The man shrugged.
Frustrated, Maureen turned to leave, wondering again how they could know the description of the person the NOPD was looking for, and she realized something. The fight she’d interrupted, it wasn’t a lovers’ quarrel. It was a family spat between brother and sister.
“You know him,” Maureen said.
The man flinched, as if a sore muscle had twitched in the small of his back, and she knew she was right. His friends studied their shoe tops.
“He came here to hide,” Maureen said. “He told what he did and y’all sent him away. One of you called us about it.” The woman hitched the baby higher on her hip then turned and headed into the house. Maureen took a shot, shouting to her. “His name?”
“Oh, shit,” one of the man’s friends mumbled. The group started breaking up, the men drifting around the parked car and up an alley along the side of the house, heading for the backyard.
The man turned the chicken and sausage on the grill, the fat falling from the meat into the fire popping and smoking. He shook his head, chuckling to himself. Maureen had known it was a ridiculous question with no chance of an answer when she had asked it. But she’d had to. She had to be able to tell her boss she’d tried. So he could tell his boss she’d tried. She realized as the grill smoke drifted to her that she was starving. What I wouldn’t give, she thought, to be at a parade party, drink in hand, food on the fire.
The man looked up from his work and gestured with the tongs at the spot in the yard where the woman with the baby had stood. “If she says that boy run by, he run by. If she say he went that way, then that’s the way he went. I don’t argue with her. That’s what she wanted to tell you. That’s what we tellin’ you now.”
Maureen studied the house, looking for the numbers somewhere on the front of it. She couldn’t find them. I should get names, she thought, and phone numbers, at least from the girl and her brother. She knew this conversation would be her only chance at that information.
Everyone here would eat and then they would scatter for the rest of the night, to the parade, later to friends and family, just in case the cops came back around later asking more questions. Then she remembered. Drayton was the detective tonight. Even if she could get that information, he’d never use it. He’d never come by this house. He’d never call. He’d never even try. He’d sit on it until after the holiday, when he’d get sent back to Homicide and the case would pass on to someone else who would put it at the bottom of their large pile of open cases.
Were they working a case on the other side of St. Charles, she thought, Drayton would have to follow up over the next few days. The brass would make him. But not here. Not when no one had died. She needed to continue her pursuit of the shooter and she was losing ground on him, standing around. Making the arrest was her best chance at getting something meaningful done. Catch the shooter yourself, she thought, and what Drayton doesn’t do doesn’t matter.
“I appreciate your help,” she told the man at the grill. “Have a good night.”
He didn’t even look at her, never mind speak to her again. She didn’t blame him much. A cop was the worst kind of party crasher.
At a crisp jog, she turned around and headed back down Harmony, turning on Danneel Street toward Downtown, heading in the direction the young woman had indicated.
13
As she moved deeper into the neighborhood, Maureen noticed that, as if they’d been raptured, the partiers and parade-goers had vanished, sucked down to the route. Most of the houses around her now were dark and empty. Whoever wasn’t down at the parade, Maureen figured, was, like Dakota and her crew, hard at work helping to throw the party. Nothing was coming over the radio. It wasn’t out of the question, she thought, that the guy at the grill had been right. She might be the only cop out here chasing this guy. That thought made her want to be the one to catch him all the more. She turned in a circle to get her bearings. She considered calling in her location, but she had nothing to report.
It was a strange Mardi Gras phenomenon, how this happened, she thought, how you could wander into these pockets of dark and quiet while the whole city raged. These silent islands had a strange and powerful gravity. She wanted to linger, to hide. She felt like she was deep in the wings of the arena while a distant rock concert exploded on a stage at the other end of a long tunnel, the fans and the band oblivious to the bomb hidden in the building. She looked around again. She had the thought she’d been trying not to have since she took off running from outside the bar: that motherfucker could be anywhere by now.
Her radio stayed quiet.
The rain-dappled cars lining the curbs glowed in the streetlights, like she’d wandered into a slumbering herd of dark, wet beasts. The flickering blue-and-white ghost light of a television set illuminated the front window of one living room a few houses ahead. She could hear the murmur of the TV program. Canned laughter.
These neighborhood streets could be a maze. Getting turned around, getting disoriented, was easy, she thought, especially on foot at night. The houses, one shotgun double after another, they looked the same, presenting the same weathered working-class face made up from the same palette of washed-out primary colors. Street signs came and went: stolen or brought down by the weather and never replaced, turned in the wrong direction in order to make exactly what she was trying to do that much more difficult. On this side of St. Charles, the city didn’t take the time or spend the money to tile the street names into the corners of intersections.
She checked the sky. She spotted the Coast Guard copter that kept a bird’s-eye on the parade route. That was Homeland Security. That chopper wasn’t engaged with police department pursuits. She stopped walking, set her hands on her hips, lowered her head, and listened to the neighborhood. She took deep breaths to quiet her pulse and calm down. A cold breeze from the direction of the parade route swept over her and she could, for a moment, hear delighted screaming and cheesy, bass-heavy pop music blaring from rattling speakers as a dance troupe moved along the route. Underneath the cheering and the music, ever-present as a heartbeat, she heard the rumble of the drums from another marching band making its way up the avenue.
Cold, tired, and hungry, she thought about going back to the crime scene, checking in with Hardin, talking to Wilburn and Cordts about getting back on the route. There were several hours of parade left to roll. Chaos would finish soon and then the night’s main event: the Krewe of Muses. On the route she and Wilburn and Cordts and the others, they could watch the crowd, look for signs and signals, read the ripples and vibrations, let the crowd tell them, hopefully, what was coming next, or at least where it was happening. These empty streets were giving her nothing. She felt useless, wandering the streets like a redheaded Alice lost in some bizarro, broke-down, broke-ass working-class Wonderland. She reached for her cigarettes.
Her hand froze inside her jacket when she heard something moving nearby.
Not a noise floating her way from the route, or from a television inside one of the houses on the block, but a sound made by something alive and close to her, something or someone moving in the darkness. She turned her radio down and listened. There it was again. Rustling material. Clothing. The shifting of rubber soles on the pavement.
She lifted her head, squinting into the darkness, studying every shadow. Waiting for one of the shadows to move, to separate itself from the others.
She moved slowly and quietly out of the middle of the street, out of the glow of the streetlamps, making herself harder to see. She cursed her electric-yellow reflective vest. She didn’t want to radio for backup. Not yet. Not until she knew what she had. And if she hadn’t been spotted, she didn’t want to surrender the element of surprise by making noise. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the greater darkness. She heard heavy breathing now. Whispers, maybe. Something, someone, was out there, moving in front of her on her right. There, she saw it.
Between two of the parked cars, there was definitely a shape, crouching in the dark.
She moved closer to the shape, easing her flashlight from her belt. She didn’t turn it on. There was every chance he had seen her approaching. Maybe he thought he held the advantage and planned to press it. She cursed her vest again. It made her an easy target.
She drew her weapon, holding it close to the flashlight. She’d use the beam to do more than aim. She recalled walking out of the bar right into Cortez and his blinding spotlight. She’d turn the flashlight on at the last possible moment. The bright beam in his eyes would give her the moments she needed to take charge of the situation.
Maureen heard breathing, grunting. Was he hurt? Was that why he had gone to that house for help and to hide? Wounded only made him more dangerous, not less.
She raised the flashlight and the gun, relaxed her knees into a better shooting stance. She clicked on the light, the bright beam splitting the darkness.
She shouted: “NOPD! Do not fucking move!”
Two confused pasty white faces, one male and one female, both barely twenty years old, stared back at her. The boy was raised up on his arms, his hands pressed flat against the hood of the car. He had a black feather boa wrapped around his neck. He turned his head away from the glare of Maureen’s flashlight. The girl underneath him, bent over the hood of a parked car, covered her head with her skinny arms and started screaming. In her flashlight beam, Maureen could see the boy’s white hips pressed up against the girl’s ample, even whiter ass. “Are you kidding me?”
“We’re not doing anything wrong,” the guy shouted. He threw his hands in the air. “I know her. She’s my girlfriend.” He wore a rugby-style shirt with wide purple, green, and gold stripes, the same one as the mother of the girl who’d been shot.
As far as Maureen could tell the boy had not even withdrawn from his partner. Well, she’d told them not to move and they pretty much hadn’t.
“Somebody called the cops?” the kid cried out. He clearly felt violated. “I can’t believe somebody called the cops. What the fuck? There’s nobody around here. We walked for blocks to find a private spot.”
He stood there with his hands up, the black feathers of his boa fluttering in the cold breeze, waiting for Maureen to tell him what to do.
The girl underneath him, who wore heart-shaped, red-glittered antennae on her head and had her purple, ruffled, sock-hop-type skirt tossed over her back, started slapping at him as best she could from the awkward position she was in. Maureen thought of Rob in the SUV slapping at his passenger and she tried not to laugh. The girl’s antennae bounced and waved as she swung her hand at her boyfriend. She wore a toy ring on her slapping hand that blinked red, yellow, and white, like the lights of a teeny-tiny ambulance.
“Get off, get off, get off me. Dennis! Oh my God.”
Hearing his name brought rugby boy halfway back to his senses. Letting his oversized shirt drop over his newly exposed privates, he stepped back from the girl, who slid down the hood of the car to the street, hoping to disappear, Maureen figured, right through the wet pavement and from the face of the earth. Maureen, doing her best not to laugh at the poor girl’s agony, could see only her waving antennae above the front of the car. “Miss, are you okay?”
No answer. “Miss?”
“I’m fine. Oh. My. God. I am going to die. This is so harassment.”
“Sir, pull up your pants, please. Please. Right now.”
He set to it, giving Maureen one more unwelcome glimpse of a Mardi Gras full moon.
“Be glad the camera crew didn’t follow me,” Maureen said.
The girl shot up from between the cars, adjusting her skirt. “What?”
Maureen raised her hands in a placating gesture. “Never mind. Listen to me. Y’all need to leave the area. Right away. We’re searching the neighborhood for a dangerous person. It’s not a good time to be creeping around in the dark. Go back to the parade.”
“Holy shit, Tanner,” the boy said, “we were totally just doing it in the middle of a manhunt. Fuckin’ A. That’s hot.” He dug into his pants for his phone.
Maureen put her face in her hands. She wished for some of Laine Daniels’s Tylenol. Or something stronger.
“Don’t say my name, you asshole,” Tanner said, slapping at him again from her improved, upright angle, her antennae waving, her ambulance ring blinking. Dennis’s phone clattered to the street. Tanner raised her hands and leaned away from him, her mouth contorted in disgust. “I’m going to kill you, Dennis. Are you still hard? In front of a cop? Gross. You are so gross. What is wrong with me?”
“You can’t say that in front of a cop,” Dennis said, “that you’re going to kill me.” He looked at Maureen, fixing his shirt to make sure it covered his crotch. “Right, Officer? Right? Were you serious about the camera crew? Where are they at?”
“Would you two get the fuck out of here?” Maureen said.
“You don’t have to be mean to him,” Tanner said. “We weren’t doing anything wrong. And I didn’t mean it. I’m not going to literally kill him. Of course not.”
“GO!” Maureen shouted, pointing in the direction of the parade. “GO NOW!”
“Bring the beer,” Tanner said, pouting and strutting away, antennae bouncing.
Dutifully, Dennis snatched up the half-empty twelve-pack and trailed after Tanner, his boozy, horny gaze fixated on her plump, swaying, purple-satin-and-lace-draped bottom. Please lead him the hell away from here, Maureen thought. She clicked off her flashlight. She rubbed her temples. I’m going to be seeing these two all weekend, she thought, I can feel it. Fucking like rabbits. Speaking of rabbits. She looked around. Nothing was coming over the radio.
“Fuck this.” She reached for her cigarettes.
Then she heard a distinct metallic ringing she’d known her whole life, a sound that she’d made herself plenty of times. Someone jamming the toe of his sneaker into a chain-link fence. To make quick work of jumping that fence. She peered again into the shadows. She saw him. Climbing clumsily over the top of a fence four houses behind her. She heard his sneakers slap the sidewalk.
She shouted, “Stop! Police!” But he didn’t listen, like she’d known he wouldn’t. He took off running. Maureen took off after him, back at full speed.
14
They’d only covered a single block before they both realized Maureen would catch him, and catch him quickly. So he broke left down a side street, turning back toward the parade. Oh, no, no, no, Maureen thought, no way am I letting him run into that crowd. Now she really had to chase him down. She feared losing him in the chaos of the parade route. That was surely what he was hoping.
She saw him hesitate and almost skid to a stop at an intersection, dropping one hand to the street to right himself. “Stop right there,” she yelled. “Stop!” She pointed at him as she ran, as if there was anyone else she could be talking to. “Stop fucking running! Get on the ground!”
She was almost close enough to tackle him. She braced herself for the impact. He slipped away from her and ran up the nearest driveway.
Instead of jumping the fence into the backyard, he dropped to his belly and crawled underneath the raised house.
Maureen stopped at the foot of the driveway, panting. She read the house numbers from above the front door so she could report the address. “You motherfucker. I got you now.”
She hit the mic on her radio and called in her location. Almost immediately she heard sirens a few blocks away. Less than a minute later she heard Hardin’s request go out over the radio for the K-9 unit to meet her. She retreated to the sidewalk, breathing heavily, pacing, squatting, shining her flashlight everywhere the suspect could pop out from under the house. She had a feeling he was done running, though. If he had the energy for it, he would’ve leaped the fence and kept going. He was digging in now. He was tired and scared. No way, though, was she going under there after him. She would wait him out. She would wait for the dogs.
She continued pacing the sidewalk. “Young man, if you are armed,” she called out, “you need to say
so. Things don’t need to escalate.” She got no answer. She hadn’t really expected one. “Come out from under the house. Slowly. You don’t, you’re gonna wish you had.” As if there were any other way to do it than slow, she thought. “Come out with your hands where I can see them.” Again, she got no answer. Surely, she would’ve heard him scramble away if he’d popped out on another side of the house. She continued stalking the perimeter of the property. No fucking way she was losing him now.
Across New Orleans, many houses stood atop short brick or concrete pillars, raised two or three feet off the ground as protection against the flooding that could plague the city during the heavy rains of summer. She’d heard of suspects diving into these crawl spaces to hide from the cops. Thing was, most suspects chose this tactic only when there were no cops watching them do it. A hiding place isn’t worth shit if the person you’re hiding from sees you climbing into it. Tonight marked the first time a suspect she was actively chasing had used this particular evasive tactic on her. She knew full well how it was handled. The K-9 unit. Most of the crooks in the city knew that, too. They hated the dogs. Feared them much more than human police officers. Maureen couldn’t understand why the petty-criminal class continued subjecting themselves to arrest by canine by trying the crawl space trick. It didn’t work for attics, either.
Thinking you could outsmart, outlast, or outrun the human cops was one thing. But nobody ever escaped the dogs. Part of her hoped tonight didn’t get to that. Talk about escalating things. She thought maybe she could keep trying to coax the guy out from under the house by reminding him about what came next. And, honestly, she could get uncomfortable with how much some of her fellow cops enjoyed watching the dogs work. And then she recalled that this guy had shot a little girl. And a teacher. And a grandmother.
Well, if, she thought, and it was a big if, she had the right guy trapped under that house. Everything they wanted to accomplish that night required getting the right guy. Maureen hoped she hadn’t been sent on a goose chase by a resentful ex-girlfriend. She doubted it. If that girl was trying to set up an innocent man, she would have given Maureen much more than a gesture made with a plastic cup; she’d have given a name.
The Devil's Muse Page 9
