The Devil in Her Way
Page 27
“I think we got rules in this department, Coughlin. I think we got strict regulations and procedures. What kind of example would I be setting if I let you slip through early? You owe me a day. I want it. You’re going to do it.” He put his arm around Maureen’s shoulder. “Without rules, Coughlin, everything descends into chaos. You know this.”
“Believe,” Atkinson said.
A call came over the radio Atkinson held in her hand. She raised the radio and responded. She turned to Maureen, her eyes ablaze. “Decomp in Armstrong Park. Some guy walking his dog found a throat slash. Pretty ripe, I hear. Wanna come see?”
“You know what?” Maureen said. “Just this once I think I’ll pass. I need a bath, and some sleep.”
Atkinson patted Maureen on the back. “Stay in touch. Five, seven quick years, we’ll get you a shield in no time. That way you won’t have to miss out on the good stuff.”
“I can’t wait,” Maureen said.
35
The following afternoon, Maureen and Preacher sat in their cruiser, Preacher behind the wheel. They were parked in the Irish Channel, the working-class neighborhood between the Garden District and the river, their light bar flashing while they babysat a small park at Second and Annunciation Streets. The gates of Annunciation Park, Preacher had explained to Maureen as they drove over, had been locked for years, throughout the early 2000s. They’d been locked for so long, he said, that when the city finally decided after Katrina to redevelop and reopen the park, the parks department had to clip the locks with bolt cutters because nobody in the city government could find the keys.
Today, they parked with the lights whirling so anyone wondering would know that the NOPD had officially claimed that territory for the neighborhood. They were paying it special attention. It was a new tactic the department employed, encouraging patrols to take their breaks at the parks in order to discourage the dealers and the gangs from reclaiming the land.
The city had sunk a lot of federal money into the new parks and playgrounds. Nobody wanted schoolkids stepping on crack vials or finding bullet holes in the new slides.
Something about the flashing lights, Preacher said, made everyone take a cop car more seriously. Maureen agreed that the city’s kids needed safe spaces to be kids.
Her last day on the clock as a trainee had been as uneventful as the day before had been exciting. She and Preacher wrote some traffic tickets. They took reports at two separate fender benders. They had a long lunch and drank a lot of coffee. Right before stationing themselves at the park, they’d spent a large chunk of the afternoon managing the car-pool lane at the swanky private school in the Garden District. Maureen had even gotten her own bright orange mesh vest and hand-help stop sign. It was her turn. She did her best to be personable. The kids were no problem. The parents were another story entirely. It was soccer-mom bumper cars with late-model SUVs.
Maureen lowered the windows of the cruiser as Preacher fired up a cigar. He puffed away, eyelids drooping, as he worked on the Times-Picayune crossword. Maureen had a hot coffee from the CC’s and a smoke of her own going. A warm breeze blew through the car, ruffling the pages of Preacher’s newspaper. Sparrows chirped on the sidewalk, fussing over bread crusts someone had tossed away.
Her arm out the window, cigarette burning in her fingers, coffee cup in her other hand, Maureen watched a thirtyish couple exercise their two dogs, a big yellow one and a small brown one, in the park. “There are leash laws, correct?” she asked.
Preacher looked up from the paper, squinted at the couple. “I’m sure there are. Usually, unless we get a complaint or we need a reason to talk to someone, we let it go.”
“I figured that,” Maureen said. “I was just checking.”
“Indeed,” Preacher said, returning to his puzzle. “Good looking out.”
The brown dog, some kind of midsized shepherd mix, Maureen figured, inspected the edges of the park, her nose to the ground, her tail wagging. A determined investigator, she seemed intent on sniffing every dandelion and blade of grass from top to bottom. Her owners called to her repeatedly and halfheartedly. Every now and again, the dog snatched something from the weeds and chowed it down, always, to Maureen’s amusement, throwing a guilty look back at her owners after she had swallowed her prize, as if she knew she shouldn’t be doing what she was doing but also knew there was nothing her owners could do to stop her.
Clever girl, Maureen thought.
The yellow dog was a different creature. She chased a tennis ball over and over again, attacking each pursuit with explosive enthusiasm, bolting after her quarry as if each throw were the first ball she’d ever chased, as if she’d only just then discovered how far and how fast she could run. The way the dog ran with such utter abandon, tail high, long legs a blur, ears pinned back, pink tongue flying loose from her toothy smile, filled Maureen with a strange envy. She knew it was just a dog at play she was watching, but joy was the only right word available for what she was witnessing.
“I wanna feel like that,” Maureen said.
“Like what?”
“Like that big yellow dog over there.”
“You wanna feel easily entertained?”
“What? No. Damn it, Preach.”
Preacher smiled. “You’re so gonna miss me, Coughlin.”
“It’s not like I’m never gonna see you again,” Maureen said. “Geez, you make it sound like we’re breaking up.”
She turned away, not wanting Preacher to see the grin she felt curling the corners of her mouth, or the color in her cheeks. If he knew he’d gotten a rise out of her, he’d never let her live it down.
The couple in the park had corralled and leashed the dogs. As the foursome headed toward the exit nearest the cruiser, the brown dog trotted merrily in front of the group, satisfied, it appeared to Maureen, with the day’s take in treasures. The yellow dog lagged a bit behind, droopy and panting, but wearing her own aura of weary contentment, carrying her now dirty and slimy ball in her jaws.
Maureen turned back to Preacher. His face was melancholy. Experience told her he was acting. Instinct told her he was not.
“What the hell, Preach?” she asked. “You’re being all weird. Seriously.”
“I was watching you,” he said, “while you watched that yellow dog run. That’s what you looked like, chasing Mike-Mike through the park. Pure. On fire.”
“That’s nice,” Maureen said, “but I failed. I didn’t catch him.”
“No, you didn’t,” Preacher said. “But while you were running, you were all in. You were committed. You were a thing of beauty.”
“Thanks, Preach.”
Preacher grinned. He put his cigar in his mouth, turning it like he was winding a watch. “What? No harassment jokes?”
“Not this time.”
“Speaking of time,” Preacher said, “we’re about all done here. Congrats, Coughlin. Your training is over.”
“Any final words of wisdom,” Maureen asked, “before I hurtle off alone into the great beyond?”
“You owe me a bottle of top-shelf fucking port, Officer. I forget nothing.”
He leaned forward in the driver’s seat, moving to turn the key, but he didn’t start the car. He turned to Maureen.
“What I was trying to say with that ‘thing of beauty’ crapola was this: Doing this job, Coughlin, in this fucking city, it’s going to break your heart. I don’t mean the royal you, I mean you in particular. More of us than you think take our twenty and check out relatively unscathed. Maybe we shouldn’t, maybe that speaks ill of our hiring standards. Who the fuck knows?
“But you, you’re special. Your heart’s gonna get crushed into a thousand tiny sparkly little shards. And then the city’s gonna force-feed you the wreckage and then laugh at you while you cough it back up. It won’t hold your hair back for you while you’re hanging over the bowl, neither. It’s not that kind of town. Make some friends. Keep them close. And when shit gets deep, far beyond what you can stand, just hold fast and don’t
give up.” He shrugged. “It ain’t poetical, but it is what it is.”
“I love this job,” Maureen said. “I love this city. I’m ready.”
“I know,” Preacher said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, that’s your problem right there.” He started the car. “You’re doomed, like the rest of us who live here. At least try to enjoy it, and keep your pension, too, if you can.”
Maureen turned as the couple and the dogs passed close by the car. The man smiled at her. “Evening, Officer.”
“Evening, y’all,” Maureen said, raising her hand in a wave. “Beautiful dogs. Y’all have a nice night.”
“Y’all,” Preacher said, laughing. He threw the cruiser into drive. “Already. You’re so fucking done. You’re a lifer if I ever saw one.”
Maureen raised her coffee cup. “Believe.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although depicted fictionally in this book, the Roots of Music is a real organization and marching band doing fantastic and important work with the youth of New Orleans. Learn more about it, its success, and how to help it continue here: www.therootsofmusic.com.
Other organizations doing great work to support New Orleans youth through education and musical tradition include Trumpets Not Guns (trumpetsnotguns.com), the Tipitina’s Foundation (tipitinasfoundation.org), and the Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp (louisarmstrongjazzcamp.com).
Thanks to the McDonald, Lambeth, Murphy, and Loehfelm families for their continued love and support; the usual band of New Orleans reprobates and raconteurs, including Jarret Lofstead for inspiring one of my favorite lines; Handsome Willy’s Patio Bar & Lounge; the Parkview Tavern; CC’s, Mojo, and the Reservoir coffeehouses; NOLAFugees Press|Productions; Laura Lippman, John Lescroart, Colin Harrison, and John Connolly for holding the door open; my wonderful editor, Sarah Crichton, and all the supertalented (and impossibly patient) people at FSG and Picador; the Garden District and Maple Street bookshops.
Love and gratitude to my agent, Barney Karpfinger, and his killer staff at the Karpfinger Agency. The best in the business.
Musical inspiration provided by Galactic, Truth Universal, the Rebirth Brass Band, the Soul Rebels Brass Band, Dr. John, Anders Osborne, Pleasure Club, Kate Bush, Otis Taylor, the Kills, the Gutter Twins, Metric, the Twilight Singers, Band of Skulls, Tori Amos, Gaslight Anthem, Garbage, the Dead Weather, the Tragically Hip.
A fond farewell to the late, lamented Rue de la Course of Magazine Street.
All my love to my extraordinary wife, AC Lambeth, for her strength, talent, vision, inspiration, and faith.
ALSO BY BILL LOEHFELM
THE DEVIL SHE KNOWS
BLOODROOT
FRESH KILLS
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill Loehfelm was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Staten Island. In 1997, he moved to New Orleans. He is the author of the novels The Devil She Knows, Bloodroot, and Fresh Kills, which won an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Loehfelm lives in New Orleans with his wife, the writer AC Lambeth.
Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2013 by Bill Loehfelm
All rights reserved
First edition, 2013
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Loehfelm, Bill.
The devil in her way / Bill Loehfelm. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
“Sarah Crichton Books.”
Sequel to: The devil she knows
ISBN 978-0-374-29885-2 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Policewomen—Fiction. 2. New Orleans (La.)—Fiction. 3. Suspense fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.O36D45 2011
813'.6—dc23
2012029704
www.fsgbooks.com
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eISBN 9781466836808