The Devil in Her Way

by Bill Loehfelm

  “But we’ll look?”

  “Yes,” Atkinson said. “We’ll look.”

  “So, what, a day? Two days with the coroner?”

  Atkinson stared at Maureen for a long time. “Do they teach you anything about real-world police at the academy anymore? Anything about, you know, being a working police officer in New Orleans?”

  “More like a week?”

  “I have no idea when the good doctor will get back to us. In his own good time, I’m guessing.”

  “What about this kid’s people?” Maureen asked. “They’re gonna want to bury him.”

  Atkinson said nothing.

  “Tell me he’s got people,” Maureen said. She felt a strange panic rising inside her. “Jesus. Tell me someone will claim him. Someone noticed he didn’t come home tonight.”

  “I can’t promise you any of that,” Atkinson said. “But it’s likely, though, that he had people, and that they’ll come for him. They’ll put his face on a big white T-shirt and they’ll blame us for him being dead. And then one of them, an uncle, a second cousin, will go looking to kill someone, or at least get to talking about it.” She swallowed the last of her punch. “And ’round and ’round we go in the unbreakable cycle of life and death.”

  18

  Later that morning, at six fifteen, before roll call, Maureen stood at the coffeepot. She felt a hand at her elbow. Preacher. She’d heard his heavy breathing as he approached.

  “Morning, Preach,” she said, turning, faking a smile. She hoped the pressed uniform and extra makeup would fool him into thinking she’d gotten at least a partial night’s sleep. She hoped he didn’t notice the tremor in her hands. She wrapped both of them tight around her coffee cup. “Ready for another day of protect and serve?”

  “Christ, Coughlin. You look positively malarial.” Preacher set his empty mug on the counter. “What’s wrong with you? What’re you doing here?”

  “Working,” Maureen said. “Only one more shift. After today, you get to make me a real police officer.”

  “If you live that long.”

  Preacher took her mug from her hands, set it beside his on the counter. He led her by the arm a few steps away from the coffeepot, the busiest place in the district right before roll call. “You need to go home. I’m sending you home.”

  This can’t be good, Maureen thought. This can’t be anything but bad. This can’t be how your last day of training is supposed to go. “I’m fine. I’m a little short on sleep.”

  “You’re lying,” Preacher said. “What happened? What did you do last night?”

  “Atkinson,” Maureen said. “She had me out at another scene last night, late.” She reclaimed her coffee off the counter, slurped it. “I got an hour. In the locker room.”

  Preacher really did look pretty furious. “What she needs is to let me finish training you before she starts.”

  “It’s not like that,” Maureen said. “She needed me. Somebody killed one of those kids last night. One of the three from the Wright shooting. We found him in the trunk of a burned-out car. That same car Wright was breaking into. Over by Charity.”

  The information gave Preacher pause. “Which one? Which kid?”

  “Mike-Mike. The one I chased. Not Marques from the playground. As far as I know he’s fine. Atkinson’s trying to trace the car’s owner and figure out how Mike-Mike died. And why, I guess.”

  Preacher frowned at the floor, thinking. Maureen hoped he might forget about her condition and let her put in a day’s work. She needed it, and not just to finish her training.

  “Two things,” Preacher said, finally. “One, I’m not driving the car all day, and you’re in no shape, so there’s that. The second, I got a reputation. Everyone’s gonna look at you and wonder what the fuck I’m doing to you. They’re gonna wonder why my cute little trainee suddenly looks like she climbed out of a grave to get to work. So you’re going home. Go home.”

  He turned away, headed for the stairs down to roll call.

  Maureen trotted after him, begging him in a harsh whisper to wait, drawing looks from the other cops preparing for the day shift. She felt like she had back in high school, when the track coach told her, his best runner, that he was leaving her home for the weekend’s meet. What had been the reason? Mono? Flu? Hangover? Or was that when she’d been suspended?

  She reached out for Preacher’s arm, spilling his coffee.

  “How do we know they’re gonna stop at Mike-Mike?” she asked. “We gotta find his people so they can come get him. We gotta find the other kids. We got work to do.”

  They were halfway down the stairs. Preacher stopped, turned to her. “Do not make a scene, Coughlin. You wanna undermine what little respect your work has gotten you, throw some teary-eyed fit. You’re not the only cop in New Orleans. You’re not even the only one in the Sixth. What happened last night will be in the morning report. The entire day shift will hear about it in about three minutes. We’ll go looking for the kids. I’ll go looking for the kids.”

  “Promise me,” Maureen said.

  “Relax with the drama,” Preacher said. “There are better cops than you in this district. We can do the job.”

  Ahead of them down the hall, Maureen saw the rest of the shift taking their seats for roll call. She ached to be there. For a moment, she resented Atkinson. It was hard enough doing what she was trying to do, a new job, a new city, so much to learn, so much to forget from back home.

  Preacher checked his watch. “Coughlin, follow orders. Go home. Don’t make me rethink how ready you are to move on. If you can’t get a good night’s sleep with the bad guys still out there, you need to get into another line of work. Your pal Atkinson gets her sleep, I promise you that.”

  He turned and lumbered down to the foot of the stairs. He stopped, hitched up his pants, and turned to Maureen. “And that don’t make her a bad cop. Or a bad person, neither.”

  In her eleven years of waiting tables, no matter how beat-down, coked-up, or hungover she’d been, Maureen had never been sent home from a shift. As a cop, it had taken five weeks and change for that to happen. It was the difference in the jobs, she told herself, not a difference in her. She hadn’t gotten older and weaker on her way to taking up a harder job. She wouldn’t believe that. Older maybe, but she had only to look in the mirror to know she wasn’t any weaker.

  On her way home, Maureen stopped at the Buffalo Exchange, a secondhand clothing shop on Magazine. She bought three button-down men’s shirts.

  19

  “Forgive me, Father,” Maureen whispered, sitting on the floor of the confessional, “for I have sinned.” There was no priest on the other side of the rusty screen. There was no one else in the church.

  She took a deep breath, held it till her chest ached and she saw spots. Between the run through the Channel and the hotbox interior of the old church, Maureen was as wet and sticky as if she’d been caught in a downpour. Her tank top, her sports bra, and her shorts stuck to her skin everywhere they made contact.

  “When we were getting close to the end, Sebastian called me a little redheaded angel of death. He was fucking with me, trying to get inside my head. I knew it then and I know it now. I told him to go to hell or something at the time. But I’ve been hearing him inside my head again lately. And I think I might have accidentally helped kill a little boy. I wonder if I didn’t put a target on him when I chased him through that field. But I don’t know what else I should have done. He shouldn’t have run. He shouldn’t have been afraid of me.”

  How had she not brought any water on her run, she wondered, or anything even to wipe away the sweat? Because, a voice in the back of her head told her, then this wouldn’t be appropriate penance, would it? Without the discomfort, her run would be an indulgence, the luxury of exercise and youth and health. The suffering made it a sacrifice. She was putting herself through some weirdo Catholic version of the no-pain-no-gain posters she used to see at the gym. Get some sackcloth running clothes, she thought, and take it al
l the way back to the Dark Ages, why don’t you?

  Before her run, she’d grabbed a troubled four hours of sleep after being sent home from work. She dreamed over and over of Mike-Mike in the trunk of the old Plymouth. She dreamed that she put him in there, cradling him in her arms like a small child being lowered into a bassinet, his T-shirt stained with orange drink that turned to blood and back to sugar water again. His big eyes opened up at her, pliant and afraid, which was ridiculous. The last time she’d seen Mike-Mike’s eyes, in the seconds before the foot chase began, they’d been wild with surprise and panic. She slammed the trunk closed. Under the palms of her hands she felt the thumping as Mike-Mike tried to punch and kick his way out. She heard his muffled shouts and screams as she pressed down on the trunk lid until the metal grew scorching hot to the touch and the sour, sickening odor of broiling human flesh made her nose run and her eyes water.

  And then, still asleep, she dreamed that she was awake in the pitch dark, the stink of mold and exhaust in her nose, her brain lying to itself and looping in on itself, putting her back in the trunk of a car on the empty roads of Staten Island. For a horrifying half second the last year and a half of her real life became the dream and she was bumping along on her way to where Sebastian was going to kill her.

  She’d finally awoken for real, clutching a pillow that smelled like the hard rubber of a spare tire. She hurled the pillow across the apartment with a grunt.

  On her nightstand, she found her lighter. She needed confirmation she was awake for real this time, and not being fooled again by yet another layer of dream. She lit the lighter and held her palm over the flame until it hurt. Then she sucked the burn on her palm and held it over the flame again. When the world didn’t flip on its axis and turn inside out, she used that flame to light a cigarette. She climbed from bed and started searching the apartment for her running clothes. She’d had these dreams before, especially when she slept at odd hours, the kind of dreams that piled one on top of another until she lost track of where the dream ended and her real life began. She taught herself the trick with the lighter as a way to manage them. The pain was telltale. She was twelve when she did it the first time. Already smoking then. Already playing with fire.

  Maureen looked around the confessional chamber, a strange light-headedness coming over her as she recalled her dreams of that morning. She saw what she swore was a tiny spider building a web in the upper corner of the confessional. Sweat rolled down her forehead and into her eyes, stinging them and blurring her vision. The box that held her seemed to be running out of air. Why was she doing this? Would it kill her to buy a notebook, she wondered, and keep a journal instead, to haunt a coffee shop like everyone else her age in her neighborhood? Why was she hiding in an empty confessional like she was some kind of fucked-up jill-in-the-box? There wasn’t even a hand pushing her down into the dark. She retreated to it voluntarily and stayed until the sheer volume of the noise in her head, her devils’ dark music, chased her leaping into the light. The answer, she knew, lay in the trunk of that car on Staten Island.

  In what ways would she change, if she could, who had lived and who had died in those dark times? Maybe she wouldn’t change a thing. And maybe that was the truth she was running from. She didn’t feel guilty that she had killed two men, she felt guilty that she had lived when friends of hers had not. She was drowning in survivor’s guilt, waiting for someone to absolve her for living, and yet she had kept secret so much of what had happened to her. That she had almost died, and hadn’t, had been the start of her rebirth. It was undeniable. And she was ashamed of it. Ashamed of surviving and moving on with her life.

  She thought of the bloody-nosed woman from the Garvey Apartments. She’d probably welcomed the man who beat her back into her apartment, into her bed, before the ink on his arrest report had even dried. What did Arthur Jackson feel? Maureen wondered. Regret? Triumph? Did he feel anything, or had he gone numb a long time ago? She thought of her mom, who until very recently would probably have taken back her runaway husband had he ever deigned to show his face. Her father, that man who did his harm with his absence instead of his presence. Did you even need, Maureen wondered, another person to have an abusive relationship with? Maybe yourself was all you needed. Plenty of people, Maureen knew, authored their own abuse, their own pain and suffering, and for them other people were simply the instruments of punishment, the cattails of the flagellant. She worried she was one of those people.

  Mike-Mike and Marques and Goody, Norman Wright and Mother Mayor—did she really care about these people, or were they the day’s punishments to her, thorns for her to twist in her own side? Was that why she’d become a cop, to ensure that she’d never run out of suffering? You have to know, she told herself, that this city, like any other, will keep tossing kindling on your martyr’s pyre for as long as you have the strength to cry out for more. Mercy is a human quality. New Orleans is just a city.

  Maureen reached out her hand, pushed open the confessional door. The air didn’t move, but somehow she felt cooler, lighter. Dull orange light fell into the chamber, the bright afternoon sun muted by the stained-glass windows. She stood and stepped out into the church. This time, instead of rushing for the doors, she lingered. She looked around. Over her head, the holes in the roof shone gold like daytime stars. So quiet. So lifeless. Like a tomb, this dead cathedral. What a waste it was to let it rot. How much work had gone into this place? How many hours? How many hands? The soaring arches, the stained glass, the statues, the tile work and the life-sized Stations of the Cross painted on the walls. And that was just the interior.

  How many bag lunches and after-work beers and loads of laundry had built this place? How many pairs of boots and gloves? How many blisters and calluses and backaches? And now, after all the effort and all that money, after the prayers and the funerals and the weddings and baptisms and confessions, after all that life, this corner property was worth more without the church than it was with it standing. The church was worth more in pieces than it was whole, like a body harvested for organs. Funny. She’d never known this church as anything but a dead place, a place to hide out like a feral cat among the crypts of Lafayette Cemetery, and she’d miss it when it was gone. She didn’t want to see it carried away in piles and pieces in the back of a truck. She’d seen that happen once already, in New York. It was too sad a thing. A lost building took lives away with it when it fell, whether there were people inside it as it went down or whether only ghosts hovered in the high corners of the ceiling.

  She headed for the door, letting her hand drift over the back of each of the old pews. She dipped her fingertips in the dry bowl of the holy water reservoir, felt the smooth marble under the dust. She had never waited for anyone else’s permission or instruction to want what she wanted. She had to stop waiting to be forgiven for taking it. She’d finish her time with Preacher strong. She’d nail the animal that had put that child in that trunk, no matter who it was.

  Putting that skin on her wall before she even got out of field training would turn some heads. The right heads. She liked that, and decided she was at peace with her ambition.

  She pushed out the heavy doors and into the afternoon.

  At the foot of the steps, she stretched her thighs one at a time, pulling each heel around to the small of her back. She felt good. Quick and light instead of heavy and waterlogged in the heat and humidity. Despite the cramped quarters of the confessional, her body had stayed loose in the warm church. She felt a twinge of regret over losing Patrick. Time with him would’ve made a nice distraction. She leaned forward, touching her toes, letting her head hang loose, her ponytail flopping over and touching the flagstones. Maybe she should raise her romantic sights above the level of distraction. Maybe that’s what Patrick was doing for himself in letting her go. She liked him more at that moment than she ever had while they were sleeping together.

  She hit the street running.

  About halfway between the church and home, as Maureen ran, her chest
and thighs burning, she heard a car approaching behind her on Constance. She turned and saw over her shoulder an enormous maroon Escalade rolling up the road, halogen headlights bright. The giant vehicle cleared the parked cars on either side of it by only inches. A few mirrors looked like they might be in danger. Tooth-rattling bass notes echoed off the surrounding houses, overpowering even the rough-edged bark of the rapper riding the beat, and setting off the alarm on one of the parked cars. The Escalade moved slowly enough for Maureen to know that the driver had noticed her in the street; she wasn’t worried about getting run down. She looked on either side of the street for a clear spot to step out of the way.

  On this block of Constance, though, the curb on both sides was jammed: cars parked bumper-to-bumper, trash cans in the street. The bass got louder. The Escalade’s engine revved behind her, impatient. She glanced again over her shoulder. It had crept up on her heels. She ran a little faster. The SUV stayed close. She gestured with her arms that there wasn’t room for her to move out of the street. The driver hit the air horn, the sound loud as a freight train’s. Maureen nearly screamed. Okay. Now they were fucking with her.

  More aggravated than frightened, she turned, backpedaling, and raised her middle fingers up high. She couldn’t see the driver through the dark windshield, but she knew he could see her. She also realized, as she ran backward on a street rife with potholes, that the truck was close enough to crush her if she fell, or even stumbled. The engine revved again, as if the driver were emphasizing the same point. Maureen turned back around and sped up. She could feel the heat of the big engine on her back like hot breath. The bass vibrated her ribs.

  She threw herself aside, hard to the left, crashing into a pair of plastic garbage bins before landing in the gutter, scraping her palms and an elbow.