He called Cate and they talked until he heard a siren. Unable to rouse her, the EMTs took her to the ER at University Hospital. The ambulance’s flashing lights had attracted a crowd of gawkers, and as it pulled away, Landry stepped onto the sidewalk and locked the gate.
Someone shouted, “That’s Landry Drake. Hey, Landry! Did a ghost kill somebody in there?”
He ignored them, hailed a cab and went to the hospital. Located downtown, this one handled most of the incidents from the French Quarter and lower-income areas. At midnight on the beginning of Mardi Gras day, it was as crazy there as on Bourbon Street. The waiting room was filled with people who took up every seat and most of the floor space too. He gave a bored clerk Tiffany’s name and his phone number, and she told him to take a seat. Someone would contact him eventually.
Pairs of eyes glanced his way as people wondered what the ghost hunter was doing here. A child far too young to be here this late said, “I seen you on the television. You’re some kind of star.”
“Not exactly,” he replied with a smile. “Why aren’t you home —" He regretted the words the moment they came out, and a large woman next to the boy snapped, “’Cause ain’t nobody there to watch him, like it’s any of your business.”
He apologized and stared at his phone, averting his eyes from the teeming mass of humanity in this place for one awful reason or another. Sooner than he expected, he got a text telling him to go through a numbered door at the back of the room. He maneuvered around people, opened the door and looked for a nurse. Instead he found a police sergeant in his fifties who was all business. He ushered Landry to one of several tiny rooms apparently used for interrogations. As he sat, Landry thought how odd it was that an emergency room contained a makeshift police station.
The cop took Landry’s name, address and phone number and asked what happened in the building. He said he spent the day with Tiffany and dropped her at the airport around six. He didn’t know why she didn’t fly home or how she got inside the building. When he came to look around, he found her unconscious, and called 911.
“What’s the relationship between you two?”
“Nothing. I met her one time before today. She and I were on a ghost tour —"
The officer stopped taking notes and looked Landry in the eyes. “Mr. Drake, I know who you are and I have no interest in creating problems for you, but you need to help me out here. You have to be completely honest with your answers. Here’s what I know so far. You’re in an old building in the middle of the night. There’s a woman with you. She’s lying unconscious on the pavement. You call 911. The doc says she lay there for hours. She’s in bad shape, Mr. Drake. Really bad shape. Let’s cut to the chase. What happened to her, and why did you wait so long to call for help?”
There was no misunderstanding what the cop was inferring. Even Landry knew the story didn’t ring true. He was in the middle of a situation he couldn’t explain. The officer thought he was the perpetrator of a crime, and he was asking for answers.
“I want an attorney.”
“I’m not surprised,” the policeman said with a sigh. “Okay. Here’s what’s going to happen. It ain’t pretty, but it’s procedure.”
A moment later the door to the waiting room opened, and the cop marched Landry through the room filled with curious onlookers and outside to a cruiser. Everyone knew Landry’s hands were cuffed behind him, but the officer was decent enough to cover the cuffs with Landry’s jacket. As dozens of faces stared through the emergency room windows, he pushed Landry’s head down until he plopped into the back of the sedan.
When they pulled into the garage at the jail, there was a TV news van filming a line of cop cars bringing unfortunates to justice. The cameras were rolling as drunks stumbled into the building.
The cop said, “I’ll do you a favor. Keep your head down and do what I say.”
Instead of stopping at the prisoner entrance, he pulled further down to a door marked Authorized Personnel Only. “This is where attorneys come in,” he explained as he helped Landry cover his head with his jacket for the quick trip inside. They walked down a long hallway into an enormous and very noisy room.
If the hospital was a crazy place on Mardi Gras, the jail’s intake area was mind-boggling. A teenaged girl with her hands cuffed behind her back vomited on the floor, people in the drunk tank shrieked from the throes of withdrawal, and prostitutes wearing little more than a few beads stared off into space as they waited for their pimps to bail them out.
The cop put Landry in a tiny room. “Who’s your lawyer?” he asked, but Landry said first he wanted to talk to Shane Young, a NOPD detective with whom he’d worked on another case. The officer refused, saying there was no way in hell he’d call a detective in the middle of the night just to let him know Landry Drake was in jail.
“Please call him. I promise you he’ll come down.”
And to the cop’s astonishment, Young heard the summary of the situation and said he was on his way.
“Tell Landry he’s free
