stabbings, beatings. Abandonments, too: a number of elderly relatives, wheelchair or bedridden invalids, had been left by their families on the outskirts of the hospital grounds.
Not least of those present was Thurlow J. Meade, who'd just finished telling his story to Jack Bauer and Pete Malo, following up the tip furnished to them by Floyd Dooley.
A police officer on duty in the ER had originally taken Meade's statement and passed it along to headquarters; now, as the incident assumed vital importance in light of the Golden Pole massacre and manhunt, a detective stood alongside the victim, minding him until the CTU agents arrived.
The detective, Stankey, balding and sharp-featured, wore a rumpled summer-weight suit, pale yellow shirt, and charcoal-gray tie. He said, 'What with all the extra calls coming in because of the storm, this one got lost in the shuffle for a while.'
Meade was sitting on top of an examining table. He wore a hospital gown. Bandages patched his face and skinned elbows. His right ankle was taped up.
'Do you recognize any of these men?' Jack said, using his cell phone monitor to show Meade a series of six photographs, head shots of different men. Five of the shots were ringers, the sixth was Colonel Paz. The purpose was to avoid leading the witness while certifying the validity of the identification, should any be made.
At the last photo, the one of Paz, Meade sat up straight — an action that caused him to groan with pain — and said, 'That's him! That's the guy! I'll never forget that face!'
'Thanks, Mr. Meade, you've been very helpful,' Jack said. He and Pete were already in motion, heading toward the exit.
Meade called after them, 'If you catch up to that guy, watch out for his gun. It's a big mother!'
CTU Center contacted the NOPD to put out an all-points bulletin on the stolen car, yielding swift results. A police patrol car found it several miles away from where it had been taken.
Jack and Pete arrived at the locale, which was several miles north and inland from the French Quarter. It was a working-class neighborhood of small, modest houses laid out on a grid of cracked-pavement streets. The area had suffered some Katrina damage but had remained largely intact.
A fair-sized crowd of neighborhood folk, men, women, and children, stood grouped around the gray sedan. Not many residents would evacuate this area. Few cared to leave behind their meager, hard-earned worldly goods to the tender mercies of thieves and looters. Most were staying. The area was on a gentle rise, most of it above sea level, but potentially exposed to gale force winds that could sweep the knoll clear if the storm came roaring in at full strength.
There were lots of kids around, running in circles, dodging in and around the clusters of adults, narrowly avoiding collisions, the adults snarling at them but the kids already gone, out of reach.
The gray sedan had been found quickly because it had been involved in another carjacking, this time of a boxy Korean-made tan-colored coupe. The sedan had cut off the coupe, blocking it and forcing it to a halt. Its gun-toting driver, who was undoubtedly Colonel Paz, had abandoned the sedan, charging the coupe on the driver's side and forcing out the two occupants, an elderly couple.
They'd been slow on the uptake, stunned by events, and for a moment remained frozen in place in their machine.
Paz had goosed them into action with a burst of machine-gun fire, emptying it into the side of the sedan he'd just quitted. Glass windows blew, doors cratering and crumpling under the burst. Then he waved it at the duo in the coupe. This time they got the message, piling out of their car and scuttling away.
Paz jumped in the coupe and took off. He was long gone when the first patrol car arrived on the scene.
Pete Malo shook his head, grinning wryly. 'The Colonel is sure cutting a wide swath across town.'
Jack said, 'But where's he headed? And to what purpose?'
New Orleans is a big city that covers a lot of ground, a crazy-quilt patchwork of neighborhoods and districts that includes such disparate walks of life as the urban cityscapes of the business and commercial precincts, the French Quarter with its Old World charm spiced with sleaze, the suburban sprawl of the Lakeview District, and such blighted zones as the lower Ninth Ward and East New Orleans.
Sandwiched inland where the business district ends and the residential neighborhoods begin is a decaying factory-warehouse area that began running to seed a long time ago.
A rough, scrappy patch of reclaimed marshland knit together by a spidery skein of canals, truck routes, and access roads, it features mostly warehouse buildings, transport company depots, and junkyards, aging sites mostly bordered by tall chain metal fences topped with spiraling loops of razor-sharp concertina wire.
An eyesore for decades, it's now a full-blown industrial wasteland. Katrina had seen to that. The storm surge had swamped the area, flooding the flats. Floodwater alone is bad enough, brackish and diseased, but the Katrina- borne deluge had served as a kind of universal solvent, leaching out tons of chemical, oil, and sewage pollutants that had been buried underground and surfacing them.
The citizenry called the sludge 'toxic gumbo.' When the waters finally receded, they left behind the residue, a noxious ooze several inches deep that contaminated all it touched.
This area had been hard hit. The polluted residue was plain to see, a silver-gray coating resembling metallic frost that blanketed fields, lots, and canebrakes. From a distance it was oddly beautiful, like a November frost, but every piece of plant life it touched, it killed, while leaving them perfectly preserved, like museum pieces.
Running through the middle of the badlands was a truck route, a two-lane blacktop ribbon. During the weekdays the road was lively with truck traffic, big rigs, flatbeds, deuce-and-a-half carriers, and pickups, all ferrying material to and fro.
Saturdays, with many of the trucking companies closed for business, traffic was much less.
Today, this Saturday, with a storm imminent, traffic was close to nonexistent.
In the middle of this emptiness, on the west side of the north-south road, stood an abandoned gas station. A rusting marquee sign's faded letters were just barely legible to make out the name of its long-defunct off-brand: JIFFY PUMP.
The pavement was cracked and weed-grown. The gas pumps were long gone, removed, though the underground fuel tanks remained, rusting, corroding, leaking oily residue into the subsoil. A flat-roofed cube that had once housed a combination garage and convenience store now stood with its doors and windows boarded up.
The dreary solitude of the setting was broken by a tan coupe that scooted southbound and riverward along the roadway. It slowed as it neared the abandoned station on the west, turning into the driveway and rolling around to the back of the building.
It was now screened from view of any other vehicles that might pass along the route.
The car stopped, its engine chugging and gurgling for another half minute or so after the ignition had been switched off before thudding to a halt.
Clambering out of the vehicle was Colonel Paz.
Take a piece of lead pipe and slam it against a hornet's nest a few times; the results are explosive. Such was the mindset of Martello Paz. The assassination attempt was the lead pipe, and the inside of his head was the hornet's nest.
He was buzzing, electric with fury. Red eyes rolled in the dark, lumpish mask of his face. His machine pistol was clutched in one hand. He was dangerously low on ammo, with barely a few rounds left in the sole remaining clip.
Somewhat the worse for wear, he'd lost his hat, his clothes were filthy and torn from rolling around on sidewalk and street scrambling for cover during the shootout, and his body was bruised, sore, and aching. Otherwise, though, he'd come out of the kill zone pretty much unscathed.
He talked to himself, maintaining a running monologue under his breath. 'All those bullets flying and not a mark on me! That's because my guardian saint is looking after me. Saint Barbara! She protects her favorite son!'
In his way, Paz was a religious man: a diabolist. Like many narco traffickers and killers, he looked to the spirits of the invisible world for protection in this one. His was not so uncommon a belief in the violent underworld, the vida loca of South American drug cartels, where a trafficker must fear his rivals, his allies, and the police, while
