One Hundred
THE ARREST WARRANT for Roof and Lynyrd Crockett that Robert Diozzi has gotten from the judge is on the dashboard of Helene’s car as we head for Briar Crockett’s house.
Helene drives way too fast, as she almost always does, once again having taken a hard pass on wearing her seatbelt. When I mentioned to her, not for the first time, that not wearing one was sort of against the law, she’d said, “I keep forgetting to arrest myself.”
Then she’d turned and said, “Now sit back and enjoy the ride.”
“You think they’ll go quietly?” I ask now.
“Hope not,” Helene says.
“Think they know we’re coming?”
“Hope not.”
I see her big hands squeezing the wheel hard as she hits the gas pedal even harder.
“I still can’t believe Holly got away.”
“I can’t and the New Orleans cops can’t, either,” Helene says. “The pervert Russian who’s been buying these girls and selling them was having them loaded into a van to take them to his plane.”
“For the flight to Saudi Arabia, you said?”
“Apparently, that’s where this month’s buyers were from,” Helene says. “I guess this rich fucking pimp found some prince who likes them blond and young.”
“Some world.”
“There and here, unfortunately,” Helene says.
“So Holly had been planning this since she got to the fucker’s big house in the Garden District.
Acting even more drugged up than the rest of them when she was ready to make her move, because she said they were going to have to kill her before she got on that plane.
When one of the guys guarding them turned his head, she kicked him in the balls and just ran. ”
I see Helene smile now.
“Did you know she was a sprinter at Cross Rivers High?”
“I think I did know that,” I say. “Guess I forgot.”
“Ran like the wind, through old houses in that old neighborhood. Finally made it all the way to New Orleans PD in Central City,” she says.
“The big Russian must have figured out that he better get out of the country without her, while the getting was good. So he was in the air before the New Orleans cops could stop the plane from getting in the air.”
“Then they called you,” I say.
“And I called the governor, and he arranged to hire the plane,” Helene says.
Somehow she is driving even faster.
“And now here we are,” she says, “on our way to take those fuckers down.”