Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(88)

Maureen strode toward Shadow, him crab walking on his back to get away from her, coughing, fighting for breath. She’d struck him a good one, knocked the wind right out of him. His eyes were tearing. Even if he could get to his feet, he had nowhere to run. Maureen knew it. Shadow knew it. She could see the knowledge, the fear, electrifying his eyes. She wanted to see just how much electricity she could generate.

She reached into her leather jacket, pulled out the ASP. She flicked her wrist and the weapon extended with a metallic snap, the end quivering with the weight of the leaded end. She put her foot on Shadow’s chest, pushed him flat on his back on the floor. He was transfixed by the vibrating tip of the ASP, drool running onto his bottom lip.

Maureen looked at Wilburn and Cordts. “Y’all do not have to be here for this. I got it from here.”

“If he’s got something to say,” Cordts said, “I wanna be here to listen.”

Maureen narrowed her eyes, trying to read the other cops. Cordts was both eager for and frightened by what might happen next, like a kid at the top of that first roller-coaster peak. Wilburn was clouded and distant. And hostile. What he wanted, and feared, was harder to read.

She thought of the strange men she had taken down in the dark. She had to admit it. This might be better. She didn’t have to hide behind a hood. She tightened her grip on the ASP. She could feel Shadow breathing hard under her boot. His red eyes stayed wild with terror. Maureen realized she was sweating like crazy, beads of it trickling into her eyes. When had the bar gotten so warm? The ASP became as heavy as a sledgehammer in her hand.

Looking down at Shadow shaking under her boot, Maureen tried conjuring the fresh memory of Preacher in his hospital bed, tried to hear the fear in his voice as he told the story of being shot. She tried to imagine the cries of the widows when the most horrible news of their lives came to their doorsteps. She tried to think of these things, and she failed.

Instead Maureen could only feel her heart beating so hard it made her body shake. She could smell the black mud of the Mississippi. She saw again how Officer Quinn had put Bobby Scales’s head under his boot, pressing his face into the mud at the riverside to suffocate him. She breathed in the brackish waters of the Arthur Kill and recalled how a year ago she had scrambled and crawled through the muck and the cattails of the dark shoreline to get away from Sebastian as he marched toward her, fists clenched, destruction on his mind.

Both men were to her in those moments nothing but monsters.

Is a monster, Maureen wondered, what she came to this city to be?

She lifted her boot. She collapsed the ASP, tucked it back into her jacket. “I told E to tell you that you would walk away from this meeting. That is how this will go.”

Shadow raised up on his elbows. Maureen righted his chair, pointed to it. Never taking his eyes off her, Shadow climbed into the chair.

“The Watchmen,” Maureen said. “Talk.”

Like a pendulum, Shadow’s red eyes moved from the hidden ASP to Maureen’s face and back again. He straightened his vest. “What? Yeah, I made introductions. It wasn’t my idea. Ruiz and Quinn, they wanted Shadow doing it. Either that or they tell Big Mike I’m gonna hit him with the double cross when he makes his big move. Big Mike hear that kind of talk and he’s gonna hit Shadow with two in the chest, feel me? So I make the connect for the cops. What the f*ck Shadow care what white boys do? They wanna play soldier, get y’all’s attention for once, that works for me.”

“So you meet Edgar Cooley,” Maureen said. “At the daiquiri place.”

“Right, right.”

“But then there’s a second meeting,” Maureen said. “After Cooley left the picture, you met with Clayton Gage.”

“If you say so,” Shadow said. “Fuck if I remember they names.”

“I do say so. This second meeting, this was back at the daiquiri shop again?”

Shadow shook his head. “This Gage didn’t want to do nothin’ out in the street. I got the feeling things didn’t work out so well for the first guy, know what I mean? Gage was more careful. Cooley and the other one who came around, the money man.” Shadow hung his head, snapping his fingers as his brain tried to resurrect the name.

Maureen could see that, in spite of his circumstances, Shadow was starting to enjoy himself, almost even forgetting he was talking to a cop. She realized that his role in solving the puzzle fed his ego. She could see what drove him on the streets. Knowing things, moving the pieces around. Systems, relationships, conspiracy. Moving parts. He didn’t want to drive the race car; he wanted to build it and watch it run in circles around the track. And he wanted to be able to walk away when the car hit the wall and burst into flames, driver be damned. A man who could build a good race car could always find another driver. She’d have learned none of these things, she realized, if she’d left him picking his teeth off the barroom floor.

“Heath,” Maureen said. “Caleb Heath is the name you’re looking for.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Cooley and Heath, they was into it”—he switched into his version of a white man’s voice—“being down, being gangsta, whatever the f*ck. But Gage, he was business, and he was cautious.”

For all the good it did him, Maureen thought. “So this second meeting, where was it?”

“At Gage’s apartment,” Shadow said.