Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran Page B

for a few minutes, but I couldn’t quite see what he was doing up there. It looked like he was fixing something. But the power was still off for the whole block. Maybe he was trying to fix it.
    Maybe. But no one was trying to fix the power anywhere else. And I doubted that one little transformer was why it was down.
    Mysteries never end. But you can’t solve them all. Not in one day, at least.
    Â 
    I drove toward the Magnolia Projects. The projects were closed. I didn’t know if they’d been closed before or after the storm—like a lot of cities, New Orleans was shutting down its projects and sending people out into the world with Section 8 vouchers. Across the street was a blue shotgun house. The shotgun was missing its back wall. The side walls folded in where the back wall was missing.
    On the porch was a young girl of maybe seventeen with a pretty face and black hair in a ponytail. Her legs dangled where stairs used to be. Next to her was a boy about twelve, just as pretty. The girl was smoking a cigarette, or a joint, passing it to the boy, who had a few drags before handing it back.
    I parked the truck and got out and walked toward them. The girl watched me and the boy watched a tree on the street. The tree lay on its side, roots sticking out like arms. The girl smoked the cigarette. Up close I saw it was long and thin like a hand-rolled joint, but brown and wrinkled, as if it had been wet. Whatever they were smoking, it smelled sour. It wasn’t pot. The girl handed it to the boy, ignoring me.
    â€œAre you Lali?” I asked the girl.
    She looked at me.
    â€œLali?” I asked again.
    She nodded.
    I gave her my spiel of who I was and what I was doing and what I wanted. She looked down at the ground beneath the porch while I talked. She didn’t seem to be listening. They passed the cigarette back and forth.
    â€œI ain’t feel good,” she said when I was done. “I think I’m sick.”
    Her accent was so thick I had to translate in my head as she spoke. She looked sick. She looked listless and her hair was dull and broken. If she was in Westchester she’d be on thirty different meds and seeing three kinds of therapists. Here, she got a folding house.
    I asked her if she remembered seeing Andray that night.
    â€œI dunno,” she said. She didn’t look at me. “Andray? Shit, Iain’t seen him in, I don’t know. Long time. During the storm? I see Terrell. That’s who I see during the storm. Terrell and Trey. And Peanut too. I seen him.”
    I pulled myself up on the porch and sat down next to her.
    â€œAndray might be in trouble,” I said. “You might be his only alibi.”
    She laughed. It sounded like nothing was funny and nothing ever had been.
    â€œ
Andray
,” she said. “
That
mothafucka.”
    The boy reached into his pants and pulled out a .44 Magnum. I watched him. He didn’t point the gun at me or Lali. He pointed it at the tree. Lali seemed not to notice.
    â€œShit,” she said. “I ain’t remember nothing. That was fucked up. I ain’t remember seeing Andray nowhere.”
    â€œI’m not a cop,” I said to her. “I’m trying to keep Andray out of jail, not put him in.”
    I explained the situation to her again. She didn’t listen. She took a big hit off her cigarette and exhaled toward my face. It smelled sour and acidic.
    â€œWhat is that, anyway?” I asked.
    The boy shot the tree.
    Lali and I both jumped in place. When the shot hit the tree a bunch of living things rushed out of it: squirrels ran in a panic across the street, pigeons flew away in terror. The boy fell back from the blast and a quick smile flashed across his face.
    I reached over and grabbed the gun from the boy.
    â€œFuck,” he said. “I need that.”
    He looked at me. He looked scared. I gave him back his gun.
    â€œThem fuckers was laughing at me,” he said.
    â€œThe