Until the Devil Weeps

by W E DeVore

  “You shouldn’t have to,” Yvie replied. “Josh will be here soon.”

  “I’m glad he wants the suits. Ben would love the irony,” Q replied. Josh had lived in board shorts and t-shirts for as long as Q had known him. “He’ll have to get them tailored. He’s what, six-two? So, they should almost fit.”

  Yvie flipped through a few hangers. “He doesn’t want all of them, just three. Won’t tell me why.”

  Q counted off on her hand. “Proposal. Rehearsal dinner. Wedding.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I’m serious,” she said. “That’s one of the weird reasons Ben gave for not wanting Josh to date you.” She switched into an impersonation of Ben’s gravelly Metairie drawl and said, “‘He doesn’t even have a suit, darlin’. A serious man has a suit for three things: a proposal, a rehearsal dinner, and a wedding.’ When I reminded him that he wasn’t wearing a suit at all three of those events for us, he said, ‘that’s not the point. I had them, I just didn’t have them on.’”

  Yvie burst out laughing and Q reached into the line of tailored jackets to pull down a dark blue suit. She held it out and admired it. “Wedding. For real. He’d look great in this.”

  They heard Josh’s voice calling to them from the bottom of the stairs and Yvie shouted, “We’re up here!”

  Q cursed to herself. “Aaron’s going to kill me. He hates it when I leave the door open. I need to get that gate fixed.”

  Josh came into the room and kissed Yvie before placing his large hands on Q’s shoulders to give her an affectionate squeeze. “Dang, Uptown, look at all those suits. How many did he have?”

  Q grinned. “I hear that you are in need of three suits, philanderer. I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of three occasions for which a suit might be required.”

  He winked at her and took the blue suit from her hands. “First, reformed philanderer. Second, shut up.”

  Josh took the jacket off the hanger and pulled it on, looking at himself in the mirror of the antique vanity. Q went to him and straightened the collar, smoothing out the shoulders. “You’ll need to have the sleeves shortened, they’re coming down about an inch too low. I’ll call Ben’s tailor for you. She’ll get you fixed up.” She looked him in his eyes and smiled. “It’s on us. Ben and me. Looks good on you.”

  He pulled her into a hug, making her eyes flood. Patting his chest, she moved back and reached into the inside pocket. “Let’s make sure there’s nothing in here. He was always leaving things in his pockets.”

  Her fingers tightened around a piece of paper and she pulled out a bright green Post-it note:

  Clementine eating bacon and tomatoes

  Little Bit moving against my hand

  Cardinal’s nest in the tree

  Yvie and Josh dancing tonight

  This glass of whiskey

  “What is this?” Q asked.

  She handed it to Josh and he said, “Looks like one of his gratitude lists.”

  “What are you talking about, Josh?” Yvie asked, coming over to read the paper.

  “After Angela was killed, he was in a bad way. He started writing down five things at the end of every day that made him happy that day and only that day. He kept it in his pocket to read through on the next day. Then he’d throw the old one away and write a new one.” Josh shrugged and looked at Q. “He never told you?”

  “No. I’ve found dozens of Post-its in the wash, but I always figured it was something for work.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, staring at Ben’s neat printing in her hand, wondering when he’d written this list, amazed that her husband had practiced this habit since his first fiancé’s death over sixteen years prior without her ever knowing about it.

  Yvie sat beside her and leaned her head on Q’s shoulder to read the note. “I think I remember that night.”

  “What night?” Q asked.

  “It was about a month before he died. Josh and I had been dancing together at the Cove and I stayed while they closed up the bar. I interrupted him in his office. He was writing something down and got annoyed with me for interrupting him; screwing his face all up - you know like he used to when he was trying to remember something?”

  Q laughed, remembering the expression.

  Yvie continued, “Then he shrugged and took a sip of whiskey and said, ‘this glass of whiskey.’ Just like that, kind of to himself, I guess. Then he finished his note and put it in his inside pocket. So, I say, ‘this glass of whiskey, what, bubba?’ and he says, ‘is good enough to be grateful for.’”

  Josh sat next to her. He took the note from Q and read it again. “Must have been a perfect day. See? He wrote the date on the back.”

  “You’re going to have to catch me up,” Q said.

  “He wrote one of these notes every day, but he only saved the ones for what he called ‘a perfect day.’ A day when nothing bad happened. He’d write the date on them and save it. There’s an envelope full of them in the safe at the Cove.” He looked at her apologetically. “I thought you knew and just didn’t want to see them.”

  Q took the note from him. “Take me there. I want to see them now.”

  The three of them drove to the Cove and Josh let them in. Q shivered in the chill of the familiar bar as a thousand memories crashed over her. Yvie wrapped her arm around Q’s waist. “You haven’t been here since, have you?”

  She shook her head, trembling. Exhaling slowly, she whispered, “Good god. He’s everywhere.”

  Pushing away the tears at her eyes, Q let Yvie guide her back to the office and Josh opened the safe, kneeling in front of it to retrieve a manila envelope. Q sat cross-legged on the floor and took it from him. She opened it and pulled out a stack of Post-its in various colors, stuck one to the other. She read the top one:

  Little Bit’s heartbeat

  Heparin

  Blood pressure meds

  Good doctors

  My brave wife

  She looked at the date on the back. “This is the day we found out about Jasper.”

  She eagerly flipped through the stack, looking for the date of their wedding and was disappointed when she didn’t find it. Then she remembered that Ben and her father had gotten into a horrible argument when Ben had refused to lie about his religious upbringing to the rabbi her father had deceived into marrying them. So, it hadn’t been quite perfect. She flipped forward in time to four years previous:

  Carrying Q through the rain

  Q teaching Aaron to eat crawfish

  Cold beer

  Q singing duets with Stanley

  Aaron saving a man’s life

  She read it out loud to Yvie. “I remember that day. It was the last day of Jazz Fest. Aaron, Ben, and I snuck upstairs in the Grandstand and watched the rain. Then we went to Stanley Gerard’s for crawfish. It was a perfect day.”

  She continued to move back in time through their relationship. Blushing at a few of the reasons Ben had been grateful for her over their years together.

  Her lips

  Her eyes

  The way her body tenses when I make her cum

  Her fingers on my skin

  Her sleeping in my arms

  Her whispering my name

  Her legs wrapped around me

  Too many things to be grateful for today

  All of them are Q

  And then she found her treasure. The night that Ben had rescued her from a rainstorm in the Quarter and an angry Urian Galanos. The first time he’d slept with her all night at her old apartment, the moment she’d fallen in love with him:

  French Quarter rain

  Q’s bed

  Waking up next to her

  Surprise phone calls in the afternoon

  I am going to marry this woman

  One of the notes fluttered to the floor and Josh picked it up. “Here’s a good one for you, Uptown. Looks like New Year’s Eve a few years ago.” He read out loud:

  My meddling sisters

  A pretty woman to kiss at midnight
/>
  That pretty woman giving me a date

  Feeling that ache finally go away

  Feeling ready to try again

  “Yeah, I’m not the pretty woman he was grateful for that day. Sounds like Strickland.” She took it back from him and put the notes in the envelope, clutching her new fortune to her chest. “I thought there’d be more,” she said.

  “There aren’t that many perfect days,” he replied.

  “Thank you, Josh. This is amazing.”

  Her phone rang and she pulled it out of her pocket to see Sanger’s face on her screen. When she answered it, she said, “Aaron, you will not believe what I just found.”

  Sanger’s partner, Rex, replied, “Q, it’s Rex, you need to come to the hospital. Aaron’s been shot.”

  ◆◆◆

  She ran from Josh’s car through the Emergency Room doors to the reception desk. The nurse behind it was in a deep conversation with another woman about the weather and Q slammed her hand down hard on the counter three times.

  “Detective Aaron Sanger. Where is Detective Aaron Sanger?”

  They told her where to find him and she impatiently pressed the buzzer to be let into the examination rooms from the reception area. When the doors opened seemingly an inch each eternal second, she forced her way through them. She frantically walked down the hall, reading the room numbers, trying to find the one she’d been given. When she finally located it, she pushed opened the door and threw back the privacy curtain.

  Sanger was sitting on the bed, shirtless. His ribs were taped and a baseball-sized purple bruise was blossoming on his left pectoral muscle.

  She threw herself against him and he grunted. “Not so rough. I have two cracked ribs and that bruise hurts enough already.”

  She pulled back and looked at him. “What happened?”

  “Fucking asshole shot his wife last night. We went to arrest him and he shot me point blank, twice in the chest.” He grunted again and moved away from his discomfort.

  Q ran her hands over his skin verifying that there weren’t any extra holes.

  “I was wearing a vest, Clementine. I’m fine. Just sore is all.”

  She collapsed into the chair in the corner and laced her fingers behind her head, folding her body into itself.

  “I don’t know if I can do this, Aaron. I lost one husband, already. I can’t lose another,” she said to her Converse.

  He didn’t say anything for a few minutes. “We can end it. This thing we’ve started. Go back to how it was before. Being a cop’s wife is hard. I’m not saying that we’ll end up there, but I want to think that’s where we’re headed. It’s not too late, though. We can go back to just being friends.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I’m your friend, your lover, or your wife. You don’t have my permission to die,” she yelled up at him before returning to regard her shoes. “I cleaned out the house today. Couch, chairs, that ugly dining room table, Ben’s clothes…. We found something when we were working. A Post-it with a list of things Ben was grateful for. Josh said he’d been doing it for years and he kept the ones from the best days in the safe at the Cove. That’s where I was when Rex called from your phone to tell me you’d been shot. I was sitting on the floor of Ben’s office, reading all of his best days. You were in there. His family. Me. Jasper. I tried to think of five things I was grateful for and all five were you. You’re not some lone cowboy anymore, Aaron. You have someone waiting for you to come home. Someone who needs you to come home to her.”

  “He was going to kill his daughter,” Sanger said.

  “And that would have been tragic, but I don’t fucking care. I’m selfish and I don’t fucking care. Why were you the one out in front, leading the charge?” Q held her knees to her chest, her face still turned down to the floor. “Your life is valuable, too. More valuable to me than anyone else’s. Why can’t you see that?”

  Before he could respond, the doctor came in with the discharge papers. Q sat up and forced a smile. She used the back of her left hand to wipe her eyes.

  “Look what you did to your poor wife, detective.” He handed Q a box of tissues and continued to scold Sanger, “Next time a murderer holding a gun tells you not to come any closer, maybe you’ll listen to him. Your scan is clear. You got lucky. No blood clots or bruising around your heart.” The doctor set the papers he was carrying down on the counter near the sink and scratched out a line, before writing a note. “You’re on desk duty for a month when you go back, but I’m not clearing you to go back to work for two weeks.”

  Sanger frowned. “Two weeks? But I’m fine.”

  The doctor nodded his head towards Q. “Yeah, but she isn’t. Go home. Take care of your wife. Get your priorities straight. You got lucky. A shot like that, vest or no, should have killed you. You want to make a pretty woman like her a widow?”

  Q looked self-consciously at her rings and looked up to find Sanger staring at her. Her eyes pleaded with him and he said, “No. You’re right. No more risks.”

  April: Closure

  The first time Derek had shown up to jam with QT and The Beasts, the Cove had sold out to capacity and held an additional crowd of two hundred people captive in the parking lot, hoping for a chance to get inside. Tonight was only slightly less crowded. Derek had pushed Q’s return to the stage on every social media channel to which he had access with promises of a once in a lifetime experience when he and his Archangel debuted songs from her upcoming album.

  Frantic butterflies filled Q’s insides as she stood at the back of the stage near JJ’s bass rig. Derek flung his guitar on his back and approached her. “You alright, angel? You look a little on edge.”

  “I thought we were going to keep this low key,” she said, her voice breathless. “This was just supposed to be a jam. You. Me. The Beasts. Not Dark Harm. Why did you do this?”

  He gestured to the crowd. “You’ve played Madison Square Garden. Twice. This is low key.”

  She nodded, but her body broke out in tremors. Derek gave her an aggravated scowl, but pulled her into a tight embrace. She sagged against his body as he whispered in her ear, “I am a god. I am ten feet tall. The world is mine. All eyes on me. Now you say it.”

  Clinging to him, she whimpered, “Why?”

  “Because I’m telling you to. Say it.”

  “I am a god. I am ten feet tall. The world is mine. All eyes on me,” she eked out in a strangled whisper.

  “That was terrible, angel. Who are you?”

  Who am I?

  It was a question she had intentionally not asked since Ben’s death.

  Who am I?

  When the answer arrived, she smirked and replied, “I’m the motherfucking archangel, asshole.” She pushed herself away, jumped up and down, shaking out the remaining tension from her body. “And you are a motherfucking freak of nature.”

  “But you’re not scared anymore, are you?”

  Her eyes traveled over the crowd. “Nope. Let’s get laid.”

  It was Derek’s theory that playing a large venue was something akin to having sex with thousands of strangers simultaneously. If you didn’t orgasm by the end of the first song, you were doing it wrong. By and large, Q had found his theory to be reasonably accurate based upon her own empirical studies.

  She sat down at the piano and hundreds of voices went silent all at once as a hush fell over the crowd. The restlessness and anticipation of the bodies in the room sent up a jittery, energetic wave that made the building vibrate in sympathy. Q played a single note on the piano, letting it ring out. Derek echoed her on his guitar in harmonic response. They repeated the slow progression, moving from major to minor as they drifted down into lower registers until JJ’s bass growled to life, playing a pulsing arpeggio. Tom pounded out a funky disco beat and Charlie’s trumpet screamed in wild aggression.

  Q put her lips to the microphone and sang:

  Put the horror in its cage

  Writhing swarms of wrath and rage

  I have to kill what
I cannot hide

  This infestation grows inside

  This disease came on so slow

  Insect songs lull the victims as the hive grows

  Derek stalked the front of the stage and slid down the fretboard of his guitar as he and Charlie battled for control of the tandem, counterpoint soloes they were both executing. Someone caught Q’s eye and she turned, hoping to find Sanger but finding a dark-haired woman filming her with her phone instead. Q gave her a quick wink and a well-rehearsed flirty smile, aping for the camera before continuing: