John Raven Beau by O'Neil De Noux

Author:O'Neil De Noux [Noux, O'Neil De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Kiss Productions
Published: 2011-03-21T04:00:00+00:00

You gotta love the ambiance

Just as I’m heading out the door Sunday morning, my phone rings. Buck barks at the phone and does a quick spin.

“Hello?”

“So what are you doing, today?” It’s Jodie.

I tell her and she says, “Mind if I come along?”

Forty-five minutes later we’re sitting next to the dumpster with fresh cups of coffee-and-chicory from PJ.’s. The strong smell of coffee momentarily overpowers the scents from the street, a mix of rotten bananas and motor oil.

Jodie glances around. “Jesus. Where do you find these places?”

“Nice, isn’t it?”

Over night someone deposited a door-less refrigerator and a broken bathtub along the curb just outside the junk yard across the street. Jodie and I are both in jeans. She wears a tan blouse over a tank-top and I wear a dark brown dress shirt over a gold LSU tee-shirt. Although I’m sweating, Jodie’s hair looks perfectly blow-dried, not a strand out of place. The woman doesn’t perspire.

“So who told you about Mullet?” I ask, knowing the answer.

“Kay. He told Merten and me, swearing us to secrecy.” She nods toward Hog Heaven, which has only two men working today. “You think he’s going to drop by or something?”

I give her a Lakota saying. “The patient coyote will catch the rabbit when it comes out of its hole.”

Jodie squints as she looks over at the filling station. “You didn’t bring binoculars, did you?” She shakes her head. “I know. You don’t need them. You and those Sioux eyes.”

I’ve never told her my secret Lakota name but she’s knows all about how well I can see. At eleven o’clock five bikers pull up and beers are distributed.

“Any of them Mullet?” Jodie asks.

I shake my head. She settles back in her seat and lets out a long sigh. “So, what district did you choose?”

A man pulls up on a reddish Harley and I look closely, but it’s not Mullet.

“District?” I ask.

“If you’d bother to read the memos in your In box, you’d know the new chief is breaking up the Detective Bureau.”

“What!?”

“We’re going back to the districts. All plainclothes. Burglary. Robbery. Sex Crimes and even Homicide.”

“That’s stupid. How are we going to pick up trends? How’re we going to know who’s robbing people two districts away, who’s raping uptown women, then getting in his car and driving downtown to rape a few? He expects us to read dailies and memos?”

Our new chief, a transplanted assistant chief from New York, is long on honesty but short on street smarts. Then again, he’s new. He’ll learn.

“The idea is to make us more visible on the streets, more accessible to the public.”

I leave that idea floating in the heat. A few minutes later Jodie tells me she put in for the Second District. The uptown police.

“What about your old district?” she says as she looks around disgustedly at this typical Sixth District street. “You could work here again.”

“That was LaStanza. I never worked the Sixth.”

“Oh.” It’s not like her. She’s embarrassed by the slip.

I keep watching Hog Heaven.

“Well, you better put in for something or they’ll just stick you some place like the Fourth.

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