by Lisa Regan
Billy tried to comfort the dog, but that—or possibly the general vibe—infuriated the cat, who set up a caterwauling that drove Ollie to his side to be cat mom. That was okay with Skip. She’d told Jimmy Dee she’d take care of his house, and she could do it by herself. But help came anyway, from an unexpected source. Without being asked, Billy cleaned up the dog puddle and then went on leak patrol, helping Skip shove furniture and rugs to safety, emptying the pots as they filled, and replacing them. He didn’t talk a lot, just threw himself into the job. Skip found herself liking him.
When they lost electricity, the two of them sat in the room with the screwed-up shutter so they could watch the storm. They sipped some of the tea Skip had made. “Thanks for the help.”
The kid gave her a crooked smile. “Guess I was raised right.”
Skip thought about the contradictions that brought up in her mind. “Hey, you never said how old you are.”
“Going on seventeen.”
That meant fifteen, she figured. “Mind if I ask what you were doing out in the rain?”
“Oh.” He had guts, but he was still young enough to squirm at that one. “Well, I had to get something for my mama.”
“In a hurricane?”
“It was something medical, you know? She’s got a…a….”
“A condition?”
They both burst out laughing. “Yeah, a condition.”
It was funny because the Drunkersons’ whining begged to be mocked, but the unfunny part was that she could think of lots of conditions Billy’s mom might have that could make her so callous she’d send her young son out in the storm of the century. They were medical, all right, and they all had cures that could have rendered Mom too helpless to go out herself. None of them involved prescriptions. Not alcohol, she thought, because nothing was open. But everybody’s dealer would be home, because where else would you be in a hurricane? Billy’s mom had to have sent him out for drugs.
So who had raised him right? she wondered. “Is your daddy at home?” she asked.
And Billy asked again, “You a cop or what?”
“So what if I am? You know I’m not going to hurt you, right? Let’s be friends.”
He crossed his arms and gave her a hostile side-eye. “I ain’t gon’ be friends with no white po-lice.”
It just about broke her heart, knowing all the toxic ingredients that had gone into producing a kid who felt that way and wasn’t embarrassed to say so.
And then he said, “What’s your name, anyway?”
Somehow in the traffic jam at the door, she hadn’t introduced herself. “Skip,” she said, and held out her hand. “Detective Skip Langdon, at your service.”
“At your service, my ass.” He still wasn’t looking at her, but she could tell he was testing, trying to see if there might be the tiniest grain of truth in what she said.
“Believe it,” she said, and stood up. “Come on, I’ll take you to Kenny’s room. You better get some sleep.”
She found Dawn and Dickie asleep on matching living room sofas, and Ollie dozing in Sheila’s room. “Ollie, wake up. Take leak duty for a while?”
And then she sacked out in Jimmy Dee’s room.
While she slept, Ollie rigged up some garbage cans and plastic bags to catch the leaks, but it went on like that for the next several hours—they spelled each other while the storm raged. The eyewall—the nastiest bands—hit in the wee hours, ripping a chunk out of the roof, but fortunately it was a chunk covering a bathroom. which could be easily closed off.
The ripping shingles evidently woke Dickie, who staggered upstairs in the dark, looking for, of all things, a bathroom—that bathroom. “Hey, I gotta get in there.” He pointed at his adult diaper. “My condition! Ya know?”
“Dickie. You know there’s a bathroom downstairs, right?”
“Oops! Too late,” he said, and ran for Kenny’s bathroom.
Maybe he’d just been looking for company. Katrina was clutching and tearing at the house. The screwed-up shutter banged incessantly, and now and again something hit the house—who knew what? Maybe flower pots someone hadn’t taken off their balcony, maybe branches or even electric wires.
She wanted to talk to someone herself, in particular her boyfriend, Steve Steinman, but it was also the dead of night in California, where he’d gone on a film-editing job. She couldn’t even justify calling Jimmy Dee. What was she going to say? “Sheila’s bathroom’s flooding?” Who wanted to hear that? Besides it wasn’t so bad—a lot of the rain was ending up in the tub.
She went back to bed and slept a few more precious hours. The wind was still howling when she awoke sometime about nine and went down to make coffee, grateful Jimmy Dee had a gas stove and hadn’t obeyed the instruction to turn off the gas. The house felt as if it was being shaken by Godzilla.
As she puttered, her phone rang. Her lieutenant, Sylvia Cappello, addressed her as Skip, which wasn’t good at all. She was only Skip when things were going so badly Cappello couldn’t bother being formal.
“Skip, it’s hell out there. The Superdome’s got a hole in the roof. The nine-one-one lines are down…and there’s flooding. I think some of the pumping stations got knocked out.”
Of course there was flooding. There was always flooding. That was why thousands of people had left their cars parked on the neutral grounds and sidewalks. It was a way of life.
“We’ve had reports,” Cappello said tentatively, apparently not wanting to speak the words, “that people are in their attics.”
Skip’s scalp prickled at the ever-so-careful phrase, the way it did when she ran into a perp who was going to be dangerous. She could feel it before he even gave her a sign. People had had to go to their attics in Hurricane Betsy—and many of them had died.
“Where? In the Lower Nine?”
Cappello was barely able to keep her voice steady. “You know Detective Little? He’s still got phone service—and he’s in his attic. And we’ve talked to the Coast Guard. The nine-one-one lines are out, so people are calling them. People are on roofs.”
“Oh, Jesus! Should I—?”
“No, there’s nothing you can do. Are you kidding me? There’s still a hurricane out there. And even when it stops, you won’t be able to drive with all the trees down. If the levee’s overtopped—”
“I’d need a duck boat.”
“Uh…you don’t happen to have one, do you?”
And that was when Skip knew how bad it was. Or thought she did. Nobody really had any idea.
Perhaps lured by the coffee smell, or awakened by the elements, Ollie and Billy filtered in, the Horvaths remaining peacefully sacked out.
Ollie rustled up some eggs and bacon—there was no way to make toast—while Skip sipped and listened to her police radio. Trying to figure out what to do.
The news on the radio made her antsy to get going. Looters were out in force. All officers had been ordered to report in. She had, and had been told to stay where she was until the wind was below fifty mph. How was she supposed to measure that? She interpreted the order this way: “Get out there and act like a cop, as soon as you can walk without getting blown against a building.”
Driving would probably be out of the question, due to debris. And there was still the question of what to do with a loose-cannon juvenile.
“What the hell?” Billy said. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“On the radio. The IBoys.”
“Huh?”
“That’s a gang. From where I stay. They out lootin’. Right in the storm.”
“You live in the Iberville?” Skip knew who the IBoys were. They weren’t just any gang. They were as lethal as you got. She would have thought looting was beneath them.
He shook his head. “I stay in Tremé. Henriette Delille Street.”
“You know those guys?”
She thought she saw his eyes flash fear before he turned away, but she couldn’t be sure. “Wish I didn’t,” he muttered.
With no AC, it was getting hotter and hotter in the house. And the wind raged on.
She thought she was going to go nuts with no electricity, no phones, and no idea what was expected of her. She had to get out there—people needed help, lots of them, she suspected. The problem was, she already had a houseful of people who also did. She could leave Ollie in charge of the Drunkersons, but Billy was a real complication. He seemed like a nice enough kid and he’d been a big help. But he’d been on the street when he shouldn’t have been, and he’d arrived with a loaded gun tucked into his jeans. And however helpful or dangerous he was, he was also a juvenile who’d as good as admitted he had an unsavory home life.
Yet she had to get him home before she did another thing. Fortunately, he lived within walking distance. As soon as she could open the door—admittedly with Ollie on the inside pushing it—she stepped out and tested. It was wet and windy, but she was fairly sure she could walk.
“Billy, I gotta get out there. Come on. I’m going to walk you home.”
“No! I can’t go home with those assholes out there.”
“What?” And then she got it. “The gangs? You’re afraid of the gangs?”
“I got my reasons.”
“You’re afraid to walk on the street with a cop?”
“Not if you give me my piece.”
“I’ll return it to your mom, but not today. Today, you’re going to put on Jimmy Dee’s rain gear and accept a police escort.”
“‘Aight,” he said, barely audible. All right.
She put on Sheila’s gear, which thankfully included a pair of Wellies, and went for a walk in the hurricane. With a sulky teenager.
The house Billy lived in was tiny, beat up, and an architectural gem, she was fairly sure. At any rate, it was old and beautiful—to her, anyway. Tiny as it was, it looked as if generations had raised rowdy, lively families in it. “This is us,” Billy said. “I be okay now.”
“Let’s make sure your mama’s home.”
“You don’t need to come in.” Anxiety twisted his young face. He no more wanted her coming in than he wanted to run into the IBoys.
“I do. It’s kind of my job. You got a key?”
“Yeah. I got a key.” He unlocked the door and opened it.
Skip knew immediately something was wrong. It didn’t smell right in there; it reeked of rot, as if nobody lived there—or had recently died there. There was a dark puddle on the floor. And another one across the room from the first, as if two idiots had been dueling with pistols. But there were no bodies.
“Mama!” Billy cried. She could hear the panic in his voice. “Mama! Mama, you here?”
Before Skip could say don’t, he ran into the other two downstairs rooms, a bedroom and a tiny kitchen, and up the stairs, with Skip on his heels. “Mama, Mama!”
He ran downstairs again and, before she even knew what was happening, out the door and down the block. She chased him until she lost him—he knew the neighborhood and he’d ducked in somewhere, in some hidey-hole he’d probably known about since he played here as a preschooler.
She put her hands on her knees and took a few noisy, painful breaths before facing whatever bad news the little house held. First, she retraced Billy’s footsteps, making sure no one was hiding in it. Then she made a more thorough search, improvising gloves with a pair of socks she found in a drawer. She touched the puddles on the floor with a paper towel. They were sticky and dark red. Blood for sure.
She went through the few drawers she found upstairs—there were none in the living room and those in the kitchen held nothing but kitchen equipment. Curiously, she found no weapons. She went through any papers she found lying about, including a bill from the Sewerage and Water Board, addressed to Kaynard Cochon. So someone lived there besides Mom and Billy.
Kaynard had only a few pairs of jeans and half a dozen T-shirts, but he did own an expensive leather jacket. There were women’s clothes in the same closet as his. A second bedroom, with kind of a combination hip-hop, sports, and piles-of-clothes theme, was obviously Billy’s.
The kid had a laptop, but Skip couldn’t see trying to figure out the password when she was supposed to be out on the streets.
She tried the usual hiding places, like shoes, shoeboxes, and under the mattress. But, ironically, it was almost in plain sight, in a bathroom cabinet, that she found a sizeable crack stash. Obviously Kaynard was a dealer—this was too much for personal use. So Billy hadn’t been sent out for drugs.
Why had he left the house?
It had to be because of violence therein. Blood had clearly been shed. But where was everybody?
She thought of confiscating the crack, but couldn’t see walking the streets with that in her pocket. In the end, she left with only the haunting sensation that whatever had happened here had happened after Billy left, and the inescapable conclusion that something bad had happened to his mom.
She felt as if her brain was scrambled. She shouldn’t have disturbed what was probably a crime scene. But she felt as if all rules might be suspended today. On the other hand, she was a homicide detective and this might very well be a homicide.
She tried Cappello. “Back!” the lieutenant said. “Had to charge the phone in the car. There’s a lot of flooding out there. Everything’s haywire everywhere. There’s no nine-one-one, there’s looting, there’s all kinds of crap in the streets, trees down all over the city—oh, yeah, and get this—OPP’s flooded.” Orleans Parish Prison. “So do this…walk down St. Claude and do what you can.”
Skip was flabbergasted. “Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we don’t know what the hell’s going on out there. Half the police who were scheduled didn’t even report in. Phones are down, people are on roofs. You want to know the truth? It’s chaos around here. And out there. So, I repeat: Just get out there and keep the peace.”
Somehow, Skip had felt that no matter what happened elsewhere, at least it would be business as usual in the police department. She tried to adjust her attitude. “On it. But I need to report a crime scene. Maybe.”
She quickly described what she’d seen, and Cappello said, “I’ll make a note of it. But if you didn’t see anyone bleeding and you didn’t see any bodies, that’s priority Z today.”
“I did see crack.”
“Langdon, I just don’t think you’re getting it. You’ve got bigger fish to fry today. We all do.”
“I know. I saw some smoke. There’s some fires too, right?”
“That’s the least of it. The levees have broken.”
Skip’s stomach fluttered. So, she could have sworn, did her heart. Everything inside her did a double take, trying to take in what she’d just heard. The city’s drainage system was antiquated and inefficient—and so, when she’d heard the word “flooding,” she didn’t understand it was anything she hadn’t seen before. Flooding was normal in New Orleans when there were heavy rains. But she understood exactly what Cappello meant. A levee breach would mean the Big One—the thing meteorologists and scientists had been warning about for years. The geographic bowl in which New Orleans was built would fill up.
“Okay, I’m outta here.” It was all she could trust herself to say. She felt a surge of energy, a physical need to do something.
Later, she’d barely be able to remember everything she did that day. She found parades of wet, panicked, disheveled people straggling down the neutral ground on St. Claude, headed vaguely toward the Superdome. What was happening here?
But most were incoherent.
“The water…it just…came…”
“I can’t find my mama! She stay just down the block. Her house gone. My mama ain’t nowhere I can find.”
“My baby! My baby!”
This last one she heard more than once. Sometimes it meant a young child was missing or injured, sometimes a grown one.
She managed to piece together that these were refugees from the flooding in the Ninth Ward. Every one of them had lost their home
and many had lost family members or neighbors. Sadness and misery oozed from them like sweat. Some openly wailed. Some just looked at her with hopeless, unbelieving eyes, unable to speak.
She tried to organize transportation or temporary shelter—even an umbrella and a blanket!—for those who’d run out of steam or fallen apart emotionally. For the sick and hurt, she called for help and crossed her fingers that it would come.
She broke up fights, but she didn’t go out of her way to stop looting—unless it was senseless looting of nonessentials. She didn’t have the heart to stop people taking supplies like food, water, and baby diapers.
Technically, she should have arrested every looter, but with the jail flooded, where was she going to put them? And how was she going to get them there? It was raining, the streets were blocked by fallen trees, and not only was she running out of juice on her phone, she was finding fewer and fewer people were answering theirs. Cell towers were out for some, and others just had to find a place to recharge. She understood without anyone telling her that she was going to have to make her own rules today—and probably for the next few days. And, also, with a sick feeling she knew she had to swallow, that what she was seeing was chaos on a scale that wasn’t going to be controllable for a long time.
She worked as late as she could, but when it got dark, there wasn’t much she could do with only a flashlight, and not much the most determined thugs could do either, but those were in short supply, it seemed. Even criminals had lost their homes and their relatives and, momentarily, their minds.
Back at Jimmy Dee’s, she found everyone gone, including the dog and the cat. Ollie’d done her usual stellar job of cleaning up, even in the flooded bathroom and the rooms with leaks. That was a relief, but she badly wanted to go home, to her slave quarters in the courtyard. Well, tomorrow. It just didn’t feel right to desert the Big House.
She foraged for food that was about to go bad, found enough of a roast chicken to make a sandwich, cursed her dead phone, and fell into bed.