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ON THE OTHER SIDE of the levee at the foot of Friscoville Avenue, the Mississippi River was the color of clay and smelled of spent fuel and something rotten.
Lester Frost’s muscle car chugged behind me as I frantically scanned the surface of the water, hearing Sunday’s words clang around in my head.
Go to the river, Cross, and find the mythological box before it floats out to sea.
Mythological box? All I could see were massive oceangoing cargo vessels, some heading to the port and others south toward the Gulf of Mexico. I strained to see the names of the ships but could make out only a few, and none of them suggested mythology or a box.
Before it floats out to sea.
I turned my attention south about a quarter mile to a small pier where a boom crane was loading pallets of supplies onto a flat-deck boat. Then I saw what bobbed in the water on the north side of the pier.
I sprinted down the embankment, opened the car door, climbed in, and said, “Take me down to that pier.”
Lester Frost didn’t like it, but he threw the GTO in gear and blazed down North Peters Street until he reached a ramp that led onto the small pier, which was owned by a service that ferried supplies out to the ocean-goers. As I was about to climb out, Madame Minerva said, “He means the box to be your tomb, pilgrim.”
“Not today,” I said, and jumped out and ran up the ramp to a small parking lot and the office.
“You rent boats?” I asked the woman behind the counter.
“Sometimes,” she said, squinting one eye at me.
“I’m a Washington, DC, police detective,” I said. “I need to rent that launch down there.”
“The Whaler’s not for rent,” she said flatly.
“Please,” I said, painfully aware of the desperation in my voice. “I’m trying to save my family. They were kidnapped almost two weeks ago, and I believe they’re being held on a boat heading downriver.”
She looked at me hard. “This is straight?”
“As an arrow. Please. I’m begging for their lives here.”
She hesitated, and then she reached under the counter, came up with a set of keys. “It’s my husband’s new toy. Whatever you do, don’t put a scratch on it. And give me a credit card to hold.”
I started to tear up, blessed her, gave her a Visa card, and took the keys. As I was pivoting to leave, I spotted the binoculars on the ledge of the window, facing the river.
“I could use those binoculars too,” I said.
She rolled her eyes and then got them for me.
“What’s your name?”
“Sally Hitchcock.”
“Sally Hitchcock, I will never forget your kindness.”
Sally Hitchcock actually smiled.
I ran out and looked back toward the road, wanting to wave in thanks to Frost and his mother. But the GTO was gone.
Five minutes later, I was pulling away from the dock in a Whaler 240 Dauntless with a three-hundred-horsepower engine that frankly scared the hell out of me when I pushed down on the throttle.
In the next half hour, I went thirty miles downriver toward the wetlands that stretched to the Gulf of Mexico, checking out every ship and boat that I passed and scanning the water for a floating box of some sort. In all, I saw thirty-nine vessels, and not one of them had a mythological name.
For several miles there were no boats at all save barges docked at the refineries and coal-transfer stations. Around nine thirty that morning I reached the Pointe-a-la-Hache Waterworks where the car ferry was crossing from the east to the west bank of the river.
To say I was shocked to see Lester Frost looking at me from the ferry would be an understatement. I waved. He waved back, with little enthusiasm. Beyond him on the deck, I could see the muscle car with the windows rolled down, and I had no doubt that Madame Minerva was still in the backseat calling the cosmic shots.
