Chapter Forty-Five
New Orleans
WALKER SAT IN the front passenger seat of the classic AMC Eagle wagon.
Belle was behind the wheel in her leather jacket, skirt, and Doc Martens, backing into a parallel parking space along Poland Avenue, a few miles downriver from the French Quarter.
The streets were slick from a passing shower that had turned to mist. More rain was on the way.
“You sure you have everything you need?” she asked.
“I’m good,” Walker said, patting his pants pocket with the forged ID.
“You sure you don’t want me to take Paladin back to your van?”
“No,” he said, holding up the Ziploc bag with the flannel. “I want Paladin to sniff this out. If he gets a good read, we’ll know that this is the Dorado we’re after. I might not even have to use the ID.”
“The fake ID,” Belle reminded him.
“Right, the fake ID.”
Now that she was in the parallel slot, she threw the lever in park. “You never told me how you got that.”
“It’s from one of the guys at Leigh Ann’s. I cut off a section of his shirt. They all had a weird smell to them, something dark under the fingers. If that smell is here, Pal’s going to know it. Isn’t that right, boy?”
Paladin barked once from the back seat.
Belle tilted her face toward the chain-link fence topped with concertina wire.
Dorado Freight was tucked into what used to be a busy naval facility.
It was abandoned in 2011. It featured wide concrete aprons and tan buildings, some with broken windows.
The federal government had recently leased sections to the city, which then sublet a few warehouse buildings to companies, one of which was Dorado.
“I could wait,” Belle offered. “You sure you want to walk back to your van from here? You know where you’re going?”
It was a workday for her. She’d be at the tattoo shop by ten, working a longer shift because the shop owner was on vacation this week and had left Belle in charge.
“Don’t wait. If this goes south, I want you as far away from it as possible.”
“Hey,” she said. “I was going to leave you a present as a surprise in your camper. But I’m going to give it to you now. It will help you fit in around here.”
“A present?” He scratched his trimmed beard.
She opened the center cargo console and extracted a New Orleans Saints ball cap. “Your old hat is looking pretty ragged.”
“I’m actually a Seahawks fan,” he said.
“Now you’re a Saint.”
“Oh yeah?” he said, trying it on.
“Yeah. The patron saint of lost causes.”
Before moving through the gate, Walker stopped at a bank of freight trailers without trucks in an asphalt parking lot. Some of the containers bore the names of shipping companies like COSCO and APL. Others were blank.
“Blijf,” Walker commanded Paladin. The dog sat on his haunches.
He climbed onto the rear hinges of a cargo door to reach the corrugated roof of a freight trailer. From this vantage point, he had a clear view of the far edge of the former naval base.
He lay on his stomach, pulling a set of small Vortex binoculars from his coat pocket for a quick reconnaissance.
Ninety percent of the former naval base appeared abandoned. He saw hangars with broken windows, concrete overrun by weeds, and familiar painted lettering that had faded over time.
All empires eventually fall. Just ask the Stoics.
He shifted for a better view and surveyed stacks of containers. They called them Connex boxes in the Teams, a term left over from CONEX, a militarized abbreviation for Container Express. In addition, beyond the containers, the facility had three-wheel mounted cranes along the wharf.
In his earlier SEAL days, Walker had learned a lot about ports.
The wharf-side equipment also included reach stackers and straddle cranes.
He focused on the river and noted a protruding pier.
There were no cargo ships there, but he saw a pleasure craft, a forty-something-foot sport fisher with a tall conning tower.
Someone at the facility liked to fish the Gulf.
Maybe that’s why the place was called Dorado.
He moved to his side, checking on Paladin. The dog sat like a palace guard.
He pulled on the lanyard around his chest, freeing the slender plastic dog whistle.
He scooted himself to the edge and hopped down.
“Blijf,” he reminded Paladin. After walking a hundred yards down the street, he blew the whistle three times.
Paladin sprang up and ran to him. As soon as he was at Walker’s feet, Walker blew the silent whistle twice.
He then turned his back and moved another twenty yards down the sidewalk. Paladin remained in place.
Good to go. That would have to do for the rehearsal on this reconnaissance op.
He blew the whistle three more times and continued forward with Paladin on his left side.
By the time Walker reached the road gate along Poland Avenue, the rain had started again in earnest. He pulled his Saints cap lower. Would a cop wear a Saints hat? Yeah, he thought. Probably. People in this town were nuts for sports.
The road narrowed, squeezed between another parking lot filled with empty trailer chassis and a building just around the corner that looked like the main office hidden among dozens of CONEX boxes and pallets.
He pulled out the Ziploc from inside his coat and opened it.
The shirt fragment was a foot long and three inches wide.
Walker knelt beside Paladin, carefully unzipping the plastic bag. The piece of fabric inside still carried the strangely sweet smell he remembered from Leigh Ann’s.
He held the cloth to the dog’s nose.
Paladin sniffed, nostrils flaring, ears twitching forward.
Walker pulled the cloth back and pointed toward the darkened wharf.
“Zoek.” Search.
As Paladin started to search, Walker’s eyes caught the rear license plate of a Ford F-150 parked outside a construction trailer and amended the command.
“Zit.” Paladin sat, awaiting his next command.
The specialty plate featured a bronze redfish arched across the left side, frozen in a splash of coastal blues.
Its tail bore the signature black spot, and the water around it shimmered with hints of marsh grass.
Above the plate number, the word Louisiana stood boldly, while a small line beneath read Support Wildlife it was the sickly-sweet smell.
He saw a man emerging from a small corner office.
“José?” Walker asked, approaching the man with a flash of his badge.
“Sí.”
“What you got there?”
José was mid-thirties, with a crew cut and a tattoo on his neck. He gestured with his chin at the sacks. “Sugar.”
“I didn’t realize sugar has a smell.”
“Sugar in the store doesn’t. This is processed sugarcane, before it goes to a packaging company.”
“It comes into the country by container ship?”
José looked at Walker suspiciously, eyeing the weapon at his side. Walker had put his coat back on but stood with his hands on his hips to reveal the gun and badge. “Sugar comes in via a bulk carrier to a refinery downriver. We send it off to manufacturers. I can show you.”
“I just need to look around some of the empty, unlocked containers,” Walker said. “We had a burglary not far from here this morning and just need to confirm our man isn’t hiding in here.”
“This way.”
José led Walker across the spacious warehouse. They exited through a door on the far side.
Charlie Babineaux stood facing them, a sawed-off side-by-side 12-gauge in his meaty hands. Behind him stood two Latin men covered in tattoos, aiming AKMs at Walker’s chest.
“I got some friends in the NOPD,” Babineaux said. “Turns out, they’ve been looking for you.”