Let the Devil Out (6 page)

Because you've never told yourself those words before. Not ever. Not a million times.

“Tell me one thing,” Maureen said. “Tell me they're not making me a rat. Promise me that they're not gonna sell me to the DOJ when they're done with me. Tell me that's not the price tag. That Justice wants someone of their own undercover in the department. Someone easy to use, who they can hurt. Did they come to me because they don't have the nerve to ask this of Atkinson? Because she's clean. Because they got nothing on her.”

“I've heard nothing,” Preacher said, “about the Department of Justice. Or about this being some kind of permanent snitching gig for the feds. It should be the one favor.”

Maureen laughed. “C'mon, Preacher. There's never just one favor. Admit it. Skinner
finally
decided to bring me back because the FBI showed up and gave him a chance to do them a favor. I do this favor for the feds and I get my job back. I'm not stupid. Nobody's doing anything for my benefit. I'm the perfect puppet. Quid pro quo, little bird.” She rubbed her eyes, sat on the bench. “Here I am accusing you of being the FBI's bitch, when in the end, it's me who's going to be their bitch.”

“I don't know for a fact,” Preacher said, emphatic, “that your reinstatement continges on you talking to this FBI guy, but, whether it does or it doesn't, doing the feds a solid can't hurt your chances. You're a good Catholic girl. Don't think of it as a price tag, think of it as penance.”

“I gave up that Catholic shit,” Maureen said.

“Then think of it as karma,” Preacher said. “I don't judge. Think of it as a mutually beneficial opportunity of which you've been availed. I don't much give a shit how you sell it to yourself. Just, for once, make the Man happy. It won't kill you. I've dabbled in it in my three decades on the job and I survived. And I remind you, if the bosses wanted to be cruel to you and roll around in their own shit in the process, which wouldn't be a first for this department, criminal charges around this Quinn thing and the Gage murder
are
a real possibility. You gotta live with that. You gotta factor that in.”

“And I remind you,” Maureen said, “this bird can sing. Factor
that
in.”

“Sing about who?” Preacher said. “Quinn? His partner Ruiz? Not much point to that, is there?”

Maureen knew there was a third name Preacher had left off the list. His. He knew he didn't need to say it, that she'd register the omission.

“Listen to me, Coughlin. The best thing that could've happened for you did happen. The people in power, they've decided they need you. That only you can do what they need done. Be smart. Take advantage of it. Pride has no place in this job we do. Results are what matter. Favors. Debts. Information. Get your badge back so the Man can forget about us and we can get back to doing the work we were put on God's green earth to do. Catching the bad guys. Believe.”

Maureen got up from the bench. “Speaking of bad guys, I saw Dice yesterday. Downtown.”

“I don't want to hear about it,” Preacher said. “Not my case. Not even my district. Not your case, either. And you're not a cop again until tomorrow. So shit that happened yesterday needs to stay there.”

“She had nothing to say about Leary anyway. Except that there's been people looking for her. I think maybe Solomon sent someone after her, to protect Caleb.”

“What did I just say? What did I just say to you about yesterday?”

“What? She followed me to my car and started talking. I was at the Spotted Cat having a drink and she saw me. I think she needed money, really. I think that's what it was about.”

“And you just decided, hey, while I've got you here, let me ask about that murder suspect you know.”

“It wasn't anything,” Maureen said.

“Then why tell me about it?” Preacher asked. “Why mention it?”

This motherfucker, Maureen thought. Honesty. Up to a point. “I thought you'd be happy to hear the girl's not dead. That's what I meant by bringing it up.”

“I am glad,” Preacher said. “I am. When you're official again, reach out to Atkinson, let her know Dice is breathing and in town. Then maybe stay this side of Canal Street for a while.”

Maureen pulled her heels to the small of her back one at a time, stretching her thighs. “I'm with you. I am.”

Preacher was giving her that disapproving look again, like every wrong thing she had done over the past few weeks was scrolling across her body like a movie on a screen.

Maureen bounced on her toes. She was ready, more than ready, to start running again. “What? Why are you looking at me like that? I said I heard you.”

“Make sure you hear this, too,” Preacher said. “Tomorrow you'll be back at work. So if there's any business you need to finish up, anything pressing or lingering that you need to get out of your system before you come back, go ahead and let the devil out tonight. One last blowout, one last hurrah, whatever. Because tomorrow you need to be ready to be a cop again. One hundred percent.”

He waited for her response.

He knew, Maureen thought. Somehow, some way, Preacher's preternatural cop intuition told him she'd been up to no good. Like when you were out on patrol and you talked to a guy on the street about the Saints or the weather, and you just knew somehow he had something in his pockets that he shouldn't have. Like whatever impulse, she thought, that had told her to pull over that pickup truck with Clayton Gage at the wheel and Madison Leary in the passenger seat. Maybe Preacher didn't know the specifics of what she'd been getting up to at night, Maureen thought, but he knew something was going on. And he knew it was wrong. Maybe he didn't know how far she'd gone, but he knew she'd strayed from the one true path.

“And leave Solomon Heath alone,” Preacher said.

“I haven't said two words to that man since I worked his party.”

“The man, his house, where he does his business,” Preacher said. “Stay away.”

Maureen opened her mouth to speak, to spit out some bullshit denial, but Preacher raised his hand against it. “You gonna hurt my feelings, Coughlin, you keep this up.”

“Sorry.”

“So we understand each other?”

“We do,” Maureen said.

“We're clear, Officer Coughlin?”

“We are, Sergeant Boyd,” Maureen said. “Crystal clear.”

Preacher nodded. Maureen watched as he got up from the bench and walked down to the water, his hands buried in the pocket of his sweatshirt, his broad back to her. One more time, he was telling her, he would look away from what she did next. Once more.

 

5

Late that night, Maureen sat alone in the corner booth of a boisterous Magazine Street bar, called the Irish Garden, a few blocks from where she lived. She was cocooned and anonymous in the hive-like buzzing and activity of the partyers around her. She excelled at this, finding the blind spot, the blank space in an otherwise crowded room, and hiding there, looking out at a room full of strangers, watching and listening, an owl in the crook of a branch, absorbing the nighttime wilderness around her, invisible and calculating. If she ever got to do undercover work, she thought, she'd be great at it. If she could keep her job long enough to get there.

She'd also found, as best as she could figure with limited reconnaissance, a blind spot in the Irish Garden's security cameras. That was if the cameras were on, something she doubted, considering the clumsy minor-league hand-to-hand drug deals she'd witnessed by the restrooms and around the pool tables. One of the bartenders was blatantly stealing. Still, she figured, one couldn't be too careful while being completely reckless and endangering everything one had worked so, so hard to get.

That round, silver-crescent-over-a-star badge—like her whole future in New Orleans—had been hidden from her for six weeks, disappeared into an amorphous legal limbo and the power and whims of others. She realized that when she had thought about her badge over the past weeks, she had assigned it a mystical identity, like a lost relic in an old adventure movie, a glowing and humming talisman lost in the depths of a yawning cave or a crumbling temple. An object of power and value like Excalibur or the Ark of the Covenant or the One Ring, it waited for her, only her, to rescue it from useless oblivion. The badge had become her Precious.

But a badge wasn't a hero's sword lodged in a stone that she could claim, it wasn't a mystical Old Testament talisman she could unearth, or a piece of magic regal jewelry that she could steal as she fumbled about in the dark. She couldn't
take
her badge back; it had to be awarded, given to her, like a secret. She needed someone to reach a hand into that drawer and liberate that badge for her. She needed
someone else
to decide she deserved it, like on the first day she wore it, her graduation day that past summer from the NOPD academy. And she just hated that
need
of someone else's power. Of their permission. Of their approval.

Her need made her feel small and fragile, blind and weak, her skin tingling in anticipation of being violated or betrayed, the usual outcomes, she'd learned, of need. This time of year, she found herself especially conscious of that lesson.

What you
need
, Officer Coughlin, she thought, picking up her drink, is to be home getting a good night's sleep for once, instead of sitting in this bar, waiting for trouble. Waiting for the chance to make things worse right when your life is about to get better.

She looked down into her drink, an underpoured, watered-down, double-in-name-only Jameson rocks in a plastic cup. She wasn't going to change her mind about tonight. She needed to quit worrying, quit thinking, and focus on the task at hand. Focus was key. Somebody in this bar who didn't even know she was there needed her.

She poked at the ice in her cup, the cubes melted through in the middle, with the hard plastic cocktail straw. She slipped the straw through a cube, fished it from the whiskey, raised it to her mouth, and let the ice slide onto her tongue. She savored the cool, the ice whiskey-slick, before crushing the cube into shards between her back teeth.

She picked up her burning cigarette from the cracked plastic ashtray, took a deep drag, pulling the smoke over the whiskey and the ice chips, blending the temperatures and flavors.

Rattling the ice in her cup, she again looked over the men in the room. Stop lying to yourself, she thought. She wasn't only there for the sake of someone else's needs. It wasn't like she didn't have needs of her own, didn't enjoy the anticipation of meeting them.

She crushed more ice in her mouth and watched the room through the smoke of her cigarette.

*   *   *

This wasn't her first time in the Garden; she'd lived in a tiny studio across the street from the place for her first six months in town, during her time in the academy, during her field training—in a big old mansion that had been carved up into apartments decades ago.

She'd dated a cook from the bar's kitchen. Briefly. Things with Patrick hadn't worked out. Or, Maureen thought, they had worked out perfectly, considering what each had been looking for going in. She wasn't sure why she used that term—not working out. Not marrying the guy didn't mean the relationship, if she would even give it that name, had failed.

Either way, whatever they'd started had ended amicably, and she and Patrick hooked up once in a while, creating a situation only slightly different from the original incarnation, she thought. What made things different now, and possibly better, was the mutually acknowledged fact that they were now in the aftermath of something and were no longer at the beginning. The fact that there was no future in it took a lot of the pressure off. The really important part was that he was good in bed, patient and mature enough that she could take her time and get what she wanted, but not some kind of sexual martyr who acted like waiting for the woman to come first was an act of enormous personal sacrifice.

They'd ended their regular thing when Patrick had landed a new gig at an upscale restaurant farther uptown. He'd made the kind of all-consuming career move that Maureen understood very well. Well, if she was gonna be honest about it,
they
hadn't ended it. He had called it quits, while the smell of sex lingered on them, as a matter of fact. But she hadn't fought him on it, which kind of, pretty much made it mutual. That was what she told herself.

*   *   *

Christ, she hated this fucking bar. She wouldn't have set foot in the place except for the task at hand, searching out one special man, the one in whom she saw herself reflected back to her, the one hiding in plain sight. She took a tiny sip of her drink, nursing. Don't get up for another whiskey, she thought. Limit your motion, your interaction with the staff and the other patrons. Don't do anything that might make you memorable.

Truth be told, she didn't much want to see her face in the mirror behind the bar.

She wasn't there to drink whiskey, anyway, good as it tasted.

Look at these men, she thought. So similar, like they rolled off an assembly line. Thick unbrushed hair. Khaki pants. Checkered shirts. Hours after the sun had gone down, their wraparound Oakleys hung around their necks on leather straps. Leather boat shoes in hideous colors. Hairy forearms. Thin and bony ankles and wrists. So breakable. And those perfect white teeth. So expensive and so fragile.

Her eyes flitted from face to face. The same, the same, the same.

So loud, their ever-running mouths. Loud voices, loud laughter. Everything they said was shouted. Every insult, every joke, every reaction to whatever game played on one of the twenty televisions or whatever played-out song came on the jukebox.

How would she ever find that one special man she was looking for? Her last mystery man. Because, she told herself, you've spent enough time as prey to know a predator when you see one. And a predator is hunting out of this bar. This was her third night in the past week camped out in the Garden, waiting for him to appear.