The Devil in Her Way

by Bill Loehfelm

  Maureen had always figured the rain stayed the same wherever you went, if she could credit herself for thinking about such things, or places other than New York City, at all.

  Around her in the empty church, in the spaces between her thoughts, Maureen could hear the drops falling from a leak in the roof, miniature heavy-bellied, dirty-water suicides. One at a time. No rhythm to them. She couldn’t hear them release from the ceiling, couldn’t hear them fall. But if she listened, she could hear the impact. That fact meant something to Maureen that she couldn’t put her finger on. It bothered her that all she could hear was the end.

  3

  Maureen stood with her back pressed to the heavy wooden doors of the church. She watched the rain pound the gray-veined marble of the steps. Thunder boomed again overhead, more angry than embarrassed this time. Despite the shelter of the doorway, Maureen stood in a puddle, the water seeping through her sneakers. She picked up one foot, shook it, then did the same with the other. Nice work. Fucking waste of a perfectly good afterglow. Great idea this, she thought, standing around in a king-hell thunderstorm while back at her apartment Patrick slumbered away in postcoital bliss, warm and naked. Yeah, that’s the way to seek solace for your troubled soul. Leave the cute naked boy in bed and run two miles in the ’hood.

  Hopefully, Patrick took instruction as well after sex as he did during and he’d still be there, still naked, when she got home. She brushed wet clumps of hair from her face, skipped out into the street, and continued her run up Constance Street.

  Running along the narrow street, she dodged ankle-snapping potholes, nodded at wet dogs barking at her as she passed their gates. She thought again of her mother’s place back on Staten Island, the last place she’d lived before moving, another place rich in potholes and barking dogs.

  In some ways, cities were the same. Some things, she figured, you couldn’t leave behind, no matter how far away you went or how strange a city you picked. Unless you left people behind, too, and Maureen figured she wasn’t ready for that quite yet. She wanted another shot at life before she struck out for the yawning wastelands and built her Unabomber shack.

  * * *

  The night before Maureen had left for New Orleans, as he’d driven away from her mother’s house, Derek had cranked the car stereo, blasting some classic number by one of those ’80s hair bands he liked and knew she didn’t—one thing she definitely wouldn’t miss about him was screwing to the romantic musings of Mötley Crüe.

  As she headed up the stairs from the foyer to the kitchen, her mother popped the cork on a new bottle of wine. Maureen was happy that Amber drank less wine these days. She was also happy that Amber finally drank decent if unspectacular bottled wine and no longer defended those shameful tragedies that came in a box. And, of course, Amber never hesitated to share.

  Maureen pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table.

  “Did you tell him?” Amber asked, her back to her daughter as she poured two glasses of white at the kitchen counter. When Maureen didn’t answer, she glanced over her shoulder, skeptical eyebrows raised. “You didn’t, did you? Christ, Maureen, you’re leaving tomorrow.”

  Amber brought the wine to the table.

  “Ma, it’s not that easy,” Maureen said, reaching for her glass. “I’m trying to pick the right time.” She tilted her head, raised her glass. “And now, it does appear that time has run out.”

  Amber’s eyebrows arched high on her forehead as she took the seat across the table from her daughter. “MMM-hmmm. As soon as you decided to move, as soon as you got into the academy in New Orleans, those weren’t good times?” Her stern gaze softened, and she reached across the table to cover her daughter’s hand with one of her own. “I’m not saying this to be mean, but—”

  “Here we go.”

  Amber hesitated, as if rethinking what she had planned to say.

  Maureen knew it was an act. Just get on with it, she thought.

  “You are doing to Derek,” Amber said, “what your father did to us.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Maureen said. “And you know it. Derek and I aren’t married. We don’t have a kid. We’re nothing like you and Dad. We’re certainly not in love. Not even a little bit.”

  “Thank the Lord for small favors,” Amber said. “But what you’re doing isn’t right.”

  “We’ve been dating for a few months,” Maureen said. “I hardly know the guy.”

  Amber raised her hand. “What this boy lets you get away with.”

  “He had a good time. He knows what he’s doing.”

  Maureen was not about to admit to her mother that, in truth, Derek had dumped her not an hour earlier, only minutes before she’d had the chance to tell him she was moving away for good. He’d dumped her, in fact, while she had her hand in his pants. Did it get any worse than that? They’d taken a walk in the neighborhood, over by her old grammar school. She’d backed him into a dark doorway behind the playground, where she’d planned on giving him a quick farewell blow job to ease his passing into her history. Before she’d even gotten him out of his jeans, he’d started in with how he knew she was using him, how he knew that her heart wasn’t in their relationship. He’d let her have it pretty good, actually.

  Maureen had been so stunned by the turn of events that she’d almost started defending herself, forgetting for a moment that she was leaving town forever in less than twelve hours. Not the kind of story you share with Mom, no matter how unfair she was being.

  “You don’t care about Derek any more than I do,” Maureen said. “You’ve been against this move from the beginning.”

  “That’s me,” Amber said, waving a dismissive hand, “ridiculous old Mom. Against everything her daughter wants, all the time. I live to punish you.”

  “Don’t make this personal. It’s not personal.”

  Amber gazed around the kitchen, her mouth hanging open in exaggerated shock. “Don’t make it personal? Maureen, you’re my only child, you’re moving fourteen hundred miles away. You’re all my family. What’s not to take personal? Like father, like daughter, I guess.”

  “That’s friggin’ cruel, Ma. I’m not like him. That’s not fair.”

  Amber raised her eyes to the heavens, entreating the divine powers. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” She looked again at Maureen, meanness in her eyes. “I always thought you were more Fagan than Coughlin. Like your grandmother, like me. Maybe I was wrong about that. I hope not.”

  “You always do this,” Maureen said, struggling with her temper. “You get so mean.”

  Her move was hard on her mom. Maureen knew this. And when Amber hurt, when she really hurt, she struck to kill, fierce and quick as a rattler. Maureen knew this, too. She’d grown up with it. Her mother’s lashing out wasn’t, Maureen thought, recalling her own admonishments, personal. But, damn, it was hard not to take it that way.

  “You always try to get me with Dad leaving us,” Maureen said, “when you can’t argue logic. And you turn cruel, and you stop making sense, like what the hell’s Nana Fagan got to do with this conversation?”

  “You remember Grandpa Fagan?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. Not well.”

  “So … what does that mean? What are you saying? Grandpa left Grandma like Dad left you. This is not news. It’s got nothing to do with the current conversation. You’re completely illogical, Ma.”

  “What’s logical about a thirty-year-old woman becoming a police officer in the most dangerous, backward city in the country, when that woman already lives in the safest big city in the world, protected by the greatest police force ever? Where she’d be a legacy, sort of? Where she could stay home?”

  Maureen couldn’t hold back a giggle. “Greatest police force ever? You know what you sound like?”

  Amber crossed her arms tight across her chest. “This oughtta be good.”

  “You sound like a woman whose boyfriend is a cop.”

  “Ex-cop,” Amber said. “And you didn’t answer my qu
estion. What’s wrong with New York? What’s wrong with staying right here? You grew up here.”

  “My point exactly,” Maureen said.

  “But it’s not personal.”

  Maureen drank down her wine in two big gulps. “You already know the answers. There’s nothing wrong with New York. There’s nothing wrong with you. I love New York. I always will. You know the problem is me, the things I’ve done here. They make life here, make moving on here … difficult. Impossible, really.”

  “It’s a big city,” Amber said. “People forget.”

  “When?” Maureen asked. “When I’m thirty-five, when I’m forty? My life is already starting way too late. And what about me? When do I get to forget?”

  “It’s been less than a year.”

  “I have no control over my life here.”

  “You’re a hero for what you did,” Amber said.

  Maureen shook her head. “So you say. So say the girls in my kickboxing class who have figured it out some. I don’t feel like a hero. I feel like a complete wreck.”

  “That SOB got what he had coming.”

  “That one night, it’s all I am anymore. And I’m not talking about other people. I’m talking about me.”

  “If more people like you had badges and guns,” Amber said, “this world would be a better place.”

  “That’s nice of you to say.” Maureen grinned. “So I’ll start with making New Orleans a better place and go from there. They can use the help.”

  “Good luck with that,” Amber said. “I’ve been Googling, you know. I can do that now. I figured it out. Well, Nat taught me. Murder, drugs, poverty, corruption. And that’s just the police department. New Orleans sounds like some third-world empire. I don’t understand the appeal for you, I really don’t.”

  “They need me down there.”

  Amber raised her hands in surrender. “I’m done trying to talk sense into you. You always did do whatever you wanted no matter what anyone else said. Go clean up. Nat’ll be home from his walk soon. He’s bringing pizza.”

  “I thought he started walking to lose more weight.”

  “Then don’t eat it,” Amber said. “Have some more rice cakes or whatever.”

  Maureen laughed out loud. “Ma, I’ve never eaten a rice cake in my life.”

  “I know,” Amber said, her cheeks flushed. “This talk of leaving, it makes me emotional. I don’t know what I’m saying. You’re going away. I hate it.”

  “You’re coming to my graduation in June, right? We talked about this. You guys said you’d come.”

  “We’re coming,” Amber said. “I promise we are. I don’t have anything against New Orleans as a place. I just don’t understand wanting to live there.”

  “You don’t have to live there,” Maureen said. “I do.”

  Amber pushed up from the kitchen table. “A cop in New Orleans. Christ Almighty, where did I go wrong? Why not just run for sheriff of Atlantis?”

  4

  The next afternoon, standing on the hot sidewalk a few blocks up Washington from the Garvey Apartments, Maureen set her coffee on the roof of the patrol car. She lifted her ponytail and pulled it tighter, hoping to catch a breeze up from the river or down from the lake on the back of her neck. No such luck. The August sun broiled her bare nape, her forehead and forearms. The cooking would continue until the daily late-afternoon thunderstorms arrived. She checked the skies. Not yet. Nothing but that hot white ball bleaching the blue out of the sky. The storms wouldn’t bring much of a break, anyway, not this late in the summer, early August. After the rains, she and Preacher patrolled an outdoor sauna instead of an oven. Six of one …

  She pressed her sunglasses into place with her finger, touched the tender spot on her cheek. Through his bulletproof counter glass, the store owner had offered to make a fresh pot of coffee for her. Maureen declined. When she had tried paying for the coffee, he had noticed her cheek and offered her ice. She’d declined that, too. The bruise was yesterday’s wound; no need for ice. She worked her jaw from side to side. By her next shift the mark would be gone.

  Sweat now tickling her collarbone, Maureen wished she’d taken the ice from the store owner for her temples and her throat, or for the back of her neck. She sipped her coffee, burning her tongue. Even in this brutal heat, she preferred a fermented cup of burnt Community. As with good bourbon, she wanted to really feel it going down. Only one thing was missing.

  “Preach, I’m gonna smoke one before we move on.”

  Preacher sat behind the wheel, tapping with fat fingers at the laptop anchored beside him on the front seat. His postshift cigar peeked up from the pocket of his blue uniform shirt. “Knock yourself out.”

  Maureen set her coffee back on the car roof. She pulled the pack from her pocket and lit up. “You having any luck with that number?”

  Preacher, who was frowning at the laptop screen, didn’t look at her. “Powerball’s not till tomorrow.”

  “Not the lottery,” Maureen said. “That phone number, from the Garvey Apartments thing. Did you get through to dispatch? Find out if that nine-one-one call really came from Apartment D?”

  Preacher looked at her. “I was gonna do that? Why would I do that?”

  Maureen took a long drag of her cigarette, releasing the smoke, dragonlike, from her nose before she spoke. “We were gonna find out who made the call. See if the call was a setup.”

  Preacher shook his head. “I passed the idea along to Quinn. He seemed to think it was a good one.”

  “Quinn? Why give that tip to him? Double-checking that call was my idea.”

  “And it’s a good one,” Preacher said, “but it wasn’t your bust. You didn’t find the stash and the guns, Quinn and Ruiz did. The detective and the DA handling that case will be talking to them about it.”

  “What about me?”

  “What about you? If Jackson gets indicted for whacking his baby momma in the nose, then the DA will give you a call. I wouldn’t hold my breath on that. They’ve got a lot more on him now. Just move on.”

  “That’s not fair,” Maureen said. “I took a punch on that bust. Quinn and Ruiz just cleaned up after me. They had it handed to them.”

  “Sounds fair to me,” Preacher said. “They shouldn’t have been cleaning up after you in the first place. There shouldn’t have been a mess.”

  Maureen turned her back on the car, took a few steps away from it. She was furious with Preacher, mostly because he was right. She’d let a manageable situation explode in her face. She had to let it go. After the shift, she’d find Quinn or Ruiz and offer her help. She’d show she could be a team player. She crushed her cigarette out beneath her boot and returned to the car.

  Before climbing back into the cruiser, she glanced across the street. She almost dropped her precious coffee. What she saw had to be a joke.

  Across the street from where she stood, not thirty feet away, a man worked hard with a screwdriver to muscle open the hood of a parked car. In broad daylight. Right in the middle of Washington Avenue. Right in front of LaSalle Park. Was this guy serious? Did he not see the blue-and-white cruiser parked across the street from him? Or did he just not care?

  Maureen stepped around the cruiser, off the curb, and into the gutter, frowning behind her sunglasses. She looked closer at the guy working the car. She knew him. She’d arrested him before. Last week. For burglarizing the same car he worked on now. Unreal. She searched her memory for his name. It was in there somewhere. Repeat offenders, she chided herself, are the people you need to remember.

  She backed up to the patrol car and leaned down into the open driver’s side window. “You see this?”

  Maureen knew Preacher felt her stare, but he refused to look away from the computer.

  “You’re seeing this, right?” she said. “Across the street?”

  Preacher didn’t respond. Because he wouldn’t look, she knew he’d seen.

  “Tell me you see this,” Maureen said, standing and rolling her shoulders, the Kevlar
vest sitting heavy and crooked on her frame. Sweat trickled down her spine. She was gonna be one of those cops that gave up wearing the vest, she could tell already.

  “I ain’t seeing nothing,” Preacher said, “except the clock.” He patted his cigar pocket. “And that says our shift ends in an hour, which means it speaks a lot louder than you, louder like the fucking bells of Saint Vincent’s, so I don’t hear nothing, either. You got reports to write.”

  Like a father he sounded, telling her she couldn’t go outside until she finished her homework.

  “We can’t let this go,” Maureen said. “Half the street’s lookin’ at us. People see me seeing it, right now, as we’re standing here. What’re they gonna think when we let this go? I mean, Preach, sir, we’re coming outta the doughnut shop, for chrissakes.”

  If I get in the car now, Maureen worried, they’re going to think I’m afraid of getting hit again. Word would circulate. Talk like that would only make the next guy she had to brace more anxious to throw down. With the drugs, the booze, the panic, and the friggin’ heat, nobody needed any additional inspiration. One surprise that had come in the academy: being a woman made her getting hit more likely, not less.

  Preacher raised a finger in the air, his eyes glued to the laptop as if crucial information crawled across the screen.

  “Correction,” he said, tipping his finger in her direction. “You are coming out of the corner store, which is really a po’boy shop and grocery by the way, and if you wanna be a detective someday you really oughtta get more observational, not to mention learn the local lingo, but anyone looking at us and seeing you is probably thinking, I hope to God that girl bought herself a sandwich while she was in there ’cause she sure could use it.

  “In general, I wouldn’t worry what anyone in this neighborhood is thinking about us. Opinions are beyond salvage levels. Believe.”