Let the Devil Out (30 page)

“He got tired of being the good soldier,” Maureen said, “and wanted an empire of his own, like you.”

“You've seen those people in the Quarter,” Heath said, “with the big white crosses, the banners with the flames, screaming about hell and the devil and damnation. It was like that, the crew he led, but worse. Much, much worse. They wore fatigues. They marched through the streets of the Quarter, chanting. I went to see him once on a Fat Tuesday, in Jackson Square. It's a big day for those types, too. You'll see. The rage that came from him, that he inspired. The vitriol. The hate. I'd never seen anything like it. Haven't since.”

He paused, shaking his head at the recollection. “I cut him off after that. Turned my back on him. I got the others I'd persuaded to finance him before to cut him off as well. His resources dried up. I heard there was infighting in his ranks.”

“You undermined him.”

“He had to go. It was clear. People like him never get
less
angry. Letting it out only lets it grow.”

“I'd imagine he didn't take to that,” Maureen said. “To you shunning him.”

And I can see, she thought, what he wanted with your son. Knowing Caleb's money came from Solomon, Gage built his movement, his army with Heath money all over again. Until it cost him his own son. The sins of the father weigh heavy, indeed.

“I admit I felt a twinge of admiration,” Heath said. “All the time I thought I was using him, he was using me right back.” He finished his cold coffee. “And I admit that after I stopped the money I was afraid of him and his thugs. I spent a good six months looking over my shoulder. Then there was a terrible fire, a lesbian bar on the edge of the Quarter. Multiple deaths. He was never connected to it, but he disappeared from New Orleans before the ashes went cold.

“I'm telling you these things,” Heath said, “because you need to believe that Leon Gage is the real thing. The worst kind of true believer. He's a dangerous man, and completely capable of the atrocities that happened today. And I have no loyalty to him, no reason to protect him.”

“It works out real well for you,” Maureen said, “if we believe that someone else is the real threat here. The radical, the fringe player, the lone wolf. You'd love for us to believe there's only one rat in the kitchen. That there's not a big, teeming nest just out of sight.”

“You're so terribly new to all of this,” Heath said. “This place, its history. Our history. You're in so far over your head you don't even know you're drowning. Wake up. Why do you think Detillier picked you as the canary in the coal mine? Because you have no idea who Leon Gage really is. You couldn't have a conversation with him if you did. You couldn't stomach it. And because he'd never talk to a cop who might remember who he was.”

Maureen handed Heath back the plastic cup. She couldn't look at him. She had to get away from him. Talking to him was worse than talking to Gage, because what Heath said made sense to her. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“Do yourself a favor,” Heath said, taking the cup from her. “Ask your FBI friend about a man named Leo Freeman and an abortion clinic in Baker, Florida, what happened there in 1993. Ask about the dead doctor. Ask him about the girls' shelter in Crestview, about the fire there in 1995. The eight bodies pulled from the ruins.”

He offered her the thermos. “Take the rest, bring the thermos back another time. You need all the help you can get.”

“That's okay,” Maureen said, and she climbed into the cruiser. “I have what I need.”

Before dawn, she decided, she would find proof of who both Solomon Heath and Napoleon Gage really were, one way or another.

She started the car and turned on the headlights. She pulled into Solomon Heath's driveway, the headlights shining into the first-floor windows. Then she backed out of the driveway, easing the car alongside Solomon. “Good night for now, Mr. Heath. I have things to do tonight. But you'll see me again. Believe that.”

 

27

Maureen parked the patrol car at the back of Touro Infirmary, by the loading docks and service entrances, away from the cops and the press crowding the front of the hospital.

As she got out of the car, two security guards came to meet her. Without a word, they escorted her into the bowels of the hospital. Maureen knew they were being overly careful and she let them. She didn't expect to get shot at tonight. The Watchmen had slunk back into their hiding places, she figured, as is typical of bullies, because they were cowards at their core. Now we know about them. Now we're on the lookout. Not just me—every one of us cops, Maureen thought, is living under a death threat. And every one of us knows it. Who she'd been avoiding by sneaking around the back was not the Watchmen, but other cops. She didn't want to talk to them. Maybe later she would, maybe in the morning, but not right then. Every ounce of energy she had left, physical and emotional, was devoted to getting to Preacher's hospital room.

Once inside the hospital, Maureen's uniform let her move freely.

She realized as she waited alone for the elevator that no one she had passed as she moved through the building, not doctors, not nurses, not orderlies, not patients, would so much as look at her. Everyone lowered their eyes. Did they know who she was? Maureen wondered. The story of her house getting shot up was in the news again because of the day's events. Did the people she walked past know that she had been the Watchmen's first target? That the NOPD had failed to stop them from striking again?

We'd had warning, Maureen thought, and we did nothing. The morning her house was shot up, Skinner had come to the house to speak with her and to survey the damage. To make promises, to her and to the cameras, like a good politician. And maybe he would've done more. But then Quinn had gone in the river with a prisoner and neither of them had come out alive, and the department turned its focus to squashing the scandal that had threatened to emerge around Ruiz and Quinn and the Heaths. The feds had only taken an active role in the case several weeks after the incident. Maybe they'd been watching all along, but so what if they had? What mattered was they hadn't done anything to help until it was too late.

We devoted our energies to covering our asses, Maureen thought, instead of defending ourselves. We played politics. As Preacher would say, we let them get behind us. Even me, she thought. I was too busy running drunk through the downtown streets at night, chasing impossible revenge against a man I've already killed, to do the work that would have protected Mays and Bridges and Harrigan and Preacher. The suspension wasn't my choice, Maureen thought. But the choices I made about how to handle it, giving in to the selfishness and rage and self-pity, that was all me.

The elevator arrived. Maureen let the doors open and close without getting on.

She hadn't put Preacher in this hospital; she knew that. Her ego wasn't quite that outsized. But could she have kept him out of it? Could she have found Madison Leary before she ended up dead? Lost to herself and no use to anyone else. Maureen grinned at her warped reflection in the silver elevator doors. I find her, Maureen thought, I keep her alive, and maybe Atkinson learns something. Maybe she shakes loose from Leary's tangled brain some iota of information about the Watchmen that stops today from happening. She shouldn't have been drinking while she was out, Maureen thought. She shouldn't have been distracted by the men, like the one from d.b.a. or even the one from the Irish Garden. She should have stayed focused. She could have worked a lot smarter.

Shit, everything she had ever done since she was about twelve she could've done smarter one way or another. Just ask her mother about that.

And now, tonight, she
should
be out for revenge. She
should
be on the warpath, along with every other cop in the city. But she felt none of that. She didn't feel dangerous and frightening. Not like she had when she'd stalked the streets with her ASP. Right then, she felt so exhausted with anger, confusion, and grief that she feared she might fall over. She had no idea what to do. She couldn't even see the rest of her shift past this visit with Preacher. She felt like the doctors here might not let her out of the hospital, and she wasn't sure she'd fight them on it.

Under the harsh, mundane fluorescents of the hospital hallways, waiting for the elevator to return, the theories of vengeance and conspiracy she'd spun in the isolation of her patrol car's front seat became fantastical. Half-mad and paranoid. Was it so impossible, so outlandish that Solomon Heath was a rich white man with a black sheep son he couldn't control? Was she becoming as delusional, Maureen worried, and not for the first time that night, as the woman who'd died in the fishing goods aisle of a half-empty Walmart? Was that the way she was headed? Living in fear. Driven by rage. Seeing webs of conspiracies and armies of enemies wherever she went. In the end, putting a bullet in her brain for the sake of a false flag. Or maybe dragging a razor across her throat to silence the voices.

The elevator door opened. She stepped aside to let an orderly pushing a woozy young girl in a wheelchair pass, pale and bald from chemo.

What she felt was fucking helpless. And she
hated
it.

How're we going to protect anyone, she thought, from anything if we can't protect ourselves? How are we going to get these guys? She stepped into the elevator this time, just before the doors closed.

She rubbed her eyes, thinking of those long frazzled moments on Esplanade, the driver of the van in her gun sights. How long before one of us pulls the trigger on the wrong white van, on the wrong guy in a pair of camouflage cargo pants? Under this kind of pressure, she knew it was only a matter of time before someone who shared her uniform made a tragic mistake, either by pulling the trigger at the wrong time or by not pulling it at the right time. And wouldn't that prove Leon Gage's point? Wouldn't that play right into his hands?

But who could blame us for having itchy trigger fingers? Maureen thought.

These guys wear grenades. They've got bigger, better guns than we do, and they buy them in suburban convention centers, Maureen thought. They're not afraid to die in the act of killing us. If I wanted this, if I wanted a gig in counterterrorism, she thought, I would've become a Marine instead of a cop. At least then I'd have the necessary combat training. And better guns.

This situation with the Watchmen
cannot
be allowed to continue, she thought. Somebody has to step up. Even if by some miracle no one else got shot over the next few days or weeks, the psychology of the threat was too corrosive. She'd heard the chatter. Starting tomorrow, solo patrols were over. The change would cut deep into the number of cars the department had on the street. This with football season in full swing and the holidays coming on hard.

She checked her phone. Nothing from Detillier. No word from him all night. She'd called him twice. Both times her call went straight to voice mail. The longer she went without hearing from him, the more strongly she suspected that he was in trouble. He had fucked up by sending her to meet Gage, she figured, and by missing entirely the multiple-shooter operation, the terrorist attack, that had been executed right under his nose.

Well, fuck the FBI, then. Fuck the feds. She didn't need them. She hadn't been around for Katrina, but waiting for the agents of the federal government to come riding to the city's rescue was not a favorite New Orleans pastime. She'd learned that much already.

The elevator doors opened onto Preacher's floor. She felt a familiar sting at the back of her eyes. Maureen was tempted to let the doors close and take her back down the way she'd come. She'd have to go farther back than the ground floor of the hospital, she realized, to start this day over.

 

28

Outside Preacher's hospital room, Officer Morello, the night's guard, slept, arms crossed, chin on his chest, in a plastic chair far too small for him, an empty Popeyes box under his chair. Maureen could smell the heavy, buttery odor of the fried chicken fat and the greasy carcass of bones, even stronger than the medicinal antiseptic odor of the hallway. She was almost disgusted. Who could leave that trash sitting there like that? In a hospital, no less. Morello defined lazy, took it to new heights. Or was it lows?

Then she realized that if the smell reached Preacher, he wouldn't complain. Popeyes would be a finer bouquet to him than any bunch of flowers.

Frayed and exhausted, listening with envy to Morello's deep rhythmic breathing, Maureen stood for several long minutes in the corridor outside Preacher's room, letting the wall hold her up. Nurses in scrubs hustled by, their heads down, their white sneakers squeaking on the tile. Somebody groaned in her sleep down the hall.

Maureen positioned herself at an angle to the door, in a spot where she could see Preacher, but she figured he couldn't see her.

To her surprise, Preacher was awake.

His eyes were half-closed. His head was turned to one side, resting deep in the pillow. He had a slight smile on his face, as if he were fighting sleep while listening to someone tell a good story. Maureen could hear the murmur of the other person's voice, but couldn't see him or make out any of his words. Though Preacher was about as pale as buttermilk, he looked better than she had anticipated. In fact, her relief at the sight of him was so great she wanted to melt down the wall and puddle on the floor.

All night when she thought about Preacher her imagination had painted him, Maureen realized, maybe because of the manner in which he was shot, as a battlefield casualty. She'd anticipated a bloody mass of bandages and wires and tubes. She'd expected machine noise worthy of an assembly line keeping him alive. Looking at him lying there, Maureen saw tubes and wires and monitors, bags of liquid suspended over his bed, but right in front of her eyes Preacher's body performed its essential functions on his own power source, not relying on one plugged into the wall.