New Orleans Noir

had planned to go straight home after work, to skip the Swamp Room, the nurses, the drinking. He made such plans often, and rarely adhered to them, but you never knew. It might have happened tonight. Then the call came in.
    Two uniforms had been driving along Magazine Street toward Jackson when a short, heavyset Hispanic woman stepped off the curb into traffic and waved them down. She told them that two kids had just robbed her on Constance Street. One held her face tightly scrunched in his hand while the other cut the shoulder strap on her bag with a large knife. The one holding her face pushed her backwards unexpectedly, and she fell. Then they ran off, laughing.
    The uniforms loaded her into the back of their car and started cruising the side streets. Within a few minutes she began screaming and gesturing at a kid in a hoodie and ghetto-slung pants walking up Fourth Street toward Laurel.
    “That’s him,” she said. “The one that pushed my face.”
    The uniforms jumped out and confronted the kid, and he reached one hand under his sweatshirt. One of the cops yelled, “Drop the knife!” then fired three times.

    “So the first two guys to go in are the state troopers. They look at each other like —catch a rabbit, no fucking problem. These are Troop D guys, country boys. They go into the woods and they come back out in about five minutes with a goddamned rabbit. Mayor tells ’em good work and he sends in the second team, the FBI guys.”
    Ernie Lowell was about the nicest guy you could hope to meet. His nickname around the Sixth District was Reverend Ernie, a moniker bestowed upon him because he was always counseling fellow officers about staying on the straight-and-narrow, and avoiding the lure of drinking and dope, corruption, or ill-gotten pussy. He was married and had five children. To a lot of the other cops he seemed too good to be true, but Lew had always found him to be a sincere guy. He was a year younger than Lew, but had been smart enough to come on earlier, and was now in his twenty-fifth year, planning to retire in about six months. He’d never shown much interest in moving up in the ranks, and until tonight he had never, to Lew’s knowledge, drawn his weapon from its holster, much less fired it at anyone.
    Ernie’s sergeant was the first to arrive after the shooting, and he relieved Ernie of his gun. The sergeant put Ernie, shaking and in shock, in the backseat. Ernie’s partner told the story to the sergeant, and the mugging victim backed it up. There were no other witnesses on the street. No one but Ernie had seen a knife.
    Lew and Tommy arrived next, and Lew dropped Tommy in front of the scene, then drove a few yards down the street until he could pull over to the curb. He walked back to Tommy and the sergeant. The kid in the hoodie was face down at their feet, the hood of his dark green sweatshirt still covering the back of his head. There was a thin stream of blood running from under the body, and the slightest beginning of a damp red stain on the back of the sweatshirt, as though one of Ernie’s shots had almost, but not quite, gone through the body.
    “What have we got?” Lew asked. The sergeant repeated Ernie’s partner’s story. Lew walked over to the partner and got it again from him, then spoke to the mugging victim, who also corroborated it.
    “And you’re sure this was one of the guys who robbed you?” Lew asked.
    “That’s him,” she said, pointing to the body with her chin. “That’s him.”
    Lew turned to leave.
    “I think that’s him,” she said to his back.
    “So the FBI guys, they take out an attaché case filled with all kinds of bells and whistles. First thing they do is divide the area into two sectors, and each one picks a sector. Then they disappear into the woods with global positioning equipment, sonar, and who the fuck knows what else. They’re gone for about an hour, then they come back, and sure as shit they’re carrying a rabbit.”
    Tommy and Lew stood over the body and compared notes as the ambulance arrived.
    “Anybody else see the knife?” Tommy asked.
    “No,” Lew said. “Did you look at him yet?”
    “Not yet,” Tommy said. “Shame it’s Reverend Ernie.”
    “I know.”
    “At least Ernie’s black,” Tommy said, and Lew looked at him. “You know, no media. Black cop, black perp, offsetting minorities.”
    “No yardage gain?”
    “Yeah.”
    Lew looked over at Reverend Ernie in the backseat of the sergeant’s car and