Let the Devil Out (10 page)

Or did Staten Island have nothing to do with it? Had her recent night work in New Orleans come to light? That was more likely.

Wouldn't make sense, though, she thought, to be giving her back her badge if he knew she'd been out at night playing vigilante.

“Between what you went through with Quinn,” Skinner said, “and what happened at your house, those things are tough on anyone. To be honest, you look considerably frayed. Even after the time off. I expected better.” He paused, waiting for Maureen to consent to his assessment. “Maybe too much booze and not enough sleep,” Skinner said. He paused again.

Maureen blinked at him. Wow. It was that bad. Her hand went to her mouth. As if her breath were the only thing that might give her away. She wanted to crawl out of the room.

“I've been around cops a long time,” Skinner said. “I was here during Katrina, and for after. I have a pretty good eye for what a particularly stressed officer looks like.”

Maureen straightened in her chair. “I'm in the best shape of my life. My doctor says I have the resting heart rate of a professional athlete.”

“You don't have to see a department shrink.” If Skinner was impressed with her physical conditioning, she thought, he hid it well. “Or any shrink. But collect yourself. Smarten up.” He touched his finger to his chest. “I'm sending you out on the street with a gun. Me.”

“I will take care of it,” Maureen said.

“I have your word?”

She swallowed. She remembered that being a cop meant she would now spend a lot of time around people who read others as well as or better than she did. Skinner didn't get where he was by being easily fooled. “You do.”

Skinner reached her badge across the desk. Maureen took it, the badge warm from being held in the DC's hand. Her hand shook. She didn't care if he saw. She slipped the badge into her jacket pocket. She felt a foot taller with the weight of it against her breast.

“Becoming a cop is one thing,” the DC said. “Staying one, that's another thing entirely. And surviving New Orleans, that's its own thing again. Nothing wrong with getting help. Even Drew Brees has coaches. Going back to our talk of Mr. Loomis, you got drafted, and you made the cut at training camp.” He waited for her to finish the story. She wasn't sure what was supposed to come next.

“Sir?”

“The easy part is over, rookie. The academy, the training. The coddling, the encouragement, that's done. Time to do real work starts now if you want to stay on the team. These are the times that separate the men from the, well”—he smiled—“you know what I mean.”

“I do, I'm ready,” Maureen said. “I'm good to go. Who dat.”

“Good, that's what I like to hear.” He studied her, thinking. “The department has looked out for you. It's time to start paying back the favors.”

“Name it, sir,” Maureen said.
This
was it, she thought. She was ready.

“The FBI has reached out to us in the Sixth District,” Skinner said, “about the Clayton Gage homicide. The father of the victim has come to town asking questions. The FBI wants you to talk to him. You feel up to the task?”

“I don't know a whole lot about what happened,” Maureen said.

“If what you want to tell the man,” Skinner said, “is what you don't know, that's fine with me. I was asked to ask you to take the meeting.”

“I'll meet him. Of course. What do I do? I don't know how these interagency things work.”

Skinner shrugged. “They work however the feds want them to work. I was told someone from the FBI will reach out to you, sometime today. He'll have the details. He'll probably coach you up a bit, too.”

“So this is part of a bigger investigation?” Maureen asked.

“Like I said, I was asked to ask you if you would take the phone call and the meeting. That's as far as I go in this.”

“Yeah, tell the agent to call me. Absolutely, sir.”

“I don't have to tell you,” Skinner said, “that pleasing the feds—FBI, DOJ, feds of any stripe—is good for the department. Part of the reason I recruited you for the Sixth was to make me look good. Here's a big chance for you to contribute.”

“Happy to have it, sir,” Maureen said. “I won't let you down.”

“You're on night shift tomorrow,” Skinner said. He stood, extended his hand across the desk. “Welcome back, Officer Coughlin. What is it the kids on the street call you?”

Maureen shot up from her seat and reached for his hand. She shook it hard. She had her badge in her pocket. Tomorrow night she'd be back in uniform. Everything was right with the world. “OC, sir. They call me OC. Some of the other officers, too. You know, for Officer Coughlin.”

“Now, please,” Skinner said, checking his watch, “let's get back to what we call normal around here.” He sat back down behind his big desk. “Don't let me see you in here again unless it's for a commendation or a promotion.”

 

9

That afternoon, groggy from a long nap and pain pills, Maureen sat on her front porch wrapped in a Mexican blanket, her legs folded beneath her. She clutched a steaming cup of fresh coffee. In an ashtray on the table beside her a cigarette burned. The sky over the Irish Channel was the color of her ashes and the air was cold and damp. The warmth in her palms from the coffee mug helped push back the chill.

She'd slept away most of the afternoon in a deep, dreamless slumber, the best hours of sleep she'd had in weeks. She felt as if she'd awoken from hibernation.

When she imagined her next roll call, she couldn't help seeing Quinn and Ruiz waiting for her, cracking wise in the corner like schoolboys and smirking at their private jokes that no one else on the squad understood. But they weren't schoolboys, she thought, the warmth in her hands dying as she squeezed the mug tighter in search of more. And they weren't cops anymore. And it wasn't always jokes that they whispered back and forth and hid from the rest of the squad. Sometimes the secret commentary had been flat-out criminal. Her ankle ached.

As she shifted her weight in the rocking chair to relieve the pressure on it, the wood creaked beneath her and she remembered that this new chair was a replacement for the first one, a gift from her mother that had been shot to pieces by automatic-weapons fire. Quinn and Ruiz had been connected to the people who'd shot at her. Quinn and Ruiz had been criminals in cops' clothing, Maureen thought, and they had almost gotten her killed.

She picked up her cigarette, took a long drag, and picked up her phone. Time to call her mother in New York, she thought, blowing out a plume of smoke. Time to let Amber Coughlin know that her daughter had kept her job.

Amber's feelings would be mixed, Maureen knew, as they always were concerning her daughter's choices. Part of Amber would be glad for Maureen; she knew how much Maureen's new career and new city meant to her. And even if Amber didn't understand Maureen's love for what she did and where she did it, Amber believed that her daughter's love for both of those things was real. But Maureen knew that another part of her mother had rejoiced at the thought of her daughter flaming out in New Orleans, because failure in Louisiana kept alive the possibility of Maureen's return to New York.

Amber answered on the third ring. “What's wrong?”

“Really, Ma? I can't call to check in?”

“Sure you can,” Amber said, “but you never do. Whenever you call in the afternoon, it's because you have bad news. When you want to check in, you call in the evening.”

This is what happens, Maureen thought, when your mother falls in love with a detective. Weird, she thought, she never considered what had happened with Nat Waters and her mother “falling in love.” Had she ever even used those words? Her mother and Waters certainly never had. But here they were coming up on a year together, and they were happy, what else could it be? What else could she name it but love? And Maureen liked thinking about the relationship that way. She had never known her mother happy. Part of her ached at being so far away while it happened. But in her own way, Maureen realized, she was in love, too.

“Your old mother's smarter than you think,” Amber said. “So out with it.”

Not that love and happiness had changed Amber much when it came to her daughter.

“Shows what you know,” Maureen said. “I'm calling with good news. Great news, in fact. I got my badge back today. My next shift is tomorrow night.”

Maureen heard the instant's hesitation before Amber's answer as she adjusted her response from what she really felt to what her daughter wanted to hear. “I'm happy for you. I know this is what you wanted. And I'm glad they didn't use what those crooked bastards did against you. I have to say, I wasn't optimistic.”

“I was,” Maureen said.

“I know, though I don't know why. You always see the world the way you think it should be. It's why you're always getting disappointed.”

Maureen set her coffee down. She lit another cigarette with the embers of the first. Whoever invented e-mail, she thought, had conversations like this one with his mother. “Ma, did you miss the part where I said I got what I wanted? That things worked out for me.”

“You need to quit smoking,” Amber said. “How can they let you smoke at that job? Don't you have to chase people, be in shape?”

“Hey, Ma, my doctor says I have the resting heart rate—you know what, forget it. I wanted to let you know things worked out. I know you were waiting to hear. Tell Nat I said hello.”

“Maureen, wait,” Amber said, “while I have you, there's something we should talk about.”

“Is it Nat?” Maureen asked. Please, she thought, don't let there be a breakup. Or worse, another heart attack. The first one had been bad, a real close call, and he struggled with his weight. “Is he okay?”

“He's fine.” A long pause. “Well, do you remember Lori DiNunzio from across the street?”

Maureen sighed. She didn't know where this was going, but she was sure Lori DiNunzio wasn't what her mother wanted to talk about. “Yeah, of course, Ma, we walked to P.S. 42 together almost every day for years.”

“I always thought it was a shame you two drifted apart. You two played at her place every day and then you never saw each other.”

“We went to different schools after 42,” Maureen said. “You know how little girls are, everything or nothing.” Which was true, though it didn't help the friendship that Lori's skeevy older brother kept trying to put Maureen's hand down his pants when Lori was in the bathroom or went to get snacks. And that Lori pushed Maureen down on the sidewalk when Maureen told her what her brother had been doing. “It was no big deal. We stayed friendly when we grew up. I'd see her around the island. She'd come in now and then where I worked sometimes. Have a drink.”

“You know, you never had another friend like that,” Amber said. “A close one.”

“I had no friends after the fifth grade,” Maureen said, “that's right, Ma. That's so true. Thanks for reminding me. I guess it's why I'm so easily disappointed. And I did so have friends. Like the whole track team in high school. Just 'cause you didn't meet them.” Maureen caught herself. She knew she sounded like she did when she was fifteen. Lying then, lying now. She took a deep breath. “Is Lori okay? Did she die?”

“Good Lord, no,” Amber said. “The morbid way you think. She got married. Finally. I was worried. She got so heavy when she moved back in with her mother. And I don't think she works.”

Aha.
There
was the point, Maureen thought. Thirty-year-old, living-with-her-mother fatty Lori DiNunzio had landed a man. And I have this backwater career. “Listen, Ma, if you want me to move home and get fat so I can land a man, just say so.”

“It's lovely,” Amber said. “To be reminded that there's someone for everyone.”

Who was this person she was talking to, Maureen wondered. “Ma. Are you drinking in the afternoon again?”

“It gives you hope.”

“Ma.”

“Who's gonna love you when I'm gone?”

“
Ma
.” Amber was hitting the box wine again, had to be. Though she didn't sound like it.

“Maureen, Nat and I have been talking. We've been discussing the future.”

“I'm staying in New Orleans,” Maureen said, exasperation creeping into her tone. “I'm staying a cop in New Orleans. I'm sorry if that doesn't make me as marriageable as old pride-of-Eltingville Lori DiNunzio.”

“Young lady,” Amber said, “we weren't talking about
your
future. You're a grown woman. You can do what you want. We're talking about
our
future, his and mine.”

“Oh, wait, what are you trying to tell me? Did y'all decide about Florida?”

“Kind of.”

Maureen stood up. The blanket she was wrapped in fell to the porch. Amber and Nat had been discussing the move south for a while. Maureen knew this; they'd kept her in the loop. Amber had hesitated to consent, though, claiming reluctance to part with the only house she had ever owned, the only thing of real financial value that was hers. Maureen partially believed her. She also thought Amber was old-fashioned and wouldn't move and cohabitate with a man she wasn't married to. The obstacle there was Maureen's father, twenty years in the wind.

“Ma, did Nat propose?”

Amber waited a long time to respond. “We're not kids. It's not like he's going to get down on one knee and do something silly like that. Lord knows, we don't need to be throwing away money on a ring.”

Maureen felt such an ache in her heart for her mother to have those things that she could barely breathe.

“But, yes,” Amber said, “Nat and I have discussed it. It would be much easier for us to move, to get a mortgage on a condo if we were married. And I could drop my insurance and get on his plan. With his retirement package from the city, it's a much better plan than mine from Macy's, and, well, I'm not getting any younger.”