Floodgates Read Online Free PDF Page B

Let me answer that one. We will. And neither of those cities will look like this, years after the fact.” She spread her arms wide and spun slowly in place, gesturing at the ruined houses spreading out around her, one desolate block after another.
    Slowly, she let her arms drop to her sides and, tears on her face, turned to gaze mutely at the camera for a moment. Then she raised a hand and pointed at a spot somewhere behind the camera. “My home was three blocks in that direction. If the levees that my tax dollars…and yours, Mister Book Author…if the levees that our money built had held, then I’d be living there, instead of sleeping on my cousin’s couch. Don’t you be telling these people that my home’s not worth rebuilding.”
    Nina started slowly backing away from the camera. The newscaster slashed her hand across her throat, and the cameraman quit filming after Nina’s first few steps. Faye could see her friend shrinking back into herself, and she missed the new, fiery Nina.
    Within three steps, Nina had stumbled over a curb and dropped to one knee, but the news audience wouldn’t see that. They wouldn’t see a clumsy, dowdy woman willing to make herself look stupid, if that’s what it took to be heard. No. They would see a prophet weeping for a lost city.
    Jodi sighed like a woman who’d lived through too many surprises for one day. She asked the reporter, “Was that live?”
    The newscaster didn’t have to say yes. Her I’m-going-to-get-a-Pulitzer smirk said it all. Faye reflected that the woman had done exactly nothing. The Pulitzer people might very well respond to what she just saw, but Nina was the one who had done her research and gotten her point across to the masses. She was the one who deserved a Pulitzer.
    ***
    Louie Godtschalk tucked his notepad under his arm, and decided to forget the academics and politicians that he was scheduled to interview. Well, perhaps he wouldn’t forget them. He’d just set them aside for the day or two it would take him to draw this passionate woman’s story out of her. Because she unquestionably had a story. No writer worth his salt could possibly look at her face and fail to see that.
    The detective, too, looked like a woman with things to say , and he’d wager that those things were worth hearing. And the biracial woman standing next to her, the tiny thing wearing army-green pants and heavy boots—she looked like someone worth knowing. She also looked like someone who didn’t suffer fools gladly.
    Louie Godtschalk came from Louisiana Creole stock, and the men in his family were routinely coaxed and bullied into their best selves by the women in their lives—women with guts and heart. The frothy little girl who had thrust her microphone in his face was not one of those women, but these three were.
    Louie knew that he was pushing the tolerance of American readers with his esoteric little book on the making of New Orleans. How many pages about drainage and levees and (God help him) sewage could he expect people to read, when they had access to all the mindless drivel in the world? Not many. But these women might be his answer. If he followed them around for awhile, they might lead him to stories that would hold the attention of even the flightiest American.

Chapter Six
    Jodi’s forensics team had made progress. There was no longer any need to refer to the victim as “it.”
    Beneath the dumbbell, and wrapped around the pelvis that Faye had known would be there, were a half-rotted pair of size two jeans. The forensics lab would carefully remove the jeans and use scientific methods to determine the sex of the pelvis, but the jeans already told the tale.
    Faye supposed there were men in the world who would have worn jeans with multicolored beads stitched across the butt, but she didn’t think many of them weighed a hundred and ten pounds. She decided not to spend much time meditating on the fact that this woman’s jeans had survived water and heat and