Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(63)

Maureen squatted beside the man’s head, careful not to get down on one knee. Blood on her boots was one thing, no sense staining her pants again. The eye flicked in her direction, seemed to track her as she hovered. She thought of Madison Leary’s heterochromic eyes, how they had popped open as if at the sound of her name, and how soon they’d gone motionless and cold after that last flash of awareness, of life.

She thought of the man she’d followed from the Irish Garden, the one she’d left bleeding in the ginger. The one, according to Preacher, she’d nearly killed. She had looked into his eye, too. That eye had been blue like this man’s, like one of Leary’s had been, but also wild and alive. She had seen everything he was feeling from moment to moment, the agony and the fear broadcast across the surface of that one wild eye. She had seen his life, miserable and terrifying as it was to him at the moment. This dying man’s eye was not the same animal. It moved away from her. Came back to her. Moving in tiny increments, it seemed to search the ceiling. A broken thing. What do you see? Maureen wondered. Are there demons coming for you? Do you think you see angels? Or is your dying eye like your feet and your fingers? Unconscious firing of dying nerves. The last of your loose electricity going to waste trying to jump-start your dying brain.

Or maybe, she thought, you know I’m here, and I am all you see. Maybe I am, to you, the devil let out of hell come calling for her due.

“Can you see me?” she teased, whispering. She could hear the smile, the taunt, in her voice, and somewhere deep inside, that smile scared her. She thought of Preacher’s talk of the scorpion and rage bloomed inside her. “Do you see me here?” She wiggled her finger at his eye. “Is that why this eye thing is happening?”

She leaned in closer, forearms on her knees. “Can you hear me? Are you hanging on in there, *? Good. Don’t leave me just yet.” She leaned down right above his ear, close enough to whisper. “I’m the one you people wanted the most. Now I’m here to watch you die.” She looked at the flag on his back. “Don’t tread on me? Fuck you. I’m standing in your blood, you motherf*cker, and you are dying at my feet.”

Maureen watched his eye, stared right into it, as the last of the life remaining in him departed. She saw it go. Nothing on or in him moved. He was as dead as the woman who’d shot him. She stood. She waited for the sensations that had come when Leary had died, the parts of her breaking free and fading. She felt none of that this time. She missed Preacher.

“Coughlin!”

Her shouted name hit Maureen like a slap in the face. She turned. Detillier. Damn. Forgot about him.

“What are you doing?” Detillier asked.

“I, uh, I thought he might not be dead, so I checked.” She looked down at the corpse, then back at the FBI agent. “But he is. I can say for sure he’s deceased.”

“Now you’re the medical examiner?” Detillier asked. “Step away, please.”

He was disturbed, Maureen could tell, by finding her looming like a reaper over the dead man’s body. How long had he been standing there, she wondered. What had he heard her say?

“Just, geez,” Detillier said, “you’re standing in the blood. C’mon, we need to be professional here.”

“All right, all right.” Maureen backed away from the body, gave the dead woman as much distance as she could as she headed over to Detillier at the end of the aisle. She left bloody boot prints on the floor.

“The woman,” Detillier said. “Do you recognize her?”

“Should I?” Maureen took another look, as a courtesy to Detillier, but she knew it wasn’t anyone she had known. “Because I don’t.”

“She look like someone you’ve heard discussed? Maybe by Quinn or Ruiz?”

“Nope.”

“What about him? You got a good-enough look.”

“I don’t recognize him,” she said.

“You see anything useful on him,” Detillier asked, “during your closer inspection?”

“I saw that he’s got a big f*cking bullet hole in the base of his throat. Gotta be where she shot him. I think he was on his knees, waiting for it. I wonder if he was begging her to do it, or begging her not to do it. We’ll see when they turn him over if he had the guts to open up his armor to her.” She shook her head. “Leave it to the man to lose his nerve when it counts. Anyways, she put a couple of rounds into the shelves behind him. Those were the first shots we heard, her trying to get him. The single shot that came last, that was her finishing the job. Suicide pact is my guess.”

“Makes sense,” Detillier said. “For some reason, these types never want to stick around for the glorious revolution. Less work to be a martyr, I guess. They never live long enough for me to ask them.”

“Revolution,” Maureen said, shaking her head. “Martyrdom. Is it really that deep, or are they just bananas? Seriously, if these two hadn’t found the Sovereign Citizens and the Watchmen, wouldn’t someone else be cleaning up the same mess in a trailer park somewhere over meth or dog fights?”

Detillier shrugged. “Anything’s possible.”

“You’ve seen this before?” Maureen asked.

“I have,” Detillier said. “And I get the feeling I’ll see it again.”