Water mark, p.11
Water Mark, page 11
What did I know? I hadn’t gotten a really good look at either of them, only a brief glance at their car, but no license plate or anything identifying. The conversation I had heard was suspicious certainly, but what could I prove? At best it would be my word against theirs. I wasn’t the property owner; in fact, I had been breaking and entering. I could argue that I was doing it for the right reasons, but what were my reasons really? I was putatively pursuing justice for some unknown woman because my own life was so messed up that I’d do anything not to think about it.
I paid for my fries and shake and meandered back to my car.
Why do grease, calories, and salt taste so good?
I looked at what I’d stolen, beside me on the passenger seat. The folder was rumpled and bent from being tucked inside my jacket during my sojourn on the roof. Would it tell me who this woman was? Would it tell me why she died? And even if it did, was there anything I could do about it?
Chapter Fourteen
Being a good citizen—and not wanting a car that smelled like grease—I got out of my car and threw away the paper wrappings of my afternoon snack. Given that potatoes were as close as I’d been to a vegetable in the last few days, I could almost call it a healthy snack, but everything being relative can only go so far. I used the extra napkins I had snagged to clean up the blood on my wrist, the dirt on my knees. Then I raided the first-aid kit in the glove box and downed three aspirin to help dull the pain and tamp down the inflammation.
My cell phone rang. I was still on the side of the flood wall that hadn’t failed, so things worked somewhat better out here. Many of the cell towers had still been blown down, but the buildings and people hadn’t been flooded and that made a big difference.
It was a Wisconsin number. Nathalie.
I hesitated for a moment. I’d already had enough adventure for the day. Then guilt kicked in and I answered.
She immediately launched in. “Got to be quick. We’re washing dogs and I said I had to go to the bathroom. She talked him into doing it again. Right after we get finished.”
Washing dogs? Whatever. “Stall as long as you can. Give me directions to the store. I’ll see what I can do.” That was all I could promise.
“It’s rescue dogs. They need to have oil and stuff washed off them. I volunteered me and Nathan. We have about five more dogs to do,” she explained. I guess washing dogs was something that needed to be explained.
She gave me directions to the store—”We meet out back by the Dumpster”—and said she’d try to stall for at least an hour before they were free to do Carmen’s errand.
Not letting my aching body make any decisions, I punched in Joanne’s number. The fates were obviously on Nathalie’s side as Joanne answered instead of the call going to voice mail. I explained the situation.
“So, we have an hour to go until we play with the drug boys out in Kenner?” she summed up.
“It looks that way. Unless you think it’s too risky.” My hurt wrist did seem to have an opinion about this.
“Leave the Midwesterners to the drug dealers?”
“I suppose not.” I told my wrist—and the rest of my painful places—to shut up.
We agreed to meet in the parking lot of a megastore out in the area, then go in Joanne’s car.
So there was nothing to do but drive back out to Kenner. If anyone was tailing me, this would confuse the hell out of them.
I parked at the far end of the lot, the part no decent red-blooded shopper would touch as it was too far to walk toting their precious goods. I had only enough time to take a final slurp from my shake and throw it into a trash can before Joanne arrived. Hutch wasn’t with her.
“Where’s the big guy?” I asked as I got in her car. Hutch was Joanne’s usual partner and about the size of a Saints linebacker, big enough to make most crooks think twice about arguing.
“He couldn’t make it.” Her terse reply hid more than it revealed.
“He doesn’t like me anymore?” The Hutch I knew would have jumped at rescuing naive teenagers.
Joanne started the car, then said softly, “I didn’t think it would be a good i.e. to bring him along.” Hutch had lived near the lake; one partial wall of his house was all that had been left. I’d only seen him once since the storm, at a get-together at Danny’s house. He was chugging a big mug of beer when I arrived and his maudlin welcome told me it was one of many. He’d draped himself over me, a long welcome hug, partly needed for him to rebalance himself enough to let go. I’d blown it off as the alcohol and the emotion of reconnecting to someone he’d known before Katrina. One more piece of the familiar returned in the midst of so much that had changed.
“What’s going on,” I asked as she pulled out of the parking lot.
“Some days he’s okay and some days…not so okay.”
“How not okay?”
“Blowing up at the little things. Because he can’t blow up at the big things. Shaking his fist at the sky won’t bring his house back. Drinking a lot. More than I’ve even seen him. Millie stayed in Houston. She’s working there, so that’s an extra strain.”
He and Millie had lived together forever. They’d never gotten around to getting married, but it was hard to imagine them apart.
“Why didn’t you want him here today?” I asked.
“The anger. I was worried he’d be too eager to knock some heads together. Which is something I really want to avoid.”
For her to say it worried me. In the past, Hutch had relied on his size to keep things cool—the occasions he fought were rare and unavoidable. Joanne was also smart enough to know that, as much as we wanted an equal world, crooks can be amazingly gender normative and having a big guy with us would have been a major help in dealing with these thugs. For Joanne to leave him behind, she had to be seriously worried.
We’re all falling apart.
Joanne pulled into the convenience store. I didn’t see either Nathan or Nathalie.
We sat in the car for a minute, then Joanne said, “Go in and get a beer.”
“You’re encouraging me to drink?”
“Not to drink. Get a bottle. It’ll make things seem more mellow than they are. Plus you can use it as a weapon.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said as I got out.
Only the clerk and one other customer were in the store. I used the shoplifting mirror to keep an eye on the parking lot as I perused my beverage choices. I couldn’t see Joanne but could see where Nathalie and Nathan should be coming from.
While I was pondering Piss Light or Piss Regular, I noticed another customer arriving. Central casting had sent a thug wannabe. He looked younger than he was, skinny and slight, trying to be taller with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head. He wore clone thug wear, the black hooded sweatshirt, jeans slung low, and a white T-shirt just peeking out. But his clothes were too new, jeans bought to look distressed, the sweatshirt still a dark black. The tags could have been clipped off the clothes this morning. Cheap mirrored sunglasses completed his look.
His skin was pasty, a scraggly brush of beard trying to grow, but unless he’d shaved an hour ago, it’d be a long time before he’d sprout a real beard. I could see the beginning of lines at the corners of his eyes, putting him in at least his mid-twenties if he was a heavy smoker. Oddly, he had the same sloping shoulders of my earlier thug encounter, almost as if he and Mr. Stooge could be cousins. Or maybe thugs just didn’t go in for good posture.
His age interested me. Either he had entered this gig late or he wasn’t very good at it. By their mid-twenties, most dealers had worked their way up from the street corner. Or not survived.
I quickly decided on Piss Regular; I wasn’t going to drink it and it was cheaper. I paid and left just as he approached the counter with his Piss Lite.
Don’t let appearances fool you; even crooks worried about calories can be dangerous.
I sauntered back to the car, going to the driver’s side to look like I was talking to Joanne.
Thug Lite took his time buying his beer before he exited the store. He was trying too hard to look casual. No wonder he needed to screw with naive Midwesterners. They were the only people that could make him look sophisticated and experienced.
I noticed movement at a far street corner, too far to be sure of faces, but a garish green and gold sweatshirt on the taller one suggested Green Bay Packers and that suggested Wisconsin. It’s Saints or die down here, so these weren’t locals.
I kneeled down, as if to be at Joanne’s level, but it also put the car between me and Nathan and Nathalie. He would recognize me and I didn’t want that to happen until we’d done what we came here to do.
“They’ve just rounded the corner,” I narrated to Joanne. As they got closer, I was proved right. Nathan in the football sweatshirt and Nathalie in a gray one that didn’t seem to need to announce allegiance to anything. Nathan was carrying a package wrapped in brown paper, which he shifted from arm to arm as if it was heavy or awkward to carry.
Thug Lite saw them, too, and started a far-too-conspicuously casual amble toward the back of the store where the Dumpster was.
Joanne didn’t say anything, just rolled her eyes. Thug Lite seemed pretty sure that two middle-aged beer-drinking women weren’t a worry.
“They’re rounding the corner to the parking lot.” I continued my drug deal play-by-play.
Nathalie glanced around. I suspected she was looking for me, but I was hidden behind the car and Joanne. Nathan was only focusing in the direction he was going, to the back corner of the building where the Dumpster was.
Two people meeting by a convenience-store Dumpster, one with mirrored sunglasses and one carrying something wrapped in brown paper. Who’d ever guess this was a drug deal?
“They’re almost at the Dumpster,” I told Joanne.
“Time to close this amateur show down,” she replied. She switched from feigning boredom at what I’d been telling her to being a woman of action. She barely gave me time to get out of the way before sliding out of the car in one quick motion. The Dumpster was about ten yards away from us; she covered the distance quickly. I trailed behind.
Joanne stopped just short of the surprised trio. She put her hands on her hips, brushing back her jacket to reveal her gun and badge. “What the hell do you idiots think you’re doing?” she demanded.
“Wha…what are you talking about?” Thug Lite stammered out.
“Little Bo Peep could figure out what’s going on here. Are you really so fucking stupid to think I’d sit in my car and not notice?” Giving them no time to answer, she grabbed the package out of Nathan’s hands, then quickly tossed it to me, keeping her hand far too near her gun for Thug Lite to try anything. “See what’s in that,” she told me, not bothering to look away from them.
I started to tear the paper.
“Hey, hey.” Thug Lite came to life. “You can’t mess with that. It’s private property.”
“Yours?” Joanne growled.
“Uh…well, maybe.” He went back to his stammering.
“It’s yours if we don’t open it, but theirs if we do open it and it turns out to be cocaine or heroin?” Joanne queried, knowing the answer.
Nathan finally chimed in. “It’s laundry detergent.”
“Are you really stupid enough to think I’ll believe that?” Joanne shot at him.
I knew she was playing bad cop, but Nathan didn’t.
“It is. It really is laundry detergent,” he said in an incredibly earnest Midwestern voice. “It’s special hypoallergenic that Mr. Smith here needs.”
“And that Mr. Smith can’t buy in a grocery store, but has to procure behind a Dumpster. Right.” To me she said, “You got it open yet?”
I had ceased tearing open the package to watch the show. I went back to work.
“You’re going to be embarrassed when you find out it really is laundry detergent,” Nathan said. “Carmen wouldn’t lie to me.” With that, he crossed his arms for extra emphasis. Of course, the woman he loved wouldn’t lie to him.
I ripped open a corner. White power spilled out. Thug Lite, aka Mr. Smith, let out a small groan as it fell to the ground.
I caught a little bit of it on my finger and smelled it. Nope, nothing soapy about this. I dusted most of it off my fingertip, then touched it with my tongue. Alcohol has been my drug of choice, but I’ve done cocaine a few times. Enough to recognize it.
“Coke,” I told Joanne.
“You’re wrong,” Nathan retorted, still not believing that that woman he loved—well, had a major schoolboy crush on—would lie to him.
“What do you think, Mr. Smith?” Joanne said to Thug Lite. “We can run it into the station, do a proper lab test. Of course, if I have to go to all that trouble, I’ll book all of you if it is indeed cocaine.” She paused to let that sink in. “But I’m off duty and not in the mood to fill out piles of paperwork. We can just dump your ‘hypoallergenic’ shit out, let a few pigeons get buzzed on it and you promise to never show your face around here again, and we can all call it a day.”
“Ah, shit, man,” he muttered.
“You can’t do this. Take it in and test it, that’ll prove we’re right,” Nathan said.
Mr. Smith Thug Lite for some reason didn’t back Nathan up. “I got places I got to go. It’d be too much of a hassle to run through this.”
“This isn’t right,” Nathan protested.
“If it’s detergent, I can’t arrest you,” Joanne said.
“Naw, naw, I don’t got the time.” Thug Lite shrugged.
“I’ll go,” Nathan said.
“Nathan,” I said. “This is cocaine. It’s not laundry detergent. Maybe Carmen was fooled, too. Or maybe she used you. But unless you want to stay here for another five years or so, depending on parole, let this one go.”
“She’s right,” Nathalie chimed in. “We need to get out of this. Without an arrest record.”
He looked from her to me to Joanne to Thug Lite, then to the ground. He just shook his head, but didn’t protest again.
Thug Lite gave the bundle in my hand one last regretful look and then scurried away. He clearly wanted distance between himself and a woman with a badge.
“Dump it back there in the drainage ditch,” Joanne told me. New Orleans and suburbs—bless its waterlogged location—is riddled with canals and ditches. One was conveniently behind the store.
When I got to the e.g. of the ditch, I tore open the rest of the package, letting the white powder pour into the water. “Gonna be some coked-out gators here tonight,” I muttered to myself as the powder drifted on the sluggish canal.
As I rejoined the group, Nathan continued his protest. “But Carmen wouldn’t lie to me.” Joanne had been giving them the don’t-trust-people-with-special-laundry-detergents lecture.
Nathalie started to say something then stopped, as if knowing that if she criticized Carmen, Nathan would defend her more.
Joanne gave me a look as if to say, “Your turn now, I’ve been the bad cop for you.”
“Nathan,” I scrambled for what to say to him that might break the lust bubble, “maybe she was fooled as well. But if so, all of you are giving new meaning to wide-eyed and naive. And even if Carmen thought it was laundry detergent, why did she send you to fetch and carry for her?”
“She has other things to do,” Nathan said in her defense.
“So important she couldn’t take a fifteen-minute walk?” I noted. “Maybe she didn’t know it was drugs, but I’ll bet money I can’t afford to lose that she had some inkling it wasn’t special hypoallergenic laundry detergent. You’re just blindly besotted enough with her to do whatever she wants, and what she wanted was to make sure she didn’t have her hands on this in case something went wrong.”
“Micky is right,” Joanne said. “You both got very lucky this time. It really doesn’t matter what your friend knew—you both ended up in a dangerous situation. If the threat of being arrested isn’t enough to make you keep your noses squeaky clean, consider this. There are a lot of desperate drug dealers in the area. A number of them lost all their dope in the flood and FEMA won’t cover their losses. They’re out the money, and their suppliers are out the money. Many lost their usual territory and they’re horning in on other locations. Desperate people and guns aren’t a good combination. You’re risking getting shot and killed.”
Nathalie had enough sense to look pale at Joanne’s words.
“But we’re from Wisconsin,” Nathan said, as if enough dairy cows should be a protective shield. “It’s not possible that we’re here less than a week and involved in a drug deal. That only happens on TV.”
“It happens on TV because it happens in real life,” I pointed out. “Only real life doesn’t have a scriptwriter to make sure innocent Wisconsinites don’t get killed.”
He turned to Nathalie. “You told them, didn’t you? You messed it all up. What am I going to tell Carmen?” He was upset and taking it out on her.
“She didn’t tell us.” I lied, jumping in before Nathalie had a chance be the nice Midwestern girl she was. “Joanne and I are working on something else out here—and in one incredible piece of luck we stumbled over what was going on here. Lucky for you.”
“I don’t believe that.”
It was a pretty obvious lie, but he had fallen for cocaine as laundry detergent, so I figured my odds were good.
Suddenly I was tired of his immature churlishness. “Believe what you want,” I said tersely. “Believe that it was fairy dust in that package and believe that Miss Carmen is Glenda the Good Witch. The reality is that you’re a naive idiot who was duped into being a mule for drug runners. You’re damn lucky it was me and Joanne and not the local cops, and more than damn lucky it wasn’t some rival gang getting rid of the competition.”
“What am I going to I tell Carmen? She’ll be mad at me.”
The experts are right; boys mature more slowly than girls. Nathan was living in his self-absorbed world. He had the raging hormones, but no brain power to keep them in perspective.
