Let the Devil Out

by Bill Loehfelm

  “Sorry.”

  “So we understand each other?”

  “We do,” Maureen said.

  “We’re clear, Officer Coughlin?”

  “We are, Sergeant Boyd,” Maureen said. “Crystal clear.”

  Preacher nodded. Maureen watched as he got up from the bench and walked down to the water, his hands buried in the pocket of his sweatshirt, his broad back to her. One more time, he was telling her, he would look away from what she did next. Once more.

  5

  Late that night, Maureen sat alone in the corner booth of a boisterous Magazine Street bar, called the Irish Garden, a few blocks from where she lived. She was cocooned and anonymous in the hive-like buzzing and activity of the partyers around her. She excelled at this, finding the blind spot, the blank space in an otherwise crowded room, and hiding there, looking out at a room full of strangers, watching and listening, an owl in the crook of a branch, absorbing the nighttime wilderness around her, invisible and calculating. If she ever got to do undercover work, she thought, she’d be great at it. If she could keep her job long enough to get there.

  She’d also found, as best as she could figure with limited reconnaissance, a blind spot in the Irish Garden’s security cameras. That was if the cameras were on, something she doubted, considering the clumsy minor-league hand-to-hand drug deals she’d witnessed by the restrooms and around the pool tables. One of the bartenders was blatantly stealing. Still, she figured, one couldn’t be too careful while being completely reckless and endangering everything one had worked so, so hard to get.

  That round, silver-crescent-over-a-star badge—like her whole future in New Orleans—had been hidden from her for six weeks, disappeared into an amorphous legal limbo and the power and whims of others. She realized that when she had thought about her badge over the past weeks, she had assigned it a mystical identity, like a lost relic in an old adventure movie, a glowing and humming talisman lost in the depths of a yawning cave or a crumbling temple. An object of power and value like Excalibur or the Ark of the Covenant or the One Ring, it waited for her, only her, to rescue it from useless oblivion. The badge had become her Precious.

  But a badge wasn’t a hero’s sword lodged in a stone that she could claim, it wasn’t a mystical Old Testament talisman she could unearth, or a piece of magic regal jewelry that she could steal as she fumbled about in the dark. She couldn’t take her badge back; it had to be awarded, given to her, like a secret. She needed someone to reach a hand into that drawer and liberate that badge for her. She needed someone else to decide she deserved it, like on the first day she wore it, her graduation day that past summer from the NOPD academy. And she just hated that need of someone else’s power. Of their permission. Of their approval.

  Her need made her feel small and fragile, blind and weak, her skin tingling in anticipation of being violated or betrayed, the usual outcomes, she’d learned, of need. This time of year, she found herself especially conscious of that lesson.

  What you need, Officer Coughlin, she thought, picking up her drink, is to be home getting a good night’s sleep for once, instead of sitting in this bar, waiting for trouble. Waiting for the chance to make things worse right when your life is about to get better.

  She looked down into her drink, an underpoured, watered-down, double-in-name-only Jameson rocks in a plastic cup. She wasn’t going to change her mind about tonight. She needed to quit worrying, quit thinking, and focus on the task at hand. Focus was key. Somebody in this bar who didn’t even know she was there needed her.

  She poked at the ice in her cup, the cubes melted through in the middle, with the hard plastic cocktail straw. She slipped the straw through a cube, fished it from the whiskey, raised it to her mouth, and let the ice slide onto her tongue. She savored the cool, the ice whiskey-slick, before crushing the cube into shards between her back teeth.

  She picked up her burning cigarette from the cracked plastic ashtray, took a deep drag, pulling the smoke over the whiskey and the ice chips, blending the temperatures and flavors.

  Rattling the ice in her cup, she again looked over the men in the room. Stop lying to yourself, she thought. She wasn’t only there for the sake of someone else’s needs. It wasn’t like she didn’t have needs of her own, didn’t enjoy the anticipation of meeting them.

  She crushed more ice in her mouth and watched the room through the smoke of her cigarette.

  * * *

  This wasn’t her first time in the Garden; she’d lived in a tiny studio across the street from the place for her first six months in town, during her time in the academy, during her field training—in a big old mansion that had been carved up into apartments decades ago.

  She’d dated a cook from the bar’s kitchen. Briefly. Things with Patrick hadn’t worked out. Or, Maureen thought, they had worked out perfectly, considering what each had been looking for going in. She wasn’t sure why she used that term—not working out. Not marrying the guy didn’t mean the relationship, if she would even give it that name, had failed.

  Either way, whatever they’d started had ended amicably, and she and Patrick hooked up once in a while, creating a situation only slightly different from the original incarnation, she thought. What made things different now, and possibly better, was the mutually acknowledged fact that they were now in the aftermath of something and were no longer at the beginning. The fact that there was no future in it took a lot of the pressure off. The really important part was that he was good in bed, patient and mature enough that she could take her time and get what she wanted, but not some kind of sexual martyr who acted like waiting for the woman to come first was an act of enormous personal sacrifice.

  They’d ended their regular thing when Patrick had landed a new gig at an upscale restaurant farther uptown. He’d made the kind of all-consuming career move that Maureen understood very well. Well, if she was gonna be honest about it, they hadn’t ended it. He had called it quits, while the smell of sex lingered on them, as a matter of fact. But she hadn’t fought him on it, which kind of, pretty much made it mutual. That was what she told herself.

  * * *

  Christ, she hated this fucking bar. She wouldn’t have set foot in the place except for the task at hand, searching out one special man, the one in whom she saw herself reflected back to her, the one hiding in plain sight. She took a tiny sip of her drink, nursing. Don’t get up for another whiskey, she thought. Limit your motion, your interaction with the staff and the other patrons. Don’t do anything that might make you memorable.

  Truth be told, she didn’t much want to see her face in the mirror behind the bar.

  She wasn’t there to drink whiskey, anyway, good as it tasted.

  Look at these men, she thought. So similar, like they rolled off an assembly line. Thick unbrushed hair. Khaki pants. Checkered shirts. Hours after the sun had gone down, their wraparound Oakleys hung around their necks on leather straps. Leather boat shoes in hideous colors. Hairy forearms. Thin and bony ankles and wrists. So breakable. And those perfect white teeth. So expensive and so fragile.

  Her eyes flitted from face to face. The same, the same, the same.

  So loud, their ever-running mouths. Loud voices, loud laughter. Everything they said was shouted. Every insult, every joke, every reaction to whatever game played on one of the twenty televisions or whatever played-out song came on the jukebox.

  How would she ever find that one special man she was looking for? Her last mystery man. Because, she told herself, you’ve spent enough time as prey to know a predator when you see one. And a predator is hunting out of this bar. This was her third night in the past week camped out in the Garden, waiting for him to appear.

  * * *

  One night a couple of weeks ago, after a show at Tipitina’s, Maureen had stopped in a bar called Ms. Mae’s for a late-night drink or three. There she’d bumped into a couple of off-duty cops, Wilburn and Cordts, guys she knew from her district. Day-shift guys.

  They should’ve avoided each o
ther, everyone in her district knew about her suspension, but the hour was late and the drinks had been flowing. Who could possibly be watching them in a dive bar like Ms. Mae’s? Maureen bought a round of whiskey shots. She bought another. She asked if any good stories floated around the station. The only interesting thing, Wilburn told her, was that in the past two weeks, three calls had come into the Sixth from women worried they’d been followed home from the Irish Garden.

  Didn’t she live right by there? Cordts asked.

  What had been done about it? Maureen asked.

  The guys told her that responding officers had put the calls down to scaredy-cat girls and clumsy young guys too full of hormones and drink. That bar was a pain in the ass, you know that, they said, the way it dumped drunk meatheads into the neighborhood every night.

  But the Irish Garden’s owner was ex-NOPD, Wilburn said with a shrug, a former detective who’d taken early retirement under a cloud five years ago.

  Brutality! Cordts coughed into his hand.

  Wilburn threw him an elbow. Anyway, he said. Circumstances made it hard to look at the bar as a trouble spot. The place was protected. There was certainly no going in there asking questions. The cops who took the calls had followed procedure and taken reports at the scene, Wilburn said, as was their duty.

  Maureen had said nothing, had asked no more questions, instead lighting cigarettes for the three of them, and buying herself one more drink for the walk home before she left.

  The story of those frightened women stayed with her after that night. Her coworkers’ easy dismissal of those incidents, not only the officers who had responded to the calls but also the men who had told her the story, ate at her, scratching at her brain.

  Against her better judgment, the next time she saw Preacher in the park, she had asked him about the calls. Were she to take matters into her own hands—and a plan was already forming—and if she got caught doing it, having tipped off Preacher that she knew of the incidents would put both of them in a tough spot. So don’t get caught, she told herself.

  Preacher told her each woman had made it safely back to her apartment, shaken but untouched by her pursuer. The first and second callers had both quit talking in the middle of their interviews, having convinced themselves in recounting the events while surrounded by impatient police officers and nosy neighbors that perhaps they had overreacted. But maybe not, Maureen had thought, because the third caller had complained of the man banging on her building’s front door for several minutes after she had gone into her apartment and called the police.

  She’d said he wore a ring. That she remembered the sound of it, would for a long time, the metal banging on the thick glass on the front door as he slapped his palm hard against it.

  Maureen knew that if three calls had come in, then half a dozen other incidents had gone unreported. And that the stalkings had been happening for more than a couple of weeks. Other women hadn’t called the police.

  Women too frightened or tired or intoxicated. Women with a few pills or a bag of weed in their underwear drawer who didn’t want cops in their house, or who didn’t want to stay up another hour or two or three waiting for those disinterested, irritated cops to show up in the first place. Or worse, women who didn’t call because they were conditioned to believe the threat existed only in their heads, or to believe that, because of the late hours they kept or the booze or the pills or the weed or because of what was, or wasn’t, between their legs, they’d brought it on themselves. That they had it coming to them. Whatever it was that had happened to them. They believed that being made afraid didn’t rise to the level of a crime. That they were silly.

  They believed what boyfriends and, unfortunately, some of their girlfriends told them—that they’d scared themselves into seeing threats where none existed, that they were paranoid, like anyone really knew what that word meant. Or brainwashed. That they should doubt their deepest, primal natural instincts for self-preservation so as not to be embarrassed.

  It was part of the problem, Maureen knew, the hard part of trying to convince people to see threats, to be wary, to be hard targets. If you oversold the message, people saw danger so often that they stopped seeing it altogether. They stopped believing in it. Nobody wants to believe they should be afraid. And too many people, thought Maureen, thought that acting careful and living afraid were synonymous, that being wary of your surroundings constituted a character flaw.

  * * *

  Sitting in the booth, her eyes moving from guy to guy, Maureen recalled Preacher telling her that the description of the stalker was similar in all three incidents, but was so generic as to be useless: white, dark hair, medium height, medium build. Only the ring stood out. Only every other guy in this bar, Maureen thought, matched the physical description. None of the women could describe a face in detail. No one could offer a name. The women were convinced the stalker couldn’t be someone they knew. Why would someone they knew treat them like that? He hadn’t been someone they’d talked to that night. If someone they knew or had met was capable of acting like that, surely they would see it. They would feel it. Right? They would know better.

  The night of her talk with Preacher, sitting at her kitchen table later, in a notebook Maureen had sketched out the details of the cases. She saw plenty to worry about.

  She saw a predator practicing the hunt, learning his territory, honing his timing, and working up his nerve. Already a pattern was emerging. Somewhere in the near but indistinct future, somewhere in her neighborhood, a rape was going to happen. That it hadn’t happened already was a small miracle. Maureen had no intention of relying on the miracle to endure. She would indeed take matters into her own hands. She thought of one of the nuns’ favorite sayings from her Catholic school days. “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

  Right at that moment, somewhere around her in the Irish Garden, mixed in with the boring, harmless men she was looking at, hiding in plain sight, was a soon-to-be rapist. She knew it. She could feel it. She had experience with predators and she had an eye for victims. She’d known them. She’d been one. Like recognizes like.

  What she needed to do tonight was spot the matching pair. That she could recognize both predator and prey, she thought, that vision, that slice of wisdom, more than anything she’d learned at the academy, would make her a cop to be reckoned with, to be feared. Being able to see both sides, to see the world as both the owl and the mouse, was a dark gift that the silver-haired man had given her. A gift she’d use against every man like him that she met.

  She sipped her whiskey.

  How long had she been sitting in this bar tonight? Long enough that the smoke from other people’s cigarettes burned her eyes.

  She checked her phone. It was after one. She’d been in the bar since ten.

  She’d find her target. She’d see him first and he would never see her. Not before, not after, she was sure of that. Plain and pale and thin, her unwashed, cornflake-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail, not made-up, in jeans and a T-shirt and an unzipped hoodie, she would never be noticed by the man she was looking for. Not by any man in that bar. Not until she wanted him to. At her time, on her terms, she would make her move. He would never see her face, but he would remember her for a long time. A very long time. She’d create a lasting, life-changing memory for one special man.

  The ASP, sleek and black, rested beside her on the bench.

  Killing a man with an ASP was tough, but not impossible. What it did best was wreak agonizing, emergency-room-level havoc on jaws and joints and teeth and the small bones of the extremities. The bigger bones broke, too, if you caught them right. The weapon was an academy graduation gift from her mother’s ex-NYPD boyfriend. In Nat Waters’s time, in Nat Waters’s hands, that ASP had broken more than a few bones on the streets of New York City, Maureen thought. It had changed the course of several lives before lying dormant for a decade, waiting to come to her.

  Now Maureen had it, and she had put it back to work on the streets of
New Orleans.

  6

  Shortly before two a.m., Maureen spotted a match. The target and the stalker revealed themselves to her one right after the other, exactly as she had expected it to happen.

  The target was young, early twenties, blond, pale, and thin and chirpy as a baby bird, one of a small flock of potential victims Maureen had been watching. She wore billowy cotton pants in a fake African pattern, a charcoal top about a size too large that almost matched the pants, and wedge-heeled shoes. She had the look of someone who’d borrowed her curvier roommate’s clothes. Maureen had seen her come in around eleven, alone and already listing from drinking at home. She wore only a thin jacket against the cold night, which told Maureen she lived nearby. She’d spent most of the night squinting at her phone, texting. The girl was upset about something, Maureen figured, that had happened before she’d left home. Her outfit had a touch of “Fuck you, I’m going out.” She’d almost had the energy to get dressed up, but hadn’t quite made it. She’d done just enough preparation to convince herself she wasn’t going out purely to get shit-faced, which gave her permission to do exactly that.

  As for what had wounded her, Maureen thought at first that a job interview had gone wrong, or maybe a rejected grad school application, but Maureen soon noticed that the girl emanated a swoony neediness that repelled everyone around her, male and female, like a bad smell. That stench, Maureen knew, was heartbreak. The girl had been dumped. Some boy’s job interview or grad school application had gone really well, and this girl was now collateral damage to his success. She watched as the girl stood on her toes on the bar rail, leaning over the bar, talking to, talking at the seething bartender, who Maureen could see had no interest in the sob story being shouted in her face.

  At about half past midnight, the girl had started bumming cigarettes from anyone whose attention she could corral. She’d have one burning down in the ashtray while she was bumming another from whatever bland boy drifted by with a Marlboro in his hand. She was light-eyed and banally cute and alone, Maureen saw, but not one of those boys hung around to talk to her. Not one of them bought her a drink. None of this was surprising. The girl was not out to hook up. This wasn’t an “I’ll fuck him over by fucking someone else” outing. This was “I can’t stand another minute of my own company alone in that fucking apartment.”