Twenty minutes later, she heard someone bang three times on the metal gate. Either Wilburn or Cordts. The three bangs was their signal that Shadow had arrived and everything was copacetic. She got up from the table, found LaValle’s office in the back. She rapped a knuckle on the door. “They’re here,” she said. “Do not come out of this office for any reason until I come back and give you the all clear. For safety’s sake. Your safety. Am I understood?”
LaValle hollered back that she was.
Maureen walked to the front door and opened it.
Shadow stood on the other side of the iron gate, a bored look on his face, his hands loose at his sides, his eyes so red Maureen thought he might have burst a few blood vessels. The weed stink off him made her own eyes water. He was slender with a small potbelly, and looking at him face-to-face Maureen realized he was not much taller than she was. She remembered him as a bigger man, taller and more rangy. Then again, she’d only gotten one good look at him, and that was from across the street before she knew who she was looking at. Back then, months ago, she’d had no reason to pay close attention; he was an older boy yelling at a younger boy she was talking to at a crime scene.
After that he was the guy who ambushed her with a throat punch. She hadn’t seen him that day, not coming at her, not running away.
He’d shorn his braids since she’d seen him on the streets, keeping it close now, and he had a long, wispy goatee hanging from his chin like Spanish moss. His puffy down vest was open, and against his chest, over his thermal tie-dyed shirt, lay his telltale cowrie-shell necklace.
Behind Shadow stood Wilburn and Cordts, each gripping one of Shadow’s upper arms in one hand. The officers were stone-faced. They hated what she asked of them, Maureen thought, which was bodyguarding her while she questioned a known fugitive and possible conspirator in cop killings, and did so off the record. Too bad, she thought, if they hated her. Or maybe, she thought, they just hated the pungent dogshit odor of the high-grade marijuana. Shadow sighed.
“He’s unarmed,” Wilburn said.
“Only love,” Shadow said, raising his chin, eyelids heavy and low. “Only love.”
This guy, Maureen thought, was gonna be her big breakthrough? If there were ever a time and occasion, she thought, that required Preacher’s touch … but tonight, there was no Preacher. There was only her and what she’d learned from him in too short a time together.
Maureen searched Shadow’s face for any indication he recognized her. She found nothing. She wasn’t sure he knew where he was or what was happening. She was surprised at his condition. There might be more than THC in his system, she thought. Out of character for someone with a reputation as a consummate operator. Then again, in her short time on the force, Maureen had found the common criminal element pretty disappointing. With very few exceptions, nobody lived up to the rep that preceded him on the streets. Not the criminals, not the cops. Maureen was determined to be one of the exceptions.
“Bring him in,” she said, opening the gate. “You guys, too.”
Wilburn and Cordts traded glances, then marched Shadow into the bar. They wouldn’t question her in front of a criminal. Wouldn’t leave her alone with him, either. She was counting on these things. Stick with me, guys, she thought.
“Shadow,” Maureen said, “follow me to the table over there.” To the other cops she said, “Can you guys wait at the bar?”
Wilburn rolled his shoulders. He spoke in a low voice as they watched Shadow stroll over to the cocktail table. “That’s three of us, Coughlin, off the streets when we should be out there. If we get a call, we have to roll. I’m not gonna broadcast anything, but I’m not gonna lie about where I am. You do what you gotta do, we’ll cover for you as best we can, but…” His voice trailing off, he completed his sentence with a shrug.
“That’s plenty,” Maureen said. “This shouldn’t take long. I appreciate your help.”
“If you can get a coherent sentence out of that guy,” Cordts said, “about anything, you deserve that detective shield, like, tomorrow.”
Maureen left them at the bar and crossed the barroom to sit with Shadow. He slouched deep in his chair. She said, “You’ve been told what this is about?”
Shadow slid a cigarette from the pack Maureen had tossed on the table. He lit it using the candle. “Some kind of parlay.” He coughed one time, sharp, like a bark. “I do for you or the wrath of God burns down the neighborhood.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Some shit like that.”
“Yeah, some shit like that,” Maureen said. “You heard what happened today.”
Shadow nodded slowly. “White boys killing cops. In a big way. Crazy, for sure. But not nothing that had to do with Shadow.”
“But you’re here.”
“Not for you,” Shadow said. “For I.”
“You remember a guy named Cooley, another guy named Gage? Clayton Gage?”
“The things I do,” Shadow said, “I meet a lot of people. Shadow diversified, you could say.”
“Well, I believe you met them during one of your diversification efforts,” Maureen said. “White boys from outside the city. They call themselves Sovereign Citizens. They were raising a militia called the Watchmen Brigade. They wanted to move guns, lots of guns, into and around New Orleans.”
“Sounds to Shadow like they got that shit done.”
“Because you helped them,” Maureen said.
Shadow held out his hands. “See these hands? These hands never so much as picked up a gun.” He pressed his palms together. “That’s not Shadow’s way.”
“You connected Cooley and Gage to Bobby Scales. You set them up in New Orleans.”
“You set them up in New Orleans,” Shadow said. “Your people. It was a cop that made Shadow make that connect. What happened today? What goes around, comes around, feel me? Y’all did this to y’all selves. Karma. Payback a bitch.”
He eased deeper into his chair, grinning, confident in his wisdom.
Maureen flipped the table, cigarettes, ashtray, and burning candle flying.
She kicked Shadow in the chest, boot heel hard to the sternum, toppling him and his chair backward onto the floor. His cigarette flew through the air. Wilburn and Cordts were halfway to her before she stopped them with a raised hand. She knew they were rushing in not to defend Shadow, not to restrain her, but to assist in the beating they saw coming. All day, every cop in New Orleans had been waiting to kick someone’s ass. Anyone. But they stopped at her wordless order. They stood frozen, panting like dogs waiting to be let off the leash.
Shadow was slow to recover. He managed to slide out of the chair and roll over onto his back. Maureen circled him. She crushed out his lost cigarette under her boot.
“Fucking motherfucking pigs,” he spat, his stoner cool evaporated by fear and rage. A surprising amount of rage, Maureen thought, for someone so stoned. “That’s it, huh? Shadow going in the river, too. Fuck y’all. I hope them white boys kill all y’all.”
Maureen strode toward Shadow, him crab walking on his back to get away from her, coughing, fighting for breath. She’d struck him a good one, knocked the wind right out of him. His eyes were tearing. Even if he could get to his feet, he had nowhere to run. Maureen knew it. Shadow knew it. She could see the knowledge, the fear, electrifying his eyes. She wanted to see just how much electricity she could generate.
She reached into her leather jacket, pulled out the ASP. She flicked her wrist and the weapon extended with a metallic snap, the end quivering with the weight of the leaded end. She put her foot on Shadow’s chest, pushed him flat on his back on the floor. He was transfixed by the vibrating tip of the ASP, drool running onto his bottom lip.
Maureen looked at Wilburn and Cordts. “Y’all do not have to be here for this. I got it from here.”
“If he’s got something to say,” Cordts said, “I wanna be here to listen.”
Maureen narrowed her eyes, trying to read the other cops. Cordts was both eager for and frightened by what might happen next, like a kid at the top of that first roller-coaster peak. Wilburn was clouded and distant. And hostile. What he wanted, and feared, was harder to read.
She thought of the strange men she had taken down in the dark. She had to admit it. This might be better. She didn’t have to hide behind a hood. She tightened her grip on the ASP. She could feel Shadow breathing hard under her boot. His red eyes stayed wild with terror. Maureen realized she was sweating like crazy, beads of it trickling into her eyes. When had the bar gotten so warm? The ASP became as heavy as a sledgehammer in her hand.
Looking down at Shadow shaking under her boot, Maureen tried conjuring the fresh memory of Preacher in his hospital bed, tried to hear the fear in his voice as he told the story of being shot. She tried to imagine the cries of the widows when the most horrible news of their lives came to their doorsteps. She tried to think of these things, and she failed.
Instead Maureen could only feel her heart beating so hard it made her body shake. She could smell the black mud of the Mississippi. She saw again how Officer Quinn had put Bobby Scales’s head under his boot, pressing his face into the mud at the riverside to suffocate him. She breathed in the brackish waters of the Arthur Kill and recalled how a year ago she had scrambled and crawled through the muck and the cattails of the dark shoreline to get away from Sebastian as he marched toward her, fists clenched, destruction on his mind.
Both men were to her in those moments nothing but monsters.
Is a monster, Maureen wondered, what she came to this city to be?
She lifted her boot. She collapsed the ASP, tucked it back into her jacket. “I told E to tell you that you would walk away from this meeting. That is how this will go.”
Shadow raised up on his elbows. Maureen righted his chair, pointed to it. Never taking his eyes off her, Shadow climbed into the chair.
“The Watchmen,” Maureen said. “Talk.”
Like a pendulum, Shadow’s red eyes moved from the hidden ASP to Maureen’s face and back again. He straightened his vest. “What? Yeah, I made introductions. It wasn’t my idea. Ruiz and Quinn, they wanted Shadow doing it. Either that or they tell Big Mike I’m gonna hit him with the double cross when he makes his big move. Big Mike hear that kind of talk and he’s gonna hit Shadow with two in the chest, feel me? So I make the connect for the cops. What the fuck Shadow care what white boys do? They wanna play soldier, get y’all’s attention for once, that works for me.”
“So you meet Edgar Cooley,” Maureen said. “At the daiquiri place.”
“Right, right.”
“But then there’s a second meeting,” Maureen said. “After Cooley left the picture, you met with Clayton Gage.”
“If you say so,” Shadow said. “Fuck if I remember they names.”
“I do say so. This second meeting, this was back at the daiquiri shop again?”
Shadow shook his head. “This Gage didn’t want to do nothin’ out in the street. I got the feeling things didn’t work out so well for the first guy, know what I mean? Gage was more careful. Cooley and the other one who came around, the money man.” Shadow hung his head, snapping his fingers as his brain tried to resurrect the name.
Maureen could see that, in spite of his circumstances, Shadow was starting to enjoy himself, almost even forgetting he was talking to a cop. She realized that his role in solving the puzzle fed his ego. She could see what drove him on the streets. Knowing things, moving the pieces around. Systems, relationships, conspiracy. Moving parts. He didn’t want to drive the race car; he wanted to build it and watch it run in circles around the track. And he wanted to be able to walk away when the car hit the wall and burst into flames, driver be damned. A man who could build a good race car could always find another driver. She’d have learned none of these things, she realized, if she’d left him picking his teeth off the barroom floor.
“Heath,” Maureen said. “Caleb Heath is the name you’re looking for.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Cooley and Heath, they was into it”—he switched into his version of a white man’s voice—“being down, being gangsta, whatever the fuck. But Gage, he was business, and he was cautious.”
For all the good it did him, Maureen thought. “So this second meeting, where was it?”
“At Gage’s apartment,” Shadow said.
“Clayton Gage had an apartment in the city?” she said.
Holy shit, she thought. She was getting it done. Shadow was giving them one fucking lead after another. Wilburn and Cordts had caught her excitement. They rose from their barstools again. Cordts tapped his wrist. She had their attention, but she was running out of time.
“I was there,” Shadow said. “It was nice. New. New paint. New shit. We had to go there late at night, when shit in the ’hood was quiet. Not the kind of place you can be bringing guns in and out of. Which was pretty much the point of me being there. Finding other places to stash the guns.” Shadow straightened up in his chair. He put his hand on his chest. “I gotta say, Officer. You scared me some there.”
“The apartment,” Maureen said. “Where is it?”
“Around the way,” Shadow said. “In them new places. The Harmony Oaks. In a building where no one was renting yet.”
“The houses that Solomon Heath built,” Maureen said. “Gage worked out of an apartment he rented from Caleb Heath.”
“If you say so,” Shadow said. “You got another cigarette?”
“They’re around here somewhere,” Maureen said, her mind spinning. “I guess I should put the table back.”
She righted the table, set the ashtray back on it. The mason jar holding the candle had smashed on the floor, spilling wax onto the wood. She walked to the bar and laid another five over the ten she had tucked under the ashtray. She hoped LaValle hadn’t heard too much of the commotion. Shadow brought his chair back to the table and sat. Maureen tossed him the pack of cigarettes and her lighter. Shadow lit up, set the pack and the lighter back on the table.
He said, “So what now?”
“Any chance you remember an apartment number?” Maureen asked.
“It was months ago, and I didn’t go but that one time.” He sat up straighter. “But it’s easy to find. First floor, in one of the brick buildings right off Louisiana, one of the old ones they saved from the projects.” He laughed. “They got like a pool and shit there now. In the old Magnolia. Looks nice. I only seen it through the fence.”
Maureen adjusted her ponytail. It was helpful information, sure, about the apartment, but her earlier excitement was waning. Clayton Gage had been dead six weeks. The apartment had probably been cleaned out and rented by now. But Caleb Heath had bolted after Gage was killed. Maybe he hadn’t had time to clean up. He didn’t seem the type to do much of that to begin with. And Maureen doubted Caleb had told Solomon what he was doing with the apartments he was supposed to be supervising on his father’s behalf. It was worth a look. They might get lucky.
Shadow stood up. “If there’s nothin’ else you need from me.”
“I think that’ll do,” Maureen said. She tapped her own chest. “Sorry about that. Bruise’ll heal in a couple of days.”
“Ain’t no thing. Shadow’s had worse. Believe that.”
He straightened his down vest. Stretching his neck, he touched his cowrie-shell necklace with his fingertips. He seemed to be lingering, Maureen thought, in order to savor the fact that the cops were letting him go. “I have to admit, Shadow thought for a hot minute he wouldn’t walk out of here.”
“Thanks for your help,” Maureen said. “I’m sure you’ve got business to attend to.”
“Shadow always has the business to do.” He turned, sauntered to the door. He tipped an imaginary cap to Wilburn and Cordts. “Irie, gentlemen.”
Wilburn stared him down, but Cordts was smirking. “We’ll see you soon, Shadow. Real soon. We’ll tell Big Mike you stopped by.”
That last crack almost broke Shadow’s cool. Almost. He threw a glance over his shoulder as he slipped out the door.
“Big Mike’ll fucking kill him,” Maureen said, “if he hears Shadow talked to us. About anything.”
“Fuck that mope,” Wilburn said. “We’ll be better off, and it’ll be an easy solve for Homicide. Everybody wins.”
“Just giving him something to think about,” Cordts said.
“You’re the one about kicked his heart out his back,” Wilburn said, stepping forward. “Now he’s your pal.”
“I was working him,” Maureen said. “Aggressively, but it was work. These are extreme circumstances. He’s not my pal.”
Wilburn stormed outside, slamming the door behind him. Maureen could hear him shouting curses then calling for his partner.
“I take it we’re done here, too?” Cordts said.
“I gotta make a call,” Maureen said, “start moving on Shadow’s information. And I’ll let LaValle know he can finally go home. But, yeah, we’re done. Thank you, the both of you, for having my back. And for showing some flex.”
“Watching you work,” Cordts said, “was interesting. Keep us posted on how it goes from here.” He tilted his head at the door. “Don’t worry about Wilburn. He could give a fuck how you treated Shadow. I think he’s just pissed you let the mope walk. Long day today, for all of us.”
“I’m gonna make sure someone pays for it,” Maureen said.
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Cordts said, “we’re all chasing that same result. Including the two guys who helped you conduct your secret interview with a wanted man.” He duplicated Shadow’s hat-tipping gesture and walked out the door.
Maureen took several deep breaths before calling Detillier. She poured another shot but didn’t drink it. Detillier was fully awake when he answered this time.
“I have new information on Clayton Gage,” Maureen said. “The location of an apartment he used in the city until his death.”
“Should I ask where you got this information?”
“Through a CI of Preacher’s,” Maureen said. “It’s reliable. It makes sense. It’s an apartment that Caleb Heath provided the Watchmen through his father’s stock of properties. That it’s connected to Heath makes me think it’s legit. He also puts Caleb Heath in that apartment with the Watchmen. He gives us back what we lost with Quinn and Scales and Leary.”
“Where’s the apartment?” Detillier asked. “You have an address?”
“Not an exact one,” Maureen said. “It’s in Harmony Oaks, the CI said, in one of the two brick buildings. One of them is part of the rec center, so there’s only one building it can be.”
“There are some logistics I have to work out,” Detillier said, “but I bet we can get in the apartment by morning.”
“By morning? How can you wait that long?”
“Listen to me, Maureen, very carefully,” Detillier said. “The Sovereign Citizens and people like them, they booby-trap their homes before they go out on their missions. I’ve seen it several times before. We have no idea what could be waiting for us there. Please trust me on this. Don’t go looking around there yourself.”
“I believe you,” Maureen said. “It’s just, it’s our best lead.”
“It is,” Detillier said. “And I’m taking it very seriously. I’m on it. I’ll roust a couple agents out of bed and send them to sit on the building overnight.”
“I can do that for you,” Maureen said.
“Y’all are shorthanded enough as it is,” Detillier said. “Believe me, I have the manpower I need after today.”
“Don’t cut me out of this,” Maureen said. “This is my lead. I tracked this down. I want to be there and see what comes of my hard work.”
“I wouldn’t dream of freezing you out,” Detillier said. “But I’ll take it from here. Keep your phone close. Trust me.”
Maureen laughed out loud. “And what do I do until I hear from you?”
“You keep doing your job,” Detillier said. “And you wait.” He hung up.
Maureen slipped her phone into her pocket. She picked up her plastic cup of whiskey, looked down into her drink. She raised it halfway to her mouth and stopped. It came to her what the look on Wilburn’s face had meant, the tough-to-read frown he’d worn as she’d roughed up Shadow. She knew that look. What Wilburn saw when he looked at her was what she had seen when she’d looked at Quinn, when she’d seen him for what he really was.
She knew it wouldn’t make a real difference to anyone, but she poured the shot of Jack down the sink anyway.