City of Secrets

by O'Neil De Noux

  “Green eyes, like you Linda, only slanted.”

  “Asian?” Aligood asks.

  “I have no idea.” Beau shrugs. “She’s only about six weeks old.”

  Linda frowns now.

  “Prettiest kitten you’ll ever see.” He steps aboard, leads them to the door, opens it and Stella is there in her usual spot, sitting up in the center of the room, until she sees he’s not alone and scampers behind the sofa, then up the cross-beam to the loft.

  “Fast,” Aligood says as he reaches in, puts the ice-chest down, goes back out on deck.

  Linda looks around the place, doesn’t seem impressed, lets out a breath, looks up at Beau.

  “You all right, tough guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  She steps up, put both hands on his chest, goes up on her toes and kisses him, softly, her lips sending a shock through his. It lingers for one, two, three seconds. She pulls away, pats his chest and walks out without looking back, closing the door behind her.

  Well, how about that?

  He’s more awake now, goes out, locks the gate, makes sure to dead-bolt the door when he gets back in and takes a long shower, leaving the kitten to check out the scents on his boots and everything else he just brought in. Stella lies on the toilet seat lid watching him when he climbs out of the shower.

  “Did you see her kiss me?” he asks her.

  The kitten stands and stretches, her hind quarter rising.

  “Huh, Stella?”

  “Meoww.”

  “She’s a good kisser.”

  Stella keeps look at him.

  “Right, Stella?”

  “Meoww.”

  And Beau laughs. She’s got her name down now.

  The rain’s pounding outside, a trickle of mist flowing through the screen of the portholes on either side of the bed, not enough water to wet anything as Beau lies on his back now, Stella above the pillow, stretched out herself. The kitty has already learned sleeping near Beau’s feet isn’t a good idea. He tends to roll around in his sleep and his foot is much bigger than her.

  Beau tries to dream of Linda and those lips reaching for his but he sees darkness and a man coming at him with an AK-47 and sees the flashes from his Glock and the man staggering and the other man opening up with his gun and the crypt chipping and him ducking and then the gate and the bullets slicing the wrought iron.

  He killed three men today. Killing men, even bastards who needed killing, was a lonely business. He used to tell himself killing a killer is a good thing, like stepping on a cockroach, only it’s not. Killers have mothers. Killers were babies once, came into the world as Beau did, innocent and needy. Someone loved them enough to raise them before they took the wrong turn and ran into a man named Beau who wasn’t a god, was just a man like them, a man who aimed a gun better.

  Right triumphs over wrong. Good over evil. So why does he feel bad? Why does he have to search within, let the shadow warrior rise again, let it calm him, let it drag him to sleep because today was a good day to kill?

  Part 4

  A Warrior Faces His Enemy

  Stella scrambling off the bed wakes Beau and Sad Lisa quivers as a wave from the lake rolls against her. Beau sits up, sees its dark out, reaches for his Glock atop the nightstand. There’s someone out on the pier. Beau moves to the end of the bed, stands and eases to the porthole looking out at the pier. In the pale yellow light there’s a dark shadow standing there, head turning around, moving to the gate to Sad Lisa.

  “Beau! Don’t shoot. It’s me!”

  Felicity Jones. Beau goes down and lets him in, puts on a pot of coffee. They sit at the galley table.

  “I wanted to catch you before you got rolling tonight.” Felicity sips his coffee, makes a face. “Kinda strong.”

  “It’s café noir. Cajun espresso only with coffee-and-chicory.”

  “Got a message for you. From your lieutenant.”

  Beau closes his eyes, puts a hand up to his brow. “He’s still across the river?”

  “Yeah. Take the next two days off. Minimum.”

  “Two days? No fuckin’ way. I’m in a zone right now.”

  Felicity looks around the place. Stella is up on the sofa watching.

  “I’ll take tonight off, but tomorrow night I’m going out again and since we’re talking shop, anything on any of the evidence, fingerprints? Did anyone ever ID the guy I shot by the goddamn fort? That’s the only body they didn’t get away with.”

  “LAPD says Brown Ravens always take their bodies with them, at least try to. Raiding the coroner’s morgue once to get two of their leaders.” Felicity smiles now, pulls a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, flaps it open, lays on the table next to his plate, reads from it –

  “Amos Michael Lander, forty years old. POB: Shreveport. Nineteen arrests: burglary, theft, auto theft, possession cocaine, possession marijuana, felon in possession of a firearm, aggravated assault, armed robbery.” Felicity looks up, “Three times.” He looks back at the sheet. “Forcible rape and three counts of illegal use of an access card. Two convictions. Armed Robbery and burglary. LKA: 1312 Mazant Street. Ninth Ward.” He folds the paper. “Two warrants. Long Beach PD. First Degree Murder, 2004.”

  “Long Beach, Mississippi?”

  Felicity grimaces. “California. South L.A.” He laughs. “Sometimes you prove you’re Cajun. Mississippi?”

  “They got murders there. I suppose.”

  “Not anymore. Katrina wiped out Pass Christian and Long Beach was next door.”

  They drink quietly for a while. Stella comes as close as the end of the sofa, but Beau knows she’s ready to bolt if the visitor moves.

  Felicity puts his elbows on the table, covers his face with his hands. “There was a small fire in the Quarter and the fire department panicked. Put it out right away, but if the Quarter goes, there goes the city.

  “Commander of the First District stopped counting the bullet holes in the building when he reached a hundred. They finally cleared out the Iberville Projects and the Louisiana National Guard’s boarding it up good and tight.”

  No need to explain. The projects overlook the First District Station.

  “We still only have a fraction of our men. Helluva lot ain’t coming back.”

  “They still using the Tchoupitoulas Walmart as a district station?”

  “Yep. The Sixth District’s there. Walmart sends in food, water.”

  “How many 29-S?”

  “Only one confirmed. Media fucked that up as well.”

  One cop committed suicide, not the half dozen reported by the press and the report of bodies stacked in the freezer at the convention center was wrong. No one raped there. No seven year old girl with her throat sliced open. No mass rapes at the Superdome.

  “The thugs are returning,” Felicity says. “The Quarter’s the hot spot right now since it’s got electricity. Latinos flocking into town, looking for work.” Felicity laughs. “Fuckin’ city council complaining the city’s gonna be a Spanish town. Hell it used to be.”

  “What’s the body count up to?”

  “Closing in on thirteen hundred. Over two thousand missing, but most of them are just scattered. That general from the Rhode Island National Guard’s getting ready to send his men, daylight missions only, into Marigny and Bywater looking for one of The Cowsills.”

  “The what?” Beau jumps as Stella’s claws grab his ankle and he scoops her before she tries to climb his bare leg. He’s in shorts and an old LSU tee shirt. He lays her on her back in his lap and he lets her play with his hand.

  “The Cowsills were a sixties rock band with a couple hits The Rain, The Park and Other Things. Indian Lake.”

  Beau never heard of them.

  “The Patridge Family TV show was based on them. A family act.”

  Never heard of that either. They had a black and white TV when he was little. Got three channels.

  Stella growls as he tickles her, then begins to purr.

  “Can’t believe you have a
kitten. You look more like a black German shepherd man.”

  “Houseboat’s too small for a dog.” And Beau feels another loss. Buck. His catahoula hound dog that lived here longer than Angie. He gave Buck to his Uncle Dreux down in Abbeville after Hurricane Rita. A catahoula needs room to run, needs open spaces, needs the swamp and the great Cajun floating prairie, the marshland. God, he misses that dog.

  “Anyway, one of the Cowsills was living down here and is missing.”

  Felicity looks at his watch and it’s only then Beau realizes its almost midnight.

  “Gotta go.”

  Beau walks him to the pier. “Got a picture of that Cowlick?”

  “Cowsill.” Felicity walks off shaking his head.

  “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  He gets an over the shoulder wave in response.

  After a cooling shower and breakfast, Stella’s not finished playing and attacks Beau again, coming at him with her back arched, tail boofed out. Bouncing. He sits on the floor with her and goes at her with one hand, then the other. Claws are sharp but draw no blood. She leaps at his hands, one, then the other.

  Beau goes to his closet and digs out a couple tennis balls. Another leftover from his life with Angie. Bag of used tennis balls, two cans of unused tennis balls, sports bag, an two-hundred dollar Prince racquet made of carbon-graphite and ceramic. Extra light. Extra powerful. They played three times. Only part he liked was the short skirt she wore.

  He spends a good half hour playing with Stella and the tennis balls. She’s so small, when she catches up to a ball, she climbs on it, legs straddling it, she has trouble keeping the ball from rolling, tumbles her off, which scoots the ball along the floor and she goes after it again. He makes sure she has plenty of food and water before stepping out on deck, locking the door behind him.

  He has his compact tactical bag with his Glock and extra magazines draped over his shoulder like a man’s purse – murse, more or less – and goes to the warehouse for supplies, piling them on his houseboat deck, then walks the pier for a few minutes. As he finishes putting the supplies into Sad Lisa, he feels someone behind him, turns to see Ann and Stu walking up, each with a can of beer in hand.

  “What you doing home, Beau baby?”

  “Wanna brew? It’s cold?”

  “Naw. I’m just taking the night off.”

  They make themselves at home, re-arranging deck chairs while Beau goes in for another cup of coffee, comes out to sit with them. Ann wears a gold Saints tee-shirt, Stu’s got on a black one, both are in shorts, flip flops. Beau is barefoot. The evening air is almost cool and the breeze keeps pushing Ann’s hair in her face, so she moves her chair around to face the breeze, puts her feet up on the rail.

  Ann says, “Met three people the last few days that say Katrina was sent by God to flush the sin out of the city.”

  “Never happen,” Stu says.

  “It was Coyote-man, the devil monster of the plains warriors, the Sioux and Cheyenne.” Beau tells them. “He steals the breath from babies, leaving them cold and dead, plays tricks on warriors on battlefields when a warrior’s bow breaks or an arrow doesn’t fly straight or when a pony trips in a gopher hole, sending its rider crashing to the ground. It’s Coyote-man. He draws warriors to watery deaths in lakes and swollen rivers where their soul will never escape because a warrior who drowns, his spirit remains trapped in the water forever and cannot fly up into the Land of the Ghosts.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?” Ann’s looking at him now.

  “I did when I was boy.”

  “What’s that?” Ann says as there’s a rush of air overhead. Beau recognizes it. Fluttering from the small colony of bats in the warehouse roof. He’d spotted them right after the storm, nesting in the decorative cupola atop the old building. Good omen for the Sioux. Good news for the white-eyes. Bats feed exclusively on insects, mosquitoes especially down here.

  “Could be a stealth helicopter,” he says.

  Ann goes, “Say what? A stealth helicopter?”

  Beau keeps his face serious. “Delta Force. Been using super-secret stealth helicopters to hunt down criminals. They have a list of targets. New Orleans thugs mostly. Not the carpetbagger Brown Ravens I’m after.”

  Stu’s buying it, but Ann gives Beau that ‘you gotta be kiddin’ look’.

  “How the hell do you keep a helicopter’s rotor quiet?”

  Beau doesn’t falter. “Teflon, ceramic coated blades, like on the stealth bomber, absorbs sound, like the way the bomber absorbs radar.”

  An errant bat swoops past the table, too quick to startle anyone until it passes.

  “Damn, it’s fast.”

  “Stealth, as well.” Beau smiles now and Ann slaps the chair.

  “I knew it. Stealth helicopter, my ass!”

  A few minutes later it looks as if Stu’s sleeping. Ann gets up, takes her man’s hand and leads him away.

  “See ya’.”

  Beau takes another walk around the harbor before locking up. Stella lies stretched out next to one of the tennis balls. Little girl is long when she’s all extended. She looks at him, gives him a ‘Meow’ and closes her eyes. The tennis balls exhausted her.

  He looks for the book he was reading. Wait. Which book? He’d been reading something. He laughs. That was BK. Damn. Another time. Another world. He goes to the small bookshelf and sees more of Angie’s books then recognizes the one he’d started.

  A thick paperback, the bookmark was only on page six. He’ll start over. The Unwritten Order by John Edward Ames, a western. The premise caught him. The US Cavalry had an Unwritten Order to never let a white woman be captured by Indians, especially Apaches or Comanches. Apparently a young cavalryman must do this to a woman he loves, before he puts his last bullet through his own brain as the savages close in.

  The rear of the book says the writer lived in New Orleans. Beau wonders if he’s back.

  •

  A freshly-shaven Beau, in another all-black get up, heads back to the door, scooping Stella up along the way. They’ve been playing, bonding, through his day off and this afternoon. She’s a tired little girl, purrs as he pets her. He kisses the side of her face, puts her on the sofa and pets her again. She lies on her side and closes her eyes. A tired little girl.

  Just as Beau locks his gate, he feels a shiver on the pier and sees Felicity Jones and Linda Pickett and another man heading his way. Looks like one of the Chicago detectives, the quiet one. Linda’s in khaki’s again, Felicity in a black dress shirt and tactical pants. The Chicago dick in black pants and a lightweight black jacket over a gray tee-shirt.

  “Beau, baby!”

  He turns as Ann Treadway comes over carrying a large book. She’s in a pink undershirt cut off above her flat belly and white panties. She sees the others come, closes the book and calls out, “Fel! Where the hell have you been?”

  “You know each other?”

  As Felicity steps up, Ann hands the book to Beau and opens her arms to give the big Intelligence officer a hug. Linda moves around, glancing at Ann’s ass now, then looks at Beau as if its his fault.

  Ann pulls away, does a slow turn. “How y’all like my new French lace panties? Straight from Paris via Fed EX. Hurricanes can’t stop Fed EX.”

  She sees Linda, smiles even wider, asks Beau, “Who’s the filly?”

  Beau handles the introduction and Linda is polite. He can’t remember the Chicagoan’s name.

  “Det. John Doherty.” He’s in his forties with a thick moustache. Thin but not skinny. In those black frame glasses, he looks more like a librarian than a dick.

  Ann taps the book. “Open to page seventy-seven.”

  Beau sees it’s a book on cats. He finds the page and there’s Stella, pictures of her as a kitten, her as an adult.

  “Told you she’s pedigree. Turkish Angora Blue.”

  Damn if she isn’t right. It looks just like Stella. So that’s what she’ll look like in about a year, as well. He shows the picture to Feli
city whose peeking at Ann’s panties. Doherty’s ogling her as well, standing back to get a complete view. Linda just nods at the picture. Beau hands the book back to Ann who reads from the printing under the pictures. “Extremely affectionate and devoted, Angoras tend to bond with one person rather than a whole family.” She looks up. “Perfect for a bachelor.”

  Beau thanks her for bringing the book.

  “And the panties,” says Felicity, which draws a glare from Linda.

  Ann closes the book, turns and heads back to Kate’s Delight rolling her butt a moment before moving away.

  Felicity’s smile is broad. “Ya’ gotta love New Orleans.”

  Doherty lets out a long breath.

  “So what brings the entourage?” Beau picks up his small ice-chest filled with bottled water and ice.

  “Knew you’d be going out tonight.” Felicity pats Beau on the shoulder. “We got a tip.”

  Linda moves next to Beau but doesn’t look at him.

  “Got an address on Coliseum Square. Some squatters moved into a big house there. Look like druggies.”

  Doherty tries to help him with the ice chest.

  “I got it,” Beau tells him. “You not hot in that jacket?”

  Beau sees no one has a vest on.

  The Chicago detective opens the jacket and shows western-style holster with a huge, blue steel revolver with a six inch barrel. He taps the ivory handle grip, smiles.

  “The fuck is that?”

  “Forty-four magnum. The most powerful handgun in the world.”

  Beau opens the Escalade, asks Felicity, “How do you know Ann?”

  “Remember Mike Brady?”

  “Name sounds familiar.”

  “First District. Ann was his girlfriend. He used to slap her around. I helped get him canned.”

  Succinct enough.

  “Calls you Fel.”

  “All my friends do, except you.”

  “Who says I’m your friend?” No way anyone can read Beau’s face. Blank. Inexpressive. Too much. Felicity’s got to see through that.

  Fel laughs, shoves him hard. Beau bounces, looks at Linda and smiles now.

  Doherty has a dark gray Ford Explorer and Fel climbs in with him. Linda goes to the other side of the Escalade. He doesn’t smell her perfume until she’s in the SUV. It’s a light scent and she’s done something with her hair. It’s got a wave to it. Fel leads the way out.