“Why?”
“To explain your situation to you.”
“Right now?”
Gaudet wiped a sleeve across his face. “He’s at the Emergency Operations Center. I’ll call him when we get close. He’ll meet us outside.”
“What about his daughter?” Murphy said.
“What about her?”
“Does he want to get her back?”
“Of course he does,” Gaudet said. “He’s worried sick about her. He’s counting on you to find her.”
Murphy doubted that. Gaudet was stalling, trying to work up his nerve. Only five feet separated them. Murphy lowered his right hand near his holstered pistol. He wasn’t going down without a fight. “What if she’s already dead?”
Gaudet shrugged. “If it turns out that way, he’ll mourn for her, but life goes on. We’ve got a city to rebuild.”
“How much is it worth?” Murphy asked.
“What?” Gaudet said.
“The skim.”
“Five percent of every contract.”
Murphy did the math. Five percent was fifty thousand dollars for every million, and the city had awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts since the storm. “That’s a lot of money.”
Gaudet shrugged. “Not every contract is part of the program. The mayor has good instincts. But it’s still very… lucrative.”
“What’s your end?”
“Two hundred thousand so far.”
Gaudet reached behind his back and tossed Murphy a pair of handcuffs. “Put those on.”
Murphy caught them in his left hand. He kept his right hand down. “I’m going to see the mayor in handcuffs, like a prisoner?”
Gaudet nodded. “Until you two straighten out your differences, he’s not taking any chances.”
The meeting with the mayor was a ruse. Gaudet was going to drive him somewhere and kill him. “What if we don’t straighten out our differences?” Murphy said.
“He’s a persuasive man.”
“But if we don’t,” Murphy said, “your job is to kill me, right?”
Gaudet shook his head. “Quit being so dramatic. It ain’t like that.”
Murphy rattled the handcuffs. “Tell me what it’s like then.”
“First, you two talk and straighten out the bad blood. Then he’ll give you an envelope. The first of many.”
Murphy slid his right foot back half a step and angled his left side toward Gaudet. He reached behind his back with both hands like he was going to handcuff himself. As his right hand swung past his side, it was hidden from Gaudet’s view. Murphy hooked the bottom of his raincoat with his thumb and pulled it back away from his pistol.
Gaudet relaxed.
Murphy whipped out his left hand and flung the handcuffs into Gaudet’s face. He lunged to the right and jerked his Glock from its holster. He snapped off three shots. Two bullets hit Gaudet high in the chest. The third put a hole in the wall. Gaudet fired once. His shot punched through the empty space where Murphy had been standing.
Gaudet sagged to the floor. His mouth hung open. He was drooling blood as he fought for breath.
Murphy stood over him while he died.
No one knocked on Murphy’s door. No sounds came from the hallway or the stairs. Nothing but the shrieking of the wind.
Gaudet weighed at least two sixty and was too heavy to move. Murphy knew that if he survived the night he was going to have to explain why he had killed his partner. But that was only if he survived the night. He dug Gaudet’s keys from his pocket. He left his ex-partner’s pistol on the floor where it had fallen.
When Gaudet had raced out of the back lot of the police academy this morning, he had Murphy’s gear bag in the trunk of his car. In that bag were Murphy’s bulletproof vest and two spare magazines for his Glock. He planned to use the five-shot. 38 to kill Jeffries, but he had enough experience to know that plans don’t usually work out the way they’re supposed to.
Murphy walked into his bedroom and pulled a shoe box from the shelf at the top of his closet. Inside, the. 38 was wrapped in an old yellow T-shirt. Murphy unwrapped the snub-nosed revolver and snapped open the cylinder. It was loaded with five rounds of. 38 +P hollow points. He tucked the gun into the front of his pants.
Back in the den, Murphy walked around Gaudet’s body, careful not to tread in the blood that had pooled on the floor. He opened the door and stepped into the hall. As he locked the dead bolt and turned toward the stairs, he heard a frail voice behind him. “Did you hear that awful noise, Mr. Murphy?”
He turned around. It was his shriveled neighbor. She stood at the far end of the hallway, near a picture window that looked out onto the street. “It sounded like a gunshot,” she said. “Did you hear it?”
“Yes, ma’am, I did. I think it was a transformer that blew.”
She was dressed in a shabby housecoat that she clutched around her throat with one arthritic hand. It was the first time Murphy had ever seen her not dressed.
“Are you evacuating?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. I have to work. I’m a policeman.”
She nodded. “I saw you in the newspaper, remember?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, you be careful.”
“You too.”
Outside on the street, Murphy walked around the block pressing the panic button on Gaudet’s key fob until he got close enough to the car to set off the alarm. He found the Caprice parked on a parallel street one block from his apartment. He opened the trunk.
Lying next to Murphy’s gear bag was Gaudet’s briefcase. To keep it closed, Gaudet had wrapped it with a bungee cord. Murphy carried his bag and the briefcase to his Taurus. He threw his gear into the backseat and sat down behind the wheel with the briefcase beside him. He turned on the dome light and opened the case. It was still stuffed with cash.
Protruding from an interior pocket was a leather datebook. Murphy opened it. A paper clip at the top of a page marked the current week. He flipped back through the weeks and saw marks indicating work days, notes on court dates, and in some places, initials with numbers beside them. Each number had the letter k behind it, as in thousands.
AD 25k. BH 50k. One entry from three months back read, “DWC 100k.”
Gaudet had kept records of his cash pickups for the mayor. Murphy had worked with Juan for years and knew he wasn’t stupid. He would have known that keeping such records was dangerous, but they were also evidence if things went bad and he ended up having to testify against the mayor. Gaudet had been planning on riding the mayor’s cash cow into the sunset, but if he got jammed up, he was going to flip.
Murphy dropped the datebook on top of the cash and closed the briefcase. He rewrapped the bungee cord and tossed the case onto the backseat. There was something more immediate he needed to worry about. He reached into his raincoat pocket and took out Richard Jeffries’s utility bill. He looked at the service location printed in the top left corner.
4101 Burgundy Street.
He felt the pressure from the. 38 revolver wedged into the front waistband of his pants.
Be there, Jeffries. Be there.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Monday, August 6, 7:45 PM
Murphy drove northeast on Rampart Street, past Louis Armstrong Park, which in better weather was a haven for dope fiends and thugs. Driving had become dangerous. The Taurus’s windshield wipers were on high, but they weren’t keeping up with the wind-whipped rain that blew sideways during the strongest gusts.
Catherine’s outer bands were here.
The streets were deserted. Anyone with the ability to get out of town had already done so. Those who couldn’t get out were hunkered down.
Where Rampart made a hard right at Saint Bernard, Murphy stayed straight and angled onto Saint Claude Avenue. He followed it twenty blocks to France Street and turned right. Two blocks up was Burgundy, a one-way street running back uptown. Murphy turned right. The darkness and heavy rain made it hard to see addresses. He idled past empty homes.
At the corner of Mazant Street was 4101 Burgundy. It was a big two-story house covered in peeling white paint. A wraparound awning, supported by a row of thin wooden columns, covered both sidewalks. The front door faced the apex formed by the intersection of the two streets.