Tony Dunbar - Tubby Dubonnet 07 - Tubby Meets Katrina (5 page)

Bonner the criminal was as happy as a kid with an ice cream cone when he reached the Broad Street overpass and dragged himself out of the water. First off, there were helpless women and children on the bridge, huddled around small fires and swatting bugs. The couple of men he saw looked old and weak, and they also had clothes that might fit him. Even ragged jeans would serve him better than the orange prison jumpsuit he had on. Anyone with a brain could figure out where he got that. Best of all, there were no cops in sight.

“Howdy ma’am,” he said to one old crone bent over a trash fire with two mournful looking kids sitting beside her.

“Howdy yourself. You got anything to eat?”

“No, I don’t,” Bonner admitted.

“Here’s something if you want it.” She poked a granola bar in Bonner’s face, and he accepted it gratefully.

“Guess I’ll look around,” he said and stood up.

“Ain’t much to see,” she told him.

He walked to the top of the bridge, which spanned Lake Interstate, and down the other side where the roadway sank beneath the flood. Just ahead, though Bonner couldn’t have identified it, was the Melpomene Street Pumping Station No. 1. It was silent as a tomb, its 2.6 million gallon per minute screws under water and powered off for the duration. Bonner noted several other campers. There were about twenty all told, he figured. Nobody was overtly friendly or curious. It was dark. Everybody was wet and miserable. Bonner found a spot by himself and lay down, his back propped against the concrete guard rail. His sleep, occasionally interrupted by helicopters flapping overhead, was fitful.

He woke up hungry. The sun was coming up over the parish prison, and the silhouetted guard towers reminded him of the urgency of travel. The other bridge-dwellers were stirring about. Of course they would notice his clothes, and somebody might have the bravado to say something about it. He wondered which way to go. He watched two kids swim toward him to the overpass. They got out dripping, clutching plastic bags, and walked among the groups of refugees offering cans of Vienna sausages and bags of chips for sale. Bonner shook his head angrily and waved them off. If they could find food, so could he.

He was preparing to dive in himself when he saw he had waited too long. A boat with two SWAT-team officers tied off at one end of the bridge. As soon as he saw them, Bonner walked the other way quickly. There was a female sleeping beside the crone, the one who had given him the granola bar. The prone figure clutched a worn poncho around her shoulders. He poked her once in the ribs and pulled the poncho off her back.

“Hey, what—” She sat up. The old lady started to say something. Bonner put one finger to her lips, “SHHH,” and wrapped the blanket over himself to hide his uniform. He could not see the officers now. The woman he had ripped the cover from was too weak to protest, and she lay back down.

Then it got worse. Two white buses had been parked in front of the prison, water over their tires. They began to move, creating a wide wake, driving slowly toward the overpass. Miraculously, they navigated the hundred yards belching exhaust bubbles and crept triumphantly onto the pavement. They chugged to the top of the overpass and stopped. A pair of prison guards got out and had a conference. They had brought with them about forty inmates each. Through the wrinkles of his poncho Bonner saw the SWAT guys again. They hiked up their side of the ramp and huddled with the guards. Bonner looked up at the windows of the buses. He saw lots of faces. Surely the prisoners inside could see him and imagine who he was. He stayed as still as possible. The old woman beside him also watched in silence. The day went on.

Many more refugees arrived on the Broad Street overpass on Wednesday. They swam in or came by boat. The SWAT guys finally left for someplace else. A food vendor showed up in front of Bonner and offered a can of Lay’s Bean Dip for five dollars. Bonner grabbed the man by the throat and whacked his head into the concrete abutment. He tossed the can of dip to the old lady. He muscled the scalper over behind one of the white prison buses. “Meet Katrina, buddy,” he whispered in the unconscious man’s ear. Bonner liked the sound of his new voice. Glancing quickly up at the rear window of the bus, he saw eyes disappear. He bashed the man’s skull on the concrete a couple more times, and then began to undress him. It took only a few minutes to steal a pair of filthy wet blue jeans, an Acme Oyster House T-shirt, and a pair of Adidas. Bonner stripped off his own prison garb and put on the new clothes. He tossed his orange jump-suit over the side. Then he tossed the food salesman over the side. Then he jumped over the side and began paddling downtown.

At the Place Palais, alone with an empty building to protect, Manuel the security guard had lots of time to reflect about what is truly important in life. In normal times his wife and kids drove him crazy. When he was at home he couldn’t even read the newspaper at night or watch his favorite shows for all the interference. It had been so long since he’d had the TV to himself, his shows probably weren’t even on anymore. He couldn’t take off his shoes without hearing that his feet smelled. He couldn’t yell at his son without his wife sticking up for the kid. She crabbed all the time, and wasn’t interested in sex. Then she bitched at him for always being angry and going to bed early. So, normally, he liked being at work.

But now he missed the whole crew of them. Manuel had not seen his family for two days, and he did not know where they were. On the police band at his security office, he learned that Chalmette, the town where he lived, was flooded. His house was near the Forty Arpent Canal which would be the most dangerous place to be if the levee broke.

No one from building management had called or shown up. The land-lines were still working, but he couldn’t connect with anyone. He had tried to reach Bucky, the chief of operations, but just got his voice mail. When he called Bucky’s home phone the line rang busy.

It was an important job, being in charge of a forty-nine-story office building, but what the hell. All he could see on his security cameras were grainy black-and-white images of empty floor after empty floor. The cameras focused on the loading bays and the front doors revealed lots of water in the streets and very little else. Sometimes a person waded or floated by. The battery was running out on the cameras anyway.

The lights in Manuel’s office and one elevator worked only because he kept feeding gas to the emergency generator. He had enough for about twelve more hours, but did he want to stay here that long?

A week ago they had been planning their vacation at the beach—Fort Morgan, Alabama, the redneck Riviera. Hell, this was supposed to be his vacation time. Family, that’s what’s important in life. If you ain’t got family, what have you got? You’ve got a job, with thirteen years built towards retirement, and a 401k. You can’t just leave. What if someone broke in? And did what? Loot the shops on the first floor? And how am I supposed to stop them? With one handgun and a case of pepper spray? Should I call 911? Manuel laughed to himself. It was a bitter laugh. Where’s Bucky, I wonder? Baton Rouge, at a Holiday Inn, no doubt. (Actually, Bucky was in Providence, Rhode Island, conferring with the company brass about ways to maximize their insurance claim.) The whole damn city may be flooded, and I’m here alone. Where are the soldiers? Why am I the one stuck?

Manuel looked at his half-eaten Payday candy bar, wrapper folded back, peanut crumbs escaping, on his desk.

“I’m getting hungry. And I am sick and tired of eating candy,” he said to the walls.

Bonner paddled from Broad Street all the way downtown to the main public library. At that point he could stand up and wade. Along the way he had hidden from police boats, run into trash cans lurking beneath the water, made a circle around swimming rats, avoided dogs baying from rooftops, watched old people dangling from windows, seen tons of garbage drifting aimlessly in the current, and witnessed the looting of a liquor store.

He had a destination in mind, though he wasn’t sure what he would find there or how permanent it would be. No matter. Bonner survived by being flexible. That was the way of nature, and Bonner had grown up in the woods. His father hardly ever knew where he was, and his mother was a drug whore. That’s a fact. Fortunately he had an uncle, an old corn farmer who owned some land down the road and fed him and exposed the young and impressionable Bonner to books. The boy was versed in all the Aryan principles, but he had an independent streak and rejected many of them. For example, he never accepted that the mud people were the enemy. Hell, they sounded just like mom and pop. For a time he was worried about the “Money Changers’ Servants,” as portrayed by the Little Flower of Jesus. But then he encountered the works of some little-noticed German and West Virginian tract-writers and concluded that all humanity was the enemy. The cops, the teachers, the jails, the parents, and the towns they lived in. But he rejected the Christian part because he didn’t see its relevance to the woodland powers. He saw a mission for himself to lead these Teutonic spirits into battle against every ugly element of so-called modern society, and this view was supported by the fact that nobody else his age liked him, and he did not like them either.

The hurricane had revealed to Bonner that there was another vast power he had never expected, and it came from the sea. He had never seen salt water, and he was as curious as any young man would be. Girls with bikinis dwelt there, and they had to be obliterated, too, which was quite confusing to his mind.

Rivette’s immediate destination was the law office of Dubonnet & Associates. Number one, he might find a lawyer he could get help from or rip off. Number two, it was the only address he had in New Orleans, except an old house in Harahan where he had briefly lived, and that was too far away. Number three, if he were caught by the police while trying to reach the Place Palais, he had a pretty good excuse. Which was, your Honor, I was not tying to escape, I was washed away by the flood and I was trying to reach my lawyer so he could tell me how to give myself up.

By the time he got into the New Orleans business district he was walking in only a few inches of water and trying to straighten out his funky clothes. He wasn’t sure where the Place Palais was. He saw only one police car rolling on the streets, but there were other figures lurking about. He kept to the shadows of buildings and doorways. It was urgent to stay out of sight.

Manuel had had it. He stuck his unfinished Julie Smith mystery and an unopened bottle of water into his red nylon satchel, checked the gun on his waistband, stuffed a handful of keys and access cards into his pocket, and walked down the frozen escalator to the first floor. The lobby, given over to retail shops, was as deserted as a tomb, and his steps echoed off the marble . Stylishly dressed mannequins stared blankly at him from behind their imprisoning windows. He hurried to the tall glass entrance doors and made sure they were locked. Then he descended the service stairs to the freight entrance. He came out on a pitch-black loading platform. Manuel felt his way down a short flight of concrete steps and walked across the empty bay to the emergency exit. He had the master key ready in his hand, but he knew it would not be necessary. This door opened freely from within. He pushed hard and was out in the street. Finally he was free to go about his own business.

Bonner Rivette, still wet, was hiding inside what had once been the doorway of the Bun and Biscuit. Now it was an abscess in the building with a wrecked aluminum frame showered in broken glass. He was standing among the shards when he saw Manuel come out of the emergency door. He saw the glint of the security man’s badge. He also saw Manuel take a big ring of keys, try to attach them to a ring on his belt, then stuff them into a red bag. The security man turned left on the sidewalk, which brought him very close to Bonner.

The criminal used a concrete block to put Manuel on the ground. It was that quick. Muttering, “I got you,” he pulled the senseless form into the wreckage of the biscuit restaurant and went through the man’s pouch and hip pockets. The guy was still breathing, so Rivette used the guard’s own handcuffs and locked him to a standpipe. He collected the keys, a batch of access cards, a can of Mace, and a small handgun. He scurried to the building’s back entrance and tried keys in the door until he found one that fit. He jumped inside and pulled the door shut behind him.

Bonner Rivette became the sole watchman over Place Palais. It was his own lightless castle.

“This isn’t bad at all,” he thought when he emerged from the loading dock into the world of retail. A bank branch, a dress shop, luggage, shoes, the whole enchilada. He tried the master key on a men’s clothing store and it worked. He waited for the alarm to sound. When he heard nothing, and saw no blinking red lights, he went for a quick shopping spree. What he came up with, groping in the dark, was a blue sports shirt with a nautical emblem on its chest. This was a valuable addition and a step-up from the T-shirt he had swiped from the looter on the bridge. A belt, a couple of pairs of socks, and a pack of underwear and he was good to go. He ran a circle around the fountain that was the centerpiece of the mall. There was a statue there of a Mediterranean goddess smiling down on him. He pumped his fists in tribute.

Realizing that he was spending a lot of time in a public place and that there might be other dwellers in this concrete realm, Rivette went exploring. He found a directory mounted on a marble podium behind a glass plate, which he perceived as the layout of the enemy’s compound. By putting his eyes close to the glass he could confirm that Dubonnet & Associates was still where the card had said, in Suite 4300, meaning floor forty-three. He had some knowledge of how cities worked since he had once been a janitor.

Rivette chanced upon the security desk. He found a half-eaten Payday candy bar and several packs of cheese crackers which he devoured on the spot. He washed them down with a bottle of Fiji water. He tried the elevators, mashing buttons till he found one that worked.

When he reached the lawyer’s office he could see the name on the door, backlit by a red exit sign. There was no hole for his master key, but he worked the security man’s cards in a slot until one did the job. Inside, the office was as empty as he had hoped. It was black as ink and as remote from sight as any escapee could wish. Now he could rest. He walked the carpeted hall stealthily, poking his nose into each dark room. It felt secure. He returned to the reception area and lay down on its leather sofa. Within minutes he was out, enjoying his first good sleep in five days.