The Heavens Rise

“Who ID’d Anthem?”

“Old classmate of his tending bar. Classmates of yours too, I guess. Said Landry kinda went off the deep end when his girlfriend went missing.”

“The video poker machines?” Ben said, hoping the effort it took to ignore this reference didn’t show on his face.

“Gunslinger wanted to try his luck apparently. Landry didn’t seem interested in giving him a turn.”

“And so?”

“Things got physical. Sounds like Landry knocked the guy on his ass, then when the guy got up, he had a gun all of a sudden.”

“And he fired it, apparently.”

“Yep. Into his own foot.”

“You’re fired, Ben!”

Ben was so startled by the voice of his boss, he spun away from this baffling detail.

Marissa Hopewell Powell was dressed in a plain V-neck T-shirt and hip-hugging blue jeans, and she was approaching with a relaxed gait and a casual smile that made Ben wonder if he had imagined her outburst. Once again, Ben was reminded of how much weight the woman had lost since they’d first met. True, the stress of losing her home in Katrina had forced her to shed a bunch of pounds in a very short time. But the rest of it she’d unloaded the old-fashioned way. A diet, brought on, in large part, by the publication of her first book, a critically acclaimed account of Katrina’s terrible aftermath that included a searing retelling of the seventy-two hours she, Ben and a few other Kingfisher staff members had spent pulling people from their flooded homes in the Lower Ninth Ward.

But Marissa’s scheduled date that night had not been some blind fix-up with a dull city accountant. More like dinner with a housing rights advocate and attorney who’d graduated from the same college she did. The guy was marriage material, and jeans and a T-shirt were not what Marissa wore to dinner with marriage material.

“Were you following me?” Ben asked.

“I live close by,” she answered, giving Rendell a polite smile.

“You live in the Marigny.”

“It’s called a police scanner. We used to use ’em before Twitter.”

“You knew I was coming here, and you were testing me, weren’t you?”

“Yep,” she said with a bright smile. “And you failed.”

“Yeah, sure. How’d your date go?” Ben asked her.

“How’s all this going?” Marissa asked.

Rendell gave Ben a searching look.

“Oh, I see,” Marissa said. “So you two are best buds now. I’m actually the reason those guys who knocked over your mother’s restaurant got caught, Luther.”

“I helped,” Ben offered meekly.

“I wrote the story,” Marissa countered.

“Because I bugged you about it every day.”

“I still wrote it.”

“That’s because I didn’t have a desk yet, so I couldn’t write the story, which is why I had to get you to—”

“Keep talking. It’ll go well for you. I promise.”

Rendell lifted his hands like an intervening parent, and to Ben’s surprise, the gesture was enough to silence both him and Marissa instantly.

“Now, Lord knows, I am truly indebted to both of you fine, fine journalists for the piece you wrote about what happened to my momma. But if memory serves, I’ve bought you both a helluva a lot of beers to make up for it. So right now I’m gonna need to tend to a bunch of scared little white kids over there who aren’t used to hearin’ a gun go off, ’less they’re duck huntin’ with Daddy. So if y’all don’t mind.”

Rendell started off.

“Well, that wasn’t racist,” Ben muttered.

“Oh, please,” Marissa groaned.

When Rendell stopped and turned to face them suddenly, Ben thought the cop might have heard his comment. But the man formed one hand into a trigger finger and pointed it at his foot. “Ben. I forgot—it was both feet.”

Ben just stared at him, so Rendell mimed shooting his right foot, reaiming, and shooting his left.

“Are you serious?” Ben called after him.

Rendell nodded.

“How is that even possible?”

“Ask them,” Rendell called back, jerking one thumb at the crowd. “When I’m done with ’em, of course. Guy who actually did it wasn’t any help at all. Said he doesn’t remember even pulling his own gun. But if you find your buddy, tell him we’d love his opinion on the matter as well.”

Ben turned to Marissa. “One foot after the other? How’s that possible? The first bullet would knock him on his ass, right?”

“Well, you know what they say.”

“Do I?”

“God watches over children and drunks. And Anthem Landry is a combination of both. So maybe he’s got extra, extra good luck.”

“Yeah, that last part is what you say, I think.”

“So you off to find your buddy now?”

“You want to join me?”

“No. And don’t ever hang up on me again.”

“Promise, as long as you tell me how your date went.”

“It didn’t go anywhere.”

“You canceled?”

“On the phone today he made some crack about how he couldn’t be married to anyone with a dangerous job.”

“And?”

“I told him I had to ask tough questions of dangerous people. And that I’d be doing it for as long as I could.”

“You wouldn’t reform your dangerous ways? Not even for an attorney?”

“Not even for Barack Obama.”

“Aw, come on. You could cover the Garden District beat. You know, new flower shops, the occasional car theft. It’d give you more time to actually edit the paper.”

“Yeah, ’cause that’s what I want to do. Spend the rest of my life interviewing nice old white ladies who think they’re going to have some kind of moment with me because they just read The Help.”

“Whatever. It’s not like we’re war correspondents out here.”

“You’re just sayin’ that ’cause we haven’t had an oil rig blow up in the past few months.”

“Suit yourself.”

“It wasn’t a match, all right?”

“All right. Fine. Makes sense, I guess.”

“How’s that?” Marissa asked.

“Well, you’re the one who told me if I was ever going to have a boyfriend, I’d have to divorce trouble first.”

“I wasn’t talking about your job, Ben. I was talking about Anthem Landry.”

His cheeks burned. He averted his eyes from hers before he could stop himself. He’d actually lain awake a few nights since she’d made the comment, wondering if the stresses of being promoted to editor in chief by Kingfisher’s new owners were starting to wear on her, wondering if his mentor had, in fact, been trying to warn him off the very career path she had shepherded him onto eight years prior. Apparently,