Ace Atkins - Dirty South

I threw the bottle into the glass and kicked out the shards with my boot.

I found my way onto the landing and looking for a foothold to follow.

I heard sirens at the far edge of the Quarter. And when I reached another rusted ladder of a fire escape, I could see NOPD patrol cars stopping by the pool hall and the bartender pointing upstairs.

I climbed.

I pulled myself onto the sloped roof, the figure crawling over the peaked edge of the old metal. My hands shook and I felt with my knees and palms for something solid on the slant. Nothing but moss and mold and metal eaten with rust.

At the peak, I could see deep into Congo Square and the white-lighted marquee of Louis Armstrong Park. I lifted my leg over the peak and the wetness of the metal roof and slid on a steady slope toward the road below the three-story building.

I clawed at the wet metal, trying to stop, but only sliding more. A metal sheet dropped into the air, pinwheeling down.

I picked up speed, the ground below getting closer, and stopped just short of careening off the edge.

The heel of my boot caught in a groaning drainpipe. I held myself there, foot cocked into the mouth of the pipe, supporting all my weight. Three stories of air waited below.

Above me, the man in the coat turned back and then jumped over a narrow crevice onto another rooftop, maybe only three feet away.

More yelling from the broken window on the other side of the street.

Wind ruffled my hair and I smelled the tired beer and urine of Bourbon Street. My hands coated in rust and dirt.

I scrambled upward and made the jump.

A moon hung over the river, the peaks of the old district’s rooftops shining silver in the early light of the summer. My T-shirt covered in rust and mud, sweat soaking my face.

I made two more jumps over narrow alleys.

Then the sound of his scattering feet stopped.

I edged onto my butt, taking a seat. I saw muddy shoe prints running off the roof.

I slid close to the edge and peered into a little banquette.

I turned to my stomach, feetfirst, and left my legs hanging until I dropped onto a second-floor wooden balcony overlooking a little garden. Red, blue, and yellow light scattered in a large open fountain and upon palm and banana trees. Thick asparagus ferns grew from clay pots.

I ran down a creaking wooden staircase and down through a little alley. At the end, a huge metal gate swung open.

Rampart Street. A couple of homeless men on the corner. A crack pusher running for me to make a deal.

“Hey, man. I bet you I know where you got them boots,” he said.

I heard a horn honking from a car heading toward Canal, a hard thud on the other side of the grassless neutral ground, and saw the man I was following roll from the hood of a Buick.

I ran after him but he moved fast, dragging a leg behind him to the wall of the St. Louis Cemetery. He disappeared.

Two cop cars converged on me and shone lights into my face. I stopped.

One of them threw me on the asphalt and pushed a gun into my spine.

“I’m following-”

“Shut the fuck up!”

“Listen to me, man.”

“Shut up before I kick you in the head.”

I heard the handcuffs clamp hard onto my wrists as the two cops yanked me to my feet and pulled me to the back of a patrol car.

“Stop.”

They did.

“What?” asked some twenty-something steroid freak as he gripped my arm tighter.

“That noise,” I said. “Can’t you hear it? He’s hiding in one of those mausoleums. He’s moving stones.”

“Drugs,” the cop said. “It’ll fry your mind.”

JAY MEDEAUX STOOD over me in the NOPD homicide bureau in a red-and-white softball uniform complete with cleats and scrunched cotton cap. He was popping a ball into his glove pocket and chomping on Big League Chew while he waited for me to finish my story. Two other detectives scribbled on reports in the pooled desk space, their heads down near banker’s lights glowing green.

“You told two officers in the First District you’d seen a ghost,” Jay said. “They thought you was juiced up.”

Anytime Jay was mad he reverted back to his y’at Irish Channel accent, even though he’d graduated from Tulane with a 4.0. When we were roommates in college, he would rarely go beyond the Boot to drink beer because he was studying history and criminology. But when he was pissed, he went back home.

He tossed me the ball.

“You seen that movie Lord of the Rings ?”

“Yeah.”

“Sounds like you been chased by some of those goblins.”

“I know what I saw.”

Jay was a big guy with sandy-blond hair cut down to the millimeter. In the last couple of years, his linemen’s gut flattened out and his face had grown more hardened.

“Nick, it’s Friday night,” he said. “Why’d you have to pick Friday freakin’ night? We were winning. My wife was there showin’ off her new ta-tas in this sweet tank top.”

“New?”

“They were runnin’ a sale in the paper. You believe that? Like they were selling used cars.”

“Vroom. Vroom.”

“You find JoJo?” he asked.

“Yeah, he picked up the kid.”

“Come on.”

Jay took me into a room where a large woman in blue uniform laid out some plastic binders filled with mug shots. I spent more than an hour flipping the sheets, looking at some wonderful freaks that could make only P. T. Barnum smile. But nothing matched the gray face with the yellow eyes in the window.

Jay walked me to a break room on the eighth floor, where he made some coffee and we sat near a window overlooking the tall Gothic-looking Dixie Brewery. Small mushroom patterns of crime lights shone for miles, seeming to spawn from the brightness of the parish jail. Everything in New Orleans worked from pockets of darkness.

“You really going to open the bar?”

“Why not?” I settled into my seat and used a napkin to clean the gutter grime off my boots.

“What about teaching?”

“I only teach two classes a year.”

“What about all your research in Mississippi?”

“Do you want to be the devil’s advocate or are you just trying to yank my chain?”

“Mainly yanking your chain,” he said. “But I don’t think you know what you’re in for. Bills, loans, payroll. Out of your league.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “I have JoJo for advice. He knows a few things about running a bar.”

“True,” he said.

I looked over at Jay in his red-and-white baseball outfit and started to laugh.

“What?”

“You look like a big candy cane.”

He didn’t laugh.

“Nick?”

“Yeah.”

“You’d tell me, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s all twisted and incestuous, man. Just give me a few days.”

“It’s not my case,” he said. “I just hear things. They just took a bunch of files and shit from that record company in the Ninth Ward.”

“What do they think?”

Jay shrugged.

“I understand,” I said. “Any forensic stuff? DNA, fingerprints?”

“It’s all being run,” he said. “But right now, I don’t see a lot of work being done.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s New Orleans, man,” Jay said. “The dead need to wait in line.”

Just as I began to stand, the officer who’d shown me the photopacks walked into the room and opened a binder to a new page.

“That him?”

I stood and flattened my hands on each side of the book. I began to nod slowly and didn’t say anything. I looked at the dirt on my hands and wiped them on my leg.

“Who is he?” Jay asked.

“Some freak grave robber,” she said. “Remember all those tombs in Metairie that got busted into a few years back? He stole old battle flags and Civil War uniforms. Guys in robbery been looking for him ever since.”