Burnt Black

by Ed Kovacs

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The eight NOLA-based Las Calaveras—the Skulls—had taken over a dilapidated two-story apartment complex in New Orleans East called Tequila Flats, so I guess there was some irony at work. The twenty-eight units were all studio apartments with a bathroom, most of them still uninhabitable following the Storm of nearly a year and a half ago. All of the units of the U-shaped wooden structure were accessible from open first- and second-floor walkways, either street side or courtyard side—there were no interior apartment halls. VCAT believed the Skulls occupied seven or eight units but were only certain about five.

  Those five rooms would each be hit by a SWAT strike team. More SWAT members acted as a ready reserve. Other officers would provide cover, maintain the large perimeter, and act as a backup reserve force. They would be joined by commanding officers from different divisions and units: SWAT, VCAT, the Intelligence Division, and Seventh District. In addition, undercover officers were already in position providing surveillance.

  That left twenty other officers to clear the remaining twenty-three rooms plus common rooms and areas. We were coming in with a large force, but I figured we could have used a dozen more bodies, even though we were hitting them during their siesta time. Between six and eight Skulls gangbangers were known to live at the complex, though it wasn’t believed they were all present.

  Most relevant to Honey and me was the fact that Fred Gaudet had found the cell-phone numbers of two of the Skulls in Felix Sanchez’s cell. Relevant to everyone was the fact that these perps were known to be armed and extremely dangerous.

  At the staging area I saw that Honey wore her SWAT BDUs and was geared up in full tactical-assault mode. Since she was a member of the SWAT team, Tactical Platoon Two, she’d been assigned for this assault to Strike Team Charlie, second position.

  I, being a lowly homicide detective and not a member of any special fancy team, was assigned to the ad hoc group called Sweep Team Two along with three uniformed cops from Seventh District. One of them was a Vietnamese American officer I knew and liked named Kevin Lee. Lee had helped me on a case that launched my career as a PI. We were to clear the rooms in an upstairs corner of the complex that was damaged and where no activity had been seen.

  I felt like a kid in gym class, whom the cool jocks didn’t want on their team. The SWAT team commander had a crush on Honey, and I hadn’t exactly impressed him as being a man of action in a confrontation a couple of months ago, so I had to bite my tongue and accept my fate. And try not to worry about Honey.

  We timed our silent arrival at Tequila Flats perfectly under battleship-gray skies, and coppers bailed out of cars, vans, and wagons in unison around the complex. With my reconditioned Colt M1911A1 .45 in hand, I led my team up a concrete slab staircase with wrought-iron banister, and we hustled toward our little corner of the assault above the inner courtyard. We all wore heavy exterior Kevlar vests with our badges prominently displayed. Like the other officers, I wore my police radio on my belt with an external microphone clipped to the top of my vest.

  Kevin Lee was behind me on the stairs and carried a Remington 870 combat shotgun, and the last two men of our little stack held M4 ARs with thirty-round magazines. Before we got to our first target room, flash bangs broke the silence: SWAT was softening things up on the other end of the building. That was normal, but then gunfire broke out. Lots of it. And our radios squawked with frantic traffic. It sounded like more than one strike team was engaged in a gun battle.

  We had all paused for a moment to look toward the shots, so I snapped, “Faces forward, hit your targets!”

  Lee and I would clear one room at a time; same with the other two members of our sweep team. There was no need for Thor’s Hammer, a WallBanger DoorKey, or any kind of breaching tool because all of the apartment doors in the complex were flimsy old French doors. I kicked open the door to apartment 20, and Lee entered yelling “Police” and covered the left side of the room. I followed him in, covering the right side. The other two members of the team ran toward a nearby apartment assigned to them.

  The room was a shambles and stunk to high heaven of garbage. A grimy mattress leaned against one wall. As I stepped forward to carefully pull the mattress back and make sure no one stood behind it, Lee ran to the closed bathroom door, instead of remaining in position, covering me. Before I could yell for him to hold up, he threw open the door—

  —and was promptly shot.

  Lee staggered backward and slid down the wall to the floor. As I bolted toward Lee I put five rounds into the wall between me and the bathroom, knowing the .45 slugs would blast through the drywall and plaster and, at the very least, give me a moment of cover.

  I pointed my .45 into the bathroom as I reached down to grab Lee and pull him out of the line of fire. A quick look showed me the small room was empty, but I also saw a gaping hole in the wall leading into the bathroom of the unit on the other side of this unit.

  Damn, they’ve turned the place into a labyrinth.

  I keyed my mike: “Officer down, officer down! Sweep Team Two, Unit—”

  Before I could finish the transmission, in my peripheral vision I saw the mattress I had wanted to check drop down from the wall and a man run forward, shooting at me.

  I put three rounds into his center mass. My ears rang from the gunfire as the slide locked back on my cannon. One mag expended. Instead of inserting another magazine, I pulled my backup Glock and holstered the .45.

  Scratch uno dirtbag. Then I saw the hole in the wall that had been covered by the mattress.

  I rekeyed the microphone. “Officer needs help, Sweep Team Two, unit two-zero, unit two-zero, officer down.”

  Lee was out cold but was one lucky SOB; his vest had stopped a slug right over his heart. I felt responsible for Lee, but there was nothing I could do for him now except take out the guy who drilled him, so I bolted for the hole in the bathroom wall.

  I stuck my gun through the hole, chanced a look, and a round exploded into the plaster inches from my face. I squeezed off two unaimed shots in the direction the round came from, and then looked again. Clear. I scrambled through the hole.

  Two caps busted, four left in the stick, one up the pipe.

  I stood up and stopped at the open bathroom door. After a beat, I chanced a look into the main room, with my Glock leading the way. This unit looked almost identical to unit 20, except a pissed-off three-hundred-pound Mexican with rheumy eyes and three-day stubble had a 9mm pointed in my direction, and damn if the guy wasn’t shy about shooting it.

  Time slowed down, sound deadened and elongated. Rounds whizzed past as I pulled the trigger, but I knew it was a miss because I jerked the pull.

  I squeezed the trigger to fire again, but nothing happened. I looked and saw that my spent round hadn’t cleared the ejection port. I had a stovepipe! I couldn’t believe the bad luck. Glocks don’t have stovepipes. I’d put thousands of rounds downrange in Glocks over the years without a jam or malfunction of any kind. My guns were always squeaky clean, my ammo top of the line.

  No way this guy can keep missing me, even if he is a hung-over druggie, was replaced in my mind with tap and rack, tap and rack. I tapped the butt of the Glock hard with my free hand. Sometimes this alone will clear the jam, but it didn’t. So I tilted the gun slightly then racked the slide hard. The cartridge flew free just as the Mexican slammed into me, causing me to fire wide.

  At least it was him that slammed me and not a bullet. His breath smelled of tequila and cigarettes and bad cheese as we grappled standing and stumbling in a death dance, his weak-side hand wrestling for my gun as my weak-side hand did the same with his pistol. He was trying to work his gun barrel into the armhole of my vest. If he could do that and squeeze off a round, he’d punch my ticket.

  I wormed my Glock toward his chest and pulled the trigger. But the gun didn’t fire. Damn if I didn’t have another stovepipe! Which put us in Guinness book of World Records territory, because Glocks don’t do this. Why had I even pulled it?
Why hadn’t I just reloaded my Colt?

  I head-butted him to not much effect and kneed him in the groin to even less. We started to spin, and I put my shoulder into his chest to drive him into the wall.

  But my aim was off and we exploded through the French door and out onto the second-floor open-air walkway. Our momentum smashed us into the wrought-iron railing, knocking a section free and dropping us and the railing toward the parking lot below. I remember sliding my forearm up toward his throat as we fell and hoping I’d just have broken bones and not be paralyzed.

  Fatty hit the pavement flat on his back. I landed on top of him, his considerable blubber providing a nice cushion as I bounced off, but not before his rib cage made the Rice Krispies sound and my forearm bones crushed his windpipe.

  I sprawled on the pavement, going through a little checklist I’d developed over the years. It included remembering who I was and where I was and gently moving parts of my body. I felt dazed but strangely okay. EMS arrived in seconds along with other officers.

  Although I insisted I was okay, a paramedic told me to “Shut up and go along with the program.” I just smiled, and within four minutes they loaded me onto a gurney as I heard other paramedics pronounce the Mexican guy dead.

  “How is Officer Lee? Kevin Lee, upstairs in unit twenty?” I asked insistently.

  “His vest saved his life,” said some copper I couldn’t see.

  “You can ask him yourself at the ER,” said a female EMS paramedic. “That’s the next stop for both of you.”

  “What about Detective Baybee? Any other officers hurt?” I asked as they started to roll me toward a meat wagon.

  “Just you two,” said a black man who was head of the Special Operations Division. His name didn’t come to me, but it should have. “All four of the gangbangers here died fighting. So there are four more out there somewhere, but we’ll find them.”

  Four dead cartel killers. That sounded real good. But no one knew just how close we had come to a very different outcome. I’d had two stovepipes, and I just couldn’t wrap my mind around that. And I could easily have died in the fall or been hit by numerous bullets. I had a hard time understanding why I wasn’t dead, since bad luck and bizarre occurrences seem to have become my constant companions since this case began.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The docs were surprised, but except for a badly bruised left forearm, I was fine. Officer Lee would remain hospitalized for a few days as they monitored his internal workings. Honey hadn’t turned up at the hospital, at least as far as I could tell. I called her cell but got dumped to voice mail. Before I could call Homicide to bum a ride back to the Tequila Flats complex, Kruger walked in.

  The good news was the press was going apeshit for the story; bad news was the chief wasn’t sparing me the Officer-Involved Shooting process. Kruger took possession of my Colt and my Glock for forensic checks. We drove back to Tequila Flats, where TV talking heads did stand-ups with cameras rolling on the perimeter of the grounds. A cute blond reporter from a local network affiliate recognized me from previous run-ins; the press office must have released my name as being one of the injured, because she yelled at me, waved her arms, and shouted questions as she tried to get my attention. I ignored her and spent over an hour with Lt. Carondolet, a beefy guy who ran every investigation in which an officer had used deadly force.

  I answered all of his questions without mouthing off and walked him through the whole scenario several times. He claimed to be satisfied that we had a “clean shooting.” He wasn’t too impressed with the fact the fat guy and I did a half gainer off the second floor, but better that than a slug in my forehead.

  Carondolet informed me I was confined to desk duty until the investigation was complete—standard operating procedure for everyone in the department … except Honey and me.

  Until now, anyway.

  Previously, when working a Five Alarm case, I had always escaped this scenario. I understood that since the chief was shutting down the Sanchez/Ruiz investigation, this would be a good excuse to put me on ice.

  “Look over there,” said Kruger as we walked toward his unit in the Tequila Flats parking lot.

  “Chief Pointer?” I asked. A mob of TV and print reporters had surrounded someone for an impromptu press conference.

  “Who else? The chief is better at working the media than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

  I turned away from the spectacle. “Call me crazy, but why can’t I escape the feeling Sanchez and Ruiz were murdered?”

  “It’s the roll of the dice, ace. You know how many cases I’ve worked where there was no question we had a homicide, but we couldn’t find the shooter, or couldn’t make charges stick, or witnesses recanted, et cetera, et cetera? Those are the cases that keep you up at night. This one…” Kruger lit a cigarette as he stood next to his unit. He absentmindedly ran a hand through his slightly wavy salt-and-pepper hair. “Believe it or not, I think another shoe is going to drop.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean enjoy your time off while you can. Because my gut tells me the defecation is about to hit the oscillation. Every occult murder I ever worked, shit just gets strange. Separate and completely removed from that line of thinking, let me ask you: You got another piece?”

  I nodded. “Handgun-wise, I have a Ruger nine mil at home and a Browning three-eighty stashed in my truck.”

  “Good.” The lean, perpetually hungry-looking detective took a long drag on his cigarette and tossed the butt. “Start carrying them both. With plenty of extra mags. The Skulls aren’t stupid. They’ll connect the names of our two injured officers to the deaths of their four guys. I’d be expecting trouble if I were you.”

  * * *

  I texted Honey that I’d be at my dojo. After years of leaving it unnamed, I now officially called it Sōhei, which literally means “warrior monk.” I’d just completed a quick expansion by buying the building next door on Magazine Street in the Lower Garden District, which tripled the size of the training area. Big Bob, an ex-felon pal, lost the lease on his gym out in Fat City, so I made him a junior partner, maybe the smartest thing I’d ever done. He hired a cute, smart, buffed-out receptionist who was great at multitasking, and we made deals with a cadre of outstanding instructors to come in and teach classes for us.

  Sōhei still offered kickboxing and MMA training, but now we offered classes in jiujitsu, sambo, octagon training, women’s self-defense, boxing, a kid’s program, yoga, and specialized tactical instruction from edged weapons to weapon retention. I popped for expensive new equipment, put in a juice bar, big-screen TVs, Wi-Fi, and a cushy locker room. The buzz spread like wildfire, and in two weeks my membership roll had quadrupled.

  This new arrangement took a lot of pressure off me, since I was no longer a one-man band; I now taught less than 10 percent of the classes, and when I got wrapped up on a case, it was easy for other instructors to step in and cover for me.

  And while I still privately called it my dojo, my thinking had changed; Big Bob and I wanted to create the atmosphere of an old-fashioned boxing gym, but in a state-of-the-art training facility. We wanted Sōhei to be a place where you could find a dedicated community of fighters or lovers of the warrior’s arts who were supportive of each other, a place where people with raw talent could be refined and molded and even develop as human beings, not just wrecking machines.

  We also started doing some community outreach, offering free classes for underprivileged kids; if we could help even one kid avoid joining a gang, then we would have succeeded.

  But tonight, as I stepped onto the Zebra mats and strapped on fourteen-ounce Hayabusa Tokushu gloves, the only thing on my mind was the high strangeness of my life since Honey and I answered the shots-fired call. We’d been off duty, so if we’d ignored the call, other homicide detectives would have handled it.

  I’d come tonight to work off some stress on the Thai bags, siphon off some adrenaline, and maybe clear my mind as I delivered various kicks and pu
nches. I’d shot a man dead today, and while that didn’t make me feel good, it didn’t bother me as much as it used to. The sad truth was, I had grown accustomed to killing. Today, I’d had no choice in the matter, with either of the cartel killers. And as to the caliber of the deceased, well, basically, I’d squashed a couple of bugs.

  As I began with simple jab/punch combinations, my mind wandered away from today’s violence to more peculiar considerations that I’d avoided thinking about. How to account for the attack dog that had come out of nowhere? The overheated dream I was about to be killed? The stovepipes? Or the new wedge that seems to exist between Honey and me? Coincidences? An overactive imagination? Did I have that dream because I’d been reading Fournier’s files and books on the occult before drifting to sleep?

  The sigil and the mysterious figure on the street corner were obvious attempts at intimidation by someone related to the case. Kate Townsend? I had to admit she’d gotten under my skin with her conclusion that I needed to be in control, that I feared losing control. And she’d been spot-on regarding my feelings for Honey and how I wasn’t very sexually active as a result.

  As I tagged the Thai bag with a left-leg front kick leading into a combo jab/right cross/jab, I knew I wasn’t afraid of physical threats, but having a black magician curse me with Satan, well, it bothered me, because I couldn’t simply ignore it, as Honey could, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I felt as if … as if I had no control of that situation, thank you very much, Kate. So I decided on the spot to go see Tony Fournier first thing in the morning, as a private citizen, and see what I could find out.

  To emphasize my decision, I executed a quick front-snap kick, then followed with a solid front-thrust kick, driving my foot hard into the heavy bag.