CHAPTER 28
THE DOCKS
POV: GIDEON
The locks open at six on Saturday morning, and by six-fifteen the first barge is through, and by seven I'm standing on the Press Street wharf with a cup of coffee watching the river come back to me.
Every boat that goes through pays.
Every boat that goes through knows who it's paying.
The Boudreaux flag isn't on any of them.
There aren't any Boudreaux boats left. The ones that aren't ash at the bottom of the Industrial Canal are tied up at a dock in Chalmette with nobody on them, because nobody who works the river is going to crew for Ambrose Boudreaux this week.
Not after River Road. Not after the tracks.
The news came up the river faster than the barges. Two Valcourts dead in one night. A house burned. And a girl in a grey dress who walked out of the fire holding the Deacon's hand.
They're calling her something new on the docks now.
I heard it at the lockhouse this morning. One of the lock tenders, an old man with a tattoo of the Blessed Virgin on his forearm, said it to the man beside him when he thought I couldn't hear.
La reine.
The queen.
***
"The fed," Ansel says, coming up beside me.
"Tell me."
"His car's in the Beau Rivage garage. Third level. Keys under the mat." He looks out at the water. "His cards have run up eleven thousand at the blackjack tables since two this morning. There's footage of a man in his jacket and a ball cap at the tables. You can't see the face."
"Whose face is it?"
"My cousin's nephew. He's about the right size." Ansel doesn't smile. He doesn't really know how. "The envelope went out at seven this morning by courier to the Office of Professional Responsibility. Both recordings. They'll have it Monday."
"And her?"
"She asked me this morning if it was done." He pauses. "I told her yes. She said good, and went back to sleep."
I drink my coffee. I look at the water.
She went back to sleep.
"Boss," Ansel says.
He's looking past me, down the wharf, toward the warehouse at the end. There's a truck idling there that wasn't there ten minutes ago. A white box truck with no markings. The back doors are closed.
His hand is already going inside his coat.
"Down," he says.
***
The back doors of the truck swing open.
There are four of them. Houston men. The same crew who came at me on the Governor Nicholls wharf, or what's left of it, and their cousins.
Ambrose isn't paying for professionals anymore.
He can't afford them. These men are cheap and angry and they have rifles, and they come out of the back of that truck firing before their feet hit the planks.
I'm already moving.
The coffee cup goes into the river. I go behind a bollard, a big iron one, and the rounds hit it and whine off, and splinters jump out of the planks where I was standing.
Ansel is behind a stack of pallets to my right.
His men are coming out of the lockhouse, out of the cars, out of the shadows of the warehouse, and the air is so full of noise it's like standing inside a bell.
I put one of them down. He falls off the back of the truck.
Another one. He goes to his knees on the planks, holding his throat.
The third comes around the side of the truck, and I line him up, and I feel it before I hear it.
It's like being hit with a hammer. High on the left side, above my heart, below my collarbone.
It turns me halfway around. My gun goes off into the sky.
I sit down against the bollard without deciding to, and the world goes very white and very far away, and there's a ringing in my ears and something warm running down inside my shirt.
I look down.
There's a hole in my coat.
Ansel is shouting. Somebody else is shouting. Shots, close. Then fewer. Then one more.
Then quiet, except for the river.
"Boss."
Ansel's face over me. Grey. His hands on my coat, tearing it open.
"Through and through," he says. His voice is strange. "It went through. It's high. It missed the lung, I think it missed the lung—"
"Did we get them."
"All four."
"Ambrose?"
"Not here. He sent them." Ansel's pressing something against the front of my shoulder, and then the back. It hurts like the knife on the wharf and the sabre in Arceneaux's kitchen combined. "We need to get you to Dr. Roux. Now. Before you bleed out on your own dock."
I try to stand up. I can't.
"Not the clinic," I say. "The rectory."
"Boss—"
"She'll wake up and I won't be there." The white is coming in at the edges. "She'll wake up and I won't be there, Ansel. The rectory."
He looks at me for a long moment.
Then he gets his arm under me and lifts.
***
I come back to myself on the iron bed in the priest's room with the barred light coming in the window and a man I've known for fifteen years sewing up the back of my shoulder.
Dr. Roux is seventy and drinks and has hands like a jeweler. He's taken bullets out of me four times. He's never once asked where they came from. He's working without looking up, and his cigarette is burning in a saucer on the dresser, and the room smells like it and like iodine and like blood.
And like her.
She's sitting on the bed beside me.
She has my right hand in both of hers, in her lap. She's in one of my shirts and her hair is down and there's blood on her, mine, on the front of the shirt and on her forearms. She isn't looking at Dr. Roux or at the wound. She's looking at my face.
When I open my eyes, she doesn't say anything.
She just looks.
"There he is," Dr. Roux says to my shoulder blade.
"Welcome back, Mr. Valcourt. You've been out forty minutes.
You lost a good deal of blood on your dock, and a good deal more in your car.
The bullet went through the top of the pectoral and out the back of the shoulder without touching anything you'll miss.
You'll have a hole. You'll have a scar. You won't lift anything heavier than a coffee cup for six weeks.
" He ties off a stitch. "Which means you'll lift something heavier than a coffee cup tomorrow and tear this open and I'll be back here Tuesday. "
"He won't," Noemi says.
Dr. Roux glances up at her over his glasses.
"Won't he?"
"No." She doesn't look away from me. "He'll do what you tell him."
Dr. Roux looks at me. Then at her. Then at me again. Something moves at the corner of his old mouth.
"Well," he says. "I've been telling him what to do for fifteen years. Nice to have help."
He finishes. He tapes the gauze. He gives Noemi a bottle of pills and a list of instructions in handwriting like a spider, and she reads it all the way through, twice, while he packs his bag, and asks him three questions about the dressing, and he answers every one like she's a nurse on his ward.
At the door, he stops.
"La reine," he says to her. Not a question. Just trying it out.
She looks up.
He tips his head to her, very slightly, the way an old man in the Quarter tips his hat, and goes out.
***
At three, she turns on the little television on the dresser, the one the last priest left, with the sound low.
She doesn't say why. She sits on the edge of the bed with my good hand in hers and flips through the channels until she finds the local news out of Metairie, and waits.
It's the fourth story.
A woman with lacquered hair standing outside the Beau Rivage in Biloxi with the Gulf behind her, grey and choppy. A photograph in the corner of the screen. Dark hair going silver at the temples. A kind face.
FBI agent missing. Car found in casino garage. Sources say Special Agent Cole Brandt, fourteen years with the New Orleans field office, may have been struggling with gambling debts. The Bureau declined to comment on reports of an internal investigation.
Noemi watches it all the way through.
She doesn't move. Her thumb moves once across my knuckles.
When it's over, a man comes on to talk about the weather. A front coming through on Thursday. Rain.
She turns it off.
"Internal investigation," she says.
"The envelope got there early."
She nods. She sits there looking at the blank grey screen with her reflection in it, a woman in a man's shirt with blood on her forearms.
"He had a wife," she says. "The reporter didn't say. But he had a tan line where a ring should be. In Mother Agathe's office. I saw it when he put his hand on me."
"Are you sorry?"
She thinks about it. I watch her think about it, honestly, the way she thought about it in the bath.
"No," she says. "I'm sorry for her. For his wife. She married a man who takes his ring off to touch other women." She looks at me. "I'm not sorry for him."
"Good."
"You keep saying that."
"You keep being worth saying it to."
She almost smiles.
***
My phone rings at four.
It's on the nightstand. I reach for it with my good arm and the whole left side of my body screams, and before I can get there, she's picked it up.
She looks at the screen.
"Ambrose," she says.
"Give it to me."
She doesn't.
She looks at me, lying on the iron bed with my shoulder packed and my blood on her arms and a morphine drip Dr. Roux left in the back of my hand. She looks at the phone in her own hand, ringing.
She answers it.
"This is his wife," she says.
I can't hear Ambrose. I can hear that he's talking, fast, low. Her face doesn't change.
"He's alive," she says. "Your men are dead.
All four of them. On the Press Street wharf, in daylight, in front of the lockhouse.
" A pause while he talks. "No. You'll talk to me.
He told you that. Friday night, with the house on fire.
He said you'd sit across a table from me and ask me what I wanted. "
She listens.
She stands up off the bed and walks to the barred window with the phone to her ear, and looks out at the alley, and listens for a long time.
"You want to stop," she says. "You don't have boats, you don't have men, you don't have partners.
You want to stop, and you want a loan, and you want your daughter married to somebody who can protect you.
" Another pause. "No. I'm not interested in your daughter's marriage, Mr. Boudreaux. I'm interested in yours. Ending."
A long silence on the line. I can hear the silence.
"Monday," she says. "Ten in the morning.
There's a café on Chartres Street. Café Sainte-Anne, by the cathedral.
The man who owns it owes my husband." She's never said those words before.
My husband. She says them like she's said them all her life.
"You'll come alone. No men inside. Bring your daughter if you like. I'd like to see her again."
She listens a moment longer.
"Then don't come," she says. "And my husband will stand up out of this bed in six weeks with a hole in his shoulder and come find you. I'm offering you a table, Mr. Boudreaux. He won't."
She hangs up.
She turns around.
I'm lying on the bed looking at her. I haven't moved. The morphine is making the edges of things soft, but she isn't soft. She's the sharpest thing in the room.
"You can't go," I tell her.
"I'm going."
"Noemi. He's a cornered animal. He sent four men with rifles to a public dock this morning. He'll bring a gun to that café."
"Ansel will be at the door. Your men will be on the street. The owner of the café will be behind the counter." She comes back to the bed and sits down beside me. "And he'll have his hands on a coffee cup. Not a gun."
"You don't know that."
"I do," she says. "He wants to live. He's an old man in a white suit who drinks chicory and likes his grandchildren. He's not going to shoot the Deacon's wife in a café by the cathedral in front of forty tourists. He's going to beg."
"And then?"
She doesn't answer.
She looks down at her own hands, in her lap. At my blood dried on her forearms.
Then she reaches over to the chair beside the bed, where her kit bag is, and opens it, and takes something out.
A small tin. Old. Dented. The paint worn off the lid so you can only see the ghost of a label, and under it, in faded pencil, in a shaky old hand, a word.
ARSENIC.
"The gilder in Chalmette," she says quietly.
"The one I swept for. He put a pinch of it in his gesso, the old way.
To keep the beetles out of the wood. When his hands got too bad and he closed the shop, he gave me his tools.
All of them. And this." She turns the tin over in her fingers.
"He said, Never leave it where a child can reach it. And never use more than a pinch."
I look at the tin.
I look at her.
"I've carried it for three years," she says. "In the bottom of my kit. I never once opened it."
The morphine is pulling at me, soft and heavy. I fight it.
"Noemi."
"He put me on a crate in a cold room with my bare feet on the tile," she says.
"He sent a man to throw me off your roof.
This morning he sent four men to shoot you on your own dock, and one of them almost did it.
" She puts the tin back in her kit bag, and closes it, and puts her hand flat on it.
"You can't go. You can't lift a coffee cup. "
"I can lift a gun."
"Not for six weeks." She takes my good hand again, in her lap. "So I'll go."
I look at her face.
It's the face from the Chef Menteur. The face from Mother Agathe's office. The face from the choir loft with the wire in her fingers.
I've spent three years making sure no one could ever take anything from her. I've bought her a door, and a lock, and a convent, and burned a house. I've killed every man who ever put his hand on her. I've never once let her walk into a room without me already standing in it.
The morphine takes me down a little further. I let it.
"Ansel at the door," I say.
"Yes."
"And you come back."
"I always come back," she says. "I came back through the door."
I close my eyes.
For the first time in my life, I let someone else go to war for me.