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wealthiest in the country. They had mansions there bigger than the elementary school where his wife Grace had taught for twenty-five years. Old Texas oil money at its most decadent.
    River Oaks was built well beyond the flood zone. Shaw searched his memory for the last action reports he’d read on the area and couldn’t come up with anything beyond the common nuisances that came with any bad weather incident.
    “I guess you’ve got a few downed power lines, water service interrupted, roads closed, some property damage from airborne tree limbs. That about cover it?”
    “As a matter of fact, no, Captain, that doesn’t about cover it.”
    Shaw didn’t have time for the other shoe to drop. “Okay?” he said.
    Robinson huffed again, and Shaw had to smile at the mental image playing through his mind. Robinson was an effeminate man, delicately built, prissy, hardly what you’d expect from a family that grew out of Old West pioneers and wildcatter stock. Shaw could almost picture the man pushing the gold-rimmed glasses back up his nose while trying to hold on to his patience with both hands.
    “Look here, Shaw, you know what a lift pump station is?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “So you know what happens when a lift pump station gets its electrical power knocked out.”
    “Yes, sir, I do.”
    The city of Houston had been dredged from a swamp back in the early 1800s. As it grew, it was forced to come up with sophisticated ways of disposing of its wastewater and sewage. Over the years a vast network of sewage lift pumps had sprung up around large developments. The lift pumps moved sewage out of the neighborhoods and into treatment plants owned and operated by a company called CenterPoint.
    When the power was off, the pumps couldn’t work. Sewage backed up. Stinking brown water bubbled up from manhole covers. Backyards turned to rivers of filthy, muddy slime. The air thrummed with the collective murmuring of vast clouds of mosquitoes and flies. After Hurricane Ike back in 2008, the same problem had led to twelve reported cases of West Nile virus.
    The answer, of course, was to get power back to the lift pumps; and to do that, relief workers had to physically climb into each station and connect it to a generator. They would then pump the station until it started yielding clean water again, and move on to the next station.
    But it was a monumental task—maybe even an impossible one, under the present circumstances. CenterPoint had given him twenty-four generators, which was all they could find. Most of their equipment was still underwater, and probably would be for a very long time. And with those twenty-four generators and the twenty percent of their workforce they could locate, CenterPoint was setting out to do the impossible.
    Of the city’s three surface water treatment plants, two were currently underwater. The third was so badly damaged it would take months to bring it back online.
    Of the seventy-five core ground water plants, all were currently offline. Of those, fifty-two would have to be completely rebuilt. Nothing was salvageable.
    None of the city’s six pressure-boosting/repump stations had survived.
    And the list just kept getting longer with every new report coming across Shaw’s desk.
    Thinking about that lengthening list, Shaw almost missed what Robinson said next.
    “I just got off the phone with Jason Weeks over at CenterPoint,” Robinson said. “He tells me that you have appropriated every single one of their generators.”
    “Yes, sir. That’s true.”
    “It is?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And who, may I ask, gave you the authority to do that?”
    “I’m not following you, sir.”
    “You’re not?”
    “No, sir. I’m not. What seems to be the problem?”
    “The problem? The problem ? Captain, are you trying to be obtuse? Is that what’s going on here? Do you think this is funny?”
    “Sir,” Shaw said, his voice heavy with exhaustion, “last night I was on a bass boat touring the Lower Second Ward