Let the Devil Out (4 page)

Not the Heaths, and not the cops and criminals alike, whom they paid off with stiff new bills passed hand to hand in unmarked envelopes. Like the envelope he had given her the night she'd worked the party. Trying to buy her, and assuming she came cheap.

 

4

That evening, as she rounded the turn past Bird Island out in the lagoon, Maureen could see high in the island's trees, settling into their nests for the night, great white egrets holding their long beaks open and squawking and beating their wings, the feathers of their wingtips thin and spread wide like human fingers, silhouetted against the sky. In the lagoon, brown-and-green ducks paddled with purpose along the water's smooth surface, their eyes fixed straight ahead, the upright triangles of their tails wagging, their V-shaped wakes splitting then fading behind them.

Maureen continued running along the track, closing in on the Heath house. She dipped and dodged as people of varied shapes and colors, wearing everything from shiny skintight biking gear to fluffy pink tracksuits, cycled, jogged, power walked, and Rollerbladed around her, talking and talking, those moving mouths always talking, to each other, to their babies, to their dogs, into their phones, or maybe all at the same time, as far as Maureen could tell.

In her own ears, music pounded. Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue. An instrumental track, one of her favorites: “Hurricane Season.” She could hear nothing else around her. She ran lost in a wash of horns so loud she couldn't think, her preferred state. The sinuous, repeating sequence of notes blasting in her ear worked like the expert combination punches of a boxer. The bass and drums and guitar rolled and thundered underneath the lightning of the horns like a runaway locomotive threatening to jump the track. But the horns were what got her, what held her. She'd never heard anything like those horns until she got to New Orleans.

The infectiousness. The irresistible raw and ecstatic power.

Where was this music when she was growing up?

As if she hadn't gotten in enough trouble as a teenager, she thought. She could only imagine what would have become of her had she hurtled through adolescence with brass band music percolating her blood and her brain tissue along with everything else drenching her system in those days, both what came naturally and the other chemicals she had added herself.

Maureen ran past the island, putting the noisy birds behind her, and the great house appeared on her right. And there he was standing in the yard, highball glass in one hand, the man himself. Solomon Heath. He was getting nearly as regular as she. Was it he, she wondered, who had dispatched someone to search for Madison Leary? Was Solomon's agent the man Dice had been talking about? New Orleans would be safer for his son if Leary was behind bars, or in the river. She put neither option past the man.

She kept an eye on Heath while navigating the obstacles around her.

He was looking right at her, watching her as she ran. Even from a distance, she could tell that something about him that evening was off. No smoke rose from the grill. He just stood there, not moving, halfway between his house and where the edge of his property melted into the park. Like he'd been waiting for her. In his right hand was the highball glass, tilted at an angle where it might spill its contents. In his left hand he held a short golf club against his pant leg, the club's metal shaft glinting in the fading sunlight.

As if whatever signal he'd been waiting for had arrived, he started walking toward the park, toward her, raising his glass to his lips and drinking, never taking his eyes off Maureen. His steps were unsteady. She wouldn't have to speed up much, she thought, to run right by him. He was in no shape to chase her, not at his age, not with the way she could run.

But she didn't accelerate; she held that option in reserve. Instead, she slowed down, letting him know, she hoped, that she had clocked his approach.

The golf club, she decided, was a prop. Something he could lean on while he'd waited for her to run past that wasn't a sign of weakness, like a cane. Not that she'd ever seen him use a cane. Not that he'd ever appeared to her a weak man. She noticed his steps in her direction had quickened. His gait had steadied. He was determined to intercept her.

Okay then, she thought. Let's do this.

At most the club was an implied threat, she decided, not an actual one. He'd have to do better than that, Maureen thought, considering what his son and his friends had already put her through. She drifted across the track in his direction. She might leave the running track, she decided, but she wouldn't stray far enough from it to cross from public property onto his. But if Solomon was going to approach her on park property, she wasn't going to stop him. She welcomed the interaction. She was glad she'd finally reached him, and without her once knocking on his door or invading his private space in any way.

Then, on one of the benches ahead of her, Maureen saw a familiar sandpaper-colored head. The head turned and Maureen saw the full-cheeked, green-eyed, red-pepper-flaked face of Sergeant Preacher Boyd, her former field training officer and her duty sergeant at the Sixth District. He turned on the bench and waved at her. Preacher wore civilian clothes: pressed dark jeans and a black Saints hoodie, and a dark knit hat. A group of white ducks crowded about his feet, complaining, Maureen figured, that they weren't getting fed. A single massive goose stood off to the side, observing the proceedings. Now this, Preacher being here, Maureen thought, this could fuck things up with Heath. She slowed to a walk. She looked over at Solomon.

He had stopped, maybe ten yards away from her. Close enough that Maureen could hear the clink of the ice in his glass. He tapped the head of the golf club on the toe of his shoe, watching her. He sees Preacher, too, Maureen thought. But does he know who Preacher is? He must, she decided. The two of them were both so deeply woven into the tapestry of the city, they had to know each other.

Preacher rose from the bench, narrowing his eyes at Solomon, frowning when he realized who he was observing. They knew each other, all right. The three of them stood, looking at one another, the points of a triangle. It wasn't Solomon putting the frown on Preacher's face, Maureen realized. It was her.

She felt caught out, embarrassed, as if she'd been busted meeting a boy she'd promised her friends she'd left behind. In reality, she had been caught doing, or been caught
about
to do, something technically much worse than meeting a bad-for-her boyfriend. According to her superiors at the NOPD, Maureen was banned from having anything to do with Solomon Heath. The excuse that he'd approached her in a public place would never wash. Not with them and not with Preacher.

“Coughlin,” Preacher said. Not loud, but authoritative enough that Maureen didn't want to hear him say it again. He would never order her to do something in public, not when she was out of uniform, but when he spoke to her like that, the command was implied.

Maureen glanced at Heath one more time. He stood his ground, staring at her, swinging the golf club through the dead leaves at his feet like a pendulum.

She sighed, turned her back on him, and jogged in Preacher's direction, her head hung low like a ballplayer on her way back to the dugout, upset with the umpire's decision. She could feel the heat of her blood as her neck and cheeks flushed. She was not happy, very not happy, about being brought to heel by Preacher in front of Heath. Part of the point in her running by his house so often, she thought, had been to demonstrate her freedom; to imply that she might be more dangerous on the loose than she had been on the job. Now, this moment she had been waiting for, that she had so carefully orchestrated, was backfiring on her. Not the first time that's happened, she thought.

Maureen and Preacher had been meeting in the park for the last month. They didn't communicate beforehand to set up the meetings. She ran through the park at about the same time every day. When Preacher needed to see her, he went to the park and waited on the bench. If Maureen saw him there, she stopped and they talked. Usually, he'd have some tidbit of department gossip for her. He kept her apprised of daily life in the Sixth District. Sometimes he had something he'd heard about the Leary case and things surrounding it. What he had most often was no news about that case at all.

Maureen knew, though they never discussed it, that the main reason for the meetings was Preacher's constant worry about her. He was checking up on her. Until today, she had appreciated the attention. She knew he was taking a risk. They both were.

Maureen and Preacher weren't supposed to see each other, to have any contact, until she'd been officially reinstated to the police department. Or fired from it. She didn't know who at the NOPD, if anyone, watched or kept track of such things. She certainly couldn't see Preacher reporting to or checking in with anyone. And if someone was watching the two of them, there was no way Preacher didn't know about it. He probably knew the person doing the spying, and that person probably owed Preacher any number of favors. Everyone in New Orleans, cop or not, owed Preacher a favor. In his way, Preacher could reach as deep into the convoluted viscera of New Orleans as the Heaths. They reached down from the top. Preacher reached up from the bottom. Both got results.

Maureen coasted to a stop, stepping off the asphalt track onto the grass to meet him. She plucked out her earbuds and silenced the music on her iPod with her thumb.

“I'm waiting,” Preacher said.

“For what?”

“For you to say thank you,” Preacher said. “Because I just saved you from making a huge mistake.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Maureen said, studying the tops of her running shoes.

“We really going to play this game?”

Maureen set her hands on her hips. She puffed out her chest and raised her chin. But she said nothing.

“What you're doing right now,” Preacher said. “Not talking? You should do more of that.”

Preacher scanned her with his eyes, evaluating her from her head to her feet, as she approached. She couldn't miss the scrutiny; he didn't even try to hide it. It was the first thing that happened each time they met. It wasn't a sexual appraisal. She'd never gotten the slightest kind of attention from him that way. This time, Maureen wasn't sure what he was thinking as he added up what he'd observed about her. Whatever it was he saw today, she could tell from his face that he didn't approve, beyond what she had tried with Heath.

“What now?” she asked.

“Do you ever eat?”

“The amount of exercise I get?” Maureen said. “I eat constantly.”

“Not that nuts-and-berries shit,” Preacher said. “Real food. Cooked food.”

“We've only known each other a few months,” Maureen said, grateful for the change in subject, “but we've spent a lot of time together. You've seen me eat. You really think I'm a nuts-and-berries kind of girl? C'mon.”

She bent forward, her hands on her thighs, huffing for breath, sweat trickling from under her headband and down the sides of her neck. She gave Preacher a hard time, goofed at things he said, but she understood his point. It wasn't like she didn't know what was happening to her.

She was losing weight. A lot of it. No one needed eyes as keen as Preacher's to see that. She'd never had much extra weight to spare, she'd always had angles where other women had curves, but during her suspension she had started losing the muscle she'd added over the summer in the police academy and her first months on the streets. Muscle she had worked hard for, that she needed in her arms and shoulders and back and backside to meet the physical requirements of her job. To protect herself on the streets.

She'd noticed this wearing away. She saw it in her hands, which were looking almost like a waitress's hands again. She saw it in the way her newer clothes no longer fit her. The running shorts she wore had fit when she'd bought them online two weeks ago. Now they sagged on her hips. She studied herself in the mirror after showers. Her ribs showed like they had in her cocaine-fueled middle twenties. Her hip bones were visible, too. For a few weeks there she'd almost had an ass. She was even losing that.

More than what she saw in the mirror frightened her. The visuals may have been what hurt her the least. What made her more nervous was that she could hear it, too, what was happening to her, when she was alone in the quiet of her house.

She could hear the grinding, the sound and the feel of stone working on stone, a feeling like the grinding of gears in her belly. Each day she was having a harder time ignoring the fierce devouring machine running every hour of the day and night in the arch under her ribs. And so
she
ran to take the machine's energy away. To burn the fear and the rage that she knew fueled it. To exhaust it before it ate her alive.

Her suspension was the first time since she was eighteen years old that she'd gone more than a couple of days without a job or a class or both to go to. So she ran.

She ran too often, too long, to the point where her body had started breaking down in protest. She ran through shin splints. Through swollen knees. Achy hips. She ran through every caution sign her body threw up in front of her.

Because she needed it.

Running, being in motion, was the only time that the world these days wasn't blurred and tilted ever so slightly on its axis, like she was looking at her surroundings through a turning wineglass. She needed the percussion of her feet pounding the dirt of the neutral ground between the iron rails of the streetcar tracks. Every long daylight stride pushed the silver-haired man farther back into the shadows. Every mile put the frightened, on-the-run woman she used to be farther behind her. She needed the shelter of the streetlight's curled arms and the stretching boughs of the live oaks arcing over her head. She needed to feel protected, to feel embraced by her new city. Running was the only time she felt safe anymore.