The Heavens Rise (12 page)

It was almost ten o’clock, and he was speeding down St. Charles Avenue in his Prius. He was most certainly not sitting in the upstairs balcony at Good Friends across from the complete bore Marissa had set him up with because they were two of the only gay men she knew.

“Well,” he finally answered, “I’m driving and talking on the phone at the same time.”

“Well, that’s fascinating.”

“You’re right. It’s big news for people who think blonds can’t walk and chew gum.”

“Uh huh. How’s your
date
going, smart mouth?”

“You first, hot stuff.”

“Seriously, Ben. Did you just walk out on Dobie after I—”

“No! Pardon me, I did not just walk out. I excused myself and explained that I had a— Wait,
Dobie
?”

“Explained that you had a
what
exactly?”

“His name’s not Davey?”

“Oh my God, Ben.”

“Maybe it’s for the best then.”

“
Ben!
Do you have any idea how difficult it was to get him to—”

“No, actually. I didn’t realize I was that hard a sell. Jesus Christ!”

“Ben!”

“Should I switch colognes?”

“It was a hard sell because you work for a newspaper and you might have to cover his office one day. But honestly, I might fire you before that ever becomes an issue, so it’s just as—”

“You’d really fire me over a blind date with a guy who admits to listening to One Direction?”

“
Where
are you going? Dobie says you hightailed it outta there like your pants were on fire.”

“So he was thinking about my pants, huh? Doesn’t sound like it was a total bust then, right?”

“
Where
are you—”

“Did he actually use those words? The ones about my pants being on—”

“No. He did not. He thanked me for wasting his time and asked me not to fix him up with anyone on my staff ever again.”

“So he was lying when he agreed to a rain check?”

“He was being polite. Which you have never,
ever
been in your entire life apparently.”

“Yeah, because that’s what
Kingfisher
needs more of right now.
Polite
reporters.”

“Watch your mouth, Uptown Girl.”

“Speaking of which, how is
your
date—”

“You have thirty seconds to tell me where you’re going right now.”

“Well, that’s good, ’cause I’m going to be there in fifteen.”

It was a lie but he hung up on her anyway.

The author of the text messages that had sent Ben Broyard flying through Uptown New Orleans was one Luther Rendell, an NOPD patrol cop with the Second District whom Ben had been cultivating as a contact for years.

The first text had read:
Shots fired at Fat Harry’s.

The second, which came just a few seconds later read.
& they were fired at yr buddy w. the funny name

•   •   •

St. Charles Avenue was a broad, oak-shaded thoroughfare that gently mirrored the Mississippi River’s crescent path through the city. Along most of its length, it was lined with Greek Revival mansions so beautiful and well maintained that an Oregon native Ben had gone to Tulane with had once asked him if people actually lived in them or if they were all museums. Antique streetcars traversed the street’s broad, grassy neutral ground, islands of segmented light that gave off great lazy rumbles as they traveled the shadowy avenue.

Ben usually avoided Uptown bars like Fat Harry’s. They were too popular with his old high school classmates. Every now and then it was fun to see which former crushworthy varsity athlete and small-time bully had been knocked from his genetic pedestal by a constant diet of fried seafood and Dixie Beer. But an occasional burst of schadenfreude
wasn’t worth the risk of an old Cannon student he barely knew dragging him into a conversation about those awful final months of senior year. Anthem Landry felt the exact same way for the exact same reason, which meant that if he’d set foot inside Fat Harry’s at all that night, he’d have been pretty sauced by the time he arrived.

Ben was jogging across the grassy neutral ground when the lights atop the ambulance parked in front of Fat Harry’s spun to life. It peeled off into the night, sirens screaming, revealing the crowd of mostly white college students gathered in front of the bar’s awning and large front windows. Ben had an insane urge to run after the thing, or at the very least, dash back to his Prius so he could pursue. But then he saw Luther Rendell, one of three uniformed cops standing at the edge of the crowd, and when the guy waved him over, Ben stepped out from the path of an approaching streetcar and crossed the street.

“Was that him?” Ben asked, breathless.

“No. That was the other guy,” Rendell answered. He was bantam-framed, with knots of gray hair that looked like steel wool, and as usual he reeked of Camel Lights and gas station coffee.

“The other guy?”

“The one who fired the shots.”

Rendell walked them away him from the crowd. “So apparently your boy Landry—”

“He’s not my boy, but continue.”

“Your friend, ’scuse me. He and the guy with the revolver get into it over the video poker machines and everyone’s watching like it’s not going to go so well for the guy with the revolver. Because they don’t know the guy has a revolver. They just know he’s got a big mouth and your buddy Landry’s about twice his size. About twice
everyone’s
size, to hear them tell it.” Which meant A-Team was long gone, Ben noted, otherwise Rendell would have seen for himself how tall Anthem actually was.

“Who ID’d Anthem?”

“Old classmate of his tending bar. Classmates of yours too, I guess. Said Landry kinda went off the deep end when his girlfriend went missing.”

“The video poker machines?” Ben said, hoping the effort it took to ignore this reference didn’t show on his face.

“Gunslinger wanted to try his luck apparently. Landry didn’t seem interested in giving him a turn.”

“And so?”

“Things got physical. Sounds like Landry knocked the guy on his ass, then when the guy got up, he had a gun all of a sudden.”

“And he fired it, apparently.”

“Yep. Into his own foot.”

“
You’re fired, Ben!”

Ben was so startled by the voice of his boss, he spun away from this baffling detail.

Marissa Hopewell Powell was dressed in a plain V-neck T-shirt and hip-hugging blue jeans, and she was approaching with a relaxed gait and a casual smile that made Ben wonder if he had imagined her outburst. Once again, Ben was reminded of how much weight the woman had lost since they’d first met. True, the stress of losing her home in Katrina had forced her to shed a bunch of pounds in a very short time. But the rest of it she’d unloaded the old-fashioned way. A diet, brought on, in large part, by the publication of her first book, a critically acclaimed account of Katrina’s terrible aftermath that included a searing retelling of the seventy-two hours she, Ben and a few other
Kingfisher
staff members had spent pulling people from their flooded homes in the Lower Ninth Ward.

But Marissa’s scheduled date that night had not been some blind fix-up with a dull city accountant. More like dinner with a housing rights advocate and attorney who’d graduated from the same college she did. The guy was marriage material, and jeans and a T-shirt were not what Marissa wore to dinner with marriage material.

“Were you following me?” Ben asked.

“I live close by,” she answered, giving Rendell a polite smile.

“You live in the Marigny.”

“It’s called a police scanner. We used to use ’em before Twitter.”

“You knew I was coming here, and you were testing me, weren’t you?”

“Yep,” she said with a bright smile. “And you failed.”

“Yeah, sure. How’d your date go?” Ben asked her.

“How’s all
this
going?” Marissa asked.

Rendell gave Ben a searching look.

“Oh, I see,” Marissa said. “So you two are best buds now.
I’m
actually the reason those guys who knocked over your mother’s restaurant got caught, Luther.”

“I helped,” Ben offered meekly.

“
I
wrote the story,” Marissa countered.

“Because I bugged you about it every day.”

“I still wrote it.”

“That’s because I didn’t have a desk yet, so I couldn’t write the story, which is why I had to get
you
to—”

“Keep talking. It’ll go well for you. I promise.”

Rendell lifted his hands like an intervening parent, and to Ben’s surprise, the gesture was enough to silence both him and Marissa instantly.

“Now, Lord knows, I am truly indebted to both of you fine, fine journalists for the piece you wrote about what happened to my momma. But if memory serves, I’ve bought you both a helluva a lot of beers to make up for it. So right now I’m gonna need to tend to a bunch of scared little white kids over there who aren’t used to hearin’ a gun go off, ’less they’re duck huntin’ with Daddy. So if y’all don’t mind.”

Rendell started off.

“Well, that wasn’t racist,” Ben muttered.

“Oh, please,” Marissa groaned.

When Rendell stopped and turned to face them suddenly, Ben
thought the cop might have heard his comment. But the man formed one hand into a trigger finger and pointed it at his foot. “Ben. I forgot—it was
both
feet.”

Ben just stared at him, so Rendell mimed shooting his right foot, reaiming, and shooting his left.

“Are you serious?” Ben called after him.

Rendell nodded.

“How is that even possible?”

“Ask them,” Rendell called back, jerking one thumb at the crowd. “When I’m done with ’em, of course. Guy who actually did it wasn’t any help at all. Said he doesn’t remember even pulling his own gun. But if you find your buddy, tell him we’d love
his
opinion on the matter as well.”

Ben turned to Marissa. “One foot after the other? How’s that possible? The first bullet would knock him on his ass, right?”

“Well, you know what they say.”

“Do I?”

“God watches over children and drunks. And Anthem Landry is a combination of both. So maybe he’s got extra,
extra
good luck.”

“Yeah, that last part is what
you
say, I think.”

“So you off to find your buddy now?”

“You want to join me?”

“No. And don’t ever hang up on me again.”

“Promise, as long as you tell me how your date went.”

“It didn’t go anywhere.”

“You canceled?”

“On the phone today he made some crack about how he couldn’t be married to anyone with a dangerous job.”

“And?”

“I told him I had to ask tough questions of dangerous people. And that I’d be doing it for as long as I could.”

“You wouldn’t reform your dangerous ways? Not even for an attorney?”

“Not even for Barack Obama.”

“Aw, come on. You could cover the Garden District beat. You know, new flower shops, the occasional car theft. It’d give you more time to actually edit the paper.”

“Yeah, ’cause that’s what I want to do. Spend the rest of my life interviewing nice old white ladies who think they’re going to have some kind of moment with me because they just read
The Help
.”

“Whatever. It’s not like we’re war correspondents out here.”

“You’re just sayin’ that ’cause we haven’t had an oil rig blow up in the past few months.”

“Suit yourself.”

“It wasn’t a match, all right?”

“All right. Fine. Makes sense, I guess.”

“How’s that?” Marissa asked.

“Well, you’re the one who told me if I was ever going to have a boyfriend, I’d have to divorce trouble first.”

“I wasn’t talking about your job, Ben. I was talking about Anthem Landry.”

His cheeks burned. He averted his eyes from hers before he could stop himself. He’d actually lain awake a few nights since she’d made the comment, wondering if the stresses of being promoted to editor in chief by
Kingfisher
’s new owners were starting to wear on her, wondering if his mentor had, in fact, been trying to warn him off the very career path she had shepherded him onto eight years prior. Apparently, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

“So I guess you don’t want to help me look for him then?” Ben asked.

“I need you in my office nine a.m. Monday morning. Don’t come strolling in at ten thirty just ’cause we have history. It doesn’t go over well. Trust me.”

“With you?”

“With everyone.”

She was a few feet away when Ben called after her. “So you really are firing me?”

“Don’t hang up on me again,” she said and kept walking.

“What’s the meeting about?”

“A story,” she said, without turning. “And it’s yours. If you’re up for it.”

With that, she waved at him over one shoulder and stepped into the intersection.

Ben checked his phone to see if he had any messages from Anthem, then he just stood there for a while, wondering what kind of drug a man would have to be on to fire two clean gunshots through both of his feet, one right after the other.

MADISONVILLE

I
t was almost midnight by the time Ben crossed Lake Pontchartrain.

He hadn’t conducted a search of Anthem’s favorite bars, hadn’t so much as placed a concerned phone call to any of the guy’s brothers, all of whom were so high-strung, a concerned phone call would have been enough to send them into a tailspin of worry. Instead, Ben had returned to his apartment, kicked back in front of the rebroadcast of the WWL evening news and waited for the inevitable text message from his bullet-evading buddy. It came right on schedule:
Big trouble. Meet me @ my baby . . . Bring sanity.

What did drunks do before they had text messages to manipulate people with, Ben wondered? Kept pay phones in business, he guessed.

Now he was heading north on Highway 22, the same route he and Anthem had traveled the night Nikki disappeared. But his destination tonight was well short of Noah Delongpre’s old compound in the
swamp, which was a good thing, because there wasn’t a timber of the old place left.