All the Devil's Creatures

by J. D. Barnett

  He drove through a stretch of Broadmoore that had taken several feet of water, and Geoff’s heart sank at the sight of the dilapidated houses, a few with large white storage containers out front. Almost ten months since the storm and people are still living out of—

  “Christ.” Geoff bounced his forehead off the steering wheel and looked at Marisol, who looked over at him with raised eyebrows from the passenger seat.

  “What?”

  “I almost forgot,” he said “Eileen’s pod. We’ve got to look in Eileen’s pod.”

  •

  No mistakes this time—I’ll do right by the Speaker and collect my reward. Like a big cat from one of those nature shows stalking its prey. Ol’ Blondie and Chica won’t have a clue. Ghost Cat Jimmy Lee—I like that.

  Jimmy Lee watched the targets drive off from the ruined site of his second murder and saw his chance to redeem himself in the eyes of the Speaker.

  Ghost Cat. Not a looser. Not an idiot. Ghost Cat Jimmy Lee.

  •

  “A storage unit,” Geoff explained. “A pod. Eileen had one on her lot in Lakeview where her house was flooded out. She was going to rebuild there. I’m sure it’s still there.”

  “Uh huh, certainly worth checking out.” But Marisol seemed distracted. With a wry tone that would have relieved Geoff had her message been less alarming, she said, “Don’t look now, Waltz, but we’re being followed.”

  Geoff stopped himself from gawking all around. “Who? Where?” He inched the Chevy forward at the intersection of St. Louis and Dauphine, waiting his turn at the four-way stop.

  “Black Ford pickup, two cars back. I noticed it on Eileen’s street.”

  “Yeah, I saw it, too. Didn’t see it leave behind us. You sure it’s not a coincidence?”

  “Pretty sure. This guy’s clumsy—an amateur. I could tell when you turned into the Quarter back there. He slowed down and turned in right behind us, rather than pass by and double back after he got out of sight.”

  “So what should I do?”

  “Let the guy follow—he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I’ll try to get a read on him, get that license plate. We’ll lose him before I go to the pod.”

  “We go to the pod.”

  “I don’t think so. Whoever killed Eileen and torched her house will find that container soon enough, so I’m not wasting any time. Assuming we’re not too late already.”

  “You’ll never find it without me. It’s like a war zone up there.”

  “I’ve probably seen worse. You go take in some brass band music, meet with T-Jacques.”

  Geoff knew better than to argue. They left the car at the hotel’s valet stand and walked down the block to grab a coffee at a café with doorways open to the street. Marisol window shopped across the street and then came and cooed over the menu and looked to pay no attention to the people around them, as if they were two Vieux Carre part-timers, their first time back since the storm, settling in as a matter of course.

  Then she said, “He found a parking spot on Decatur. Now he’s sitting in the bar caddy-cornered from us, pretending to read a paper. He has some kind of bandage on his nose and looks like a bum.”

  Geoff sipped his chicory coffee. “You’re good. Do you think he’s after what we’re after? Maybe works for the Prince?”

  “Maybe. He thinks we know something, but I’d bet he knows more than we do.”

  “Then let’s confront him.”

  “Not yet. What would we do with him? We have a busy afternoon planned.”

  Back at the hotel, Marisol gave the bellman a hefty tip to have the car taken to a garage six blocks away. When she walked off for her rendezvous with the valet, Geoff retreated to his room for a respite before stepping out to the rot-smelling alley to begin his hike to Faubourg Treme and that day’s second line parade.

  •

  Ghost Cat Jimmy Lee sat in his pickup just inside the garage, watching the hotel entrance and waiting for Blondie and Chica to come out. Ignorant dingbats don’t have a clue. The garage attendant eyed him but kept his distance—one flash of the Glock kept him from meddling.

  A Chevy pulled up beside him, leaving the garage, a sedan like Blondie and Chica drove. He checked the rear when it pulled out. Same license plate. He braced himself for his targets’ reemergence, but the valet kept driving. Jimmy Lee put the truck in gear, then reconsidered. Traffic crawled through the old, narrow streets. He turned off his ignition and put on his baggy jacket to conceal the Glock and walked after the Chevy.

  Six blocks away, the sedan pulled into another garage. Jimmy Lee waited on the sidewalk and watched the valet park in a loading zone. The garage attendant sat in a little Plexiglas booth. The valet handed the attendant the keys and some cash and said something through an opening in the booth. Then he walked away.

  Jimmy Lee approached the attendant. With the muzzle of his weapon pointed through the slot in the booth, he said, “Get out.” The attendant, an old man in a faded blue jumpsuit, complied with hands raised. Jimmy Lee ordered him out of sight behind a van and clocked him hard in the head with the butt of his handgun. The attendant fell to the oil-stained floor in a heap. Jimmy Lee started walking back to the booth but then turned, considering the old man lying there. He thought, The Ghost Cat’s soul is already in hell. Then he shot the attendant in the head.

  •

  Keeping watch for the black pickup and its sick fool driver, Marisol zigzagged through the Quarter on foot. She felt irritable and out of sorts after last night, struggled to get back in her game. As she doubled back down an alley near the hotel, she saw the black truck parked illegally, its nose sticking out of the garage across from the hotel in plain view of the entrance. Brilliant fellow. She found a vantage point out of sight and looked up and down. The filthy, wounded-dog looking man who was following them would stand out even in the Quarter. She didn’t see him. Probably drunk in a bar, thinking he’ll pick up the trail when we leave the hotel—like we’d never notice his slimy presence in his banged up old truck and its Texas plates. Moron.

  She made her way to the garage where the valet, for a decent tip, had stashed their car. She found the Chevy in the loading zone as she had instructed, but no sign of the garage attendant. She did not give his absence much concern—the whole city seemed understaffed since the storm. She took the keys from the attendant’s booth.

  An outsider would have had trouble finding Eileen’s Lakeview house from downtown even before the storm—the way the city’s streets operated on their own geometry, the grid following the bend of the river rather than any superimposed Euclidean ideal. She drove into the flood zone, first up Canal with its silent streetcar tracks and empty homes. But she saw plenty of signs of reconstruction. New siding here, mold treatment there …

  But as she got closer to the lake and the wasted sprawl of modern Lakeview, the devastation became complete. Piles of rubble and cleared lots and the homes still standing marked with FEMA’s grisly code.

  No stop lights worked; many street signs were missing. She heard the sounds of construction in the distance and saw the occasional truck on the streets laden with supplies from the big box hardware stores in Jefferson Parish. Otherwise, desolation, as if the last nine months had been for nothing but clearing land and waiting.

  She followed Waltz’s well-drawn map the best she could but had about decided that he was right, that there was no way to find this place on her own, she should have waited till after the parade and brought her client. Her stupid, egghead client whom she’d fallen in the sack with the night before like a small town slut a decade past her prime. She scolded herself for violating her own cardinal rules: never get too close; always walk away clean when the job is done.

  And what she hated most: she’d had a blast. And she couldn’t get the feel of him, his perfect strong, gentle touch, out of her mind.

  She fumed. Her head ached. Then she rounded a barren corner and came upon Eileen’s house, just as Waltz described—a gutted red-brick ranch style
with a white storage unit the size of a small cottage on the dead front lawn, man-tall block letters advertising its brand: POD.

  She always travelled with her kit on jobs and had no trouble jimmying the lock. Inside the tomb-like pod, she looked through the detritus of the woman’s life. She spent an hour with furniture and trinkets, precious things of glass, metal, and hardwood salvageable and reclaimed from the flood waters and the mold. Nothing that spoke of illicit science or strange creatures or Nazi experiments.

  A pile of blankets in the corner. No way they could have survived the flood. They were piled too purposefully for Marisol’s eye, as if purchased and brought here just to furnish this lonesome unit on the washed-out plain.

  Under the blankets, a metal cask marked with the abbreviation LIN. Liquid Nitrogen? She engaged a valve on top, releasing a cloud of vapor. Coughing as the oxygen in the tight space condensed, she turned her head toward the pod’s opening to catch her breath. Then she peered through the dissipating wisps of gas into the cask. A transparent canister. She lifted it with care. And what she held before her turned her gut to cold stone and pierced her heart with the memory of an awful time—a malformed human fetus floating cold and lifeless in a sickly fluid.

  •

  He felt the sun on his face and heard the surf and smelled the girl with the coconut bikini and the grass skirt and the big tropical flower in her hair and she knelt beside him and lifted a cup made from a half-coconut shell like the ones that covered her breasts filled with a milky sweet boozy drink for him to sip. Coconuts, falling all around from the tree above him, and one heading down fast right to the middle of his face …

  Jimmy Lee awoke and would have screamed in agony but when he jerked his head up he rapped it on a thick sheet of metal and his teeth clamped down hard enough to crack had his tongue not been there, and that shut him up.

  He lay in the dark and stifling space trying to remember where he was, the pain from his gashed tongue rivaling that of his thick and twisted nose. A car trunk—you climbed in a car trunk, Chica and Blondie’s car. To see where they go, what they know. Been strung out for three days, and not enough air in here. Must have fallen asleep. Momma always said you were the stupid one. He did not ponder the thought that he might never had awoken at all had he not shifted and bumped his broken nose.

  He checked for his weapon. Still there. He had stuffed the trunk lid latch with a wad of paper to keep it from locking. He lifted the lid a crack. Still daylight. He climbed out and looked upon a flat, lost plain, crossed by broken streets, studded with heaps of rubble and dying trees and boarded up houses covered in blue tarpaulins. He saw the storage unit standing open. Carrying the Glock, he limped toward it, his leg numb with sleep. He stepped up into the pod, and there was Chica, her back to him, looking down at something she cradled, seemingly enthralled.

  “Hey.”

  She started and turned but her look of shock and fear snapped away and she arched her eyebrows and grinned and said: “Hello, soldier. You got something for me?”

  Jimmy Lee glanced at the gun he carried and waved it at her from his hip, grinning, feeling his confidence return. Can’t keep the Ghost Cat down. “I know you want to suck on this, Chica, but I think you have something for me.”

  He took another step forward, and she raised the canister over her head and said: “Uh-uh, cowboy. I’ll smash this crazy thing.”

  “Go ahead. I’m here to destroy it.”

  She looked at him with cartoon incredulity. “What? Destroy this?” She looked up at the fetus. “You’re nuts, man. Do you know how much this little monster is worth?”

  He paused. Then he shook his head. “I don’t care what it’s worth. It’s done.”

  “Let’s work together. I know a buyer. Split the profit. Who asked you to destroy it? I bet they’re not paying you near what it’s worth.”

  “Don’t matter. And don’t play me.”

  Jimmy Lee could see the sweat on her brow. Women had been playing him his whole life, from his mother on. He could tell Chica’s friendliness was an act. A desperate act, to save her hide. He saw the fear on her.

  He lurched forward faster than he knew he could. Before he had formed the idea, he had her by the hair with the Glock’s muzzle under her chin. “This is what’s going to happen, bitch. You’re going to give me that thermos thingy. But first we’re going to have a little fun.”

  He reached for her breast—taut under her shirt with her hands raised, still holding the container. She said, “Okay. First game: catch.”

  She tossed the canister forward into the air. Jimmy Lee loosened his grip and grabbed after it, batting it to the pile of blankets, cursing his reflexes, realizing at once he had made a mistake. He felt her push away his gun-wielding arm while he was off balance and he stumbled. She bent and reached down and he saw a flash of metal at her boot and then he felt the sick wet slicing as she brought the blade up between his legs. She head-butted his torso hard, shoving him against a mahogany boudoir as he howled in rage and pain. He felt himself collapsing and he swung the gun wildly with no aim. It went off and he saw the ceiling of the pod open up and he couldn’t gain control of the thing so he swung it around again in blind fury and as she scooted out of reach but he brought the weapon down and managed to make contact just above her temple.

  She collapsed before him, unconscious. He felt the blood coursing down his leg and leveled the gun down at her face. He would finish her off just like the scientist in her lab. Bitches gotta learn they can’t mess with the Ghost Cat.

  But he pulled the gun up without firing. No—too easy. This one’s gonna suffer. This one’s gonna burn.

  •

  Geoff followed the music. The band played funked up jazz through Treme streets spared the worst of the flood but still half-empty and lonesome as the old families struggled to come home or decided not to come home at all.

  In the second line, Geoff swayed a little bit but mostly just followed and observed like any other member of the minority of whites that came out for the parades. He bought a hot sausage sandwich and a can of beer from a dreadlocked man with a hibachi set up in the back of a pickup. He took a picture for a young white couple, volunteers from Minnesota at their first second line parade, and tried to frame the parasol carrier in the background just right. Two brass bands marched today, their numbers depleted due to members still exiled in Houston or Atlanta, Cleveland or Denver. And amid this fine old New Orleans tradition, Geoff detected something different intertwined with the exuberance—a deep sadness, and a burning anger.

  T-Jacques played in one of the bands, marching and shuffling and swinging his trombone like a swordsman cutting figure eights. He wore long black shorts and a spotless white t-shirt far removed from the sharp suit Geoff saw at the Frenchman Street gig. Through the crowd, their eyes met.

  The parade broke at a corner bar that had taken enough water to ruin the furniture. Cheap card tables and folding chairs served temporary duty. At the bar, T-Jacques drank beer.

  Geoff approached, and T-Jacques looked at him and turned back to his beer and said: “Alright.”

  “We need to talk some more.”

  “I don’t think we got much to talk about, man.”

  “I’m trying to find who killed Dalia, to bring them to justice.”

  “There’s no justice till you open your mind.”

  Geoff nodded, leaned against the bar sipping ice water as the crowd pressed in behind them passing bills over their heads and receiving beers in return. The smell of sweat and mold permeated the place. “I’ve seen things, T-Jacques. Heard things. I’m ready to listen to your truth.” He could not bring himself to say he would believe.

  “I told you before; it’s all the Plan, son.”

  “You have to tell me what you mean.”

  T-Jacques looked up from the bar and met his gaze with hard eyes. “Let me tell you, Waltz. It’s all part of the Plan.”

  “What plan?”

  “The Plan. The Plan that blew up
the levees and flooded our people. The Plan that, before that, bought up our neighborhoods to jack up the rent for the pretty white families to move in. The Plan that put the crack rock on our streets, that put the AIDS in our blood. The Plan to remake the whole world into some sterile white bread suburb.”

  “Okay. This isn’t getting me anywhere.”

  “Then you don’t know where you’re going.”

  Geoff looked at his hands clasped before him on the bar, the sounds and the smells of the crowd adding to the feeling of chaos. He fought to keep his thoughts organized but knew he had no choice at this moment but to put rationality aside, to suspend his disbelief. He said, “What did Dalia believe she had found?”

  With hard eyes boring into him, T-Jacques said, “My people were great plasterers, creoles de colore trained by French craftsmen in Saint-Domingue three hundred years ago, but also inventing their own style—a rococo more rococo than anything the Europeans ever tried. We made the designs swing.”

  Closing his eyes and rubbing his temples, Geoff thought he wouldn’t mind reading a book about French-Creole plasterwork someday. When he had the time. “That’s pretty awesome, T-Jacques. But—”