A house burst into flame on the next block, orange sparks twisting high in the sky. In the distance he could hear gunfire and he could see a helicopter trying to land on a hospital roof, and he wondered if snipers were shooting at it. His hands were damp on the stock of the rifle, his eyes stinging with sweat. When he swallowed, his saliva tasted as metallic as blood.
He stepped off the far side of the neutral ground and began working his way down the street, past automobiles whose windows had been broken and their stereos ripped from their dashboards. He waded up onto the lawn of the house the looters were ransacking and watched the flashlight beam go from room to upstairs room. Then the light shone down a staircase, its beam bouncing off the downstairs hallway as the person carrying the flashlight descended the stairs. Otis wrapped his left arm in the sling and steadied the rifle’s barrel against the trunk of a live oak, waiting for the front door to open.
But the flashlight went out and the inside of the house fell into darkness. The front door did not open.
Where was the boat?
Otis stared into the shadows on both sides of the house and could see nothing of significance. Then, as heat lightning rippled across the clouds, he realized the flooding at the back of the house was even greater than in front. In fact, the alley and the garages along it were filled by a dark, swiftly running river that had created a navigable canal though the entirety of the neighborhood.
Somebody hit the starter button on an outboard motor and Otis saw the bow of the aluminum boat plow down the alley, the dark shapes of four men slouched forward in the seats.
He walked back home, his rifle slung on his shoulder. Tom Claggart and his friends were talking loudly in Claggart’s yard, lighting smokes, locking and loading, grinning at Otis. A couple of them wore olive-green T-shirts and camouflage pants with big pockets on them. “You save any for us?” one man asked.
“They cut bait,” Otis replied.
“Too bad,” the man said.
“Yeah, too bad. There’s nothing like hanging black ivory on the wall,” Otis said.
He had said it as bitterly and as ironically as possible. But to his listeners his remark was that of a kindred spirit. They roared at the inference. For Otis, that moment would remain like a dirty fingerprint on the mist, one that would come back to haunt him in ways he could not have imagined.
Chapter 9
EDDY AND BERTRAND Melancon were not given to complexities. They kept it simple. If a good situation put itself in your road, you made use of it. If it might jam you up, you put it in the ditch. Anything wrong with that?
Eddy and Bertrand saw the storm as a gift from God. White people in New Orleans had been making money on the black man’s back for three hundred years. It was time for some payback. The uptown area of the city, from Lee Circle all the way up St. Charles Avenue to the Carrollton District, was like a tree full of ripe peaches waiting to be shook. The Melancon brothers had never been house creeps. They specialized in armed robbery and took down only high-value victims and thought breaking and entering was for chumps who deserved what they got when they walked into a blast from a twelve-gauge shotgun. But when tens of thousands of homes and stores were abandoned and without power, their security systems worthless, the cops either gone or pulling scores themselves, what was a guy supposed to do? Crowd into the stink at the Superdome or the Convention Center and try to find a place on the floor where somebody hadn’t already downloaded his bowels?
The boat they had boosted in the Ninth Ward was perfect for the job. It had a wide beam, a shallow draft, cushioned seats, and a seventy-five-horse motor on it. As long as they concentrated on jewelry, coin collections, guns, and silverware, and avoided loading with heavy stuff like television sets and computers, they could possibly amass major five-figure money by dawn. They just had to keep it simple. The only dude between themselves and Central Lockup was that cracker Purcel, a bucket of whale sperm who did scut work for Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater, and they’d run over his fat ass with their ’sheen in the Quarter, left that motherfucker not knowing what hit him.
Now they were going house-to-house on a flooded street where every live oak was broken in half on top of the yards, only one house with lights working in it, choppers flying overhead to the hospital roof, not a police boat in sight, Bertrand and Eddy both working the upstairs of a mansion that had beds in it with canopies over them, like the kind in Gone with the Wind, Eddy stuffing a woman’s fur coat into a drawstring laundry bag along with a handful of necklaces he found buried at the bottom of her panty drawer.
Bertrand shined the light into the top of the closet. “Look what we got here, man,” he said.
Eddy paused in his work and stared upward at the panel his brother was prying loose from the closet wall. Both brothers were thick-bodied men, the muscles in their shoulders swollen and hard as iron from shrug-lifting sixty-pound dumbbells in each hand. Both were stripped to the waist and sweating profusely in the superheated interior of the house, Bertrand with a red bandana knotted tightly around his head.
Bertrand reached inside the wall and lifted out a short-barreled blue-black revolver with checkered walnut grips and a Ziploc bag fat with white granular crystals. “Oh mama, Whitey’s private stash and a thirty-eight snub. This is gonna be one pissed-off dude,” he said. “Wait a minute. That ain’t all.”
Bertrand stuck the bag of cocaine down the front of his trousers and handed the revolver to his brother. He reached back inside the wall and lifted out five bundles of one-hundred-dollar bills, each of them wrapped with a wide rubber band. He whistled. “Do you believe this shit? This motherfucker’s in the life.”
“Maybe this ain’t the place to take down,” Eddy said.
“Hey, man, ain’t nobody know we here. This is our night. We ain’t blowing it.”
“You’re right, man. The dagos ain’t running things no more, nohow. What you doing?”
Bertrand stuck the bundled bills in the bag, his eyes dancing in the glow of the flashlight. “Don’t worry about it.”
A third man entered the room. He had pulled off a gold-and-purple T-shirt and wadded it up and was using it to mop the sweat off his chest and out of his armpits. He wore paint-splattered slacks and tennis shoes without socks. Whiskers grew on his chin like strands of black wire. “Kevin thinks he saw a guy out in the street,” he said.
“That kid’s been wetting his pants all night. I told you not to bring him,” Bertrand said.
“He’s just saying what he saw, man,” the third man said. His eyes dropped to Bertrand’s waistline and the Ziploc bag that protruded from his trousers. “Where’d you get the blow?”
“Same place we got the thirty-eight. Now go take care of Kevin. We gonna be right there. I don’t want to be hearing about nobody out in the street, either. It’s Michael Jackson and Thriller out there. This city is a graveyard and we own the shovels and the headstones. Motherfucker come in here, he gonna eat one of these thirty-eights. You hear me, Andre? Get your ass downstairs and bring up the boat. And don’t be cranking it till we there.”
“What y’all got in the laundry bag?” the third man said.
“Andre, what it take for you to understand?” Bertrand said.
“I’m just axing,” the third man replied. “We in this together, ain’t we?”
“That’s right. So go do what he say,” Eddy said.
Andre huffed air out his nostrils and disappeared down the stairway. Bertrand tapped one fist on top of the other, his gaze roving around the room. “There’s more. I can feel it. I can smell money in the walls,” he said.
“What you smell is them flowers all over the place. What kind of people put flower vases in every room in the house right before a hurricane?” Eddy said.
The question was a legitimate one. Who could afford to place fresh bowls of roses and orchids and carnations in a dozen rooms every three or four days? Who would want to? Bertrand stared at the water stains in the wallpaper and pushed against the softness of the lathwork underneath, his stomach on fire, rivulets of sweat running out of his bandana. “These walls is busting wit’ it, Eddy. It’s a drop or something,” he said.
“Give it up, man,” Eddy said. “It’s burning up in here. It must be a hundred and twenty degrees.”
Bertrand looked hard at his brother and grimaced as his ulcers flared again. This could be the perfect score. Why did his insides have to betray him now, why was his head always full of broken glass? Why wasn’t anything easy?
