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the night jailer to bring Felix “Chula” Ramos to the interrogation room. When Chula arrives, his body is clinking with waist and leg chains. He is wearing only a pair of white boxer undershorts and they look strangely innocuous against his tattooed skin.
    “Lose the restraints, Cap?”
    The night jailer is old and has gin roses in his face. He is not interested in either the thespian behavior of others or saving them from themselves. “Holler on the gate,” he says.
    Chula sits at the government-surplus metal table and takes my inventory, one hand relaxed on the tabletop. “I could rip out your throat. Before you could even beg, that fast,” he says, snapping his fingers.
    I pinch the fatigue out of my eyes. “Your fall partner, what’s-his-name, Luis, is an ignoramus, but I think you’re even dumber than he is.”
    The skin twitches under Chula’s left eye, as though an insect is walking across it. “Say that again?”
    “You guys dissed me and the sheriff because you have outstanding federal warrants on you and you thought you’d be blowing Bumfuck for an upscale federal facility. It’s not going to happen.”
    “You’re sending us to ’Gola, you’re saying?”
    “Eventually, but right now we’re transferring you to Central Lockup in New Orleans. Notice I said ‘you,’ not ‘you all.’ Orleans Parish has warrants on both you guys. It’s chickenshit stuff, but we’ll be honoring the protocol and shipping you off before dawn.”
    “The whole City is getting blown off the map. Who you kidding, man?”
    “With luck the prisoners at Central Lockup won’t be deserted by the personnel. But who knows? The salaries of civil servants in Orleans Parish suck. Can you tread water in a flooded room full of other guys doing the same thing?”
    “That ain’t funny, man.”
    “The sheriff and I had a big laugh about y’all’s jackets. Your fall partner boosted a bank in Pennsylvania, but a dye marker exploded in the bag and queered all the bills. So your idiot of a friend took seventy-five thousand dollars in hot money to a coin laundry and washed the bills over and over until they were pink. Then he tried to buy a forty-thousand-dollar SUV with them. This lamebrain not only outsmarted you, he cluster-fucked you six ways from breakfast. You’re going to do double nickels at Angola, half of it for him. If you think I’m lying, call me after you go into lockdown with the Big Stripes. Know what the Midnight Special is up there? Think of a sweaty three-hundred-pound black dude driving a freight train up your ass.”
    I wink at him. He stares at the opaque whiteness of the door, a shadow-filled crease forming across his brow. I can hear him breathing in the silence. A bolt of lightning crashes outside and the lights in the building flicker momentarily. “What you want, man?”
    “You said your sister was in the sack with a junkie priest.”

CHAPTER
6
    BY MIDMORNING NEWSCASTERS all over the country were announcing that Hurricane Katrina had changed direction and had dropped from a category 5 storm to a category 3 just before making landfall, devastating Gulfport but sparing the city that care forgot.
    New Iberia’s streets were clogged with traffic, as were those of every other town and city in southwest Louisiana, the Wal-Mart parking lot a coordination center for fundamentalist churches that unhesitatingly threw open their doors to anyone in need of help. But the sun was shining, the wind flecked with rain, the flowers blooming along East Main, more like spring than summer. We all took a breath, secure in our belief that we had faced the worst and that the warnings of the doomsayers had been undone by our collective faith.
    But the newscasters were wrong and so were we. New Orleans’s long night of the soul was just beginning.
    During the night hurricane-force winds and a tidal surge had driven oceanic amounts of water up the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, nicknamed the “Mr. Go” canal, all the way