She waited. Mother said nothing. And neither did Preacher. Maureen pointed to the window. “Who is out there?”
“I already answered that question,” Mother said.
“Your back door isn’t locked,” Maureen said, “is it?”
“I already answered that one, too.” Mother lifted her chin. “I think I need to talk to a real police officer.”
“You leave the back door open for your grandson, don’t you?” Maureen said. “So he can sneak in and out for food, maybe even the shower and his bed, and you can claim to be none the wiser.”
“That’s not true. I would never treat Marques like a criminal. He’s a sweet boy.”
“If that is Marques out there,” Maureen said, “creeping around in the dark, he now has five or six twitchy cops stalking him. They’re sweaty, they’re bug-bit, and they’re getting more pissed by the second. Don’t you think you should tell us if your grandson is out there? Aren’t you smarter than this?”
“He’s not out there,” Mother said.
“If he gets shot,” Maureen said, “you are responsible for the consequences. For all of them, the whole bucketful, and not just what happens to him, but what happens to all of us, and this whole neighborhood. They’ll blame us, but you’ll know the truth. And I know for a fact you won’t have the nerve to tell it, will you? Not even to your daughter.”
“It’s not him,” Mother said. “He knows better.”
“Then where is he?” Maureen asked.
“I really think,” Mother said, “that there should be a lawyer here. I want a lawyer here.”
“Nobody’s been arrested,” Maureen said. “We’re not here to hurt Marques. We’re trying to help him.”
“So I should trust you?” Mother asked. “Why? Because you’re white? Or is it because you’re the police?” She shook her hands at the ceiling, shouting. “Praise Jesus and lawdy, lawdy, lawdy, here come the white woman gon’ save all the little black babies.”
“There can be a lawyer tomorrow,” Maureen said, not rising to the bait. “There can be a lawyer later.”
“So you say.” Mother put her hands on her hips, defiant to the last. “Your shit is tired, little girl.”
Fuck this, Maureen thought. Time to take it to the next level. She had the extra set of handcuffs from the car in her back pocket. She could cuff Mother Mayor, set her on the couch, and search the house herself. If Mother insisted on a scene, Maureen would hang a laundry list of charges on the stubborn bitch. How about aiding and abetting, harboring, accessory after the fact, for starters? Not that Mother wouldn’t love being busted, being paraded out the front door and into the squad car. She’d eat it up. The neighborhood martyr.
One more deep breath, then, Maureen thought. One more shot at letting sense prevail.
“Where is Marques?” she asked.
And then, without thinking, before she got an answer, Maureen reached behind her back for the cuffs. She heard the barest whisper of a “shit” from Preacher.
Mother Mayor, who had witnessed her share of arrests, had recognized the move.
“Oh no! Oh no you DID NOT!”
No sense in not pulling them now, Maureen thought. She raised the cuffs over her head. “WHERE IS HE?”
Maureen caught motion—a shape, a shadow—in the corner of her eye.
“I’m right here.”
Maureen lowered the cuffs.
Marques, haggard and dirty, his face a defiant echo of his grandma’s, stood in the doorway between the two rooms. “I’m right here.”
Mother Mayor cupped her hands over her mouth and nose. “Why, baby? Why? They’re gonna take you away. What about your momma? What if we can’t find you this time? What if we can’t bring you home?”
Marques wore a long white T-shirt over blue basketball shorts. His sneakers were filthy. The T had a photo screened on the front, a picture of Mike-Mike with a small gun in one raised hand and a fan of dollar bills in the other. Photoshopped, Maureen realized, to imitate another infamous photo that had circulated around the city a couple of years ago. The picture was faked, Maureen thought, but the dates beneath it were not: Sunrise 1997–Sunset 2011.
I waited tables, she thought, almost as long as Mike-Mike was alive. That’s no kind of life.
“I didn’t know he was in the car,” Marques said.
He can’t even bring himself, Maureen thought, snapping back to reality, to talk about the trunk. She tucked the handcuffs back into her jeans.
“I swear I had no idea,” Marques said.
“I know,” Maureen said.
“I didn’t. Mr. Bobby just said get rid of the car. He said Mike-Mike was off doing him a favor.”
“I know. You don’t have to tell me this right now, Marques.”
“Get it out of the ’hood and torch it, he said. It was my idea to do it by the firehouse.”
“I know.”
“He promised us fifty bucks. Each. We was gonna give Mike-Mike a cut, me and Goody, soon as we found him. ’Cause we were boys, you know?”
“It’s okay,” Maureen said. A lie.
It wasn’t okay, of course, and she knew it, and it wasn’t going to be okay, and everyone in the room knew it. They were like people in a waiting room, trying to swallow a terminal diagnosis. Things had completely gone to shit. It might very well turn out that the fire had killed Mike-Mike. That right there, no matter what Marques claimed to know, would destroy his life. But the kid was twelve and petrified. What else was she going to tell him, other than it was okay? If someone had told me that lie when I was twelve, she thought, and given me even some false hope, my whole life might’ve turned out different, or at least a lot less messy.
The first shots hit—two thunks into the front of the house—like a heavy ball or bricks thrown against the wall. Then the telltale crack of gunfire—the terrifying sound lagging a fraction of a second.
The next two bullets exploded through the front window.
Nobody screamed. But everyone moved.
Preacher tackled Mother Mayor, the two of them thumping hard to the floor, landing in a heap. Maureen dove after Marques, who had turned to flee. She snatched at his ankle, tripping him, sending him sprawling across the kitchen floor, his palms squeaking on the linoleum as he slid. Panicked voices shouted over Preacher’s radio. Multiple sirens erupted outside. Yelling. More gunshots. Nothing hit the house this time.
Maureen didn’t hear Preacher answer his radio.
Answer them, Preach. Answer.
In front of her, Marques lay on the kitchen floor. Maureen could hear him fighting for breath. She scrambled after him, called his name. He didn’t answer. She grabbed one of his legs, pulling him toward her as she threw her body over his.
Two more shots hammered the side of the house.
A drive-by. Scales. Had to be. She called out, “Is anyone hit?” No answer. “Preacher?”
Marques struggled and squirmed underneath her. A good sign. If he’d been shot, he wouldn’t be able to fight her. She didn’t feel blood underneath her in his clothes or on his skin. She didn’t see any leaking out of him onto the floor. Terror made him strong and frantic, but she kept him pinned, covering his limbs with hers. She knew he’d explode out the back door and hit the streets running if he got away from her.
“Preacher?”
A serious coughing fit, maybe Preacher, maybe Mother, Maureen couldn’t tell. Then, finally, Preacher’s voice: “Fuck. We’re good. We’re okay. You?”
“Same,” Maureen said.
“Stay the fuck down. The both of you.”
“You’re okay, Marques,” Maureen said, teeth clenched. She struggled to sound soothing. She wasn’t any good at it under normal circumstances, forget while getting shot at. “You’re okay. Relax. We’re okay.”
Unless someone kicks in that back door, she thought, staring hard at it and praying that Mother Mayor hadn’t lied about locking it. Somebody comes through that door with a gun and we are dead. Maybe she could somehow get be
tween Marques and the door, shove him into the living room, buy him a few seconds. After that, what? All of them were toast. She swallowed hard, her throat dusty and arid.
“It’s all right, Marques,” Maureen said, staring down the back door. “We’re gonna be fine. We’ll be outta here soon. Your grandma’s all right, Marques. They missed.”
Marques settled underneath her. More from exhaustion, she figured, than anything she’d said. Thank God. He was wearing her out.
“Get off, yo.”
Maureen eased her weight off of him, settling on the floor beside him, one hand pressed firmly into the small of his back. She felt brave enough to draw her legs underneath her.
“Stay down. Stay still.”
Kneeling, she kept her head low, letting her mind run in place of her feet. Maureen felt comforting warmth spreading in her belly. She smiled. Scales would be fucking furious. They’d managed to double fuck him. Not only had he missed a second chance to get Marques, but this time the cops had snagged the boy instead, and he knew it. Scales had rolled up, guns blazing, right into what amounted to a trap. Who cared if it happened by plan or by accident, she thought, as long as he got caught? And she wanted him caught tonight.
She could be part of it. She was three feet from the back door. She could be out that door in under two seconds. In the mix. In the chase.
The seconds kept ticking by.
Under her hand, Maureen felt Marques try to rise to his knees. She pushed him back down. The boy, she told herself, the boy is the reason you’re here. Do your job. Protect him. Don’t go chasing the wrong target yet again.
The sirens of the police pursuit faded into the distance. Loud voices crackled over Preacher’s radio. Maureen listened to the chase carry on without her. She leaned back on her hands and let out a long exhale. She slid herself out of the way on her backside as Mother Mayor crawled into the kitchen.
Mother threw herself over Marques, gathering him to her like a bundle of laundry and squeezing hard enough to wring him out. She sobbed. Marques said nothing, letting himself be held. He all but disappeared into his grandmother’s arms.
Maureen lay down on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Holy shit. She was exhausted.
Two cops burst through the front door, guns drawn, yelling for no one to move.
This time Mother Mayor screamed. Maureen rose up on her elbows. Fucking cowboys. Don’t do this, she thought. Don’t turn this into one big lawsuit.
“For fuck’s sake,” Preacher said. “Are you kidding me? The fucking cavalry arrives.”
He sat on the floor with his back propped against the living room wall. He was pale, Maureen noticed, and breathing more heavily than usual, but he seemed okay overall. She had a feeling it was the cigars more than the bullets that had him ailing.
“In here is the one place there wasn’t any shooting,” Preacher said. “Put those guns away, you sweaty pricks. There’s women and children in here. We’re in one piece and we’d like to stay that way. Believe.”
The two cops holstered their weapons, apologizing. They waited for orders.
“Don’t move,” Preacher told them. “Don’t mess nothing up. Go back outside.”
Without a word they stepped back outside.
“Fucking amateurs,” Preacher said. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, patted at the sweat on his head. “Coughlin, make yourself useful for a change. Get over here and help me up.”
34
Maureen stood with Atkinson in the street outside Mother Mayor’s house, the two of them awash in colored lights and surrounded by busy people in and out of uniform. They smoked cigarettes and surveyed the damage from the drive-by. The holes in the front wall of the house were hard to see in the night, two dark spots high up on the vinyl siding. Tomorrow, in the daylight, somebody would get up on a ladder for a better look at the damage. The front window, completely shot out, was the obvious and immediate problem. Imagine all the mosquitoes getting in, Maureen thought. And those flying roaches, too, drifting through the night like helicopters with broken rudders.
Maureen watched as neighbors descended upon Mother Mayor’s property and took over the glass clean-up, inside and outside the house. The women supervised while the men worked. Plywood boards were carried over from neighboring yards and sheds and propped up against the side of the house, ready to cover the window as soon as the broken glass had been removed. They’d keep the bugs and the weather out, Maureen thought, but the inside of Mother Mayor’s place would be even dimmer now. Those thin, flat boards perfect for covering windows and doors, Maureen had learned, were never in short supply in this town. Neither were tools or ladders. Or neighbors, for that matter, who at least helped clean up while gossiping about how the mess got made.
A few feet away, Preacher sat alone on the back bumper of an ambulance, his uniform shirt open over his white T-shirt after getting checked out, his color returning as he nursed a bottle of water. Maureen knew he was already thinking about his next cigar.
Mother Mayor was inside the house, in the kitchen with Marques and two investigators from the juvenile division. Protecting Marques, not only from the streets but also from the potential caprices and cruelties of the system, had begun. It was going to be a long process.
Atkinson crushed out her cigarette in the gutter, her blond hair and pale face turning blue then red then blue again in the whirling emergency lights.
“What’s the word on Scales?” Maureen asked.
“They beat the pursuit first to Carrolton Avenue and then onto the I-10, where they blew east at over a hundred miles an hour. Smoked us easy. The state police are aware. They won’t get caught. Not tonight.”
“Was it the Escalade?”
“One of those new Camaros,” Atkinson said. “Stolen like the Escalade, I’m sure. It’s that ugly burnt-orange color. One of my neighbors drives a Honda that color. I don’t get it.”
“Should make it easy to find,” Maureen said.
Atkinson checked her watch. “Oh, the flames shooting up in the sky as it burns will probably help with that, too. We’ll find the car by mid-morning, what’s left of it, at least. I don’t think he’s putting twelve-year-olds on the job this time, though.”
“What’s next for Marques?” Maureen asked.
“The juvenile officers will leverage his status as a witness and as a victim against his role, whatever it was, in Mike-Mike’s death and any drug business. They’ll try to get him a break.”
“And then you’ll do what?” Maureen asked.
“I’ll let them,” Atkinson said. “If I have my way, Marques doesn’t even miss band practice tomorrow. Whether Scales killed Mike-Mike with his own hands or tricked Marques and Goody into burning their friend to death, he is the one responsible for that murder. Wright’s, too, as far as I’m concerned. Scales is the one I want. He did his best to turn Marques into a criminal. There’s no reason for me to do the same thing by locking Marques up with people just like Scales.”
“Seems to be plenty of them out here on the streets, too.”
Atkinson shrugged. “Indeed. But without them, what would women like you and me do with ourselves?”
“Will Marques get to stay with his grandmother?” Maureen asked.
“I don’t see why not,” Atkinson said. “If only because the process of taking him away from her would last until he was eighteen anyway, the way this city works. The farther he gets from me, though, the less power I have over his fate.”
“Not me,” Maureen said. “This is my district. I’ll be around here nearly every day.”
Atkinson released a long, low whistle. “Be careful with that. Don’t go appointing yourself anyone’s savior, no matter how bad he seems to need it. He’s got a mother who’s a soldier, and a force of nature for a grandmother. He’s got backup.”
“For all the good it’s done him so far.”
“The one with no family,” Atkinson said, “is the one in the morgue. You’re not a social worker. You wanna help M
arques? Put cuffs on Bobby Scales.”
“And the battle goes on,” Maureen said. “At least we’ve got him on the run. The more energy he’s got to spend hiding from us, the less he’s got to spend on Marques.”
“We’ve definitely given him some bigger and badder worries,” Atkinson said. “What do you make of this shooting? Tell me what you think.”
“I don’t know how he expected to hit anyone inside the house,” Maureen said, “popping off two shots at a time. He couldn’t see us from the street. The shooter used a handgun, probably. Revolver. We found no shells in the street.” She frowned. “Lousy choice of weapon. I’d think he’d want a semiauto, if not a full. Aim and squeeze off two shots. Aim again, squeeze off two more. Hard to do in a moving car, thank God. Either overconfident or amateurish.”
Or, a new thought told her, they hadn’t planned on a drive-by at all.
“Could be that Scales hadn’t anticipated us tracking Marques to his grandma’s house,” Maureen said. “So he had to adjust on the fly when he spotted the cruiser out front. The drive-by was a last-second choice. A pride saver or a frustration move. Not even Plan B, probably. But he had to do something.”
“Not bad,” Atkinson said, nodding. “We’ll know more, maybe, when we pull the bullets from the house. Let me know which detective in your district ends up with this one. I’m gonna want a powwow.”
Preacher had wandered over from the ambulance. He hitched up his pants. “Ladies,” he said, with a nod. “Glad we all survived Officer Coughlin’s idea of a day off.”
“Whaddaya think, Preach?” Maureen said. “I got sunburned and eaten alive by mosquitoes. I uncovered a major new drug-dealing strategy. I got punched in the throat. I got shot at. Can we call this my last day of training or what?”
Preacher gave Atkinson a long look. The detective sergeant dropped her eyes and raised her hands. “This has nothing to do with me. I’m so not involved here.”
Preacher turned to Maureen. “Except for the drug thing, Coughlin, none of that other stuff is supposed to happen. It’s shit you’re supposed to avoid.”
“C’mon, Preacher,” Maureen said. “You don’t think I earned a break?”
The Devil in Her Way Page 26