The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke

the flashlight descended the stairs. Otis wrapped his left arm in the sling and steadied the rifle’s barrel against the trunk of a live oak, waiting for the front door to open.
    But the flashlight went out and the inside of the house fell into darkness. The front door did not open.
    Where was the boat?
    Otis stared into the shadows on both sides of the house and could see nothing of significance. Then, as heat lightning rippled across the clouds, he realized the flooding at the back of the house was even greater than in front. In fact, the alley and the garages along it were filled by a dark, swiftly running river that had created a navigable canal though the entirety of the neighborhood.
    Somebody hit the starter button on an outboard motor and Otis saw the bow of the aluminum boat plow down the alley, the dark shapes of four men slouched forward in the seats.
    He walked back home, his rifle slung on his shoulder. Tom Claggart and his friends were talking loudly in Claggart’s yard, lighting smokes, locking and loading, grinning at Otis. A couple of them wore olive-green T-shirts and camouflage pants with big pockets on them. “You save any for us?” one man asked.
    “They cut bait,” Otis replied.
    “Too bad,” the man said.
    “Yeah, too bad. There’s nothing like hanging black ivory on the wall,” Otis said.
    He had said it as bitterly and as ironically as possible. But to his listeners his remark was that of a kindred spirit. They roared at the inference. For Otis, that moment would remain like a dirty fingerprint on the mist, one that would come back to haunt him in ways he could not have imagined.

CHAPTER
9
    EDDY AND BERTRAND Melancon were not given to complexities. They kept it simple. If a good situation put itself in your road, you made use of it. If it might jam you up, you put it in the ditch. Anything wrong with that?
    Eddy and Bertrand saw the storm as a gift from God. White people in New Orleans had been making money on the black man’s back for three hundred years. It was time for some payback. The uptown area of the city, from Lee Circle all the way up St. Charles Avenue to the Carrollton District, was like a tree full of ripe peaches waiting to be shook. The Melancon brothers had never been house creeps. They specialized in armed robbery and took down only high-value victims and thought breaking and entering was for chumps who deserved what they got when they walked into a blast from a twelve-gauge shotgun. But when tens of thousands of homes and stores were abandoned and without power, their security systems worthless, the cops either gone or pulling scores themselves, what was a guy supposed to do? Crowd into the stink at the Superdome or the Convention Center and try to find a place on the floor where somebody hadn’t already downloaded his bowels?
    The boat they had boosted in the Ninth Ward was perfect for the job. It had a wide beam, a shallow draft, cushioned seats, and a seventy-five-horse motor on it. As long as they concentrated on jewelry, coin collections, guns, and silverware, and avoided loading with heavy stuff like television sets and computers, they could possibly amass major five-figure money by dawn. They just had to keep it simple. The only dude between themselves and Central Lockup was that cracker Purcel, a bucket of whale sperm who did scut work for Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater, and they’d run over his fat ass with their ’sheen in the Quarter, left that motherfucker not knowing what hit him.
    Now they were going house-to-house on a flooded street where every live oak was broken in half on top of the yards, only one house with lights working in it, choppers flying overhead to the hospital roof, not a police boat in sight, Bertrand and Eddy both working the upstairs of a mansion that had beds in it with canopies over them, like the kind in Gone with the Wind, Eddy stuffing a woman’s fur coat into a drawstring laundry bag along with a handful of necklaces he