“Yeah.” From the deck.
“Thanks for saving my boat.”
“It saved me.”
Cruz came down and Beau grabbed another bag, shoving every T-shirt he had inside, along with extra jogging shoes. He wished he had something that would fit Cruz. They’d just come from her apartment on Fleur de Lis. Seven feet of water and still rising. She’d lost everything. The woman looked shell-shocked, eyes trying to focus. She moved in slow motion. Lack of sleep. Neither had slept much.
“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.