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.
Well, when she was running and when she was chasing. And when she was hurting someone else.
One thing that being a cop and these past few weeks of night work had taught her—chasing after something or someone could feel as good, maybe better, than running away. Maybe because there was a real, live person at the end of the chase. Someone you could catch. Tangible damage you could do. The things she was running from, they weren’t outside her, they were in her, and so she carried them with her. She knew that. One thing Maureen knew for sure was that neither the chasing road nor the fleeing road was anywhere near as frightening as the thought of standing still.
As she stretched in the soft grass of the park, she focused her vision on an ant crawling through the blades between her feet. She blew out her breath and the ant fell over on its back.
She moved her hands to the small of her back, did a slow back bend. When she’d righted herself she said, “You couldn’t have picked a spot by the water fountain, at least? I’m putting in work here.”
“We can walk over to it if you like,” Preacher said.
Maureen looked out over the lagoon, eyes narrowed. She had an idea why he was there. Disappointment crept over her. This evening was crashing down around her ears in a hurry. “We’re fine right here,” she said. “Go ahead and get it over with. What have you heard? Is the axe coming down?”
“Excuse me?”
“I told you last time we met,” Maureen said, “that I have my meeting tomorrow morning with the district commander. You’re here because you’ve heard how it’s gonna go. And you wouldn’t be if things were gonna go well.”
“Come sit on the bench with me,” Preacher said.
“Wow, that bad.” Maureen set her hands on her hips. She looked over her shoulder at the spot where Solomon had stood with his cocktail and his golf club. He was gone.
Preacher ambled over to the bench and sat. Half a dozen ducks waddled to him, quacking, their expectations renewed by his return.
Maureen hadn’t realized until that very moment that, despite everything she’d done wrong both to earn her suspension and while serving it, she had been completely confident the DC would reinstate her. For the past six weeks, as far as the NOPD knew, she’d done everything the department had asked of her. She had kept quiet and stayed away from other cops. She had told no one about her searching the streets for Madison Leary, not even Preacher. Had the NOPD found out anyway? Where had she blown it? Dice had said no one she had questioned while searching for Leary had made her for a cop. She couldn’t see how any of the guys she’d dealt with in the streets could know she was police. Not one of them got a good look at her face. They’d hardly heard her voice. She wasn’t sure any of them even knew it was a woman who had taken them down.
But why would Preacher cross town to stake her out in Audubon Park the night before her big meeting other than to cushion the blow of the bad news in person? He was brave. And professional. And he had always looked out for her. If she were walking into an ambush in her meeting tomorrow, Preacher would warn her.
“Do I need to buy a plane ticket and get out of town?” Maureen asked. She looked through the trees at Solomon’s house. He knew by now his bribe hadn’t worked. Maybe he’d tried different tactics and reached into the department. “Have the brass changed their minds and decided to bring charges?”
Preacher turned on the bench when he realized she hadn’t followed him. “Good Lord, woman. Would you come over here and sit? Did I say I’m here about your meet with the DC? I’m not. It’s something else entirely. You Irish, you always expect the worst. Most dour motherfuckers I ever met. How any of you ever had the nerve to get on a boat I have no idea.”
“We were highly motivated,” Maureen said. “Our survival instinct is epic.”
“Some of my people,” Preacher said, “they were highly motivated, too.”
Maureen sat next to him on the bench. A couple of noisy, dissatisfied ducks tottered in her direction. They had an arrogance to them, Maureen decided. The way they demanded things from you but never looked right at you while they did it, giving you one reluctant eye, like aristocrats demanding tribute. She kicked at them. “Beat it.” The goose hissed at her, lowering its head and spreading its broad wings. “Jesus.”
“This is their turf,” Preacher said, his thick arms extended over the top of the bench. “Most people feed them. You really gonna hate on them for expecting to get what they’ve always gotten? You don’t look any different to them than the rest of us do.” He smiled. “Just another sucker.”
“They’re fucking annoying.”
“They’re fucking birds in a park,” Preacher said. “They’re doing what they’re supposed to, tryin’ to eat. It’s not personal. They’ll go away in a minute.” He raised his chin at something over Maureen’s shoulder. “Look, there you go. Salvation.”
A young girl, no more than two or three years old, waddled much like a duck to the edge of the lagoon. Her pink puffy jacket rode up on her ribs. Her shock of curly red hair blew in the breeze. In one hand she held a plastic Bunny bread bag. She reached into the bag with her other hand, throwing fistfuls of white bread into the grass. Crumbs stuck to her fingers. She screamed with delight as the ducks headed in her direction, quacking up a storm, wagging their tail feathers, putting on a show as they snatched the bread out of the grass. More ducks came paddling over from out on the lagoon, attracted by the fuss. Maureen worried the goose would make a power move for the bread bag. She wondered if the girl’s parents stood close enough to protect her from the goose if the bird got aggressive, or to rescue their little girl if she got overexcited and tumbled into the lagoon.
Maureen decided she was close enough to the little girl to intercede if disaster struck.
Or maybe, just maybe, Maureen thought, a little girl could feed the ducks at the park on a fall afternoon for a few minutes without something terrible and violent happening. She rubbed her temples with her fingertips. She wished she’d brought her cigarettes on her run.
She turned to Preacher. “Tell me you’ve got good news.”
“You’re not going to take it that way.”
“You’re killing me, Sarge,” Maureen said. “Just straight killing me.”
“When you go see Commander Skinner for your badge, he’s going to ask a favor of you.”
Maureen took a deep breath and held it. Keeping quiet these past six weeks, she’d been led to believe that was the favor. Now there’d be more. She felt foolish for being surprised. She blew out her breath. “How big a favor?”
Like it mattered, she thought. Like she wouldn’t do it, whatever it was, to get her badge back.
“The FBI wants to talk to you,” Preacher said.
Maureen sagged on the bench, as if her bones had turned to putty. “You are fucking kidding me. That wasn’t supposed to happen. That was the deal.”
“I’m not kidding,” Preacher said. “And it’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“Is my phone tapped?” Maureen asked, sitting up. “Is that why we’ve been meeting in the park like a couple of fucking spies? Am I being surveilled?”
“I wanted to talk to you,” Preacher said, “before the FBI did, and before you went in to see the district commander. So you could have your tantrum with me, instead of the DC.” He turned to her. “Is that even a real word, surveilled?”
“What do they want?” Maureen asked. “I made my statements already. Detailed statements.”
“The Sovereign Citizens kid,” Preacher said, “the one who that Leary woman murdered on Lyons Street, the one who went to that reform school with Caleb Heath, name was Gage. Clayton Gage. His father has been in town asking questions. He’s been to HQ and Homicide a couple of times, making angry demands.” He shrugged. “It was his son who got killed, peckerwood shitheel that he was.”
Maureen winced. “Tell me we’re not back to covering up that traffic stop again. I can’t. We did our best with that. It wasn’t worth the lies we told. Not about Gage, not about Leary. I’m exhausted even thinking about it.” She waved her hand. “Atkinson is lead detective on the Gage homicide now anyway. I secured the scene the night it happened, took a quick look at the body. The FBI knows all this. That was it. The father can talk to Atkinson. She doesn’t want to do it, that’s not my problem.”
“What I’m hearing,” Preacher said, “is that the feds think the father might be a source of useful intel on the Citizens and the Watchmen Brigade militia and whatever else his son might have been into. The money, the guns.”
“He’s involved, the father? He’s part of the Sovereign Citizens movement?”
“Unknown at this time. That’s probably the main thing the FBI wants you to find out when you talk to him.”
“Wait—what? You’re shitting me. Preach, the Citizens, the Watchmen, they tried to kill me. And the feds picked me for this because…?”
“I don’t have specifics on that,” Preacher said. “But as near as I can figure, while Atkinson is lead on the murder, you’ve had more direct contact with the players.” Preacher ticked off Maureen’s connections to the case on his fingers. “You pulled over the truck with Gage and Leary in it. You took her to jail. You worked the Gage murder scene. Before that, you discovered the Nazi guy’s body, the first victim, what was his name, Cooley.” He raised his hands as if to fend off blame for the FBI’s choices. “Anyways, looks like as far as the FBI’s concerned, you, Coughlin, are the resident NOPD authority on these psycho patriot derelicts.”
Maureen sat up straight on the bench. Livid, she didn’t know which way to look. “Man, fuck the FBI. Those terrorist motherfuckers in the Watchmen are already pointed in my direction. With guns blazing. Where was the FBI when these guys were stashing guns all over Central City? Where were they when these guys used their guns to try and kill me? They gotta be kidding me. Papa Gage is their problem. I don’t get paid enough for this shit. I’m doing federal work, I want federal pay, and federal benefits.”
She stood, her legs feeling thick and heavy. She needed to get moving again. She shook her head, turning to Preacher. “The feds knew I’d react like this, didn’t they? They knew I wouldn’t like this idea. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“You got it wrong,” Preacher said. “You’re way ahead of yourself, as usual.” He threw a glance at the little girl’s parents, who had started eavesdropping. “And lower your voice.”
“They sent you out here to soften me up to the idea.” Her tone was derisive. She should’ve known, Maureen thought. She should’ve known there’d be more dues to pay, even after her suspension ended, to get out from under what had happened with Quinn a month and a half ago. She and Preacher, they were the only ones left around and they’d never stop paying. But, wow, she thought, Preacher tasked with the FBI’s foreplay? It stung that he would go along. That he would deceive her on their behalf.
“Look at you,” she said, giving him the up-and-down now, “a fucking butter man for the federales. Who’d a thunk it?”
Preacher rubbed his palms on his wide thighs. Maureen knew as soon as the last words left her mouth that she’d overstepped, even for her. She thought for a moment he might get up and walk away without another word to her. She took a deep breath. She forced herself to forget they were talking in the park, wearing their civilian clothes. Preacher was her direct superior. She had to stop abusing his patience.
“That’s not the case,” he said. “I’m not applying grease on anybody’s behalf. This comes on the QT from my sources in the department. Our department. Like maybe somebody in Homicide, a tall blond Detective Somebody who you already owe a world of favors, is tipping me some info. I’m not supposed to know this shit, and you sure as hell aren’t supposed to know it. We’re not even supposed to be talking, remember? But here I am anyway, like I’ve been the past six weeks. I’m here for you, Coughlin. For your sake. Not for anyone else’s. You should do this favor for the FBI. It could be good for you. It could be good for the department, which you owe a few favors. Most important, lest you forget the point of what we do, helping the FBI might help us catch some bad guys. Serious bad guys out to hurt cops. Learn how to accept a favor.”
Maureen felt a hot wave of shame. She raised her hands, puffed out her cheeks. “Shit, I’m sorry.”
Preacher had protected her from the moment she had climbed into the police cruiser as his trainee. He had protected her from the bad guys, from bad cops, from herself. And not just her. He watched over everyone in the Sixth District. Here was the one guy in New Orleans she could trust, and she was shit-talking to his face. She’d stop, right then.
Tomorrow, she thought, she would be a real cop again. No more pretending, no more running the streets in an oversized sweatshirt, hiding her face. She should feel nothing but relief. Instead, though, she felt the oily stain of compromise.
Do us one more favor, the men in charge said. It’s right here in my hand, what you want. All I have to do is slide it across the table. Shake that ass for tips one more time. Then we’ll stop asking. Except they never did. Not today. Not tomorrow. She thought of her plans for later that night. She could let them go. She could stay home. Tomorrow, she would be a cop again. Right, she thought. Tomorrow. Which meant not tonight. Tonight she remained whatever it was she had become, what she had made herself into, over the past six weeks. She’d refused to put a name on it. If she named that other self, she thought, it might stay.
One more night, she thought. One more time. On my terms.
Because you’ve never told yourself those words before. Not ever. Not a million times.
“Tell me one thing,” Maureen said. “Tell me they’re not making me a rat. Promise me that they’re not gonna sell me to the DOJ when they’re done with me. Tell me that’s not the price tag. That Justice wants someone of their own undercover in the department. Someone easy to use, who they can hurt. Did they come to me because they don’t have the nerve to ask this of Atkinson? Because she’s clean. Because they got nothing on her.”
“I’ve heard nothing,” Preacher said, “about the Department of Justice. Or about this being some kind of permanent snitching gig for the feds. It should be the one favor.”
Maureen laughed. “C’mon, Preacher. There’s never just one favor. Admit it. Skinner finally decided to bring me back because the FBI showed up and gave him a chance to do them a favor. I do this favor for the feds and I get my job back. I’m not stupid. Nobody’s doing anything for my benefit. I’m the perfect puppet. Quid pro quo, little bird.” She rubbed her eyes, sat on the bench. “Here I am accusing you of being the FBI’s bitch, when in the end, it’s me who’s going to be their bitch.”
“I don’t know for a fact,” Preacher said, emphatic, “that your reinstatement continges on you talking to this FBI guy, but, whether it does or it doesn’t, doing the feds a solid can’t hurt your chances. You’re a good Catholic girl. Don’t think of it as a price tag, think of it as penance.”
“I gave up that Catholic shit,” Maureen said.
“Then think of it as karma,” Preacher said. “I don’t judge. Think of it as a mutually beneficial opportunity of which you’ve been availed. I don’t much give a shit how you sell it to yourself. Just, for once, make the Man happy. It won’t kill you. I’ve dabbled in it in my three decades on the job and I survived. And I remind you, if the bosses wanted to be cruel to you and roll around in their own shit in the process, which wouldn’t be a first for this department, criminal charges around this Quinn thing and the Gage murder are a real possibility. You gotta live with that. You gotta factor that in.”
“And I remind you,” Maureen said, “this bird can sing. Factor that in.”
“Sing about who?” Preacher said. “Quinn? His partner Ruiz? Not much point to that, is there?”
Maureen knew there was a third name Preacher had left off the list. His. He knew he didn’t need to say it, that she’d register the omission.
“Listen to me, Coughlin. The best thing that could’ve happened for you did happen. The people in power, they’ve decided they need you. That only you can do what they need done. Be smart. Take advantage of it. Pride has no place in this job we do. Results are what matter. Favors. Debts. Information. Get your badge back so the Man can forget about us and we can get back to doing the work we were put on God’s green earth to do. Catching the bad guys. Believe.”
Maureen got up from the bench. “Speaking of bad guys, I saw Dice yesterday. Downtown.”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Preacher said. “Not my case. Not even my district. Not your case, either. And you’re not a cop again until tomorrow. So shit that happened yesterday needs to stay there.”
“She had nothing to say about Leary anyway. Except that there’s been people looking for her. I think maybe Solomon sent someone after her, to protect Caleb.”
“What did I just say? What did I just say to you about yesterday?”
“What? She followed me to my car and started talking. I was at the Spotted Cat having a drink and she saw me. I think she needed money, really. I think that’s what it was about.”
“And you just decided, hey, while I’ve got you here, let me ask about that murder suspect you know.”
“It wasn’t anything,” Maureen said.
“Then why tell me about it?” Preacher asked. “Why mention it?”
This motherfucker, Maureen thought. Honesty. Up to a point. “I thought you’d be happy to hear the girl’s not dead. That’s what I meant by bringing it up.”
“I am glad,” Preacher said. “I am. When you’re official again, reach out to Atkinson, let her know Dice is breathing and in town. Then maybe stay this side of Canal Street for a while.”
Maureen pulled her heels to the small of her back one at a time, stretching her thighs. “I’m with you. I am.”
Preacher was giving her that disapproving look again, like every wrong thing she had done over the past few weeks was scrolling across her body like a movie on a screen.
Maureen bounced on her toes. She was ready, more than ready, to start running again. “What? Why are you looking at me like that? I said I heard you.”
“Make sure you hear this, too,” Preacher said. “Tomorrow you’ll be back at work. So if there’s any business you need to finish up, anything pressing or lingering that you need to get out of your system before you come back, go ahead and let the devil out tonight. One last blowout, one last hurrah, whatever. Because tomorrow you need to be ready to be a cop again. One hundred percent.”
He waited for her response.
He knew, Maureen thought. Somehow, some way, Preacher’s preternatural cop intuition told him she’d been up to no good. Like when you were out on patrol and you talked to a guy on the street about the Saints or the weather, and you just knew somehow he had something in his pockets that he shouldn’t have. Like whatever impulse, she thought, that had told her to pull over that pickup truck with Clayton Gage at the wheel and Madison Leary in the passenger seat. Maybe Preacher didn’t know the specifics of what she’d been getting up to at night, Maureen thought, but he knew something was going on. And he knew it was wrong. Maybe he didn’t know how far she’d gone, but he knew she’d strayed from the one true path.
“And leave Solomon Heath alone,” Preacher said.
“I haven’t said two words to that man since I worked his party.”
“The man, his house, where he does his business,” Preacher said. “Stay away.”
Maureen opened her mouth to speak, to spit out some bullshit denial, but Preacher raised his hand against it. “You gonna hurt my feelings, Coughlin, you keep this up.”
“Sorry.”
“So we understand each other?”
“We do,” Maureen said.
“We’re clear, Officer Coughlin?”
“We are, Sergeant Boyd,” Maureen said. “Crystal clear.”
Preacher nodded. Maureen watched as he got up from the bench and walked down to the water, his hands buried in the pocket of his sweatshirt, his broad back to her. One more time, he was telling her, he would look away from what she did next. Once more.