John Ames - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 5. Whole No. 783, November 2006

Beau wasn’t arguing.

Merten wiped the sweat from his face. “We got snipers shooting at the Corps of Engineers who’re trying to get to the holes in the levees, got looters all over the city. We need the army, a couple of airborne divisions.”

“The navy,” Beau said. “They have the boats.”

“Freakin’ A.” Merten wiped his face again.

It made sense to Beau, an experienced homicide team at the airport, but he didn’t like it. In the first thirty-six hours, he and Cruz confirmed only one murder victim, a street punk he recognized immediately. Jimmy Bigelow, a.k.a. Killboy, was on NOPd’s top-ten wanted list, a drug-dealing murderer from the lower ninth ward. Arrested twice for first-degree murder, Killboy never went to trial. The ever-inefficient D.A.’s office nol-prossed each charge, claiming they couldn’t get witnesses to testify. Beau was the investigating officer in one case and didn’t need witnesses, he’d recovered the murder weapon with Killboy’s fingerprints on it next to a body lying inside Cassandra’s Social and Pleasure Club on St. Claude Avenue, but the D.A. didn’t feel it was enough.

Beau had to admit, seeing Killboy with a neat hole in his forehead made up for not bringing him to trial. Only he wondered how many crimes Killboy had perpetrated in the two years since the Cassandra case.

Merten had pulled Beau aside before he led the rest of the assembled NOPD back into the city. “We got a buncha people AWOL. Glad you came back.” Beau, on a three-week vacation, certainly didn’t have to return, but how could he do anything but? As Merten backpedaled away he added, “Take care of the rookie.”

That was Saturday, September third, and this was Monday, and instead of turning back to the lake to return to Bucktown, Beau guided the pirogue away from the levee breach into Lakeview. The water was nearly to the roofs of the houses and probably still rising in this brown-water world. He waited for Cruz to ask what they were doing now, but she just faced straight ahead, probably seeing nothing but the memory of her apartment.

The smells were even stronger away from the levee, a rotting, mildew stench, oil floating on the water. They moved through patches reeking of sewerage. Cruz waved at a patch of churning water to their right. “What’s that?”

“Gas main. Natural gas.” That particular stench was added to the rest as Beau maneuvered away from the bubbling water.

Eventually Cruz turned her head and asked, “Where are we going now?”

“Looking for someone to rescue. I’m tired of waiting around for bodies.”

She nodded and said, almost under her breath, “We should get back.”

This was their off time. Rest time. Sleep time. Their twelve-hour shift was approaching. Another team, two homicide detectives from Eugene, Oregon, was covering the day watch. Young, both in their late twenties, they’d handled exactly one murder in their careers. Eugene wasn’t a hotbed of crime. Back at the airport, cops were still arriving from all over, volunteers trying to help with the greatest natural disaster in American history. Beau had never seen so many different badges.

The strong sun was hot on Beau’s head and he wished he’d taken the green baseball cap offered by the Eugene cops. A University of Oregon Fighting Ducks cap. The logo looked like a pissed-off Donald Duck. When he was at LSU they played the Ducks his freshman year. He got in a couple plays, ran a quarterback bootleg for fifty-six yards and a touchdown. Headline the next day in the Baton Rouge paper read: Tigers Feast on Duck 47-0.

“Seriously, Raven, we should be getting back.” She’d turned to face him and tapped down her sunglasses to glom him over the top. He saw Cruz was back. Those chocolate-colored eyes were focused now, serious again.

He glommed her back. “Don’t call me Raven.”

She thought it was cute, a joke between the two of them. He didn’t like it. She’d started it back when she’d worked with him on a case where Beau tracked down a cop killer who called himself The Wolf. Ran the man to ground and watched him commit suicide.

Beau was half Cajun, half Sioux. At six-two he towered over Cruz. He was lean at one-eighty pounds, with dark brown hair in need of a haircut and a square jaw. He’d been told he had the look of a predator with sharp, light-brown eyes and hooded brow — a hawk, actually, with his thin nose. Not shaving regularly gave his normal five o’clock shadow a deeper hue.

It began to smell a little like the swamp around Vermilion Bay and for a moment Beau was taken back to the pirogue he’d paddled with his father when he was little and the world seemed a magical place to fish, hunt, and explore. That was until he went to school and was called a swamp rat by the other kids.

Cruz turned around again. “You never told me how your mother and father met. How did a Sioux woman from North Dakota meet a Cajun from south Louisiana?” Since partnering with Beau, Cruz had asked more about his background than any partner he’d known. Maybe because she was Hispanic and big on her heritage, part Cuban, part Costa Rican.

“South Dakota,” he corrected her.

“Okay, South Dakota. How’d they link up?”

Jesus. The questions never stopped. Beau took in a deep breath of sticky air. “My mother was a mail-order bride from the reservation.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Raven!”

“Don’t call me that.”

Her eyes went wide with impatience. Beau almost smiled.

“They met at a USO show. He was in the army and she was a singer.”

He could almost hear his mother’s soft voice singing him to sleep in that old Cajun daubed cabin they’d lived in back on Vermilion Bay. Built by Beau’s great-grandfather, its walls filled with swamp mud to keep the house almost cool in summer and warm in winter, it was unpainted and the greatest place for a boy to grow up.

Cruz was more interested in his Sioux half, asking to see the obsidian knife he carried in a sheath at the small of his back. Why was it sharp on only one side? Why a rock knife? Why the bone handle? He told her it was the way of the plains warrior, the Lakota, called Sioux by the white-eyes and their enemies the Crow and Pawnee.

Another withering stare from Cruz had Beau turn the pirogue around and head back toward West End. Sticking to the center of the streets to keep from running into the roofs of cars, they passed the carcasses of two dead dogs as they eased through an intersection, the street signs indicating they were at the corner of Colbert and Chapelle. A meow turned them both to the right. An orange-striped cat atop a roof meowed again and took a hesitant step their way.

“Over there,” Cruz called out.

“I see it.” Beau turned the pirogue and cut the engine as they neared a one-story brick home. Cruz grabbed the roof’s gutter and called up to the cat, which just meowed back.

“You might have to snatch it,” Beau said just before the cat lowered its ears and crept close enough for Cruz to stand and grab it by the scruff of its neck.

“It’s only a juvenile,” she said. It looked skinny to Beau, whose Catahoula hound dog was thankfully safe back at his uncle’s cabin on Bayou Brunet. He eased the pirogue away from the house.

“There aren’t any people to rescue here.”

“They evacuated early.”

“It’s the people in the Ninth Ward, Lower Ninth, Mid-City, Hollygrove,” Cruz said, petting the cat which she held tightly in her arms. “They don’t have cars.”

That Beau knew; some made it to the Superdome and Convention Center but some of the old ones, young stubborn ones, others who didn’t believe the weathermen, just stayed home. Beau couldn’t blame them. He was tired of hearing the gloom-and-doom from the weathermen. Hadn’t the city evacuated for Hurricanes Georges and Ivan for no reason? Sixteen hours in gridlocked traffic just to turn around. Every time a tropical storm inched into the Gulf, the weathermen came on the air with special reports, each network trying to outdo the other, scaring everyone with bulletins crying Wolf — wolf; The sky is falling, the sky is falling. They were bound to be right once and Katrina was it.