LITMIR.BIZ

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the rich who knew how to profit from disaster, and the few people those rich needed to get richer and stay comfortable.

      “Lots of cops left and went over to Morgan City,” he told her. “Plenty of work there. But … I dunno. I didn’t want to leave, and I had enough seniority to avoid the layoffs.” And plenty of stroke, too, he added silently. He’d called in a lot of favors to make sure that not only would he stay but those in line ahead of him for promotion would get the ax instead. He’d made captain less than six months later.

      “This is my home” was all she said to explain why she stayed. “I love this city.”

      “Even now?” he asked her, eyebrow cocked in disbelief.

      “Especially now,” she replied, a soft smile on her lips.

      He thought about that for a moment while he drank his café au lait. The night breeze brought the stagnant scent of the river, mingled with the aroma of beer and piss in the street. Even hours before dawn, the muggy air wrapped around them with warm tendrils, promising a brutal summer to come. But this city suited him, suited his personality. The Switch had been the best goddamn thing that had ever happened to him.

      “Me too,” he finally said, because he knew she expected it, and pushed aside the strange twinge of sadness that came from realizing that he loved it for far different reasons than she did.

      Though he never went back inside the club, he waited for her each night and walked her to the café. On the third night, she tucked her arm through his as they walked. On the fifth, she greeted him with a kiss and a smile.

      On the seventh, she asked, “Do you have a coffeemaker at home?”

      He had an apartment south of the Quarter, a more than decent place where he lived for free, thanks to a desperate landlord who agreed that it was better to have a cop live there than have squatters take up residence. With so many vacant homes and apartments in the city, it was rare for any cop to pay rent.

      It was almost a mile from the café, but she insisted that she didn’t mind walking.

      His place wasn’t overly messy, but it sure as hell wasn’t set up as a nice place to have company. The curtains had been left behind by the previous tenants, and had likely been old back then. Décor was limited to a pile of magazines with scantily clad women on the covers, a cluster of empty beer bottles on the coffee table, and, by the door, a framed newspaper article from several years back with the headline: Witness recants testimony. NOPD officers cleared in wrongdoing.

      He never brought girls back here, had never thought what it would look like through a woman’s eyes. Oddly ashamed, he started to apologize, but she stopped him with a smile. “It’s all right. It’s good. You’re a good person.” Which only made his shame increase, because he knew that he wasn’t, though it had never mattered to him before.

      He snaked his arms around her waist and pulled her tightly to him. She let out a small squeak of surprise. “Nah, I’m a bad boy,” he said, trying to be flip, yet feeling it like a confession. He instantly felt silly for saying it and sorry for being rough. He didn’t want this girl to think of him like that. He didn’t want her to be the kind who was only attracted to the assholes and pricks.

      But she simply smiled and laid her hand on his cheek. “You’re not fooling me,” she said, voice low and husky. “You’re my good boy.”

      Danny knew how to fuck, how to get what he wanted, how not to care. He’d lost count of the number of prostitution “arrests” he’d made—girls who’d paid their fine directly to him with their mouth or cunt. It had been a long time since he’d had any sort of concern for the pleasure of his partner, and he felt like a fumbling virgin as he touched Delia, shamed and horrified when his uncertainty translated into a betrayal of his own physical response.

      Yet she neither mocked nor took insult. Lowering her head, she gently coaxed him back, easing him, exciting him. And before he could squander her efforts, he shifted her to her back and returned the attention. She tasted sweet and wild, and as she tightened her hands in the sheet and cried out, he couldn’t help but feel a pleasure that nearly matched her own. When she finally lay spent and shaking, only then did he move up and find his own release, thrilled beyond measure when she clasped her arms and legs around him and cried out his name.

      He held her close after, stroking her hair as her breath warmed his chest, savoring the almost foreign sensation of feeling whole, secure. Happy.

      The next night they walked out to what was left of the Mississippi, made their way upriver, and stood on a dock where, only three years earlier, the Canal Street Ferry had loaded and unloaded thousands of cars and people. The river had a bit more temper here due to the bend in it and the way the silt had settled. The current roiled beyond the mud, but to Danny it felt like an older woman trying to prove she was young and attractive. Look at me, he imagined the river saying. I still got it. I’m still a bad girl. In a few more years, the silt would build up more and the river would subside, muttering, disgruntled, and hurt to be so unappreciated.

      “When I was a kid, my mom would take me out to the levee nearly every Sunday afternoon,” Danny told Delia. “We’d sit and watch the ships and barges go up and down the river and we’d make up stories about what they carried and where they were going.”

      “That sounds nice,” she said, tilting her head to look at him.

      “Yeah. It was cool. She’d pack sandwiches and chips and we’d make a picnic of it.”

      She leaned up against him. “Do your parents still live here?”

      “Dad left when I was about six,” he said. “Mom died about ten years ago. Cancer.” He shrugged to show her how much it didn’t affect him anymore. He wanted to tell her that he’d scattered his mother’s ashes in the river or on the levee or somewhere that would have been meaningful in some way, but the truth was that he’d never even picked them up from the funeral home. He didn’t care what happened to the ashes—not because he hadn’t loved his mother, but because he felt it was just one more stupid, sentimental detail that people wanted to believe was important.

      He looked out toward the bones of a ship that had been stripped nearly clean by the welders. That’s what it’s like, he thought. No one cared where that metal would end up. That ship would never be rebuilt.

      “Do you remember where you were when it happened?” she asked him, and for an instant he thought she was talking about his mother’s death.

      “You mean the Switch?” he asked, to be certain. She nodded. “Sure,” he said, thinking quickly. The truth was he didn’t remember exactly. Probably working. Maybe at home. It wasn’t until about a week later that it started to sink in to everyone that nothing was ever going to be the same, but even then he didn’t remember being upset or worked up over it. The fickle bitch of a river had run off, it wasn’t ever coming back, and that’s all there was to it. “I was on a domestic violence call,” he decided to say. “I’d just put handcuffs on a guy for slapping his wife when my partner told me the spillway had collapsed and the river was changing course.”

      She looked at him as if expecting him to say more. He wondered if maybe he should make some more crap up, add some details and tell her that the guy worked on a ship and had come home to find out that his wife had been screwing another guy. Maybe tell her that he’d slapped his wife in front of their six-year-old son, and that as soon as he was bailed out, he hopped on another ship and never returned.

      No, Danny decided. Best to leave it as it was. One thing he’d learned from the perps he arrested was that most of them tripped themselves up by making their lies too complicated. Keep it simple and short. Less to keep straight that way. “So, where were you?” he asked her.

      Delia blinked, pursed her lips. “I was at the emergency room with a neighbor of mine. She … fell and broke her wrist. I was playing with her daughter in the waiting room when it came on the TV.”

      She turned back to the water, rubbing her arms against the light breeze. “I wonder what they’ll name

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