The Chef Read online

Oh, right. For a minute there, I forgot Vanessa was married. To a total jerk. A wealthy jerk that could probably buy six of these food trucks with change found under his living room couch cushions.

  “Hey, no problem,” I say. “I’m glad you stopped by to see me. Maybe we can—”

  “I stopped by for a sandwich, Caleb,” she says briskly, her attitude turning chilly. “Nothing more, nothing less. Have a good night…and tell your partner I appreciate her working late.”

  Vanessa turns and walks away, her slim shoulders slumped. I watch her for a moment, hoping she’ll glance back. Hoping she’ll give me a sign she’s interested in more than just my food.

  But she doesn’t.

  Chapter 16

  I AM nothing if not a man of my word. I promised Marlene I’d clean our truck again, so that’s precisely what I do—and then some.

  My grumpy ex-wife heads home a few minutes after Vanessa leaves, with one parting shot: “Poor big handsome Caleb. Thought his last-minute meal would save the princess. But the princess is going back to her troll, and you’re going to be stuck doing the dishes.”

  I know she’s on the money—which I refuse to admit out loud—and I spend another hour wiping down the stove again, rewashing the pans and utensils, and re-sanitizing our prep station.

  The next morning, I get up a whole hour early—still stiff and sore with my one-sided fight with a baseball bat—to give Killer Chef a good scrub on the outside, too. Since you can’t exactly drive a giant food truck through an automatic car wash, I park her on the curb in front of my colorful ranch house in Tremé—a funky, historic part of the city I just adore—to do it by hand. I fill an empty plastic trash can with soapy water, grab a long-handled mop, and get to it.

  Soon the truck is dripping with suds, top to bottom. I’m dripping, too. This is harder work than it looks, but the predawn morning is cool and quiet, and I’m enjoying the solitude. A couple of the neighborhood kids who are also up early peer at me and give me big waves, and I wave back. When Killer Chef and his magical truck started parking here, I made a point of passing along leftovers to area families I knew were going through rough times.

  But I did it right. I gave them my food with a slip of paper, saying I was doing test runs in my kitchen, and having their written reviews would help me out. It still works today, and you know what? They and their kids watch out for my truck, and not once has it ever been spray-painted, or broken into, or had the tires slashed.

  I uncoil my garden hose and start spraying Killer Chef’s shrimp-and-crossbones logo with water, washing off the last of the soapy suds, when a couple of the kids across the street yell out, “Hey, mister, watch out! Watch out!”

  I turn, and a man pops up from the other side of the truck, and I nearly turn the hose on his face full-force—thinking at least the cold blast of water would knock him back—but then I lower the hose and say, “Shit, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

  It’s not Ty Grant, nor anyone from his posse, nor anybody wearing yellow, or even a reporter from the Times-Picayune or a TV crew looking for an ambush interview.

  It’s my former boss, Chief of Detectives Brian Cunningham.

  I lower the hose and he steps forward, saying, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Trying to save some face, I reply, “That’s not why I said ‘shit,’ Chief. Shit is what you look like.”

  I hate to admit it, but it’s true. His eyes are red and droopy. His hair is all mussed up. His striped blue tie is stained and lying askew across his belly. And his dress shirt is so wrinkled it looks like a white raisin, and there are stains along his gray slacks legs. Even when we’ve worked some vicious and shocking murder cases in the past, going “balls to the wall” for days, I’ve never seen him like this.

  “A week without sleep will do that,” he says. “Look, Caleb, I need to talk to you.”

  I give my old boss a brisk shake of my head. “Don’t bother, Chief. I’m over it.”

  While I’ll always resent the way he left me hanging during the whole shooting investigation, I have too much respect for the man to hear him grovel. I’m sure he heard about my baseball bat meeting with Ty Grant and wants to make late amends. I go back to spraying down my truck, the water pinging loudly off the metal siding.

  “Caleb, I’m not here to—”

  “It’s too late for an apology,” I tell him. “Official or otherwise. I’m not interested. Besides, handing in my resignation was the best decision I ever made.”

  “Would you please just—”

  “Do I miss my old job?” I ask. “Sure. But my life is good now, Chief. I’m cooking around the clock. I bet the Franklin Avenue knuckleheads eventually stop following me around and go back to selling dope and making money. And I feel happier than I have in a very long—”

  “Damnit, Rooney, can you shut off that water and listen?”

  I worked for him for six years and never once heard him raise his voice to me. Something’s wrong. I lower my hose and turn off the spigot.

  He wipes his face with his right hand, lets out a deep sigh. “During a staff meeting of senior department heads a week ago, we got an unexpected visitor who made everyone sit up at attention.”

  He grasps the lapels of his jacket and flips them back and forth. “From the feds. Dressed in a much nicer suit than mine.”

  I drop the hose on the pavement, try to find a dry piece of my T-shirt to wipe my soaked hands, and fail.

  “Who was he?”

  “Special Agent Marcus Morgan, with the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. He was paying us a courtesy call. To let us poor peasants know that he and his team had come here to investigate a high-level terrorist threat alert against New Orleans. One that’s both credible and imminent.”

  “Shit,” I say. “Now it makes sense. A week ago I was on Bourbon Street, saw two undercover cops scoping the crowd along with two tactical unit guys in full battle rattle. They wouldn’t say why they were out and about, only that some higher-ups were spooked.”

  He nods. “Spooked. Yeah. How about scared shitless?”

  There’s a spreading puddle of water from my hose going across the pavement. “Marlene and I also spotted two Black Hawk helicopters flying low and slow near the Garden District the other night. Part of the alert?”

  He nods and says, “You may think you’re just cooking there, Chef Caleb, but you sure as hell are staying alert.”

  “Did the feds say when we might get hit?”

  He holds out his hands. “When else? During Mardi Gras. Nine days away. And we’re not talking one nut or two like the Orlando nightclub shooting or the Boston Marathon bombing. This? We could be dealing with an entire cell of professional, stone-cold killers who want to do as much death and destruction as possible.”

  My God. Out here on the quiet morning streets of my dear Tremé, it seems like I’m in one of those nightmares where you see something dangerous and violent approaching you, and your legs can’t move, freezing you in place.

  “Any indication how?”

  He shrugs. “Take your pick. Suicide vests, IEDs, snipers, biological weapons like anthrax…the thing is, terrorist bastards are always one step ahead, weaponizing stuff that’s usually innocuous. Like box cutters, or razor blades, or sneakers, like that shoe bomber asshole in 2001. It’s all due to him that thousands of folks have to take their shoes off every day at airports.”

  I say, “What’s our…I mean, besides the higher alert and more guys on the street, what’s the department’s action plan?”

  “Plan?” he says. “Jesus, Caleb, we didn’t have time for any planning after Morgan briefed us. Every cop in that room started yelling out offers to help, however they could. Anything the feds needed, the NOPD would give ’em. Resources, manpower, equipment, intel, you name it. And that’s why you’ve seen those additional faces on the street.”

  Up the street two young girls are jumping rope, their cheery little voices reaching us here, these two older and wiser men talking about h
undreds—hell, maybe thousands!—dead in just over a week. Those little girls. My friends. Neighbors. The tourists coming here, looking for a good time.

  Now they’re all just targets.

  “And what else?” I ask.

  “Hah,” he says, weaving back on his heels. “That’s an excellent question. ‘What else?’ Everyone in that room with a crescent badge demanded that we do more, flood the streets, start cracking down on our street sources and other informants to see what we could squeeze out. But you know what happened, right?”

  Right, I thought, remembering my senior year in high school, right after 9/11, and learning later that the information and intelligence was out there about the impending attack, but bureaucratic inertia and turf battles let al-Qaeda proceed unmolested, sending nearly three thousand innocents to their graves.

  “They said screw you, stay out of our way.”

  Another sigh from my overwhelmed and overworked former boss. “That’s about it. Morgan said we should keep our damn mouths shut and stay the hell out of it. Let them handle the situation.”

  “Christ, that doesn’t make any sense, Chief,” I say. “The FBI always coordinates with the locals with something like this. We know the city better than anybody. What’s different this time?”

  “Way above our pay grades, Caleb,” he says. “Some big-time meetings are taking place in DC. Apparently, there’s international security implications, too. Unbelievable, isn’t it?”

  He shakes his head with disgust and dread, and right now, I’m so angry I feel like punching a hole into the side of my truck.

  “After the agent and his team cleared out,” he continues, “Superintendent Fontaine took the floor. Everyone—and I mean everyone!—thought he was going to say to hell with the feds, that we have to save our city, and do what has to be done. Instead, the ass-kissing bastard doubled down on Morgan’s orders. You can imagine the response that got…but he wouldn’t say anything different. Even said that under threat of immediate termination, everyone in the department would follow the FBI’s lead. Or else.”

  I’m disgusted but not surprised. “Sure, from Fontaine’s perspective, doing that makes sense,” I say. “He follows the FBI’s lead and nothing happens, he’s gained a lot of favors with the feds. And if something does happen, well, his hands are clean. How could a department like us win out against the big bad feds from DC?”

  “Shit, yeah, right to the point as always, Rooney.”

  “Then again…maybe the feds are overreacting. Getting jumpy. Maybe their intel stinks, and they don’t want to look embarrassed if they’re wrong.”

  “But what if their intel isn’t wrong?” he says. “Doesn’t mean we have to follow their lead, now, does it. But here we are, with our collective thumbs up our asses.”

  I see the little girls still jumping rope and turn away so I don’t have to see their innocence and, yes, vulnerability. I say, “Yep, that sounds like the dysfunctional New Orleans Police Department I used to know and love.”

  “The one and only,” he says.

  I go to grab my hose to roll it up and put it away.

  “No offense, Chief, I’m sure glad I’m no longer part of it.”

  He narrows his eyes and gives me a cryptic look that stops me in place.

  “Me, too,” he says. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Rooney, we need your help.”

  Chapter 17

  I’VE SEEN my former commanding officer make that face before. It used to mean he was about to give me an order he knew I wasn’t going to like. But now that he’s not my boss anymore, I don’t know what the hell it means.

  “Hold on, Chief,” I start, but he cuts me off.

  “Do I have to remind you what happened the last time the feds showed up to ‘help’ us through a major crisis?” he says, shaking his head in disgust. “How the hell did that work out for the Big Easy? Am I right?”

  Of course he’s talking about Katrina. A brutal once-in-a-century hurricane that battered our city and changed it forever, leaving behind waterlogged corpses in the streets, thousands of destroyed homes and dreams, and neighborhoods that more than a decade later are still ghost towns. When it was all over, nearly two thousand New Orleanians had lost their lives, many of them women and children, and there are some who think that number is still too low. I remember drinking in a Bourbon Street bar one night, years ago during an anniversary event of Katrina, and one old-timer saying to the other, “You know what the difference is between New Orleans now and Nazi Germany in 1945? Back in ’45, the Americans treated Germany’s cities better after it was all over.”

  Yeah, so there’s not much of a reservoir of trust and good feelings toward the feds.

  But now, a major terrorist attack during Mardi Gras? The body count could dwarf the Katrina stats, make the memories of that killer storm seem pleasant in comparison.

  “You don’t have to convince me,” I say. “But what kind of help are you talking about?”

  He nods. “No one’s counting on a couple carpetbagging suits from DC to keep us safe. Least of all me. Like you said, Rooney, no one cares more about this place—or knows it better—than the people who call it home. But no one’s willing to touch this thing. Not with the FBI up our ass and the superintendent rolling over like a dog. Everybody’s hands are tied.”

  He pauses a moment, and I know what he’s going to say next, and I beat him to it.

  “Except for mine, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  I shake my head in disbelief.

  “Chief, you want me to interfere with a federal terrorism investigation? As a civilian?”

  “I want your help, Rooney. I want your eyes. Your ears. I want you to knock on doors. Knock around a couple heads if you have to. I need someone on the outside. A man I can trust. A good cop who gives a real damn about this city—”

  “I’m not a cop, Chief. Not anymore.”

  “Tell that to the gangbanger you chased down the other day,” he says. “You couldn’t stop yourself from going after a purse snatcher. Are you really going to sit on the sidelines now? Bullshit. I know you, Rooney. It’s who you are.”

  I try to keep my expression calm and composed. But I’d be lying if I said his words weren’t touching a nerve in me.

  “Look, even if I wanted to…I used to work major crimes,” I say. “My beat was homicide, gangs, drugs. We’re talking a terrorist cell infiltrating the city, setting up…whatever the hell they’re planning. Where would I even start?”

  He glances down at his shoes, like he’s ashamed at what he’s going to say next.

  “I wish I could tell you. Agent Morgan and his team wouldn’t say a peep after that shit-ass briefing. They’re keeping their leads and intel close to the vest. I’ve spent the last week poring over hundreds of our old case files, looking for any terrorist links. I got nothing.”

  Great. So this isn’t just the biggest case I’ve ever tackled. It’s also the coldest.

  “There’s always something, Chief. Maybe you’ve been sitting behind a desk for too long.”

  “Let’s hope you haven’t been standing behind a stove too long,” he shoots back, lightening our collective mood just a bit as we both smile.

  He extends his hand. “Thanks, Rooney.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. I haven’t done a thing.”

  “No,” he says with confidence. “But you will. I know you too well.”

  We shake, affirming our secret pact. Then Cunningham turns to go, and something comes to me.

  “Chief…” I say. “You showing up like this—why the whole fedora-and-trench-coat routine? Why not save yourself a trip and just give me a call?”

  He turns back and speaks plainly. “Because if the feds are any good…and I pray to God that they are…they’re listening. To both the good guys and the bad guys.”

  Chapter 18

  CUNNINGHAM’S WORDS leave me in a dark place that morning, thinking and re-thi
nking, pondering and trying to come up with avenues of approach to grab an investigative thread—any thread—and start pulling. During the entire busy brunch shift, as the customers line up, I get a sick feeling to my stomach looking at this line of innocents, knowing at this moment, there are probably a group of men in this city who would love to see them dead, shattered, bleeding, wounded, and screaming in pain and horror.

  My old chief is right. This city’s been to hell and back once before. I can’t leave its fate in the hands of a bunch of outsiders. I have to step up and help.

  But how?

  My head is swirling so much, I botch not one, but two, food orders that morning. I even nick the tip of my index finger with my chef’s knife, an amateur accident I’ve not had in years.

  My ex-wife easily notices that something’s on my mind. But in typical Marlene fashion, her “support” comes in the form of sarcastic scolding.

  “Hey, quit fantasizing about that married broad and focus on our food!”

  Of course I can’t tell her the truth. That I’m not daydreaming about Vanessa.

  I’m trying to figure out how to prevent a nightmare.

  It does leave a bad taste in my mouth, not being able to tell Marlene what’s really bothering me, but I need to keep focused, and I can’t bring her into what I’m doing.

  I’ve done it before when I was active-duty in major crimes, but it still doesn’t make it feel any better.

  When the morning shift finally ends, I hang up my apron and bid Marlene adieu. Then I hop the Rampart Street streetcar and ride it to the end of the line. From there it’s a short walk to my destination: the central business district. A lot of folks think New Orleans is all old, narrow roads and balconied town houses. But this “downtown” part of the city has wide, traffic-snarled avenues running between tall, glistening office towers.

  It’s also packed with people. Especially lots of children, everywhere I look. Which isn’t typical, but today is the first Sunday of Carnival season—“Family Sunday,” as it’s known—and the procession passing through here this afternoon promises to be a lot tamer and more kid-friendly than most others. At least by New Orleans standards.