Big Easy Bonanza

of temporary blacktop around the construction.
    Tubby stopped the car and let it idle. It was very dark. “This is far enough for me,” Tubby said.
    “Take a walk with me,” Reggie said. He had put his glasses back on.
    Tubby looked at him and shook his head.
    “Let’s go,” Reggie told him. He showed Tubby the gun he was holding in his lap. It was a medium-size .38, and Reggie cocked it.
    “Why, Reggie, you surprise me again. I guess this means our partnership is over. You can have my clients.”
    “Thanks a million, Tubby. A joke a minute, right? I need you to get out of the car with me.”
    “If you’re going to shoot that thing, go ahead. I’m not getting out of the car.”
    “If you make me shoot you here, which I will, it’s going to mess up my plans, and I’m going to have to take it out on one of your darling girls. I’m not saying which one. You want to pick her right now?”
    Tubby was looking at a fiercer face than he had ever seen on his partner before. Did Reggie have this much backbone, or was he bluffing? Their eyes held. Tubby blinked first. He turned away and opened the door.
    “That’s two for you tonight, Reggie. You’re showing me talent for chicanery and deception I didn’t know you had.”
    “Thanks, Tub. Just keep on talking.”
    They both got out of the car. Reggie pointed with his gun into the darkness, in the direction of a path around the sand pile.
    “You might as well carry this for me,” he said, handing Tubby the gym bag. Tubby started walking where he was told to walk, with Reggie behind him.
    The whole area was surrounded with bright-red plastic fencing, and what had formerly been a wide street was now an excavation twenty feet deep and twice that wide. Like many New Orleans boulevards, these streets were built on top of vast concrete tunnels designed to carry off millions of gallons of rainwater. In a typical deluge they would fill up quickly. If it lasted more than thirty minutes or so, the pumping stations that forced the water uphill to Lake Pontchartrain six miles away would reach capacity, the tunnels would back up, manhole covers would pop off and release geysers, and the streets would start to overflow onto lawns and over doorsills. The city’s effort to increase pumping capacity and build ever-greater drainage systems was an engineering drama that had been going on for three hundred years. The project on Napoleon Avenue seemed to local residents to have been going on for much of that time.
    Tubby and Reggie stepped over the plastic fence and walked along the side of the dark ditch. Around them were cranes, bulldozers, and pile drivers, idle and caked with mud, waiting for the morning. People didn’t walk around the neighborhood here at night anymore. Tubby hoped for a watchman. The locals kept their doors and windows shut to try to block out the incessant roar of pumps and generators that labored day and night to move the sludge along. In the daytime this constant noise became background for pile drivers on tall cranes that slammed creosoted timbers, bigger than telephone poles, deep into the muck to support the concrete floor of the new expanded culvert. Construction pipes and steel reinforcement rods were stacked all over what used to be sidewalks.
    There was an overgrown kids’ playground by the trench, and Reggie took Tubby there: He sat down as if to rest on a pile of pipe next to the open chasm of the unfinished canal, the pistol held loosely in his hand. A cat, almost invisible in the night, ran across the playground and nuzzled up against Reggie’s leg. He brushed it away with the barrel of the gun.
    “Take your wallet out of your pocket very carefully, Tubby, and give me whatever money is in there.”
    “What for?”
    “You’re being mugged. I’m afraid you’re going to be another victim of urban crime.”
    Tubby reached into his pants for his wallet and as he did so asked, “Is this really necessary, Reggie?”
    “I’m afraid so. I know you very well, and for a crooked man you’re straight as an arrow. Darryl’s dead, and you won’t be able to let me get away with it. All of this would have been avoided if Darryl had just had the money with him when he went for the dope, like he was supposed to. The fact that he didn’t is still confusing to me, because if he planned to rip us off, Champs would have been put out of business, all legal, in about forty-eight hours. This should have been a win-win situation for me. I would have