Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(33)

She folded her hands over her badge and closed her eyes. She promised herself again she was safe now. She was being ridiculous. Her life was different now than it had been a year ago. She was different now. The evidence was everywhere around her. Ironclad evidence. Be a good cop, a smart cop, she told herself. Trust the evidence. The silver-haired man was not coming to get her. There had been nothing supernatural about Frank Sebastian. Nothing.

Maureen knew that the power to haunt her was power she gave him. His specter was her creation. She was being silly, a child who missed her night-light. Frank Sebastian wasn’t under her bed. He wasn’t out there on the streets. He wasn’t in a big house on the park. He was dead. He was staying dead, and she had run so far and changed so much that his ghost, should it ever manage to sneak out of hell, could never find her. Would never recognize her. She would stop going out at night looking for him. She wouldn’t take so much into her own hands anymore. That would be a start. She’d let the devil out, like Preacher had said. Now leave him out there, she thought. Leave him out there in the dark. He didn’t need her help with his work. And she didn’t need his help with hers.

She touched her shoulder. With her fingertips, under the collar of her T-shirt, she could feel the lingering bruised and tender indentations Patrick’s teeth had left in her skin.

*

She’d called Patrick and asked him over to her house two nights ago, after her conversation with Preacher about the FBI agent, too wired to sleep after three whiskeys. She’d paced the house for an hour, feeling like she’d burst. She needed a respite, a release from her own head.

Patrick had brought her more pills, though she hadn’t asked for them when she’d called him. Stepping through the front door, he’d held out the plastic bag to her as if it were a bouquet of flowers. She’d accepted his gift with an embarrassed grin, whisking it away, swallowing one pill dry as she walked to the bathroom. She knew his bringing these pills to her without her asking for them first constituted a bad sign, and maybe a bad turn in their relationship, but she decided at the time that she’d worry about that later. She had other things on her mind for the immediate future.

In the bathroom, she’d put the pills with the others in an old orange prescription bottle. She took one more with a handful of water. She heard the door open and the bottles clink as Patrick got a beer from her fridge. She hardly drank beer. She realized she kept it in the house for him. She’d looked away from the mirror as she closed the medicine cabinet.

*

In the locker room, Maureen hung her head. She kneaded her belly with her hands, trying to massage away the billowing disgust in her gut. Trading sex for pills. That wasn’t what she was doing, right? Couldn’t be. She didn’t do that kind of thing. On the other hand, she’d never given him any money for them, and that shit wasn’t free. Nothing was free. Nothing. He had never asked for payment. The pills were part of their friends-with-benefits thing, right? They both understood that. Which was why the deal was unspoken. That’s what Patrick would say if she asked him. She knew she never would ask. They didn’t talk much when they got together.

She’d considered that one day in the future he’d call in a favor from her, take his payment for the pills that way. Whether she’d indulge him would depend on the favor. She’d also considered that he might use the pills against her under the right circumstances, like if he got in trouble with another cop. The wrong cop. She knew firsthand what moral firmaments the bite of handcuffs and a flashlight in the eyes could shake loose in a man. Patrick didn’t seem likely to get in trouble with the law, or to rat on a friend; but one never really knew. His drug use was casual, recreational. Actually, Maureen realized, she’d never seen him take anything. She didn’t know him that well at all. He was a hell of a cook and a good lay. He liked Harp lager and American Spirit cigarettes. Sometimes when he stopped over his clothes bore the barest hint of marijuana or another woman. He knew next to nothing about her, but Maureen knew he was smart enough to understand one essential thing. He knew better than to cross her.

She could be that wrong cop if she needed to be.

*

That night, Patrick hadn’t been seated on her couch for five minutes, hadn’t been in the house for ten, hadn’t drunk a third of his beer before she’d had his pants open, cupping him in one hand and stroking him with the other, him groaning, his teeth digging into her bare shoulder, his pills dissolving into her bloodstream. Calming her ankle. Melting the muscles in her back and her legs. She was already feeling distant, separate, by the time Patrick came in her hands, as if she were watching the two of them from across the room through a veil of gauze.

She’d let him finish his beer as she cleaned her hands in the bathroom before leading him into the bedroom, where, lights out, she let him go down on her.

Her orgasm was slow to arrive, booze and narcotics and exhaustion and noise in her head running interference, making it tough for her to reconnect with her body, but she got there, finally, and when she came the feeling hit her hard and sudden as a car crash, her belly tensing, her fists twisting the sheets. She nearly burst into laughter at the relief, her thighs quivering. It was almost too much. Almost. She pushed his head away, squirming free of his mouth.

Once she’d mostly caught her breath she pulled his face up to hers by his ears. Grabbing his shoulders, her hands traced the muscles of his chest as he climbed on top of her. As her fingertips glided over Patrick’s ribs, Maureen thought of the man she had left groaning in the ginger stalks. She wondered which exactly of those precious bones now under her fingers she had she broken in him. Patrick’s rib cage expanded and contracted in her hands as he breathed. She thought of that other man’s punctured, bubbling, bleeding lung.