Doing the Devil's Work

by Bill Loehfelm

  Before she and Atkinson parted ways, she had one more thing she wanted to discuss. She had a feeling they’d inched over the top of the roller coaster’s first hill, their weight stacking behind them, and that coming events might twist and turn far too quickly for another chance at private conversation. Atkinson had her own sunglasses on and was thumbing a breath mint from its foil package. She offered it to Maureen, who took it, cracking it between her back teeth.

  “You gonna be all right to drive?” Atkinson asked.

  “Fuck no.” Maureen savored the cooling sting of the mint on the back of her tongue. “I can walk it from here. I might stop at Slim Goodies and treat myself to breakfast. I’m never up before they close these days.”

  “Stop by your car, put your ‘on duty’ card on the dash,” Atkinson said. “Avoid the ticket and the tow.”

  Maureen nodded. “One more thing.”

  “No more things,” Atkinson said. “Wait to hear from me.”

  “It’s not about Quinn, or Heath, or Gage, or anyone else. It’s about me.”

  “Why am I suddenly really uncomfortable?”

  Maureen set her hand on Atkinson’s forearm. She led them away from Ms. Mae’s door, past a small coffee shop to the next storefront, a costume shop that didn’t open until noon.

  “I did a bad thing,” Maureen said. “I took a bribe.”

  “Sweet Jesus. Officer, you need to be careful here.”

  “It was an accident. After the detail at his house, Solomon Heath overpaid me by a thousand dollars. The money is home, in the envelope it came in. Some guy was handing out envelopes after the party, to the help. I put mine in my pocket without checking it. Quinn said three bills, so I figured it was three bills. When I got home, I saw it was more.”

  Atkinson was quiet for a long time. “And then what did you do?”

  “Nothing. I had a glass of wine on the porch, thought about calling Quinn, see what he got paid.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t do that.”

  “I didn’t,” Maureen said. “I already knew by then I couldn’t trust him.”

  “What was the money for?” Atkinson asked. “What did you do for him?”

  “Nothing,” Maureen said. “Nothing, I swear. I figured it was gratitude for helping Quinn squash Caleb’s connection to Gage. Or maybe he was greasing me for times like this, so I’d be on his team when Caleb got in trouble again.”

  “Or maybe Quinn asked him to do it,” Atkinson said, “in case he ever needed anything on you. The bribe wasn’t about Solomon, it was about Quinn.”

  “Good Lord.”

  Atkinson took off her sunglasses, rubbing the back of her wrist against her cheek. Maureen saw again, under the makeup, the dark black circles like storm clouds under her eyes. She said, “You have the money.”

  “I do.” Maureen took a deep breath. A shard of the breath mint caught in her throat. She gagged for a moment and coughed it up, spitting it onto the sidewalk. “Can we use this? Trying to bribe an officer? Maybe to go after Solomon somehow? We’re going to need to get through him to get to Caleb.”

  Atkinson laughed. “Maureen, you took the money, and didn’t tell anyone right away.”

  “I didn’t take take it,” Maureen said, her voice growing hoarse from exhaustion and cigarette smoke. “I didn’t know I had it until I got home. This was only last night that it happened.”

  “You withheld information about Caleb Heath’s relationship to a murder victim from Drayton at the crime scene,” Atkinson said. “You withheld that information again when he came after you at the district, about that murder. That next night Caleb Heath’s father gave you over a thousand dollars in cash, which you pocketed and took home. And we’re gonna use this situation against the Heath family? Maureen, you’re smarter than this. Who do you think gets fucked in this scenario if it comes to light? Not the Heaths, that’s for damn sure. Christ, you look like an extortionist.” Atkinson raised her hands. “I can’t believe I brought you into this. You’re a mess.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” Maureen said, “except try to be a team player. And this is what I fucking get. I’ll return the money. I’ll bring it back to Solomon this afternoon.”

  “Absolutely not,” Atkinson said. “Do not interact with that man.”

  “You’re telling me to keep it?” Maureen asked. “I don’t want it. I won’t take it. I’m not like Quinn. This is how he got the way he is, by doing it that one time, but it’s never that one time, not for the criminals, not for the cops, not for anybody.”

  “Maureen, please shut the fuck up. I want you to listen to me. If you ever speak of this conversation, ever, to anyone, including me, I won’t stop with running you off the police force, I’ll run you out of the state of Louisiana. I am not playing.” She moved in closer to Maureen. “This thing with the money, it never happened.”

  “You mean get rid of it?”

  “There. Was. No. Money. There never was.”

  “So if I get asked about it, if it comes up anywhere in what comes next, I lie. If it’s the feds asking the questions, if it’s Preacher, if it’s you, I lie.”

  “There was no money,” Atkinson said. “Never happened. Understood?”

  “Affirmative, Detective Sergeant.”

  “Go home. Go to bed. Go to work tonight. You can be a great cop, Maureen, as long as we can keep you out of jail. Not another word, not another move, until you hear from me. You get inspired, you get a brilliant idea about how to fix everything, before you do anything, think about how much better you look in NOPD blue than you will in OPP orange.”

  25

  While paying her tab for her eggs and pancakes at Slim Goodies, Maureen heard police cars flying down Magazine Street, one after the other, their sirens screaming. They’d turned most of the heads in the diner. As the sirens moved into the distance, she’d said a silent prayer of thanks that she was no longer on the day shift, and that, with her belly full of pancakes and fried eggs, she didn’t have to go racing through the neighborhood at top speed.

  She left a big tip and pushed open the front door of the diner, slipping on her sunglasses, lighting a cigarette, and looking forward to a few moments of peace during the slow walk home. She had time to squeeze in a few hours of sleep before her shift that night, and let the vodka wear off. Her ankle would be sore from the walking. She’d need a couple of Percocets to get through her shift. Maybe she could find a quiet place to park the cruiser, avoid everyone and everything as much as possible, and lie low for this one shift. New Orleans would survive.

  She turned off Magazine onto Sixth Street to discover her block bursting at the seams with cops and emergency vehicles of every kind. That was where everyone had been headed. Two cruisers with their lights going sat nose-to-nose at her corner, closing off the block. One more guarded the other end. An ambulance was parked in the middle of the street, its back doors flung open. A fire truck idled on the far side of the ambulance. Maureen didn’t see or smell any smoke. Her next thought was that a medical emergency had occurred. Something had happened, an accident that had scared her neighbors into calling every emergency number they could find. She put her hand to her hip, found her weapon there.

  Those neighbors milled about on their porches or out on the sidewalk, many of them talking to either uniform or plainclothes police officers taking notes. The firefighters hung around their truck, chatting with one another. Whatever had happened appeared to be over. Maureen knew the look of a crime scene when the drama had ended and the task of gathering information about it had begun. She removed her gun from her hip, tucked the holster into her jeans at the small of her back. She couldn’t walk into a crime scene smelling like booze and openly armed.

  She trotted down the middle of Sixth, slowing as one of the officers standing near the parked cruisers walked up Sixth to meet her. “You’re Coughlin, right?”

  “I am,” Maureen said. “What happened? What’s going on?”

  “You’re to wait here,” the off
icer said. He held up his hand as Maureen made to move by him. “Just for a minute. Sergeant Boyd is here. He’s going to escort you through the scene.”

  He keyed his mic and announced Maureen’s arrival.

  She knew that Preacher was the scheduled duty sergeant for the night tour, and wondered what he was doing at a late-morning crime scene. She couldn’t imagine he had good news. Preacher emerged from the crowd, walking her way with his head down. He was dressed in civvies, which Maureen realized she had never seen before. He wore a pressed, oversized, merlot-colored guayabera shirt and neat, dark jeans, the cuffs rolled up to expose black socks and brown sandals. At first glance, despite his chaotic surroundings, he looked ready for an espresso and a game of dominoes. Mirrored aviators hid most of his face, but Maureen saw that his usually busy and expressive mouth was a hard, tight line.

  She squeezed between the bumpers of the patrol cars and entered the scene to meet him. “Preach, what’s happening?”

  “For fuck’s sake, Coughlin,” Preacher said, the stink of his cigars enveloping him, “is it too much to ask that you answer your phone?”

  Maureen fumbled through her pockets and found her phone. She checked it. Preacher had called eight times in the last thirty minutes. “I had the ringer off,” she said. “I was eating at Slim Goodies. I always turn it off when I eat out.”

  “Since when do you go out to breakfast? I’ve heard you talk a million times about straggling out of bed at noon. Today you decide to be the early bird?”

  “I had that detail last night,” Maureen said, thinking fast, eager to follow Atkinson’s instructions not to talk of their morning and not to lie to Preacher at the same time. “I was in bed earlier. I like Slim Goodies. I like diners. I like breakfast, sometimes in the morning. What happened here, Preach? What the fuck is going on?”

  “Slim Goodies got a liquor license?” Preacher asked.

  Maureen blushed. She couldn’t look at him. “Listen, Preach, it’s kind of a private thing.”

  “I don’t even want to know.”

  Preacher took off his sunglasses, wiped his face and the back of his neck with a black bandana. In her next-door neighbor’s front yard, three EMTs knelt in a circle. Maureen couldn’t see who was getting their attention. The EMTs worked deliberately, their faces calm. She tried to take comfort in that, anxiety eating at her insides. “What happened at the neighbor’s place?”

  “About forty minutes ago,” Preacher said, “somebody shot up the block. Bad. One of their Great Danes got hit. The black one, I think.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Winged in the shoulder,” Preacher said. “Calm fucking dog, considering he got shot. Better than most people. That’s him the EMTs are working on now. He should be fine. I think it was flying debris that got him, shrapnel, not a bullet. We need to talk to the family before we can let them take him to the vet, so we’re doing what we can for the poor guy here.”

  “Any people get hit?”

  “Thankfully, no,” Preacher said. “They shot fast, with some heavy-duty firepower. Maybe even military grade. Close to it, anyway. We already ran out of those plastic cones to mark the casings. We’ll pick up over a hundred, easy.” He paused. “Their efforts were concentrated on a specific target.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They were after you,” Preacher said. “Your house got the worst of it, by far.”

  “Me?” Maureen said. “My house?”

  She looked past Preacher down the street. She realized that most of the police action was focused on her place. Crime scene techs stood in the middle of her garden, trampling the plants while photographing the front of her house. Her ginger plants now wilted in every direction, the red flowers gone, as if someone had decapitated the stalks with a weed whacker. She could see that the front window of the house had been shot out, and that the front wall was peppered with bullet holes. Big ones. Her wooden rocking chair and little metal end table had been obliterated.

  “Come with me,” Preacher said. “I sent some guys around to Seventh Street, by the way, checking for stray shots. No collateral damage so far. So that’s good news.”

  Cops and techs stepped aside, saying nothing, not meeting Maureen’s eyes, as she and Preacher moved down the street and approached the house. She felt like the mourning widow at a wake being led to the side of the beloved deceased. The closer she got to the house, the worse the damage appeared. Her knees felt watery.

  “A white minivan,” Preacher said, holding open her gate. “They stopped, threw open the door, and let loose. Covered plates. Guys in ski masks. That’s everything we got from the neighbors on the block. Can’t say I blame them for ducking, must’ve sounded like a fucking war zone.”

  “That van is already burning somewhere,” Maureen said.

  “They’ll wait until after dark,” Preacher said. “But, yeah, I don’t see us lucking into nailing them in a traffic stop.”

  Passing through her front gate, Maureen searched for but couldn’t spot her black and gold flamingos. Vaporized, she figured, in the onslaught. Thankfully, miraculously, the Drew Brees statue had escaped damage. The front window of the house had drawn most of the fire. Not only had the glass been shot out but the frame and the woodwork had been destroyed. The bamboo shade had been shredded and blown into the front room, along with a lot of the glass and wood from the window frame. Numerous deep holes the size of tennis balls punctured the wall surrounding the window, as if giant toothy jaws had bitten into the house. She knew the inside wouldn’t look any better, and wondered how deep into the house the damage extended.

  “AR-15s,” Maureen said. “Modified. I’m willing to bet.”

  “That’s what I’m hearing,” Preacher said. “Or worse.”

  Maureen lit a cigarette. She took a deep inhale of smoke, furious and committed to not tearing up in front of so many neighbors and coworkers.

  “Jesus, Preach,” she said, tremors of rage in her voice, letting the smoke trail out. “This is one step shy of a rocket attack. Like fucking Fallujah.”

  She turned, looking over the crowd and entertaining the thought that whoever had done this was observing her, wanting to watch her see the damage done to her house. She looked for Madison. She saw faces she didn’t know, but nobody paid special attention to her. The shooters weren’t out there, weren’t watching her. She said, “This wasn’t a warning, was it?”

  “No, no, it wasn’t. Somebody tried to kill you this morning. Someone who knows your schedule, who knew you’d most likely be home mid-morning.” Preacher scratched his chin. “We found something on the porch. You should have a look at it.”

  For a moment, Maureen’s thoughts turned to the envelope of cash from Solomon Heath. Where had she left it? In the kitchen. She spotted a large upside-down bucket by the front door. Something dark, it looked like blood, was smeared on the door. That had to be what Preacher was talking about. “This is a bad day.”

  “It’s nothing that’ll make you lose your lunch, or your breakfast,” Preacher said. “The bucket was for the flies. We took it from a neighbor’s yard.” He stopped at the foot of the steps. “Go ahead, have a look. It’s nothing alive, or human, if that makes you feel any better.”

  Maureen walked up the stairs onto her porch. She wedged the toe of her boot under the lip of the bucket and flipped it over. A bloody pink pig’s head stared up at her. Flies rose up in a cloud, buzzing. She stepped back, waving her hand in front of her face. That explained the bloodstain on her door. She looked back at the street. Someone had thrown the head. It had hit her front door and come to rest on her porch. Hell of a toss from the middle of the street, she thought. Someone had taken the time to get out of the van, aim the head, and make a good throw. With the whole neighborhood in duck-and-cover mode from the gunfire, she thought, that someone would’ve enjoyed plenty of time and had no worry about witnesses.

  Maureen stepped to the edge of her porch, looking down the steps at Preacher. “They want us to know,” she said, “want the
neighborhood to know, that they know I’m a cop, and that they were willing to do this anyway. They want us to know that’s why they did it. They want us to know they’re not afraid of us. It’s got to be the Sovereign Citizens and the Watchmen.”

  “That’s about how I see it,” Preacher said. “This is a first, though. Usually one cop is as good as any other to them. We’re all the same. They ambush, or take advantage, like cowards. They don’t outright hunt. I’ll double-check, but this is the first I’ve seen or heard of them coming after a specific cop. And with a vengeance, it seems.”

  “Fucking hooray for me,” Maureen said. “I always wanted to be somebody’s first time.” She thought again of the guns found at Bobby Scales’s house. “We’re done worrying about them moving into the city. They’re already here. We’re behind.”

  “We should have a look around inside the house,” Preacher said. “If you feel up to it. A quick walk-through. For safety issues, in case there’s a gas leak or some such. We checked around the outside, didn’t find anything dangerous.” He made his way up the steps. “We’ll have to let the techs in soon for a close look at the bullets and the bullet holes. Evidence recovery. Can’t imagine they’ll find anything different from what’s out front. It’s gonna be a while before you can start to clean up. Probably not till after dark. I’m sorry about that.”

  “I can live with the mess,” Maureen said. “I’ll manage. As long as we can make a few extra passes tonight on patrol. I’m not sure I’ll be able to lock the door.”

  Preacher laughed. “You can take the night off. We’ll get by without you for one shift. New Orleans will survive.”

  “Fuck that,” Maureen said. “I’m not changing a fucking thing. I’m not missing a night of work, and I know the next thing you’re going to say. I am not getting a hotel room and hiding out, either. No how, no way. This is my place and nobody’s driving me out of it.”

  “I’ll put someone out front,” Preacher said, “while you’re at work and after. Till we make some headway on this.”