Let the Devil Out (25 page)

“They could be anywhere,” Maureen said. “They could be gone. They might've escaped.”

Back-to-back gunshots roared through the store. Maureen shouted and tried to shrink. Two more shots echoed under the high ceiling in the cavernous space. Detillier had time to mutter “Fuck me” before one more lone shot followed the others. The gunshots had come from the same location, far from where Maureen and Detillier hid. Whoever was shooting wasn't aiming at them. From what Maureen could discern, all the shots had come from the same gun. The source was a single shooter repeating fire, Maureen figured, not an exchange of gunshots. Had Tactical slipped someone inside through a back entrance? Had the shooters been taken out? Maureen doubted it. Detillier was in contact with the world outside; they would've alerted him. That's assuming, Maureen thought, that there's order and strategy to what's happening out front—a big assumption.

As the echoes of the final shot died, Detillier counted down, “Three, two, one.”

He didn't have to tell Maureen what to do.

When he hit “one,” they scrambled to their feet and ran up the checkout aisle, Maureen hard on Detillier's heels. She could hear him shouting information into his radio as they sprinted through Housewares. She was grateful for Detillier's narration of their location and progress, “Bathroom, Dining Room, Kitchen.”

With the shots fired, SWAT, Tactical, and everyone else would come crashing in with guns drawn, and there'd be heavy weaponry involved. The description of the shooters, she recalled, mentioned a man and a woman in matching outfits. A
white
man and a white woman, that was true, and dressed quite differently from how Detillier and she were attired. But considering what had gone down that afternoon, those trigger fingers would be extra-itchy. Maureen didn't even want to think about how far ahead of the brains that commanded them those fingers might run.

Borrowed FBI jacket or not, Maureen thought as she ran, after everything she had survived in her life, she was in no mood to get cut down by friendly fire.

 

21

Using the direction of the gunshots, Maureen and Detillier tracked the shooters to Sporting Goods, located in the far back corner of the store. Detillier turned down the sound on his radio, in case anyone hiding in the store tracked their approach. They moved through Electronics at a brisk pace, crouched and cautious, guns drawn, held low in two hands in front of them. They breathed hard. They didn't speak. They didn't see any other people.

Maureen, two steps behind Detillier's right shoulder, listened for voices, for sobs, for curses or commands. For any breathing that wasn't her or Detillier. For any movement around or behind them. Every couple of steps she turned and checked their rear. She heard nothing but her own breathing, her own heartbeat, and the piped-in music and a fantasy football report on ESPN playing on a TV in the electronics department behind them.

As they closed in on Sporting Goods, they caught a scent in the air that led them closer to the shooters, the pungent iron-copper smell of spilled blood. Fresh blood. The scent and the quiet told Maureen what they would find. Bodies. She hoped they belonged to the Watchmen.

Detillier gasped and froze as he turned the corner into the fishing aisle. He held his free hand up behind him to stop Maureen from coming closer. He had lowered his gun. It hung loose in his hand by his side. Ignoring his command, Maureen lowered her own weapon and walked up beside him.

She had shrugged off Detillier's “stop” sign on the assumption that its purpose was to protect her from what she'd witness in the fishing aisle. Poor man, she thought. Nice try. Wasn't his fault that he had no idea what she'd already done when it came to death, never mind what she had seen. When she pulled even with him at the end of the aisle, though, she realized Detillier hadn't been trying to protect her delicate feminine sensibilities. His motivation had been more practical. He'd simply not wanted her to step in anything sticky.

The brown-haired woman was seated at an angle, her legs open in a V in front of her. Her arms hung limp at her sides. Her body slouched against a rack of fishing rods, a handful of which had tumbled to the floor around her. A pistol lay on the floor by her right hand. An AK-47 lay across her lap. Except for the guns, she looked to Maureen like any number of drunks she'd seen sleeping one off in a doorway. Well, except for the guns and the fact that the back of the woman's skull was missing. Pieces of it, and a good portion of what her skull had contained, now coated three shelves of heavy test fishing line. Without thinking, Maureen licked her lips. Then she wondered what foul particles she had drawn into her body. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of the hand that held her gun. She holstered her weapon. She turned and made eye contact with Detillier. He said nothing, turning away to speak into his radio.

That was when Maureen noticed the man.

He was prone on his belly, a few feet down the aisle beyond the body of the woman.

He wore a yellow “Don't Tread on Me” flag tied around his neck as a cape, like a child playing superhero, over his body armor. A large pool of blood haloed his head. Maureen realized the pool was growing, spreading fast across the dirty tile floor. That told her the man's heart continued beating. Not strong enough to keep him alive much longer. Minutes, Maureen guessed. Moments. His heartbeat was killing him, Maureen thought. Pumping his blood out onto the floor of the Walmart instead of to his body or his brain. She thought maybe she heard a quiet gurgle. She'd heard a similar sound just the night before. She knew what it meant. The man's arms splayed at his sides. There was no weapon anywhere near either of his hands.

She drew her gun anyway, tapped it against her thigh, contemplating.

She glanced over her shoulder at Detillier. She saw that he continued talking into his radio, one hand held up in the air to direct the others to his location. People more important than her were coming to take control of the scene. The thing to do here, she thought, the thing I
should
do, seeing as this guy
is
alive, is tell Detillier, have him call EMS to the fishing department. Today we don't have to wait for the crypt-keeper to come with the keys. Those glass doors slide right open. This guy would give the NOPD and the FBI a living witness to use against the Watchmen. If he could be saved.

Leaning forward, hands on her thighs, Maureen noted that the blood appeared to be leaking from under the man's head or neck. She reached out her foot, with the tip of her boot moved the man's chin a couple of inches. Ah, she thought, there it was. He'd taken a bullet, at least one, right at the base of his throat. I could, she thought, get in there, find and apply pressure to those wounds. She'd tried it for Leary. This guy, though, Maureen thought, he wasn't going to make it, either. She didn't have to be a doctor to see that, with the amount of blood he'd lost. She could see it laid out in front of her on the tile floor.

And, truth be told, she much preferred he died instead of lived.

She sniffed, watched as his feet twitched. His fingertips, too. The last primal circuits in his brain prodding his extremities to do something about the hole in his throat, Maureen figured. Was this guy one of the men who'd shot up her house a month and a half ago? Was he one of the cowards wearing masks and firing automatic weapons from a van in the street who had tried to kill her in her bed? Not enough nerve to get out of the getaway car to finish the job, not having the balls to meet me at my door. I bet that's how you killed those cops today, she thought. A sneak attack. An ambush. Like the fucking coward you are.

Maureen moved closer to the dying man. He didn't seem to be breathing, she thought. She must've imagined that gurgle she heard. Standing over him, she could see one of his eyes. It was blue. It moved.

Surprised, she moved closer to him, not caring that she'd now stepped in the blood. She'd wash it off later. Wouldn't be the first time. Detillier would be pissed, not that there was anything he could do about it. Crime scene integrity and all that.

Maureen squatted beside the man's head, careful not to get down on one knee. Blood on her boots was one thing, no sense staining her pants again. The eye flicked in her direction, seemed to track her as she hovered. She thought of Madison Leary's heterochromic eyes, how they had popped open as if at the sound of her name, and how soon they'd gone motionless and cold after that last flash of awareness, of life.

She thought of the man she'd followed from the Irish Garden, the one she'd left bleeding in the ginger. The one, according to Preacher, she'd nearly killed. She had looked into his eye, too. That eye had been blue like this man's, like one of Leary's had been, but also wild and alive. She had seen everything he was feeling from moment to moment, the agony and the fear broadcast across the surface of that one wild eye. She had seen his life, miserable and terrifying as it was to him at the moment. This dying man's eye was not the same animal. It moved away from her. Came back to her. Moving in tiny increments, it seemed to search the ceiling. A broken thing. What do you see? Maureen wondered. Are there demons coming for you? Do you think you see angels? Or is your dying eye like your feet and your fingers? Unconscious firing of dying nerves. The last of your loose electricity going to waste trying to jump-start your dying brain.

Or maybe, she thought, you know I'm here, and I am all you see. Maybe I am, to you, the devil let out of hell come calling for her due.

“Can you see me?” she teased, whispering. She could hear the smile, the taunt, in her voice, and somewhere deep inside, that smile scared her. She thought of Preacher's talk of the scorpion and rage bloomed inside her. “Do you see me here?” She wiggled her finger at his eye. “Is that why this eye thing is happening?”

She leaned in closer, forearms on her knees. “Can you hear me? Are you hanging on in there, asshole? Good. Don't leave me just yet.” She leaned down right above his ear, close enough to whisper. “I'm the one you people wanted the most. Now I'm here to watch you die.” She looked at the flag on his back. “Don't tread on me? Fuck you. I'm standing in your blood, you motherfucker, and you are dying at my feet.”

Maureen watched his eye, stared right into it, as the last of the life remaining in him departed. She saw it go. Nothing on or in him moved. He was as dead as the woman who'd shot him. She stood. She waited for the sensations that had come when Leary had died, the parts of her breaking free and fading. She felt none of that this time. She missed Preacher.

“Coughlin!”

Her shouted name hit Maureen like a slap in the face. She turned. Detillier. Damn. Forgot about him.

“What are you doing?” Detillier asked.

“I, uh, I thought he might not be dead, so I checked.” She looked down at the corpse, then back at the FBI agent. “But he is. I can say for sure he's deceased.”

“Now you're the medical examiner?” Detillier asked. “Step away, please.”

He was disturbed, Maureen could tell, by finding her looming like a reaper over the dead man's body. How long had he been standing there, she wondered. What had he heard her say?

“Just, geez,” Detillier said, “you're standing in the blood. C'mon, we need to be professional here.”

“All right, all right.” Maureen backed away from the body, gave the dead woman as much distance as she could as she headed over to Detillier at the end of the aisle. She left bloody boot prints on the floor.

“The woman,” Detillier said. “Do you recognize her?”

“Should I?” Maureen took another look, as a courtesy to Detillier, but she knew it wasn't anyone she had known. “Because I don't.”

“She look like someone you've heard discussed? Maybe by Quinn or Ruiz?”

“Nope.”

“What about him? You got a good-enough look.”

“I don't recognize him,” she said.

“You see anything useful on him,” Detillier asked, “during your closer inspection?”

“I saw that he's got a big fucking bullet hole in the base of his throat. Gotta be where she shot him. I think he was on his knees, waiting for it. I wonder if he was begging her to do it, or begging her not to do it. We'll see when they turn him over if he had the guts to open up his armor to her.” She shook her head. “Leave it to the man to lose his nerve when it counts. Anyways, she put a couple of rounds into the shelves behind him. Those were the first shots we heard, her trying to get him. The single shot that came last, that was her finishing the job. Suicide pact is my guess.”

“Makes sense,” Detillier said. “For some reason, these types never want to stick around for the glorious revolution. Less work to be a martyr, I guess. They never live long enough for me to ask them.”

“Revolution,” Maureen said, shaking her head. “Martyrdom. Is it really that deep, or are they just bananas? Seriously, if these two hadn't found the Sovereign Citizens and the Watchmen, wouldn't someone else be cleaning up the same mess in a trailer park somewhere over meth or dog fights?”

Detillier shrugged. “Anything's possible.”

“You've seen this before?” Maureen asked.

“I have,” Detillier said. “And I get the feeling I'll see it again.”

“Well, whatever happens next,” Maureen said, “it won't involve these two.”

 

22

With the bad guys dead, Maureen didn't have anything to do.

She hung around the fishing aisle, thinking someone might want to ask her questions about what had happened there, but nobody did. Everyone who came through went right to Detillier. As the crowd grew, she grew more and more eager to leave. She wanted to lose the FBI jacket and get out of her heavy vest. She wanted to go home, be alone, and have a drink and a long shower. For right now, she'd be happy to get outside and breathe cooler, less blood-laden air. Outside she could find someone to ask about Preacher's condition. Christ, she had a shift that night, which was hard to even think about.