Let the Devil Out (16 page)

“I got it,” Maureen said, grinning.

Preacher frowned at her.

She grinned again. “Indeed.”

Preacher stared at her.

“What?” Her throat was dry and tight. Why was he doing this to her? “Why you looking at me like that?” She willed herself to leave her hair alone. She set her hands on her thighs, and immediately started kneading her quads like a cat. Her palms were sweaty. “Big Man. Fox Den. OCH.” She gave him a thumbs-up, a gesture she was fairly sure she had never used in her life. “I got it. I'm good.”

Preacher continued staring, narrowing his eyes. He was close to breaking her, and Maureen knew that he was aware of it. She didn't even know what it was he wanted her to confess. She broke eye contact with him. Her foot began thumping on the car floor again. She looked at it like it was a sick small animal, like she had no control over it or attachment to it. She felt sorry for it. She thought for a split second about shooting it.

“Out with it, Coughlin,” Preacher said. “You mentioned New York. Did you get bad news? Something's got you squirming in your seat like a dirty-diapered toddler. I wanna know what it is. Is it this FBI thing? If you're not ready to be on the job, we need to talk. You have no more room for error out here. None.”

She reached for her pack of cigarettes on the dash. She lit up, checked the time on her phone, stalling as she reviewed her options. Where to start?

She could confess that roll call and this night shift now added up to the longest stretch of hours she'd gone without a drink or a pain pill in six weeks. That she could feel the information he'd given her moments ago dissolving in her brain like sugar in hot water. Her head hurt and her mouth was dry and her eyes itched and the chemical void in her bloodstream had her feeling like someone had slipped sandpaper between her skin and her muscles. She hated moving. She couldn't not. Her legs jumped with a twitchy life of their own. Since they'd parked the car, her brain alternated shouting lame excuses to stop by her house with growling bitter admonitions for leaving the pills at home. She had found herself glad and relieved when Preacher's back had started hurting him, and she hated herself for feeling that way.

She licked her lips. What had she been thinking, going cold turkey? Because you didn't need a quit strategy, she thought, if you didn't have a problem. Just one would make it better. Half a one so she wouldn't feel quite this bad.

If she didn't want to talk about what she knew damn well was withdrawal, and she sure as hell didn't, she could bring the conversation back to roll call. She could continue poking around the edges of the investigation into the beatings, trying to see how far along things had gotten and running the risk of exposing herself. Could she find out how much Lamb knew, what theories he had, if any? She wondered again if Preacher suspected her, but she couldn't devise a way to discern that from him without leading him to suspect her, if he didn't already.

He was smarter than she was, and decades more savvy. That she might con or cajole him into revealing his thinking was a ridiculous idea and she knew it. She worried that the real reason they were on the street together was so he could be alone with her, so he could question her without really, officially
questioning
her.

She felt like that loony guy in the Edgar Allan Poe story, the guy with the beating heart hidden under his floor. She remembered the end of the story. The guy was batshit crazy. That was the point and the punch line. He was crazy with rage. With guilt. Too crazy and angry and guilty to shut the fuck up and sit still. Like any other criminal. Was that where she was headed?

“Nothing's up,” she said. “I'm fine. I just, I'm anxious, like I was saying before. I feel like a dog that's been cooped up in the house all day, you know, like for weeks.” She gestured at the crowded bar a block ahead of them. “I've been in a cage and we drive to the dog park and now you won't let me out of the car. I just, you know me, Preach. I want to be
moving
.”

Preacher shook his head. “No. No, you're not the usual you. I've never seen you, never seen anyone crush half a pack of cigarettes like you have in the past two hours. Bored dog, my ass. You smoke like someone who's cuffed up in the interrogation room. Like inside the cigarette is the only place that there's any air.”

A neon-green Jeep packed with college kids, the music cranked, caught his attention as it sped past. He watched it continue on in the rearview. Maureen watched his eyes, his hands, his right foot, urging him in her mind to start the car.
Please
.

She dropped her half-finished cigarette out the window. She was that dog again, panting, watching her master stand there ball in hand, waiting, dying for him to throw it.

Instead Preacher said, “How is it you smoke like you do and run like you do? Those things don't go together. You got an extra set of lungs at home in the closet?”

“The nuns in high school used to ask me the same question,” Maureen said. “I'm a walking, running contradiction, Preach. It's part of my charm.” She lit another cigarette. “I make it happen like I do everything else. Through sheer force of will.” She shrugged. “I'm in great shape. I have the resting heart rate of a professional athlete.”

“That's the thing,” Preacher said. “I know you can run for miles. I saw you cruising around the track in the park. Graceful as a racehorse. But when you stop moving, and I can see you, you don't look healthy. That's my point.”

Maureen looked away from him. “What the hell does that mean? That doesn't make any sense.”

“It makes me wonder what's driving you. I need to know my officers. I need to know what they carry, and how much it weighs.”

She climbed out of the car. “I need to stretch my legs. Boredom, that's what's driving me. And it weighs a fucking ton.”

It wasn't untrue; she needed to stretch. Not that she was about to start bending over and doing stretches in the middle of Magazine Street. But she felt better standing than she did sitting.

She walked around to the front of the car, leaned her backside on the hood. The night was cold. The wind picked up. She crossed her arms, rubbed them. She'd left her leather jacket in the car. It would have to stay there. She couldn't even look at Preacher. Not right then. Every now and then someone standing around in front of the bar glanced her way. The wind carried music and voices to her. She jammed her fists into her armpits. She looked down at her boots. The chemical withdrawal was appropriate, she thought. November was now her white-knuckle month.

*   *   *

After her dealings with Sebastian, she'd made it through the New Year before her first meltdown. It caught her by surprise. She thought she was doing great. She hadn't even known what a panic attack was until she'd been having them for two weeks. Once, she had passed out on the staircase in her mother's house, the fall leaving her with a bump the size and color of a plum on her hairline above her right temple.

And days before that accident another attack had left her staggering across busy Amboy Road, fighting to stay conscious and upright, finally crumpling to the sidewalk when she made the other side. A year should feel like a long time, especially because so much had changed. That had been the whole point of everything she had done in the past twelve months.

Yet, right at that moment, standing on a nighttime New Orleans street, a cop leaning against a police car, she could reach back and hear the tires screeching from the cars on Amboy Road that had barely missed her. She could feel the cold concrete of the sidewalk against her cheek as she lay there with her heart fluttering inside her like a dying hummingbird. She almost missed it, the breathless emptiness. The forced surrender of the complete collapse. She thought she might die right there on that Staten Island sidewalk. She remembered thinking she should feel more afraid of death than she did.

But then her breath had returned and her heartbeat had settled. The bird inside her either died or escaped. Her limbs had gathered underneath her of their own volition and she'd stood, unsteady and wet-eyed like a foal. And something told her she had to get up and get away from the scene of her collapse before the ambulance came. She didn't know what kind of hospital the men in white would take her to should they get their hands on her. She wanted no one strapping her down on the gurney. She'd been captured once in her life. Never again.

Nat Waters, who had been there through the days of the silver-haired man, who in his decades in the NYPD had seen more people short-circuit than he cared to remember, had convinced Maureen to start seeing the shrink early that spring. He was the first one to use the acronym PTSD. The shrink had been the second.

Maureen rubbed her hands over the backs of her arms. PTSD. She'd thought she'd left those letters in the doctor's office. She thought she'd left them, all those names, her
diagnosis
, her
condition
, the reason for her prescriptions, thirteen hundred miles behind her on Staten Island. On the banks of the Arthur Kill where she'd lost her favorite switchblade slicing open one man's throat and stabbing another's leg, where Sebastian's blood had run hot down her arms to her elbows, stinking like copper and steaming off her hands in the cold night air.

This was why, she thought, no one understood her pursuit of Caleb and Solomon Heath, and why she didn't know if she could ever make anyone else understand. Atkinson. Detillier. Even Preacher. She wanted Caleb, she needed him, she
had to have him
because no one else could, no, because no one else
was willing
, to see his future like she could. And she could see his future as clearly as she could see her past. Heath was the larva. He needed to be crushed and smeared before he got too big and too quick to catch.

The trunk of a car. The stink of the Arthur Kill. The roar of the oncoming train.

Maureen had already seen what Caleb Heath would become.

She had already killed him once.

And for the life of her, Maureen couldn't think of a sane way to explain everything she knew to Preacher, or even to Atkinson. Forget Detillier. There was no talking to any of them without sounding like she had Poe's beating heart under her floor. Not without telling them that, on a cold November night very much like this one, she had killed two men with her bare hands. She didn't know how to talk about what she had done. Or how it had made her feel. Not without revealing that deep, deep down inside her, in places where no man's breath or body, where no doctor's probing fingers or questions, where no other human being had ever reached, in the abyss inside her where the darkest things with the sharpest teeth lived and swam and hunted, she missed that killing feeling, the blood running over her hands, through her fingers. The unassailable power of being the one who lived.

Not everyone gets to be the killer. Most don't. Most women who'd been where she had, they became the killed. The dead. The forgotten parts of someone else's story.

*   *   *

Maureen's phone buzzed in her pocket, calling her back to Magazine Street. She checked the screen. The number was private. She answered anyway; she had an idea who it might be. “Coughlin.”

“Officer Coughlin, it's Agent Detillier. I thought I'd hear from you tonight. We need an answer from you about meeting with Gage. We want to keep him interested while he's in town.”

“I understand,” Maureen said.

“I'm sorry,” Detillier said. “I have another call coming in. Hang on.”

“Sure,” Maureen said.

Voices rose outside the Balcony Bar up the street, catching her attention. Two short fat girls in high heels, tight tops, and too-tight skirts had started screaming at each other, thrusting fingers at each other. The front of one girl's top was damp. She'd had a drink thrown in her face. That wet spot was gonna get cold, Maureen thought.

By the door of the bar, Maureen could see the large form of the bouncer rising above the crowd. He had his massive arms folded across his chest, and he was paying close attention to the unfolding conflict. She knew there was another door guy there, too, somewhere in the crowd. A smaller man who checked IDs. Unlike the NOPD, she thought, the bar had enough staff to handle their business. She saw that no boyfriends or wanna-be shining knights had stepped into the conflict. Good news. Alcohol-infused testosterone always made things worse. Always.

Even if the girls came to blows, Maureen would make a move only if a weapon appeared. She'd see it and hear it from the crowd, which would open up like a slow-motion explosion if something got drawn. Unlikely, considering the combatants. Which was fine with her. She really didn't feel like jumping into a drunken catfight. Not the return to action she'd had in mind. In a minute and a half to two minutes, the incident would escalate or defuse.

Maureen turned again, her phone held to her ear, looking at Preacher through the windshield. He was watching the busser at the Rum House across the street sweep under the outside picnic tables. He was picking his nose. What was Detective Atkinson doing right then? Maureen wondered. She thought about the Sixth District task force, the one that specialized in dangerous arrests and warrants. She thought about Homicide, Vice, Special Victims. The fast track to plainclothes work, like Detillier had mentioned, that was what she wanted. Plainclothes, property and persons, they were the way out of uniform and into the bigger and better work. It was never too early to start thinking about the future, now that she was putting past calamities behind her.

“You there?” Detillier asked.

“I'll be happy to talk to him,” Maureen said. “Anything it takes to get these guys. Do I need to wear a wire? Because I'm okay with that.”

“Won't be necessary,” Detillier said. “This isn't an investigation of the man. Think of it as a fact-finding mission, a feeling out, to see if he's worth continuing attention after he settles matters concerning his son. You won't have to wear a wire. You won't have to make an arrest.”