“Hey, Gunner,” said Tobie, when he answered his phone. “It’s me.
“Tobie? Jesus. You okay? The police have your picture splattered all over the place.”
“I’m okay. Where are you?”
He had to shout to be heard over the noise of traffic in the background. “We’re set up at Lee Circle. They’re not letting us get any closer.”
“Listen, Gunner. You remember our conspiracy theory? Well, believe me, it’s bigger than we imagined. Much bigger. I need to get into this reception at the World War II Museum. How can I do that?”
“Jeez. That’s not going to be easy. It’s not open to the public. Just Medal of Honor winners and a few select guests. One of our supporters has a cousin in the mayor’s office and managed to get a couple of guest passes we thought we might use to sneak a few people inside. I’d let you use those but she said she’d meet us here at the Circle and she hasn’t shown up yet.”
“What time do you expect her to get there?”
“She was supposed to be here half an hour ago.”
They came down off the interstate at the St. Charles exit. Mist clung to rooftops and the spreading branches of half-dead crepe myrtles dripping with old Mardi Gras beads. This part of the avenue had seen better days, the grand houses that once stood there having long ago been torn down and replaced by rows of dreary office buildings.
“Now where?” said Bubba.
“Left.”
They swept under the interstate, past parking lots dark and sodden from a recent rain. Lee Circle stood just on the other side of the freeway, a broad circular mound planted with grass, dwarf yaupons, and wildly blooming pink rosebushes. In its center rose a sixty-foot column of white marble crowned at the top by a statue of Robert E. Lee.
The Circle had been on a downhill slide even before Katrina. Now most of its ugly 1950s-era buildings stood empty and boarded up. Of all the graceful old homes that had once fronted the green, only one remained, a decrepit pink turreted house at the corner that had been turned into a bar.
“There,” she said, pointing to the small group of protestors in rain slickers who’d gathered on the right side of the mound. From here they could look up Andrew Higgins Drive, past the red stone towers of the old Confederate museum, to the concrete and glass ware-houselike bulk of the World War II Museum. There, a different kind of crowd had gathered, men in suits and women in jewel-toned silks and aging veterans in mothballed uniforms. The reception might be limited to Medal of Honor winners and select guests, but the guest list must be mighty long, Tobie thought. The streets in all directions were lined with parked cars.
Bubba pulled in close to the Circle’s curb, the white pickup behind him honking as he stopped traffic. “It ain’t gonna be easy to find someplace to park in this mess. I’ll meet y’all outside the museum.”
Tobie looked at her watch. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Bubba. We don’t find that bomb, this whole area could blow.”
“You don’t find that bomb,” said Bubba, “and I’m never going to get paid.”
She found Gunner fiddling with his PA system. He’d had to run an extension cord from the Circle Bar across the street to the steps in front of the statue, and the connection didn’t seem to be working very well.
He flung up his hands when he saw her. “Oh, God; stay back, Tobie. You come any closer and I’ll never get this thing to work.”
“What’s he mean by that?” Jax Alexander asked, giving her a hard look.
“I don’t know,” she lied as she stopped and let Gunner walk up to them.
“Leila got here a few minutes ago,” he said, reaching under his rain slicker to pull out two gray cards embossed with the D-Day Museum emblem and encased in plastic sleeves suspended from black neck bands.
“Thank you, Gunner.” She hung one of the black bands around her neck and handed the other to Jax. “What exactly are you protesting, anyway?”
Gunner pointed at the damp white banner they’d stretched across the base of Robert E. Lee’s column. From the size and shape of the cloth, she thought it might once have been someone’s bed sheet before it was donated to the cause and stenciled in big black letters: MAKE LEVEES NOT WAR.
Lance Palmer had cast a final look around the museum’s cavernous lobby and was heading for the exit when he got a call from one of his operatives.
“We just intercepted a conversation between the Guinness woman and that guy named Gunner Eriksson,” said the operative. “She’s on her way to the museum now.”
“We’ll pick her up,” said Lance with a smile. He snapped his phone closed and nodded to Hadley. “We just got lucky.”