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

John Raven Beau hadn’t been frightened since he was a kid. There was no fear when he’d gunned down the men he’d chased, no fear when their bullets whizzed past his face with the sound of an angry hornet. As a child he’d been frightened, as most children, of wild sounds coming from the swamp at night, of imagined bogeymen. He’d been frightened when his grandfather told him about Coyote-man, the mythical enemy of the plains warriors, the Sioux and their cousins, the Cheyenne. Stories of the sly trickster who stole the breath from babies, leaving them cold and dead, of tricks played on battlefields when a warrior’s bow broke or an arrow didn’t run straight or a pony tripped on a gopher hole, sending its rider crashing to the ground. Coyote-man drew warriors to watery deaths in lakes and swollen rivers where their soul would never escape, for a warrior who drowned could never rise from the depths.

Beau knew better than to think it was Coyote-man who drew Katrina’s hot winds to New Orleans, knew the myth was just that — a myth. But something drew the storm here. Something drew it from the gulf. Steering currents, or was it, after all, the rotted breath of Coyote-man that sucked the storm ashore? And was the trickster sitting on a rooftop cackling at Beau as he studied the horizon wondering if it would be the same sun rising in the east?

When the sun finally rose, with Juanita Cruz gently dozing next to him, Beau felt a hammering in his chest as he watched the sky turn from black to charcoal gray then lighten into reddish orange before streaming into yellow. It was the same sun and it made him feel as if his heart would collapse from the pain.

“What is it?” The voice came from a distance. “What is it?” It was a familiar voice. He turned to it but only saw a blur. He wiped his eyes and it was his partner, sitting up now, staring at him, her brows furrowed.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Beau felt his head shake, felt his heart hurting so badly he wondered how he could breathe. He looked back at the sun. It should be off-kilter, askew, every object should be a fraction of an inch from its true place. Everything was wrong, but nothing looked wrong. It was the same sun.

He looked back at his partner and told her that.

“You’re not making sense,” she said, brushing grass from her pants.

“Don’t you see?” he heard himself say.

“No.” She looked him in the eye again and said, “You talking about back there? What they’re doing, isn’t it what we’d all like to do sometimes? Just clean house.”

Beau felt himself shivering in the heated air. “On purpose,” he said. “They’re even leaving the bodies to be found on purpose, so word’ll get out.”

“Sure,” Cruz said. “You said it. Word to the criminals. See what we can do when we want to.”

The pain still shot through his heart but Beau could breathe now. He needed the breath to explain. “We don’t do that.”

Cruz leaned back, a haughty look on her face. “You saying it’s bad?”

“No. I’m saying we don’t do that. We kill... I killed... when I had no choice. It was me or them. We don’t execute people.”

“It bothers you that Killboy’s dead? That cop-shooting Abdon guy? I forget the third one.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, hell, you said it: Everything’s changed. The whole damn world’s changed.”

Cruz looked at him a long while before getting up and holding out her hand to pull him up. He grabbed it after a few seconds and she tugged him up. Beau looked back at the city, at the roofs protruding from brown water like cypress stumps in a bayou. He felt the stab again in his heart.

“Is that why you were crying?” Cruz asked.

“No. Yes. Maybe.” How could he explain it when he didn’t know? A plains warrior didn’t cry. They never showed their emotions like the white-eyes. Maybe it was his Cajun side. Certainly his father would not have hidden his emotions if he saw the great Louisiana city, la Nouvelle Orléans, inundated in brown water.

It took Cruz to say it aloud. “Tonight never happened. We’re solid. There’s no other choice.” She pointed to the construction site next to the canal. “Lets get some help with the motor. Maybe get a lift. Check on Joe and Sad Lisa.”

Beau started to follow, but his legs wouldn’t move. And he realized he knew why it bothered him. It was right there in front of his eyes. There was no going back. Nothing would ever be the same again.

This was New Orleans, A.K.

Copyright © 2006 O’Neil de Noux

Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee Tony Fennelly came to New Orleans in 1969 and on her first night in town “spotted a beautiful French-speaking Cajun boy,” to whom she has now been married for over 30 years. Her Margo Fortier mystery series is set in NOLA, where the actress/writer returned after Katrina.

City officials are bragging that murders in New Orleans have gone way down since Katrina.

Yeah, big deal. Now, five months later, our population is still less than one-third of the pre-storm number. Fewer folks to kill and fewer ill-wishers to kill them. But while the crime rate has dropped here, it has hurtled upward in Houston and Baton Rouge where so many of our lowlifes landed.

With most of the drug dealers and gangsters still out of town, the usual shootings and stabbings over turf have given way to more sensible killings done by respectable people. I learned about one of those while waiting in line at a FEMA facility.

I chose the one in the Jewish Community Center on St. Charles Avenue because I could park nearby for free, and gathered documents proving my ownership of a once-great car, now a flooded-out derelict rusting in the driveway.

The door was guarded by a brawny employee of a private security contractor. I thought him overqualified for a job entailing no more serious a confrontation than, “Sir, would you please take that orange juice outside?” and was curious enough to elicit that he was only deployed here briefly between tours of Iraq. Well, good for him, I thought. I’d hate for all the muscles and military comportment to be wasted on the likes of us here.

I was settled in with a flier about sorting “hurricane-related debris” for pickup when I heard, “Hey, Margo Fortier!”

It was my Uptown friend, Caroline, waving her reptile purse from a middle row of chairs. She gave up her place in line to sit with me in the rear.

“Oh, Margo! I’m so glad you’re back!”

That’s the common greeting these days. We’re all glad anyone is back, even if we didn’t know them before.

“Almost two weeks,” I told her. “Julian is working at the LaBorde Gallery, cleaning flood-damaged artwork. — How did you ride out the storm?”

“Our insurance handled the damage, but it was awful for us.” Caroline fanned herself with a kidskin glove. “On August twenty-seventh, we saw the report that Katrina was coming and decided it was a good day to fly up to our summer place in Charlotte. Then we had to watch all that devastation on the cable news.” She clasped her hands. “We felt just terrible. — How about you and Julian?”

“Taillights on I-10, like the rest of the masses. We left the twenty-eighth with our dog and enough clothes for the three days we expected to be away.”

“That’s what everyone thought, three days. So where did you go when you couldn’t return to New Orleans?”

“We had a choice,” I said. “Julian’s Cajun cousin, Verbus, volunteered a camper on his farm in Turkey Creek. The road was a half-mile away through the cow field and we would always have to watch where we stepped.”

“That doesn’t sound very tempting.”