The Devil Always Collects Read online

  The Devil Always Collects

  John Moore

  Copyright © 2015 John Moore

  Second Edition 2018

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13:9780996342803

  Dedication

  For Sam, My Son

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One: A Day in My Life

  Chapter Two: A Night in My Life

  Chapter Three: The Zombie Life

  Chapter Four: Shopping day

  Chapter Five: Bad News

  Chapter Six: Stalker Trouble

  Chapter Seven: Pesticide Pollution

  Chapter Eight: Sugar Time Happy Time

  Chapter Nine: Processed Food Show

  Chapter Ten: Back in New Orleans

  Chapter Eleven: Mardi Gras Ball

  Chapter Twelve: Death is Lurking

  Chapter Thirteen: Mourning a Loss

  Chapter Fourteen: Changing Jobs

  Chapter Fifteen: Seeking Redemption

  Chapter Sixteen: Bail or No Bail

  Chapter Seventeen: Search for the Truth

  Chapter Eighteen: Funerals and Stashes

  Chapter Nineteen: Hospital

  Chapter Twenty: Interpol

  Chapter Twenty-One: Chasing the Evidence

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Unwelcomed Help

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Back in Business

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Devil’s Disciples

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Setting Sail

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Captured

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: El Alacran

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: More Bad News

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Blogging in the U.S.

  Chapter Thirty: Small Victory

  Chapter Thirty-One: Going Back Home

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Reckoning

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Debts Come Due

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Trapped Again

  About the Author

  Chapter One:

  A Day in My Life

  “Reverse engines! Reverse engines,” the deck hand yelled trying to raise his Cajun accented voice over the pounding rain blowing sideways across the river. But his warning was too late. The barges, caught in the current, were heading toward the bridge, the Huey P. Long Bridge in New Orleans. The roar of the push boat’s engines now in full reverse throttle screamed as lightning flashed across the morning sky. He grasped the aluminum railing of the ladder leading to the second level of the tug. As if in slow motion, the lead barge of twelve, loaded to the brim with crude oil, crashed into the bridge. The sound of metal against concrete drowned out all other sounds and the deck hand struggled ferociously to retain his grip on the ladder lest he be thrown into the muddy, Mississippi water. He prepared himself for the worst, the darkness of the water, the pungent smell of the oil leaking from mangled barges. Would the bridge tumble down, crushing the tug boat and killing him together with God knows how many rush hour motorists on the bridge? He cast his prayers to heaven as the boat tilted on its side. He feared the boat would never come to rest until it reached the bottom of the river.

  “Alexandra, get your ass in here! What do you know about this mess on the Bayou Oil account?” Mr. Jenkins, a crusty, balding man in his late sixties yelled. “Sarah slapped the paper on my desk and this shit’s on the front page. Huge headlines. Barton wants this incident to go away.”

  Oh, shit. I knew this thing was going to blow up. I bolted out of my hidden section of the cube farm and dashed into Mr. Jenkins’s office, heart and pulse pounding. Mr. Jenkins is such a dick. He overreacts to everything, screaming and acting like his intestines were on fire. Maybe this time he had cause to trigger the fire drill. Maybe this is really, really bad. I barely entered the room before I was hit with a flying copy of the New Orleans Times he threw at me, the article trumpeting, “Bayou Oil Management Reckless: Barge Still Leaking.”Giant-sized print, no less. The words in the headline are taller than my outstretched hand.

  “John, calm down,” Sarah said. “We’ll figure this out. After all, Bayou did run their barge into the Mississippi River Bridge. What did you think the paper was going to do?” If any of us knew the newspaper business, it was Sarah. She sold stories to the Times as a freelance journalist for five years after she finished journalism school at Tulane. Sarah Richard had shoulder length blonde hair, framing a face more suited to a model than a retired journalist and current PR manager. Her voice had a calming effect on me and on everyone within earshot. She seemed to always have it together no matter what the situation. Not like me. I pee my pants every time old Jenkins says my name. I hope someday to be like her. She’s 46 but looks no older than her 30s. She’s so fit. No bulges except where they are supposed to be. She’s elegant and graceful too.

  Jenkins jolted me back to reality.

  “Who the hell are you dealing with at that rag of a newspaper anyway?” Before I could answer, he reminded me that he started this PR company, and it’s his name on the door and his ass on the line with Barton. I’ve heard that familiar refrain too many times to count. Funny how he yells at me and I’m on the hot seat. His ass is nowhere in sight.

  “Doesn’t matter which one of those vultures is writing this gibberish, they are all a bunch of hacks anyway.”

  I pushed my chestnut brown hair from my eyes and acted as if I were reading the article for the first time. Sarah’s right, what did he expect the newspaper to write? New Orleans gets its drinking water from the Mississippi River. Now, a barge was leaking crude oil in it, and people had the right to know. I could never bring myself to drink New Orleans tap water knowing it came from the river. Everything I drink is bottled: water, bourbon or beer. And then there’s the fact that Bayou Oil is not the media’s darling. It has a long history of reckless behavior. The only reason its owner, Dan Broussard, isn’t in jail is that he’s rich and politically connected. Politically connected in New Orleans, Louisiana is everything. It’s not what you know; it’s who you know in this city. No sooner did I have these thoughts than Jenkins spoke them.

  “Goddammit! If Edwin was still governor, we’d be able to make one call and get this all straightened out. Best governor we’ve had since Huey Long. Those meddling Fed sonsabitches put him in jail over nothing. He always gave the people more than he took,” Jenkins screamed, looking across Poydras Street more or less in the direction of the Federal Courthouse.

  Edwin Edwards, former governor of Louisiana. The people admired him for his polished good looks, Cajun charm, quick wit, and glib tongue. He’s the stuff that myths are made from. The Feds weren’t impressed or interested in his looks or his tongue. They watched his hands, which they concluded were in the pockets of every company doing business in the state.

  “Screw the myth, it’s the man we want to pay for his crimes,” a determined FBI agent once said.

  That agent got what he wanted, too. The federal prosecutors in New Orleans put his hands, adorned with their accessory bracelets, his glib tongue along with the rest of him in jail for eight years. I don’t think Jenkins ever got over it.

  Sarah poured him a glass of Black Jack whiskey, two fingers, and put it in front of him. She knew exactly how to shut him up. He wasn’t a heavy drinker by New Orleans standards, but a couple of slugs of whiskey kept him on track. In the lull as he was guzzling it down, Sarah seized her opportunity.

  “Let’s hear what Alex has to say,” she said, looking directly at me. Her voice was cool, calculating and calming. It reminded me of a cat purring. Soft and soothing.

  Her confident manner calmed me down just like it always did. Sarah always looked out for me and I trusted her completely. There wasn’t a malicious or scheming bone in her body. She always wante
d the best for me and everybody else. It’s like she possessed magic healing powers; she dispensed confidence like doctors wrote scripts. It worked too. Words catapulted from my mouth, aimed right at Mr. Jenkins. Dead on target.

  “I called the Coast Guard and got a statement from Captain Richard Moore, the officer in charge of the accident investigation and the spill cleanup,” I said. “They will have it all contained later tonight. The estimates of how much crude leaked into the water will be downgraded tomorrow morning at their press conference. I spoke to Jess Johnson at the Times and gave her all the details. She should be speaking to the captain right about now confirming what I told her. She ran the spill story today because it was the biggest story of the day, but will run a follow-up tomorrow, downplaying the environmental threat. We will be off the front page by tomorrow morning. They’ve got the kind of story they love to put on the front page tomorrow. Seems they’ve found another body. The Quarter Killer has killed again. If it bleeds it leads, they say.”

  “Oh, no,” Sarah gasped. “Not another one. How many has he killed”? Sarah’s change in demeanor was vivid. The color left her face, pale replaced pink. Her voice was shrill and at least one octave higher than normal. It was apparent that she was unnerved by the random body drops happening around us. Who would be next was on everybody’s mind. As a woman living alone, who was next was certainly on my mind.

  “Seven or so,” I said. No one knew exactly how many he’d killed or anything about the Quarter Killer’s rampage in New Orleans. The police had no clue who he was or why he was killing young women. I was petrified and just the mention of him paralyzed me. Every woman I knew was scared to go anywhere for fear that she’d be next. He had been killing women age 25 to 45 for about five years now. Those were the only details that had been released by the police and were the only ones I knew to be true. The street talk and rumors were far worse. Dismembering, mutilation, torture, rape. Raw fear permeated the city. Deep in my fibers, often unspoken, was an ever-present fear that I might be next. My mind tortured me. Who is this guy? Why is he doing this? Questions without answers. Just like his killings without reasons. Maybe there was no why. My mind drifted to a dark region of my thoughts, a place without time or space, only terror.

  Mr. Jenkins broke the silence and croaked, “That’s good, he’s getting us off of the front page”—shocking bourbon talk that dragged me back to the present. Bourbon talk, callous but true. True in his world of getting it done for the client. I don’t believe he really took joy in some poor soul’s murder. He was just single-minded and able to divorce himself from the gruesome side of life. Maybe he’d lived too removed from compassion or maybe he never had it at all. He was on the back slope of his 70s, sliding faster than he wanted and clinging to any twig that might connect him to his fading world. Just another news story. No one he knew. People die every day. The death of an innocent person in the streets was not his problem. His problem was keeping his client happy and making money. Making as much money as he could in as short a time as possible. Cold, business thinking. Bourbon thinking.

  “Alex, let’s get a story ready about how much Bayou Oil is helping to clean up the mess. Bayou has worked round the clock, sleeping in shifts, bringing in experts—whatever we can find. We need something heroic to put a better face on them,” Sarah said to bring us back on topic. “Let’s run back-story articles on Dan Broussard’s charity work. We need images of good deeds, not black, gooey oil.”

  So, mission in hand, off I went to my cube world. The truth be known, I was happy to have the mission. I was damn good at this stuff. I could dig up good or bad stories about anyone or anything. I could grab your heart and change your mind. Manipulating human emotions is what I was born to do. Trained to do it, too. Excitement replaced fear. Still, something wasn’t right about the way Sarah reacted to the news of another body. She momentarily lost her composure. She never does that. I guess it’s understandable, though. She may be older than the victims, but she’s a woman. Soon enough, these thoughts fled, replaced by conjured images of Bayou Oil’s heroic efforts to save the city of New Orleans from polluted waters. I pulled up my background files on Bayou and Dan Broussard and hit pay dirt. Mr. Broussard was awarded the Humanitarian of the Year award by the New Orleans YMCA in 2005 for his efforts helping New Orleans get back on its feet after Hurricane Katrina. He worked with the Krewe of Rex charitable group to rebuild schools damaged or lost in the storm. He formed his own group to rescue cats and dogs left homeless by the storm, and built a shelter to house them until they could be reunited with their owners. The optics were great. He knew how to work the photojournalists. There were pics of him with the mayor, students, puppies and lots of little old gray- haired—or blue-haired depending on how the light hit them—women doing everything from hugging, cutting ribbons to just looking plain old cute. Smiles, smiles, and more smiles. Enough teeth to bankrupt the tooth fairy.

  He was also king of the Rex Mardi Gras Parade the following year. Bayou Oil celebrated by contributing $50,000 to Katrina cleanup efforts. Cleanup. I light went on and I said to myself, that was it. Bayou has always been first in line to clean up for New Orleans. I began to like this angle.

  My cell phone rang, and the newly familiar voice of Captain Richard Moore said, “Alexandra, this is Captain Moore, with the Coast Guard. The spill is contained. Bayou Oil’s crews have gotten the majority of the leakage safely out of the water and into a second barge. My preliminary investigation reveals that the accident was caused by a steering malfunction in the tugboat pushing the barge. The city’s water is safe, and the bridge did not sustain any appreciable damage. I am putting all these findings in my report.”

  Wow! Great news! Bayou doesn’t own the tug! They hired the company to push the barge up river. The spill isn’t really their fault. We’ve got to get this out. I hung up the phone and immediately called Jess at the newspaper. She had already spoken to the captain and was typing her follow-up story. She’d collected all of the details and was about to lay the spill at the feet of the tug company. I asked if they sent any photographers to get photos of the cleanup, knowing full well they did.

  She was way ahead of me and offered, “Would you like to look through them, dear?” I felt her smiling at me through the phone.

  I could barely contain myself enough to act nonchalant. “That would be wonderful,” I said.

  Jess is a Caribbean American woman, slight of build and close cropped hair, born and raised in New Orleans. She is widely respected at the newspaper and everywhere else. She has used her 51 years in journalism well. She started at the paper with a paper route, confident that she would someday be writing the articles in the papers she rolled and tossed in front yards. Jess maintained perfect grades all through high school and went on to attend the University of New Orleans where she graduated summa cum laude. The New Orleans Times snapped her up before she could market her talents to other newspapers. She loved the paper and the city. She knew everybody who was anybody and where all the bodies were buried. I knew she thought well of me. Jess once told me she could see her young self in me. She often chided me, saying I was wasting myself doing public relations work. She said she knew a hard-nosed journalist when she saw one. She always helped me when she could, and now she was doing me a huge favor.

  I was so excited, anticipating the likely spectacular photo optics of Bayou cleaning instead of polluting. Some other company polluted the river and Bayou Oil cleaned it up. They are practically heroes. For the second time today, I almost peed my pants with excitement. Before I could even call Sarah to fill her in, the photos hit my inbox. They were great. Bayou’s men all over the spill, wearing their brightly colored Bayou Oil coveralls. Containing barriers, vacuums, divers, a huge spotlight, and God knows what else. They marshaled it all like a military operation, working, cleaning and erasing the spill. I had what I needed. It was up to me now.

  I quickly wrote a press release describing Bayou Oil’s tireless eff
orts cleaning up the oil spill that they did not cause. I credited their post-Katrina cleanup experience for developing their expertise in disaster response. “They don’t waste time waiting for the responsible party to step forward; they go to work tirelessly defending the river and city we all love.” My spiel went on and on with photo reminders of Dan Broussard’s many charitable contribution and efforts for the city, complete with photos past and present. Of course, Jess only sent me photos the paper wasn’t going to use and which I was free to share with other media outlets.

  I brought Sarah up to speed and got the green light to charge ahead. I called all the local television stations and gave them a heads up before sending the press release, with accompanying photos. Then I reached out to the blogosphere and magazine worlds with the same info. I Facebooked, Tweeted, Instagrammed, and just about every other damn thing a person could do to get the word out. Within an hour, my spin on the spill was everywhere.

  By the time I wrapped things up, it was 6:00 pm, time for girls’ night out. Look out Big Easy, here I come.

  Chapter Two:

  A Night in My Life

  Now it was time to leave the dark side of the City, the work side, behind. It’s ladies’ night in the Quarter. Whoohoo!!! Bourbon time. Laissez les bon temps roulez.

  I was meeting Charlotte first for drinks at the Pat O’Brien’s in the Quarter. We are both huge fans of The Walking Dead. I haven’t seen her for two months. That’s eight episodes. I can’t wait. I don’t know what it is about that series that intrigues me, but I just can’t stop watching. Zombies, walkers, biters everywhere. Poke a hole in their head and they’re dead. How fun? Maybe I like all of the unpredictable chaos each episode offers. Nothing like the life I had on the Indiana corn farm I grew up on. I left that life as soon as I could for the bright lights and lazy days of New Orleans. You wouldn’t think Charlotte was the type to like it either. She is tall, slim and ridiculously attractive. Classy, with a dash of wild child in her. She has the cleverest intelligence about her I’ve ever seen. She’s always got it together. Very clean, crisp and sharp. Charlotte’s never slutty. Of course, the calibration of the slut scale in this city is different than anywhere else in the world. Women in New Orleans don’t consider a lot of sex and sex partners slutty. This is the city that care forgot. What can you expect from a city that was originally settled by pirates and criminals? Morals didn’t play a starring role in New Orleans’ history and they barely make a cameo appearance today, despite the church crowd’s earnest efforts. Just look at the city’s early history. In the late 19th century, the city fathers created a prostitution zone for all so inclined to enjoy. Storyville was established by the New Orleans City Council, in an effort spearheaded by Alderman Sidney Story, to be a place where prostitution was not illegal. Not the same as legal in a technical sense, but that is the New Orleans way. They were not going to say it was legal, they just said it wasn’t illegal. So, from 1897 to 1917, Storyville was established by municipal ordinance to limit the sex trade in this wild, port city to a 16-block area. It didn’t limit prostitution; it just made it more convenient for the consumer.