“Stop!”
10
Maureen leaped down the steps. She wasted one more millisecond over how to rouse Preacher. She went with two hard slaps on the hood of the cruiser and a good and loud “Goddamn it, Preacher!”
She took off after the kid at a dead sprint. He had a solid head start.
He cut left and darted through the open gate of LaSalle Park, taking a quick look back as he broke across the playing field, a wide-open square of grass as long as a football field and twice as wide. Maureen was across the street in a blue flash. On her way through the gate she checked for anyone who might help the kid escape. The tennis courts and playground were empty. The three-on-three at one of the basketball courts stopped so the players could watch the chase. They didn’t make a move to join in.
One of them, muscular and shirtless, ball tucked under his arm, hollered, “Run, shorty, run.”
Maureen wasn’t entirely sure he was yelling at the kid.
Racing across a grassy field in a bulletproof vest was about as easy as doing it wearing a life jacket full of nickels. She felt like the Tin Man running the hundred-yard dash. She worried her gun belt would explode, leaving a Gretel trail of handcuffs, pepper spray, flashlight, bullets, baton, and who knew what else across the field. Not a report she wanted to write.
But as she ran, her wind was good, deep breaths pumping through her nose, and the magnificent adrenaline surge of the chase didn’t hurt, either. The pain in her foot from Mother Mayor’s door was gone.
The kid ran with that electric jackrabbit speed that’s nature’s special gift to young kids. His arms and legs churned, his head rocking from side to side with the effort. But he had to keep clutching at his drooping, oversized shorts with one hand. It slowed him enough that he wasn’t opening greater distance between them. Maureen thought she might even be closing on him. She tried to decide how to corral him without a flying tackle. God forbid the kid came out of the chase bruised or bleeding. She’d never hear the end of it. And people were watching, more than just the guys on the basketball court, even if she couldn’t see them. There were eyes around her in windows and cars. She and this kid were racing at full speed in broad daylight across a wide-open ball field in view of half the neighborhood. Appearances were everything these days.
Maybe only five yards separated them, but Maureen needed more field than she had left to catch up. The kid would beat her to the opposite gate. Once they got out of the park, they’d hit a maze of side streets that he knew way better than she did. There were alleys, yards, and abandoned vacants that he could cut through or disappear into. And then, wouldn’t you know it, here comes Preacher squealing around the corner in the cruiser, lights flashing and sirens screaming. The sight of it only gave the kid a burst of speed. And then Preacher was slowing down. What the fuck was he doing?
Maureen tried to match the kid’s surge. She guessed Preacher’s plan. Bad idea.
Preacher wanted to intercept the kid as he hit the street, using the car. That way, the kid couldn’t dodge; he wouldn’t have time. Maureen put her head down. Just beat him to the spot, Preach. Slow him down for two seconds and I can bag him. Just beat him to the spot and haul ass out of the fucking car. And for chrissakes, don’t run the poor kid over. But Preacher had his mind made up and stuck with his plan. And like Maureen feared, he arrived too late.
The kid blew through the gate and through the invisible collision point while the cruiser was fifteen feet away. Instead of blocking the kid, Preacher executed a perfectly timed interception of Maureen. She went sprawling across the hood of her own patrol car, slamming at half speed into the front quarter panel with a jangle of equipment and an audible oof.
She could hear Preacher shout “Holy shit” from inside the car.
She wanted to pull out her baton and beat Preacher’s head in.
She did the only thing she could, which was recover her footing and storm away from the car. Preacher climbed out of the driver’s seat and called her name, asking if she was okay. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she heard a touch of laughter in his voice. She didn’t even bother looking behind her for the kid’s choice of direction; he was gone. Preacher called her name again, a sharp Coughlin! But Coughlin was winded, sweat-soaked, empty-handed, and pissed. She was going to need a minute. Either out of sheer laziness or because he had, like his beloved dogs, picked up on her mood, Preacher stayed at the car. Somewhere in the back of her mind, way, way back, Maureen was grateful. Then the ground shifted and she lost her balance. Her head went light. She saw spots.
She doubled over, hands on her knees. She tried to focus on spreading her toes and rooting the four corners of each of her feet on the sidewalk through the soles of her boots. She felt the growing pulses of a headache at the base of her skull. She tried to let it pass right by her, like a shooting star. She focused on feeling steady on the earth, first through her feet, then her ankles, then her calves and her knees. She breathed through her nose, forcing it to be deep and slow, trying everything her yoga teacher in New York had taught her.
Don’t. Inhale. Panic. Exhale.
She repeated the pattern again, then a third time, a fourth. Her pulse relented. How long was this taking? she wondered. Not long enough for Preacher to suspect anything other than her being winded from the chase and pissed that her quarry had escaped.
She stood upright, waited for the world to tilt. It didn’t. Okay. All right. She was definitely getting better if she could fight off an anxiety attack that quickly. Good to know going forward. She turned to find Preacher leaning on the hood of the cruiser. The light bar flashed blue, but he’d silenced the siren.
“Holy shit, Coughlin,” he said. “I am impressed.”
His amazement seemed genuine. The look on his face reminded Maureen of her old high school track coach, at least the look he used to get before he realized she could fall out of bed and run like a mustang and so stopped being impressed with her speed.
“You almost caught that kid. You are fast. No joke.”
She knew the answer, but she asked the question anyway. “You didn’t see which way he went, did you?”
“Fuck, no,” Preacher said. “I was trying to not run you over. You were supposed to get in the car so we could go after him.”
Maureen had a hard time believing that had been the plan. She suspected Preacher had come wailing around the corner with no plan other than saving himself from the total embarrassment of sleeping through the chase. CYA, that was the prime directive.
“Let’s get to looking, then,” Maureen said. “We’ve got plenty of shift left.”
Preacher hauled himself off the hood. “What we need to do is go up the supermarket on Claiborne and get you a Gatorade. Let you cool down.”
“Then we can look?”
“Then we’ll see what happens, see how we feel.”
“We?”
“Rook, you want a cold drink or not? I’m buying.” He opened the driver’s side door, talked to Maureen from behind it. “You can tell me about your get-together with Mother Mayor. Then we can talk about what to do next. We got two other kids to go after. Maybe one of them’ll be easier to catch. Who knows, maybe Atkinson solved the case already and we just haven’t got the memo.”
A cold drink sounded like a good idea. She felt a cramp in her bruised arch and another threat in her left hamstring. Hundred-yard sprints in ninety-five-degree heat in full gear could do that to a person. Especially a person running on two pots of coffee and no sleep.
She walked toward the car, remembering, finally, that keeping Preacher happy was as important as impressing Atkinson. If she was smart, and patient, she could figure out a way to do both.
11
“Six feet deep,” Maureen said, repeating in disbelief what Preacher had told her.
They stood by the cruiser at the far end of the shopping-center parking lot near the corner of Washington and South Claiborne.
Maureen, clutching a half-full ice-cold quart of Gatorad
e, watched car after car turn off Washington and into the lot through the driveway marked EXIT ONLY.
“Six feet, give or take,” Preacher said. “Six here, two or three down by Mother Mayor’s place.” He made a stirring motion in the air with his index finger. “You saw the television footage of the two guys floating around in the pickup bed?”
“Not that I remember.”
“They went spinning right down Claiborne, right past here,” Preacher said, “like a canoe caught in the current. Crazy. Big truck, too. Anyways, that footage was shot down at the next light.”
Hard to imagine, Maureen thought, that the place they stood at that moment, smoking cigarettes and drinking Gatorade, the soles of their boots sinking into the heat-softened asphalt of the supermarket parking lot, had been at one point essentially an extension of the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain.
“Used to be a Walgreens there at the light,” Preacher said, frowning, “though maybe it was a Rite Aid, I forget. Gets harder every year to remember what was where before. Anyway, whatever drugstore it was, that’s where they were headed.” He laughed. “You ever try to paddle a pickup truck? With your hands?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
Maureen unscrewed the cap of her Gatorade bottle, taking smaller sips this time, restraining herself from gulping the second half of the bottle like she had the first. Pounding a pint of ice-cold Gatorade had left her eyes watering, a sharp pain blooming through her chest. Learning to function in this heat, learning how to expend and recover, was proving a challenge.
For miles in every direction, Maureen thought, people had drowned in the middle of a city. As best as she could figure, the nearest levee breach had been miles away from where she now stood. All day people had drowned. In parking lots, in their backyards, in their cars, in second-floor bedrooms, in first-floor pantries, in every household hiding place imaginable, and in the middle of wide-open, empty streets. Who drowns in a house? Or staring up at streetlights and billboards through six feet of hot, dirty water? Who drowns while straining to reach for their own rooftop, leaving torn fingernails behind in the eaves as the water carries them away? Who drowns trapped in the fucking attic, the family photo albums and the old cookware they were saving for their daughter’s wedding floating by above their heads?
Dragging on her cigarette, Maureen imagined bodies floating down South Claiborne in the days after the levees broke, drifting under the dead traffic lights and treetops, spinning in the current like empty plastic bottles. Bodies adrift under a clear blue sky, or under a starry dome, carried on the floodwaters toward the lightless downtown skyline. She thought again of 9/11. Bodies falling, towers falling under a clear blue sky. 9/11. Katrina. Weren’t these supposed to be once-in-a-generation, not two-per-decade events? And what the fuck was it with American tragedies and beautiful days?
She remembered the damp, moldy air of the car trunk where Sebastian had held her, bruised, bleeding, and trapped. It had smelled like a wet rug in that trunk, a wet rug left in the dark for days, weeks. She’d been told pockets of New Orleans smelled like that even months after the water had gone. In some places, she’d heard, it smelled like a corpse had been rolled up in the carpet. She took a deep breath, fluttered her eyelids behind her dark glasses, trying to chase away the pictures, to chase away the scent. Her musings always left her messing with the same question, her brain poking at the mystery the way her tongue worried at a sore or a burn inside her cheek: How do you come back from that?
Yet there it was—Claiborne Avenue, normal and busy on a weekday afternoon. Three lanes racing in each direction divided by a wide grassy neutral ground where old men kicked away the windblown trash as they played dominoes on folding tables set up in the shade of short, fat palm trees. Unreal. How did anyone who lived here put it together, hold it in their heads? Or did they not organize anything, did they let the facts and the memories drift around in their skulls till they snagged on something and hung in place, like bodies in the trees, like flies in a web?
New Orleans was like some bizarre cross between the third world and an enlightened civilization that had advanced beyond ordinary American worries, Maureen thought. And here she was in the middle of it, gun on her belt, badge on her chest. Sweating her ass off.
“Fucking retards,” Preacher said. “Out in an epic flood in a pickup truck, for what? A case of Heineken and some Vicodin?”
“What happened to them?”
Preacher’s head snapped around. “I give a fuck? Somebody probably saved them, then someone else probably gave ’em a house somewhere.”
Maureen raised her hands in surrender. “Sorry I asked. My bad. Just curious.”
Preacher sniffed, wiping under his nose with his knuckles. “You and these questions.”
“I feel like I oughtta know what I can,” Maureen said. “Seems disrespectful to ride around, working here, living here, being here and not knowing.”
“You can’t know,” Preacher said. “You weren’t here. That’s not an insult. It’s just a fact.”
He looked away, shaking his head. They stood silent for a long moment.
“You want stories, read a book, get a local boyfriend or girlfriend or both or whatever. Write a letter to Anderson Cooper. Or Brad Pitt. Get HBO. Get on the Internet. But after we part ways, don’t go around asking questions, not at the other cops. Makes people uncomfortable. They may act like they’re cool about it, but they’re not. You’ll be disappointed and they’ll be embarrassed. It’s like asking to see their dicks.”
“I’ll remember that,” Maureen said.
“Besides the fact that these days everyone who worked a day after that fucking storm is worried about getting some federal indictment shoved up their ass. Believe.”
“Okay, then,” Maureen said. “Thanks for the advice.”
“You know me. That’s what I’m here for. You’ll learn what you’ll need to about the aftermath. Osmotically. I mean, it’s not like you can get away from it. It’s not like it goes away. History. It stays when it happens to a place. Or a person.”
Preacher turned, opening his arms at the shopping center: a supermarket, a dollar store, and a discount sneaker-and-athletic-wear store that Maureen hadn’t noticed before. She made a mental note of the place. She’d come back later, pick up some inexpensive workout gear.
“It’s the same kind of stores as before,” Preacher said, “just with different names. Coming here makes me feel better. I don’t know why.”
“So everything’s different,” Maureen said, “and the same all at the same time.”
“See that? You’ve pretty much got it figured out. Whaddaya need me for?” Preacher finished his Gatorade. He tossed the empty plastic bottle in the grass by the side of the parking lot. “I’ll be in the car.”
“I want to pass by Mother Mayor’s again,” Maureen said, bending down and picking up Preacher’s empty, “and that playground one more time. I want to talk to the basketball players. Maybe they know the kid I chased. A name, at least.”
“Maybe you should give Mother a rest for the day,” Preacher said. “Let her cool off.”
“The basketball players, then. I at least want to talk to them.”
“I can save you the trouble. They don’t know nothing, if they’re even still there.”
“Indulge me, please,” Maureen said. “I’m naïve and ambitious and wet behind the ears. I wanna keep the promise I made to a superior officer.”
“Then let’s get going,” Preacher said, sliding into place behind the wheel, “unless your pal Atkinson is signing off on OT for this bullshit.”
12
Preacher rolled the car slowly down Third Street, crunching gravel in the gutter, close to the curb on the backside of the park, near where Maureen lost that young boy among the side streets. Maureen rolled down her window, eyeballing the park, the surrounding stoops and porches. In the field she’d sprinted through earlier, someone tossed a tennis ball for a brindled pit bull mix trailing a hunk of thick rope
for a leash. Either because of the dog or because of the day’s heat, the pit and her owner had the field to themselves. The new basketball courts with their netless hoops stood empty, as did the new tennis courts. The summer heat, Maureen thought, it drove people indoors down here the way the cold did up north.
But in the playground, alone atop the arch of a jungle gym, sat the drummer, the kid who’d lingered the other day to taunt Maureen.
“Stop the car,” she said. “I see one of them, the one who mentioned Scales.”
“Who?”
“Bobby Scales, who owned the green car?”
“What car?” Preacher couldn’t help himself this time; he started laughing. He threw the car into park. He hit the lights, left the sirens off. “See the thing is, I have to make sure you can handle every different kind of asshole cop there is before I let you go off on your own. You have no idea how taxing it is.”
“I know how taxing you are,” Maureen said, struggling with her sense of humor. “Fucking very. I can tell you about that.”
“Save it for your memoir, English major,” Preacher said. “Let’s get this done.”
Maureen opened her door, climbed out onto the sidewalk. To her surprise, Preacher turned off the lights and got out of the car. She heard him come up behind her as she headed for the playground gate. “Preach, I got this, he’s twelve.”
“The kid?” Preacher said, hitching up his pants. “He’s all yours.”
Preacher lifted his chin at the field, at the panting dog and her owner. The dog reared back on its haunches, squinty-eyed, barking for the ball its owner waved overhead. “This heat, no shade, that motherfucker better have water for that dog. Some of them—the dogs, that is—don’t know any better and run till they drop. They drop dead sometimes. Call me if you need help with the kid, unless he rabbits. That happens, you’re on your own. You got the legs for it.”
Maureen and Preacher parted ways at the playground entrance. She approached the jungle gym. The entrance behind her was also the playground’s only exit. She stayed between the kid and the gate, adding up the angles like a soccer goalie. The kid showed no urge to run. He stayed on his perch, checking her out while shading his eyes with one hand, clutching his drumsticks in his other. On the ground beneath him sat a bulging backpack. He wore long black basketball shorts that ended way below his knees and a dark polo shirt two sizes too large for him. In his baggy clothes, he seemed smaller than he had yesterday. The shirt had an emblem Maureen didn’t recognize on the right side of the chest, like a private- or charter-school uniform. He looked like a kid fresh out of school, which was weird, because school didn’t start for two more weeks.
The Devil in Her Way Page 9
