Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(14)
“The man, his house, where he does his business,” Preacher said. “Stay away.”
Maureen opened her mouth to speak, to spit out some bullshit denial, but Preacher raised his hand against it. “You gonna hurt my feelings, Coughlin, you keep this up.”
“Sorry.”
“So we understand each other?”
“We do,” Maureen said.
“We’re clear, Officer Coughlin?”
“We are, Sergeant Boyd,” Maureen said. “Crystal clear.”
Preacher nodded. Maureen watched as he got up from the bench and walked down to the water, his hands buried in the pocket of his sweatshirt, his broad back to her. One more time, he was telling her, he would look away from what she did next. Once more.
5
Late that night, Maureen sat alone in the corner booth of a boisterous Magazine Street bar, called the Irish Garden, a few blocks from where she lived. She was cocooned and anonymous in the hive-like buzzing and activity of the partyers around her. She excelled at this, finding the blind spot, the blank space in an otherwise crowded room, and hiding there, looking out at a room full of strangers, watching and listening, an owl in the crook of a branch, absorbing the nighttime wilderness around her, invisible and calculating. If she ever got to do undercover work, she thought, she’d be great at it. If she could keep her job long enough to get there.
She’d also found, as best as she could figure with limited reconnaissance, a blind spot in the Irish Garden’s security cameras. That was if the cameras were on, something she doubted, considering the clumsy minor-league hand-to-hand drug deals she’d witnessed by the restrooms and around the pool tables. One of the bartenders was blatantly stealing. Still, she figured, one couldn’t be too careful while being completely reckless and endangering everything one had worked so, so hard to get.
That round, silver-crescent-over-a-star badge—like her whole future in New Orleans—had been hidden from her for six weeks, disappeared into an amorphous legal limbo and the power and whims of others. She realized that when she had thought about her badge over the past weeks, she had assigned it a mystical identity, like a lost relic in an old adventure movie, a glowing and humming talisman lost in the depths of a yawning cave or a crumbling temple. An object of power and value like Excalibur or the Ark of the Covenant or the One Ring, it waited for her, only her, to rescue it from useless oblivion. The badge had become her Precious.
But a badge wasn’t a hero’s sword lodged in a stone that she could claim, it wasn’t a mystical Old Testament talisman she could unearth, or a piece of magic regal jewelry that she could steal as she fumbled about in the dark. She couldn’t take her badge back; it had to be awarded, given to her, like a secret. She needed someone to reach a hand into that drawer and liberate that badge for her. She needed someone else to decide she deserved it, like on the first day she wore it, her graduation day that past summer from the NOPD academy. And she just hated that need of someone else’s power. Of their permission. Of their approval.
Her need made her feel small and fragile, blind and weak, her skin tingling in anticipation of being violated or betrayed, the usual outcomes, she’d learned, of need. This time of year, she found herself especially conscious of that lesson.
What you need, Officer Coughlin, she thought, picking up her drink, is to be home getting a good night’s sleep for once, instead of sitting in this bar, waiting for trouble. Waiting for the chance to make things worse right when your life is about to get better.
She looked down into her drink, an underpoured, watered-down, double-in-name-only Jameson rocks in a plastic cup. She wasn’t going to change her mind about tonight. She needed to quit worrying, quit thinking, and focus on the task at hand. Focus was key. Somebody in this bar who didn’t even know she was there needed her.
She poked at the ice in her cup, the cubes melted through in the middle, with the hard plastic cocktail straw. She slipped the straw through a cube, fished it from the whiskey, raised it to her mouth, and let the ice slide onto her tongue. She savored the cool, the ice whiskey-slick, before crushing the cube into shards between her back teeth.
She picked up her burning cigarette from the cracked plastic ashtray, took a deep drag, pulling the smoke over the whiskey and the ice chips, blending the temperatures and flavors.
Rattling the ice in her cup, she again looked over the men in the room. Stop lying to yourself, she thought. She wasn’t only there for the sake of someone else’s needs. It wasn’t like she didn’t have needs of her own, didn’t enjoy the anticipation of meeting them.
She crushed more ice in her mouth and watched the room through the smoke of her cigarette.
*
This wasn’t her first time in the Garden; she’d lived in a tiny studio across the street from the place for her first six months in town, during her time in the academy, during her field training—in a big old mansion that had been carved up into apartments decades ago.
She’d dated a cook from the bar’s kitchen. Briefly. Things with Patrick hadn’t worked out. Or, Maureen thought, they had worked out perfectly, considering what each had been looking for going in. She wasn’t sure why she used that term—not working out. Not marrying the guy didn’t mean the relationship, if she would even give it that name, had failed.
Either way, whatever they’d started had ended amicably, and she and Patrick hooked up once in a while, creating a situation only slightly different from the original incarnation, she thought. What made things different now, and possibly better, was the mutually acknowledged fact that they were now in the aftermath of something and were no longer at the beginning. The fact that there was no future in it took a lot of the pressure off. The really important part was that he was good in bed, patient and mature enough that she could take her time and get what she wanted, but not some kind of sexual martyr who acted like waiting for the woman to come first was an act of enormous personal sacrifice.