For a moment, neither of them noticed Murphy.
He could not fire his last round of buckshot without hitting Kiesha.
Then Jeffries turned and saw him. He dropped the sheet of paper and the knife and snatched the Glock from his waistband. Murphy tried to jump behind the wall but his right leg folded under him. He fell on his back in the doorway.
Jeffries screamed something, but the wind sucked his words out of the room before they reached Murphy’s ears.
With the pistol thrust out in one hand, Jeffries took two steps toward Murphy and fired. The bullet smacked into the doorframe beside Murphy’s right ear. Jeffries took a third step and paused to take careful aim. He didn’t seem to notice that the slide on the Glock had locked back on an empty magazine.
Murphy noticed.
When Jeffries pulled the trigger, nothing happened. So he pulled it again. Then he turned the pistol in his hand and stared into the empty chamber.
Murphy raised the shotgun and fired.
The blast caught Jeffries high in the chest. He stayed on his feet for several seconds, looking down at the dozen black holes smoking in his chest. Then he collapsed.
Murphy pulled himself up from the floor. There was no need to check Jeffries for a pulse. No one survives a round of buckshot to the chest from six feet.
Murphy dropped the shotgun and looked at Kiesha Guidry. “Are you hurt?”
She stared at Jeffries. “Is he dead?”
“He’s dead.” Murphy hobbled toward her and reached for his folding knife, but it wasn’t there. He lowered himself onto his left knee and tore at the duct tape with his fingers.
A blast of wind ripped through the broken French doors and shook the house like a dog with a bone. From another upstairs room came the sound of breaking glass. Then from outside, Murphy heard what sounded like a piece of tin bouncing down the street.
Catherine was here.
“We need to get downstairs,” Murphy said. “We’re going to have to ride out the storm here.”
She looked at him and nodded.
“You are Kiesha Guidry, right?”
She nodded again.
“We’ve been looking for you.”
She started crying.
After Murphy tore the last piece of duct tape that bound Kiesha to the chair, he tried to pull her to her feet, but she couldn’t stand. So he bent down and hefted her onto his right shoulder and swung her into a fireman’s carry. His knee almost gave out after the first step, but he managed to make it all the way to the top of the stairs before he had to set her down.
Outside, the wind was a continuous roar, like a speeding train. The hammerlike gusts shook the house to its foundation. Murphy was worried the old house couldn’t stand up to the beating it was about to get.
After a minute’s rest for his throbbing knee, Murphy bent over to pick up Kiesha again, but she laid a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “You’re hurt,” she said. “I can make it.”
She ended up helping him down the stairs.
They took shelter in the bathroom. Three of the four walls were interior walls and there were no windows. They lay down together in the bathtub and Murphy covered them with his raincoat. He wrapped his arms around her.
“What if it floods?” she asked.
“It won’t,” Murphy said. “The levees have been redesigned. They’ll hold this time.”
The storm raged for hours. Early on, a transformer exploded and the streetlights went dark. All around them, Murphy heard trees and light poles snapping and crashing to the ground. Despite the tremendous noise, Kiesha fell asleep. She woke up once when something big smashed into the side of the house, but when Murphy told her it was nothing to worry about she fell back asleep.
Sometime after midnight, the storm started to slacken. The eye was getting close, Murphy thought. After the eye passed, the wind strengthened again.
Part of the roof blew off around 2:00 AM. The sound of the wood being ripped apart jolted Murphy. He expected the walls to fall down on top of them any minute. But the house held. By three o’clock, the worst of the storm was over.
Dawn came late. He woke Kiesha and they walked outside and stood on the sidewalk. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. The wooden awning that had broken his fall and saved his life had blown away. There was no sign of flooding. The levees had held.
“I told you,” he said.
She was bundled in his raincoat and looked up at him. She smiled for the first time. “You didn’t know. You just said that to make me feel better.”
Murphy smiled back. “Did it work?”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Thursday, August 9, 6:30 PM
Catherine wreaked tremendous havoc across the city, swatting down power lines, uprooting trees, damaging and destroying homes and businesses, but because she did not leave a biblical flood in her wake like Katrina, the cleanup and rebuilding began almost immediately.
By Wednesday afternoon, less then forty-eight hours after the storm, the power was starting to come back on. By Thursday night, half the city had lights, including the Star amp; Crescent on Tulane Avenue, where Murphy found a seat at the bar.
He had spent all day Wednesday and Thursday locked in an interview room at PIB, grilled by Lieutenant Carl Landry about the deaths of Detective Juan Gaudet and serial killer Richard Lee Jeffries. In all that time, Landry only once acknowledged, and even then reluctantly, that Murphy had saved Kiesha Guidry’s life.
At six o’clock Thursday night, Murphy had walked out of the PIB office without handcuffs on. He considered that a victory. He drove straight to the Star amp; Crescent.
The video had helped. Homicide had recovered Jeffries’s camera. The last segment of the video showed Murphy, battered and bleeding, ripping the bonds off Kiesha Guidry’s wrists and ankles, slinging her over his shoulder, and then limping away as he carried her to safety.
Murphy was on his first beer when a familiar voice spoke behind him.
“I heard the lights were back on, so I figured you’d be here,” Kirsten Sparks said.
Murphy looked over his shoulder. “Pull up a chair. I think I might owe you a beer.”
“You owe me more than that, hero, but I’ll take a beer as a down payment.”
Murphy signaled to the off-duty cop behind the bar.
“You see the front page today?” Kirsten asked.
He nodded. “Landry showed it to me.”
“Is that where you’ve been?”
Murphy took a long sip of his beer. “For two days.”
“The AP picked up the story. CNN and Fox have both called. Bill O’Reilly wants me on his show. I’m surprised he hasn’t called you.”
“I lost my phone.”
“There’s definitely a book deal in it for you, probably a movie too. ‘Hero cop saves mayor’s daughter’. ”
“I doubt I’ll get a thank-you card from the mayor,” Murphy said.
Kirsten leaned closer and whispered. “Gaudet’s calendar was a gold mine. Wait until you see tomorrow’s front page. I wouldn’t be surprised if the feds indict Guidry next week.”
“I’m going to have to testify before the grand jury. Tell them about the calendar. About what Juan told me before… he died.”
Kirsten laid a hand on Murphy’s shoulder. “I’m sorry to sound so gleeful about the story. I know this has to be really hard on you.”
“Juan was a big boy. He made his own decisions.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping their beers, both lost in their own thoughts.
Kirsten broke the silence. “Something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”
“Yeah?”
“How did you find out about the house on Burgundy?”
That was the same question Lieutenant Landry had asked him at least fifteen times. Murphy told the PIB man that he was driving back to the office for the search-warrant briefing when he got an anonymous call. His cell-phone number, along with the Crime Stoppers tip line, had been at the bottom of one of the articles about the serial killer.