Let the Devil Out

by Bill Loehfelm

  At the moment, Detillier insisted, there was no one to hunt.

  Maureen wasn’t so sure that was true. Somebody, she thought, scratch that, everybody should be looking for Leon Gage. Detillier had to be thinking the same thing.

  She suspected, though, that he feared the raw wrath and bloodlust of a gut-shot NOPD. Anyone connected to these attacks who the city cops got their hands on tonight wouldn’t live to see the morning. Any information a prisoner gave up before dying would be beaten out of him, and that information would be useless as a prosecution tool. As badly as she wanted Leon Gage caught or even dead, she understood Detillier’s strategy. He needed Gage, needed the information in his head.

  As the voices of the men surrounding her got more heated, Maureen decided that hanging around corpses and angry men did her no good. From a distance, she made eye contact with Detillier and pointed toward the front of the store. He nodded and put a finger to his lips. She got the message. Talk to no one. She decided she might heed his wishes. She might not. Someone had to find Leon Gage. She’d blown the hunt for Madison Leary. She wouldn’t make that mistake again. Detillier made a hand signal at his ear that meant he’d call her later, like someone would make to a friend across a crowded barroom. The gesture seemed so absurd, Maureen had to fight back laughter.

  On her way out of the Walmart, she passed through the grocery section and grabbed a cold bottle of water. She’d pounded half of it down by the time she got outside.

  23

  Maureen felt as if she’d escaped from a maze as she stood outside the front door, people in uniform hustling past her. She ran her fingers along her scalp, enjoying the cold air, wondering how she’d get a ride to Dizzy’s to pick up her car.

  As she peeled off her FBI jacket, a familiar voice called her name.

  She turned to see a smiling man, large and muscular, approaching out of the swirling crowd of law enforcement filling the parking lot. Dressed in full paramilitary gear, with his wraparound shades, flattop haircut, and an automatic rifle strapped across his chest, he looked like a soldier dipped in blue ink. Maureen recognized him right away. Sansone. One of the muscle-bound boys from the Tactical Unit.

  “Why am I not surprised,” he said, “to see you in the middle of this mess, Cogs?”

  “What can I say? You guys were too slow. The pros had to step up.” She took off her shirt, and unstrapped her vest and pulled it off, dropping it to the ground behind her with a grunt. She put the jacket back on. She rolled her shoulders. In her thin sweaty T-shirt, she shivered in the cold. “Much better.”

  “I heard you were rolling with the feds on this. Badass.”

  “That’s an exaggeration,” Maureen said. “One fed. Guy named Detillier. He’s working the Watchmen case, the guys who shot up my house. I was with him when this shit went down. It was Detillier who knew they’d be here at the Walmart. We were halfway here before the first nine-one-one call came in from the store.” She patted her pockets. “Tell me you have a cigarette.”

  “For you,” Sansone said, “of course.” He produced a pack of cigarettes and a Zippo. He lit hers, then lit one for himself. “Tell me you got ’em. Please tell me it was you and not that fed.”

  “I hate to disappoint you,” Maureen said, “but they offed themselves before we got to them.”

  “Fucking cowards,” Sansone said, stomping on the pavement. “I hate that shit. Hate it. So much for my hard-on.” He growled. “But I’ll get it back tonight. We’ll be out busting many heads tonight. I’ll be sporting a fucking table leg. I’ll be staggering.”

  Maureen took a long pull of her cigarette. “What’ve you heard about Preacher?”

  Sansone shrugged, looking away from her, exhaling a long plume of smoke. “He was alive when he went in the ambo. Conscious, too. Talking, of course, because he’s fucking Preacher.”

  Her relief was so overpowering she lost her balance. She found a concrete planter by the door, sat on the edge. “You were there? You saw him?”

  Sansone shook his head. “Fuck, no. This is my day off. This parking lot is the first place that I’ve been. I’m just now catching up myself. I missed everything.”

  “And?”

  “Straight into surgery is what I heard. He got that far.”

  “Nothing since?” Maureen asked.

  “It hasn’t been that long,” Sansone said. “Not much more than an hour since the first calls came in to nine-one-one.”

  “Holy shit. An hour? I feel like I’ve been running for days. This is fucking insane.” She crushed out her cigarette in the dirt of the planter. She was absolutely fiending for a drink. Preacher hadn’t been the only officer shot. Waiting to hear it wouldn’t make the news any better. “What about the others? What’s the word?”

  “Bad, bad, bad.” Sansone nodded at the Walmart. “Those two dead pieces of shit in there walked into the Reginelli’s on Poydras and opened up. Pulled AKs out from under long coats, like in a fucking movie. Mays and Harrigan from the First were in there on lunch, splitting a pizza, sitting right by the door. They never had a chance. Not a chance. Died with their weapons in their holsters.” Sansone coughed into his hand, covering the cracking in his voice. “Harrigan’s old lady had a kid like six months ago. Fucking family man. Mays wasn’t even thirty yet. This is a fucking nightmare.”

  Maureen looked away from him. She focused her gaze on a leafless, half-dead tree on the edge of the parking lot. She let her tears run. “What happened with Preacher? Can you tell me?”

  Sansone looked over his shoulder. “Landry, you know him, the fat kid from the day shift? His girlfriend is an EMT. She was there.” He sniffed. “According to what Landry’s girl heard, Preacher was in Neyow, in Mid-City, eating lunch with some guy named Bridges, a lieutenant from the Fifth District. It’s a regular thing they do, I guess. Every Tuesday.

  “The shooting, it was like with Harrigan and Mays. Guy walked in quick, drew down with an automatic rifle. Went right for the cops and started shooting, not giving a fuck, not about civilians, nothing. People screaming, diving out of the way. Busser caught a round in the hip. I think a patron caught some shrapnel. Preacher had his weapon with him. He was sitting in the back of the dining room facing the door, saw the man walk in. Dropped him. Killed the fuck out of him. Emptied the fucking clip from his seat is what I heard. Took a couple of rounds before it was over. Bridges had his back to the door, took a bullet in the back, another in the shoulder. I think the lieutenant caught the worst of it. It was bad. Way bad. He’s hanging in, though, the word going around. But who the fuck knows, you know?”

  “I heard the shooter had grenades strapped to his chest,” Maureen said. “Is that true?”

  “I heard that, too,” Sansone said. “After what these two here did, I’m thinking Preacher saved a lot of lives. I bet you that fuck was gonna blow the whole place, pull the pin and go out in a blaze of glory, that kind of shit.”

  “Mays and Harrigan,” Maureen said. She bummed a second cigarette. “They were working, they were in uniform, right?”

  “They were. Why?”

  “Preacher was supposed to be running the night shift in the Sixth tonight,” Maureen said. “And the lieutenant, was he on duty?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I bet not,” Maureen said. “How did these guys know Preacher’s a cop? If they were randomly driving around Mid-City looking for cops to kill, didn’t they see a unit in their travels? They didn’t see anyone else in uniform? Instead they go after two guys in civilian clothes?”

  “Preacher’s being a cop,” Sansone said, “means he’s been making enemies in this city for thirty years. Lots of people know him, know his face. You know him: if he’s in the room, everybody knows it. He’s done some things, did some things back in the day, I mean, he’s Preacher, but you know how it is.” He frowned at the sky, trying, Maureen could tell, to fit the pieces together. “But personal shit would’ve been just people going after him. What happened today is plain crazy. Nobody does s
hit like this, not the Mob, not the gangs. Blowing away cops two at a time? Four in one day? Honest guys, every one of them. Nobody was mixed up in any shit.”

  “Detillier’s been telling me about these guys,” Maureen said. “The shooters. They’re a new breed, part of a bigger movement, a national thing. They’ve gone after cops before, been doing it for years, across the country. Ambush. Suicide-mission sneak attacks on random cops. Or they set traps, create emergencies, and pick off law enforcement as they respond.”

  “What the fuck for?”

  “Protest,” Maureen said. “Revolution. Martyrdom. You know, because their noble deaths will inspire their brothers-in-arms to put down the remote and pick up their guns. To fight the New World Order or whatever.”

  “You are fucking kidding me,” Sansone said. “This shit is national?”

  Maureen nodded. “It is. All it takes is a Google search to find out about it.”

  “Then why am I only hearing this from you now in a Walmart parking lot after four cops get shot? What the fuck?”

  Maureen shrugged. “Detillier said the FBI is running behind on the matter. But they’re catching up. That’s why he was talking to me.”

  “Wow,” Sansone said. “Just, fucking wow.”

  He stood, his hand over his mouth, for several long moments. He set his hands on his hips, blew out his breath, crossed his arms over his chest, his shock morphing into rage. Maureen realized she’d made it that much harder for Detillier to keep the department calm after these shootings. She’d informed soldier boy number one here that the NOPD was now under siege. That they were at war. He’d tell his friends. He’d tell a lot of people.

  “What happened to Harrigan and Mays fits the profile,” Maureen said. “But Preacher, they hunted him.”

  “They targeted you, too,” Sansone said. “Weeks ago.”

  “That they did.”

  She’d sat at a table with Leon Gage, she thought. Had a conversation with him. She’d been a sitting duck. She hated to admit it, but he probably could’ve killed her pretty easily. So why hadn’t he? Was killing her dirty work left to the guys in that van? Had the white van really come to kill her? Where was it now? Outside her house? In the confusion, Detillier had never called in the plate number. Someone needed to find Leon Gage and ask him these questions. And do it in a way and in an environment more conducive to answers than lectures.

  “Jesus, Coughlin,” Sansone said, “what the fuck did you do to these guys?”

  Madison Leary had killed two of their foot soldiers, Maureen thought. But me, I did something worse. I drove their financier out of the country, the source of the cash they used to buy their weapons, the source of their stash houses and hideouts in New Orleans. I cost them Caleb Heath. And he wasn’t coming back, Maureen realized, while she and Preacher remained a threat. “I canceled their meal ticket,” she said. “And they took offense.”

  Sansone’s radio squawked and he turned his head to listen.

  Maureen looked back into the Walmart for Detillier but couldn’t see him. In Sporting Goods, giving directions, she figured. And he’d probably be a while; he had enough of a mess to clean up.

  “We’re standing down,” Sansone said. “Headed back to the district.”

  “To do what?”

  “Man, I don’t know. Whatever’s next on the to-do list, I guess. This is gonna be bigger than us, Cogs. The Staties will come in. The FBI is already on it. I’m here to take orders. I’m sure there’s some weed dealer who missed his court date who needs his door kicked in. You?”

  “I’m working tonight,” Maureen said.

  “Hey, listen,” Sansone said. “A bunch of us, we’re gonna grab something to eat before we go back to the Sixth. You wanna come with?”

  Maureen thought about it. She wanted to go, but she wouldn’t. She was afraid. The others had been on the force so much longer than she had. She was afraid they’d start telling back-in-the-day, remember-when stories about the two officers who’d been killed, or about Preacher’s lieutenant friend who’d been shot in the back, people the other officers knew but who were strangers to Maureen. Or worse, they’d tell stories about Preacher. Eulogizing him. Memorializing him. Already talking about him as if he were dead while he lay opened up on the operating table. She couldn’t deal with any of it.

  “I gotta take a pass,” Maureen said. “My car is in the Tremé. I gotta go pick it up, then somehow get my shit together for work tonight. It’s not like they can give us the night off for bereavement or whatever.”

  “Well, stay frosty, Cogs. You’re a true soldier.” He raised his sunglasses up onto his head, squinted into the distance. “Where are your people again? Jersey, right?”

  “New York,” Maureen said. “Staten Island.”

  Sansone pointed toward the wall of law-enforcement vehicles forming a perimeter around the Walmart parking lot. Along the outside of that perimeter, the TV news crews had gathered, the vans side by side, their satellite dishes pointed at the sky. Maureen could see the reporters lined up, standing with their backs to her as they talked into the cameras.

  “If this isn’t a national story yet,” Sansone said, “it will be any minute. You should call your people and let them know you’re okay. I mean, who fucking knows what those media people are saying.”

  Maureen checked her phone. She’d gotten no calls, which was a good sign. Her mother and Waters hadn’t heard the news of the shootings yet. “I’ll do that. When I get a minute, I’ll send a text.”

  Sansone shook his head. “No, no, no. Not a text. Let them hear your voice. You like acting like you’re a lone ranger, but you’re not. Show respect for your people.”

  “Okay, okay,” Maureen said. “I’ll call.”

  “Ten-four.” Sansone moved to turn away, then came back to her, standing closer than he had before. “Whatever it is that happened at the river, whatever went on before that with Quinn and Ruiz, consider that over and done with. Maybe it gets revisited down the road, maybe it doesn’t. That depends on you, mostly. But right now we’re under the gun, and you’re one of us. We gotta stick together. You need something, you call, you reach out. Ya hear?”

  He waited for an answer.

  “I hear you,” Maureen said.

  “And whoever else there is to get, we’ll get ’em. Only a matter of time.” He grinned and pounded his armored chest with his gloved fist. “Believe.”

  Maureen felt tears rising to her eyes again. They ran down her cheeks when she tried to blink them away. She knew who else there was to get. She knew at whose doorstep the blood trail ended. Forget the goddamn weed dealers, Solomon Heath’s door needed kicking in. She wanted to pin the man down, hold a broken bottle to his throat while he called his sons in Dubai. She wanted to, but she wouldn’t. Not then. Not yet. She returned Sansone’s grin and nodded at him. “Right,” she said. “We’ll get ’em. Believe.”

  But she was lying. She didn’t believe.

  * * *

  She watched Sansone as he marched away from her to join the rest of his crew before they went out to eat together, which they would do before they spent the night working together. Maureen knew she’d have to dart out of roll call in a hurry if she was going to get on the streets alone tonight. And she needed to do that. Work alone. She didn’t need anyone asking her questions about where she was going and what she was doing.

  Carrying her vest and wearing the FBI windbreaker, she walked to Detillier’s car. She left his jacket in the backseat and put her leather jacket back on. She turned and looked back at the scene. She shouldn’t leave. Eventually, somebody would want to talk to her about what had happened inside the Walmart, and outside Li’l Dizzy’s. Then again, Detillier had been there for everything. He was the one everyone wanted to talk to, and he could tell the story as well as she could. She realized they hadn’t discussed her conversation with Leon Gage. Perhaps that had been what the “call me” gesture had been about.

  Maureen couldn’t think of anything from that
conversation that would’ve tipped her off to what was happening across the city while she sat with Leon. She couldn’t think of anything that might tell her what would happen next, either. He’d babbled at her, killing time while his people killed cops. Overall, she felt pretty fucking useless. Detillier would want to talk about Leon Gage. And he’d want to talk about Madison Leary. A call to Atkinson, Maureen thought, was probably a good idea.

  She pulled out her phone and walked off to the side of the parking lot, away from the reporters. But before she spoke with Atkinson, she had another call to make. She found the number and waited for an answer, the phone to her ear.

  “Maureen,” Amber said, “what’s the matter?”

  “Ma, every time I call,” Maureen said, “that’s how you answer.”

  There was silence, which was Amber’s way of either refusing to argue or starting an argument, Maureen was never sure. But the silence was a good thing. If Amber were aware of what had happened in New Orleans, she’d be hysterical, not pouting.

  “Last time I called and you answered like that,” Maureen said, “I had good news.”

  “And that was two days ago,” Amber said. “What are the odds you’ve got more good news already?”

  This time Maureen was quiet. Her mother had a point. She didn’t have good news, unless she counted the fact that she wasn’t one of the cops who’d been shot, which was kind of a big deal.

  “Am I right or am I right?” Amber asked.

  “Some stuff went down at work today, Ma,” Maureen said.

  “Stuff? What do you mean by ‘stuff’?” Already Maureen could hear panic creeping into her mother’s voice. “Do I need to turn on the TV? Is the city flooding again? I thought hurricane season was over. Let me find Nat and tell him to turn on the TV.”

  “Before you do that,” Maureen said, “listen to me. No, we’re not flooding.”