Maureen bent over, grabbing the man’s ankles. “Fuck it. That’ll have to do. You take his arms, I’ll take his legs.”
Cordts grabbed the kid’s wrists and together they lifted him off the street. He weighed next to nothing, Maureen thought. She felt guilty for thinking about kicking him. This was not a healthy person, and no one was coming to help him tonight. There were no screams or spasms from him this time. She was willing to bet that he’d heard them talking. He knew they were about to leave him be.
A flurry of muffled pops punched through the crowd noise and the sounds of the passing parade. Maureen froze. Gunshots. And from not more than a few blocks away. No one in the crowd around her reacted. Had she made a mistake? Fireworks, then? She locked eyes with Cordts. Nope. Not fireworks. She wasn’t wrong. She could tell by the look on his face. Without a word, they dropped the clown in the street and took off running toward the gunfire.
4
Maureen sprinted up Seventh Street, shouting into her radio, “Show Cordts and Coughlin responding to gunshots, heading north on foot up Seventh Street.” Cordts ran hard at her heels.
Wilburn’s voice crackled back to Maureen over her radio, reporting that he was trying to get an exact location for the shots fired, and promising to catch up. Maureen knew an NOPD unit was patrolling in the area, but Dispatch didn’t know yet where to send them. As of that moment, no one knew exactly where the shooting had happened. She was glad there’d been no subsequent shots to direct her.
She and Cordts stopped running and tried to get their bearings. Latecomers to the parade rushed by them, headed for St. Charles, clutching everything from twelve-packs to screaming twins. Other people pulled rolling coolers, little red wagons, and crying children behind them, hustling for the relative safety of the parade route. They were spooked, Maureen saw, but they were not panicked, not fleeing for their lives. That told her that these people had heard the shots, but that the gunfire had come from a fair distance away.
She and Cordts were on the wrong street, of no use to anyone.
They stopped people going by, barking questions at them about the gunfire. No one had anything to offer. Most people shook their heads, not even speaking, refusing to meet Maureen’s eyes. They didn’t want to admit out loud, she could tell, to her or to themselves, the truth about what they’d heard. They pushed their strollers and towed their coolers and kids with their eyes cast down, their strides determined.
Anyone who was gracious enough to speak repeated the same thing, as if reading their lines from a cue card: “I’m sorry, Officers, I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see anything.”
Parade-goers continued flowing past her and Cordts, schooling fish headed downstream toward the big river of people on St. Charles Avenue, the authoritative rumbling of marching band drums adding a spring to their step. Nobody, Maureen noticed, had made an about-face and headed back to their car and away from the parade. And more was at work here than the unique New Orleans combination of enthusiasm and fatalism, Maureen knew. The parade-goers couldn’t leave the area if they wanted to. There’d be no driving into or out of most of Uptown for another few hours. The parade had everyone boxed in together and they knew it.
Maureen could hear the throbbing drums moving away from her now. The echoes bouncing off the surrounding houses faded. Maybe that would help her find the right location. Wouldn’t be long, though, before another band came marching up the street. This parade had been rolling awhile, she thought. Maybe they’d catch a break, and the end of Chaos was coming. She strained to hear shouting, screaming, or anything emanating from the scene of the shooting that might lead them in the right direction.
Maureen turned in a circle, her arms raised at her sides. You, she said to herself, cannot panic. We cannot have panic at the parade. Cordts hustled up to her.
“Where do you think?” he asked. “I’m stumped.”
“I don’t know,” Maureen said. “You heard them, too. I’m not crazy.”
“I heard them,” Cordts said. “Wilburn heard them. All these people did. That was shots fired. This is happening.” He turned in a circle. “Maybe more toward Downtown? Yeah, east, toward Downtown, I think.”
“Fuck. Maybe we should split up.”
Cordts tilted his head, listening to the radio chatter. “Or maybe we should wait for a definite location from Dispatch. We’re not the only cops out here.”
A tall, gray-bearded, bowlegged man in a Yankees cap, beads swinging around his neck, staggered up to them. He pointed behind him, toward Downtown, a bent cigarette burning between his swollen knuckles. “Washington and Baronne, by that bar over there. It’s bad, Officers. I think maybe a kid got killed.”
As they ran, Cordts called in their destination. Over the ecstatic cheers welcoming another float rolling up from St. Charles, Maureen heard a terrified woman screaming as loud as she could for someone, anyone to help her.
5
The screaming woman knelt in the center of the intersection of Baronne and Washington Avenue, outside a bar named Verret’s. Blood stained her face and hands. She cradled a wounded man’s head and shoulders in her lap. Every scream sent chills up the back of Maureen’s neck. The man lying in her lap groped at the amoebic red stain spreading across his white T-shirt with a sleepy, limp hand. Maureen set her hand on her weapon, her palm slick inside her glove. Where’s the gun that shot this guy? she thought. Where’s the shooter? What are we walking into?
The bloodied woman was only one of several people crying out for help. They lay scattered in the street, like dolls dumped from a toy box by an angry child. On their backs, on their knees. Some were injured. Others were only confused and terrified. Everywhere Maureen looked, dark puddles spread across the wet pavement throughout the intersection like clouds in a black sky.
Maureen counted the possibilities: beer, wine, blood.
The air reeked of spilled booze and piss and smoke.
“What an absolute clusterfuck,” she said. “Jesus Christ.”
“We’re gonna need some fucking help.” Cordts keyed his mic. “This is Cordts. We found it. Intersection of Washington and Baronne. Multiple wounded. Multiple possible GSW. No sign of a shooter. We’re securing the scene.”
“The kid,” Maureen said. “Where’s this kid who got shot?”
She scanned the sprawled and wounded lying on the blacktop, searching for the dead child. She had to distinguish right now between the wounded and the merely frightened; the frightened had to wait. She focused her vision, looking for that child, and at the same time remaining alert for any continuing threat. She registered again that they had heard only the original set of shots.
“You see anyone with a gun?” Cordts asked. “Anyone who looks like a shooter? You see a gun anywhere?”
“I don’t see anything but a big fucking mess,” Maureen said. “I think the shooting is over. Where’s that kid?”
Maureen turned around and looked down Washington Avenue toward the parade. She could see hundreds of hands rise in the air, a rock concert crowd, oblivious, as the glowing float rolled by, its ghostly masked riders tossing strands of beads into the air. Against that backdrop, she saw Wilburn jogging in their direction. Not quite the cavalry, but it was a start.
“Okay, listen to me,” she said to Cordts, “I got these two in the intersection.” She pulled on plastic gloves. “Get with Wilburn, try to make some sense of what’s happening. Find out if that kid the guy was talking about is for real. We need to know who’s been shot and who twisted their ankle and pissed their pants. We’re gonna hafta direct EMS when they arrive. They’re gonna have to prioritize.”
Cordts rushed away to meet Wilburn, and Maureen moved to the woman in the intersection and knelt at her side. She had bright streaks of blood along her pale jaw from where she kept swiping at the strands of brown hair falling in her face. She had stopped screaming, and now shook with sobs, trying and failing to calm herself so she could comfort the man in her lap.
“Are you hurt?�
�� Maureen asked to get the woman’s attention. “Were you hit?”
“Of course he’s hurt,” the woman shouted. “Are you fucking blind? He’s fucking shot.”
“You,” Maureen said. “I’m talking to you. Are you hurt?”
“No, no, no,” the woman said. “Just him, they came after him.”
The man licked his lips. His eyelids fluttered. He seemed aware of Maureen’s presence. “It’s okay, sir,” she said. “Don’t try to speak. More help is on the way.”
His hand had stopped moving, lying like a dead thing on his chest. Judging by his wound, Maureen figured he’d taken at least one bullet, maybe two, high in the rib cage, under his armpit.
Maureen did not hear the telltale wet and sucking sound that indicated lung damage. More blood pooled underneath the man. He’d taken another bullet in the back of his leg, in the meat of his thigh. He’d been shot, Maureen noted, from behind. Remember that. They came after him, the woman had said. Maureen filed that away for later, too. The knees of his jeans were wet and dirty. She checked the palm of his limp hand, found it scraped. He had collapsed facedown and the woman had rolled him over. The bullet in his leg had not, thank God, hit the femoral artery. His pants were bloody, but Maureen saw no exit wound on the front of his thigh. That meant the bullet remained inside him, most likely moving every time he did.
Hang in there, Maureen thought. Hang in there. You lived this long. First, we have to do something about the bleeding.
She stood, placing herself at the center of a clock, trying to slow her breathing as she surveyed the scene. Fucking mayhem everywhere. She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist, careful of the blood on her hands. Other cops had arrived on foot from the parade route. They tended to the people in the street. That was good. We’re gaining control of the situation, Maureen thought. She focused on finding one thing she needed at the moment, and that was help stopping the bleeding. There, at ten o’clock, standing outside the bar on the corner, hands over her mouth, was a bartender, Maureen identifying her by the white towel hanging from her belt.
“You,” Maureen called out, pointing, striding in the direction of the bar. “Bartender. You run inside and get me bar towels.” She clapped her hands. “Let’s go.”
She returned to the couple, kneeling again. “Miss, help is coming.”
The woman turned, blinking at Maureen. “My God, they shot him. They fucking shot him. Oh my God. Where is the ambulance? Where are the medics?”
Maureen made eye contact with the woman, tried to hold her gaze. “Miss, EMS is almost here. We’re gonna help you, both of you. Miss, what’s your name?”
“What? Who? Me? Susan. My name is Susan.”
The bartender appeared over Maureen’s shoulder, extending a fistful of clean, fuzzy white towels. Maureen grabbed one, pressed it against the man’s chest wound. She took the woman’s hand, placed it over the towel. “Pressure here, Susan. Against his ribs. Keep pressure here.”
The towel turned bloody quickly. These aren’t wounds, though, Maureen thought, watching the redness spread, that should kill a man. We can’t let him die. We can’t leave him lying in the street like this. She clenched her teeth, moved Susan’s hand, and placed a new towel over the first. She pressed Susan’s hand again to the wound. “Pressure here. Don’t worry, you can’t press too hard. You won’t make it worse. But let him breathe.”
Having a task helped Susan focus. “Okay, okay, okay.” She held the towels in place with both hands. Her face was the color of oyster shells.
Maureen tried using a towel to fashion a tourniquet for the man’s leg. His thigh was too thick. She jammed a fistful of towels under his leg, guessing at where the wound might be. The man screamed in pain. Found it. She imagined the bullet moving around in his leg and chased the thought away. Squeezing his thigh didn’t seem the best idea, but she wanted to keep as much of his blood as she could on the inside.
The bartender stood over them, at a loss for what to do.
Maureen was about to demand more towels, she didn’t know what else to do, when two people in blue, a man and a woman, skidded up to her on their mountain bikes. EMTs. Thank fucking God. Not an ambulance, but better than her alone with a bunch of bar towels.
“What’ve we got?” the man asked, getting down on one knee. Maureen glanced at his name tag. Jewell. He pulled on latex gloves. Over his shoulder, the woman unpacked their gear from the bikes.
“Multiple GSW,” Maureen said. “Chest, back of the leg. He’s lost a good amount of blood.”
Jewell leaned over the man in the street. “Sir? Sir? Can you hear me? We’re going to help you out.”
“He’s in and out,” Maureen said.
“Where are the rest of you?” Susan demanded. “Where is the ambulance? What is this? He needs an ambulance. You can’t put him on a bicycle.”
“There are more of you coming,” Maureen said. “Right?”
“Of course, of course,” Jewell said, nodding, his attention focused on the wounded man. “We were closest. We’re quickest through the crowds. The ambulance is on its way.” He looked at Susan. “They’re minutes away. Tops. I promise.”
Maureen stood, watching as two mounted police trotted up Washington Avenue, their horses’ hooves clopping on the pavement. The horses snorted, alien and enormous, out of place standing in the middle of a city intersection, shaking their heads, jingling their bridles, as their riders reined them to a stop. The mounted officers, their faces impassive, surveyed the scene from under their rain-glistened helmets. Maureen knew they were assessing any possible threats, that they could see better than anyone on foot and so were watching the perimeter of the scene, but, to look at them, they seemed to be deciding if the plebian chaos at their feet was worthy of their attention.
We have bikes, we have horses, we have little red wagons, rolling coolers, and Mardi Gras floats, Maureen thought, but what we fucking need is an ambulance. Not a lot to ask for. She keyed the mic on her radio. “This is Coughlin. I’m on the scene. Repeating ambulance request. These guys on the bikes are not enough. We have multiple GSWs and other injured at Washington and Baronne. We need transport for the victims ASAP.”
“On the way,” came the response. “Offer whatever assistance possible until then.”
“An ETA, maybe? People are getting panicked.”
“ASAP.”
Finally, she heard the sirens. About fucking time. “We’re gonna need more than one.”
“Any and all available units are on their way,” Dispatch calmly told her. “We’re doing the best we can.”
At her feet, the two EMTs worked on the wounded man, talking calmly to each other, asking Susan questions about allergies, medical conditions. Susan sat in the wet street, knees drawn to her chest as she answered the questions, fighting back sobs.
Across the intersection, Maureen watched Cordts rise to his feet beside a green sedan punctured with bullet holes. He was pale and shaken, his back straight, his bright yellow vest smeared with blood. Maureen lost her breath when she saw what he held in his arms.
Cordts cradled a child, a young girl of nine or ten clad in black tights and matching fairy wings. She lay limp as a rag doll in Cordts’s arms, her black wings crushed under her. Cordts leaned in and spoke to her, his head close to hers. She did not respond. One of her legs dangled blood-soaked and useless. A little red sneaker fell from her foot into the street, rolling then bouncing to a stop. From where she stood, Maureen could not see if the girl’s eyes were open or closed, or if the girl was breathing. She could see the flashing lights of the ambulance rushing closer as it sped down Washington Avenue, the siren screaming louder and louder. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, Maureen urged. Move faster. Everything needs to happen faster.
The girl’s mother, a black-haired woman in black leggings and a purple-, green-, and gold-striped rugby jersey, was draped over Cordts’s shoulder, grabbing at her daughter, trying to take the girl from his arms. Cordts saw Maureen watching him and called out to he
r for help. “Cogs!”
“We got this,” Jewell said.
“Ten-four,” his partner confirmed. “Go.”
Maureen hustled over to Cordts.
He had turned his back to the mother once again, watching the ambulance approach, the girl in his arms not moving. It looked to Maureen like the girl was breathing, but she couldn’t be certain wishful thinking wasn’t playing tricks on her.
Wilburn stood a few feet away from them, his hands on the girl’s father’s arms, trying to talk him down. The father wore a floppy black-and-red jester hat that kept slipping down over his eyes. We gotta get these people outta here, Maureen thought. Wilburn looked ready to cuff the father. Cordts had started to hyperventilate.
“Ma’am, ma’am,” Maureen said, rushing to the mother. The woman ignored her, repeating the girl’s name over and over as she continued trying to reach around Cordts for her daughter. “Lyla, Lyla, honey, Mommy’s here. Mommy’s here.”
“Ma’am,” Maureen said. “The ambulance is here. Let the officer help Lyla.”
Hearing her daughter’s name struck the woman like an electric shock. She froze. Maureen took advantage of the moment and slipped between her and Cordts, freeing him to move with the girl toward the ambulance. The woman swung her fists, hitting Maureen on the arms, her eyes electric and wild, yelling, “She needs her mother.”
She tried to move around Maureen. “Lyla, Lyla,” she shouted again, loud and mournful. “Mommy’s here. Mommy’s here. You’ll be okay.”
Maureen could hear the guilt and the sheer terror fracturing the woman’s voice. She kept her face turned away from the flying fists and grabbed the woman’s shoulders, realizing she still wore the bloody gloves. The mother screamed, lunging after Cordts and her daughter. Maureen released her arms and grabbed her by the waist. The woman spun in Maureen’s arms, breaking free, her face contorted in rage and agony. She brought her hand far back behind her, loading up for the slap she then delivered hard across Maureen’s cheek. The crack was half as loud as a gunshot, the blow hard enough to stagger Maureen and set her eyes watering. She backed away, fists clenched at her sides.
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