O’Neil De Noux might be the best short story writer of detective fiction working today. I say something like that that every time, with every one of his stories, because it’s true. And I just can’t think of a better way to describe O’Neil’s incredible talent at taking us into his worlds. And yes, I have said that before as well.

In this story, we are lucky enough to have an original Detective John Raven Beau story. You are going to love this one.

O’Neil has published almost fifty novels with more coming regularly. His awards include The United Kingdom Short Story Prize, the Shamus Award (for best private eye fiction), the Derringer Award (for excellence in mystery short fiction) and Police Book of the Year. Two of his stories have appeared in the prestigious Best American Mystery Stories annual anthology. You can find out a lot more about his work at his website http://www.oneildenoux.com/

Detective John Raven Beau’s newest temporary partner rolls her eyes as he cuts through a Shell station to avoid another annoying makeshift stop sign nailed to a sawhorse set up at most intersections since Katrina. It’s August 29, 2006, the anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina hitting last year, and the city is still unable to get the traffic lights working. Yet, Shell has the station at Claiborne Avenue and ML King up and running and lined with cars thirsty for a fill-up. Beau zips into the station in his new unmarked police car, a silver 2006 Pontiac Grand Prix GXP, a gift from General Motors to the beleaguered New Orleans Police Department after they lost most of their cars to Lake Pontchartrain when she reclaimed the marsh most of the city was built on. The Pontiac has a V8 Corvette engine that growls nicely even at low speed.

A horn blares to Beau’s left and he spots two men struggling in the front seat of a white Lexus while a third stands outside with a chrome revolver in his right hand. Beau jams the brakes, tells his partner, “Gun.”

He alights from the Pontiac with his Glock in hand, focusing the sights between the shoulder blades of the man with the revolver.

“Police! Don’t move!”

Beau pulls the slack on the trigger of the expertly pre-sighted, nine-millimeter Glock 34 with its light-absorbing, non-reflective mottled, gray-black camouflaged finish—another gift, this one from ATF. The man drops the revolver and raises his hands slowly, peeking at Beau now. He’s in his mid-thirties, about six feet, lean, a dark-complected African American with close-cropped hair and wearing the same getup Beau wears, a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black running shoes. Except Beau wears a duty rig—canvas gunbelt with gold star-and-crescent badge affixed, handcuff case, double magazine pouch, and a carbon-fiber holster with Serpa active retention system that automatically locks the weapon as it is holstered. It’s waterproof. Beau tenses, waiting for the man to rabbit.

“On the ground.” Beau orders. “Face down.”

The man obliges and Beau’s on him quickly, left knee in the center of the man’s back, Glock pressed against his neck.

“Don’t move, asshole. This gun has a hair trigger,” Beau tells him. Not true, no cop wants a hair trigger, but the statement keeps the man frozen as Beau handcuffs him behind the back. Last month the US Secret Service sent a team to teach NOPD how to use the new steel, collapsible ASP nightstick and one-handed handcuffing techniques.

The men in the car scream at each other, fists flailing, the driver trying to get out of his seat belt. The other man punches him in the face. Beau’s partner runs up, aiming her Glock at the men in the Lexus and shouts, “Freeze! Police!”

Beau joins her, opens the passenger door and yanks the waistband of the man throwing the punches. As he comes out, a black semi-automatic hits the pavement. He’s younger than his buddy. Beau slams him against the car and he goes limp, looks at Beau with eyes surprisingly cold, blank, lifeless like a shark’s eyes. Only his face isn’t expressionless as Beau’s. The would-be robber smiles.

The bully-thugs are back, all right, from Atlanta and Houston. The city’s most dedicated criminals. Predators with no remorse, like hyenas. They go after the weak or wounded. Hyenas laugh as they hunt. Beau shoves the second man to his partner, who kicks his feet and the hyena goes down.

The driver, also African American, comes out of his door and yells, “They’re carjacking me!”

Beau starts around the car and glances back at his partner. She’s got the hyena covered, her Glock pointing at his nose, her left knee on his right arm, a high heel digging into his sternum. With her skirt hiked, the hyena is looking up her skirt. A captive audience a few inches away.

Beau searches the driver, who bounces in place and shouts, “They jumped me! They jumped me!”

“Calm down,” Beau tells him. “Wait here.”

Beau goes back around and sees his new partner wears pink panties today. She holds up her cuffs for Beau and he cuffs her prisoner, goes over to search his while she searches hers. They have a rapt audience of gas station customers, all gawking, a couple on cell phones, one snapping pictures. Beau waves.

“Damn.” a kid shouts. “Better than the movies.” He cups his hands around his mouth and calls out to Beau, “What’s your name?”

“Officer Friendly,” Beau calls back.

It takes the kid a second before he laughs.

John Raven Beau is Officer Unfriendly. This NOPD homicide detective stands six-two, lean, square-jawed, with straight, dark brown hair and deep-set, pale-brown eyes. He is half-Cajun and half-Sioux, with appropriate personality traits, the live-life-to-its-fullest Cajun side and the stoic plains warrior of his Lakota ancestors—their enemies call them Sioux. It’s an odd combination from an odd couple, Beau’s Cajun father and Lakota mother. Beau is often torn between kissing people on both cheeks or showing his obsidian hunting knife, sharpened on one side to better scalp heathens and criminals. He’s never scalped anyone, although he’s sent six men to their graves with fatal gunshot wounds. Every shooting, according to the Orleans Parish Grand Juries, was justified. So far.

Beau’s newest temporary partner is Karyn Connact of Ypsilanti, Michigan, population 22,000, mostly white folk from Scandinavia, Germany, the British Isles. Karyn’s Irish and English, and therefore naturally conflicted. At twenty-five, she’s five years younger than Beau, stands five-seven, slim build, with light brown hair and green eyes. She’s pretty and knows it and, unlike most woman police officers, wears makeup, including bright red lipstick.

Karyn came down AK (After Katrina) with a lot of do-gooders who wanted to help. She stayed, joined the force and, with a master’s degree and five years as a detective with Detroit PD, came with a lot of experience, an attitude, and a look. Karyn wears skirts. A plainclothes officer, she wears shorter than normal skirts and doesn’t give a damn who doesn’t approve or what a criminal, or her partner, sees on occasion.

Katrina was just the impetus to get Karyn out of Michigan. The incessant cold finally convinced her to come south, along with the political correctors who’d changed her university’s mascot from the Eastern Michigan Hurons to Eagles.

A marked police car skids into the station and she stands. Beau holds up four fingers so the cop inside can call in a Code-Four. No further backup needed. Sergeant Adrian Pauger climbs out, calls, “What you got, Beau?”

“Carjackers.”

Pauger has blue-black skin that shines with perspiration. He wears the new NOPD navy-blue heat-absorbing uniform and it’s pushing a hundred degrees today with humidity in the nineties. The department switched to the dark uniforms after looters liberated hundreds of their sky-blue police shirts AK and passed them to fellow citizens, criminals, and other miscreants.

Karyn moves next to Beau and says, in a jittery voice, “I didn’t see the gun.”

“Tough to see through my thick head.”

She’s a perfectionist and the fact she missed a man with a gun will grate on her.

“By the way, your prisoner could see up your skirt back there.”

“And you couldn’t?”

Touché.

Karyn secures the pistol and semi-automatic from the pavement before they disappear.

“I’ll get another unit,” says Pauger. Standard procedure. Keep prisoners separated.

Beau pulls him aside.

“Your car have one of those new in-car video camera systems?”

“Matter of fact, it does.”

Beau lowers his voice. “Turn off the monitor and focus the camera on the back seat. Let ’em visit.”

Beau moves past the prisoners both lying on their bellies. Neither looks at him as he takes his new digital recorder—another gift to NOPD, this one from Sony—to the victim for a quick statement. Pauger searches the prisoners again and moves them, one at a time, to his car and puts them in the back seat. The windows are up but the engine’s running and the AC’s on. They’ll feel it through the vents in the plastic screen dividing the rear from the front seat.

Pauger joins Karyn and Beau now with other witnesses, people who don’t mind giving statements. Most don’t realize they’ll have to go to court. Beau spots the two prisoners talking in the back of the police car.

They run out of witnesses, including the kid who asked Beau’s name, and follow Pauger’s car to the Second District Station on Magazine Street, one of the few stations that didn’t flood.

They separate the prisoners into two tiny interview rooms. Karyn slips the compact flash card from Pauger’s in-car video system into a port on one of the new Macintosh iMacs—you guessed it, a gift from Apple Computers. The iMac automatically downloads the file from the flash card, saves it on the computer, and starts playing it on the seventeen-inch monitor.

The older prisoner glares at the young hyena, who stares straight head, without expression.

“You a fuckin’ ass stumble bum.”

The hyena comes right back with, “Didn’t see you do nothin’ but stand there.”

“That was a new Lexus.”

“Let that big cop get the jump on you. Got your gun, didn’t he?”

“Got yours too.” The older one looks around, squirms to get comfortable handcuffed behind his back.

The hyena says, “My gun was better’n yours.”

“What you mean, you dumb fuck? Cuz it had more bullets?”

“Mine was better. Ask Peanut.”

The old one stops squirming. “Man, don’t tell me it’s the one you used on Peanut.”

Nothing from the younger one as the older one glares at him, leans closer and says, “Tell me that wasn’t the short you used on Peanut.”

Nothing from the young one for a half minute before he turns those blank eyes to his buddy in crime and says, “So.”

“So? So!” The older one bounces in the seat. “Man, didn’t you see The Godfather? You leave the fuckin’ gun at the scene or toss it in the sumbitchin’ river!” He shakes his head, looks outside the car. “You don’t keep it.”

“I did after I done Boh-man.”

The older one turns slowly to the hyena, who’s staring straight ahead again, a nice full-frontal mug shot. The older one growls, “You shot Boh-man and Peanut with the same gun?”

“Man, don’t talk to me like you my momma.”

“You don’t think the police ain’t gonna put two and two together?”

“Not since the storm. They ain’t got the equipment no more.” He turns to the older one. “Goddamn headquarters was under ten feet a water.”

“Yeah? You sittin’ in a spankin’ new Crown Vic fulla new equipment…” The older man stops talking, looks around the interior of the car, at the oversized rearview mirror, and goes “Fuck” six times before Pauger climbs into the front seat. They are silent all the way to the district station.

Yes, the hooligans are back. Beau recognizes the names. Peanut. Real name Jerome Lester Thomas, a cocaine dealer shot six times in the back on Oleander Street, Girt Town, a month ago. Boh-man was found in an abandoned riverfront warehouse with two bullets in his head, one of the first murders AK. Karyn remembers them too and moves to the police computer, learning Boh-man had a six-page rap sheet which included two first degree murder arrests, both charges dropped because witnesses refused to testify. The two perpetrators have extensive records also; the older one, Alvin Leonard, has been handed twenty times by the police. The hyena is Sylvester Boxer, arrested nine times. Neither convicted of anything.

Beau makes a pot of extra-strong coffee-and-chicory. Karyn, who’s developing a taste for Beau-style black coffee, although she takes hers with four packs of Equal, sits at the next desk and they sip and discuss strategy.

“I’ll take the young punk,” she says.

“Naw, he’s seen enough of you. The older one will underestimate you because you’re a woman. He might stumble when you mention the guns, Peanut, and Boh-man. I want the young one.”

Detectives Baudier and Gautier come into the squad room. Both are bald, both on the short side, both wearing closeout suits, Baudier in green, Gautier in blue. Karyn fills them in, ask if they’ll listen to the microphones when she and Beau go into the interview rooms, in case the suspects get feisty. They finish their coffee, refill the cups, and go into the separate interview rooms. Beau slips a fresh flash card into the new digital video recorder on its tripod in the corner, making sure the camera catches the suspect’s face as he sits in a wooden folding chair behind the tiny table of the windowless room slightly larger than an apartment closet. He presses the “record” button, goes around and takes off the handcuffs, telling the hyena everything is recorded now, so be cool.

Beau sits across from him, back to the camera, in a matching wooden folding chair, only Beau’s doesn’t have its front legs shaved down a half inch like the suspect’s chair so the man has to struggle to keep from leaning forward.

Beau turns back to the camera and says, “I am Detective John Raven Beau, New Orleans Police Homicide Division.” He gives the date, time and location, opens his clipboard, and takes out the hyena’s driver’s license, taken from the man’s wallet.

“I’m here with Sylvester Boxer.” Beau reads off Sylvester’s date of birth, driver’s license number, and address. “You still live there?”

“Where?”

“You gonna have to pay attention if this is going to work. Do you still live at the address I just read from your driver’s license?”

“Yeah.”

Beau withdraws a Miranda form from his clipboard and reads Sylvester his rights, showing him the form, handing him a Bic ballpoint, asking him to put his initials next to each sentence he’d read. Sylvester obliges.

“You understand these rights?”

Sylvester takes a couple seconds, all dramatic now, before he goes, “Yeah.”

“You want to give me your side of the story?”

Another couple seconds before, “I don’t know.”

“If you want to, say yes and sign right here.” Beau points to the sentence at the bottom of the form which reads “I have read this statement of my rights. I understand what my rights are. At this time, I am willing to answer questions without a lawyer present and understand I can stop answering at any time”.

“What do I get outta this?” Sylvester’s eyes are still lifeless, his mouth twisted in a bad impersonation of the Elvis lip curl.

“You get to tell your side of the story.” Beau points to the camera. “Say no and I turn it off, put the cuffs back on.”

Sylvester looks up at the camera lens, the lip still curled, and says, “The man said I could get in the Lexus. He attacked me.”

Sylvester signs the waiver and for the next hour, they go through it twice, blow by blow, he tells his full-of-shit story, sticking to it.

“What about the gun that fell out of your waistband?”

Sylvester smiles, opens his arms and says, “A man’s gotta protect hisself in this city.”

“How long you had the gun?”

“Since the storm. Found it outside Walmart. On Tchoupitoulas. Someone musta dropped it when they looted the place.” He snickers, having fun now.

Beau pulls out his cell and punches in his home number, letting it ring. After four rings he say, “This is Beau. You have anything on those guns for me?”

He watches Sylvester from the corner of his eye and goes, “What?” Beau raises an eyebrow at Sylvester, leans back and jots on his notepad. “Say that again? Jerome Lester Thomas? Aka Peanut.”

Sylvester’s trying not to pay attention.

“Boh-man?” Beau asks his cell phone. “What was his real name? Alvin Hill? You sure about this?”

For the record, a police officer cannot beat a confession out of a suspect, can’t violate their Miranda rights by not telling them they have the right to remain silent. But they can pull a fast one past their eyes. Beau closes his cell and slips it back into its case. He looks at the blank eyes for five long seconds before he says, “You do know the police can match a bullet to a gun, can match a shell casing to the firing pin of a gun, don’t you?”

No reaction.

“Come on. You’ve seen CSI, Law and Order, NCIS. You know about firearms examination, ballistics evidence.” God, Beau hated using TV shows as examples, especially police shows cops hate to watch, shows with all the answers, murders solved in sixty minutes. That red-headed guy on CSI: Miami, or is it CSI: Tuscaloosa, has shot more men than NOPD in its entire history.

Well, almost.

Sylvester sucks in a deep breath, leans back and puts his hands behind his head.

Beau shakes his head and chuckles. “You know where I’m going with this, so I’m just going to say it. The gun you had on you. The Beretta nine-millimeter was the same gun that killed Alvin Hill, aka Boh-man, almost a year ago, and Jerome Lester Thomas, aka Peanut, last month, here in our lovely city.” He leans back and adds, “Your gun. Your murders. You got real problems, Sylvester. Carjacking is chump change. First degree murder, that’s my specialty. Remember what I said at the beginning of our talk?”

No reaction.

“Remember? NOPD Homicide Division? Murder is my business, Mr. Boxer.”

Beau waits a few seconds.

“You wanna talk about it?”

Sylvester says, “Can I think on it? Couple minutes.”

Beau leaves the camera recording and asks Gauthier to sit in the open doorway so Sylvester doesn’t get up and destroy the camera. He calls his partner’s cell and pretends to be the firearms examiner, telling her about the guns before starting up another pot of coffee. Karyn comes out. Her interviewee’s giving up nothing. Beau goes back in with Sylvester, this time with a Mac PowerBook and shows him the conversation from the back seat.

“That’s a voluntary statement, Mr. Boxer. An uncoerced confession.”

Sylvester slumps in his chair and says, “I got somethin’ to swap.”

“Swap?”

“I’ll give you somet’in’ good if you don’t charge me with murder.”

“What can you give me that’s better than murder?”

“I can give you the man.”

“What man?”

Sylvester Boxer leans back in his chair, a shaky grin on his face, and says, “I can give you the man who supplies the guns. Not just some o’ the guns. Just about all of them. Enough to start World War II.”

“Again?”

“What again?”

“We already had World War II. You talking World War III?”

“One o’ ’dem. I can give you the man with enough guns to start the next one.”

There’s no getting the DA’s office on the phone. Like headquarters, their office remained under water for weeks AK. Hell, Beau doesn’t even know where the DA’s Office is now. They show up at the makeshift courtrooms around town when there’s a hearing or trial. So, if Sylvester wants to make a deal, his lawyer’s going to have to send a search party.

“I can’t speak for the DA,” Beau tells Sylvester. “But we’re still on camera and what you tell me in the way of cooperating will be seen by a jury at any trial you’re involved in. Let them know you want to cooperate.”

He looks at the camera and goes, “Yeah?”

Beau takes notes on the man for the next fifteen minutes. Sylvester gives up the name, address, where the man hangs and more importantly, where the guns are stored. Gauthier takes Sylvester to the bathroom while Beau punches in a phone number on his cell, a friend’s number.

“It’s me,” he starts, and explains what Sylvester Boxer’s offering.

“He wants to make a deal? You know I can’t make a deal for the DA’s Office.”

“You wanna come hear what he has to say?”

She waits three seconds before she says, “Okay.”

“I’m at the Second District Station.”

Karyn comes out from her interview room, looking tired, yawning. “My guy wants a lawyer now.”

Once they say they want a lawyer, the interview ends. Before Beau can respond, Baudier volunteers to put Karyn’s prisoner in a holding cell.

“Good idea.”

Karyn and Beau bring fresh coffees into the interview room where Sylvester Boxer waits and passes him a cup. He ogles Karyn as she sits across from him. The camera’s still recording.

“We’re going to check out the information on your gun dealer,” Beau tells him. “So, you wanna tell me about the murders now?”

“What murders?” Sylvester looks at the camera and snickers, says the magic words, “I wanna talk to my lawyer.”

Beau turns off the camera and they put Sylvester in a different holding cell before hitting the police computers to get everything they can on the man.

It’s not long before the friend Beau called earlier steps into the squad room. Special Agent Linda Pickett, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Dallas Field Office, on special assignment to New Orleans since Katrina, crosses the room with two hulking agents. Beau’s known Linda for nine months. She pulled him from the land of the almost-dead last November when he mixed it up with the Brown Ravens. Got him to the hospital in time. They’ve been a couple, on and off, would probably be a lot more serious if she ever made up her mind about them.

He hasn’t seen Linda in a couple weeks and she gives him a knowing smile as she steps up, those bright blue eyes locked on his. Her long blond hair is in a familiar ponytail and she wears a black tactical jumpsuit, her Glock in a canvas holster on her left hip. Embroidered letters ATF cover her left breast and her gold ATF shield with eagle perched atop is clipped to her gun belt just in front of her weapon. Like Karyn, Linda is twenty-five and doesn’t want to leave New Orleans, no matter how bad it gets.

She stops in front of Beau and says, “You think this guy knows what he’s talking about?”

Beau introduces her to his newest temporary partner and they shake hands as if each was handed an ice cube.

“He gave us the name and address.” He hands Linda the nine page rap sheet of Bryan Elvis Hernan, white male, thirty-one, six feet tall, two hundred pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, with three tattoos: red heart over his heart, orange lightening bolt on left forearm, and a black cottonmouth coiled around his right arm. “This is the man,” Beau explains. “Stays on Jordan Street, you know, where Brad Pitt’s rebuilding houses for the people who lost everything. I met him.”

Linda looks up from the papers. “You met Elvis Hernan?”

“Brad Pitt. Like some others, he’s a do-gooder. Nice guy. Won’t leave New Orleans. Sound familiar?”

Beau had never met the two hulking agents with Linda. Both are on the short side, around five-six, one Black, one Hispanic. Linda introduces them as Avery Jackson and Alonzo Herrera as she flips through the rap sheet. Hernan’s been popped for burglary, aggravated battery, aggravated assault, aggravated rape, armed robbery, arson, possession of cocaine, possession of methamphetamines, Peeping Tom, and murder twice. No convictions.

“Peeping Tom?” Linda’s eyebrows raise.

“Slummin’ probably.”

“Well,” Linda says, “You want to see who can get a search warrant first?”

“Search warrant?” Beau says. “Last time we looked for a duty judge, he was in Lake Charles.”

Writer intrusion—For y’all unfamiliar with Louisiana, Lake Charles is near the Texas border, about two hundred miles from New Orleans.

They both know the score. The feds are, if anything, efficient paper-pushers.

“We’re gonna need a fly-by of Jordan Street,” Beau mentions. Baudier and Gautier volunteer to get a good description of the place to put in the search warrant.

Beau, Linda, and Karyn come up with a plan and the women curiously don’t address each other but vet everything through him. SA Linda Pickett and her confederates get a hold of an assistant US attorney, compile their search warrant, and get a federal judge—they are easier to find. Meanwhile, Karyn and Beau book Alvin Leonard with armed robbery by carjacking. They charge Sylvester Boxer with the same charge as well as two counts of first degree murder, in anticipation of the firearms examiner at the state police lab in Baton Rouge linking Boxer’s semi-automatic with the murders. Hell, they got him admitting it on the new, state-of-the-art in-car video.

Beau feels odd sitting there, watching Karyn and Linda check each other out while trying to make it look like they’re not. Hell, Beau thinks—I’m not that good a catch for either of these women to worry over. Maybe they realize this and wonder what the other sees in him. Tall, dark, and handsome doesn’t go far these days.

“You don’t have any trouble climbing over fences in a skirt?” Linda asks.

Karyn leans back in her chair and looks up at the ceiling. “Nope. I just hike it up and climb.”

“I’d like to see that,” says ATF SA Jackson, who immediately covers his mouth with his hand. Too late. The look Linda shoots him could freeze a snowman.

Beau goes to his computer to knock out a daily report.

At two a.m., they pull up in two vans, one on each side of the house on Jordan Street. All are in jumpsuits now, even Karyn, and wear heavy flak vests. Baudier and Gautier reported they could see the flood line on the house, about two feet below the roof. The house is old, the only house on the levee side of the block with electricity. Many of the houses on the block have been cleared away, concrete slabs and or mud pits where single family dwellings once stood a block away from the Industrial Canal. Across the street, Brad Pitt’s reclamation project has a number of half-built houses going up on stilts. Several houses on the next block look occupied.

They’re in the lower Ninth Ward, crack cocaine capital of Louisiana. Unfortunately, a lot of decent, older folks used to live here along with the criminals. Folks without cars or other means of evacuating. The ones who didn’t drown when the levees broke were stuck in attics or on rooftops for days in blistering hundred-degree temperatures for a long damn time.

There are no cars parked at the man’s house. There’s a light on above the front porch and one in back. Beau’s heartbeat rises when two Fifth District NOPD marked police cars pull up in front of the house and everyone tumbles from the vans to hit the front and back doors simultaneously. Jackson uses a battering ram on the front door, Linda the first one in with Herrera her wingman. Linda first. It’s her warrant. Gautier smashes the back door and Beau’s in first, Karyn right behind with a shotgun and Baudier covering their backs. Beau covers the right flank, Karyn the left. It’s a kitchen with two exit points.

Voices shout up front. A movement to Beau’s left catches his eye as Karyn fires twice at a figure that goes straight down. Beau leaps forward, Glock trained on the figure on the floor, his heart stammering, arms itching, legs twitching as he focuses. The air is hot with the taste of gun smoke, smelling of gunpowder now and blood.

Gautier moves past Beau, calling out, “Police!” He steps to a hallway and calls out again.

“Federal Agents!” Linda calls back and they search the rest of the place.

Beau, down on his haunches, moves to the body, sees a stainless-steel semi-automatic Smith & Wesson next to the man’s hand. Karyn caught him dead center in the chest and face with two twelve-gauge double-aught buckshot rounds; the top of the man’s head is gone. It’s Hernan all right, same jawline, the right tattoos. He wears gray shorts and black socks. Beau looks back at Karyn, her eyes ovaled now, smoke drifting from the muzzle of her twelve-gauge shotgun.

A hand touches Beau’s back and Linda says, “The house is clear.” She steps around Beau and checks Hernan for vital signs, as if—with only half a head.

Beau stands, holsters his weapon and moves to his partner. Karyn stares past him at the body and says in a low voice. “It feels weird. Unreal. Like it didn’t really happen.”

“It doesn’t usually play out this neatly. You okay?”

She slowly nods. Herrara taps Beau’s shoulder and points at two bullet holes next to the back door and says, “He missed.”

Beau goes down on his haunches again, leans over and sniffs the Smith & Wesson, and sure enough, Hernan fired it, probably the instant Karyn fired. Shotgun verses a nine-millimeter at close range. Miracle only one person was hit.

Karyn says, “I saw the gun but didn’t even realize he fired.”

Beau stands and pats her shoulder. “You couldn’t have done better, partner.”

“It still feels weird.”

“Welcome to NOPD. Weird is our middle name.”

Jackson finds an arsenal in the rear bedroom. Beau has never seen a claymore mine up close, but the one just inside the door is rigged with a trip wire. There are boxes of ammo to the ceiling and crates of handguns, assault rifles and what looks like a fifty-caliber machine gun. They leave it to ATF.

By the time Karyn and Beau step back out front, a host of NOPD cars and unmarked sedans have Jordan Street blocked. An ambulance stops a half block down and two EMTs start their way. Feds are all over the yard now, two moving to speak with Linda, Herrera, and Jackson as they come out of the house. Beyond the police lights, Beau sees faces and large eyes peering at them.

Before Katrina, the people here would be taunting the police, throwing a rock or two, but AK they look with dazed expressions. An old man comes and leans against the back of one of the unmarked police vans. His white beard is in stark contrast to his black skin.

Lieutenant Dennis Merten steps around a van and heads straight for them. At six feet, he’s a couple inches shorter than Beau, but looks larger with his linebacker build. His wide face, complexion as dark as burned wood, carries a perpetual scowl. He opens his arms palms-up and says, “Don’t tell me.”

“Never fired a shot,” Beau says. “My partner got the bastard.”

“Really?” Merten’s shoulders sink in relief. “You had me going for a second.”

All he needs is another John Raven Beau shooting.

No need to ask who is going to handle the paperwork on this. A federal warrant, it’s up to the Feds. ATF, FBI, whoever draws the short straw.

Beau mentions, “By the way, we solved two murders today.”

“Huh?”

“We put it in a daily report. Emailed to you as an attachment.”

“You did?” Merten wants to growl, go into his angry bear impersonation, but they solved two murders.

“What murders?”

Beau tells him. He doesn’t seem impressed.

“Thugs killing thugs,” Merten growls, and wanders toward the Feds. Linda looks at Beau and he can see she wants to talk, but they can’t at the moment. She raises a thumb to her ear, little finger extended downward in the universal phone signal, and mouths the words, “Call me.”

Beau nods and Karyn says, “I guess y’all are an item.”

“Something like that.”

Karyn and Beau peel off their heavy flak vests and move to the van. The old man with the beard waits for them to get close before he says, “Y’all NOPD?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I guess y’all are back.”

Yeah. Like Custer at The Little Bighorn.