“Take me to him,” Maureen shouted from the passenger seat of Detillier’s sedan. “Take me to him right fucking now.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Detillier said, his eyes fixed on the road as they hurtled up North Rampart Street, dodging traffic, running red lights, speeding away from Dizzy’s and the Tremé, headed for the wide boulevard of Canal Street. “He was shot in Mid-City, at a place on Jeff Davis. I don’t know what hospital he’s going to.”
“Get on the radio and find out,” Maureen said. “Find out where he is. Find out if he’s alive.” She pounded her fist on the dash. “Right! Fucking! Now!”
“Let me fucking drive,” Detillier shouted back. “There’s nothing we can do about Preacher right now.”
They caught the green light at the intersection of Rampart and Canal. Detillier muttered under his breath for the foot traffic to keep clear. Maureen braced herself against the dashboard as they sped through the intersection, the sedan bouncing hard over the streetcar tracks, tires screeching as Detillier hung a hard left onto Canal. Maureen saw stars as her shoulder slammed into the door, knocking her head on the window and the breath out of her lungs. They missed crashing into a parked car by half a foot, passing so close that Maureen could see the foam daiquiri cup in the console. She coughed as she fought to regain her breath.
Leaning forward in the driver’s seat, Detillier stomped on the gas, swinging around slower traffic where he could, running lights, headed toward the river.
“This is an active-shooter situation,” Detillier said. “It’s not over.”
“I’ll find Preacher my fucking self,” Maureen said, reaching for the sedan’s police radio. Detillier slapped her hand away.
Maureen almost punched him. “What the fuck was that?”
“Are you not listening?” Detillier said. “If not to me then to the radio. We’re on the job here, we’re in a situation.”
Maureen had not been listening to the radio chatter. The fate of Preacher was everything. She couldn’t focus on the voices coming over the radio long enough to make sense of the frantic calls and commands rasping out of the speaker. She tried to tune in. SWAT was rolling. The harbor police were involved. Demands for roadblocks at the bridge and on the highway at the parish line, and at the Causeway and the Twin Span. She heard codes and orders that she knew weren’t NOPD. Everyone in the area was on deck. Everyone. It made sense to call in other law enforcement, but she couldn’t decipher what any of them were doing. She didn’t know who was going where. From the sound of things, nobody was really in charge.
Near the foot of Canal, at the big palm-tree-flanked casino, Detillier made a hard right onto the much narrower two-lane Tchoupitoulas Street, bobbing and weaving as fast as he could through the business district toward Uptown. Maureen felt her brain beginning to catch up, to function and put things together in real time. She hadn’t asked where Detillier was taking her. He hadn’t said. Now she had an idea, not of the physical destination but of what would be waiting for them when they arrived.
“Where are we going?” she asked. She rubbed her sore shoulder, touched the tender bump rising on her forehead. “We’re going after them, aren’t we?”
“We are,” Detillier said, nodding.
“Where?”
“The Walmart. Pay attention to the radio, get me an update.”
“You’re shitting me.” Maureen gripped the dash again with both hands, her eyes wide because Detillier had them pointed into oncoming traffic. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, the street turns one-way up here, one-way right at us.”
Detillier jogged the sedan to the right, shifting off Tchoupitoulas onto Annunciation, sliding back into traffic headed in the right direction. They sped past the World War II museum, ducked under the highway. When they came out the other side of the highway overpass, Maureen could see helicopters in the sky up ahead, none of them over the Walmart.
“Trust me,” Detillier said, “They’re at the Walmart.”
“That is ridiculous,” Maureen said, shaking her head. “That’s fucking ridiculous.”
Detillier turned the car again and again, darting from side street to side street. Maureen clutched at the dashboard and the door handle, trying to prevent getting more damaged than she already had and trying to hatch an idea of how cop killers had ended up at Walmart.
“Preacher was shot in Mid-City,” Detillier said. “The other shooting was right around here, on Poydras in the business district.”
The overpass that they had just crossed under marked the unofficial border between Uptown and Downtown, Maureen thought. If you wanted to go toward the lake or across the river, or toward Baton Rouge or the southernmost parishes from the business district, you caught the highway here. Several arteries, almost every artery, out of town, Maureen realized, linked in this one place. But, she thought, the city streets underneath the highway tangled into a spaghetti pile of dead ends, one-ways, cobblestone alleys, on-ramps, exit ramps, and construction detours. She knew people born and raised in New Orleans who got turned around enough down there to end up across the river. If you passed straight through and missed the highway, though, Tchoupitoulas shot you out of the spaghetti pile right at Religious Street, which led to the riverside Walmart. She guessed the shooters had panicked and had given up on trying to find the on-ramp that would let them get away.
“They were running for the Ten and got lost, so they went to ground at the most familiar territory they could find. Incredible.” She paused, stunned by her own horrifying thoughts. “Holy shit. Well, either they’re panicked and stupid and got lost or they’re smart and strategizing, and when they were done killing cops they made a planned beeline for the biggest box of guns and hostages they could find.”
They raced parallel to the river, the railroad tracks and the shipping wharves hidden behind a high concrete wall. They were back on Tchoupitoulas. Detillier kept making risky passes into the oncoming traffic. Near the river, large trucks made up a fair amount of that traffic. Their bleating steamship horns spiked Maureen’s already frantic heart rate. Please don’t let us kill someone, she thought. Please don’t let us die. I never dreamed I’d want to find a fucking Walmart this bad.
The store materialized ahead of them on their right, the low, boxy building set deep inside its vast, mostly empty parking lot. The lot was massive, Maureen thought. Weird how few cars were there. Whoever had built the place had anticipated a lot of business they weren’t getting. No, she thought, it’s not the lack of cars that’s weird. It’s the lack of police cars. Of anything with a siren on it.
“Why are we the only ones here?” Maureen asked. She realized she hadn’t seen him reach for the radio. If Detillier was so convinced the shooters had fled to the Walmart, why hadn’t he called anyone else? FBI? NOPD?
He eased up on the accelerator.
“Why are we slowing down?” Actually, she thought, Detillier hadn’t picked up the radio since they’d gotten into the car. He kept claiming not to know anything. Well then, why wasn’t he calling someone and asking questions?
“This Walmart does terribly,” Detillier said. “It’s barely hanging on, and they stopped selling guns after they got looted in the storm.” He threw Maureen a nervous glance. “But I’m guessing the people we’re after didn’t know that. Doesn’t mean they’re not armed to the teeth already. We should count on it.”
“Point made,” Maureen said. Her throat was so dry she could barely get the words out.
Detillier pulled the sedan into the very back of the parking lot, and threw the car into park. He stared straight ahead through the dirty windshield at the Walmart a hundred yards ahead.
“We gonna let anyone know where we are?” Maureen asked.
Detillier didn’t answer. He watched the Walmart, listening to the radio.
Maureen’s eyes dropped to the radio, as if she could read there whatever mysterious signal Detillier was hoping to discern from the chaotic chatter of orders, police codes, and panicked questions filling the car. She ground her teeth. What the fuck were they just sitting there for, doing nothing? Her breath got short, tears of rage again welling in her eyes. She palmed tears from her cheeks. She inhaled her snot and swallowed. She took a deep, deep breath, then exhaled long and slow.
She turned to Detillier.
“Can you just call someone? Anyone? There’s got to be news about Preacher. I need to know. I can’t make anything out of that mess on the radio.”
Detillier raised his hand, gesturing, Maureen realized, for her to be quiet.
“And there it is,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been waiting for.”
“There what is? For fuck’s sake.”
“The response to the first nine-one-one call”—he raised his chin in the direction of the Walmart—“from inside the Walmart. I was right. Those fuckers are in there. Someone fleeing the store called it in.” He shifted the car into drive, rolled them toward the store. “Showtime.”