throw myself as far away as I can.
Orange flame bursts from the barrel of Wendy’s gun.
An explosive grunt sounds beside me. My attacker staggers, then pulls his gun back up. Wendy’s gun spits again. He bellows in rage and pain, then charges her with blind fury. Wendy fires again but misses, and he starts shooting, round after round. He misses four times, but then Wendy’s head snaps back and I’m screaming in denial, knowing in my bones that she’s gone.
He turns back to me, but he’s wounded and can’t move well. Blood has matted the teal Polo to his chest and shoulder. From twenty yards away, he raises his gun and points it at me. My eyes are full of tears, and I can see that he’s abandoned his plan. He means to kill me now.
The gun wavers, steadies, then flies skyward as thunder booms behind me and ricochets back from the far shore. I whirl to find John kneeling at the edge of the levee, his.40-caliber automatic leveled with absolute stillness.
“Hit the bricks!” he yells.
I dive onto the walkway, and John empties his clip, blast after blast roaring across the river, the echoes of his first shots smashing into the reports of the later ones. When I look up, my attacker is gone.
As the last shot fades, I crawl across the bricks to Wendy, hoping it’s not too late. The hair at the back of her head is a mass of blood and brain matter, and my heart knots against the truth. The first thing I learned in a military field hospital is that visible brain matter means the casualty won’t make it.
“Get down!” John shouts. “Find cover!”
I kiss Wendy’s hair, then get slowly to my feet and walk to the crest of the wooden steps and look down. The man in the Polo is doubled over near the bottom step, gasping for breath and trying to hang on to a wooden chain post. As I watch, my heart empty of pity, his hand slips off the post and he tumbles headfirst into the river.
After a moment he bobs to the surface, floating in place, his mouth opening and closing like that of a landed fish. Then he slowly turns away as the current takes hold of him. I feel no urge to save him, but as the current pulls him along the bank, I realize that if the river takes him, we may never know who he was, never find Thalia, or Jane, or any of the others – or even learn what happened to them.
Hopping over the chain, I try to keep pace with him by running along the treacherous riprap. Navigating the gray rocks without breaking an ankle is difficult, and the high water carries him rapidly along, not only downriver but into the main channel. He’s twenty feet from the bank and slipping farther away.
“Help!” he shouts, panic filling his dull eyes. “I can’t breathe!”
His lungs are probably filling with blood. He could drown internally before the river gets him. I can’t go in after him; he could drown me even without meaning to.
“Please!” he shouts. “I can’t stay up!”
“Go to hell!” I yell, though I need to save him.
He’s twenty-five feet into the channel now, turning in slow circles in the wake of a distant tug. Spinning away from me, he shouts something I can’t hear. Then, as his face comes around, again he repeats it.
“Where is she?” I cry.
“Save me!” he yells again. “I can save her! Please!”
“Tell me first!”
His head slips under the water, then bobs up again. I struggle down to the river’s edge, where a big piece of driftwood lies wedged in the rock. It’s a long branch, worn smooth by the water on its journey south.
“Jordan!” shouts a voice from miles away. It’s John, back at the steps. “Bring him in with the branch!”
I pull at the limb with all my strength, but I can’t free it from the rocks. Every second he slips farther downstream, my sister’s fate going with him. I can’t save the bastard without jumping in myself, and that would be insanity. Good swimmers drown in the Mississippi, even without someone trying to kill them.
Suddenly, without conscious thought, my hand flies to the zipper of my fanny pack, and my hand jerks out the Canon point-and-shoot I used at the gallery fire in New York.
I point the lens at the drowning man and shoot one exposure, then scrabble along the riprap, leaping from rock to rock with no regard for my bones, trying to get close enough for a clear shot. But the channel has him now. He’s thirty-five feet out and spinning away. As his face comes around again, I shoot three quick shots, then sprint along the tops of the rocks, hoping for another turn. When he’s forty feet out, I get off two more; then his head slips below the surface and does not return.
Panting with exhaustion, I turn away from the water and climb carefully to the top of the levee. John is sitting on top of the steps, fifty yards away, a cell phone in his hand. The sound of approaching sirens rolls over me from the direction of the Quarter. As I trot down to where John sits, he puts down the phone and tightens his belt, which he has tied around his thigh.
“You’re hit in the leg?” I ask.
Clearly in great pain, he nods, then points down the steps. “Go down there and see if you can find his gun. He might have dropped it. Fingerprints.”
I study every inch of weathered wood as I work my way down the steps, but there’s no gun. There is blood, and a lot of it.
“Look on the rocks just under the water,” calls John.
They don’t call the Mississippi the Big Muddy for nothing. You can’t see through it. Dropping to my knees, I feel my way along the first submerged step, but a soft splinter is my only reward. The second is coated with funk. Moving sideways, I feel among the submerged rocks, and again find nothing. But as my hand comes out of the water, I freeze. Lying between two rocks in a rainbowed pool of oily water is a cellular telephone. Retrieving it from the water, I see blood on it.
“What have you got?” John shouts.
Holding the phone by its antenna, I climb back up the steps.
“Son of a bitch,” John groans.
“It’s still on,” I tell him, looking at the water-filled LCD screen.
“Careful.” He takes the phone by its antenna and holds it before his eyes. “Shit! It just shorted out. While I was looking at it!”
“You can still get prints, though, right?”
“Maybe. But what we really need is the memory chip. This phone’s getting on a plane to Washington. Don’t mention it to any beat cops. Wait for Homicide.”
He points down the levee toward the French Market, where two white-helmeted mounted policemen are spurring their horses across the streetcar tracks.
I sit beside John, and in the first seconds of stillness, I start to shake. I wring my hands, trying to make them stop.
“Wendy’s dead,” I say softly.
He nods.
“She threw herself in front of me.”
“I saw her. She did her job. She was a good kid.”
“She wasn’t a kid. She was a hero. And she worshiped the ground you walked on.”
“I know. Goddamn it.”
“She deserves a medal. For her family.”
“Goes without saying.”
“So what the hell were you doing here?”
John shakes his head but doesn’t look at me. “I didn’t feel good about you walking around the Quarter. I knew you’d gotten upset at Frank Smith’s, and I’ve always felt you were in more danger than anyone realized. I also knew you didn’t have your gun.”
I squeeze his hand. “I’m glad you’re paranoid.”
“What did the guy say to you down there?”
“He said Jane was alive.”
John looks at me, his eyes hard. “Did you believe him?”
