Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 5. Whole No. 783, November 2006

When the Levees Break by O’Neil De Noux

Born and raised in New Orleans, where he was a police officer in adjacent Jefferson Parish for twelve years and a P.I. for six years, O’Neil De Noux is currently in Lake Charles, LA. Still displaced by Katrina, he’s attempting to resettle along the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. His new book, New Orleans Confidential, is a collection of 1940s noir P.I. stories.

Five days before Katrina blew into town, topping the levees in Jefferson and St. Bernard Parishes, breaking through the levee at the 17th Street Canal, the London Avenue Canal, and Industrial Canal to inundate New Orleans, Detective John Raven Beau started his vacation by having his houseboat raised into dry dock. Five days after Katrina, Beau sat in a flat-bottom pirogue next to Sad Lisa. The hurricane had lifted his houseboat off the dry dock and deposited her between the remains of two huge boat sheds and the skeleton of Joe Boughten’s Boat Repair Yard, which had shielded the big winds from Sad Lisa, now floating in eight feet of water that covered the entire area. Lake Pontchartrain had taken the land as far as Beau could see.

With the strong summer sun beating down on the brown water, Beau and his partner had to shield their eyes from the glare with hands over brows, although both wore dark sunglasses. The stench was the worst part, reeking of dead fish, mildew, and a thick petroleum smell. The oaks were dying, the ones that hadn’t toppled over. The roofs of large trucks could be seen on what used to be high ground, boats littered the entire area, most upside down, half-sunk, pleasure crafts next to shrimp boats. A half-mile away, the levee breach at the 17th Street Canal was still pouring into the city.

“Well, she’s not listing,” said Beau’s new partner, Juanita Cruz. Five years younger than Beau, Cruz was twenty-five and had been promoted to detective a month before Katrina — or B.K. as it was now known. For the rest of time, this new New Orleans would be A.K. — after Katrina. Her brown-black hair pulled into a bun, she wore a black T-shirt over baggy black nylon pants and black combat boots. Across the rear of her T-shirt, NOPD was stenciled in silver letters. Beau wore the same getup, his .9mm Beretta Model 92F in a canvas holster along his right hip.

Beau tied up against his houseboat, heard a noise, and looked up into Joe Boughten’s face. Joe smiled weakly and said, “She’s seaworthy. Only one around here that is.”

Beau climbed aboard, followed by Cruz. Joe, in a soiled T-shirt that was once white, baggy gray shorts, face unshaven, eyes bleary, held up a can of beer and said, “Want a brew? They’re hot, ‘a course, but that’s the way the British drink it, ain’t it?”

“Engine ruined?”

“No gas. We emptied the tanks, remember?”

“How’d you get beer?”

“I stocked up before the storm.” Joe belched, then excused himself to Cruz, who stared at him real hard.

“Tell me you didn’t ride out the storm,” Beau said as he looked around Sad Lisa. Pieces of railing were missing, so were the seat cushions of the built-in seats, but he’d stored the radar and antennas below before putting the boat into dry dock, so it didn’t appear much else was missing. Then he saw the tarp on the roof. Joe had covered a hole.

Joe waited for him to look back before saying, “It was like bein’ in the middle of an atomic blast.” He turned to Cruz. “Wind so strong, rain slammin’, waves crashin’, things flyin’, hittin’ everything.” He belched again and took a step back. “Been listenin’ to the radio. Is it true about all the shit at the Dome?”

Beau shrugged. Cruz told him some of it was true.

Joe waved his hand. “No looters been by here yet, but they will, I’m sure.”

“Unlikely for the moment,” said Beau. “We had to get through two checkpoints. Coast Guard and National Guard stopping everything on the water.”

“Good. Bet they don’t check at night. Never seen it so dark around here.”

Beau went inside and dug out a canvas suitcase and started packing clothes. He could smell bacon now, saw a pan on the stove with three slices in it. There was enough propane to last awhile. “Hey,” he called out to Joe.

“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.

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.

“Lower Ninth Ward.”

Beau dropped the wallet and contents in a brown paper bag, writing his name and unit number on the outside, along with Freddie London’s name, and passed it back to the pathologist, who would send it along with the cadaver.

Cruz followed Beau into an office where a computer actually worked. The NOPD and Louisiana State Police computers were down, but the FBI was up. Freddie London, same DOB and SSN, had fourteen arrests, from rape to armed robbery, extortion, burglary, and two heroin busts.

“Jesus, what’s he doing on the street?” Cruz said as Beau reached into the small NOPD file on the desk to pull out a printout of NOPd’s Most Wanted. Freddie London was number twelve on the list.

Beau sat in the gray metal chair behind the gray metal desk and looked out the small window at the bright sky outside. He pulled his shirt away from his chest and fanned it. There was some sort of air conditioner working in the hangar at least.

“What are the mathematical probabilities?” he said. “Two of our most-wanted stone-freakin’ criminals are found a short distance from one another with holes in their heads, bullet trajectories nearly identical, through-and-through wounds so we can’t compare bullets.”

Cruz shrugged.

“Who is Sting?”

“You gotta be kiddin’.”

Beau shrugged.

“You didn’t have MTV in that cabin?”

Copeland peeked in and said, “They’re bringing in six more.”

Floaters. Three black, two white, one Asian, a teenager. Beau and Cruz watched Dr. Sumner examine them, keeping as far away from the stench as possible.

Beau found Copeland later, napping on a cot.

“You awake?”

“Huh?” Copeland blinked open his eyes and yawned. “I am now.”

Beau pulled up a folding chair and took out his notepad. “Describe everything, will ya? The area, how the bodies were lying, everything.” He handed Copeland a fresh Mountain Dew.

Juanita Cruz found a CD player and a Led Zeppelin CD and began playing one particular song over and over again, letting it reverberate through the hangar. After the first fifty times, Beau’d had enough of the little ditty called “When the Levee Breaks.” He hoped someone would complain. No way he could tell a partner who had lost everything that the high-pitched male voice bemoaning that when the levee breaks he’ll have no place to stay was getting to be too much. The electric guitars just kept groaning and the man kept singing about how crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good, ending with the refrain “going down, going down.” He watched Cruz and knew she was listening intently, but her face revealed no emotion. It was creepy.

During that shift nine bodies were brought in, all natural deaths. Drownings, classified accordingly by the pathologists, using the NASH classification system. Humans died a natural death, accidental death, suicide, or homicide. In New Orleans, where things were done differently on purpose, Beau had seen deaths listed beyond the NASH system. “Death by Misadventure” was the most common. Nearly everyone in Louisiana knew someone who’d died that way. Usually it was preceded by the victim calling out to friends, “Hey, y’all, watch this.” The victim would then jump off a roof or dive into a sluggish bayou that looked deeper than it was.

Beau thought “Death by Stupidity” would be more appropriate. That evening as the pathologists, Sumner and two others, examined the bloated bodies of these latest Katrina victims, Beau exchanged stories with them. Stories of weird deaths, morons playing chicken with trains, idiots playing Russian roulette, one particular cretin who told his buddies he was going into the house next-door to investigate a bad smell and lit a match in a house with a gas leak.

Cruz gave Beau a pained expression when the stories stopped and he had to explain. “The more of this you see, the more you need to laugh. Release the pressure. You should know that.”

Just before dawn, Copeland brought in a third body with a bullet wound in the forehead. He looked at Beau and said with a sly grin, “You been sneaking out and popping these dudes?”

Beau gave him a long, withering stare, the stare of the plains warrior, unsmiling, unemotional. Copeland shuddered, maybe teasing, maybe not, and stepped away. John Raven Beau had a reputation. He was a killer, plain and simple. Since joining NOPD he’d gunned down five men, the most infamous in the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, the only living swamp within the city limits of a major American city, 23,000 acres’ worth. Beau tracked a cop killer through the swamp through the night and left his body next to a railroad trestle.

In the eyes of every rookie he met, once they realized who he was, Beau saw the recognition, the morbid fascination, and the distancing, because Beau was a dangerous man, no doubt. It kept Beau on the outside, kept him separate from the brotherhood of cops, kept him isolated and alienated as he’d been his entire life from his first day in kindergarten when the kids stared at him as if he came from an alien world.

Beau moved to the body bag and waited for Dr. Sumner. Cruz came out of the office, carrying her CD player, the taller of the Oregon cops in tow. His name was Al and he seemed smitten with Juanita Cruz or was just simply on the make, big-time. He spent a lot of time schmoozing with her and Beau couldn’t think of a better way to distract her.

She turned on the CD and the wailing guitars and driving beat of the levee-breaking song echoed through the hangar. Dr. Sumner shook his head as he unzipped the body bag, which held a dark-skinned man with long black hair and a bullet wound in his forehead.

“This one’s older.”

Up closer, Beau saw the man had some gray in his hair and obvious age lines on a face flaccid in death. The man was wet, but hadn’t been in the water long. Sumner found a wallet with three Louisiana driver’s licenses with three different names but the same face on them. The oldest license had the man’s real name, one familiar to everyone in the NOPD. Abdon Jeffries, listed as an AA — African American — by NOPD, although Abdon was a mulatto with a white mother. Some things never changed in the South. If you were part African, you were African. A convicted felon with thirteen arrests, Jeffries was number three on NOPd’s Most Wanted list.

“Wound’s perforated, right?” Cruz asked as she stepped closer.

Sumner lifted the head, felt under it, and said, “Yep.”

Through-and-through, like the others, round, neat, clean. “Straight path,” Beau added. “How do you do that?”

“Sniper?” said Cruz.

“Have to be dead-on perfect.”

Beau stepped over to where Copeland sat with one of the triage nurses from the next hangar, where they worked on the injured, and asked the sergeant, “Where?”

“South Shore Harbor. Next to the capsized casino.”

Cops didn’t believe in coincidences, even if the word was in the dictionary.

“I didn’t recognize him,” Copeland said. “Abdon Jeffries, right? That’s the bastard who shot that Seventh District cop. Crippled him, remember?”

Beau closed his eyes for a second. Yeah, he remembered. Jeffries hired a sharp lawyer and then the D.A. went in unprepared and Jeffries walked. He’d seen the crippled cop in a wheelchair getting into the “police only” elevator at headquarters, going up to the radio room where he worked as an operator. A desk job for a paraplegic.

Beau let out a long breath, opened his eyes, and spotted his lieutenant entering the hangar. He went straight to him, about to tell him about the three men with holes in their heads, but Merten shook him off, heading over to a pair of men standing in the far doorway.

Merten came back with the men and introduced them, a third pair of detectives who would work with them examining the bodies. From Philadelphia, these guys were older, both Italian-Americans, both grizzled veterans of the homicide wars. They asked for the midnight shift and Beau quickly gave it up to them. The Oregon guys wanted the evening watch, so Beau and Cruz would take the day watch.

Merten took Beau and Cruz aside. The big man’s eyes were red-rimmed. “It’s bad out there. People on roofs, starving dogs everywhere. Thirty people died in an old-folks home in St. Bernard. The employees left them to drown. We got a full-scale riot at the Convention Center but I gotta go over to the First District. We’re raiding the Iberville Projects in boats. Snipers been shooting at the district station since the storm.” He took in a long breath and let it out, wheezing in fatigue. He gave Beau a long look and said, “No. You know I need you here.”

“You want to hear what we’ve come up with?” asked Cruz.

“Not now.”

Beau went back to Copeland for details and got, “The body was right on top of the levee. Like I told you, South Shore Harbor.”

Beau put it in his notes.

Copeland also said, “It wasn’t Notre Dame that burned. It was the big place across the street.” Beau knew the area well. There were lots of big places but he wasn’t in the mood to ask.

Later, as their shift ended and Beau was in his portioned cubicle, Cruz stepped in from her shower with a towel wrapped around her head. She had on a terry-cloth robe and carried clothes in her hand.

“Why do we want to work the freakin’ day shift?” she asked, leaning her head forward to rub the towel through her hair. Her hair was shiny from the bright overhead light, traces of reddish brown mixed in with dark brown. Juanita was naturally pretty, looking younger now without makeup.

“I want to be free at night,” he said.

“Night? You found some action? Some nurse?”

He almost smiled.

“We’ve been sleeping through the steamiest part of the day, you silly Cajun. Why work in the heat?”

She dropped the towel on the small table next to Beau’s cot where he sat with his notepad. He’d finished consolidating his notes on the killings. Homicide cases were built with paperwork. He was closely examining a city map, checking out the South Shore Harbor area.

“What’s with the map?” Cruz asked. When he looked up, she dropped her robe and picked up a T-shirt. In her bra and panties, she was facing Beau, who blinked twice. She pulled on the T-shirt and climbed into a pair of lightweight gym shorts before looking back at him.

“What the hell is this?” Beau sat up stiffly on the cot.

“What?”

“The little bra-and-panty show. I’m your partner, not your sister.”

She huffed, narrowing her eyes. “Maybe I’m just trying to get your attention.”

Beau tried to keep from getting aroused, an automatic physical response. He glared at her, turning the excitement into anger. “You never fool around with your partner. You know that. A partner’s a partner. Closer than a friend. But not a freakin’ lover.” He stood and walked to the rear of his enclosure.

He turned back to her and she snapped, “I don’t know anything anymore.” She opened her arms. “Everything’s changed. Everything! The whole damn world’s changed!” She stormed out.

Beau went out a few minutes later with her towel and found the Oregon cops sitting next to the empty examining table. Al was reading a Spiderman comic. He dropped the damp towel in Al’s lap. “Go give this to Juanita.”

“Juanita?” Al stood up.

“Yeah. She could use some company.”

“Okay.” Al took off for Cruz’s room.

The other Oregon cop said, “I thought you were her partner.”

Beau gave him a deadpan look. “I said she needs company.”

The cop shrugged.

Beau left. Over his shoulder he said, “I thought y’all were from Oregon. Not Disneyland.”

The next morning, Beau located the Wildlife and Fisheries agent who’d lent him the pirogue to visit Cruz’s apartment and Sad Lisa and asked if he could use a pirogue that evening. The agent jotted Beau a note authorizing the use. The man’s name was Prejean and he hailed from Abbeville, parish seat of Vermilion Parish, where Beau grew up.

“Give this to the supervisor,” he said, passing the note to Beau.

Six more drowning victims came in that afternoon and one murder victim shot three times in the back. No ID. Body pulled out of the Industrial Canal. Beau took a nap after their shift ended, setting his alarm for eleven P.M., and was surprised when Cruz, decked out as he was in all black, came into his cubicle and asked, “Where we going?”

“Um, I’ve got something to check out.”

She pulled out her Beretta and checked its ammo. “You planning to go without me, Raven?”

“How’d you find out about this?”

“I’m a detective,” she said smugly, holstering her weapon. “We’re headed for South Shore Harbor, or what?”

Damn, he wanted to do this alone. Didn’t want her anywhere near this. Not because she was a woman or even a rookie. He worked better alone. But as he looked at her, he knew if he dumped her it would tear her down and she’d been torn down enough. A partner was a partner and they’d face the danger together.

He nodded and checked his weapon and ammo clips. They took radios, which didn’t work, and their cell phones, working about as well. Beau secured three large flashlights from two National Guardsmen from St. Louis and talked two other National Guardsmen into taking them with their Humvee to the Bonnabel Boat Launch in Metairie, where Wildlife and Fisheries was set up.

On the way, the guardsman riding shotgun kept looking back at Cruz. She tried discouraging him with a yawn but the guy asked question after question, about NOPD, the high crime rate, Bourbon Street, Mardi Gras. Beau read his nametag: Smith. The other was Jones. Jesus. Milquetoast Midwesterners.

“I seen it on the Internet,” he said. “Women showing their boobs for carnival beads. We don’t get that in South Dakota.”

Cruz gave Beau a smirk as she asked them, “Y’all from South Dakota?”

“Sioux Falls.”

She pointed a thumb at Beau. “He’s half Sioux. Oglala. His mother lives on the Pine Tree Reservation. That near Sioux Falls?”

Pine Ridge Reservation, thought Beau, but correcting her would only encourage the conversation.

Smith stared at Beau and answered, “It’s on the other side of the state.”

Jones turned around and said, “You look half Sioux.” There was no malice in his voice but Beau knew his people and the white-eyes of both Dakotas didn’t mix much.

“Show them your knife,” Cruz said.

Beau, who’d assumed a deadpan, blank expression as soon as he’d heard these guys were from Dakota, gave his partner an unresponsive look.

“It’s obsidian,” she went on, sitting up now, getting a kick out of it. “Sharp as a razor.”

Beau turned his gaze to Smith, who nodded and turned around, and thankfully, the questions stopped.

The Wildlife and Fisheries supervisor read the note authorizing Beau to use a pirogue and said, “Y’all sure about this?”

Beau nodded. The man shrugged and said, “We got no radio for y’all. All the towers are down.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“We’ll need it back before daybreak.”

“No problem.” Beau thanked the man and moved to the pirogue. This one was aluminum, the outboard looked new and started immediately.

“You got a full tank,” the supervisor called out as they pulled away from the boat launch into Lake Pontchartrain, heading east to ride along the big levee that had protected most of Jefferson Parish. The levee had been topped by Katrina in Kenner and parts of Metairie, but most of JP had escaped the flood. Beau had heard eighty percent of New Orleans was now under water.

Moonlight reflected off the tiny waves in the lake and starlight added a faint hue to the entire scene. The levee loomed as a dark shadow to their right. Beau was so used to the smell of the salty water, it didn’t register until the scent changed as they approached the 17th Street Canal, where water from the city had mixed with the lake, giving the area an oily stench. Huge lights lit up the area around the canal entrance. Helicopters, lit up like Christmas trees, moved back and forth to the break in the levee to drop their sandbags.

Looking to his right, Beau couldn’t see the boatyard or Sad Lisa and wondered how Joe Boughten was getting along. Probably fine, so long as the beer held out. Veering to port, they skirted West End. It took awhile, moving carefully, to travel the next eleven miles to Lakefront Airport. There were some lights on there but the entire place was under water. South Shore Harbor, two miles beyond, was darker. Beau saw a cloud had moved in front of the moon.

“Remember, when we go ashore, stay with me,” he told her. “Partners never split up. No matter what happens. Don’t separate.”

“Okay, okay.”

“I’m serious.” Beau wasn’t being overprotective. He’d learned years ago to stick with his partner. Whatever happens to one happens to both. Can’t protect each other if you split up, like they did on TV. Hell, just about everything cops did on TV shows was flat-ass wrong.

They reached the levee just beyond the harbor, the capsized casino looming overhead like a black mountain. Turning off the engine, they paddled along the levee. Thankfully the cloud moved and the moonlight came back. When he was studying the map, Beau figured there was one way to find out about this, one possible way.

Not five minutes from the casino, he spotted a boat pulled up to the levee and his heart raced. He pointed to it and Cruz nodded. It was a boat made for speed, a huge outboard motor, all painted black. Beau was surprised they’d left no guard. They were that confident. The boat was tied up to a large chunk of concrete. The base of the earthen levee was littered with huge blocks of concrete all the way to the water’s edge. He pulled the pirogue next to the speedboat.

He unfastened the boat and handed Cruz the rope. She tied it to the pirogue’s stern and they towed it about fifty yards, pulling it up on the levee between two larger concrete blocks. Then they paddled the pirogue an additional fifty yards to tie it up. They left the flashlights and walked the levee back to where the speedboat had been originally.

Moving to the top of the levee, they looked at the eastern portion of the city. The moon and starlight gave a silvery pallor to the dark water and the roofs were black spots. As far as Beau could see, the city was under water.

Beau and Cruz positioned themselves back down the levee, each behind chunks of concrete on either side of where the speedboat had been. Beau eased his weapon from its holster and rested it against his leg as he sat. He covered his right eye with his hand and used his left eye for five minutes, then switched. When he opened his right eye the light seemed brighter since his pupils had dilated in the blackness behind his hand. He focused his hearing away from the lake lapping against the levee and concentrated.

He ran it all through his mind again. Someone was dumping these bodies where they would be found. No other way to get here except by boat. They probably had one on the other side of the levee to navigate canals that were once streets, but this was how they got in and this was their exit point. He knew he was lucky to find their boat.

An hour later, a helicopter came from the direction of Lakefront Airport and flew out over the east, its running lights extra bright, two searchlights scanning back and forth. From the moonlight, Beau thought he caught a white sheen on the craft. Coast Guard chopper.

He settled back and thought of the word describing where he and Cruz lay in wait. It was called a batture, a colloquial term indigenous to New Orleans. Possibly from the French battre: “to beat.” Here on the land between the top of the levee and the water’s edge, along the lake and the river across town, was where the original French settlers beat their washing, against rocks that naturally dotted the area, long before the levees were built up. He could envision the women in long dresses leaning over with their wash as they chattered with one another to ease the boredom. His Cajun ancestors most likely did the same along Vermilion Bay and its bayous.

Beau spent the hours keeping his breathing regular, keeping his senses tuned, keeping himself calm. The Sioux called it the battle calm, a relaxed state bordering on tranquility so when battle was joined a warrior maintained the cool hand and struck true, while his enemies, particularly the white-eyes, let their blood rise to levels that made their aim unreliable.

Over the lapping of the waves, Beau heard the faint scrape of footsteps. He peeked around the concrete and eased off the safety of his .9mm Beretta model 92F. Its rubber grips were tacky from the humidity, providing extra grip, although Beau’s hand was not sweaty in the least.

A figure rose to the top of the levee from the other side, followed by a second, one carrying a rifle, the other a machine gun, and both wearing all black. When the first paused to glance up at the sky, Beau saw the man was wearing night-vision goggles. Damn! Who were these guys?

More footfalls, faint and yet firm, revealed a total of five men now. Besides the one with the rifle, two carried what looked like Steyr machine guns. One started down the levee their way. Beau inched around so he could keep that man and the others in his line of vision.

It didn’t take long for the man to realize and call out, “The boat’s missing!”

“You sure we’re at the right place?”

“Look for the red marker.”

One of the men disappeared beyond the levee momentarily and came right back. “It’s right here.”

“Dammit to hell!”

Feet shuffled and a sharp voice said, “Someone’s here!”

It was instantly followed by, “Police! Freeze!” The second voice was Cruz.

Beau peered around and saw his partner standing with her Beretta in the standard two-hand police grip, her knees bent slightly as she aimed her weapon at the closest man. The men had their weapons trained on her.

Beau flipped the safety back on his Beretta and holstered it, stood with his hands spread, and called out, “Over here.”

Three of the men wheeled toward him.

“We’re NOPD,” Beau said. “And there’s more of us in the boats.” A bluff.

No one moved for three heart-thumping seconds before one of the men in back, one carrying a handgun, eased forward and said, “Beau? Is that you?”

The hair stood out on Beau’s arms and the back of his neck.

“All right, everyone put your weapons down,” said the same man as he came forward, removing his night-vision goggles. Lieutenant Merten’s eyes shone like bright agates as he stepped up to Beau. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Behind Merten the men lowered their weapons and began pulling off their goggles. Beau recognized a robbery detective and an old buddy from the Second who was now on the SWAT team. The fourth man looked young and Beau didn’t know him. The fifth man, taller than the others, kept his goggles on. He was the only white man in the group.

“Put your weapon down, Juanita,” he called out, and Cruz slowly lowered her gun. Beau looked back at Merten and said, “Where’d you leave the latest one? Where it’ll be found easily. So word’ll get out. The criminals will know.”

“Jesus, Beau. What are you doing?” Merten seemed in pain. He leaned closer. “I told you to stay by the airport.”

“Only we know where to find our Most Wanted.” Beau’s voice was deep and even, without emotion. “Only we know who they are, know they’re bad enough to stay behind, too entrenched to evacuate. Wasn’t hard to figure it had to be us.”

“Is he solid?” from the fourth man, the young unknown face leering at Beau.

The fifth man finally removed his goggles and stepped forward. Beau felt a weakness momentarily in his knees. Assistant Superintendent Ashton Garner, the man most NOPD felt should be Chief of Police, the former head of the Training Academy who’d trained his men and women to be like brothers and sisters. It was Garner who made them all feel as if NOPD was family. Us against the world.

Garner tapped the fourth man on the shoulder as he passed and said, “He’s as solid as they come. Notice he’s saying we and us and not ‘y’all did this,’ isn’t he?” Garner arrived next to Merten and stared Beau in the eyes. Beau gave him a poker-faced, lingering, emotionless stare in return.

“This is John Raven Beau,” Garner went on.

“Oh,” said the unknown man. “I hearda him. He’s killed more’n us.”

Killed, Beau thought, not executed, but he kept his mouth shut.

Merten shook his head. “Can’t believe you brought the rookie.”

Beau turned to him. “Looks like we’re all in this now.”

Garner took in a deep breath.

Beau stepped around them and moved to his partner, getting between her and the men, nodding for her to holster her weapon, which she did reluctantly. He turned back and told them where the boats were.

“We’ll show you.” He led Cruz through them to the top of the levee.

No one moved behind them for a few moments before Merten and Garner came along. When they reached the spot where the speedboat was tied up, Beau pointed to it, then turned back to face his lieutenant and assistant superintendent. He waited until the stragglers arrived before he said, “That better be the last one.”

“Who the hell are you to tell us that?” snapped the unknown man. “What is your major malfunction? Man, we nailed Abdon Jeffries, didn’t we?” He raised the high-powered rifle in his hands, the one with the big scope. So this was the sniper, the triggerman.

Beau stared into Garner’s eyes. “If I figured this out, someone else will. And there’s no ‘us’ with the Feds. They’ll nail every one of us, me and Cruz, too, because we know.”

He waited for the recognition to come to Garner’s eyes. He turned to Merten with, “So we’re in this together and tonight’s the last one.”

Beau took Cruz by the arm and they went on to the pirogue, neither looking back. As they were climbing into the flat-bottom boat they heard the angry growl of the speedboat as it backed into the lake, growling louder as it pulled into the dark waters.

Just after they’d passed the 17th Street Canal, they hit something in the water and the outboard died. Beau got it started but it wouldn’t propel them. He raised it and saw why. They’d lost the propeller. So they grabbed the oars and rowed the pirogue over to the Bucktown levee, pulled it up on the grass, and shoved the anchor into the ground before going to the top of the levee to wait for dawn.

Cruz lay on her back, hands behind her head, knees up. Beau sat cross-legged, like a plains warrior sitting around a campfire, and looked out at the lake. He faced the eastern horizon and waited. Motionless, except for breathing and blinking, Beau watched the horizon. He tried his best to keep his heart from racing, as it had when the shadowy figures had closed in on him on the levee. But his heart raced as he watched the horizon; goosebumps covered his arms.

John Raven Beau hadn’t been frightened since he was a kid. There was no fear when he’d gunned down the men he’d chased, no fear when their bullets whizzed past his face with the sound of an angry hornet. As a child he’d been frightened, as most children, of wild sounds coming from the swamp at night, of imagined bogeymen. He’d been frightened when his grandfather told him about Coyote-man, the mythical enemy of the plains warriors, the Sioux and their cousins, the Cheyenne. Stories of the sly trickster who stole the breath from babies, leaving them cold and dead, of tricks played on battlefields when a warrior’s bow broke or an arrow didn’t run straight or a pony tripped on a gopher hole, sending its rider crashing to the ground. Coyote-man drew warriors to watery deaths in lakes and swollen rivers where their soul would never escape, for a warrior who drowned could never rise from the depths.

Beau knew better than to think it was Coyote-man who drew Katrina’s hot winds to New Orleans, knew the myth was just that — a myth. But something drew the storm here. Something drew it from the gulf. Steering currents, or was it, after all, the rotted breath of Coyote-man that sucked the storm ashore? And was the trickster sitting on a rooftop cackling at Beau as he studied the horizon wondering if it would be the same sun rising in the east?

When the sun finally rose, with Juanita Cruz gently dozing next to him, Beau felt a hammering in his chest as he watched the sky turn from black to charcoal gray then lighten into reddish orange before streaming into yellow. It was the same sun and it made him feel as if his heart would collapse from the pain.

“What is it?” The voice came from a distance. “What is it?” It was a familiar voice. He turned to it but only saw a blur. He wiped his eyes and it was his partner, sitting up now, staring at him, her brows furrowed.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Beau felt his head shake, felt his heart hurting so badly he wondered how he could breathe. He looked back at the sun. It should be off-kilter, askew, every object should be a fraction of an inch from its true place. Everything was wrong, but nothing looked wrong. It was the same sun.

He looked back at his partner and told her that.

“You’re not making sense,” she said, brushing grass from her pants.

“Don’t you see?” he heard himself say.

“No.” She looked him in the eye again and said, “You talking about back there? What they’re doing, isn’t it what we’d all like to do sometimes? Just clean house.”

Beau felt himself shivering in the heated air. “On purpose,” he said. “They’re even leaving the bodies to be found on purpose, so word’ll get out.”

“Sure,” Cruz said. “You said it. Word to the criminals. See what we can do when we want to.”

The pain still shot through his heart but Beau could breathe now. He needed the breath to explain. “We don’t do that.”

Cruz leaned back, a haughty look on her face. “You saying it’s bad?”

“No. I’m saying we don’t do that. We kill... I killed... when I had no choice. It was me or them. We don’t execute people.”

“It bothers you that Killboy’s dead? That cop-shooting Abdon guy? I forget the third one.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, hell, you said it: Everything’s changed. The whole damn world’s changed.”

Cruz looked at him a long while before getting up and holding out her hand to pull him up. He grabbed it after a few seconds and she tugged him up. Beau looked back at the city, at the roofs protruding from brown water like cypress stumps in a bayou. He felt the stab again in his heart.

“Is that why you were crying?” Cruz asked.

“No. Yes. Maybe.” How could he explain it when he didn’t know? A plains warrior didn’t cry. They never showed their emotions like the white-eyes. Maybe it was his Cajun side. Certainly his father would not have hidden his emotions if he saw the great Louisiana city, la Nouvelle Orléans, inundated in brown water.

It took Cruz to say it aloud. “Tonight never happened. We’re solid. There’s no other choice.” She pointed to the construction site next to the canal. “Lets get some help with the motor. Maybe get a lift. Check on Joe and Sad Lisa.”

Beau started to follow, but his legs wouldn’t move. And he realized he knew why it bothered him. It was right there in front of his eyes. There was no going back. Nothing would ever be the same again.

This was New Orleans, A.K.

Copyright © 2006 O’Neil de Noux