“Why? So they can get shot at, too? Maybe that’s what they want. A cop parked alone in a car would be a sitting duck. I’ll be fine. I’ll be better than fine. Now I know they’re coming. They blew their element of surprise.”
“We know you’re tough,” Preacher said. “Don’t show us how stupid you can be. I don’t want to make that phone call to your mother.”
“I’ve been run out of my house before,” Maureen said. “Never again.”
“This matter is not resolved,” Preacher said. “Don’t think of it as such.” He put his fingertips into a bullet hole by the front door. He shook his head. “Rounds this size, coming in this hot, you’re lucky the place didn’t catch fire and burn down. I don’t know what they used, but it was more than what they needed.”
“I’m fucking standing here,” Maureen said. “So whatever they used, it wasn’t enough.”
“You got renter’s insurance?” Preacher asked.
“Probably not enough,” Maureen said. With her foot, she pushed the pig’s head away from her door. “Those motherfuckers. Ridiculous theatrical bullshit. Fucking coward redneck farm boys. Shooting at a woman in her bed. You know they’re having a big circle jerk somewhere, Preach, grabbing their dicks and cackling about what big men they are.”
She wanted to pick up the pig’s head and hurl it into the street. On second thought, maybe she’d keep it. She’d bleach the bones and hang the skull over her front door. Like a trophy, a warning. “You ever see anything like this, Preach? Ever see someone come after one of us at home?”
“No,” Preacher said. “Can’t say I have. Even in this town. Never thought I’d see the day, to tell you the truth.”
“You’d be so bored without me, Preacher,” Maureen said, trying to inflect her voice with humor. Her hands shook as she opened her front door. She flinched as the door swung open, lilting on its hinges. “You wanna come in? Escort me around my own house?” She reached around her back, pulled her gun. “I have my weapon on me.”
“This tough-gal talk,” Preacher said. “It makes you sound frightened, is what it does. You’d be smart to be frightened. I’m fucking frightened.”
Maureen felt the pressure building behind her eyes. “Knock it off. Stop.”
“I won’t come in,” Preacher said. “The district commander is on his way, and a community relations officer to deal with the press. I’m going to brief them, and to keep an anti-fuck-up eye in general on the proceedings out here. They’re both gonna want to talk to you, so brush your teeth. I’ll be in to check on you before any of that. And if you need me before you see me, holler. Don’t hesitate.”
“I never do,” Maureen said. “What’re you going to tell the DC?”
“That some backwoods militia group has moved into the city. That they’re hunting cops, one Sixth District officer in particular. I’ll make sure he knows if he hasn’t heard already about the connections between Gage and the Sovereign Citizens group. I’ll direct him to the feds from there. I’d imagine the FBI will want to talk to you about this, too.” He patted at his neck with his handkerchief. “Maybe that’s why the Citizens went for you, because of that traffic stop from the other night. Maybe they blame you for Gage getting killed. It would suit the conspiratorial, victimized mind-set those humps seem to favor. Maybe they’ve been planning this for a while, waiting to pick one particular cop, raise their game, and you stepped into the crosshairs.”
He looked at her for a long time, as if processing a change he’d only now recognized. “Jeez Louise, Coughlin, you’re the victim of an act of domestic terror. This is what al-Qaeda does in Afghanistan, blow up cops.” He patted his forehead again. “What the fuck is this world coming to?”
“Gage lived long enough to tell someone about me pulling him over the other night,” Maureen said. “I guess that’s possible. If the Citizens and the Watchmen are already set up here, they’d be able to arrange a hit by now. But how would they know where I lived? I’m not listed. My name isn’t exactly uncommon.”
“New Orleans is a small town,” Preacher said. “You’d be surprised who knows what.”
His radio crackled. The DC was on-site, a voice announced, and looking for him. “Let me get with him and get things moving. Go nowhere without talking to me first.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Maureen said.
Something told her that busting Scales had touched the match to this particular fuse. Maureen knew that she was the only person involved who knew everything, about Leary and Gage, about Scales and Gage and Heath and Quinn and Ruiz and the Sovereign Citizens and the Watchmen Brigade, and how they all connected. Preacher knew some things. Atkinson knew most of the story. But only Maureen saw the whole web.
She wondered what kind of bounty that knowledge made her worth. Four figures? Five? Six, even? How high was the price on her head? Would it go up, she wondered, now that the Sovereign Citizens had come after her and missed? Later, she’d ask Quinn. She had a feeling he might know. She wondered for a moment if he’d come after her himself, but she knew he didn’t have the nerve. She’d known killers. Quinn wasn’t a killer. But he’d hand the killer a weapon and look away. Quinn would do that.
She walked into her house. Her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She answered, heard Atkinson’s stern if sleep-fuzzy voice. “I heard what happened. Are you okay?”
Maureen stood in her living room, looking over the internal injuries her house had sustained. Upsetting. Gruesome, but survivable.
“I’m somewhere between enraged and distraught,” she told Atkinson. “I don’t think the idea of that many bullets being meant for me has entirely sunk in yet.” She paused. “I’ve been shot at before, but this is a different thing.”
“We can assume that news of the Scales bust has hit the streets,” Atkinson said.
“Keeping a lid on that information was doomed from the start,” Maureen said. “We both knew that. Between the task force, the other uniforms on the scene. We’d been after him a long time. Nabbing him was a real score, we thought he was a dangerous man…” She let her voice trail off.
“As soon as I get myself together,” Atkinson said, “I’m going over to the Tents and I’ll take another run at Scales. See if there’s anything else he can give us to help track down the shooters and where we might find them. If it’s in there, he’s gonna give it up.”
Maureen didn’t see the point. Why would Scales know of plans to blow up a cop? Why would anyone tell him? But arguing with Atkinson was pointless in its own right. She wouldn’t do anything she thought was a waste of time. Atkinson didn’t believe in going through the motions for somebody else’s feelings.
“Multiple shooters,” Maureen said, “in an unmarked white minivan. That’s the full extent of what we’ve got.”
“It’s a start.”
“I gotta go, Detective,” Maureen said, pushing shards of glass and bamboo splinters across the living room floor with her toe. “I need to restore a semblance of order here before my night tour, for the sake of my own sanity.”
“I completely understand,” Atkinson said. “Reclaim your space. If it helps, think about it this way. If they thought you could be bought, they’d have come to you with money. If they thought you could be frightened or intimidated, they’d have come after you with threats. The fact they came with loaded guns? With intent to kill? Somebody is afraid of you.”
“It doesn’t feel like a compliment,” Maureen said.
“We’ll make them pay,” Atkinson said, very matter-of-fact about it. Maureen envied her confidence, and not for the first time. “And I’m not talking about the damage to your house.”
With that, Atkinson hung up.
Maureen slipped her phone into her pocket. Get moving. That was the key.
What to do first? Avoid any more damage. That was first.
She walked into the kitchen. Debris blown in from the living room littered the floor but her table and chairs and her appliances remained intact. On the table sat the enve
lope full of money. She snatched it up. She counted the cash quickly, thirteen hundred, and shoved it deep into her front pocket. She walked into the living room, surveyed the wreckage. She ran her fingers into her hair, interlacing her fingers over her skull, squeezing her head between her palms. Her throat was tight. The dust in the air tickled her nose. Her life had been perforated. Violated.
Holes everywhere. Puncturing the walls. Blasted into the planks of the beautiful hardwood floor, into the stone façade of the rebuilt fireplace. Splinters and chips of stone and plaster had sprayed throughout the room, mixed in with the pulverized glass from her front window. The air in the room glowed with sunlight reflected off the hovering particles of dust. A breeze off the river fluttered the shredded window blinds. She tried to imagine the sound of that destruction. The house was not hers, she had landlords, but she felt as if she owned what she saw, the house and the damage. She felt responsible for putting it right.
She had moved out of her mother’s house when she was eighteen. For the next dozen years on Staten Island and then in New Orleans, she’d made do with either furnished apartments or secondhand stuff donated by coworkers, bought at garage sales, or rescued from the curb. Home was a place to wash off the world and crash after work, to get high and get laid between shifts. It had never been a place to live. Until she’d rented this house. On this house, for the first time in her adult life, she had indulged. For the first time, she had planned to stay.
Her first investment in her new home life, her first prize, her big reward, payback to herself for innumerable sleepless nights on her feet as a waitress, was her beautiful queen-sized bed. She’d bought it in a Royal Street antique shop. She had spared no expense. Not on the hand-carved wooden headboard depicting a trio of pelicans aloft under a crescent moon. Not on the box spring, the mattress, the sheets, or the pillows. She’d never owned a bed like that. Never owned anything bigger than a double. Never in her life had she thought about thread count, or pillow shams, or bed skirts. Or silk versus satin. The bed was her main luxury, her primary indulgence. Her island. Well, so much for that.
From where she now stood in the living room, with the freestanding fireplace blocking her view, she couldn’t see the bed, but she saw the evidence that bullets had reached her bedroom. Holes in the floor and the walls there, too. Exploded paperback books on the floor. Shards of mirror glinting in the sunlight.
She told herself, standing there, that she couldn’t bear to enter the bedroom because she couldn’t stand seeing a lovely piece of furniture terminally wounded. Over a hundred years that bed had lasted—through fires, floods, and plagues—she thought, until Maureen Coughlin got her hands on it. Then it hadn’t lasted a month. Deep inside, though, she knew the real reason she couldn’t look, couldn’t move from where she stood. She didn’t want to see how many bullets had hit the bed, and where. The damage they had done, the damage that would’ve been done to her. She didn’t want to acknowledge that had she been home and asleep, like she so often was, that the coroner would be wheeling her dead body through the wreckage of her home, her corpse zipped into a cold black plastic bag. She thought of what Atkinson had told the task force outside Scales’s house. Bullets go places. Indeed they did. She didn’t want to think where the bullets in her bed might otherwise have gone. She didn’t want to think of Preacher calling her mother with the news. Could not think of her mother receiving it. Would they ship her body back to Staten Island? Maureen wondered. Or would they bury her here in her new home?
She heard Preacher reenter the house. She didn’t have to turn around. She knew him by his slow gait and his heavy breathing. His face was mournful when she looked at him. “The DC would like to see you. If you don’t want to talk to him now, I can make arrangements for later.”
“I want to talk to Ruiz,” Maureen said. “Now. That’s all I care about.”
“Have you tried him yourself?”
“I haven’t bothered. He won’t answer me.”
Preacher hesitated. “Why is that?”
“Because he’ll know where to find Quinn. He knows that’s what I want.”
“Call Quinn yourself,” Preacher said.
“He won’t answer me, either,” Maureen said. “He knows better. I’ve found some things out, Preach. Things I can’t tell you yet.”
“You’ll see Quinn tonight,” Preacher said. “He’s working the night tour. We can talk then, the three of us.”
“Not tonight,” Maureen said. “Today. Me and Quinn need to do this alone. This afternoon. Now. I don’t trust him with a whole day to cover his tracks.”
Preacher came closer. He spoke quietly. “Coughlin, you’re not saying he had anything to do with this? No. No way. Not this. Nothing this big. That’s an accusation, if it leaves this house, that ends our careers.”
“I want to see him,” Maureen said. “I’m tired, Preach. I’m tired of everyone telling me how it should play, and what I should think, and patting me on the fucking head and telling me that I don’t understand the way things work in crazy ol’ New Orleans. I want to see some shit and make some decisions for myself. It starts with Quinn. I wanna hear, from him, what he knows and what he doesn’t, what he’s into and what he’s not. Then I’ll decide what I believe. And what I don’t.” She could feel the cash in her pocket, could feel the corners of the folded envelope digging into her thigh. “It’s your turn, Preach, to trust me. On this one, I know more than you.”
Preacher was quiet a long time. “I guess we’ll both know after today, one way or another, if you’re gonna make it with us or not.” He looked away from her, scratching at the stubble on his throat. “Dispatch will have a twenty on Ruiz. I’ll reach him for you. Should I tell him to meet you at the Sixth?”
Maureen shook her head. “Tell him to call me on my cell. I don’t want anything out over the radio. We’ll pick a place to meet when he calls me. And tell him he better not tell anyone else about it, especially Quinn.”
Preacher sucked his teeth. “I don’t think we have to worry about that. We both know Ruiz is cutting his ties with Quinn. That should’ve been the tell right there that Quinn had gone too far.” Debris crunched under Preacher’s feet. “The DC? What do you want to do about him?”
“I’ll follow you outside,” Maureen said. So she was going to talk to the district commander with a pocketful of bribe money. So be it. Why not? That cash would go a long way toward a new bed. She deserved it. “May as well get it over with.”
Preacher stopped them in the doorway. “The TV people are arriving. DSU. WWL. We can do this inside.”
“Fuck it,” Maureen said. “The people who shot at me are going to be waiting for the news reports. I want them to see my smiling face. I want them to know they missed their shot at the title.”
26
In the time it had taken Maureen to sweep the debris into a large mound in the corner of her living room and for Preacher to come through with info on Ruiz, the day had flipped personalities. The warm, sunny morning gave way to high gray clouds. A damp and chilly wind rolled in from the west. Though hours off yet, heavy rain was on the way. The city would get one of those cool and windy October nights that reminded everyone that there would finally, mercifully, be a fall.
Before leaving the house to recover her car and meet Ruiz, Maureen had pulled on a brown leather jacket over her long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. The jacket covered the service weapon she wore tucked into her waistband at the small of her back.
Two miles away, on the border of the Sixth and Second Districts, Maureen found Ruiz in the St. Vincent de Paul No. 2 cemetery across the street from Newman High School, sitting alone on a white marble bench between two decrepit crypts, his elbows resting on his thick thighs, his fingers laced in front of him. His blue uniform was stretched tight over his big shoulders. A paper coffee cup sat at his hip. He was waiting for her right where Preacher had said he’d be.
At first glance, Ruiz appeared to be puzzling over the faded names and dates on the crumbling
grave marker before him. Maureen realized that he frowned not at what he saw, but at the thoughts moving around like clouds in his head. She could only imagine what they were. He appeared contemplative, a mood Maureen had never witnessed in him, and something about the look of it on him struck her as sad. He was a living version of the solemn, mourning statuary that surrounded him. The ground hadn’t shifted under only her feet in the last few days, she thought. Others she worked with had lost their bearings and their balance, as well.
She was, however, she reminded herself, the person getting shot at.
As she approached Ruiz, she considered asking to sit beside him on the bench. She decided against it. She had neither the time nor the inclination to make nice. No good cop today.
“You heard what happened,” she said, looming over him, crowding him as much as her size would allow.
“I heard. I’m sorry.” He turned his hands palms up, studied them. “I’m glad, everyone is glad, that you didn’t get hit. Anyone get hurt?”
“The neighbor’s dog took some shrapnel. He should be okay. That was it, thank God. I went out for breakfast. First time in weeks, maybe months.” Saved, she thought, by the anomaly. “Can you believe that?”
“I’m sorry about that Marques kid, too,” Ruiz said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that. I’m sorry we scared him like we did over Scales. We never really meant him any harm. We wouldn’t have hurt him. The way I figured it, we were doing him a favor, keeping him convinced not to testify. You have to admit, that was the quickest way for him to get himself killed. Our way, scared into keeping his mouth shut, he was protected. I know who we are, what we’re supposed to be about, to represent, but who living in the real world believes any of that protect-and-serve bullshit anymore?”
“I’ll explain it to him,” Maureen said, “next time I see him. But I don’t think he’s gonna see it your way. I’m not sure I do, either.”
“This thing with Heath got bigger,” Ruiz said, spreading his hands, “way bigger than it was ever supposed to. And it went all crooked. You have to understand, those militia fucks, I didn’t know a thing about them.”
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