by Seth Pevey
Melancon slapped his fedora down on the dashboard, rubbed his forehead in exasperation.
“The kid…but why would he?”
“Shit,” Melancon said and stepped out of the vehicle.
He found Janine standing on the banks of the Mississippi, right near the old veteran’s cemetery that flanked the eastern end of the battlefield. She was watching a few Harbor Police boats churn through the muddy water near the shore. The big beams on the front of the boats danced across the surface of the water.
The old man tucked his hat under his arm. Lowering his head, he made his approach.
“Damn,” he said, low and solemn, as if it were some kind of a prayer. “Damn it all.”
Janine turned to face him. “We don’t know yet, David. Not for sure. It isn’t over until we find him. If we ever do. All we know is that a security officer on board made a positive ID on Andre. Scar on his neck and all. He phoned it in to the police on shore but then foolishly tried to apprehend the boy himself. When he did, Andre jumped overboard and was last seen going under the water.”
Felix showed up, still pale as a ghost. Paler, perhaps. He mouthed some silent words to his partner and shook his head. “This is…”
But his words failed him. Taking a running start, the young detective kicked a piece of driftwood so hard it splintered into three pieces. It must have hurt, from the look on his face afterwards. He stalked off into the darkness, cursing under his breath.
Melancon peered down at the swiftly moving murk, wine-colored and final, the wakes of the rescue boats troubling its man-made shore of rocks and clay. After a long life on the banks of this capricious river, he knew it well: knew precisely what that fickle and violent water was capable of—it took zero mercy on those who disrespected it.
“You reckon Andre was a good swimmer?” the old detective asked.
Janine’s eyes went soft and warm and full of a shimmering wetness, but she gave no reply. Melancon put an arm around her, a bold move considering the many professional eyes surrounding them, but she leaned into it anyway.
“We fucked up,” she said, sniffling a bit. “All of us fucked this right up. The boy paid the price.”
Melancon held her there, but the moment didn’t last long. Just as quickly as she had fallen into despair, Janine straightened her back and wiped her eyes dry. Now she was again a stalwart police detective, surveying riparian operations.
“Andre has…or had a pistol. We think,” he told her.
“Why would he—”
“We don’t know. Protection, maybe? Just thought you should know.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter too much now,” she said, looking out at the river.
“We’ll take a look around,” Melancon said. “Try to stay out of y’all’s way as best we can.”
She nodded, looking away from him and out towards the boats, a painful quiver to her lip that perhaps only he could detect.
Melancon wound his way through the uniforms, shook a few hands, until he finally found a place alone in the darkness, where he wiped away a bit of moisture from his own eyes. Tired calf muscles took him up on the earthen levee, where he could look back upriver and see the twinkling downtown buildings blocking out the stars. Between him and the central business district, he also spied the old sugar mill looking craggy and angular in the night. It was not a place he was particularly fond of, since recent memories from that decrepit old monument of industry were unpleasant to say the least. They were recollections of a cruelty that, when brooded on in the slightest, sent a long, slow chill up his spine. There was just something about this part of town—something that attracted dark happenings. But it wasn’t just this part of town. It was the whole place. The world entire, as it would, kept on being cruel.
There’s a chance he made it to the shore, David Melancon told himself, though he wasn’t quite sure he could really believe it. The river was so broad, so strong, so deep, and Andre so small and helpless. But it wasn’t over until it was over. He had to push those thoughts away and bring his whole mind to bear on the search.
“Felix!” he called out. He could see the young detective’s flashlight waving against the rocks up ahead.
“Yeah, I’m over here. I’ve got something!”
Melancon hurried down with some speed, nearly falling face-first after the corner of a large stone caught his loafer at a compromising angle. But he reached the muddy, lapping shore below the earthwork and looked down at what his partner had found.
His heart quivered. This forlorn thing. This stomach-churning sight.
A strange brass fish. How it shone in the flashlight’s heartless beam.
A horn.
The horn.
His horn.
Melancon put his hand over his mouth and barely held back a sob before it could announce itself.
Felix was shaking his head, still muttering something under his breath. He picked up the instrument carefully, reverently. With a cringe he tilted it downwards, letting the accumulated river water trickle out of the fat end and down onto the rocks.
“Do you…pray much these days, partner?” the young detective asked.
Melancon didn’t answer. He couldn’t. “Keep looking,” he choked out. “I don’t have a light.”
As Felix made widening circles around the find with his beam, Melancon tilted the horn this way and that, looking at it closely. The twisted tubes. The three valves. The flange of bent metal. All of it looked duller and more used upon closer inspection. Or maybe it was just the way it took on the moonlight.
What a thing, he thought to himself.
“Here!” Felix shouted from the other side of the levee.
In the veterans’ graveyard, fifty feet from the river, Felix had found a waterlogged shoe, just the size a thirteen-year-old boy like Andre would wear. He held it up in triumph.
“It’s a miracle,” Felix was already saying, casting his eyes and his torch around for the boy, as if he might appear behind a leaning headstone at any moment.
Melancon felt the shoe. Yes, it was wet. The water was cold and dripping, and there had been no rain for several days. There was no other possible explanation.
“He has to be alive. It’s too far from the river, Felix. He’s alive, damnit. He’s alive!”
The two men embraced for a moment, laughing and nearly jumping with excitement. Melancon shook the horn above his head before finally restraining himself and straightening his fedora.
“Should we tell Janine?”
“Not yet, Felix. Keep looking.”
“I don’t see the other shoe anywhere.”
They kept the search up, casting out in random directions, yelling the boy’s name and getting no response. Then they came into a dark unused parking lot filled with trash and broken bottles. Just as Melancon was beginning to doubt himself, just as he was beginning to wonder why a wet shoe had given him so much hope, he spied the billboard.
“It’s Satchmo,” Melancon said when Felix’s flashlight lit up the ripped and tattered sign announcing Jazzland, Louis Armstrong prominently featured in the center of it all.
Felix ran towards the sign. Halfway there he stepped on something lying in the parking lot, which sent him sprawling. He fell onto his back, gave out a small yelp and rolled a bit, holding his ankle. A metallic tinkling followed the yelp as something rolled out into the darkness.
“Shhh…I twisted it—”
“Felix, look what you tripped on.”
Melancon picked up Felix’s dropped flashlight and then, with his handkerchief, the metal objects that were lying next to it.
“It’s all brass tonight, I guess. Shell casings from a high-powered rifle. Maybe a 30-06.”
Felix stood up slowly and brushed himself off.
“What does it mean?”
“Andre must have left them here.”
“Could just be some redneck shooting off rounds.”
“I don’t know, Felix; we aren’t in the middle of the woods here. A high-powe
red rifle this close to civilization would probably be reported. These are just sitting here, right near the sign of you know who. And look.”
He held one up in the beam of the flashlight.
“It’s shiny. Like it has been in someone’s pocket and not sitting out here in the weather.”
“You think he was trying to tell us something?”
“Not trying,” Melancon said, pointing at the portrait of Satchmo blowing his horn, “doing.”
“You think he’s headed to Jazzland? To accomplish what?”
Their eyes met then.
“Felix. Why would he be going to an abandoned theme park dedicated to his idol, late at night, with a pistol but no horn, by himself, after he’d already attempted something like suicide a few hours ago? Having left behind some important bit of evidence lying in the middle of a parking lot?”
Felix started to answer but seemed to choke on the words.
“Do we tell Janine?”
“No, we don’t want anything to spook him. We go in quiet. And we go in a hurry.”
“I don’t think he would—”
“I don’t know, Felix. Wouldn’t you be thinking that same way if you were in his shoes? I mean, you’re rich and loved and I’m sure you’ve thought about it a million times. Now imagine how he feels, dripping and cold with river water, walking off into the night, hunted, with no one that loves him around and able enough to take him in.”
“I just…alright, let’s go quick. It would have taken him an hour to walk there and that’s about how long it’s been since his little swim, right?”
“We walk right through the detectives and don’t say a word, partner. Keep it off your face. We have to get there fast before…”
He couldn’t finish the thought. Instead, he started walking.
Eighteen
Melph Jones stared out of the cracked windshield of his Explorer. He was an old hand at staring, watching, waiting. There was a certain rhythm to it, a cadence of mind so easy to slip into. It was almost like a meditation of sorts. He could watch for hours—the mechanics of patience were a thing the Marines had taught him well. When death and dismemberment were on the table, when hate and anger were in full flare, it was often the more patient man who won out. Common sense to apply that stillness to this fucked-up situation, which also called for him to be slow, deliberate, thoughtful. There was an edge, and he was teetering on it to be sure.
So, he was practicing that patience now from a parking spot in the pitch-dark shade of a gnarly oak tree, right at the edge of the old battlefield. But it wasn’t an easy vigil.
First: the lights down by the river. There were so many that it was like some sort of a military operation down there. He watched thick beams dance across the dark water, and it all gave him a tightness in the chest. That frantic, urgent scanning of the river by so many men—it could only mean one thing. But it was a story that Melph Jones couldn’t yet tell himself. He would have to sit and wait to be told it by someone else, before he could ever truly accept it. Or maybe see with his own eyes what the search would dredge up and drag onto the shore. No, he wouldn’t create such a thing out of thin air. He would wait for it to be real—hours, days, weeks of patient, silent waiting if need be.
Second: he was the superstitious type, no matter what he told himself. He did not like a battlefield, particularly not one as old as this and flanked by the acid-eaten stones of countless war dead. He’d known too many living soldiers. He’d eaten with them, slept alongside them, shared bottles with them, and then watched them die, watched them wiped away, mere smudges of humanity. He didn’t have to come to a place like this to see and remember them. Their faces and names and ways lived in his head, always, and there was no comfort to be found here among their remains.
Thankfully, he didn’t have to wait long for a new development to take him away.
The old El Camino was already pulling out, retreating, making the long loop that cut through the historic grass, headed away from the search operation’s brilliant glow. But why? Why were those two detectives fleeing from all of this hullaballoo? Surely this was the center of things. Why were they headed back out onto the highway, away from all of the flashing lights and boats and—
Melph slipped his ride into gear and crept forward, headlights off. Radio silence.
Where were they going?
He’d lost the detectives earlier, but it had been easy to pick up their trail again. The authorities always traveled in packs, and you’d never catch them dealing with trouble alone. He’d seen the chopper flying low just minutes after losing them, and had simply followed it as it went cutting across the night sky. From there he had soon fallen into the stream of police cars headed east.
But he hadn’t even needed to do all that. Not really.
Because, after all, the two detectives had Andre’s phone.
And the detectives were smart, but not too smart—just smart enough to maybe find Andre, if he were still among the living, without being smart enough to realize how easy it was to track the location of a family member’s cell phone.
The problem was that it was so easy, Melph knew he wouldn’t be the only one with the Find My Phone application open right now.
And therein lay trouble number three: somewhere, nearby perhaps, he knew there was another set of patient, vigilant eyes watching the little dot float across the map. That, more than anything, gave the waiting an edge.
He crept forward a little more quickly now, keeping to the right where the shadows of the oak trees lay across the asphalt. The detectives were nearing the highway. Melph let them pull out and get well ahead this time, but he would not let them get away.
Because they knew something.
About Andre.
They had to. Why else would they be leaving now? They had to be getting close. Whatever business those two were about would lead him to the boy, he was sure of it. And he had to get there before—
Melph was nearly T-boned pulling out onto the highway, preoccupied with his hunt. The pickup truck swerved and let out a few angry honks before righting itself.
He had to focus. No mistakes.
The detectives took a left on Highway 47 and headed north, away from the river. He followed them at a distance, keeping his headlights off and using the app to make sure he was going the right direction. The El Camino entered a long stretch of road that cut through empty grassland and began picking up speed. He let them go, continued northward.
Several miles he burned through the darkness, past canals and old defunct drive-ins and dive bars. He lit a cigarette and took in the scenery.
Mostly nothing but alligators out here, big nutria rat made toxic from all the human runoff. This is where you were likely to find a dead body rolled up in a carpet, though, Melph thought. He kept waiting for the detectives to pull over by some fetid pool, to shine a light out onto his nephew’s bloated corpse floating nearby. But they never did.
Instead, they pulled into a turnoff. A dead end.
What was this place? There was something oddly familiar about it.
Melph rolled onto the shoulder of the highway and, from a distance of about two hundred yards, peered through his binoculars. Hard to make out much, except what he could discern in the El Camino’s headlights. As he looked, it became clear that the two detectives had turned into the entryway of a large abandoned parking lot. A parking lot to what exactly? He couldn’t be sure. There was nothing much out here, or so Melph thought, having spent almost his entire life on the opposite end of the city. He could see the older detective had stepped out and was running his hand across an iron bar that stretched across the pavement, barring access. Melph killed his engine and waited in the darkness for what might happen next.
The detective was back at the wheel now, and the El Camino revved a few times, bouncing forward. It pulled off to the side and stopped with its headlights pointed out into the muddy darkness. Finally, the tires squealed, the chassis fishtailed, and the old car charged headlong into
that wetness, forging its own path towards the parking lot.
Brave. Brave but stupid. Did that thing even have four-wheel drive?
They must be in some kind of awful hurry, and that had meaning.
Melph started his engine and crept closer, until he could see the clumps of mud being flung out into the roadway. The El Camino’s headlights moved forward bit by bit until they gradually became nothing but a glow off in the deep swamp.
But this wasn’t the only glow now. In the darkness a new set of lights had emerged. They appeared on the deserted stretch of highway, coming from the other direction. Melph couldn’t make out the type of car, but he had a pretty good idea. Whatever and whoever it was pulled off the road and into the darkness before he could size it up and confirm. He waited and listened for the slamming of a car door. When he heard it, he reached immediately into his back seat and prepared himself.
Fucked-up situation was putting it lightly. And he had known so many.
Here was the leather case in his lap now. The one tool for situations too far gone to repair. Melph pulled out the long object from inside of it—metal and wood and more metal. Inscribed on the stock was a stag’s head. On top was a long-range precision scope. He gripped it in his hands and found his breath growing still, his thoughts calming, the mechanics of patience all revisiting him in the darkness of this swampy spot.
He opened the door and stepped out, rifle slung over his back, and charged into that darkness.
Nineteen
I’m walking through the big park. There are rusty metal beams overhead, broken beer bottles everywhere, the smell of swampy water blowing in the cold wind.
It only took me an hour to get here. I’m getting good at running. But now I’m here and there’s no more running left to do. I have to be brave.