Maureen worked up her best smile. “How much trouble am I in?”
“Not as much as Marques,” Preacher said.
“Does this mean I get two thousand push-ups?” she asked.
Neither man laughed, or even smiled. Maureen tossed her smile aside.
“You could have come to me,” Dodds said. “We could have done this inside. Safely. Like professionals. Like adults. We’re supposed to be the adults here.”
“I told Marques to stay put,” Maureen said, turning to Preacher. “Mr. Dodds here was ten yards away. I wanted to grab Scales while I had him in front of me. He’s the target, isn’t he?”
“Marques panicked and ran,” Dodds said, “before I even realized what was happening. Can you blame him? He’s a frightened kid to begin with. It didn’t start with this Bobby Scales stuff. He’s been in trouble here before. He knows the rules about repeat offenders. The kid wants to march. Wants it as bad as I’ve ever seen a kid want anything. He did every last one of those push-ups, and ten for good luck.” Dodds held up a flat hand. “Even as a board. Great form for a little kid, too. He’d make a pretty good Marine.”
“Where would he go?” Maureen asked. “Where would he run to?”
“I’m guessing he’d go home,” Dodds said. “I don’t know what other options he has. He doesn’t hang with any of the other kids in the band. Not since Mike-Mike was asked to leave. We’ve been trying to change that, to get him to make more friends in the band, the whole ‘you are who your friends are, make sure they’re lifting you up, not dragging you down’ stuff, but these kids, Marques isn’t the only one, they’re worse than old men about the old neighborhood. Everything is ‘my hood’ this and ‘my crew’ that. They were barely out of diapers when the storm hit. It’s imitative of the older kids and the grown-ups, but the young ones do believe in it, hard. It’s tough being a neighborhood kid with no neighborhood.”
He held up the blue binder. “I have a last name and an address for Marques from when he registered. I don’t know what it’s worth.”
Preacher flipped open his notepad. “Marques Greer. 2053 Josephine.”
“The two thousand block,” Maureen said. “That’s not good, is it?”
“Not at all,” Dodds said.
“The house where I grabbed up Little E,” Preacher said, hitching up his pants, “is 2012. I’m not optimistic anyone lives at 2053 at all. We get this shit constantly, people throwing out addresses that flooded out. Like we weren’t here. Like we don’t know and aren’t gonna figure it out. Sometimes it’s even where they used to live. It’ll happen to you, Coughlin. I promise.”
“Marques told me,” Maureen said, “that he came back to New Orleans with his grandmother, from Baton Rouge. We got a name for her? A phone number? Someone has to pay for this program, right?”
“Roots of Music isn’t free,” Dodds said, “but some of the kids, we enroll them on scholarships paid for by donation. We can only afford a few but we do as many as we can. Marques is a scholarship kid. So was Mike-Mike. They came in together.”
“But you take down an emergency contact, right? You have that number.”
“We do.” Dodds put on his glasses and flipped pages in the binder. “Never used it. The thing with the push-ups we handled here.”
When he found the right page, he held the binder out to Maureen. She shifted aside so Preacher could read over her shoulder.
“Has anyone tried this number?” Preacher asked. “That’s a Texas area code.”
Dodds turned pages again, finding a new one. He held the book back out.
“Marques and Mike-Mike left the same Texas contact number?” Maureen asked. “How would Marques have a Texas number? His grandmother never got past Baton Rouge.”
“It’s Mike-Mike’s number,” Preacher said, “the one on the cell phone his people gave him when he came from Houston.”
“Why would Marques give that number,” Maureen asked, “and not a New Orleans number for the grandmother?”
Dodds shrugged. “Mischief. Protection. He doesn’t want his grandma knowing when he gets in trouble. Who knows?”
“Camaraderie, too,” Preacher said. He tapped his fist over his heart. “Because they’re boys. It’s gangsta to be mysterious.”
“These numbers are worthless,” Dodds said, snapping the binder closed. “Pay-as-you-go, throwaway cells. When kids like Mike-Mike get sent back to New Orleans, they get a cell prepaid for two weeks, a month, maybe. Their people always promise to reload the account. They never do. If we tell the kids to come back when they get a real phone number, we won’t see them again. We really don’t want to let them go, or chase them away, once we’ve got them in the door.”
“But it didn’t strike you as odd that these two unrelated boys listed the same out-of-state contact number?” Maureen asked.
“Why would it?” Dodds answered. “Who would notice?” He held up the binder. “I got Mississippi numbers in here, Baton Rouge, La Place, Atlanta, Birmingham. If all we took were kids from two-parent homes with solid New Orleans addresses and phone numbers, we couldn’t field a jazz quartet. The kids with no stability are the ones we want. They need the help. We didn’t want to kick Mike-Mike out. We really didn’t. It was maybe the toughest choice I’ve made since I took this job. But he was bad for the group. We had no one to reach out to for help with him.”
“It is what it is,” Preacher said. “A lot of the families that got scattered after the storm stayed scattered. Whoever handled Marques’s paperwork inside Roots wouldn’t look twice at a Houston cell-phone number attached to a grandmother moving back to town from Baton Rouge. Paperwork that says Houston on one line, Baton Rouge on another, and New Orleans on a third? That’s normal.”
“Jesus,” Maureen said, “how does anyone keep track of anything around here?”
Preacher and Dodds traded glances, each giving the other a chance to answer.
Preacher stepped up. “Exactly like this. By driving around all day and paying attention, by talking to other people trying to pay attention and then threading the stories together. Legwork. That’s the job, Coughlin. That’s the city.”
Maureen looked back and forth between Preacher and Dodds. She chewed her bottom lip. She knew what she wanted to ask: Really? It’s still like this? It’s still this much of a clusterfuck? Katrina was six years ago. But she knew better. The two men before her were not the audience for that question. She could take it to Waters, bitch to him about the chaos, the dysfunction, and the disorder later. He’d get a good laugh over it. And then he’d tell her to think about Ground Zero, about the complexities, the starts and stops, the backstabbing and foolishness, all that drama presided over by a soulless, soul-crushing bureaucracy in a city that hadn’t been 80 percent underwater for six weeks. Instead of asking Why is it like this? she knew the right question to ask was What do we do now?
Before she could ask it, her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out and checked the number. Atkinson. Maureen had the feeling that here was her answer about what to do next.
She looked at Preacher. “It’s Atkinson.”
“Let’s not have the detective sergeant getting kicked to voice mail,” Preacher said. “Answer it.”
Maureen flipped open her phone. “Coughlin.”
“Where are you now?” Atkinson asked.
“In the Quarter. You got my message?”
“I did.”
“We have an address for Marques, and a last name. 2053 Josephine.”
“Meet me there,” Atkinson said. “Bring Preacher.”
She was gone before Maureen could agree. Of course, there was no question.
“Atkinson wants us to meet her there.”
“Then there we two shall be,” Preacher said.
“Atkinson came by this morning,” Dodds said. “The kids hadn’t gotten here yet. She didn’t say what it was about. She said she couldn’t wait.”
“She was due in court,” Maureen said.
“Has she
found Marques?” Dodds asked.
“I fucking hope not,” Maureen said. “She’s a homicide detective.”
Preacher raised his hand. “Easy, Coughlin. Settle.” He handed a business card to Dodds. “You see, you hear from Marques, call us. Call Atkinson. Call the Eighth District, even. They know the story. Fuck it, call your wife and bring him home for dinner.” His eyes flitted to Maureen, then back to Dodds. “Just don’t let him out of your sight.”
“Will do,” Dodds said. “I’ll try the Houston number. You never know. But I’ll tell you this, I’d bet anything you can find him back here tomorrow at two in the afternoon for the next practice. He never misses. Never.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Preacher said. “Let’s get him through tonight first, then we’ll worry about tomorrow.”
“Thanks for your help,” Maureen said.
She put out her hand. Dodds shook it.
“Good luck, Officer Coughlin,” he said. “Welcome to New Orleans.”
“Thanks,” Maureen said. “I get that a lot.”
She and Preacher climbed into the cruiser, Preacher driving. They didn’t speak.
He hit the lights, then backed them out of the square and down Chartres Street. The first side street they hit, Preacher took them over to Decatur, where they made a right and traced the river toward Canal and a route uptown. Preacher stayed quiet as they bumped over the Canal Street streetcar tracks and drove Tchoupitoulas through the CBD.
“You’re still pissed,” Maureen said.
“What did I fucking tell you this afternoon?”
“You told me to go home. I know. I’m sorry.”
Preacher slammed on the brakes, stopping the cruiser in the middle of the road. Other drivers swerved around them. Maureen was petrified. Of an accident. Or Preacher. She’d never seen him this angry. Was she about to get fired? He looked like he wanted to slap her.
“I also told you,” Preacher said, “not six fucking hours ago, that this situation is about Marques and not about you.”
“What’re you talking about? I did everything I could to protect that kid. I took every precaution.”
“You did everything you could,” Preacher said, “to protect yourself. Sneaking over there like that, off-duty and out of uniform, trying to work around the teachers, and around me, and around Atkinson, trying to make yourself look good. You think I’m stupid? This ain’t my first rodeo.”
“It wasn’t like that, Preach,” Maureen said. “I swear. That wasn’t my plan.”
“The best chance we have of protecting that kid,” Preacher said, “and anyone else that Scales has on his hit list, is catching Scales. And that kid is the best chance we have of catching that motherfucker. And now the kid is in the wind.”
He resumed driving, shaking his head. “If I was you, I would find a real delicate way of telling Atkinson what you learned from Marques, so that she don’t know it’s you who spooked and lost her best witness. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re oh-for-two with those three boys. We are not doing well. We are not doing a good job.”
“Aren’t you forgetting that I saved Marques’s life this afternoon?”
Preacher slammed on the brakes again. More screeching and swerving.
Her stomach somersaulting, Maureen gripped the door handle hard.
“If Scales pulls a gun in the middle of Jackson Square,” Preacher said, “and starts shooting, we’re scrubbing blood off St. Louis Cathedral. Jesus H. Christ on a Popsicle stick, Coughlin, I don’t even wanna think about it. And what did I tell you after the Arthur Jackson business? Suppose Shadow was hiding around that corner with a gun? It’s dumb luck that your brain salad isn’t splattered all over Chartres Street.”
Preacher loosened the top button of his uniform shirt. “I can’t take this, Coughlin. I can’t. I feel like I’m gonna barf my meat pies all over the dashboard. Your way ain’t always the best way. Every idea you have ain’t a good one just ’cause you had it. Ain’t no one ever told you these things before?”
“If I hadn’t been there,” Maureen said, shaken but defiant, “Scales would have Marques. And we probably wouldn’t even know it.”
Preacher started driving again. He was quiet for a long time.
“I know. Things worked out better than if you’d listened to me. It’s just there are things you need to learn about being part of a team, about respecting authority and chain of command. You’re not always gonna be so lucky. The next time might be a disaster. Odds are it will be. How long you think you’re gonna last as a cop leaving messes for fucking ranking detectives to clean up?”
“I saved his life,” Maureen said. “I did.”
“Yes, you did. You got that going for you.”
Maureen lit a cigarette. Her hands trembled. “So why do I feel so fucking shitty?”
“My little girl,” Preacher said, “she’s growing up.”
31
Maureen stepped out of the patrol car onto Josephine Street and into a warm sprinkle of rain, more a mist than a shower. As she and Preacher wove their way through the lower Garden District and then Central City, she had watched the edge of a low thunderstorm pass like a magician’s hand over New Orleans, dissipating the thick heat. The flat white sunlight of high afternoon had morphed in the humid early evening into a dense and golden liquid that coated everything around her: the struggling trees, the potholed and trash-strewn street, the broken-down cars, and the abandoned clapboard houses.
In the eerie fantastical light, Maureen had felt for a moment as if she were traveling through a wet painting. Her anxiety had dissipated with the heat. Preacher, too, had mellowed. Now standing in the street looking at the remains of the house at 2053 Josephine, she felt slammed back into her reality. Atkinson waited for them perched on the hood of her white car, oblivious to the rain, smoking a cigarette with her cowboy boots up on the bumper.
The wrecked, rectangular cottage on a slab had at one point, before the flood, been painted white, but six years of weather and neglect had turned the house a sad ashen and dingy gray, forlorn even in the gorgeous light of the sunset. Plywood boards, tagged with amateurish graffiti in dulled colors, covered the door and windows. To the right, the remains of another house sagged into itself, overgrown with crawling vines. Next door on the left was a scorched slab, blackened pipes sticking up through the concrete like bony fingers.
On the front wall of 2053, to the left of the front door, was painted the marking that Maureen had come to think of as a Katrina tattoo: the infamous spray-painted “X” inside a circle, with special markings inside the pie’s slices for the search party, the date of the search, and, in the bottom triangle, the number of bodies recovered. According to the symbol she was looking at now, the ATF had searched the place on September 12. They’d found no bodies.
Maureen saw that on the other side of the front door from the “X” an animal rescue group had kept a running tally of the dates they’d left dog food. Every other day for a week. And then, under the tally’s final date, was a note: Two dogs found, one lost, one taken. The rescue group had started to leave a phone number, but after four numbers had run out of paint. No great loss, Maureen figured. Wasn’t likely that whoever had abandoned the dogs had returned to reclaim them. More recently, several city agencies had papered the front door with a variety of official notices.
“I’ve been thinking about how all this fits together,” Atkinson said, walking over to Preacher and Maureen. “I think what we’re dealing with is the second coming of the J-Street Family. Goody is Scales’s nephew. Mike-Mike was Goody’s lapdog and Marques was the third musketeer, either recruited or conscripted. It is, or was, the makings of a crew.”
“Scales is J-Street?” Preacher asked. “I never even heard of him. And I knew those fuckers, every last one of them.”
“You had no reason to know him,” Atkinson said. “Not until now. He’s coming of age before our eyes, making his move, recruiting every foot soldier he can find, now that the feds have the bi
g dogs locked up and have moved on to other things.”
“Like the NOPD, for instance,” Preacher said.
Atkinson gave Preacher a rueful smile. “Feds are more interested in us than any J-Street leftovers these days, that’s for sure.”
She walked back to her car. Reaching in the driver’s side window, she popped the trunk from under the dash. From the trunk she pulled a pry bar and a heavy long-handled flashlight. She handed the pry bar to Preacher, who turned and handed it off to Maureen.
“I’ll stay here with the cars,” Preacher said. “You go.”
Maureen followed Preacher’s gaze down the block, where she saw the house that must’ve been where Preacher had picked up Little E “rescuing” the puppy.
The house was actually in good shape, freshly renovated if not rebuilt from scratch. It was also the only place like it on the block. Teenagers hung on the front porch, the girls and boys segregated like shy students at an eighth-grade dance. The three girls huddled on the steps, chatting with one another while leaning over cell phones balanced on their knees. The four boys clustered at one end of the porch, draped like boneless sunning cats over the porch swing and the railing, doing their best to get the attention of the girls and ignore them at the same time. Maureen knew the girls were doing the same thing as the boys, and, she noted, were already better at it.
In the front yard, younger kids teased a gray-and-white puppy with a rope toy. Nothing cruel to it that Maureen could see. The kids, three girls and a boy, shrieked and giggled. They weren’t much younger than Marques and his friends. The puppy leaped and yipped after the toy, its stubby tail a beating blur. It looked healthy enough. The animal certainly had energy to burn. She thought of the bloated, scarred animal that Preacher had confiscated from Little E. Maureen lit a cigarette. Over the flame of her lighter, she watched Preacher watch the house, his gaze fixed and intense. He made excuses about the car, but really it was the dog he wanted to watch.
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