Let the Devil Out (7 page)

*   *   *

One night a couple of weeks ago, after a show at Tipitina's, Maureen had stopped in a bar called Ms. Mae's for a late-night drink or three. There she'd bumped into a couple of off-duty cops, Wilburn and Cordts, guys she knew from her district. Day-shift guys.

They should've avoided each other, everyone in her district knew about her suspension, but the hour was late and the drinks had been flowing. Who could possibly be watching them in a dive bar like Ms. Mae's? Maureen bought a round of whiskey shots. She bought another. She asked if any good stories floated around the station. The only interesting thing, Wilburn told her, was that in the past two weeks, three calls had come into the Sixth from women worried they'd been followed home from the Irish Garden.

Didn't she live right by there? Cordts asked.

What had been done about it? Maureen asked.

The guys told her that responding officers had put the calls down to scaredy-cat girls and clumsy young guys too full of hormones and drink. That bar was a pain in the ass, you know that, they said, the way it dumped drunk meatheads into the neighborhood every night.

But the Irish Garden's owner was ex-NOPD, Wilburn said with a shrug, a former detective who'd taken early retirement under a cloud five years ago.

Brutality!
Cordts coughed into his hand.

Wilburn threw him an elbow.
Anyway
, he said. Circumstances made it hard to look at the bar as a trouble spot. The place was protected. There was certainly no going in there asking questions. The cops who took the calls had followed procedure and taken reports at the scene, Wilburn said, as was their duty.

Maureen had said nothing, had asked no more questions, instead lighting cigarettes for the three of them, and buying herself one more drink for the walk home before she left.

The story of those frightened women stayed with her after that night. Her coworkers' easy dismissal of those incidents, not only the officers who had responded to the calls but also the men who had told her the story, ate at her, scratching at her brain.

Against her better judgment, the next time she saw Preacher in the park, she had asked him about the calls. Were she to take matters into her own hands—and a plan was already forming—and if she got caught doing it, having tipped off Preacher that she knew of the incidents would put both of them in a tough spot. So don't get caught, she told herself.

Preacher told her each woman had made it safely back to her apartment, shaken but untouched by her pursuer. The first and second callers had both quit talking in the middle of their interviews, having convinced themselves in recounting the events while surrounded by impatient police officers and nosy neighbors that perhaps they had overreacted. But maybe not, Maureen had thought, because the third caller had complained of the man banging on her building's front door for several minutes after she had gone into her apartment and called the police.

She'd said he wore a ring. That she remembered the sound of it, would for a long time, the metal banging on the thick glass on the front door as he slapped his palm hard against it.

Maureen knew that if three calls had come in, then half a dozen other incidents had gone unreported. And that the stalkings had been happening for more than a couple of weeks. Other women hadn't called the police.

Women too frightened or tired or intoxicated. Women with a few pills or a bag of weed in their underwear drawer who didn't want cops in their house, or who didn't want to stay up another hour or two or three waiting for those disinterested, irritated cops to show up in the first place. Or worse, women who didn't call because they were conditioned to believe the threat existed only in their heads, or to believe that, because of the late hours they kept or the booze or the pills or the weed or because of what was, or wasn't, between their legs, they'd brought it on themselves. That they had it coming to them. Whatever
it
was that had happened to them. They believed that being made afraid didn't rise to the level of a crime. That they were
silly
.

They believed what boyfriends and, unfortunately, some of their girlfriends told them—that they'd scared themselves into seeing threats where none existed, that they were paranoid, like anyone really knew what that word meant. Or brainwashed. That they should doubt their deepest, primal natural instincts for self-preservation so as not to be embarrassed.

It was part of the problem, Maureen knew, the hard part of trying to convince people to see threats, to be wary, to be hard targets. If you oversold the message, people saw danger so often that they stopped seeing it altogether. They stopped believing in it. Nobody wants to believe they should be afraid. And too many people, thought Maureen, thought that acting careful and living afraid were synonymous, that being wary of your surroundings constituted a character flaw.

*   *   *

Sitting in the booth, her eyes moving from guy to guy, Maureen recalled Preacher telling her that the description of the stalker was similar in all three incidents, but was so generic as to be useless: white, dark hair, medium height, medium build. Only the ring stood out. Only every other guy in this bar, Maureen thought, matched the physical description. None of the women could describe a face in detail. No one could offer a name. The women were convinced the stalker couldn't be someone they knew. Why would someone they knew treat them like that? He hadn't been someone they'd talked to that night. If someone they knew or had met was capable of acting like that, surely they would see it. They would feel it. Right? They would know better.

The night of her talk with Preacher, sitting at her kitchen table later, in a notebook Maureen had sketched out the details of the cases. She saw plenty to worry about.

She saw a predator practicing the hunt, learning his territory, honing his timing, and working up his nerve. Already a pattern was emerging. Somewhere in the near but indistinct future, somewhere in her neighborhood, a rape was going to happen. That it hadn't happened already was a small miracle. Maureen had no intention of relying on the miracle to endure. She would indeed take matters into her own hands. She thought of one of the nuns' favorite sayings from her Catholic school days. “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

Right at that moment, somewhere around her in the Irish Garden, mixed in with the boring, harmless men she was looking at, hiding in plain sight, was a soon-to-be rapist. She knew it. She could feel it. She had experience with predators and she had an eye for victims. She'd known them. She'd been one. Like recognizes like.

What she needed to do tonight was spot the matching pair. That she could recognize both predator and prey, she thought, that vision, that slice of wisdom, more than anything she'd learned at the academy, would make her a cop to be reckoned with, to be feared. Being able to see both sides, to see the world as both the owl and the mouse, was a dark gift that the silver-haired man had given her. A gift she'd use against every man like him that she met.

She sipped her whiskey.

How long had she been sitting in this bar tonight? Long enough that the smoke from other people's cigarettes burned her eyes.

She checked her phone. It was after one. She'd been in the bar since ten.

She'd find her target. She'd see him first and he would never see her. Not before, not after, she was sure of that. Plain and pale and thin, her unwashed, cornflake-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail, not made-up, in jeans and a T-shirt and an unzipped hoodie, she would never be noticed by the man she was looking for. Not by any man in that bar. Not until she wanted him to. At her time, on her terms, she would make her move. He would never see her face, but he would remember her for a long time. A
very
long time. She'd create a lasting, life-changing memory for one special man.

The ASP, sleek and black, rested beside her on the bench.

Killing a man with an ASP was tough, but not impossible. What it did best was wreak agonizing, emergency-room-level havoc on jaws and joints and teeth and the small bones of the extremities. The bigger bones broke, too, if you caught them right. The weapon was an academy graduation gift from her mother's ex-NYPD boyfriend. In Nat Waters's time, in Nat Waters's hands, that ASP had broken more than a few bones on the streets of New York City, Maureen thought. It had changed the course of several lives before lying dormant for a decade, waiting to come to her.

Now Maureen had it, and she had put it back to work on the streets of New Orleans.

 

6

Shortly before two a.m., Maureen spotted a match. The target and the stalker revealed themselves to her one right after the other, exactly as she had expected it to happen.

The target was young, early twenties, blond, pale, and thin and chirpy as a baby bird, one of a small flock of potential victims Maureen had been watching. She wore billowy cotton pants in a fake African pattern, a charcoal top about a size too large that almost matched the pants, and wedge-heeled shoes. She had the look of someone who'd borrowed her curvier roommate's clothes. Maureen had seen her come in around eleven, alone and already listing from drinking at home. She wore only a thin jacket against the cold night, which told Maureen she lived nearby. She'd spent most of the night squinting at her phone, texting. The girl was upset about something, Maureen figured, that had happened before she'd left home. Her outfit had a touch of “Fuck you, I'm going out.” She'd
almost
had the energy to get dressed up, but hadn't quite made it. She'd done just enough preparation to convince herself she wasn't going out purely to get shit-faced, which gave her permission to do exactly that.

As for what had wounded her, Maureen thought at first that a job interview had gone wrong, or maybe a rejected grad school application, but Maureen soon noticed that the girl emanated a swoony neediness that repelled everyone around her, male and female, like a bad smell. That stench, Maureen knew, was heartbreak. The girl had been dumped. Some boy's job interview or grad school application had gone really well, and this girl was now collateral damage to his success. She watched as the girl stood on her toes on the bar rail, leaning over the bar, talking to, talking
at
the seething bartender, who Maureen could see had no interest in the sob story being shouted in her face.

At about half past midnight, the girl had started bumming cigarettes from anyone whose attention she could corral. She'd have one burning down in the ashtray while she was bumming another from whatever bland boy drifted by with a Marlboro in his hand. She was light-eyed and banally cute and alone, Maureen saw, but not one of those boys hung around to talk to her. Not one of them bought her a drink. None of this was surprising. The girl was not out to hook up. This wasn't an “I'll fuck him over by fucking someone else” outing. This was “I can't stand another minute of my own company alone in that fucking apartment.”

Maureen could see the girl's emotional defenses whirling in the air around her like a cloud of stinging insects. Unfortunately, while the emotional defenses were working overtime, Maureen feared alcohol and the late hour had dulled the girl's other self-protective instincts. And she was not the only one who had picked up on that weakness.

A dark-haired, clean-shaven man, his thin shoulders hunched, sat alone at a small table under a huge television, a collection of plastic cups on the table in front of him. He wore a black hoodie, deep indigo jeans with the cuffs folded up, expensive and well-worn black work boots. He wasn't dressed breaking-and-entering dark, Maureen noted, that might be too conspicuous, but dark enough to hide in the nighttime shadows. He was pretty good at hiding, she had to admit.

She hadn't seen him enter the bar, hadn't seen him order a drink and sit. She'd been scanning the room like she'd done fifty times that night and had missed him, until that last time. Like a ghost, he wasn't there, and then he was—alone, disengaged, hiding in the shifting light of the big television screen over his head. He was collecting plastic cups in front of him instead of throwing them away as he got another drink. To Maureen, that was the tell. He was measuring something, Maureen thought. Something inside himself. Adding up, piling on. Keeping count. Trying to hit a target. Proving to himself how much liquid courage he'd poured into getting his nerves up. See what you can do, he'd tell himself. You're ready now. How many drinks lit the spark, Maureen wondered. How many to turn the power on? Six? Seven? Was there a magic number he needed to reach? Or did he wait until some internal switch he hadn't quite learned to throw on his own turned over?

Maureen watched as the girl signed for her tab, chattering away at the ever-bored bartender as she did so. She staggered to the door. The man ran his fingers through his curly hair. He zipped up his sweatshirt. Maureen saw the thick ring on his finger. She had her man. He used the glass of the bar's French doors to track the girl. Maureen downed the last of her watery whiskey, slid to the end of the bench in her booth to get a better look at the man. She slipped the ASP into her back pocket, pulled her sweatshirt low over her backside.

The girl paused in the open doorway, not five feet away from the man in the black hoodie, opening her clutch and removing her phone. Maureen hoped she'd had a moment of clarity or instinct and was calling a cab. No such luck, as the girl frowned into the blue glow of the small screen and her thumbs went to work.

Can't you leave it alone, Maureen thought, for ten minutes and get yourself home in one piece?

The girl stepped out of the bar and staggered down the sidewalk, focused on her phone. Maureen risked losing sight of her for a quick second as she slipped out the side exit instead of taking the more exposed path through the barroom to the front door. She pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt, hiding her face and hair, and stood beside the door, pretending to be checking her own phone. The girl drifted by, texting away.