“No.”
“Maybe I’d better not.”
“How about fifty bucks?”
“Oh.” Rico brightened. “Yeah, okay. Hang on, I’ll get it for you.”
He disappeared into the back room again.
My cell phone rang. I flipped it open. “Hello?”
“It’s me.” Big Stupid’s voice was so deep I thought it would vibrate my cheap cell phone apart. “Get a pencil and write down this address.”
It was a little farther than I wanted to walk, but I had as much chance getting a taxi with a hurricane on the way as I did flagging down a ride on a Space Shuttle.
I alternated between a slow jog and a fast walk. Rain bands came in waves, lashing me with stinging droops.
The sun would poke out one second then everything would go dark the next. All the French Quarter’s bright debris flew along like a parade trying to escape on a mighty wind.
When I got there, Big Stupid’s Humvee was already parked across the street from the knick-knack shop. He climbed out to meet me, his own mountainous build anchoring him against the hurricane blow down.
“Little Duane says he’ll meet you inside.”
“Right. Let’s do this.”
We went inside.
* * *
Well, this is where we all came in, isn’t it?
Big Stupid leapt up.
Little Duane had a gun.
Big Stupid punched Little Duane so hard his whole family tree died back to the Middle Ages.
I checked the window again. A bunch of them with guns already at the back door. My guess was they’d have the front covered too.
Little Duane was going to shoot me. Of course he was. You don’t just waltz in asking about somebody’s secret operation.
“We need a way out,” I told Big Stupid. “Fast.”
In the back room. A ladder up to a hatch that led to the roof.
But the padlock was a problem.
I came down the ladder. Big Stupid went up. He grabbed the padlock and gave it a jerk. Wood splintered and cracked.
The padlock held fast, but the screws holding the latch in place in the hatch’s frame might as well have been screwed into a stick of butter. He dropped the latch and lock and pushed open the hatch and went out.
I followed him up there, rain coming down through the hatch.
Out on the roof, I almost fell the first ten seconds I was up there. Spanish roof tiles slick with rain. My feet went out from under me, and I would have gone flying except Big Stupid snatched me out of mid-air, one enormous hand under my left arm.
I dangle from his grasped, glanced back at the hatch. The head of a guy poked up, a black dude in a Saints cap.
He saw me, and I saw him.
I reached for the .38 at my back, pulled it out, thumbing back the hammer. I tried to aim, swinging there in the wind, Big Stupid holding me up. I aimed square for his chest and squeezed the trigger.
The pistol bucked in my hand, and the shot went high, hitting him in the throat. Blood sprayed, and more blood and bone and flesh shot out the back of his neck.
His hands came up to paw at the wound, and he fell back down the ladder. I heard him crashing into his buddies below over the racket of the hurricane.
“Set me down, man!”
Big Stupid set me down in front of him. I baby step-duck walked across the roof to the next building.
The roof of the next building was flat and an easy two-foot jump. I skipped over and looking back at Big Stupid, signaling him to follow.
I saw some of those Ninth Ward guys rise up behind him, one pointing a Glock.
“Look out!” I yelled.
Big Stupid jumped, and the Glock spat fire. Blood sprayed from the meat of Big Stupid’s shoulder and he landed on the roof next to me like God had let a dump truck fall out of His pocket.
I aimed sloppy and fast, squeezing the trigger three times. One of the shot’s caught the Glock guy in the side of the head, spinning him around. He went down, slid down the tiles and into the alley.
A bunch more were coming up the ladder and more shots followed.
Big Stupid grabbed my arm and pulled me along. “Come on!”
We crossed two more roofs before finding metal stairs down to the alley. If Big Stupid knew he’d been shot, he wasn’t letting on.
We peeked around the corner, looking back down the street at Big Stupid’s Humvee. Rain flew hard and sideways.
We were almost out of daylight. A stop light at the intersection flapped in the wind like a used tissue, blinking red and bathing the wet street in hellish light.
I couldn’t think of anything to do but make a break for it. “Can you run?”
“I can run.”
“Okay. Fast.”
I ran for the Humvee, each footfall splashing, Big Stupid thundering behind me. We reached the Humvee and climbed in, and every second I thought I’d hear a shot and feel a bullet in the back but it didn’t happen.
Big Stupid cranked the Humvee, shifted into gear and pulled out.
Through the rainy blur of the windshield, I saw a figure step into the street. When the windshield wiper cleared the view, I saw it was the guy with the AK-47.
He lifted the rifle and blazed away at us, the tap-dance patter flashing and metallic tunks along the hood and the windshield sprouting holes up the middle.
“Shit!” I ducked under the dashboard.
Instead of veering away, Big Stupid stomped the gas. A split second later I heard and felt the squish-crunch sound of flesh and bones under the tires of the Humvee. Big Stupid was still accelerating.
He looked down at me a few seconds later. “It’s okay. We’re safe now.”
The streets of New Orleans were deserted. The sun had gone down, and when Gertrude stole the electricity away – which it certainly would eventually – the city would go from eerie to full blown terrifying.
The Humvee plowed down Canal Street, the water halfway up the wheels.
I was going over my list of phone numbers. I wanted to confirm something, so I could feel better about my half-assed detective work. The number Rico had given me matched one of the numbers on the list.
I showed Big Stupid the piece of paper that had cost me fifty bucks at the tattoo parlor. “Can you drive to that address?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go then.”
He turned the Humvee onto St. Charles, and we left the French Quarter. In the Garden District, we had to maneuver around some fallen trees before we found the right address. I told Big Stupid to park at the end of the street.
“Okay,” I said. “Now call this number.”
I told him the number and told him what to say.
He dialed the phone and put it up to his ear. It looked like a toy phone next to his giant head. Big Stupid’s face was so blank, he might have been ordering a pizza or calling in an air strike.
Finally he said, “Cobb there?”
A pause.
“Well, tell him this is a message from Little Duane. He’s got to go fetch his stash. We’re closing up shop because of the hurricane and getting out.”
The voice on the other end didn’t like that, screeched into Big Stupid’s ear.
“It’s on you now. We’re out.” Big Stupid hung up the phone.
The absolute very second he hung up, I realized how bullshit my plan was. Cobb had jumped bail and could be anywhere. Phone numbers were not so much attached to addresses anymore.
Call a number with a New Orleans area code, and the guy could be answering his cell in Vegas.
In the file Ray had given me, Cobb’s home address was different than the one Rico had given me. Maybe the local address was where he sacked out with friends when he was in town.
Who could say? It was a shot in the dark, and the longer I sat there with the rain coming down –
A group of them emerged from the house and ran for one of the cars parked on the street. From this distance, I had trouble seeing around some hedges and other parked cars, so I couldn’t tell for sure if it was three or four of them, and I didn’t see any faces. But they were coming out of the right house, so I figured the game was on.
“Follow them, but stay back a ways,” I told Big Stupid. “And keep the headlights off.”
If it hadn’t been for their taillights we’d have lost them in ten seconds. Wind and rain seemed to hammer us from every direction, tree branches bouncing off the Humvee.
I really thought one of the big oaks would topple any minute and flatten us.
This was some fucking bullshit. I was going to kick Ray’s ass when I got home for getting me into this.
We circled back south until the neighborhood got kind of iffy. The car ahead of us stopped at a big two-story house. It looked like it might have been a big fancy plantation style number back in the day, but she’d fallen on hard times, the paint peeling and creeper vines crawling up the sides.
All the windows around the first floor were boarded up. It looked like the sort of place low-budget horror filmmakers went to in order to make clichés out of themselves.
We parked down the street and watched the five of them dash from their car and into the house, all of them bent against the brute force of the hurricane as they ran.
Big Stupid and I sat in the Humvee, every inch of it vibrating in the savage wind.
“Turn on the radio,” I said.
He did it.
The guy on the radio said that Gertrude hit the coast as a Category Four hurricane but had immediately been downgraded to Category Three as it moved over land. Everyone on the coast was fucked.
The levies were expected to be fucked. Soon the storm surge would fuck a bunch of people inland.
“We’re going to need to find some high ground after this,” I said.
“And some food,” Big Stupid said.
I reloaded my .38 and then asked Big Stupid, “You got a gun?”
“No guns.”
I rolled my eyes. “These guys don’t fuck around, man.”
“No guns.”
“Well, fucking shit, you got some kind of weapon or not?”
Big Stupid reached into the backseat and came out with a crowbar.
Good enough.
“Okay. You ready?”
“Let’s wait until it lets up.”
I blinked at him.
“That was a joke.”
“Hey, you sure you even want to do this? Not like you’re obligated.”
“I said I’d stay with you. I do what I say.”
Well, I’ll be damned. “Okay then. Come on. Around the back.”
We left the Humvee and bolted toward the house. We went around the side toward the back, but pulled up short when we discovered a side door. I tried it. Locked.
I put my mouth close to Big Stupid’s ear. “Use the crowbar. They won’t hear it over the storm.”
He cracked it open in like three seconds, the sound of the splintering door jamb lost in the wind. We wiped rain from our eyes and went inside.
A kitchen. All kinds of appliances still in the boxes piled everyone, in the corners, on the counters. New stuff. Stolen off trucks maybe.
I motioned Big Stupid forward with the .38.
The next room was probably meant to be a dining room this close to the kitchen, but it was full of vintage clothing and furs and boxes of jewelry on the table.
The house had been turned into a big storage facility. Just like Big Stupid had said, a huge place to hide shit.
I looked around. A stack of blue ray players. A brand new set of tires. Stacks of DVDs and boxes of iPods and smart phones.
If we were going to find the armored car cash in all this mess, then the only way to do it was follow the people who knew where it was.
I paused. Listened. Nothing.
Shit.
Maybe they’d heard us breaking in.
I pointed my gun in one direction and looked at Big Stupid. I then pointed at myself and then another direction. Big Stupid nodded and we headed off toward different parts of the house.
Some tidbit from high school American History class rattled around in the back of my brain – Custer dividing his forces.
This made me think how Shaggy and Scooby always got suckered into wandering off alone while Fred did whatever he did with the two chicks.
I looked back hoping to see Big Stupid but didn’t.
Double Shit.
I crept down a back hallway, floorboards creaking.
A bedroom full of luggage, trunks, bags, backpacks, suitcases. In front of me, like a ghost, Cobb rose up, clutching a huge military duffle bag to his chest.
Our eyes met.
I leveled the .38 at him.
He blinked and understood.
Cobb tossed the heavy duffle at me and knocked the revolver aside. I stumbled back, and by the time I recovered, he was on me, one hand on the wrist of my gun hand and the other going for my throat.
We wrestled on the floor, and I felt his knee come up and smash my balls. I yelled. He slammed my gun hand against the floor, and I lost the revolver.
I turned my head and sank my teeth into Cobb’s hand. Blood flooded my mouth, and I heard Cobb scream. He wrenched his hand away, and I spit his own blood at him. I punched him in the face, and then he punched me in mine.
We rolled around and I got on top of him and got both hands around his throat.
I thought I heard something blunt smash into something else and a yelp elsewhere in the house, but I was too busy to worry about it.
My hands found Cobb’s face, thumbs pushing into his eye sockets. The eyeballs didn’t squish as easily as you might think. I really had to dig my thumbs in there, but I finally felt a pop and a give and Cobb went stiff, hot blood washing over my hands.
Cobb quivered, legs and arms flailing a moment before he went limp. I pushed his dead body away from me and gasped for breath.
I looked up.
It was the bearded one coming after me, the one I’d seen in Sandy’s house when I’d pulled the stocking off his head.
He held an axe handle over his head and was set to bring it down with two hands on my skull. I threw up my hands in a feeble attempt to ward him off, but it was no use. He was going to bash my brains out.
Big Stupid appeared behind him and stove in his skull with the crowbar. The man’s head dented in like it was made of tin foil. He twitched and stutter stepped to the side and fell over.