Doing the Devil's Work (36 page)

Preacher was quiet a long time. “I guess we’ll both know after today, one way or another, if you’re gonna make it with us or not.” He looked away from her, scratching at the stubble on his throat. “Dispatch will have a twenty on Ruiz. I’ll reach him for you. Should I tell him to meet you at the Sixth?”

Maureen shook her head. “Tell him to call me on my cell. I don’t want anything out over the radio. We’ll pick a place to meet when he calls me. And tell him he better not tell anyone else about it, especially Quinn.”

Preacher sucked his teeth. “I don’t think we have to worry about that. We both know Ruiz is cutting his ties with Quinn. That should’ve been the tell right there that Quinn had gone too far.” Debris crunched under Preacher’s feet. “The DC? What do you want to do about him?”

“I’ll follow you outside,” Maureen said. So she was going to talk to the district commander with a pocketful of bribe money. So be it. Why not? That cash would go a long way toward a new bed. She deserved it. “May as well get it over with.”

Preacher stopped them in the doorway. “The TV people are arriving. DSU. WWL. We can do this inside.”

“Fuck it,” Maureen said. “The people who shot at me are going to be waiting for the news reports. I want them to see my smiling face. I want them to know they missed their shot at the title.”

26

In the time it had taken Maureen to sweep the debris into a large mound in the corner of her living room and for Preacher to come through with info on Ruiz, the day had flipped personalities. The warm, sunny morning gave way to high gray clouds. A damp and chilly wind rolled in from the west. Though hours off yet, heavy rain was on the way. The city would get one of those cool and windy October nights that reminded everyone that there would finally, mercifully, be a fall.

Before leaving the house to recover her car and meet Ruiz, Maureen had pulled on a brown leather jacket over her long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. The jacket covered the service weapon she wore tucked into her waistband at the small of her back.

Two miles away, on the border of the Sixth and Second Districts, Maureen found Ruiz in the St. Vincent de Paul No. 2 cemetery across the street from Newman High School, sitting alone on a white marble bench between two decrepit crypts, his elbows resting on his thick thighs, his fingers laced in front of him. His blue uniform was stretched tight over his big shoulders. A paper coffee cup sat at his hip. He was waiting for her right where Preacher had said he’d be.

At first glance, Ruiz appeared to be puzzling over the faded names and dates on the crumbling grave marker before him. Maureen realized that he frowned not at what he saw, but at the thoughts moving around like clouds in his head. She could only imagine what they were. He appeared contemplative, a mood Maureen had never witnessed in him, and something about the look of it on him struck her as sad. He was a living version of the solemn, mourning statuary that surrounded him. The ground hadn’t shifted under only her feet in the last few days, she thought. Others she worked with had lost their bearings and their balance, as well.

She was, however, she reminded herself, the person getting shot at.

As she approached Ruiz, she considered asking to sit beside him on the bench. She decided against it. She had neither the time nor the inclination to make nice. No good cop today.

“You heard what happened,” she said, looming over him, crowding him as much as her size would allow.

“I heard. I’m sorry.” He turned his hands palms up, studied them. “I’m glad, everyone is glad, that you didn’t get hit. Anyone get hurt?”

“The neighbor’s dog took some shrapnel. He should be okay. That was it, thank God. I went out for breakfast. First time in weeks, maybe months.” Saved, she thought, by the anomaly. “Can you believe that?”

“I’m sorry about that Marques kid, too,” Ruiz said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that. I’m sorry we scared him like we did over Scales. We never really meant him any harm. We wouldn’t have hurt him. The way I figured it, we were doing him a favor, keeping him convinced not to testify. You have to admit, that was the quickest way for him to get himself killed. Our way, scared into keeping his mouth shut, he was protected. I know who we are, what we’re supposed to be about, to represent, but who living in the real world believes any of that protect-and-serve bullshit anymore?”

“I’ll explain it to him,” Maureen said, “next time I see him. But I don’t think he’s gonna see it your way. I’m not sure I do, either.”

“This thing with Heath got bigger,” Ruiz said, spreading his hands, “way bigger than it was ever supposed to. And it went all crooked. You have to understand, those militia fucks, I didn’t know a thing about them.”

“Then why the transfer request?”

“Quinn was getting weird,” Ruiz said. “Paranoid. Truth was, the worse shit got with his ex and the boy, the angrier he got. Bad things were happening with him and it started coming out in these crazy ways, him blaming everybody, anybody, for his life being fucked up, for him being broke all the time, for his boy getting knocked around. He was drinking on duty. Getting into other shit.” Ruiz shook his head. “Quinn doesn’t know I asked for the transfer. He thinks it was forced on me. I tried to use our splitting up to help him, to play it like people were getting suspicious of us, that maybe they were trying to break us up. I thought maybe he would take it as a warning to mellow out, that he would get the hint.” Ruiz pulled out his cell phone from his pocket, looked at it, and set it on the bench beside his coffee cup. “I got a wife. I got daughters. I’m a team player, Quinn is my boy, but there’s only so far I can go with his shit. I can’t get fired, lose my pension, my benefits. I can’t go to jail. Not for Quinn’s weirdo friends.”

“Quinn didn’t get the message,” Maureen said. “You need to tell me where I can find him. He can’t get out from under this on his own. We both know Heath won’t help him.”

A long, shrill coach’s whistle and the voices of shouting girls emanated from one of the school athletic fields, the sounds echoing off the stone surrounding Ruiz and Maureen. After-lunch P.E., Maureen figured.

“You know who the Mannings are, right?” Ruiz said.

“I’m from New York,” Maureen said, “not Mars. One of them plays up there, you know.”

Ruiz turned, looking over his shoulder at the back side of the school. “They went to that high school right there, Newman. I want my girls to go there. I went there, too. Matt did, for his freshman year.”

“Matt who?” Maureen asked, confused.

Ruiz considered Maureen for a long moment, looking up at her, his eyes narrow and dark. For some reason, she had the feeling he was about to stand and walk away from her, that he had lost any hope of their conversation being useful. He checked his watch, looked away from her. She wasn’t sure what she would do if he tried to leave the cemetery. He had a hundred pounds on her. She thought maybe staying engaged in the conversation, wherever it wandered, would keep Ruiz seated. “Matt would be who?”

“Matthew is Quinn’s first name.”

“I never knew that,” Maureen said. It was true.

“I knew him since he and I were six years old.” Ruiz chuckled. “Me and him, we grew up together, right over in the next neighborhood, in Broadmoor, two houses apart. He’s got three brothers, they’re named Mark, Luke, and John. None of them live here anymore.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I am not,” Ruiz said, shaking his head. “No shit. His parents were like that. Super Catholic. Super devout. His grandparents were worse. Bible thumpers from the Irish countryside. That’s why, when he got in trouble, he ended up in Ignatius instead of reform school.”

“I thought that was some exclusive boarding school for big shots.”

“What? No. Who told you that? It was a last-chance stop for rich white boys before juvenile detention and grown-up jail. Nobody admitted it, nobody talked about the school that way, but that’s what it was. If your family had the dough to grease the juvie courts and the Church, and your son couldn’t stay out of trouble in New Orleans, you shipped him off to the Jesuits in Mississippi. Nobody who could afford it wanted their kids in the city system with the blacks, you kidding? The public schools were bad enough.

“You ever been to Bay St. Louis? If you want to relax in the quiet by the Gulf, it’s perfect for that. You’re a teenager that likes raising hell and you don’t know anybody in town, it’s fucking miserable. That’s where Gage came in. He was Caleb’s go-to guy. He was a couple years older. He’d flunked out of Ignatius but stayed in town, worked in the cafeteria, did odd jobs on campus, something like that. He was another Louisiana kid, small-town south Louisiana.”

“They all know each other,” Maureen said. “Gage, Quinn, and Heath. They’ve been a team for years.”

“The three of them have been runnin’ podnas for decades,” Ruiz said. “In Bay St. Louis, Quinn was raising hell alongside them every step of the way. Even back then, as a teenager, Caleb had a way of sniffing out people useful to him and making them feel like his friend, usually by using his money. He really just wants to be worshipped. Gage was a delinquent, the kind of guy Caleb wouldn’t spit on in New Orleans, but in Bay St. Louis he knew where to find the easy drugs and the easy girls. He’d find them trouble and Caleb would pick up the tab. But Gage was watching and learning.

“When Gage needed a silent partner to support the Watchmen, Heath was the first person he called. Heath couldn’t hand out the cash fast enough. Caleb was a real swinging dick in high school. Think of the rich kid with the big watch outside of F and M’s, the one who found Gage’s body. Bankrolling a gang of badass gun-happy rednecks brings Caleb right back to his glory days cutting up in Mississippi. Quinn told me that Gage made him some ridiculous camouflage jacket with stripes on the sleeve and epaulets and some stupid Watchmen logo on the back. Got him a matching ball cap.

“Caleb wants to be like his old man. Always has. He wants to be a boss man, have people kissing his ass. He wants to preside over an empire. Only he doesn’t want to work for it, he just wants to peel the bills off the roll. Say what you want about Solomon, he put his time in. He builds shit. Caleb just wants to tear down.”

“The city’s full of rich, spoiled white kids,” Maureen said, “who aren’t financing domestic terrorism.”

“Maybe Caleb’s a true believer,” Ruiz said with a shrug. “Maybe he
believes
that Sovereign Citizens fuck-the-police Don’t Tread on Me shit. Maybe he’s been in it with Gage from the beginning. Maybe it goes all the way back to those days in Mississippi. I wasn’t really tight with Quinn again till we were cops. All I know is some people, you look at them and you can tell they came off the assembly line with hollow, empty spaces where important parts should’ve gone. Caleb Heath is one of those people. So’s your friend, whatshername, that woman from the pickup truck. Heath’s got money; she doesn’t. Otherwise, I don’t see a whole lotta difference. They’re not
whole
people. We should be glad we can’t understand them.”

“So when Gage tells Heath the Watchmen want to do business in New Orleans,” Maureen said, “and that they need some local connections, Heath calls Quinn. That’s the next step. Gage to Heath to Quinn.”

“Exactly. Heath calls Quinn and says, hey, our old pal Clayton Gage is in town, he needs a guy who can hold some product till he can move it through town. Me and Quinn, we have Shadow on a short leash from a pot bust, we go to Shadow, and Shadow puts Gage’s flunky Cooley with Scales. Now we have Scales, who everyone is looking for, under our thumb, and we figure we turn him over to Atkinson as soon as Gage is done with him. We’ve got the whole thing worked out. This is New Orleans, it’s all who you know.”

“Except,” Maureen said, “Scales pisses off one of his girlfriends and she dimes him to Atkinson before the product has been moved. And your business deal with a gunrunning child killer goes up in smoke. What a fucking shame.”

“We didn’t know,” Ruiz said, “that the product we were dealing with was guns. Anyone says product, we think drugs. I never heard about guns until the story of you guys busting Scales went around. We made introductions, we never saw none of it after that. I never saw Gage, never met him, until that night you stopped him in his daddy’s pickup truck.”

“And you never asked, did you?” Maureen said.

“I had no idea about the guns, and we were gonna give up Scales as soon as we were done with him, I fucking swear. Heath played us, all of us.”

“I had no idea,” Maureen said, “that Quinn came from big-enough money to roll with the Heaths.”

“He doesn’t,” Ruiz said. “At the time Matt got in trouble, his father worked at City Hall, in zoning and permits. Solomon Heath paid Quinn’s way through Ignatius, all three years, and got himself a helping hand in the system for his Christian charity. That’s how Matt and Heath became friends. If that’s what you want to call them. Their fathers put them together.”

“They don’t seem a natural pair,” Maureen said.

“But they are, Quinn is his father’s son,” Ruiz said with a shrug. “Owned by the Heaths like his daddy. And proud of it. They use him. Like a farm animal. He needs them. He’s been paying child support for ten years. He needs the work they hire him for. I know he does. And it’s not like the old days in the eighties, nobody’s doing hits for the mob anymore. We’re not criminals. In Matt’s defense, I think he decided to become a cop on his own. His dad was dead by then, grandparents, too, and his brothers left town, even before the storm. I always wondered if Quinn became a cop because he thought it was the best way to be useful to the Heaths. They’re kind of the only family he has in New Orleans anymore.”

“He needs to get away from them,” Maureen said. “Forget the history. He needs to talk to me now. His buddy Caleb is in bed with cop killers, with terrorists, buying them their guns, helping them move into New Orleans. Caleb’s not footing the bill for truck-stop speed and condoms in Bay St. Louis anymore, Rue.”

Ruiz said nothing.

“Rue, listen to me. I’m done keeping a lid on what we did, not with a house full of bullet holes. Compared to everything else going on, our cover-up is small potatoes. Forget the brass, forget the feds, what do you think is gonna happen in the department when word gets around that Quinn is protecting cop hunters. A betrayal like that? Forget it. Cop or not, he’ll be lucky to get out of New Orleans alive. What do you think happens to
us
when word gets around we covered for him?”