Chapter Twelve
BY THE TIME Walker rolled into the Lower Ninth Ward, the sun was slouched low against the rim of the levee, casting long amber fingers through a lace of broken shingles and hanging trees. The light gave everything an eerie warmth, the same sensation he felt when studying the Hopper paintings.
Much of the Ninth, Leigh Ann had explained, was still condemned. But as his van rattled down the mostly empty streets, it seemed to Walker that the Ninth didn’t resist the condemnation. It wore its wounds plainly and proudly, daring the observer to look away.
Walker eased the van along Reynes Street, tires crunching on gravel and windblown glass.
Around him rose the aftermath of a storm that had blown out over twenty years ago.
Leigh Ann had called it poor, but poverty didn’t feel like the right word.
This was something more elemental, quieter, crueler.
In Kandahar, poverty screamed. Here, it whispered.
He passed a car that looked more like a battle wreck, its hood tilted like a broken jaw, wheels stripped bare.
Windowless shotgun homes leaned at odd angles, craning toward the street, weary of what they had experienced.
One porch held the husk of a rusted tricycle with a wheel missing.
Everything living had either fled or was growing through the wreckage.
Walker slowed near what might once have been a store. The faded sign read Buy Rite, though only half the neon sputtered in pink light. A pay phone dangled nearby, its cord twisting softly in the breeze like a pendulum without a clock.
He stared at it for a long moment. When was the last time I saw a pay phone?
On his drive from one corner of the country to the other the week before, he had seen manicured avenues, majestic mountain passes, cornfields that stretched to the horizon, light reflecting off grain silo, the geo metry of a well-kept ranch, the pastel hues of morning sun chasing away evening showers.
But not here. Here, the world had stopped being beautiful.
This wasn’t poverty. This was neglect, institutional and generational, a spiritual rot as thick as the Spanish moss on the branches. A war zone, like Afghanistan. Not the firefights, but the blank spaces between. The way a bombed-out village looked two years after it stopped making the news.
Paladin stared out the window. He too knew a war zone when he saw one.
If Leigh Ann’s decoding of Connor’s journal was correct, it meant that Connor had dug through the bones of this neighborhood, peeling back layers of corruption in search of the rot at its core.
An aspiring journalist working on his first story with a Moleskine and an inconvenient conscience, asking questions no one wanted answered, perhaps in a quest to connect a modern chemical weapon, fentanyl and Snowball, to floodwaters and failed promises.
And if Leigh Ann’s theory was correct, someone killed him for it.
Walker passed a house that had had its front door torn off the hinges. A spray of yellow insulation clung to the threshold, fluttering like a moth’s wing. Another’s roof slumped inward, the siding buckled, stained with black mold.
“My God,” Walker breathed as he maneuvered around a pothole.
It wasn’t that it was unlivable. Some people still tried. He could see them, shadowed figures in doorways, shirtless boys leaning against porch railings, watching the stranger in the faded blue van. But it wasn’t living, he thought. It was resisting death with dignity.
His inward philosopher reawakened.
Is resisting death with stubborn grace what I’m doing?
The nightmares did not care about intent. The cold sweats didn’t respect strategy. And John Staub, his friend, his brother, was still dead because of what Walker had done. Or failed to do.
“Good men die,” he whispered, answering the voice.
Paladin shifted on the passenger seat, watching him.
“Don’t worry, boy, we’re going to set up shop,” he said, voice steadier. “Somewhere quiet.” He reached across and scratched the dog’s ear.
Paladin’s tail tapped the seat twice in agreement.
Walker shifted into third and continued forward, deeper into the decay. Maybe he was still alive so he could finish what Connor had started. And maybe, in doing so, find one small answer to the question that haunted him.
Not whether he was good, but whether, with what time he had left, he could do something that was.