Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(15)

They’d ended their regular thing when Patrick had landed a new gig at an upscale restaurant farther uptown. He’d made the kind of all-consuming career move that Maureen understood very well. Well, if she was gonna be honest about it, they hadn’t ended it. He had called it quits, while the smell of sex lingered on them, as a matter of fact. But she hadn’t fought him on it, which kind of, pretty much made it mutual. That was what she told herself.

*

Christ, she hated this f*cking bar. She wouldn’t have set foot in the place except for the task at hand, searching out one special man, the one in whom she saw herself reflected back to her, the one hiding in plain sight. She took a tiny sip of her drink, nursing. Don’t get up for another whiskey, she thought. Limit your motion, your interaction with the staff and the other patrons. Don’t do anything that might make you memorable.

Truth be told, she didn’t much want to see her face in the mirror behind the bar.

She wasn’t there to drink whiskey, anyway, good as it tasted.

Look at these men, she thought. So similar, like they rolled off an assembly line. Thick unbrushed hair. Khaki pants. Checkered shirts. Hours after the sun had gone down, their wraparound Oakleys hung around their necks on leather straps. Leather boat shoes in hideous colors. Hairy forearms. Thin and bony ankles and wrists. So breakable. And those perfect white teeth. So expensive and so fragile.

Her eyes flitted from face to face. The same, the same, the same.

So loud, their ever-running mouths. Loud voices, loud laughter. Everything they said was shouted. Every insult, every joke, every reaction to whatever game played on one of the twenty televisions or whatever played-out song came on the jukebox.

How would she ever find that one special man she was looking for? Her last mystery man. Because, she told herself, you’ve spent enough time as prey to know a predator when you see one. And a predator is hunting out of this bar. This was her third night in the past week camped out in the Garden, waiting for him to appear.

*

One night a couple of weeks ago, after a show at Tipitina’s, Maureen had stopped in a bar called Ms. Mae’s for a late-night drink or three. There she’d bumped into a couple of off-duty cops, Wilburn and Cordts, guys she knew from her district. Day-shift guys.

They should’ve avoided each other, everyone in her district knew about her suspension, but the hour was late and the drinks had been flowing. Who could possibly be watching them in a dive bar like Ms. Mae’s? Maureen bought a round of whiskey shots. She bought another. She asked if any good stories floated around the station. The only interesting thing, Wilburn told her, was that in the past two weeks, three calls had come into the Sixth from women worried they’d been followed home from the Irish Garden.

Didn’t she live right by there? Cordts asked.

What had been done about it? Maureen asked.

The guys told her that responding officers had put the calls down to scaredy-cat girls and clumsy young guys too full of hormones and drink. That bar was a pain in the ass, you know that, they said, the way it dumped drunk meatheads into the neighborhood every night.

But the Irish Garden’s owner was ex-NOPD, Wilburn said with a shrug, a former detective who’d taken early retirement under a cloud five years ago.

Brutality! Cordts coughed into his hand.

Wilburn threw him an elbow. Anyway, he said. Circumstances made it hard to look at the bar as a trouble spot. The place was protected. There was certainly no going in there asking questions. The cops who took the calls had followed procedure and taken reports at the scene, Wilburn said, as was their duty.

Maureen had said nothing, had asked no more questions, instead lighting cigarettes for the three of them, and buying herself one more drink for the walk home before she left.

The story of those frightened women stayed with her after that night. Her coworkers’ easy dismissal of those incidents, not only the officers who had responded to the calls but also the men who had told her the story, ate at her, scratching at her brain.

Against her better judgment, the next time she saw Preacher in the park, she had asked him about the calls. Were she to take matters into her own hands—and a plan was already forming—and if she got caught doing it, having tipped off Preacher that she knew of the incidents would put both of them in a tough spot. So don’t get caught, she told herself.

Preacher told her each woman had made it safely back to her apartment, shaken but untouched by her pursuer. The first and second callers had both quit talking in the middle of their interviews, having convinced themselves in recounting the events while surrounded by impatient police officers and nosy neighbors that perhaps they had overreacted. But maybe not, Maureen had thought, because the third caller had complained of the man banging on her building’s front door for several minutes after she had gone into her apartment and called the police.

She’d said he wore a ring. That she remembered the sound of it, would for a long time, the metal banging on the thick glass on the front door as he slapped his palm hard against it.

Maureen knew that if three calls had come in, then half a dozen other incidents had gone unreported. And that the stalkings had been happening for more than a couple of weeks. Other women hadn’t called the police.

Women too frightened or tired or intoxicated. Women with a few pills or a bag of weed in their underwear drawer who didn’t want cops in their house, or who didn’t want to stay up another hour or two or three waiting for those disinterested, irritated cops to show up in the first place. Or worse, women who didn’t call because they were conditioned to believe the threat existed only in their heads, or to believe that, because of the late hours they kept or the booze or the pills or the weed or because of what was, or wasn’t, between their legs, they’d brought it on themselves. That they had it coming to them. Whatever it was that had happened to them. They believed that being made afraid didn’t rise to the level of a crime. That they were silly.