Once she made it to the back side of the route, it didn’t take her long to find a familiar face. Half a dozen male cops leaned against a battered cruiser. With their ripped muscles and zero-body-fat frames, their flattops and their tattoos, they looked like Special Forces costuming as beat cops for the holiday. One of them was a tactical officer named Sansone. Maureen had met him when they served a warrant together once. Since then they had crossed paths on occasion around the district and most recently in the aftermath of a bloody standoff at the Tchoupitoulas Walmart.
He spotted her, slapped a buddy in the chest with the back of his hand, and pointed to her. The buddy grinned, but didn’t look her way, focusing instead on the phone in his hands. As she approached the cruiser, which was parked on St. Charles in front of the Wendy’s, she watched the men watch the crowd. Unless you looked at them closely, knew how to watch them watch the crowd, they didn’t appear to be paying attention to anything beyond their phones and each other. But better examination proved that no two sets of eyes looked in the same direction. None of the officers, as far as she could tell, watched the parade.
They were like wolves, she thought. To the untrained eye they idled relaxed and at rest as they stood together in a loose pack, their breath making white clouds around their faces, but in truth they remained hyperaware of everything around them, reading not just sights, but the sounds and the smells, the vibrations in the air. She figured Sansone had seen her long before she saw him notice her approach. They all had, and they all wondered what she was doing on their turf. She stopped in her tracks a few yards away from the group when three officers broke away from the pack and started walking at a steady but unhurried pace, shoulder to shoulder, to the neutral ground.
The three of them, somehow, created a wall, exuding a force field that extended ten feet in every direction. Maureen watched them step in between two groups of teenagers that she hadn’t seen converge. The center officer shook his head and raised his arm straight up, rotating his pointed finger, telling one group to turn around and walk away. There was chatter from the group, some dissent, but the kids did what they were told. Then the other group, without being told, turned and walked away in the opposite direction. The officers watched both groups for a few moments then made their way back to their comrades at the car.
Maureen thought of Morello, of his threats and histrionics, of his cultivated air of menace and violence. Just now, the officers she had watched had been working while outnumbered three-to-one. Nobody had put a hand on anyone. No one had argued with anyone. No one had raised his voice. No one made threats. Not the cops, or the kids. No violence. No drama. Only results.
That right there, Maureen thought as she approached her fellow officers, is what I need to learn how to do. And while making it appear so effortless. That was power.
“Look at this,” Sansone shouted, stepping away from the car and meeting her in the street. “The OC, down here with the riffraff.” He walked toward her, his hand extended. “All the action is up your way tonight. What the fuck are y’all doing up there? Lock your shit down, rookie, or we’re gonna have to do it for you.”
Maureen shook his hand. She felt foolish in her coat, gloves, and knit hat while Sansone worked in the cold and rain in his shirtsleeves, and, of course, his luminous yellow vest. No one got away with not wearing one of those. Not even the rock stars like Sansone.
“So the word down this way,” Sansone said, “is that you took somebody out, and that he croaked on you later, surrounded by nothing but civilians. That true?”
“He was alive,” Maureen said, “when Cordts and I left him to see about the gunshots.”
She wanted to explain herself, but remembered Hardin’s admonitions about answering questions. She figured it applied to the entire night’s events. “He’s an OD, we think. Hardin probably doesn’t want me talking about it. No offense.”
“If Hardin’s got your back,” Sansone said, waving a dismissive hand, “you’re good. I wouldn’t worry. Trust me.” He adjusted his vest. “You’d think they’d figure out how to size these fucking things. We use them all the fucking time. Nobody’s got one that fits. Nobody.”
“What’s going on with y’all?” Maureen asked. “Hardin is curious.”
“Quiet,” Sansone said. “But we’re watching. It’s early yet for us down here.”
“Those kids y’all separated?”
“That’s nothing,” Sansone said. “They’re sticking out their chins at each other, posturing, both groups waiting for us to break it up before they have to do anything. You know, like kids in the school yard waiting for the teacher to separate them before they have to start swinging and hurt themselves. So we oblige them. May as well. We only need one of them to have one too many shots of Crown and make a mistake. Guys start throwing fists, then, next thing you know, somebody’s got a gun out. Then someone else has a gun out. Before you can blink twice—we got bodies. That shit goes on all night. We take turns.” His tone was that of someone describing kids spilling each other’s soda at a birthday party. Sansone bumped her with his elbow and smiled at her. “Hardin really send you down here or you hiding out from Drayton? You in trouble again?”
Maureen shrugged, trying not to grin. “You think I’m this far from my route assignment,” she asked, “without Hardin’s permission?”
She looked away from Sansone, experimenting with trying to absorb the scene while projecting the outward impression she was uninterested and looking at nothing. She’d developed moderate experience with the skill, with absorbing the room, as it were, when she’d worked New York barrooms as a waitress. She’d worked to cultivate it since joining the police force. This parade business, though, was its own kind of science. It required her senses and her powers of observation to operate at a whole new level, one she hadn’t hit yet. She knew that. The jump would come with practice. She lit a cigarette, offering one to Sansone. He took it and they stood together smoking, watching everything and nothing at the same time.
She didn’t know Sansone very well, but he was becoming one of her favorite coworkers. It wasn’t the athlete’s body covered in rock star tattoos or the movie star smile, though those things didn’t hurt. Here was the cop, Maureen thought, that Laine needed to put in front of her camera. No, it wasn’t his looks that mattered to her. From the jump, Sansone had treated her like an equal. He loved being a cop. He loved other cops. He was natural with her, and without affect or agenda, and though she suspected it was part of his considerable charm, he treated her at times like she was cooler than him, like she was the more admirable individual of the two. While being Officer Coughlin could be a constant trial to her, she felt that being Officer Sansone was effortless, and she envied him his ease in his skin. She hoped that ease would rub off on her.
“I heard Drayton on the radio,” Sansone said. “He’s fucking hot. The prick. He’s hollering for Wilburn and Cordts, too, who aren’t answering him, either, by the way, but I heard him ranting and I thought, he’s got that tone, that’s gotta be Cogs. Tell me it’s you. C’mon, tell me.”
“Hardin sent me here,” Maureen said, “for intel. He can handle Drayton.”
“So where’s Cordts and Wilburn then?” Sansone asked, smiling.
“I don’t know where Wilburn is,” Maureen said. “I think he got stuck chaperoning some amateur camera crew. Last I saw Cordts, he was babysitting the perp with Morello.”
“So we did catch someone,” Sansone said. “I had a feeling. Things had gotten awful quiet.”
Shit, Maureen thought. Probably shouldn’t have mentioned that. She was tempted, now that she’d given the secret away, to brag a little on being the one to run Goody down. She decided against it. “No comment.”
Sansone barked out a laugh. “No comment? What the fuck does that mean?” He considered her for a few seconds. “Relax, we all know how it goes. You’re hiding the perp from Drayton to protect your access to him. That’s what I would do. Fucking Hardin. He hides it, but he can be a jok
ester. I promise you, he’s got you, Wilburn, and Cordts spread all across Uptown just to fucking annoy Drayton.”
“Hardin did send me here to talk to y’all,” Maureen said. “At first glance, at least, it looks like it’s gang business behind this shooting. He was wondering what was happening on that front down here.”
“Who’s the gangbangers? Victims or shooter or everybody?”
“Shooter,” Maureen said. “We had multiple vics, one we specifically think was the target. The others are collateral damage. We think the shooter panicked when it came time to pull the trigger.”
“A kid, then?” Sansone said. “These spray jobs that catch the bystanders, if they’re not drive-bys, they’re kids who can’t handle themselves. What’re we working with? A baby gangbanger making his bones?”
“He goes by Goody on the street,” Maureen said, nodding, deciding on the spot to trust Sansone, or more to the point, that Hardin would. “He’s fifteen, but was already J-Street by way of family, so I don’t think he needed an audition. The main victim is a middle school music teacher. Two people who know him told me he’s got no gang connection. Not by past association or family. Which makes me think he was chosen at random. Or that it was a mistake, that the shooter thought he was hitting someone else. But the teacher was shot at close range, and the shooter yelled ‘Three-N-G’ before he pulled the trigger. So we’re wondering what that was about.”
“If your shooter is part of the J-Street family, then he’s trying to get us going after Three-N-G by calling out their name,” Sansone said. “That’s my first guess. They like to think they’re clever. Some of them are, most of them not so much.”
Sansone raised his chin at the crowd gathered on the neutral ground. “We got Three-N-G out here tonight. This is a prime spot for them. They’re out here every night. Maybe we can make something happen, get them to give us some info.”
Maureen looked at the cluster of young men Sansone had pointed out to her.
She noticed for the first time that many of the kids, the ones standing in groups back from the crowds, weren’t watching the parades, either. They wore no beads or funny hats or blinking souvenirs. They had no stuffed animals or plastic cups jammed into their coat pockets. They watched, Maureen noticed after a moment, only one another, and their focus was intense, though they pretended not to be paying attention to anything in particular. Their attitude and affect wasn’t very different from that of the police officers watching them.
Sansone and his coworkers watched the groups of kids watch one another. Everyone stood around for hours, posturing and gesturing and waiting to see what would happen next, or if anything would happen at all. The parade was the reason they were gathered together on St. Charles Avenue instead of going about their separate nights in their different pockets of the city, but the Muses parade itself held no interest for any of them.
“You’re sure your suspect is J-Street?” Sansone asked.
“I know him, from another thing I did over the summer,” Maureen said. “He was straight J-Street then. His uncle was in.”
“You said the uncle was J-Street? As in past tense.”
“Bobby Scales.”
Sansone rocked back on his heels. “Oh, that dude. Yes, he is in fact dead. Man, he wasn’t even twenty-five. And how old is the nephew?”
“Fifteen.”
Sansone shook his head. “Fucking figures. Kids, it’s always kids in the middle of this shit these days. I’d spend less time chasing teenagers if I coached high school football like my brother.”
He gestured at another cluster of seven teenage boys. They stood maybe ten yards from the 3NG crew. “We got J-Street out here, too. Everybody’s out every night there’s a parade.” He sighed. “We got Fourth Ward boys out here. We got some Harvey Hustlers from over the bridge. They’re far from home, but it is Mardi Gras. That might be trouble, we’ll have to see. Those guys over there? That’s Young Melph Mafia. We got one-tenners, or one-tenner wannabes at least, I’m not sure, under the overpass bugging the homeless people. Them and another few dozen kids from across the city. They’re still at that age where the boys and girls chase each other around. It’s like a fucking middle school field day over there. Kids everywhere.”
Maureen gestured at a group of tall young men in matching gray tracksuits standing close together, laughing. Each held a plastic water bottle. One of them wore a small drawstring bag on his back that bulged with a bottle of liquor. “What about them? Who’re those guys?”
Sansone laughed. “Them? That’s the Edna Karr basketball team. Maybe some of them are track. The Karr marching band is in the parade. They come out to watch their buddies in the band, to flirt with the cheerleaders and the flag twirlers.”
“I don’t know my schools yet,” Maureen said. “Not all of them.”
“You a cheerleader in high school, Cogs?” Sansone asked with a smile. “You wave a flag for the band?”
“What do you think?” Maureen asked. “I ran track. I didn’t wave anybody’s flag.”
“Too right,” Sansone said. “We watch them, too, the good kids. If they leave in a hurry, that’s a warning sign. Like how you know there’s a hawk around when the other birds disappear.”
“A warning sign?” Maureen said. “We’ve got half a dozen gangs in a six-block area. How much more warning do we need? Why don’t we scatter them? Get them out of here?”
“Chase them where?” Sansone asked. “The next block up or down, where they’re agitated and out of place and the next cop’s problem? Back into the neighborhood, where we can’t watch them?” He shrugged. “Besides. For now, everyone is behaving. Most of the time, everyone behaves themselves just enough for us to leave them be. There’s no reason to upset that balance. They know the line, they’re good at walking it, and the ones that don’t, usually it’s not us that have to teach them. Nobody wants that much of our attention. And believe me, you don’t want to be the reason something starts out here.
“For the most part, even here, the route polices itself. Let it. We’re here to relieve the pressure, not add to it. Simple physics. The balloon can stretch, as long as it doesn’t pop. That’s all we care about.”
Maureen hitched up her gun belt. “So do you really think any of these guys are worth talking to?”
“About what happened up by you?” Sansone winced and shrugged. He sighed. He narrowed his eyes at the 3NG crew. “You want, I could get a couple of those characters over here, ask ’em a few questions.”
“What’re they gonna tell me?” Maureen asked.
“They’re gonna tell you lies,” Sansone said. She got the impression he was regretting his earlier offer to speak to one of them. She understood. If they had their shooter in custody, why excite the atoms he was responsible for? He added, “But it lets you get a look at them.”
“I can see them from here,” Maureen said. “And I don’t want to upset your environment. Seems pretty mellow, actually.”
“It is,” Sansone said. “For now.”
27
As he talked to her, Maureen watched Sansone focus on a young man in the 3NG group, eighteen or nineteen, talking to a group of half a dozen girls. Sansone threw a glance back at his fellow officers by the car, alerting them to what and whom he was watching. Maureen saw them notice. The pack loosened a tiny bit, each officer giving himself a clear running lane should they need to charge. She was convinced that were the scene played back on video, you’d never see any of them move a muscle.
“Yeah, honestly,” Sansone said, as if he’d forgotten she was there for a minute. “I don’t know if I see the point of talking. I know these guys, what they do, who they run with. They know I know, but they’re not admitting to anything. Not without leverage, and we don’t have any of that. We’ll learn more letting them be. They’ll tell us what’s up.” He held out a hand, trembled it. “There’d be a buzz in the air if something big was going down. That’s why I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not feeling it.” He shrugged. “
That’s a good thing.”
As she listened to Sansone, Maureen watched the same kid that he did. He stood out from the others, and it was clear to Maureen that he meant to. He wore diamonds in his ears bigger than any she’d ever own. They sparkled in the colored lights of the passing floats. He wore a small diamond cross around his neck, against his camel-colored cashmere sweater. Over that he wore a rust-colored down vest that had cost plenty more than the seventy-dollar fluorescent vest she wore. Baggy cords. Brand-new boots. Everything matched, and everything he and his friends wore looked fresh off the rack. They looked like they’d stepped out of a magazine or catalog shoot. The young man looked, Maureen had to admit, very good. They all did, his whole crew, but he shone brighter, and it wasn’t jewelry that made the difference.
She noted that he wore a camouflage bandanna around his head, which marked him as 3NG, the knot tied in the front. His buddies wore bandannas, too, but theirs were tied around a wrist or an ankle, where it was semi-hidden by a pant leg or a shirtsleeve. It occurred to Maureen that Goody had not been wearing a camo bandanna. The 3NG shout, she decided in agreement with Sansone, had been a ruse, a diversion for the witnesses to send the cops in the wrong direction. Deciding what Goody wasn’t, though, Maureen thought, didn’t help much when trying to determine why he had done what he did, and what kind of retaliation his actions might inspire.
“What about the J-Street guys?” she asked. “Would any of them give something up? Considering we got one of their own in the back of a police car?”
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