Let the Devil Out (35 page)

“Shadow,” Maureen said, “follow me to the table over there.” To the other cops she said, “Can you guys wait at the bar?”

Wilburn rolled his shoulders. He spoke in a low voice as they watched Shadow stroll over to the cocktail table. “That's three of us, Coughlin, off the streets when we should be out there. If we get a call, we have to roll. I'm not gonna broadcast anything, but I'm not gonna lie about where I am. You do what you gotta do, we'll cover for you as best we can, but…” His voice trailing off, he completed his sentence with a shrug.

“That's plenty,” Maureen said. “This shouldn't take long. I appreciate your help.”

“If you can get a coherent sentence out of that guy,” Cordts said, “about anything, you deserve that detective shield, like, tomorrow.”

Maureen left them at the bar and crossed the barroom to sit with Shadow. He slouched deep in his chair. She said, “You've been told what this is about?”

Shadow slid a cigarette from the pack Maureen had tossed on the table. He lit it using the candle. “Some kind of parlay.” He coughed one time, sharp, like a bark. “I do for you or the wrath of God burns down the neighborhood.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Some shit like that.”

“Yeah, some shit like that,” Maureen said. “You heard what happened today.”

Shadow nodded slowly. “White boys killing cops. In a big way. Crazy, for sure. But not nothing that had to do with Shadow.”

“But you're here.”

“Not for you,” Shadow said. “For I.”

“You remember a guy named Cooley, another guy named Gage? Clayton Gage?”

“The things I do,” Shadow said, “I meet a lot of people. Shadow diversified, you could say.”

“Well, I believe you met them during one of your diversification efforts,” Maureen said. “White boys from outside the city. They call themselves Sovereign Citizens. They were raising a militia called the Watchmen Brigade. They wanted to move guns, lots of guns, into and around New Orleans.”

“Sounds to Shadow like they got that shit done.”

“Because you helped them,” Maureen said.

Shadow held out his hands. “See these hands? These hands never so much as picked up a gun.” He pressed his palms together. “That's not Shadow's way.”

“You connected Cooley and Gage to Bobby Scales. You set them up in New Orleans.”

“
You
set them up in New Orleans,” Shadow said. “Your people. It was a cop that made Shadow make that connect. What happened today? What goes around, comes around, feel me? Y'all did this to y'all selves. Karma. Payback a bitch.”

He eased deeper into his chair, grinning, confident in his wisdom.

Maureen flipped the table, cigarettes, ashtray, and burning candle flying.

She kicked Shadow in the chest, boot heel hard to the sternum, toppling him and his chair backward onto the floor. His cigarette flew through the air. Wilburn and Cordts were halfway to her before she stopped them with a raised hand. She knew they were rushing in not to defend Shadow, not to restrain her, but to assist in the beating they saw coming. All day, every cop in New Orleans had been waiting to kick someone's ass. Anyone. But they stopped at her wordless order. They stood frozen, panting like dogs waiting to be let off the leash.

Shadow was slow to recover. He managed to slide out of the chair and roll over onto his back. Maureen circled him. She crushed out his lost cigarette under her boot.

“Fucking mother
fucking
pigs,” he spat, his stoner cool evaporated by fear and rage. A surprising amount of rage, Maureen thought, for someone so stoned. “That's it, huh? Shadow going in the river, too. Fuck y'all. I hope them white boys kill all y'all.”

Maureen strode toward Shadow, him crab walking on his back to get away from her, coughing, fighting for breath. She'd struck him a good one, knocked the wind right out of him. His eyes were tearing. Even if he could get to his feet, he had nowhere to run. Maureen knew it. Shadow knew it. She could see the knowledge, the fear, electrifying his eyes. She wanted to see just how much electricity she could generate.

She reached into her leather jacket, pulled out the ASP. She flicked her wrist and the weapon extended with a metallic snap, the end quivering with the weight of the leaded end. She put her foot on Shadow's chest, pushed him flat on his back on the floor. He was transfixed by the vibrating tip of the ASP, drool running onto his bottom lip.

Maureen looked at Wilburn and Cordts. “Y'all do not have to be here for this. I got it from here.”

“If he's got something to say,” Cordts said, “I wanna be here to listen.”

Maureen narrowed her eyes, trying to read the other cops. Cordts was both eager for and frightened by what might happen next, like a kid at the top of that first roller-coaster peak. Wilburn was clouded and distant. And hostile. What he wanted, and feared, was harder to read.

She thought of the strange men she had taken down in the dark. She had to admit it. This might be better. She didn't have to hide behind a hood. She tightened her grip on the ASP. She could feel Shadow breathing hard under her boot. His red eyes stayed wild with terror. Maureen realized she was sweating like crazy, beads of it trickling into her eyes. When had the bar gotten so warm? The ASP became as heavy as a sledgehammer in her hand.

Looking down at Shadow shaking under her boot, Maureen tried conjuring the fresh memory of Preacher in his hospital bed, tried to hear the fear in his voice as he told the story of being shot. She tried to imagine the cries of the widows when the most horrible news of their lives came to their doorsteps. She tried to think of these things, and she failed.

Instead Maureen could only feel her heart beating so hard it made her body shake. She could smell the black mud of the Mississippi. She saw again how Officer Quinn had put Bobby Scales's head under his boot, pressing his face into the mud at the riverside to suffocate him. She breathed in the brackish waters of the Arthur Kill and recalled how a year ago she had scrambled and crawled through the muck and the cattails of the dark shoreline to get away from Sebastian as he marched toward her, fists clenched, destruction on his mind.

Both men were to her in those moments nothing but monsters.

Is a monster, Maureen wondered, what she came to this city to be?

She lifted her boot. She collapsed the ASP, tucked it back into her jacket. “I told E to tell you that you would walk away from this meeting. That is how this will go.”

Shadow raised up on his elbows. Maureen righted his chair, pointed to it. Never taking his eyes off her, Shadow climbed into the chair.

“The Watchmen,” Maureen said. “Talk.”

Like a pendulum, Shadow's red eyes moved from the hidden ASP to Maureen's face and back again. He straightened his vest. “What? Yeah, I made introductions. It wasn't my idea. Ruiz and Quinn, they wanted Shadow doing it. Either that or they tell Big Mike I'm gonna hit him with the double cross when he makes his big move. Big Mike hear that kind of talk and he's gonna hit Shadow with two in the chest, feel me? So I make the connect for the cops. What the fuck Shadow care what white boys do? They wanna play soldier, get y'all's attention for once, that works for me.”

“So you meet Edgar Cooley,” Maureen said. “At the daiquiri place.”

“Right, right.”

“But then there's a second meeting,” Maureen said. “After Cooley left the picture, you met with Clayton Gage.”

“If you say so,” Shadow said. “Fuck if I remember they names.”

“I do say so. This second meeting, this was back at the daiquiri shop again?”

Shadow shook his head. “This Gage didn't want to do nothin' out in the street. I got the feeling things didn't work out so well for the first guy, know what I mean? Gage was more careful. Cooley and the other one who came around, the money man.” Shadow hung his head, snapping his fingers as his brain tried to resurrect the name.

Maureen could see that, in spite of his circumstances, Shadow was starting to enjoy himself, almost even forgetting he was talking to a cop. She realized that his role in solving the puzzle fed his ego. She could see what drove him on the streets. Knowing things, moving the pieces around. Systems, relationships, conspiracy. Moving parts. He didn't want to drive the race car; he wanted to build it and watch it run in circles around the track. And he wanted to be able to walk away when the car hit the wall and burst into flames, driver be damned. A man who could build a good race car could always find another driver. She'd have learned none of these things, she realized, if she'd left him picking his teeth off the barroom floor.

“Heath,” Maureen said. “Caleb Heath is the name you're looking for.”

“Yeah, that's it. Cooley and Heath, they was into it”—he switched into his version of a white man's voice—“being down, being gangsta, whatever the fuck. But Gage, he was business, and he was cautious.”

For all the good it did him, Maureen thought. “So this second meeting, where was it?”

“At Gage's apartment,” Shadow said.

“Clayton Gage had an apartment in the city?” she said.

Holy shit, she thought. She was getting it done. Shadow was giving them one fucking lead after another. Wilburn and Cordts had caught her excitement. They rose from their barstools again. Cordts tapped his wrist. She had their attention, but she was running out of time.

“I was there,” Shadow said. “It was nice. New. New paint. New shit. We had to go there late at night, when shit in the 'hood was quiet. Not the kind of place you can be bringing guns in and out of. Which was pretty much the point of me being there. Finding other places to stash the guns.” Shadow straightened up in his chair. He put his hand on his chest. “I gotta say, Officer. You scared me some there.”

“The apartment,” Maureen said. “Where is it?”

“Around the way,” Shadow said. “In them new places. The Harmony Oaks. In a building where no one was renting yet.”

“The houses that Solomon Heath built,” Maureen said. “Gage worked out of an apartment he rented from Caleb Heath.”

“If you say so,” Shadow said. “You got another cigarette?”

“They're around here somewhere,” Maureen said, her mind spinning. “I guess I should put the table back.”

She righted the table, set the ashtray back on it. The mason jar holding the candle had smashed on the floor, spilling wax onto the wood. She walked to the bar and laid another five over the ten she had tucked under the ashtray. She hoped LaValle hadn't heard too much of the commotion. Shadow brought his chair back to the table and sat. Maureen tossed him the pack of cigarettes and her lighter. Shadow lit up, set the pack and the lighter back on the table.

He said, “So what now?”

“Any chance you remember an apartment number?” Maureen asked.

“It was months ago, and I didn't go but that one time.” He sat up straighter. “But it's easy to find. First floor, in one of the brick buildings right off Louisiana, one of the old ones they saved from the projects.” He laughed. “They got like a
pool
and shit there now. In the old
Magnolia
. Looks nice. I only seen it through the fence.”

Maureen adjusted her ponytail. It was helpful information, sure, about the apartment, but her earlier excitement was waning. Clayton Gage had been dead six weeks. The apartment had probably been cleaned out and rented by now. But Caleb Heath had bolted after Gage was killed. Maybe he hadn't had time to clean up. He didn't seem the type to do much of that to begin with. And Maureen doubted Caleb had told Solomon what he was doing with the apartments he was supposed to be supervising on his father's behalf. It was worth a look. They might get lucky.

Shadow stood up. “If there's nothin' else you need from me.”

“I think that'll do,” Maureen said. She tapped her own chest. “Sorry about that. Bruise'll heal in a couple of days.”

“Ain't no thing. Shadow's had worse. Believe that.”

He straightened his down vest. Stretching his neck, he touched his cowrie-shell necklace with his fingertips. He seemed to be lingering, Maureen thought, in order to savor the fact that the cops were letting him go. “I have to admit, Shadow thought for a hot minute he wouldn't walk out of here.”

“Thanks for your help,” Maureen said. “I'm sure you've got business to attend to.”

“Shadow always has the business to do.” He turned, sauntered to the door. He tipped an imaginary cap to Wilburn and Cordts. “Irie, gentlemen.”

Wilburn stared him down, but Cordts was smirking. “We'll see you soon, Shadow. Real soon. We'll tell Big Mike you stopped by.”

That last crack almost broke Shadow's cool. Almost. He threw a glance over his shoulder as he slipped out the door.

“Big Mike'll fucking kill him,” Maureen said, “if he hears Shadow talked to us. About anything.”

“Fuck that mope,” Wilburn said. “We'll be better off, and it'll be an easy solve for Homicide. Everybody wins.”

“Just giving him something to think about,” Cordts said.

“You're the one about kicked his heart out his back,” Wilburn said, stepping forward. “Now he's your pal.”

“I was working him,” Maureen said. “Aggressively, but it was work. These are extreme circumstances. He's not my pal.”

Wilburn stormed outside, slamming the door behind him. Maureen could hear him shouting curses then calling for his partner.

“I take it we're done here, too?” Cordts said.

“I gotta make a call,” Maureen said, “start moving on Shadow's information. And I'll let LaValle know he can finally go home. But, yeah, we're done. Thank you, the both of you, for having my back. And for showing some flex.”

“Watching you work,” Cordts said, “was interesting. Keep us posted on how it goes from here.” He tilted his head at the door. “Don't worry about Wilburn. He could give a fuck how you treated Shadow. I think he's just pissed you let the mope walk. Long day today, for all of us.”