The Lazarus Heart (6 page)

Frank fumbles for the remote control and turns the volume back up until he can't hear anything above the meteorologist's nasal voice

The heavy drinking began a couple of months before his promotion to detective, when Frank was still just a beat cop working the Iberville projects east of Canal Street. His partner was a young black woman named Linda Getty, a rookie he'd been working with only a few weeks when they got the call, what he would always remember as the Bad Call. It was a rainy Shrove Tuesday and for Frank that afternoon would mark the moment that his descent began, his piecemeal disintegration to this place of self- loathing and boozy rot.

"This domestic shit is the worst," Frank said.

Linda nodded, flicking the butt of her cigarette out the window of the squad car as he answered dispatch.

"Yeah, we're only a couple of blocks from there now," he said into the radio handset, and turned the car around. Now, whenever he thinks back on the four or five minutes before they reached the maze of tenements bordering St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery, it always seems that there was some vague sense of foreboding, something more urgent than the usual dread of getting himself in between two people who hate each other as bad as married couples can. But that's probably bullshit and he knows it, like someone seeing St. Paul in a bowl of gumbo just before they almost choked to

death on a crab shell, making something out of nothing for the sake of consolation. "I know you must have heard this a hundred times in training," he said to Linda,

talking fast like he always did when he was nervous, "but this mundane shit is a hundred times more dangerous than, say, robbery calls or drug busts. At least you go into those
expecting
someone to take a shot at you or something. Shit like this, you just never fucking know what to expect."

"I hear you," said Linda, trying to sound tough and sure of herself. The way that Frank remembers it, he wished she really did.

A small crowd had already gathered by the time they pulled up outside the graffiti- covered red brick building, people in the muddy yard and a few standing in the street looking at something on the blacktop. Distrusting, resentful faces turned toward them as they got out of the car. Frank remembers thinking that at least the rain had stopped.

"What the hell you gonna do about this?" a woman said, a short woman almost as wide as she was tall, with mint-green curlers sprouting from her hair. Frank could hear a man's voice from one of the apartments, loud and crazy.

"You folks need to go on home," he started, and then he heard Linda gasp, the sound someone makes when they've just seen something a hundred times worse than they've ever imagined anything could possibly be.

"Don't you be tellin' me to hush up and go away," the fat woman scolded, strident, angry. "I done asked you what you gonna
do
about this!" But Frank had already turned his back on her, was staring at Linda standing on the other side of the car, one hand over her mouth and her voice filtered through her fingers.

"What is it?" he asked. "What's wrong?" But she was already pointing at the thing he'd noticed in the street as they'd pulled up to the curb.
A fucking dead cat,
he thought.
Jesus, she better not be pulling this scene on me over a goddamn dead cat in the fucking road.

Linda fumbled for her cigarettes, lit one and inhaled frantically to keep from vomiting, a trick he knew well. "Frank!' she mumbled, "Oh, God. Oh,
look
at it."

He stepped around the back of the patrol car, trying to keep his eyes on the restless onlookers and the general direction he'd heard the man's voice coming from, trying to get a better look at whatever his partner saw lying in the street.

It wasn't a cat. He saw that a second later, a glimpse of the small brown body between the figures huddled around it, naked skin and sticky red smeared across the blacktop. The baby was maybe six months old, and Frank didn't have to ask to know that a car had run over its head.

Linda was leaning against the car, coughing, repeating, "Oh, God, oh, God," over and over like a prayer between puffs, like maybe there was some way to forget what she'd just seen, a trick that would allow her to
unsee
it. Someone in the crowd laughed then, a dry, hard laugh that Frank remembers as clearly as the broken body. And then the first gunshot and he could move again, the spell broken. He remembers yelling at Linda to get her shit together, pull it together right
then
or he was going to kick her fucking ass.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, wiping her mouth and reaching toward her holster. "But Jesus, Frank..."

"There ain't nothin' you can do for that poor child," the fat woman shouted at them from the other side of the patrol car. "You best be worryin' about the ones he
ain't
killed yet." And Linda glared at the woman, squinted through the tears leaking from the corners of her eyes, spilling down her cheeks.

"Listen to the lady," Frank said. He leaned past his partner into the car, trying to sound calm as he grabbed the radio mike. "Hey, we need some fucking backup out here!" He paused before going on, took a deep breath and wondered if the operator could hear his heart pounding away in his chest, could smell the blood and adrenaline straight through the radio.

The man who had fired the shots was waiting for them on the second floor, had barricaded himself inside with his girlfriend and her three children. One of the kids was the dead baby in the street- the fat woman had told them that when Frank had finished radioing for backup. The guy's name was Roy and he'd been smoking crack all day. The fat woman had also told them that. They both drew their guns before starting up the iron-and-concrete stairs to the second floor, where they crouched just past the top of the stairway, Linda pressed flat against the wall, Frank a few feet closer to the door, a lot more exposed.

Almost five minutes had passed since he'd called for assistance and they still hadn't even heard so much as a siren. Frank's hands were sweating, slick around the grip of his pistol. They could clearly hear the man and woman inside, screaming at each other, and the terrified voices of the children, but there had been no further gunfire. On the way up Frank had glimpsed movement through a broken window. He'd guessed it was the same window from which the baby had been tossed.

"Shit," Linda hissed behind him. "Where the fuck
are
they, Frank? We shouldn't even be up here without backup."

"Just shut up a minute, okay?" he snarled at her, bracing himself against the iron railing, setting himself up for a clear shot if the door to the apartment opened and there was
anything
at all in that asshole's hands.

When he shouted to the people inside, he could hear the strain in his voice, the fear coiled there. It made him feel almost as sick as the sight of the dead kid had, the tire tread pattern pressed into the pulpy mess where its brain and skull had been.

"Roy? Roy, can you hear me in there? This is the police. Put down your weapon and open the door before anybody else gets hurt-"

"Hey, fuck
you,
motherfucker!" a male voice boomed from behind the door. The black paint was coming off the metal door in big, ugly flakes, and Frank could see a lighter, older shade of black revealed underneath. He remembered these details so clearly.

"I ain't doing
nothin'
for no goddamn City of New Orleans cops! You gonna get your lyin' cracker ass back into your police car and leave me the hell alone or I'll blow this bitch's brains out!" And then the woman screamed again.

"Jesus, Frank, where the hell
are
they? They shoulda fucking been here
twice

already."

He didn't have an answer for her, but he knew they were in over their heads. "I don't know,
okay?"
he whispered, struggling to sound calm against the panic

gathering in his belly, filling his insides like cold lead. "But we're going to have to back off and just wait..."

"Back off and wait for
what,
Frank? Nobody's coming, and he's ready to kill those people in there. There are
children
in there, for Christ's sake."

"Hey, motherfucker!" the man's voice boomed again, a ravening, mad-dog voice that Frank knew there could never be any reasoning with. No answer to that voice except force, force enough to kill before it would back down. "Are you deaf or what? I
said,
get the hell off the goddamn stairs or I'm gonna pop this bitch in the fuckin' head!"

"It doesn't matter," Frank said, speaking to Linda as loudly as he dared. "There's nothing we can do by ourselves." He called out to the man behind the door, "Okay, Roy, we're going to back off now and leave you alone just like you said. But I want you to do some-"

And then the shotgun made a sound like thunder trapped inside a metal box and wanting out, tearing its way free, and the black door was blown completely off its hinges. There was no time for them to get out of the way-Frank saw that at the same instant he saw Roy raising the Mag-10 Roadblocker for another shot. The woman was

sprawled at his feet. Frank could see that she'd been caught between Roy and the door when the monster Ithaca semiautomatic had gone off, that the blast had cut her in half. Roy was covered in the woman's blood, and the air was thick with smoke and a settling crimson mist.

"Stay down!"
he screamed at Linda, stealing precious seconds to aim before he fired his revolver twice, both shots catching Roy cleanly between the eyes. The huge man jerked backward and his spasming fingers squeezed the Roadblocker's trigger one last time, but the shot went wild, blowing a hole in the ceiling above his head, adding plaster dust and more smoke to the haze already billowing from the doorway of the project apartment. Roy stumbled backward, tripped over a coffee table, and fell dead to the floor.

"Mother Mary..." Frank whispered, but he couldn't even hear his own voice for the ringing in his head, the smothering echo of the shotgun.

"Are you okay back there? Linda, are you okay?" She didn't answer, but he was already up and moving, advancing on the doorway, the barrel of his .38 not moving from Roy's prostrate form. He'd fallen backward and both his feet were sticking up in the air, his expensive athletic shoes soaked in blood, his own blood and the woman's.

Frank stepped carefully past the buckled, broken door; the hole blown in the center was as big as his fist and he knew it was fucking amazing he wasn't a dead man. He stepped over the shredded mess slumped in the door, something that had been a human being hardly a minute before. The floor was slippery and he steadied himself by leaning against a wall. That was covered with blood as well, and his hand came away red and sticky. There was no sign of the other children. Frank guessed they were hiding somewhere in the apartment.

"Linda, I could really use your help up here," he shouted, leaning cautiously over Roy's corpse. "We gotta find these kids."

He noticed that there were two neat punctures just above the bridge of Roy's nose, a widening pool of blood and gray matter on the floor beneath his head. Both of his

eyes were wide open, staring blankly up at the ceiling or God or his killer. The shotgun was still clutched in his hands.

"Linda? Did you
hear
me?"

When she finally answered him it was a weak, uncertain sound. He looked slowly over one shoulder, reluctant to turn his back on this crazy man even now, even when

there was absolutely no way he would be getting up again. Frank stared out through the clearing fog of smoke and dust, the doorway of the apartment gaping like a ragged exit from some backwater recess of hell.

Linda was sitting at the top of the stairs, her back against the brick wall of the building, surrounded by a spreading puddle of her own blood.

"I think I got hit," she said, her words already mired in dulling shock. "Frank, I think the bastard shot me."

Frank almost slipped in the dead woman's intestines on the way out, barely managed to catch himself. Even from a distance he could see the blood jetting from the wound in Linda's thigh, bright red arterial gouts in time to her heartbeat, spilling her life out onto the dirty concrete. Linda was staring at the wound dumbstruck, as if it amazed her, as if it was the most incredible thing she'd ever seen but no
part
of her, nothing that could have happened
to
her.

When he reached her Frank dropped to his knees and looked at the hole, her brown skin and pink muscle chewed to hamburger. He had no idea how the blast could have missed him and caught her until he saw the jagged piece of shrapnel sticking up out of the wound, a piece of the door that must have sailed right by him.

"Listen, I've got to get you an ambulance," he said, stripping off his shirt for a pressure bandage.

"And while I'm gone you're going to have to keep some weight on this." She nodded listlessly.
She's gonna fucking die right here,
Frank thought as he wrapped his shirt tightly around the hemorrhaging wound.
She's gonna bleed to death right here before I even get to the fucking car to call for help.

"I think I'm okay," she slurred. "It doesn't hurt that bad. I think I can walk."

"Shut up, Linda," he said, tying the sleeves of the shirt, finishing the bandage. "If you don't sit still and keep pressure on this leg you're not gonna have to walk anywhere ever again. You'll have angels to carry you wherever you want to go."

She looked at him, blinked, and smiled, a stupid junkie kind of smile. Then she was pulling something off her finger, pressing it into his blood-smeared right palm.

"Please, Frank," she said, "tell Judy I'm sorry, okay? Tell her I still love her. You'll do that, right?"

He stared down at the ring, a simple white gold ring, trying to understand what she was saying to him.

"If something happens... if I don't make it. . . you tell Judy I said I was sorry." Linda folded his fingers closed around the wedding band.

Frank took a deep breath, knowing there was no time for his surprise or the pampering of his own fears. The bandage was already soaked through. He put both her hands on it and pressed down hard, and she almost passed out. He slapped her cheeks until she was conscious enough to keep her own hands over the shotgun wound.