Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(39)

Preacher shook his head. “No. No, you’re not the usual you. I’ve never seen you, never seen anyone crush half a pack of cigarettes like you have in the past two hours. Bored dog, my ass. You smoke like someone who’s cuffed up in the interrogation room. Like inside the cigarette is the only place that there’s any air.”

A neon-green Jeep packed with college kids, the music cranked, caught his attention as it sped past. He watched it continue on in the rearview. Maureen watched his eyes, his hands, his right foot, urging him in her mind to start the car. Please.

She dropped her half-finished cigarette out the window. She was that dog again, panting, watching her master stand there ball in hand, waiting, dying for him to throw it.

Instead Preacher said, “How is it you smoke like you do and run like you do? Those things don’t go together. You got an extra set of lungs at home in the closet?”

“The nuns in high school used to ask me the same question,” Maureen said. “I’m a walking, running contradiction, Preach. It’s part of my charm.” She lit another cigarette. “I make it happen like I do everything else. Through sheer force of will.” She shrugged. “I’m in great shape. I have the resting heart rate of a professional athlete.”

“That’s the thing,” Preacher said. “I know you can run for miles. I saw you cruising around the track in the park. Graceful as a racehorse. But when you stop moving, and I can see you, you don’t look healthy. That’s my point.”

Maureen looked away from him. “What the hell does that mean? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes me wonder what’s driving you. I need to know my officers. I need to know what they carry, and how much it weighs.”

She climbed out of the car. “I need to stretch my legs. Boredom, that’s what’s driving me. And it weighs a f*cking ton.”

It wasn’t untrue; she needed to stretch. Not that she was about to start bending over and doing stretches in the middle of Magazine Street. But she felt better standing than she did sitting.

She walked around to the front of the car, leaned her backside on the hood. The night was cold. The wind picked up. She crossed her arms, rubbed them. She’d left her leather jacket in the car. It would have to stay there. She couldn’t even look at Preacher. Not right then. Every now and then someone standing around in front of the bar glanced her way. The wind carried music and voices to her. She jammed her fists into her armpits. She looked down at her boots. The chemical withdrawal was appropriate, she thought. November was now her white-knuckle month.

*

After her dealings with Sebastian, she’d made it through the New Year before her first meltdown. It caught her by surprise. She thought she was doing great. She hadn’t even known what a panic attack was until she’d been having them for two weeks. Once, she had passed out on the staircase in her mother’s house, the fall leaving her with a bump the size and color of a plum on her hairline above her right temple.

And days before that accident another attack had left her staggering across busy Amboy Road, fighting to stay conscious and upright, finally crumpling to the sidewalk when she made the other side. A year should feel like a long time, especially because so much had changed. That had been the whole point of everything she had done in the past twelve months.

Yet, right at that moment, standing on a nighttime New Orleans street, a cop leaning against a police car, she could reach back and hear the tires screeching from the cars on Amboy Road that had barely missed her. She could feel the cold concrete of the sidewalk against her cheek as she lay there with her heart fluttering inside her like a dying hummingbird. She almost missed it, the breathless emptiness. The forced surrender of the complete collapse. She thought she might die right there on that Staten Island sidewalk. She remembered thinking she should feel more afraid of death than she did.

But then her breath had returned and her heartbeat had settled. The bird inside her either died or escaped. Her limbs had gathered underneath her of their own volition and she’d stood, unsteady and wet-eyed like a foal. And something told her she had to get up and get away from the scene of her collapse before the ambulance came. She didn’t know what kind of hospital the men in white would take her to should they get their hands on her. She wanted no one strapping her down on the gurney. She’d been captured once in her life. Never again.

Nat Waters, who had been there through the days of the silver-haired man, who in his decades in the NYPD had seen more people short-circuit than he cared to remember, had convinced Maureen to start seeing the shrink early that spring. He was the first one to use the acronym PTSD. The shrink had been the second.

Maureen rubbed her hands over the backs of her arms. PTSD. She’d thought she’d left those letters in the doctor’s office. She thought she’d left them, all those names, her diagnosis, her condition, the reason for her prescriptions, thirteen hundred miles behind her on Staten Island. On the banks of the Arthur Kill where she’d lost her favorite switchblade slicing open one man’s throat and stabbing another’s leg, where Sebastian’s blood had run hot down her arms to her elbows, stinking like copper and steaming off her hands in the cold night air.

This was why, she thought, no one understood her pursuit of Caleb and Solomon Heath, and why she didn’t know if she could ever make anyone else understand. Atkinson. Detillier. Even Preacher. She wanted Caleb, she needed him, she had to have him because no one else could, no, because no one else was willing, to see his future like she could. And she could see his future as clearly as she could see her past. Heath was the larva. He needed to be crushed and smeared before he got too big and too quick to catch.