Preacher pulled his flashlight from his belt, handing it over to Maureen. “I take it you don’t have yours.”
“Weapon?” Atkinson asked.
“Not carrying that, either,” Maureen said. She worried Atkinson might leave her behind; no way Preacher would hand over his gun to her. “Sorry about that. I haven’t been home since lunch.”
“You see what I have to work with here,” Preacher said.
“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Atkinson said.
She crossed the sidewalk and stepped into the thigh-high grass surrounding the abandoned house. Maureen dropped her smoke in the street and followed.
“Watch out for the trash and bottles,” Atkinson said.
As they closed in on the house, Maureen picked up a familiar sickly sweet odor. She stopped, breathed in deep to be sure. Something had died nearby, and not long ago, maybe in the house. They’d lost track of Marques only an hour or so ago, but Goody? Only hearsay put him in Baton Rouge. “Hold up.”
Atkinson stopped, turned. “Don’t worry, Maureen. I smell it, too. It’s not a person.”
Another thing to look forward to, Maureen thought. The varied bouquets of death and decay, and being able to sort them with a sniff. “What is it, then, that smell?”
“Rats, probably. Dead under the house, around the yard. The city probably came through, spread poison around. They do that when the vermin get especially bad.” She started walking again. “Follow me around the back.”
When she came around the rear of the building, a swarm of vicious mosquitoes descended on Maureen like an attack squadron of tiny vampires. She felt pinpricks up and down the back of her neck and her arms. Swearing, she dropped the flashlight and the pry bar in the grass, slapping at her exposed skin, aggravating her sunburn, and probably looking, she realized too late, like a rank amateur. Rotting animals and killer Amazon mosquitoes, she thought, and they hadn’t even opened up the abandoned house yet. No wonder Preacher hadn’t wanted to come. And she’d thought he was giving her time with the detective. The longer she knew Preacher, the smarter, the savvier, he got. She slapped at the back of her neck again. Atkinson’s collared long-sleeved shirts in the summertime made a new world of sense.
Maureen snatched up the tools she’d dropped in the grass. “Sorry about that. I think I stepped on a nest.”
“Light a cigarette,” Atkinson said. “That’ll help with the bugs.”
Around the back of the house, pots, pans, glassware, utensils, kitchen appliances, lay scattered across the yard, as if the kitchen had sneezed its contents out the back door. A couple of upturned kitchen chairs. Had everything been washed out by the floodwaters, Maureen wondered, or thrown out months or years later in a bitter tantrum? Somebody had lived here once. They had left a life here, thinking they’d be back in a matter of days. Someone who’d done a lot of cooking, Maureen thought, looking over the detritus, and had kept two dogs. She wondered if they’d cooked for their dogs.
The evening light was dying and throwing shadows. Atkinson clicked on her flashlight. She shone it on the edges of the board over the back door. “This one isn’t nailed down. Look at the dirt there on the porch. The board’s been moved. Someone’s been going in and out.”
She stepped to the side of the doorway, tapped on the board with the flashlight handle. The thuds echoed dully inside the house. “NOPD. This building is condemned and scheduled for demolition. Anyone inside?”
Atkinson waited beside the doorway, listening. Maureen hoped to hear Marques’s soft voice from inside the dark building. She wanted to see him slip out from behind the board.
“Anyone inside should come out now,” Atkinson commanded, “with their hands where I can see them. This is the NOPD.”
Her grip tight on the pry bar, Maureen waited, tense. The cigarette in her lips repelled the bugs from her face, but her arms and the back of her neck were getting devoured. She’d be a pint low before this adventure ended, but she was determined not to flinch or fade under the assault. The jury remained out on the bulletproof vest, she thought, but she’d never come to work, never leave the house again in the summer without bug spray.
Atkinson turned to her. “Help me with this.”
Together, they pulled the board aside, dropping it to the ground. Maureen almost ducked before the open doorway, but stopped herself. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting to rush out of the darkness. Not a flurry of bullets, but a cloud of bats, maybe, or a swarm of flies.
Atkinson seemed to have anticipated nothing, which was what they got.
Maureen followed Atkinson into the kitchen. She’d been right about the death smell. Definitely worse outside or underneath the house. Not that the inside smelled that great. Decay, mildew, animal piss. They made a right out of the kitchen and headed down a short hall, deeper into the dark, the buckled linoleum floor cracking and creaking beneath their feet.
At the end of the hall was a room with no door. And in the hall the strong smell of something unmistakable. Not death. Doritos. No doubt about it.
Inside the room, two mattresses were laid against opposite walls, each covered with a single dirty sheet. Snack bags, take-out containers, and empty plastic soda bottles littered the room, a mini-landfill between the beds. In one corner of the room, a Coleman lantern stood atop a red cooler. The cooler had a water line stained around its middle, like a bathtub ring. A second lantern sat in the opposite corner. There’s your kerosene for the car fire, Maureen thought.
Someone had tacked a tattered Saints flag halfway up one wall.
If she didn’t consider what she’d gone through to get here, Maureen thought, this room was a typical young-boyhood hideout, the local version of a tree fort or a clubhouse—post-Katrina Central City–style. She shone her flashlight around the room.
They hadn’t found Marques in person, but maybe they’d found where he’d been, and where he would come back to. She walked over to the lantern. Using her lighter, she easily got it going. Plenty of fuel. They had ready access to kerosene.
“See the height of that flag?” Atkinson said, shining her light on the gold helmet at its center. “That’s a twelve-year-old’s reach. This has got to be it.”
“Our boys.”
Atkinson pressed her lips together. Her eyes scanned the room. “I’d like some hard proof.”
Maureen ran her flashlight over the mattresses. “Valuables, anything personal would be close at hand, right? Hidden within reach of the beds?”
“Or carried with the boys.”
Maureen spotted something, papers peeking out from under one of the mattresses. She walked over and pulled the pages free. Sheet music. She couldn’t read the notes, but the title printed across the top of the page said “Do Whatcha Wanna.” She handed the papers to Atkinson.
“That’s marching-band music.” Atkinson kicked through the trash. She bent over, came up with a drumstick. “Who do we know who plays drums in a marching band?”
“Let’s see what else we got,” Maureen said.
She squatted at the foot of the mattress. She grabbed it by the corners and flipped it over, losing her balance and tumbling over on her backside.
“Well, look at that,” Atkinson said.
Maureen righted herself, dusting the back of her jeans as she stood.
Framed in the circle made by Atkinson’s flashlight was a handgun. Small-caliber.
“I’ve seen the ballistics from the Wright killing,” Atkinson said, shaking her head, a sadness seeping into her voice. She glanced at Maureen, looked back at the gun on the floor. It had been under the same mattress as the sheet music. “We’re looking at the murder weapon that killed Norman Wright.”
“You’re not changing your mind about who shot Wright, are you?” Maureen asked.
“No, I’m not,” Atkinson said. “Chances are the dead one did the killing. It’s kind of a sad axiom around here. Killing other people is a leading cause of death in New Orleans. I think Marques just hung on to the gun for protec
tion after Mike-Mike died.”
“Well, that’s a break for you, I guess, in that case.”
Atkinson shrugged. “I guess. We’ll find prints for all three boys on it, but we’ll match the gun to the residue on Mike-Mike’s hands.” She was quiet for a while. “I would’ve been okay tonight just finding Marques.”
“Me, too,” Maureen said. “The night’s not over yet. What’re the chances we find something in this trash that leads us back to grandma’s house?”
“Slim to none, something tells me,” Atkinson said, “and Slim left town.”
Maureen got down on her knees, started sifting through the trash. She’d dug through worse in her day. “Maybe somebody put Slim on a bus back home from Houston.”
32
When Maureen and Atkinson got out front, the cars were there, but Preacher was gone.
After a panicked moment, Maureen spotted him down the street, leaning on the picket fence and talking to the boys who’d come down from the porch. Nobody, not Preacher, not the boys, and certainly not the placid-faced girls on the steps, appeared tense or angry. The little kids had been rounded up and taken inside. Maybe they were short on bug spray over there, too.
She and Atkinson had found nothing else useful anywhere in the house.
“Maybe we can sit on the place,” Atkinson said. She sounded unsure.
“Not worth it,” Maureen asked, “or not doable?”
“I can’t do it personally,” Atkinson said. “I got other cases. He’s gonna see a unit sitting out here from three blocks away. He’ll see us long before we see him.”
“Let me do it,” Maureen said. “I’ll go home and get my car. I’ll bring a thermos of coffee. My weapon.”
“No offense, but no fucking way,” Atkinson said, chuckling. “I wouldn’t put a seven-foot, ten-year vet out here alone overnight. Weapon or no weapon. If something happened to you? Everyone involved would be eaten alive if word got out that a trainee was left alone on an all-night stakeout. I need my pension.” She raised her chin in Preacher’s direction. “Let’s see what your guru’s accomplished.” She put her fingers in her mouth and whistled.
Preacher turned at the sound. He waved. He shook hands with the boys, exchanging a few more words with them before heading back Maureen’s way.
“Community policing at its finest,” Preacher said upon his return.
He had copies of the photos of Mike-Mike and Goody in his hand. Maureen was stunned he said nothing about being whistled for, by a female no less.
“What’d you get?” Atkinson asked. “We know he’s been here. We got nothing else.”
“The past couple of weeks,” Preacher said, “three boys have been in and out of the house.” He held up the photos. “Goody and Mike-Mike had set up residency. The third came and went. Couple days here, couple days gone at a time.”
“What else went on at the house?” Atkinson asked. “Were they dealing out of it?”
“That had stopped before the boys showed up,” Preacher said. “They came after the house was taken off the market, so to speak.”
He waved his arm at the wrecked vacants surrounding them. “According to the folks down the street, the city’s come through finally and condemned these houses, slated them for teardown ASAP. Might happen next week, might happen next year. But the knuckleheads can’t use ’em for business anymore when no one knows what kind of uniforms will be coming through when. And then, of course, should you be using the place for warehousing, the wrecking ball’s not gonna wait for you to move your package out of the way.”
“Weird,” Atkinson said, turning in place, studying the houses. “When the city starts spreading paper on a block, the bodies usually drop in twos and threes. We get a real flash of real violence. Turf wars. Like Baghdad, fighting almost house to house, block to block. But Wright was our first trip to Central City in a while. People around Homicide were even starting to talk.”
“I don’t get it,” Maureen said. “I don’t get people shooting each other over empty houses any more than I get them killing each other over broke-down cars.”
“These empty houses,” Atkinson said, “have been a boon for the drug dealers since the storm. They provide limitless free space. For selling drugs, for hiding guns, sometimes for dumping bodies. They provide cover for deals and meetings. But now, finally, the city is starting to clear the blighted housing. When they move into a pocket like this, whatever crew has been working here has to clear out and set up again elsewhere. Most of the time, they don’t have to go far, a few blocks maybe, but they almost always run into another crew’s territory.”
“And then comes the violence,” Preacher said.
“So whoever was using 2053 had set up shop in a new location,” Maureen said, “before the boys turned it into their clubhouse.”
“We can probably see it from here,” Atkinson said. “Stash houses and luxury condos are the only housing stock we’re not short of in this town.”
Maureen walked out into the middle of the street, looking up and down the block. She wasn’t checking for the new stash houses, though. She was studying the parked cars.
A late-model SUV, not the maroon Escalade, with Texas plates sat parked outside the house full of kids. Otherwise, the half-dozen cars on the block were busted-out rattletraps. They were not unlike, Maureen thought, the green Plymouth near the heart of this whole mess. They looked drivable, but barely.
Patrolling Central City with Preacher, she’d noticed plenty of cars that resided curbside, parked on blocks or ramps. It was one of the reasons that Wright repeatedly hitting so obvious a target had confused her. He’d had no shortage of choices.
In the evenings and on weekend afternoons, groups of men of every age often gathered around the cars, their hoods and trunks and doors propped open. The men were ostensibly fixing the engine or doing bodywork, but really they drank beer, listened to music, smoked cigarettes and cigars, and socialized. Maybe that was why it took an awfully long time, months if not years, Maureen assumed, to fix an old car in New Orleans. To Maureen, the old cars comprised part of her district’s social landscape. Seeing the men in their place around the old cars gave her a sense of order, a sense of peace, about the neighborhood. It was one of those signs that she was learning to read, a sign of normalcy.
Now she wondered if the old cars hadn’t become something else entirely for the local criminal crews: camouflage.
“What about the cars?” Maureen asked. “What if instead of changing blocks or houses, Scales changed tactics when the notices went up? What if he started using these old cars parked everywhere as storage? He’s new. He’s short on muscle, right, if he’s got kids like Marques, Mike-Mike, and Goody doing his dirty work? He could move the cars around whenever he wanted, without ever exposing the stash to the light of day. Why not have a mobile stash? Like a shell game. That way, you’re not dependent on some asshole who smacks up his baby momma and draws the cops right to your stash. Is it that big a leap from a broken-down dishwasher to a beat-up Plymouth?”
She turned to Atkinson. “You told me when I first told you about those three boys that they were lookouts, that they were watching the car for Scales. A drug stash would be a hell of a reason for that, as well as the reason for Wright to be breaking into it. We said it that night. We just didn’t understand the scale of it.”
“I could see it,” Atkinson said. “It’s risky, but it’s aggressive. Creative, if a better idea on paper than in reality. It’s a young man’s strategy.”
“Like trying to kidnap a twelve-year-old,” Maureen said, “and decking a cop in the middle of the French Quarter?”
“Damn,” Preacher said. “How long was that Plymouth there? How many times did we drive past it? We never looked at it twice.”
“Why would we,” Maureen said, “until Wright got greedy, or desperate, and blew it?”
Just like Arthur Jackson, she thought, who lost control of himself and showed the world his biggest secret. She recalled Preacher dis
couraging her several times from going over to the car. She wondered if he remembered that, too. Probably, she figured. But now was not the time to play I told you so with her FTO and superior officer. There was probably never a good time for that.
“Okay, here’s another thing about the house,” Preacher said. “The past couple of days, it was down to one kid coming and going.”
“Marques,” Maureen said.
“Skinny kid,” Preacher said, nodding. “Has a big backpack with drumsticks poking out.”
“Have they seen him today?” Maureen asked.
“They haven’t seen him since yesterday,” Preacher said. “They came around looking for him last night, thinking he might want to stay with them, but he wasn’t here.”
“He’s living out of that bag,” Atkinson said. “Crashing somewhere at night. He’s running, no doubt about it.”
“So where was he last night?” Maureen asked. “He got himself to band practice this afternoon.”
Atkinson’s radio crackled in her car. “Hold that thought.”
She trotted over to the car, leaving Maureen and Preacher alone.
“We gotta find that boy,” Preacher said. “If I had to bet on it, I’d say that crew across the street isn’t doing any dirt. They seem like good kids. But they’re not stupid. If they’ll talk to me, they’ll talk to anyone that comes asking. It’s one way to not choose sides. If he hasn’t already, Scales will search through his backlog of real estate inventory looking for Marques.”
“I hope we didn’t give him away by coming here,” Maureen said, looking up and down the block. She didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean someone didn’t see her.
Preacher checked his watch. “We missed our chance to get Marques’s name in roll call for the night shift. I’ll get something sent out, anyway.”
“We’re not going to find one twelve-year-old boy,” Maureen said, “by occasionally glancing out the window of a police cruiser. Not at night, not with so many places to hide.”
“Hey, hey, a little faith here,” Preacher said. “The others will put a lean on the whole neighborhood for this. It’s summertime, people out on the street all night. We’ll twist some arms. We’ll make it happen.”
The Devil in Her Way Page 24