Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(19)

“Stop f*cking moving,” she said, “and lie there.”

“I can’t—I can’t breathe.”

“Lie still,” Maureen said, “and take it like a man.”

“My f*cking ribs. Fuck.” He squirmed and cried out. “I can’t—you broke my f*cking knee. Christ, it f*cking hurts.”

“Let it,” Maureen said. “Let it hurt.”

She tapped the weighted ball of the ASP against his cheek, traced the underside of his eye as if caressing it with her fingertip. Blood stained his teeth. Dirt dusted his hair. She watched his terrified wild blue eye roll around in its socket, searching for her, for her weapon, for an escape. She knew she sat back far enough that he couldn’t see her face.

“Lie there and let it hurt,” she said, “and no more talking.”

“What the f*ck?” Maureen heard the girl say. “Holy shit, my face is bleeding.”

“Go in the house and clean up,” Maureen said, not turning, not looking up or at the girl, hiding her face with the hood of her sweatshirt. “Go in the house and clean yourself up and don’t come back outside. Do not call the police.”

Maureen heard the sniffles as the girl started to cry.

“Everything is fine,” Maureen said, with as much gentleness as she could muster. “Take care of your dog.” She used the voice she’d been taught to use with witnesses at a crime scene, which was exactly what, she realized, this girl had become. Well, better to be the witness, Maureen thought, than the victim. “Go inside.”

The girl did the smartest thing she had done that night. She went inside the house.

Maureen turned her attention back to the panting, bleeding man beneath her.

“Now it’s you and me, handsome. Alone in the dark.”

He had stopped struggling. His pain made it impossible for him to lie motionless. There was no comfortable position for him, wouldn’t be for months, but he was listening. He was trying to obey her.

Maureen rose up on her knees, lashed down again with the ASP on the man’s injured knee. Something shattered in it this time, and something broke in him. He sobbed.

She leaned her face down to his ear. She was hunched over his body as if he were felled prey, which, she supposed, he was. She could smell the cheap vodka on his breath, sweating out of his pores. Her ankle throbbed. She hated him, blamed him, for the pain she felt. She could smell her own whiskey breath on his skin. He cried underneath her, biting his bottom lip to stifle the sound. She could feel his chest pulsing with sobs between her thighs. She’d lose him soon to the pain and the damage she’d done. She was losing her chance to talk to him, to deliver the rest of the message she’d prepared.

“I know you,” she said. “I know what you are. I know what you do. I know what you want, what you think. I see you. You ever try this shit again, and I will know. It will come to me like a dream and I will reappear. Things won’t go down like this next time. There won’t be any pain next time. This time you saw stars. Next time the lights go out.”

She rose to her feet. She glanced up and down the block, gave the cottage windows the once-over. She settled her sore foot on the small of the man’s back. She leaned more of her weight on it to increase the pain she felt. She listened for sirens, heard none. No one was coming. Not for him. Not for her. “Stay here. Stay here and count to one hundred before you move a muscle.”

If he’d heard, he didn’t acknowledge her. Didn’t much matter, Maureen thought. With what she’d done to his knee, he wouldn’t be following her, or making an effort to get into that girl’s house. Hell, he might be lying there in the crushed ginger in the morning. She didn’t much care. She backed away up the walk, collapsing the ASP and slipping it into her back pocket. She’d clean it off when she got home.

She passed through the gate and out into the street. She pulled her hood close around her face. Her rolled ankle would hurt like a bitch in the morning, swell up to grapefruit size if she didn’t get ice on it soon. She couldn’t exactly load up on Percocets before her sit-down with the district commander. But right then and there, having left a would-be rapist sobbing in the shadows, her insides felt right. The engine that tremored in her belly twenty-four-seven had gone quiet, like it had those other times. She didn’t care about anything that had happened before that very moment. She didn’t care about the future. What she cared about was the quiet. The past was so very far away. The entirety of her future was her walk home.

The satisfaction was a dangerous feeling. She knew that.

I could do this every day, she thought.

Well, no, she corrected herself. Starting tomorrow, you can’t do this ever again. You’ll have to find another outlet, another answer, sweet as this one has been.

Her first time really going after someone had just kind of happened. She wasn’t looking for it. An opportunity arose in front of her, an accident, even, in the form of some dumb boy. So she did it. To see what it would feel like. And she found she liked it.

*

She’d been in the Marigny most of that night, skipping dinner, catching a band at the Apple Barrel. She’d had a few during the set, which ran late. After the drinks and the music, she’d stayed out and hung around Frenchmen Street, chatting up the street musicians and the homeless kids, looking for Madison Leary. Maybe for Dice, too.