky, forgotten landscaping decorations.

  “If I know my cars. And I believe I do. That rotting hunk of metal is the front bumper of a Pontiac Bonneville.”

  Felix snatched the binoculars away. It took him a minute to catch the thread, but when he did, he lowered the glasses and nodded his head. “Just like the one on the security camera, the night the first girl…Diaz…at the gas station. In Florida.”

  A silent agreement passed between them.

  “We have to get a look at that license plate,” Melancon said. “If it says what I think it says then I believe that is enough to call in the cavalry.”

  They waited, ten, fifteen, twenty tense minutes. They wanted another sign of Min Ji or the man they called Big Chief, if he were inside. But the swamp shack was quiet on its lumber haunches. A light breeze blew through the grass, and with it an isolated grey cloud moved over the detectives, dropping chilly raindrops on their little stand in the sedge.

  When nothing emerged for that long while they decided to make their move, crossing the oyster road and disappearing into the jungle of the front lawn as best they could. The dog walked silently alongside Felix, sniffing the gravity of the situation, perhaps. When they arrived at the corner of the house, the grass abruptly stopped and the hard clay began. Above them, the floor of the old house squeaked and squealed.

  There were people inside. More than one, to be sure. But how many more?

  At the back of the house the ground began to lower into the river. Down on the shore was a small dock, with one of the smallest shrimping boats Melancon had ever seen anchored there. It bore an engine far too large and powerful for the size of the craft itself. Just beyond it, Melancon could see the sluggish, placid waters of the Pearl, or a tributary to the Pearl, or maybe he wasn’t sure just what it was—perhaps he was a bit lost out here, where the waterways branched out like the blood in your veins.

  More creaks coming overhead, heavier now. Something masculine in the footfalls? Felix was holding the dog around the neck and looking up, shading his eyes from the dust that fell where the person above tread over them.

  Melancon pointed to the other end of the packed clay, where a few more oyster shells had been added to form a sort of driveway. He could see the Bonneville clearly now. Sneaking up to it, the long-gone shine of purple could be discerned through the dust and layers of swamp sediment. Through the windows, once fine velvet seats had begun to explode with the sponginess inside them.

  He crept around to the back. But he already knew.

  The license plate was there. Plain and bold. Sure enough, NL723.

  NL

  Melancon bent low and wiped the dust off the plate, beckoning to Felix.

  “Use your phone to take a picture,” he said. “I think this might be what we need.”

  While Felix captured the image of the plate, Melancon tried unsuccessfully to reach Janine back at the NOPD station. If he could get this info to her, she could get it to local law enforcement, who could get it to a judge, who could get a warrant.

  Just one more bar of signal. And all of this could be over.

  Heavy footsteps in the house above them, and Scrappy began to emit a low gr
owl. The isolated rain cloud seemed to be turning into something heavier, and at the edges of the house rainwater was collecting into shimmering pools.

  “Got it,” Felix said. “Now let’s go get that warrant.”

  By the time they saw the gaping, black emptiness that had opened up above them, it was too late. The floor that had covered their heads, protecting them, had been pulled away without a sound.

  Scrappy’s mumbled growls rose to full-blown barks.

  And then it fell on him.

  A heavy, thick, shrimp-smelling net. It fell on David Melancon and his partner and bound them in an instant.

  His view obscured by the nylon. A heavy tugging at his legs. His arms moving as if he were swimming in molasses.

  Melancon thought of Julie.

  His little fig. She would now be all grown up. A woman. He had made a series of such stupid mistakes, all culminating here, at this biggest and final error.

  He hadn’t pulled his gun in time.

  Melancon pushed away the sentimental thoughts and filled his mind instead with thoughts of the cool metal at his side.

  But the lead weights were made to be a drag and the net itself to capture and bring up creatures from the depths, wriggling and disoriented. His right arm had all but been rendered useless, with two, or was it three, weights that had somehow wound themselves over his wrist. His left arm was still mobile. Just barely. As he struggled to get it over to his right hip, where a life-saving tool waited, it too became entangled. By the time he reached his revolver, his palm had collected a whole nest of the nylon net, rendering it even more useless than it already was for gripping a weapon properly.

  Panic filled him now. All four limbs scrambled for purchase. A shadow loomed over him as he wriggled on the ground.

  Now a great weight crashed down on his chest, knocking the wind right out of him—a white shrimper’s boot coming down heavily around his center of gravity, pinning him to the clay.

  A rag over his face and eyes, and the world was gone in an instant.

  Eighteen