“That’s why that motherfucker Dee had to get got. That right there is why. Because he gonna do everyone like he done Benji. With that shit he slingin’, that evil shit.”
“Flakka,” Maureen said.
“What?” Goody asked.
“That’s what it’s called. Flakka.”
“TWD. That’s what Dee call it,” Goody said. “TWD.”
“TWD?” Maureen asked.
“The Walking Dead,” Wilburn said.
“What-fucking-ever,” Cordts said. “So you’re Goody the Do-Gooder now? You a vigilante, out cleaning up the streets? Give me a break. Who you’re supposed to be is changing every other minute here.”
“I told Dee not to bring that shit around our neighborhood,” Goody said. “I went to him like a man and I told him straight-up not to bring it around Benji no more. That shit turned Benji into a fiend in like a day. No joke. And then other people are asking around about it, like it’s this great new shit, and I’m like what the fuck? Look, I got nothing against a motherfucker trying to honest earn out here, I quit that mess but I don’t judge, but that shit’s like voodoo black magic. I don’t want no part of that. I don’t want my friends having no part of that. I told Benji, and I told Dee, shit like this? Only white people make up shit like this. White people in white coats in laboratories are behind this shit. That’s how this shit happens. I told you I learned some things in Baton Rouge. There’s white people behind this shit. I say, don’t bring it into our ’hood. I got a kid here now. Not J-Street, not Three-N-G, not nobody should be touching this stuff. Let it keep killing white boys in the Quarter. Keep it there where it belongs.”
Goody realized he’d begun crying as he talked. He wiped his hand down his face, wiped his tears and snot on his already filthy jeans. “Then it’s a do-nothing motherfucker who look just like Dee that gets shot, and Dee right as rain out there working for the white man selling this evil to the rest of us. You telling me there ain’t something fucking wrong going on with all that?”
“Fuck this,” Cordts said. “Fuck this avenger sob-story bullshit. Cogs, you know this kid because he killed a friend of his, right? His own friend. A twelve-year-old.”
“I didn’t do Mike-Mike,” Goody said. “I did not.”
“So you just stuffed him in the trunk and helped burn the body, then,” Cordts said.
Goody said nothing, seething as he gripped the edge of the table.
Maureen watched Goody’s wet eyes flit to Cordts’s gun and off to the side, to the gun and away, again and again. She knew Cordts saw it, too. She watched Goody’s hands. Don’t do it, Goody, Maureen thought. Don’t do it. That was Goody’s problem: that habit of reaching for the gun as a solution. She heard Wilburn’s chair creak again as he stood. She glanced up at the Guinness mirror and saw Wilburn had his hand on his weapon.
“The house you ran to, Goody,” Maureen said. “Not where you hid, not Ms. Cleo’s, but the house on Harmony Street. Why did you go there?”
“The girl there, Alisha, she’s Benji’s sister.”
“You wanted to tell her,” Maureen said. “You wanted to tell her you’d killed Dee for her. And she turned on you.”
“She knew me and Benji was tight,” Goody said. “She called me all damn day, every day. Asking me where Benji at? Where Benji at? You his best friend, where my brother at? I mean she knew, but she didn’t want to know. And I couldn’t tell her nothin’ good anyway, because I couldn’t find the motherfucker, either.”
“So, what, you wanted to impress her by killing someone?” Cordts asked. “No wonder she ratted out your punk ass.”
“That baby girl Alisha was holding,” Maureen said, “that’s your daughter.”
“She’s mine and Alisha’s,” Goody said, nodding. “Alisha stay there with her brother and our baby girl. Big brother Will don’t like me. I just wanted to tell her that Dee was gone. With Dee gone, I thought maybe we’d have a better chance of getting Benji back. I had to do something. Getting Dee was the only thing I could do for Benji. To protect him. If he couldn’t get that shit no more, maybe he’d at least go back to Alisha and Will’s house. They tight, that family. Except for Benji, they do right.” He looked at Cordts. “I told you. I got my own little girl, yo. I got my own daughter.”
Cordts said nothing.
“That little girl is why I came back to New Orleans from Baton Rouge,” Goody said. “I didn’t even know about her until a few weeks ago. I’da stayed there if not for her. Will didn’t want her to tell me, but Benji did. I guess Benji talked Alisha into telling me, into going behind Will’s back. Benji knew a baby girl would get me back to New Orleans.
“I was doing all right in Baton Rouge, you know?” Goody said. “Thinking about going to school and shit. Then Alisha call me, said, ‘Come for Mardi Gras, I got something to tell you.’
“After I heard, I figured I got to man up, and stay in New Orleans, you know? I got to. It was like I knew already in Baton Rouge that I had to get my mind right. I told Alisha we could get a place, be a family. She laughed at me, said Will would never have that.” He wiped his face again, looking at his dirty hand, wiped it on his shirt. “I thought if I could get Benji away from that TWD, get him home, Will, he might look different at me, you know? Because I proved I could do something for the family, do right for the whole neighborhood, getting rid of Dee.”
Maureen put her face in her hands, took a deep breath. Her hands smelled like sweat and coffee and nicotine. Benji had died within minutes, she figured, of Goody pulling the trigger, and in the process throwing his own life away by shooting three innocent bystanders instead of one drug dealer who probably had it coming.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Cordts said, tossing a cloth napkin across the table.
“And now here I am,” Goody said, wiping his snotty hands on the napkin without picking it up. “In a fucking cracker bar with three fucking cops. Happy fucking Mardi Gras.”
Maureen looked at Cordts, watched him absorb what Goody had said. He was as pale as she’d ever seen him. Milk pale. Almost chalk pale. He worked the tip of his tongue over his teeth, drummed his fingers on the table. What Goody had said about having a daughter, that fact had to matter to Cordts.
Nobody spoke for a long time. Maureen could hear Wilburn shifting in his seat behind them.
“You’re fifteen,” Cordts finally said, his voice cracking. The conversation had sapped his rage, reduced him to something spent and exhausted, like the papery shell of an exploded firework. “And because of what you did tonight, you’ll be a grandfather before you get out of fucking jail. You’ll watch the girl grow up through Plexiglas, if she ever knows you at all. And I’ll get old and fat chasing your grandkids around New Orleans. It never fucking ends, does it? The madness. It just never ends. No matter what we do.”
He slid to the end of the booth. He handed Maureen his gun, then handed her the gun he’d found in the street. “Make sure that girl gets her stuff back.”
He peeled off his yellow vest, tossed it on top of the sneaker and the wings. “Fuck you. Fuck this. Fuck all y’all. Fuck Mardi Gras. Fuck New Orleans. I’m done. Have a nice fucking press conference. I’m going home and I’m going to sleep until Ash Wednesday.” He took a deep breath. “Then I’m packing the car and driving to wherever the fuck I run out of gas and I’m staying there, like I shoulda done after the storm.”
He looked at Wilburn. “Sorry, bro. I tried.”
Cordts turned and walked away into the kitchen, making his way, Maureen guessed, out into the night through the back door.
“Do we stop him?” Maureen asked, rising to her feet, turning to Wilburn.
“So what now?” Goody asked, fixed in his seat. “Does this mean I can go?”
Wilburn looked into the empty space that Cordts had left behind. “You know what? Nobody but us knows what happened in this room tonight.” He glanced at Goody, then Maureen. “Whatever we say happened, that’s what happened. That’s the story. Just a thought.”
/> “So we’re not going after Cordts then,” Maureen said. “We let him disappear?”
Wilburn turned in his chair and looked out the front window of the restaurant. His face was shiny with sweat. “Well, look at that. Parade’s over.”
36
“I need you to stand up, Goody,” Maureen said, passing Cordts’s service weapon to Wilburn before tucking the extra gun into the back of her pants, “and put your hands behind your back.”
“Man, fuck this,” Goody said. “I told y’all all that shit and y’all are gonna do me like this? Y’all really gonna arrest me after you kidnap me? Man, fuck the police.”
“Do it,” Wilburn said, jaws tight. “Fucking shut up and do it.”
He was furious, Maureen could tell, about Cordts, and he was fighting hard not to blame Goody for Cordts’s nightlong meltdown, a collapse that meant the end of Cordts’s career and probably their friendship as well. She knew that in Wilburn’s mind, what had happened to Cordts tonight had been triggered by Goody shooting up that intersection. He believed that had Cordts not held that bloody little girl in his arms, he might have made it through the night.
After a long moment, Goody slid out of the booth without a word. Maureen cuffed him and sat him in the chair she’d been using.
“Wils, call Hardin and tell him we’re coming out with Goody and without Cordts, and that Cordts is fine and we’ll explain later.”
Maureen waited until Wilburn had started walking for the front door, phone at his ear, before she grabbed Goody by the arm and stood him up.
“I got a little girl,” he said. “Why would I shoot one?”
“But you did,” Maureen said. “Whether you meant to or not, you did. Her and two other people. That won’t ever go away.”
“Man, that other crazy cop,” Goody said, “he straight-up kidnaps me, holds me hostage, and he gonna walk away from this shit like he didn’t do nothing wrong and I go to jail. Ain’t that some shit.”
Maureen bit her tongue and marched Goody to the front of the restaurant, where Wilburn and Eddie waited at the door.
“Hardin was able to get the car across,” Wilburn said, “now that the parade’s over. He’s right out front.”
“Open it,” Maureen said to Eddie. “Let’s get this over with.”
Eddie opened the door. As Maureen stepped through it, shoving Goody ahead of her, a bright light blinded her and she felt her prisoner torn from her hands. She saw a flash of a long coat and wavy gray hair. She shaded her eyes from the spotlight, yelling, “Goddamn it, Cortez!”
But before she got the name out, the light had moved away from her, following a stern-looking, made-for-TV Drayton as he loaded Goody into the NOPD Explorer, his fat pink hand pushing down on Goody’s head. Donna shouted questions at him. Laine stood off to the side of the action. Maureen spied Hardin behind the wheel of the truck. He didn’t look at her.
Drayton slammed the back door and climbed into the front seat beside Hardin. He rolled down the window so Cortez could continue to shoot him for as long as possible. Maureen shaded her eyes again as the roof rack erupted into a sapphire light show and the car pulled away.
Cortez and Larry hustled into the street, filming the Explorer as it bounced across the now-deserted, trash-strewn neutral ground, over the streetcar tracks, and hung a U-turn, racing, Maureen was sure, to the site of the press conference. Donna checked her makeup in the reflection afforded by the restaurant window. Laine held her position on the sidewalk, watching her Craigslist camera crew grab a last few seconds of dramatic footage.
Maureen and Wilburn stood alone on the sidewalk, empty plastic cups and torn plastic bags blowing around their feet and along the gutter like tumbleweed. They could still hear the parade as it rolled on without them.
The rain started falling again, coming down for the first time that night in big, heavy drops.
Maureen turned to Wilburn. “We got our man and I feel like shit. Absolute shit.”
“You get used to it,” Wilburn said. “Goody’s survival chances weren’t any better if we didn’t catch him. Especially once word gets out he was gunning for Dee Harris. So there’s that. And that’s the best I have to offer right now.”
Laine, her down vest pulled over her head for shelter from the rain, approached them. “You think we can get a ride to the press conference?”
Maureen and Wilburn laughed. “In what vehicle? We’re as stranded as you are.”
“Cogs,” Wilburn asked. “You want a beer?”
“I’d love one,” Maureen said.
They walked back to the Dublin House.
“First round is on me, Officers,” Eddie said, holding the door open for them. “We’ve got a long way to go yet before we sleep.”
Laine followed them to the door. “Oh, thank God. It’s really starting to come down out here.”
Maureen watched from inside the bar door as Eddie extended his arm to block the entrance in front of Laine. “Sorry,” he said. “Parade’s over. Bar’s closed. But don’t worry. We’re doing it all over again tomorrow night.”
“And the night after that,” Wilburn said.
“And the night after that,” Maureen said. “And again the night after that. You get the picture. Happy Mardi Gras. Remember, Laine, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
“Seriously?” Laine asked. “You’re really doing this to me?”
Maureen hesitated. She looked at Eddie, who shrugged, then Wilburn, who said before he walked away, “Do whatcha wanna, I’ll be at the bar.”
“Eddie, go pour the man his beer,” Maureen said, standing before Laine and her crew, bedraggled and pathetic, huddled in the doorway.
“You can walk over to the press conference in the rain, or you can come in here and have a beer. But the camera stays off. Those are your choices.”
Nobody said anything as they filed into the bar.
“And a happy Mardi Gras to all of you, too,” Maureen said.
37
Less than twenty-four hours after Benji Allen had come storming down St. Charles Avenue, raging through the last minutes of his short life, Maureen was back on the route for the Friday-night parades. Her back ached. It had started hurting nearly the minute she took her route assignment at Eighth and St. Charles. Her feet felt swollen in her shoes. She imagined that various aches and pains would remain a fact of life for most of the next week. She’d get by; she’d endured worse. A touch of her hangover remained, but the headache that came with it was, thankfully, fading. She’d had only one beer at the Dublin House. But after her shift, she and Wilburn had caught up with Sansone and his crew and their postparade bar crawl had kept Dakota and her crew hopping until the horizon had lightened. She’d had worse hangovers.
And it’s dry out here tonight, Maureen thought, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and back again, looking, she knew, like a child stuck waiting outside an occupied restroom. The rain and mist of the night before had moved on, leaving a crisp and cool early evening. The dry air was supposed to last clear through the weekend and Fat Tuesday. No sniffles tonight. Weather-wise, she thought, the worst was over. For the most part, she felt pretty damn good.
She was surrounded for the moment by proud, strutting middle school majorettes wearing sleeveless, sparkling green-sequined uniforms and tasseled white boots. They were beautiful. And they knew it. High-stepping, chins up, smiles peeking through their discipline as the crowd cheered for them, batons spinning over their perfectly coiffed heads, the girls, every one of them three feet and change and nothing but muscle, they reminded Maureen of the kids she’d walked through under the overpass last night. She wondered how many of these girls ran in those wild flocks of kids. She thought of Lyla, not much younger and smaller than they were, maybe a future majorette herself, recovering from her gunshot wound in the hospital. She thought of Cordts’s lost almost-daughter, who never got to be any of these girls.
She thought of Goody, who now sat in jail, and who was not much older than the majo
rettes. Alisha, the mother of his daughter, wasn’t much older, either. It was kids like the ones surrounding her, like Goody and Alisha, too, and like those who had been carousing under the overpass and all up and down the parade route and who marched in every single Mardi Gras parade from beginning to end last night, who Cordell taught in school every day. He’d survived his wounds, guarded but stable with the ferocious Susan stationed at his bedside. But he wouldn’t be back in the classroom for quite some time. Maureen didn’t know the first thing about Cordell as a professional, or about teaching, or music, for that matter, but she had a feeling in her gut that Cordell would be missed where he worked.
Hands clasped behind her back, chin raised, Maureen stood her post, her eyes scanning the crowd.
The flag twirlers followed the majorettes, the band followed them, passing around Maureen like a river around a rock, drowning her in their thunderous version of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll, Part 2,” the beating drums shaking her rib cage, vibrating her heart.
38
After the band had passed, carrying their thunder on down the avenue, a gap emerged in the parade. As parade-goers spilled into the street and awaited the next of the Krewe of Hermes’s twenty-nine floats, Laine stepped out of the crowd and came her way, dodging wild children scrambling after beads and toys in the street. Maureen looked for the others, but Laine was alone. She wore her down vest like she had when she was working, but wasn’t holding her clipboard. Instead she held a forty-ounce bottle. Around her neck she wore several long, colorful strands of beads, one that swung down to her knees. On her head, peeking inches above her wild red hair, she wore one of Hermes’s most prized and popular throws: a pair of blinking wings.
She approached Maureen with a sly smile. “Evening, Officer. Good to see you again.”
“Hey, Laine,” Maureen said, feeling friendly and relieved not to have to fight off a camera. “I like your wings.”
“I do, too,” Laine said. Her eyes were a touch glassy and she spoke as if her lips were swollen. The half-drunk forty-ounce in her hand, Maureen thought, was clearly not her first of the night. “Appropriate, right? Hermes, the messenger. He might’ve been a journalist, in modern times, right? We’re, what do you call it, simpatico, me and Hermes.”
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