I write this as I sip a latte and chew on a beignet in a café across the street from the entrance to Audobon Park on the St Charles Avenue side.  It's November in New Orleans but you can still sit outside in the afternoon and so far the promised tropical storms have done nothing more than create spectacular fireworks over the bayous. Tabitha Locke is busy taking pictures of the St Charles streetcar with the new camera her daddy bought her as a coming home safe present.  Devereux and Sommers delivered her back to her mother last weekend but her father immediately put her on a plane to New York, the whole incident of her disappearance put down to a Texan commune we'd pulled her out of ‘just in time'.  She got read the riot act for a day and then was showered with gifts.  They had two good days together before the inevitable fallout and she came back yesterday ‘for Mom'.  Mom isn't doing much better since I last saw her, given the growing proximity of Carcosa and the King In Yellow.  Yeah, we still got a lot to do. 

At least Dr Shine was shut down - an army of monsters on the loose and at Stenneau's beck and call would have been a nightmare.  In comparison with Cairo, this one went by the numbers and thank God no fatalities with just yours truly spraining an ankle and Parisi getting a little tenderised.  That, at least is the physical damage.  The mental costs are still being weighed.  Greene has taken vacation after nearly ripping the head off one of the ViCrime guys in an argument over a football game.  Fortunately, Pierce was around to intervene before any serious damage was done.   Then there's Sommers who hasn't really been the same since Martikian died.  She just has moments when she has trouble keeping her emotions and the tears in check - so far it has all been in the office and there's a washroom nearby where she can pull herself together but what's going to happen if she breaks down in the field?  To her credit, she held it together for the mission and I could see the Marine training kick in.  

So we've been back to the scene of the ‘event' as the curiously anodyne language of Delta Green calls it.  All caved in and hard packed like nothing was ever there.  Looks like Stenneau's team came and cleansed the place after we'd shoved a maverick missile up a certain Doctor's ass.  The clinic on Dumaine is dark and there's no sign of life.  DG want us to break in and search the place but so far we've held off and I'd guess if they cleaned the depot, they'll have cleaned there too.  The Doctor's residential address was almost empty - an outwards shell kind of like Shine's public face.   As far as we know, there's still something terrible lurking in the basement of the building where Marty went first through the door for the last time although the place apparently burned down earlier in the week so maybe Alice and her box of deadly delights took care of business before she blew town.  I hope so.  Pierce got an unsigned card from the Cayman Islands that said ‘Glad you're not here'.  Typical Alice, or Dottie or whoever the hell she was.  Whatever, it made us all smile. 

So the DG boys also left town after last weekend although I think the fixer, Barnard is still in the area.  There was a final debriefing session which was surprisingly tense.  Devereux pulled the jackets on Adam and Nancy, although how she got the intel is still a secret I'm sworn to keep.  Adam is ex-USN Seals but did stockade time for the rape and vicious beating of a female ensign.  Nancy was an FBI Agent who was found eating her former partner although he was already dead and they could never prove she was responsible.  She did time at a secure mental institution which she managed to escape from.  Technically she should be within walls but I sense the hand of Alphonse in all this and it's one of those cases that everyone involved would rather see long gone.  Great friends we have!  Anyway, Devereux saw the missile hit the gate but not much after that before Pierce pulled the switch on the winch that Greene had cleverly recommended, getting them both out of a burning hell in one slightly singed piece. 

Devereux is with her kid this weekend.  I know she wants to quit as SSA and go back into the pool but affirmative action could have her pinned in and the suits probably want a fall girl if the business with the mob war goes to shit.  Speaking of which, that seems to have swung back into action - three incidents in these past 7 days, all Stenneau hits on Farino businesses.  It's also killing season on the streets - homicides, especially domestic ones are up 250% on last year so the boys in blue are feeling the heat.  Parisi and Pierce have been enjoying themselves, kicking in the doors of recidivists with Stenneau connections and knocking heads.  Maybe if they shake enough trees, something will fall out but I doubt it.  Sommers and I have been looking for Stenneau personnel serving time - they all seem to have cushy assignments, if our penal system can ever be called such.   

Seven and a half weeks until New Year's Eve.  That's all the time we have to turn things around and Stenneau and Screech have been planning their moves for decades.  It's like Adam said, ‘Creatures are just creatures - most of them are dumb animals and can be shot and killed as such.  The people that use them and worship the Gods that spawned them are another matter.  That's where the danger lies.  It's hard to predict the moves of a madman.' 

Four weeks in the Big Easy and it feels like it's been years.  I lost a friend, sprained an ankle, gained a surrogate daughter and discovered there are things beneath the monsters in the abyss that Nietschze warned about, things beyond the capability of human minds to even envisage in their darkest nightmares. 

There's a hurricane brewing and it's going to swallow either us or Stenneau alive.  I look at Tabitha sharing a joke with my dead father and Paul Martikian and I think about Beverley, Cecile, Doris, Frost, Greg and Justin as late afternoon drifts into early evening.