Let the Devil Out (15 page)

She took a deep breath before she spoke. “Because it's easier to get answers if the guy we're asking about isn't around and watching out for who the neighborhood people are talking to. We roll right up on everyone midday and start making demands, shit gets shut down. Maybe moved to another location, and we're back at zero. Worse, this guy now knows we're asking about him. We want him to be the
last
to know we're looking at him.”

Preacher smiled. “A gold star for Officer Coughlin. Wilburn, take notes.”

Maureen hated that she'd been forced to play teacher's pet, but directing the question at her, and referring out loud to her absence, was Preacher's way, she knew, of announcing to the squad that he had her back. The attention also meant, she hoped, that Preacher would put her on the store.

“Let's change things up. Morello, you're out of Central City; you're in the Channel tonight, instead. Wilburn and Cordts, you've shown such initiative, y'all take the Washington corridor tonight. My gut tells me the lawn-chair guys are trying to make a statement, trying to reclaim some territory. We may have an opportunity there. They might actually want our help in the neighborhood for a change. Go find out if I'm right.”

So much for that, Maureen thought. Getting Washington Avenue meant Wilburn and Cordts got the store. Cordts spoke up. “I noticed those apartments next door, there's ‘No Trespassing' signs all over them now. That's new.”

Preacher nodded. “If someone is holding a knife to the sweater-vest man's back, I wanna help them sharpen it. Make me proud, gentlemen. On my night shift, we're gonna make real cops outta you yet. ABT. Always. Be. Teaching. That's how I do. Believe.” He waited. “Yes?”

“Yes, sir,” Wilburn said.

“We believe, sir,” said Cordts.

“Halle-fucking-lujah,” Preacher said. “In other news, nothing yet on that shooting death from the 2000 block of Second. We're waiting for suspect info from Homicide. I'm thinking someone from the neighborhood, as are you all, but we're waiting for something, anything, more specific.”

“Who caught it?” Maureen asked.

“Drayton,” Preacher said.

A collective groan went up.

“Enough with that,” Preacher said. “Y'all are cops, too. Y'all have people out there you can put the lean on. Here's an idea, do some police work for a change. Who knows what might happen?” He held up a piece of paper. “Maybe something like this, for instance. This here is a memo from Sergeant Hardin of the Eighth District.”

Maureen's ears perked up at the mention of Hardin. The Eighth District included the Quarter and the Marigny, where she had been looking for Dice and Madison Leary. Hardin knew they were both part of Atkinson's murder case.

“If you haven't already heard,” Preacher said, “someone took a bad beating in the Channel two nights ago.”

Maureen's heart sank. This was not what she wanted talked about at roll call.

“Victim is a Caucasian male, mid-twenties,” Preacher said. “An unknown person or persons snuck up on him and put down the hurt with a blunt weapon of some sort. Left him lying in the bushes outside a residence with a punctured lung. This was damn close, people, to being a homicide.” He shrugged. “But it's not, so it's staying here in the district. Detective Lamb has it.

“The fun part is this. You may also recall we've gotten calls in recent weeks about young women being followed home from bars on Magazine, the Irish Garden, especially. Morello, you caught one of those, I think. We have reason to think this may be our guy. One of the girls said something about a ring. This guy had a heavy college ring on his hand. The young lady who called him in, she had been drinking in the Garden that night. She was arriving home when the beating happened, and it happened in her front yard. Like I said, I think this is our guy, which would make this good news. We'll see if the calls stop coming.”

“So that's it, then?” Maureen asked, before she could stop herself. “We're letting Lamb take it from here?”

Preacher was quiet a long time. Maureen worried that she'd said too much.

“If Lamb needs anything from us,” Preacher said, “he'll ask, I'm sure. I know he talked to the kid this afternoon. How that conversation went, I don't have details. If you feel really compelled, Coughlin, you can offer your services to Detective Lamb. Can I continue?” He held up the paper again. “Unlike many of you lesser cops, Sergeant Hardin pays attention to shit. This attention-paying compulsion has caused him to notice that this beating, instead of being an isolated incident, fits into an emerging pattern. This is the fifth assault of this kind in the past three weeks.”

These assaults we pay attention to, Maureen thought. She crossed her arms and slouched in her chair. We count them. We write memos. God save the young white men.

Preacher ticked off the connections on his fingers. “The victims are male, young, early to mid-twenties, fairly well off, and white. None of them have a record. None of them actually live in the neighborhood where they were assaulted. If you've been by Fat Harry's during an LSU game, you know the type of guy I mean. The five of them are so alike they could be frat brothers.”

Maureen folded her arms as she listened. She hadn't realized she'd been so predictable. Just another reason to hang it up, she thought. Patterns got people caught.

“One aberration: last night's beating was the first one of its kind in the Irish Channel. Every victim suffered the same kind of injuries. A pipe, a baton, to the joints or the bones. Whoever's doing it, he wants it to
hurt
. For a long time. I hesitate to use the word
vigilante
, because as far as we can tell none of these guys who got their asses kicked had committed any crimes. But whoever is doing this, he seems to think they had it coming.”

“Word gets out there's a pattern,” Morello said, “and we're gonna have frat boys all over town wanting police escorts back to their cars.”

“That's what neighborhood security is for,” Wilburn said. “Let them babysit.”

“So robbery is out as a motive?” Maureen asked.

Preacher wagged a finger. “Good question. No, nothing was taken. Which emphasizes to us that the beating was the point. Right now, I'm issuing a be-advised kind of order. If whoever is doing this has started hunting uptown, we need to be on the lookout.”

“And girls walking home from the bars at night?” Maureen asked. “We looking out for them, too?”

To Maureen's surprise, Preacher grinned. “Officer Coughlin. We've missed your particular brand of … you around here. Not only are we as a police department looking out for those very women”—he tilted his finger back and forth between himself and her—“but
we
are looking out for them, personally, you and me. You're with me tonight on Magazine Street.”

A slow clap broke out among the officers.

“You with me so far?” Preacher asked Maureen.

“Yes, sir,” Maureen said. “Maybe these beatings, maybe it's something related to those attacks down in the Fifth District, on St. Claude? The Fifth abuts the Eighth. Those were random beatings. Every vic in those cases is a white male.”

“Or the kids with the bats on Esplanade,” Wilburn said. “The ones robbing the cyclists. Could be something like that.”

Preacher shook his head. “The kids with bats only go after bike riders, and the point of those attacks was robbery. And I think we caught those kids. Not that others won't soon pick up the mantle. And the bats.” He looked at Maureen. “Anyway, the guys on St. Claude, the three of them live in that neighborhood, and they're middle-aged. They were assaulted by a gang of kids who didn't care if they were seen. Not one of the guys who took these other beatings got the slightest look at who attacked them. They had nothing to offer ID-wise. Nothing. That's impressive work by the assailant. And it points to planning and forethought. To intent. That person doesn't want
anyone
knowing who he is.

“One of the St. Claude guys named a kid from his art class as one of his attackers. Whole different thing. The guy dishing out these other beatings, he's on a mission.”

He let his words hang in the air. Maureen thought she heard a hint of respect in Preacher's voice. She was happy to hear the masculine pronouns. “This mission, this crusade, if it has come to the Sixth District, it ends here.
Before
it escalates, 'cause we know that's next. I want no heroes dropping bodies in my district. Not for any reason. Believe.”

Maureen looked down into her coffee. Way ahead of you, Preacher, she thought.

 

13

“I want you to do something for me,” Preacher said. “About that store on Washington.”

They were parked on a short block of Magazine Street, outside a custom furniture shop, positioned in the middle of a stretch of bars and restaurants that stayed open late. Maureen, in the passenger seat of the parked cruiser, sat looking out the window. Her heel thumped on the floor. She chewed her thumbnail. She turned to Preacher, blinking. “What?”

“You okay?” Preacher asked.

“Yeah, I'm fine. It's tough, you know, sitting here in the car after so much time off. I would've liked the grocery store gig. Talk to people. Move around some.”

Preacher said, “That's what I'm asking you about. The grocery store. Believe me, I'm not leaving the whole thing up to Wilburn and Cordts.”

He resettled himself in his seat. Being parked for hours at a time wasn't doing him any good, either, Maureen could tell. She knew his back hurt. He glanced at her, then returned to watching the street through the windshield.

“I know you've come back gung-ho,” Preacher said. “Which is why I thought you'd be better off easing back into it. That's why you're out here with me, instead of alone in a car of your own.”

“I figured it was something like that,” Maureen said. “So we're babysitting Magazine Street, and you're babysitting me. I get it. Making sure no frat boys get their asses kicked.”

Preacher sucked his teeth. “Not that I owe you an explanation for your orders, as your commanding officer and such.”

Maureen blew out her breath. She lowered her head in supplication. “I know, I know, I'm being an ungrateful bitch. Again. I'm working on, what's the word for it,
processing
, what happened six weeks ago. It's weird being back, in the car, in the uniform. More so than I thought it would be. Brings a lot of it back. It makes me edgy, the discomfort. Part of me feels like I never left, part of me feels like an impostor. I'm in a hurry to feel normal again, you know?”

“I do, believe me,” Preacher said. “I spent a few years, never mind weeks, after the storm trying to feel what you want to feel, but I don't think there's any way to speed up that process. If there is, I never found it.”

“It's not just what happened here in New Orleans with Quinn and those guys,” Maureen said. She thought of Skinner's admonitions. Who did she trust more than Preacher? “There's things I brought with me here, things from home. From back in New York. This time of year, it makes me kind of squirrelly. Like people here get at the end of August.”

Preacher kept looking out the car window, distracted, watching the traffic. Maybe thinking, Maureen wondered, about late August six years ago. He shifted his hips again, trying to relieve the pressure on his low back. Maureen considered the pain pills at home in her medicine cabinet. Wouldn't take but ten minutes, less than that, to pass by her house and get them. One for him, one for her. Did she want him asking, though, where she got them? He wouldn't ask, she realized, he would just know.

“We every one of us got baggage,” Preacher said, turning back to her. “Don't hafta be a cop for that. Three hundred years people have been coming here to be somebody else. It's not new, what you feel.”

Maureen was sure he thought she meant she was feeling some boy, maybe some family drama. What would Preacher do, she wondered, if she flat out told him she'd killed people in her past? Imagine saying it, she thought. Imagine spitting out the story like a mouthful of bad milk. She couldn't do it. Not yet, if ever. “You don't want to hear this sentimental shit.” She shrugged at him. Smiled. “You're in the car with me, so you get the blowback.”

“And that's why
you
are in the car with
me
,” Preacher said. “So no one else gets the blowback. I don't know who else could handle you.”

Maureen turned in her seat to face him, hands in her lap, her chin raised to him. Work was what they should be talking about. Work. “The store on Washington, you have something you want me to do.”

“I want you,” Preacher said, “to track down Little E. Tomorrow night, you'll be back in the saddle on your own. Find out what he knows about the guy with the white pit bull. Little E's dealt with you before. He knows you have my trust. He's my best informant. Green as you are, you're the only one on this squad I trust with him. If he's got any info, he will give it to you.”

“Gotcha. And thanks for that,” Maureen asked. “What do I do for him?”

“Slip him a couple of bucks,” Preacher said. “He won't need any more than that. I'll get you back for the money.”

“I got it,” Maureen said. “No worries. Where's he staying these days?”

“No idea.”

“Okay. Where do I find him?”

“Your best bet is gonna be somewhere he's looking for work. Dinnertime, maybe one of the new cafés on Oretha Castle Haley. They don't know him yet. Late night, check the bars. They'll usually let him help clean up at the Fox Den because of his father and the Indian thing. He drinks at Pop's House of Blues, or the Sportsman's Corner. Maybe the Big Man. Chances are he'll work at one, spend it at another. He moves in a small orbit.”