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.