Bound by Blood - Hardcover

Nelson, Rick

 
9780312372644: Bound by Blood
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0312372647 ISBN 13: 9780312372644
Verlag: Minotaur Books,US, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

New Orleans detective Jack Brenner is struggling with a faltering marriage, an injured partner, and an overbearing lieutenant when Emmett Floyd Graves, a convict facing lethal injection, sends Jack word through his lawyer that he has information about the unsolved murder of Jack’s cousin, a civil-rights worker killed in the summer of 1972.

Jack is intrigued but suspicious, and before he can figure out whether he’s being played, he and his new temporary partner, Keisha Lundy, are assigned to the drive-by shooting of a teenage boy. Eerily, both Steven Bowen and Jack’s cousin David were distance-running phenomenons at the same high school where Jack himself was a champion hurdler. Jack juggles the Bowen case with his own secret investigation of Graves’s claim, backed up by Keisha, who knows what it’s like to lose a young family member through violence. Jack thinks he has time to make sense of things before bringing anyone else into it. But then television reporter Willow Ashe, an old flame from Jack’s past, comes on the scene. She not only stirs up old memories of hot nights on the levee, but breaks Graves’s story on the evening news for all the world to see, including Jack’s lieutenant, wife, and aunt. Jack is in hot water at work and at home. But the publicity gets him what he wants---a chance to solve his cousin’s murder. 

The two crimes, separated by thirty years, send Jack and Keisha shuttling between the Big Easy underworld and the delta town of Bon Terre. Jack’s gut tells him that the Dixie Mafia kingpin who runs Bon Terre is somehow connected to both murders. Proving it will put him and people he cares about in the line of fire.

An impressive debut set among the moonlit bayous, great houses, and old ghosts of Louisiana, Bound by Blood delivers a fine balance of humor, violence, and sorrow.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rick Nelson had more than twenty years of experience in the energy industry and was director of human resources for the city of Pasadena, Texas. He lived with his wife in Houston, Texas.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Everyone in New Orleans knows that when you crack open a crab shell and a pungent ammonia odor smacks you in the face, the crab was dead before it hit the boiling pot. But the acrid air blasting my nostrils as I entered the Second District squad room Monday morning wasn’t foul shellfish. It was the cleaning crew’s liberal application of caustic wash to the linoleum floor. As I reached my desk, the phone rang and I lifted the receiver, not knowing I was about to rip open something that, unlike a putrid crab, I couldn’t toss away.

“Detective Brenner.”

“Jack, this is Neil Gross.” The nasal voice belonged to a public defender whose father generously supplemented his son’s income rather than let him join his law firm.

I settled into my chair. “A little early in the day for you.”

“I have an arraignment before a judge with a ten o’clock tee time. I’m on my cell phone sitting in traffic.”

It was July and a hundred percent humidity, but Neil no doubt had his Porsche’s top down. “So whose case are you pleading out today?”

“I’m the poor schmuck who got stuck defending that redneck scumbag Emmett Floyd Graves.”

“All your clients are scum, Neil. Isn’t he the guy who stabbed a corrections officer to death trying to get off the bus to Angola?”

“I pled him on drug dealing. Now it’s capital murder.”

“Then my advice is to lose the case.”

“Listen. I called you because Graves was in Bon Terre when your cousin David was killed.”

Hearing my cousin’s name caused my face to flush with the heat of July 1972. Static crackled in my ear.

“Jack? We don’t have such a good connection.

I clenched the receiver. “What’s your client got to do with David?”

“Oh, good. You . . . there. I . . . recharged the damn . . . Graves . . . he can—”

A dull hiss replaced the sputtering on the line. I returned the receiver to the hook.

“Smells like cat pee in here.” My partner, Ferrell Arceneaux, walked up wiggling his nostrils with his thumb and forefinger. A few months earlier, he was shot, almost fatally. He had lost weight from the surgery, but his belt was still a good six inches below the bottom of his tie. I was now working with a temporary partner until he was released for full duty.

Arceneaux sat at the desk across from me twitching his nose. I looked past him into another decade, my mind rapidly scanning through dark childhood images.

“What’s eating you?” he said.

My eyes refocused on Arceneaux. “You know a guy named Emmett Graves?”

“Yeah. He sliced up a guard trying to escape during transport to the Farm. Why?”

“Neil Gross is defending him. Says Graves was in Bon Terre when my cousin David was killed doing civil rights work there.”

Arceneaux pulled his lower lip. “David’s the one they named the chapel for at your temple, ain’t he?”

“The library.”

“What the fuck could Graves have to do with your cousin?”

“Don’t know.” I watched the fans spinning from the high ceiling. “Maybe he knows something about his murder.”

“Did he tell Gross that?”

I turned up my palms. “Neil’s cell phone went dead before he could finish.”

Arceneaux drummed his knuckles on the blotter. “Whatever it is, don’t get involved with Graves. I’ll tell you a story I heard about him when I was a uniformed in Lafayette.”

I leaned back in my chair.

“Emmett Graves came down here in the sixties from the red clay country up around Monroe,” Arceneaux said. “He got a job digging trenches for a natural gas line near the Atchafalaya in the middle of summer. The basin was boiling like a schoolhouse furnace, and Graves was slapping at mosquitoes in a ditch filling up with water almost as fast as the crew could sling out the mud. The working conditions didn’t bother him, but the black boy alongside him did.”

Arceneaux looked around, then leaned across the desk and hushed his voice. “He complained to the foreman about having to work with a nigger. The foreman told him nigger work was all Graves was fit for, so Graves cursed the man and walked off the job.

“The black kid didn’t show for work the next day neither. Someone cut off half his hand the night before.” Arceneaux drew a finger across his palm.

“That afternoon, the parish sheriff found Graves sitting without a shirt on the bank of a bayou holding a cane pole with a line in the water. There was a whiskey bottle and a brown paper sack next to him. One deputy lifted him up by the armpits and another grabbed the rod from Graves’s hands and pulled the line up. The hook looked like a burnt piece of pork sausage with a dull, hard covering at one end. When the deputy reached down and picked up the sack, he saw four black fingers in it and he spewed his lunch into the bayou. Then Graves says, ‘Can’t catch nothing with this bait. Don’t even a gar eat nigger meat.’”

Arceneaux sat upright and resumed a normal tone. “An all-white jury convicted Graves of simple assault. Nine months later, he was out, doing odd jobs and driving stolen cars to Texas.”

“This one of your Cajun yarns?” I asked.

“No siree. This is for true. I’m telling you. Don’t mess with Emmett Graves.”

The phone rang and I quickly grabbed it. “Brenner.”

“Sorry we lost contact.” Neil Gross’s voice was as astringent as the ammonia searing my nostrils.

“What’s this about Emmett Graves and my cousin?” I asked.

I heard him rev the Porsche’s engine. “He says if you visit him at Angola, he’ll help you find who killed David.”

The skin tightened across my forehead. “What’s he told you?”

“Not a damn thing.”

“How do I know this isn’t some sort of con shuck?” I asked.

“I’m a lawyer, not a mind reader. Let me know if you want to talk to him.”

I heard the Porsche downshift and the tires squeal around a corner.

“What’d Gross say?” Arceneaux asked as I hung up.

“Graves wants to talk to me about David’s death.”

“Cons always say they have information. He’s jerking your chain. Or Gross is trying to use you to muddy the waters at trial.”

“Neil isn’t that smart,” I said. “And he doesn’t care about his clients.”

“Well,” Arceneaux said. “No disrespect to the dead, but this is 2003. Whaddaya think you’re gonna do about it now?”

“What he’s gonna do is get that fine-looking butt of his out to the car.” My temporary partner, Keisha Lundy, stood over us like a five-foot-ten sculpture of polished obsidian. “We gotta meet with the DA before we get on the stand and put Frank Marino away.”

Arceneaux looked up at her with fretful eyes. “Sorry. Didn’t...

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Verlag
Minotaur Books,US
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312372647
ISBN 13 
9780312372644
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
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Verantwortliche Person
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