“What’s next?” Laine asked. “You gonna call me a carpetbagger? Spoken like a true newbie.”
“Do you even have a home?” Maureen asked. “A place that you actually care about? Or is it all one big video shoot to you?”
“Enough, enough,” Hardin said. “This does nobody any good.” He turned to Laine. “You’ll forgive me if I prioritize my people’s work over yours. Having cameras pointed at my officers the whole time that they’re working a case doesn’t help them any. It doesn’t make the parades any safer. We’re trying to prevent more violence. That’s bigger than anything you’re trying to do. If you have any experience reporting on a city, you know how fast these things can escalate.”
“With respect,” Laine said, “maybe Officer Coughlin is overstating her complaints about what I consider worthy content. I know for a fact you have a shooting suspect detained in the back of a police car, with no immediate plans to afford him due process. I saw it happen. I have a fair bit of it on camera. That gives me a very good opportunity to make the NOPD look bad if that’s what I want, and I don’t need anybody’s permission to do that. No one would blame me. A lot of people would think me pretty heroic. And yet, my camera crew is here with me on the parade route filming a twenty-foot-tall light-up red shoe, instead of watching a teenage suspect get babysat by a cop twice his size who would clearly like to break him in half. What does that tell you?”
Hardin looked at Maureen. “Cordts is there, too,” she told him. “Everything was copacetic when I left them.”
“What do you want?” Hardin asked.
“I need to talk to you about the OD,” Laine said.
“We haven’t confirmed that’s what it was,” Maureen said. “The EMTs left with the body minutes ago, practically. There’s been no statement from the coroner’s officer. Don’t put words in our mouths. There’ll be nothing official until after the weekend at least.”
“We don’t have information on that incident to share at this time,” Hardin said. “Other than to confirm there was a nonviolent fatality on the parade route tonight. Officer Coughlin is correct, there will be no news beyond that anytime soon.”
“An official statement is not what I’m looking for,” Laine said. “We’re not the nightly news. Actually, I’m here because I have information to share with you. About what may have happened to that kid.” She smirked and nodded at Maureen. “Off the record, of course.”
“Depending on what you tell us,” Hardin said. “We’re talking about criminal activity. I’m not sure you get the final decision on what’s off the record.”
“We’re all ears,” Maureen said.
“I think I know how that boy died. I think I know what killed him.”
“Really?” Maureen asked. “Did you see something happen after we left?”
“No,” Laine said. “Donna found him in the street after she left that bar by the scene of the shooting. Look, I haven’t been entirely honest about why we’re here in New Orleans, why we’re filming here now.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear this,” Hardin said.
“The Mardi Gras story is cover,” Laine said. “Or more like a backup plan. I’m trying to make an on-the-fly, real-time documentary about flakka.”
“Who?” Maureen asked.
“Not who,” Laine said, “but what. It’s a street drug, a brand-new synthetic cathinone, a superamphetamine. Alpha-PVP is the more official name. This shit is completely warping people. Like the bath salts that turned people into zombies, remember that? Only times ten. Times fifty. It’s five bucks a hit and it’s got people facedown in their driveways, naked, chewing concrete until they’ve ripped their own teeth out. People stay up eight, nine days in a row bingeing on it. They lose everything in weeks, if not days. It makes crack look like amateur hour. It’s going be a bigger problem, and a bigger story, than meth and no one is on it yet. No one is seeing the pattern, seeing the sickness move, but me.”
Maureen glanced at Hardin, shaking her head. “How have we not heard of this? Sounds like that ‘mojo’ shit.”
“Sounds much worse,” Hardin said.
“Right now,” Laine said, “it’s mostly rural whites taking it. Small towns, poor folks. Nothing sexy. No glamour. So who gives a fuck? Not national news, that’s for sure. And not national law enforcement like the FBI or the DEA. But I’ve got interviews with a bunch of small-town Florida cops—Florida is where it started—who are terrified of this shit. And I did those interviews months ago. Since then it’s moved north and west from Florida. It’s creeping into the cities surrounding the Appalachians and it’s moving along the Gulf Coast, too. They’ve had cases. And I think it’s in New Orleans now.”
“Why did you lie about reporting on it?” Maureen asked. “If it’s such a big deal?”
“I needed a cover story,” Laine said, “because how else am I going to get the NOPD media relations to treat me halfway decent about talking to cops during Mardi Gras? I can’t very well say I’m coming here to expose a brand-new drug problem moving into New Orleans that your police department isn’t fighting because it doesn’t know fuck-all about it.”
“What better camouflage than another out-of-town hustler looking to cash in on Mardi Gras? That was the first thing you thought. Plus, if I don’t get the flakka story here, I put up the Mardi Gras show on the YouTube channel and we get another half a million hits and my investors pay for me to chase this shit to Baton Rouge or Lafayette, maybe all the way to Houston, and the show goes on.”
“You have investors?” Maureen asked. “In a YouTube channel?”
“We crowd-source,” Laine said. “And Donna has fans in Silicon Valley. The Internet is a funny place.”
“She’s got silicon, all right.”
“I nail this story, though,” Laine said, “I don’t need to go begging for cash or monetize Donna’s tits. A story like this, I can get real money behind me again. A serious production company. Sell it to HBO. Showtime. Netflix. Cable news. I can really get my career restarted. For real this time. No more running from town to town, hiring kids off of Craigslist.”
“And you think flakka’s what killed this kid?” Hardin asked, all business. “You said you have interviews, but do you have real experience with this? You sure it’s here?”
“I’ve never taken it,” Laine said, “if that’s what you mean by experience, my gonzo days are over, but I’ve been tailing it across the Gulf Coast. Florida, in the panhandle. Then Alabama? Mississippi? New Orleans has to be next. It’s the biggest market between Pensacola and Houston, and it’s fucking Mardi Gras. What better time, what better place to be pushing a new product that makes people absolutely crazy? You got people driving in, blending in, from a hundred small towns around the south. Some of them are carrying this shit. I promise you.”
“First it makes them crazy,” Maureen said. “And then it kills them.”
“I mean, the death rate isn’t one hundred percent, obviously, but it’s pretty lethal. And it’s not just ODs. It’s accidents that are killing people, too. Extreme violence. One woman tried jumping from an overpass onto an eighteen-wheeler passing underneath her. Naked. She missed. People jump off rooftops, stagger into traffic, throw themselves through plate-glass windows. I talked to a cop outside Mobile, he took down a kid running naked through the park stabbing trees with a butcher knife. That cop used the same word over and over again. ‘Zombie.’ Every cop I talk to, they use that word. No one could talk the kid down, no one could talk to him or reach him in any way. It was like he’d been beamed down to Earth deaf and blind from another planet.”
“That sounds familiar,” Maureen said, turning to Hardin. “This kid who died on the route was almost naked. And he was crazy enough, and violent.”
“And covered in sweat, right?” Laine asked.
Maureen nodded.
“The flakka spikes your body temperature,” Laine said. “The disrobing and the rampage that this kid went on, that’s two of the main giveaways. I have footage
of other people doing the same thing. I have eight cops in six different towns telling me the same stories.”
Hardin pinched the bridge of his nose. Suddenly, his shoulders slumped and he seemed exhausted. “Is anything ever enough? Any drug, any high, any amount of money? There’s always something new, something more, something worse coming right at us. Why not, what’d you call it, bath salts times fifty? A zombie drug? Why the fuck not? Why the fuck not? And this is New Orleans, when was the last time a plague passed us by?”
“Go ask the coroner about recent drug-related deaths,” Laine said. “Check with the other police districts here in New Orleans about incidents like this guy’s last rampage. I’ve been in town with my crew for a week and I’ve already uncovered two other possible cases, one in the CBD and one in the Quarter.
“The guy from the CBD is in a coma, unlikely to wake up. His body temp spiked so bad he cooked his brain. That’s the usual cause of death, brain and massive organ failure from the crazy high body temp. He single-handedly destroyed the dining room of the Renaissance Hotel before collapsing on the sidewalk outside Lucy’s bar. The guy from the Quarter is dead. He drowned in the river. He was fished out from under the Creole Queen. His body was caught in the paddle wheel.”
“I heard about that one,” Maureen said. “I heard he was a gutter punk, that he went swimming with his buddies in the river late at night and the currents got him.” She looked at Hardin. “Right?”
“Happens once or twice a year,” he said with a shrug. “Kids get fucked up on God knows what. River at night looks peaceful, looks calm. A drowning like that is nothing that draws special attention or points to anything out of the ordinary, I’ll tell you that.”
“I interviewed the drowned guy’s swimming buddy,” Laine said. “Keith, I think his name was. I wondered what they were doing swimming in the river in January. Keith said he and his friend took something they had never tried before. A guy passing through the Quarter gave it to them for free. Told them to pass it around, to share it, but I think they took everything he gave them.
“Keith said it was so powerful that it made them feel like they were cooking from the inside out, that they’d been tricked into swallowing charcoal briquettes and were trying to stop themselves from cooking so they wouldn’t be cannibalized. He thought maybe that was why they jumped in the river. That they were afraid the guy who dosed them was going to hunt them down and eat them.”
“Now that sounds like a story that would’ve made the rounds,” Maureen said. She looked at Hardin. “‘Cannibals in the Quarter’? How did that story not make it uptown?”
“I’m sure Keith told me more than he told the police,” Laine said. “Does what he said sound like a story that a street kid would tell a cop?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Maureen said with a snort. “It sounds like a story a street kid would tell a lady with a camera and cash in her pocket.”
“Well, as far as I could find out,” Laine said, “the cops down in the Quarter didn’t really ask for any info besides the basics. If they even asked for that.”
“What else is there besides the basics?” Maureen asked. “The bottom line is that Keith and that other kid got fucked up and went in the river, at night, in the cold. Like the sergeant said, it happens. It was a thing before this new drug came to town. And since you’re breaking this news to us about flakka tonight, why would those other cops think to ask this Keith about anything out of the ordinary, when everything else they were dealing with wasn’t abnormal?”
“I’m trying to pass along what I learned,” Laine said. “I don’t want anyone else to die tonight, either. From flakka or from gunshots.”
“I’m guessing,” Maureen said, “that your pal Keith didn’t offer up any good info on this mystery benefactor who provided the drug that killed his friend.”
Laine shrugged. “Real tall but skinny. Super, super skinny, Keith said. Bald. Looked like he was made of chalk. Had a buddy. A short, skinny bald kid, boy or girl, he couldn’t tell, with a big tattoo on their head.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Maureen said.
“What?” Hardin asked.
“Never mind,” Maureen said. “Sounds like a pair even the supremely fucked up would remember.”
“Sounds made up to me,” Hardin said. “He’s probably some short, fat guy with a dog. Haven’t these guys literally fried their brains? We’re gonna trust what they say?”
“Check with the hospitals about other ODs and drug casualties coming in,” Laine said. “I guarantee you’ll see a pattern. The sweats, the rage, the sudden collapse.”
“And if we do that, when we put these stories together,” Maureen said, “we should tell you about it for your movie, of course. You get great footage. You get your legwork done for you. Nice deal for you.”
“I’d love an interview,” Laine said, “with you, with you, Sergeant Hardin, or anyone else who’d be moved to contribute to the project. There’s no rule that says we can’t be on the same side here. I didn’t have to tip you guys off to any of this. Any legwork done on this flakka story is work that I did. Yes, I’m trying to revive my career, but exposing this drug is also a public service. Why can’t everybody win? Where’s the law against that? I help you, you help me. Your whole department benefits. Every time a new drug hits the streets, the federal money starts flowing again, for the new equipment, for the task force and the overtime and the lab work. And, and you get a leg up on the next monster in the war on drugs. How can all that be bad?”
Maureen raised her hands. “You want to talk to the coroner and stuff, I can’t stop you. But I’m not a detective, and I can’t help you with any of this. I promise you no police officer in this city has time to go looking for Keith and his chalk-monster drug dealer. Good luck getting to the coroner, to be honest. We’re all busy twenty-four seven for the next week.”
“And I already said I’m inclined to believe you about this problem,” Hardin said, “but I got an extra hundred thousand people in my neighborhood tonight, and tomorrow night, and the next four days after that. I got one shooting already and I’m scrambling to prevent the next one. I got no time to help you get your movie together. We won’t get in your way, and if anybody from my district wants to help when this is over, Officer Coughlin or anyone else, I’m probably okay with that. But I’m asking you nicely one time not to distract my officers with your project. I need my people on point. Forget the zombies; I promise you that as we speak I got twenty to thirty live armed kids stalking the neighborhood wondering who shot who and why, and if they’re gonna be the next target or the next shooter. That plague is real, and is already entrenched and killing people. I can’t have anyone dying from it this weekend. The zombies will have to wait until Mardi Gras is over.”
“I’m afraid more people are going to die this weekend from this drug,” Laine said. “That’s why I came forward with this.”
“More people are going to die tonight,” Hardin said, “if I don’t find out the story behind that shooting on the other side of St. Charles. We’re done here, Ms. Daniels.”
25
After Laine had disappeared into the crowd, Maureen and Hardin made their way back up Sixth Street at a slow stroll.
“You buying this, Sarge?” Maureen asked. “About this new drug?”
“There’s always a new drug,” Hardin said. “What she’s right about is that we haven’t heard jack shit about flakka. I heard about that kid in the CBD who trashed the hotel. That’s the Eighth District, where Wiggins took over for me when I transferred up here. We talk. He told me about it, as a joke. He had to punch the kid out in the back of an ambulance. I’m not telling Laine that, especially since the kid’s in a coma now. The medics couldn’t sedate him because they didn’t know what drug he was on, so Wiggins had to do it the old-fashioned way.
“But Wiggins said the EMTs were freaked the fuck out. Even strapped to the gurney the guy did serious damage to the back of the ambulance anyway, thrashing around so hard. We won’t g
et a tox report on that kid who died tonight for weeks. I’ll bet anything no one even asked for one on the kid who got pulled out of the river. I don’t know if we can get one on him now. I doubt it. I’m sure that body is gone.”
“Maybe that kid comes out of his coma and can point us to the chalk monster,” Maureen said. She sipped her coffee, which had gone from steaming hot to lukewarm. “I can’t believe that sentence came out of my mouth.”
“I hope he recovers, and I hope it’s not before Ash Wednesday.” Hardin massaged his bald dome with one gloved hand. “Because we don’t fucking need this right now. I can’t take this on right now. I can’t. We’re too thin to do what we have to do already.”
“Speaking of,” Maureen said, “what are we going to do about tonight? Morello has that Todd Curtis kid just sitting there. He wouldn’t let me arrest him. In theory, they were waiting on Drayton to do that and question him before he goes in the system. But it’s been a while now and nothing seems to be happening. Do we know where Drayton is?”
“You got this kid out from under the house?” Hardin asked.
“Well, no. I chased him under there. Canine got him out.”
“But you were there when they cuffed him,” Hardin said.
“I was. I started cuffing him myself, started his Miranda, but then Morello stopped me.”
“You said earlier that you knew him,” Hardin said.
“He’s a neighborhood hard case,” Maureen said. “He was part of that whole thing with those kids, Marques Greer and Mike-Mike. He’d split for Baton Rouge, but now he’s back. His uncle was a dealer and a gunrunner.”
“You think he’s back in town working for his uncle?”
“His uncle’s dead,” Maureen said.
“Why am I not surprised?” Hardin said. “Who killed him?”
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