In the wake of the storm, NOPD officer Marlin Boulet attempts to rescue survivors, while his partner, Charlie Pratt, gets scared and takes off.
Two years later.
Captain Embry introduces Boulet to his new partner… Trevor Cobb, an ex-Army Ranger who did two years special ops in Afghanistan. Boulet can’t figure out why a guy from up north would want to be a cop in New Orleans.
When Embry announces to the team that they need a couple guys to cover a charity event in the French Quarter to benefit the Ninth Ward, Cobb smirks. He thought this was the badass squad, didn’t expect to be covering social events. Boulet tells Embry that he and Cobb will take the assignment.
That night at the benefit, Boulet toasts to a long partnership; but Cobb tells him he doesn’t drink on the job. An attractive blonde, Christina DuBois, hosts the event. She gets up and gives a pep talk about rebuilding the ninth ward. Boulet notices Cobb staring at her and informs him that she’s Rex DuBois’ daughter. He owns the casino. Cobb’s going to need to make a lot more than 29K a year to pluck that flower. Suddenly a shot rings out and Boulet’s friend and neighbor, Kaja Fontaine, the singer at the event, goes down. Boulet and Cobb jump into their car and pursue the shooter. Cobb shouts directions to Boulet as they track the perp through the city to the casino, where they find his car flipped and abandoned.
One of the officers, Jeff “Glue Boy” Gooden, hands Boulet a baggie full of worms found in Kaja’s dressing room. Apparently they were delivered in a flower box. Boulet thinks he knows who sent them. Tommy Corville, a fisherman who was also Kaja’s boyfriend until she broke up with him a week earlier. Another officer, Ginger “Love Tap” LeBeau, informs Boulet that Kaja just died.
Out on Tommy’s fishing boat, Boulet dumps the bag of worms on Tommy’s head while dangling him overboard. Tommy swears he’s been on the gulf coast shrimping for the past two days and had his brother deliver the worms. When he can’t give Boulet the name of any buyer, Boulet cleats the rope and Tommy plunges underwater. Cobb thinks maybe he’s going a bit “overboard,” but Boulet recounts other stories of Tommy’s abuse towards Kaja.
Back at the station, Embry announces he’s sending some guys to the fish market to check out Tommy’s story. Ginger informs him that they found a couple joints and a gram of coke in Kaja’s car. Boulet insists she was off drugs; but in any case she wasn’t killed for them. Embry gives Boulet and Cobb the good news that they’ll be going back to the charity event for a second tour of duty… only this time they’ll be accompanied by a bunch of harbor cops. After the briefing, Boulet looks up and sees his old partner standing outside the fence. Charlie seems to know as much about the previous night’s event as Boulet does. He explains that he held onto his police radio when he left and he’s been diligently listening to it ever since. Charlie asks why Boulet hasn’t returned any of his calls. Mostly he wants to know if he’s talked to Embry for him yet. Boulet tells him he hasn’t and he’s not going to.
Boulet comes home to find his estranged wife Ayana and their daughter Tawni. Ayana informs Boulet that they’re just back to get the things he refused to send them. Couldn’t bring himself to send them, he corrects her.
At the charity event, Christina DuBois tells a reporter that she thinks Kaja would have wanted them to come back tonight… to reverse the perception that the city she loved is a lawless, dying place. The reporter thinks it’s remarkable that Christina can stay so positive given the tragic circumstances of her own brother’s death. Christina refuses to comment on that.
At the bar, Cobb overhears Christina and asks Boulet what happened to her brother. Turns out he was murdered in the Ninth four years earlier. He stopped to change a tire and someone stole his wallet and bashed in his head. Boulet’s cell goes off. Tommy’s alibi checks out. He didn’t kill Kaja. Suddenly the party is engulfed in gunfire. Boulet and Cobb run out to their car as it explodes.
The next day Ginger informs the team that in spite of all the gunfire, they somehow came out of it with only three broken bones. No fatalities. Cobb points out that the bullet holes in the banners were well above people’s heads. These guys weren’t shooting to kill… they were shooting to miss.
In the casino security booth, Boulet and Cobb look at surveillance footage. No sign of their guy. Then Boulet notices a screen of gamblers with just part of a roulette wheel spinning in the corner. He asks the head of security, Gordon Wix, to show him the footage from Tuesday… at around 10:30pm when the shooter would’ve come through. Wix hesitantly nods to the technician who presses some buttons and the footage appears. Boulet notes that now the roulette wheel isn’t in the footage at all. Cobb asks what it would mean if all the sector’s cameras were off by a few inches. The tech responds that a four foot wide path would’ve been completely obscured. Wix turns to the room, demands answers. Then he promises to get to the bottom of it.
Outside, Boulet notes that mistakes like that just don’t happen in casinos.
Down the street, they run into Charlie, who’s been waiting for Boulet. He managed to come up with a file on the casino employees they just questioned. Turns out they are gulf war vets turned mercenaries. They’re part of BlackRiver Security and they’ve got a contract with the casino now. Boulet tells Charlie he did good. Charlie insists that he’s going to win back Boulet’s trust.
Boulet and Cobb head to the DuBois estate where they inform Christina and her father about their suspicions. Rex tells them he’s not going to spy on his own employees. No problem, they’ll just get a warrant. They ask Rex if he’s really willing to take the risk that his daughter won’t be the next victim. He’s not. He tells them to do what they need to do… quietly.
Boulet and his wife are sharing an intimate moment when they suddenly notice water pouring down the stairs. Boulet runs upstairs and grabs their terrorized daughter. Outside, Ayana starts screaming when she notices her address in Atlanta spray-painted on the side of the house. Whoever did this knows where she lives.
Back at the Casino, Boulet, Cobb and the team make their arrests… and not quietly. At the station, Boulet and Cobb question Wix. He claims to have been at home in his hot tub at 9:15 the previous night when the water bomb incident occurred. Boulet tells him he thinks they figured NOPD cops were quitters, so they sent him a message. Then he makes it clear that they sent the message to the wrong guy.
Back at the station, Embry reprimands Boulet and the team for their impulsive roundup at the casino. He’s already received two calls from the FBI because Black River Security is employed by the federal government. And more importantly, they give millions in campaign contributions to a particular political party. Get the picture? Embry sends them all off to gather some actual evidence.
Boulet throws the keys at Cobb and instructs him to drive to Ziggy’s, his favorite gumbo joint. It’s what Boulet does when he needs to think. Under the freeway overpass, he tells Cobb to stop the car. They get out and Boulet jumps him. What the hell? Boulet wants to know who he really is. Man from Cincinnati driving to Ziggy’s and asking no directions. Boulet pulls a gun on Cobb and tells him if he lies again, he’ll cuff him before he even sees his hands. Cobb explains that he did his basic training at Fort Poke in Leesville and came down here all the time. Then he warns him that if he ever does that again, one of them isn’t walking away. Boulet drops the gun.
Boulet looks down his street and for the first time notices all the “Sold” signs. He suddenly realizes that all the property in the ninth is being bought up by a single company called ‘Orleans Renewal, Inc. He pays a visit to an old girlfriend in real estate. Now she’s running a real estate/voodoo shop. He discovers that ‘Orleans Renewal belongs to the DuBois family. Suddenly it all adds up in Boulet’s head.
At the DuBois estate, Boulet and Cobb tell Rex that his daughter’s been paying Mr. Wix and his company to sabotage her own charity in order to scare people away from the ninth so she can buy up all the land. Rex is ready to have Boulet and Cobb thrown off his property, when they hand him copies of stock certificates in a land holding company incorporated by Christina, made out to Wix and his company. Christina doesn’t deny it. She tells her father she didn’t do it for the property. She did it for her brother who was murdered in the ninth with a tire iron. She doesn’t want those people ever coming back. She confesses that for her the hurricane wasn’t a disaster, it was a cleansing. Rex tells Christina to stop talking. Boulet cuffs her and is reading her her rights when a red laser dot lands on her forehead. Cobb yells for everyone to get down. Boulet tackles Christina to the floor, out of harm’s way; then he and Cobb bolt out the door, guns drawn, in time to see a black SUV speed off.
They chase down the bullet-proof vehicle when suddenly they hear Charlie’s voice on the police radio. He’s also in hot pursuit and tells them he’s closing in. Charlie deliberately crashes into the SUV, disabling it. One of the shooters grabs Charlie and takes off in his car. Boulet forces the bloody SUV driver to tell him where his partner is heading.
In an abandoned field, a helicopter waits to pick up the shooters. The shooter screeches to a halt, gets out and starts running for the helicopter. Boulet has a Katrina flashback and hesitates when he sees Charlie’s car, with Charlie trapped inside, rolling towards the pier. Cobb screams at Boulet to snap out of it; then he runs to the river, dives in and rescues Charlie. Boulet recovers, grabs an industrial hook attached to a heavy chain, and hooks it onto part of the chopper’s underbelly, forcing the helicopter to land.
Boulet heads home and discovers his neighborhood has organized a house-drying party. Cobb is already there, digging a hole to replant one of his trees. Boulet tells Cobb he hesitated when he saw Charlie. Cobb acknowledges that Boulet’s human. And so is Cobb. Boulet pulls out a police record on Cobb. He tells him not all the records were lost in the storm.
Cobb explains he was born and raised in New Orleans East. From March ’04 to when the storm hit he was doing time at OPP. When the jail flooded his cell mate, who couldn’t swim, was pulling him down with him, so he… and we flashback to Cobb holding his cellmate’s head underwater. Then Cobb explains to Boulet that when he escaped, he vowed that if he got a second chance he would change his life. Boulet warns him that if deep down he’s still a criminal, he’ll know and he’ll take him down.
But in the meantime? Boulet buries Cobb’s criminal record along with the tree.
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