“Then why the transfer request?”
“Quinn was getting weird,” Ruiz said. “Paranoid. Truth was, the worse shit got with his ex and the boy, the angrier he got. Bad things were happening with him and it started coming out in these crazy ways, him blaming everybody, anybody, for his life being fucked up, for him being broke all the time, for his boy getting knocked around. He was drinking on duty. Getting into other shit.” Ruiz shook his head. “Quinn doesn’t know I asked for the transfer. He thinks it was forced on me. I tried to use our splitting up to help him, to play it like people were getting suspicious of us, that maybe they were trying to break us up. I thought maybe he would take it as a warning to mellow out, that he would get the hint.” Ruiz pulled out his cell phone from his pocket, looked at it, and set it on the bench beside his coffee cup. “I got a wife. I got daughters. I’m a team player, Quinn is my boy, but there’s only so far I can go with his shit. I can’t get fired, lose my pension, my benefits. I can’t go to jail. Not for Quinn’s weirdo friends.”
“Quinn didn’t get the message,” Maureen said. “You need to tell me where I can find him. He can’t get out from under this on his own. We both know Heath won’t help him.”
A long, shrill coach’s whistle and the voices of shouting girls emanated from one of the school athletic fields, the sounds echoing off the stone surrounding Ruiz and Maureen. After-lunch P.E., Maureen figured.
“You know who the Mannings are, right?” Ruiz said.
“I’m from New York,” Maureen said, “not Mars. One of them plays up there, you know.”
Ruiz turned, looking over his shoulder at the back side of the school. “They went to that high school right there, Newman. I want my girls to go there. I went there, too. Matt did, for his freshman year.”
“Matt who?” Maureen asked, confused.
Ruiz considered Maureen for a long moment, looking up at her, his eyes narrow and dark. For some reason, she had the feeling he was about to stand and walk away from her, that he had lost any hope of their conversation being useful. He checked his watch, looked away from her. She wasn’t sure what she would do if he tried to leave the cemetery. He had a hundred pounds on her. She thought maybe staying engaged in the conversation, wherever it wandered, would keep Ruiz seated. “Matt would be who?”
“Matthew is Quinn’s first name.”
“I never knew that,” Maureen said. It was true.
“I knew him since he and I were six years old.” Ruiz chuckled. “Me and him, we grew up together, right over in the next neighborhood, in Broadmoor, two houses apart. He’s got three brothers, they’re named Mark, Luke, and John. None of them live here anymore.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I am not,” Ruiz said, shaking his head. “No shit. His parents were like that. Super Catholic. Super devout. His grandparents were worse. Bible thumpers from the Irish countryside. That’s why, when he got in trouble, he ended up in Ignatius instead of reform school.”
“I thought that was some exclusive boarding school for big shots.”
“What? No. Who told you that? It was a last-chance stop for rich white boys before juvenile detention and grown-up jail. Nobody admitted it, nobody talked about the school that way, but that’s what it was. If your family had the dough to grease the juvie courts and the Church, and your son couldn’t stay out of trouble in New Orleans, you shipped him off to the Jesuits in Mississippi. Nobody who could afford it wanted their kids in the city system with the blacks, you kidding? The public schools were bad enough.
“You ever been to Bay St. Louis? If you want to relax in the quiet by the Gulf, it’s perfect for that. You’re a teenager that likes raising hell and you don’t know anybody in town, it’s fucking miserable. That’s where Gage came in. He was Caleb’s go-to guy. He was a couple years older. He’d flunked out of Ignatius but stayed in town, worked in the cafeteria, did odd jobs on campus, something like that. He was another Louisiana kid, small-town south Louisiana.”
“They all know each other,” Maureen said. “Gage, Quinn, and Heath. They’ve been a team for years.”
“The three of them have been runnin’ podnas for decades,” Ruiz said. “In Bay St. Louis, Quinn was raising hell alongside them every step of the way. Even back then, as a teenager, Caleb had a way of sniffing out people useful to him and making them feel like his friend, usually by using his money. He really just wants to be worshipped. Gage was a delinquent, the kind of guy Caleb wouldn’t spit on in New Orleans, but in Bay St. Louis he knew where to find the easy drugs and the easy girls. He’d find them trouble and Caleb would pick up the tab. But Gage was watching and learning.
“When Gage needed a silent partner to support the Watchmen, Heath was the first person he called. Heath couldn’t hand out the cash fast enough. Caleb was a real swinging dick in high school. Think of the rich kid with the big watch outside of F and M’s, the one who found Gage’s body. Bankrolling a gang of badass gun-happy rednecks brings Caleb right back to his glory days cutting up in Mississippi. Quinn told me that Gage made him some ridiculous camouflage jacket with stripes on the sleeve and epaulets and some stupid Watchmen logo on the back. Got him a matching ball cap.
“Caleb wants to be like his old man. Always has. He wants to be a boss man, have people kissing his ass. He wants to preside over an empire. Only he doesn’t want to work for it, he just wants to peel the bills off the roll. Say what you want about Solomon, he put his time in. He builds shit. Caleb just wants to tear down.”
“The city’s full of rich, spoiled white kids,” Maureen said, “who aren’t financing domestic terrorism.”
“Maybe Caleb’s a true believer,” Ruiz said with a shrug. “Maybe he believes that Sovereign Citizens fuck-the-police Don’t Tread on Me shit. Maybe he’s been in it with Gage from the beginning. Maybe it goes all the way back to those days in Mississippi. I wasn’t really tight with Quinn again till we were cops. All I know is some people, you look at them and you can tell they came off the assembly line with hollow, empty spaces where important parts should’ve gone. Caleb Heath is one of those people. So’s your friend, whatshername, that woman from the pickup truck. Heath’s got money; she doesn’t. Otherwise, I don’t see a whole lotta difference. They’re not whole people. We should be glad we can’t understand them.”
“So when Gage tells Heath the Watchmen want to do business in New Orleans,” Maureen said, “and that they need some local connections, Heath calls Quinn. That’s the next step. Gage to Heath to Quinn.”
“Exactly. Heath calls Quinn and says, hey, our old pal Clayton Gage is in town, he needs a guy who can hold some product till he can move it through town. Me and Quinn, we have Shadow on a short leash from a pot bust, we go to Shadow, and Shadow puts Gage’s flunky Cooley with Scales. Now we have Scales, who everyone is looking for, under our thumb, and we figure we turn him over to Atkinson as soon as Gage is done with him. We’ve got the whole thing worked out. This is New Orleans, it’s all who you know.”
“Except,” Maureen said, “Scales pisses off one of his girlfriends and she dimes him to Atkinson before the product has been moved. And your business deal with a gunrunning child killer goes up in smoke. What a fucking shame.”
“We didn’t know,” Ruiz said, “that the product we were dealing with was guns. Anyone says product, we think drugs. I never heard about guns until the story of you guys busting Scales went around. We made introductions, we never saw none of it after that. I never saw Gage, never met him, until that night you stopped him in his daddy’s pickup truck.”
“And you never asked, did you?” Maureen said.
“I had no idea about the guns, and we were gonna give up Scales as soon as we were done with him, I fucking swear. Heath played us, all of us.”
“I had no idea,” Maureen said, “that Quinn came from big-enough money to roll with the Heaths.”
“He doesn’t,” Ruiz said. “At the time Matt got in trouble, his father worked at City Hall, in zoning and permits. So
lomon Heath paid Quinn’s way through Ignatius, all three years, and got himself a helping hand in the system for his Christian charity. That’s how Matt and Heath became friends. If that’s what you want to call them. Their fathers put them together.”
“They don’t seem a natural pair,” Maureen said.
“But they are, Quinn is his father’s son,” Ruiz said with a shrug. “Owned by the Heaths like his daddy. And proud of it. They use him. Like a farm animal. He needs them. He’s been paying child support for ten years. He needs the work they hire him for. I know he does. And it’s not like the old days in the eighties, nobody’s doing hits for the mob anymore. We’re not criminals. In Matt’s defense, I think he decided to become a cop on his own. His dad was dead by then, grandparents, too, and his brothers left town, even before the storm. I always wondered if Quinn became a cop because he thought it was the best way to be useful to the Heaths. They’re kind of the only family he has in New Orleans anymore.”
“He needs to get away from them,” Maureen said. “Forget the history. He needs to talk to me now. His buddy Caleb is in bed with cop killers, with terrorists, buying them their guns, helping them move into New Orleans. Caleb’s not footing the bill for truck-stop speed and condoms in Bay St. Louis anymore, Rue.”
Ruiz said nothing.
“Rue, listen to me. I’m done keeping a lid on what we did, not with a house full of bullet holes. Compared to everything else going on, our cover-up is small potatoes. Forget the brass, forget the feds, what do you think is gonna happen in the department when word gets around that Quinn is protecting cop hunters. A betrayal like that? Forget it. Cop or not, he’ll be lucky to get out of New Orleans alive. What do you think happens to us when word gets around we covered for him?”
Ruiz stood. He was so close that Maureen leaned back, resettling her weight on her heels. He looked down at her, fear in his eyes. “You wouldn’t spread that rumor. You wouldn’t rat him out like that. Not to his own.”
Maureen straightened her shoulders, holding her ground. “It’s not a rumor. Whether he meant to or not, Quinn did what he did. What I’m trying to tell you, Rue, is that I’m not the one he needs to worry about anymore. This case with Scales is going federal. Quinn needs to come in with me, and you, so we can tell our story before someone else does, before everyone else starts telling it for us. It’ll be too late then.”
Maureen felt Ruiz’s fast-food-and-cigarettes breath on her cheeks. They stared into each other’s eyes. Maureen’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She stepped back from Ruiz and checked the caller. Atkinson. She answered, keeping an eye on Ruiz, backing away from him.
“Coughlin.”
“I’m at the Tents,” Atkinson said. “You know who isn’t here?”
“You have to be kidding me.”
“One Robert Carter Scales,” Atkinson said.
“Tell me they didn’t fucking lose him.” If Ruiz was listening to her, or was interested in going anywhere, Maureen noted, he wasn’t showing it. She was furious enough to start jumping up and down in place.
“Oh, this one is not on them,” Atkinson said. “This one is on us.”
“How is that?”
“Scales left in the custody of the NOPD,” Atkinson said. “In the custody of Sixth District Platoon Officer Matthew J. Quinn.”
“I’m going to call you back in one minute,” Maureen said.
“When I’m off the phone with you,” Atkinson said, “I’m putting out a BOLO on Quinn. We need that witness. As for Quinn, he has crossed a bright and shining line. He’s done.”
“The shooting this morning,” Maureen said, “it was cover for Quinn snatching Scales. Get the whole department in an uproar.”
“It makes sense,” Atkinson said, “but we need Quinn to know for sure. And, Maureen, I have to tell you, if you hide anything from me about Quinn’s whereabouts, for even one minute, you are guilty of a felony.”
“One minute,” Maureen said, but Atkinson was already gone. She blinked at Ruiz. “What else do you know?”
“I’ve done my part,” Ruiz said.
“That was Atkinson, a detective sergeant, calling me,” Maureen said. “Right now, this very minute, she’s putting out a BOLO on Quinn. He’s taken off with Scales, but I get the feeling you know this already, that you knew about it when I got here, that you knew about it before I got here and that this roundabout sob story about your lost lamb of a pal is a stalling tactic. Where is he, Rue? Hiding him is a felony. You need to tell me. If I’m going down, I’m burning us all.”
“Your house getting shot up was never part of the plan. Not as far as I knew.”
“Don’t make it sound like it was my house they were after,” Maureen said. “They were shooting to kill me.”
Ruiz took a deep breath, again gazing away from the cemetery and at the school. “He’s taking Scales to the river bend, to the levee past the zoo at the end of Magazine Street, where people used to run their dogs before the Corps of Engineers closed it off for the levee work. No one is there anymore. The woods between the river and the levee are still standing. You can’t see anything happening on the river’s edge from the road, or even from the levee.”
“You can’t lie to me about this,” Maureen said. “You can’t. You’re positive that’s where he’s going?”
“He called me a while ago,” Ruiz said. “Not too long before you did. Asking me to meet him there, asking me to help him put Scales in the river. He didn’t even tell me why. He just figured I’d do it, that I’d help him kill this guy and cover it up.” He shook his head. “I got kids.”
He sat back down on the bench, any aggression gone out of him. “I hung up on him. I’ve been sitting here since, wishing this shit had never happened.” He turned, gazing up at Maureen, elbows on his knees. “Cogs, you know, you coulda let that goddamn pickup truck go on by.”
27
Maureen emerged from the trees on the back side of the levee onto a sloped, gravelly patch of riverbank bracketed on one side by a leaning willow and on the other by a chain-link fence that ran several yards out into the murky river. She had called Atkinson from the car. She figured she had five minutes, maybe ten, alone with Quinn before more cops arrived.
Beyond the willow tree, the shoreline continued upriver until it ran into a tumble of flat boulders that formed the barrier between the woods and a maritime salvage yard. Through the trees, Maureen could see the tilted sections of storm-damaged derricks and oil rigs brought in from the Gulf of Mexico. Downriver, on the other side of the chain fence, was the Army Corps of Engineers shipyard, a mammoth dredging ship idle at anchor at the edge of the wharf.
The river was low. The rocky beach ended at a wide apron of pungent black mud littered with trash and driftwood left behind by the receding river.
In front of her, Quinn stood ankle deep in the sucking mud, along the edge of the water. He was breathing heavily, leaning over with his hands on his thighs. Sweat darkened the back of his uniform shirt, the fabric stuck to his body. Beside him, facedown, clad in his orange OPP jumpsuit, was Bobby Scales. His ankles were shackled and his hands cuffed behind his back. One of his black rubber jail shoes was missing. He writhed on his belly like an eel tossed up on the riverbank, struggling to keep his face out of the mud. Maureen could hear his panicked breathing. She could see the trail through the stones and the mud Quinn had made dragging the struggling Scales to the water.
Before she could say anything, Quinn turned his head in her direction, squinting at her. He spat into the mud. “Cogs? The fuck are you doing here?”
“You really need to ask me that?” She started down toward the water. The ground was soft and wet under her feet.
“Did Rue send you?” Quinn asked.
“Not in the way you mean,” Maureen said.
Quinn straightened up, twisting side to side to work the kinks out of his back, casually, as if she’d found him moving furniture and not dragging a kidnapped prisoner into the Mississippi River. His movements seemed
to sink him deeper into the mud. Maureen wasn’t sure he was aware of it. From the state of him, Maureen could tell Quinn hadn’t planned on doing this alone. “So you’re not here to help,” he said. His speech was slurred. Booze.
“Depends on what you mean by help.” Maureen stood at the edge of the mud. Her foot sank as she stepped into it, the mud pulling at her boot with a sucking sound. She lifted her foot free and stepped back onto the stones. “I know about your friendship with Gage. I know about Shadow. This can’t go down like this. It can’t.”
“Why not?” Quinn asked. “Because of what you think you know? That’s the problem with you, Cogs. Your weakness is you have this idea that everyone cares what you think, what you think you know and see. Like you’re so fucking important.”
“You’re not a fucking murderer, Quinn,” Maureen said. “For chrissakes, think about what you’re doing. Think about who you’re doing it for. How are you gonna live with this?”
“Pretty easy, to tell the truth,” Quinn said. “So you’re not going to rat on me, you’re only concerned about my conscience? You’re here for me, is that what you’re saying?” He laughed. “How’d you fucking find me, anyway?”
“Ruiz did send me here.”
Quinn’s eyes went wide with surprise. He was astonished his former partner had given him up, Maureen could tell, but he wasn’t angry. He wouldn’t use the word rat, no matter how betrayed he felt. “Don’t be too hard on Rue,” Quinn said. “Don’t blame him. He never really knew how everything fits together. He never knew how deep it runs. He’s not a bad guy.”
“He doesn’t want you to do this,” Maureen said.
“Not bad enough to be here with you.”
Scales had rolled over onto his back, and recovered his breath enough to speak. “Hey, hey, this dude crazy. Help me, miss. Help me. This man gonna kill me.”
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