The Devil in Her Way Read online

“Not unreasonable.”

  “I think when he heard the other units arriving, he meant to run, not fight. I really do. That wasn’t a ‘I wanna fight six cops’ kind of punch that he threw. Something in him saw the opportunity to knock me down, maybe he saw me standing between him and the stairs, I don’t know. I’m not sure how much he meant it. I think it was panic. If what that woman said is true, about not being the one who called us, his shock at seeing me makes more sense.”

  “The thing of it is,” Preacher said, “if he had a knife in his hand, or a bat, or a pipe, or a gun within reach, and panicked the same way, and everything else plays out the same, then that’s your blood on the concrete over there. Panic is dangerous. For everyone, whether it makes sense or not. You have to avoid it.” A siren wailed not far away, closing in on them. “Otherwise we’re calling that ambulance for you. He can’t get behind you. No one can. Ever.”

  Maureen stared across the street at the park and the playground and the basketball courts.

  “Ever,” Preacher repeated. “Anybody home, Coughlin?”

  “Yes, sir,” Maureen said. “It’ll never happen again, sir.”

  “I ain’t lost a probie yet,” Preacher said. “Not to the rules and not to the streets. And, girl or not, you won’t be the first. I’m the good kind of selfish, the kind that’s gonna make you a good cop. Live it. Believe.”

  In her peripheral vision, Maureen noticed movement beneath her in the parking lot. Glancing down, she saw that a young boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old, had drifted out from under the stairs. She wondered how long he had been down there.

  The boy wore an oversized white T-shirt over faded cargo shorts in a blue, white, and gray camouflage pattern. He wore them low. Standard uniform for the neighborhood. His knobby shoulders rounded, his hands in his pockets, he looked up at Maureen and Preacher at the top of the stairs, watching them with one eye half closed, as if peering at a slide through a microscope.

  Maureen caught Preacher’s eye and tilted her head, directing him toward the boy.

  “Hey there, son,” Preacher said, peering off the balcony. “Do me a favor, take your hands from your pockets.”

  His hand drifted to his hip, to his weapon. Maureen’s throat tightened.

  “Preach, he’s, like, eleven.”

  “I’m twelve,” the boy said.

  “Hands, son,” Preacher said. “Let me see them.”

  The boy did as he was told. He slid each hand free slowly. In each hand he held a smooth wooden stick, drumsticks. He didn’t say anything. His mouth was tight and twisted, as if he had something to say but couldn’t find the right words for some big thoughts kicking around in his head.

  “There something we can help you with?” Preacher asked. “Something you need?”

  The boy took a half step toward the foot of the stairs.

  “You can come on up here,” Preacher said, waving the boy toward him with the same hand that had reached for his weapon. “We don’t bite.”

  “Do you live here?” Maureen asked. “Which apartment are you in?”

  The boy opened his mouth to say something. A sharp whistle, like the sound of a man calling a dog, stopped him from speaking. The boy dropped his gaze. Maureen spotted the whistler standing across the street. An older boy, eighteen, nineteen years old, wearing baggy jean shorts and a black Bob Marley T with the singer’s laughing profile emblazoned over a giant pot leaf. The older boy had his hair in short twists that were bunched like the candles on a birthday cake by an old-school terry headband. He wore a cowrie shell necklace tight around his neck. Black aviators hid not only his eyes but also most of his face.

  “Yo! Shorty!” he yelled, with as much command, or maybe it was warning, in his voice as there was in his whistle.

  The younger boy turned away from Preacher and Maureen. He didn’t even look to see who had been yelling to him. He already knew. He tucked his sticks in his pockets and slunk away across the apartment-complex parking lot. He didn’t look back at Maureen and Preacher.

  When the boy hit the sidewalk, the whistler turned and headed up Washington Avenue in the opposite direction, talking on a cell phone. Mission accomplished, apparently.

  “You know what,” Maureen said, watching the whistler walk away, “gimme a minute.”

  “For what?”

  “Hey!” Maureen yelled across the street. “Hey! Hold on a second.”

  The whistler looked back over his shoulder, just to let Maureen know he’d heard and was ignoring her command. Cell phone to his ear, his lips moving, he continued walking away.

  “Bob Marley. Wait right there a second.”

  “Coughlin, what’re you doing?”

  “I want to talk to that guy,” Maureen said, three steps down the staircase. “I wanna ask him what he thinks is going on.”

  Something had happened between the two boys. Maureen could feel it buzzing in the air around them, but she couldn’t decipher what it was.

  “It’s just regular ‘don’t talk to the cops’ street bullshit between kids,” Preacher said. “A chance to show us up. Maybe they’re brothers. Forget it.”

  Maureen watched the younger boy walk away in the opposite direction.

  At the corner he fell in with two other boys the same age and size and dressed in the same style, big T-shirts, big shorts slung low beneath hips and butts they didn’t have. She watched as the three of them bumped their small fists and talked. Maureen felt comforted that the kid had hooked up with friends. He looked them in the face when they spoke to him. She grinned at his amateur gangsta lean. She wondered what they talked about.

  At a break in the traffic the trio crossed the street and meandered into the ballpark, more of an open field with tilted bleachers and a battered softball backstop. They appeared headed for the basketball courts or maybe the new playground beyond the courts, but in no hurry.

  Maureen looked around for the whistler, but he was gone.

  A commotion had started building in Apartment D, raised voices, then shouts, then something breaking—a lamp or a mirror. Maureen jumped back up the stairs, headed in that direction, but Preacher grabbed her by the arm as she moved past him.

  “Give it a minute and let those boys work,” he said. “Stay right here. We’re guarding the only escape route.”

  The woman screamed. The sound was more like a roar, really, Maureen thought. She was afraid of what might come out the door.

  “Oh, man,” mumbled Arthur from his spot against the wall. “Now y’all gone and done it to me.”

  Red-faced and dripping sweat, two officers dragged the woman out the front door, one officer gripping each of her thick, gelatinous arms. Her hands were cuffed behind her back. Inside the apartment, the baby wailed at top volume. The woman flopped about on the balcony like a giant hooked fish, unleashing a stream of profanities the likes of which Maureen, even in all her years in the bar business, had never heard. When the woman had exhausted herself, the officers eased her facedown on the balcony and released her arms. They checked her breathing and stood.

  One cop, a burly unibrowed Hispanic, stretched his lower back. The other, a tall, thin blond with a big nose, walked over to Preacher and Maureen.

  “What the fuck happened in there, Quinn?” Preacher asked.

  “You won’t believe it, Preach,” Quinn said, his chest heaving as he struggled to recover from the effort of subduing the woman. “In the dishwasher. Like, two pounds of weed in a garbage bag. And three guns in a shoe box.” He smiled. “A fucking bust and a half and we fucking fell right into it.”

  Preacher’s eyebrows jumped up his forehead. He threw a quick glance at Maureen. “Yes, indeed.”

  Quinn shrugged. “Ruiz was the one that spotted the washer was unhooked and leaning half outta the counter. He went in there for a glass of water.”

  “Tell ya what,” Preacher said, turning to Maureen. “Now I believe it wasn’t her that called us here. These two clowns are no dealers. They’re holding for someone else, under
orders, I’m sure, to stay away from the cops.”

  Maureen scanned Washington Avenue in both directions. The three boys and the whistler were gone. I don’t know what it is, she thought, but we’re missing something here.

  2

  Sitting in a back pew of a dim and empty church, soaking wet and taking a break from running in the driving rain, the stained-glass shadows spreading like puddles all around her, Maureen stared at her white hands, her fingers thin and spidery in the dust-cloudy half-light. She wiggled her fingers, watching the digits move as if they were underwater, or unattached to her, or she to them. So white, she was. Always had been. Like plaster. Like marble. Like porcelain, or clouds. She made fists. Squeeze. Release. Squeeze tighter. Release again. She watched the blood rush in and out of her knuckles. The punch that had dropped Arthur Jackson to his hands and knees, that had left his blood on the concrete, hadn’t left a mark on her hand. She wanted that punch back. She wanted a do-over on the Garvey Apartments. For reasons that had nothing to do with Arthur Jackson’s health.

  It could have been, Maureen thought, it should have been her finding the weed and the weapons in that kitchen. She had no doubt she would’ve spotted the crooked dishwasher. Had she controlled the scene like she should have, like she’d been trained to do, she could be crowing about what she’d done, letting that goof Quinn buy her a beer at the Bulldog. Instead, while everyone else went out after work, she was learning from Preacher how to gracefully fudge a trip sheet. The art of mitigating self-inflicted damage was a lesson he felt she really needed to learn. She’d felt like she was back in high school detention all over again.

  At the Garvey Apartments, she had exploded from the patrol car looking to bang some heads. She had to admit that. She hadn’t given a second thought to controlling anything, especially herself. She’d make up for it, though. She’d find out who had really made the call to the police about Apartment D. She’d impress Preacher with her initiative. Prove she was more than a blunt instrument.

  In the last days before she’d moved to New Orleans, late at night through her mom’s living room window, while the rest of the neighborhood slept, Maureen had watched a spider spin a vast web that stretched from the branches of a spindly birch tree to the curbside streetlight. She remembered the sight of the silken threads, pale and wispy in the lamplight, drifting in the breeze with one end unanchored. It was marvelous, it really was, in the truest sense of the word, how that solitary spider built that web one strand at a time, something so tiny and determined building a trap so intricate and beautiful, so strong and deadly—all of it starting from one slender and delicate thread—and the spider, skilled and smart, avoiding getting caught up in her own trap.

  And when birds or the wind or boys playing ball broke the web during daylight hours, out came the spider at night to rebuild. Every time.

  Maureen crossed her hands and locked her thumbs together, bending her fingers into the eight legs of a spider, like she used to do as a kid making animated shadows on the wall.

  Fragile, loose threads were what her thoughts, what she, felt like too often these days, like those first few strands of the web—unmoored, untethered and blowing loose in the breeze.

  She hadn’t told a soul the whole truth about that dark time last winter on Staten Island, when a twisted, murderous psycho named Frank Sebastian had hunted and brutalized her. Maybe keeping her mouth shut had made things worse for her, had let the anger and bad memories linger. Her mother knew a few things. Detective Waters knew others. Throughout the spring after the incident, Maureen had dated a cute, kind, and dumb younger guy named Derek, and she’d told him some of the story. Not all of it, but enough to explain why she sometimes flinched when he touched her or whispered her name, and why she sometimes woke up panting and screaming in the night, ready to throw fists.

  Derek knew that Maureen had been a victim of violence, though, no, she hadn’t been raped. And he knew that she had saved herself, mostly, from the perpetrator of that violence. The fact that Sebastian was dead, and that she had killed him, and not just him, that detail she kept to herself.

  Another thing Derek never knew was how he put the idea of New Orleans in her head with his talk about the Saints and their miraculous Super Bowl run. He couldn’t stop talking about how if the Saints could find a way, the dead-in-the-water Saints, the goddamn ’Aints, for chrissakes, couldn’t his beloved New York Jets do the same? Maureen didn’t care much about football, didn’t care much for the boy, to be honest, but the idea of a new city, a new place, a wounded place deep in the process of remaking itself, that idea she liked a lot.

  Somewhere else she could be someone else.

  The concept had lodged in her brain, where it grew, like an infection.

  New York City slashed its budget, killing the police academy class she’d already enrolled in. It killed the one after that, too, leaving her with at least a year of her own to dispose of before she could become a cop. She had to leave New York. It was sad. She’d been so sure at first blush, when she first decided to be a cop, that she wanted to wear the hometown colors, to wear its badge, but she couldn’t wait. She wouldn’t survive the delay. She knew herself. She’d be back on her feet with a drink tray in her hand, bumping coke off her house key between rounds and thinking about everything great and healthy she’d do if she could just get a few days off.

  Researching other opportunities, she discovered that New Orleans, flush with federal grant money, was announcing its first academy class in three years. She started reading about the city and the police department in the online version of the New Orleans newspaper. Even six years after Katrina, she kept seeing words like remake, recover, reinvent, and rebirth—things she wanted and needed for herself. A new, reform-minded police commissioner had rolled into town not long ago and now sat at the right hand of a popular mayor. Firings, forced retirements, and indictments battered the department. Everything from murder cover-ups to faked traffic tickets. Cops going to jail every month, it seemed. All the scandal only heightened her attraction. She saw opportunity in it. She applied. She got in, with an offer of a city job until her academy class filled up. Just as she’d suspected, the NOPD was hot for fresh blood, eager to recruit from beyond the city and the state. And then all that was left to do was to fire her therapist, pack the car, and kiss her mom goodbye.

  Here in New Orleans, it was so far, so good.

  She sniffed, her nose itching. Her eyes watered, and she fought off a sneeze. Tell us about your father, Maureen. You were only eleven when he left. Don’t you think that matters? That was what the shrink had asked her. Right, she’d thought, and that’s why I want to play a boy’s game and run around with a gun in my hand. So Daddy will love me. Whatever. Fuck you. Believe it or not, Doc, it’s not always about the one with the penis. Selfish prick that he was, her father wasn’t the problem. Maybe the girl just wants to kick some ass.

  The therapy, her mother’s idea, had proved costly and pointless, nothing more than an excuse to take expensive pills that gave Maureen diarrhea and headaches. The medication worked, though, in a way. She thought less about her past when she worried in the present about not soiling herself in public like a toddler. She gave up on the therapy and the medication within weeks. She had other options, she knew, and liked none of them: ill-gotten opiates, Irish whiskey, various combinations of both. Old and tired, all of it.

  She hated the fog and the hangovers that trailed her into her days when she indulged in chemicals the night before, found them even more debilitating than the nightmares. Cultivating a Xanax addiction didn’t seem the best way to launch a law-enforcement career. She’d done the “just to get by” thing with coke in the past, when she was waiting tables. It was bullshit, lazy self-deception. She’d known it then and believed it now. Plus, she’d watched her mother use white wine to numb her own wounds for years. Alcohol and its sister drugs only preserved the pain. They retarded its natural disintegration. Though she was unsure which part of her was broken, Maureen
feared that fate. She didn’t fear a fight. She didn’t fear pain. She feared, had always feared, stasis, paralysis.

  Confession is good for the soul. That was what her old high school track coach, a Catholic priest, had told her. They’d talked on occasion, though never in detail, the spring after everything happened, after the insomnia had kicked in hard. She’d gone back to her old high school campus to run endless late-night laps around the school’s outdoor track. But the old priest assumed that it was guilt that had Maureen running in circles, guilt about something she’d done, like cocaine or married guys, or something she hadn’t done, like get married and have babies. The priest assumed that she suffered from the want and need of forgiveness. But she wasn’t sorry for what she’d done, at least not the thing that was keeping her up at night.

  Of course, she’d never said anything to dissuade the priest. She hadn’t expected real help from him; she just liked hearing there was hope for her. She liked the warm sound of someone else’s faith in the dark. Maybe that was why she liked this old church, why she’d picked it as the rest stop and turning point for her evening runs. She liked catching her breath amid the shuffling steps and murmured rosaries of the neighborhood widows. According to the handwritten signs out front, she wouldn’t be able to do it much longer. The city had shrunk since the storm. The diocese was dying, literally. The church was to be deconsecrated and locked down in the coming weeks, its valuables shipped away or sold at auction. Maybe, Maureen thought, she wouldn’t let that stop her from coming. Maybe the church would be even more beautiful without all that Catholic suffering and guilt getting in the way.

  It would shine, maybe—like a newly minted divorcée.

  Over Maureen’s head, the rain pounded like a stampede on the slate roof of the church. Thunder rumbled as if God, embarrassed over her thoughts, were clearing his throat. It doesn’t rain this hard at home, Maureen thought. Ever. The rain, it’s another one of those things, like the heat, like the light and the air, elemental things, that was different about Louisiana, about New Orleans. Which was home now, by the way, Maureen reminded herself. No more Staten Island. Forget the living room window. Forget the itsy-bitsy spider.