Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(76)

Under the harsh, mundane fluorescents of the hospital hallways, waiting for the elevator to return, the theories of vengeance and conspiracy she’d spun in the isolation of her patrol car’s front seat became fantastical. Half-mad and paranoid. Was it so impossible, so outlandish that Solomon Heath was a rich white man with a black sheep son he couldn’t control? Was she becoming as delusional, Maureen worried, and not for the first time that night, as the woman who’d died in the fishing goods aisle of a half-empty Walmart? Was that the way she was headed? Living in fear. Driven by rage. Seeing webs of conspiracies and armies of enemies wherever she went. In the end, putting a bullet in her brain for the sake of a false flag. Or maybe dragging a razor across her throat to silence the voices.

The elevator door opened. She stepped aside to let an orderly pushing a woozy young girl in a wheelchair pass, pale and bald from chemo.

What she felt was f*cking helpless. And she hated it.

How’re we going to protect anyone, she thought, from anything if we can’t protect ourselves? How are we going to get these guys? She stepped into the elevator this time, just before the doors closed.

She rubbed her eyes, thinking of those long frazzled moments on Esplanade, the driver of the van in her gun sights. How long before one of us pulls the trigger on the wrong white van, on the wrong guy in a pair of camouflage cargo pants? Under this kind of pressure, she knew it was only a matter of time before someone who shared her uniform made a tragic mistake, either by pulling the trigger at the wrong time or by not pulling it at the right time. And wouldn’t that prove Leon Gage’s point? Wouldn’t that play right into his hands?

But who could blame us for having itchy trigger fingers? Maureen thought.

These guys wear grenades. They’ve got bigger, better guns than we do, and they buy them in suburban convention centers, Maureen thought. They’re not afraid to die in the act of killing us. If I wanted this, if I wanted a gig in counterterrorism, she thought, I would’ve become a Marine instead of a cop. At least then I’d have the necessary combat training. And better guns.

This situation with the Watchmen cannot be allowed to continue, she thought. Somebody has to step up. Even if by some miracle no one else got shot over the next few days or weeks, the psychology of the threat was too corrosive. She’d heard the chatter. Starting tomorrow, solo patrols were over. The change would cut deep into the number of cars the department had on the street. This with football season in full swing and the holidays coming on hard.

She checked her phone. Nothing from Detillier. No word from him all night. She’d called him twice. Both times her call went straight to voice mail. The longer she went without hearing from him, the more strongly she suspected that he was in trouble. He had f*cked up by sending her to meet Gage, she figured, and by missing entirely the multiple-shooter operation, the terrorist attack, that had been executed right under his nose.

Well, f*ck the FBI, then. Fuck the feds. She didn’t need them. She hadn’t been around for Katrina, but waiting for the agents of the federal government to come riding to the city’s rescue was not a favorite New Orleans pastime. She’d learned that much already.

The elevator doors opened onto Preacher’s floor. She felt a familiar sting at the back of her eyes. Maureen was tempted to let the doors close and take her back down the way she’d come. She’d have to go farther back than the ground floor of the hospital, she realized, to start this day over.





28

Outside Preacher’s hospital room, Officer Morello, the night’s guard, slept, arms crossed, chin on his chest, in a plastic chair far too small for him, an empty Popeyes box under his chair. Maureen could smell the heavy, buttery odor of the fried chicken fat and the greasy carcass of bones, even stronger than the medicinal antiseptic odor of the hallway. She was almost disgusted. Who could leave that trash sitting there like that? In a hospital, no less. Morello defined lazy, took it to new heights. Or was it lows?

Then she realized that if the smell reached Preacher, he wouldn’t complain. Popeyes would be a finer bouquet to him than any bunch of flowers.

Frayed and exhausted, listening with envy to Morello’s deep rhythmic breathing, Maureen stood for several long minutes in the corridor outside Preacher’s room, letting the wall hold her up. Nurses in scrubs hustled by, their heads down, their white sneakers squeaking on the tile. Somebody groaned in her sleep down the hall.

Maureen positioned herself at an angle to the door, in a spot where she could see Preacher, but she figured he couldn’t see her.

To her surprise, Preacher was awake.

His eyes were half-closed. His head was turned to one side, resting deep in the pillow. He had a slight smile on his face, as if he were fighting sleep while listening to someone tell a good story. Maureen could hear the murmur of the other person’s voice, but couldn’t see him or make out any of his words. Though Preacher was about as pale as buttermilk, he looked better than she had anticipated. In fact, her relief at the sight of him was so great she wanted to melt down the wall and puddle on the floor.

All night when she thought about Preacher her imagination had painted him, Maureen realized, maybe because of the manner in which he was shot, as a battlefield casualty. She’d anticipated a bloody mass of bandages and wires and tubes. She’d expected machine noise worthy of an assembly line keeping him alive. Looking at him lying there, Maureen saw tubes and wires and monitors, bags of liquid suspended over his bed, but right in front of her eyes Preacher’s body performed its essential functions on his own power source, not relying on one plugged into the wall.