Doing the Devil's Work (7 page)

“You didn’t like it? You didn’t like what you could do with that big body?”

“I worked in a different time, Maureen. People got medals for shit that gets you brought up on charges nowadays. I’m not saying it was a better time, but it was different. Everyone didn’t have a camera in their hand twenty-four seven for one thing.”

“Did you get one of those medals?” Maureen asked. She knew as she spoke that Nat wouldn’t rise to the bait; he never did when she antagonized him. She wanted him to know she was never afraid to poke the bear.

“That doesn’t matter,” Waters said. “Is there
anyone
down there you can talk to? Somebody away from the job? And I don’t mean beers after work with the other cops. I mean like a friend. Somebody to take a long lunch with, shoot the shit with over coffee. You ever see Patrick anymore? You said the two of you stayed friends.”

“He’s been by once or twice,” Maureen said. “A couple of nights. But he’s not, you know, what you said. We don’t have coffee when he comes over.” She got up from the table, hobbled toward the bathroom. If only that dope-slinging motherfucker had stopped when he was told, she thought, she wouldn’t be gimped up like this. She had another long shift ahead of her. “It’s tough. I haven’t been here that long. I work a lot. And the job doesn’t exactly leave me feeling like socializing.”

“Just think about it,” Waters said. “You have to do something. Something other than work. Take a class. Join a running club. You can try yoga again. I thought you liked it. That helped, right? Maybe something more intense, like kickboxing.”

“I thought I’m supposed to be trying to
stop
hitting people,” Maureen said. In the bathroom, she opened the medicine cabinet, careful not to see herself in the mirror. “Classes? That’s what you did to deal? What classes did you take? You did two things with your life, Nat, play football and be a cop.”

Waters chuckled. “Save me the sarcasm. I haven’t seen my sons in twenty years. I was a shambles when you and I met. Face it. I weighed almost three bills. I wasn’t much good at being a cop anymore. And I only quit when I almost died of a heart attack. I was even worse at being a functional human being than I was at being a cop. You don’t want to live like I did for my whole career. You don’t. Trust me. Don’t be ridiculous.

“All I’m trying to say is I remember how it was when we met, Maureen, when you were waiting tables. All you did was work. Everyone you knew, you knew from work. You didn’t move as far away as you did, take the chances you did, work your ass off in the academy and training with Preacher to live the same life you had up here.”

“I hear you, Nat,” Maureen said. She started to settle down. She felt herself warming inside toward him, remembering how much she liked him. He took shot after shot from her prickly temper, her sharp tongue, and he never flinched, never snapped, never hung up on her. Never gave up on her. She felt a pang of something new, something she’d never felt: envy for her mother. She took an orange pill bottle from the medicine cabinet shelf, shook out two pills.

Percocet. For her ankle. She shook out a third. Additional favors from Patrick. Friends with benefits, indeed. “I do hear you. I know you’re on my side. It’s just hard.”

“I know it is,” Waters said. “That’s why I keep telling you to get some help with it. I was a cop as long as you’ve been alive. Trust me, the job’ll take everything from you if you let it. Everything. And I know it’s more than the job that eats at you. People you knew were murdered. You were almost murdered yourself. You had to kill two men to survive.

“The thing I never learned, Maureen, the thing that no one ever taught me that I’m trying to teach you, is that you have to protect yourself not only from what’s coming, but from things that have already happened. Something is always coming up behind you, breathing on your shoulders, chasing you. Most people get to live their lives oblivious to this fact, but you and I know different. Protect yourself. No one else is going to do it for you. I’ve been telling you that since the day we met.”

“I’m trying,” Maureen said. Her runner’s high, her endorphin-laced confidence, had vanished. Her righteous anger had dissipated as quickly as it had arisen. She didn’t want to talk anymore. She wanted to lie down on the floor, feel the cool tile against her cheek. “Sounds like it’s gonna take more than fucking yoga.”

“You need people,” Waters said. “You need friends.”

Sadness flooded through her. She swallowed her pills dry. She wondered when she had learned how to do that. Years ago, she figured, waiting tables. She couldn’t remember not knowing how. “I am trying.”

“Try harder,” Waters said. “Be braver. Or you’re going to lose more than your job. That’s the reality, Maureen. I gotta go, your mom and I have plans. I’ll give her your love.”

He hung up.

Maureen walked back to the kitchen, where she poured herself a cup of cold coffee. She had been planning a nap for after her shower, but right then she needed something to wash the bitter taste of the pills from her mouth.

6

Around ten o’clock that night, Maureen smoked a cigarette and nursed a cup of cold coffee under the spotlights of the Orleans Parish Prison intake and processing center, a boxy cinder-block bunker painted the dull cream and brown of the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office. The one-story building stood hidden behind the dirty six-story art deco shell of one of the old city jails, flooded during Katrina and abandoned in the years since. At the end of the street lay the flat, ugly expanse of the construction site that would in two years be the new intake center and jail. It might all get built, she thought, before she retired.

When she finished her smoke, she walked up the wooden ramp and pushed through the heavy green door, dropping her coffee cup in the trash as she passed the long benches and the humming vending machines in the lobby, the smell of institutional antiseptic rising from the freshly mopped floor. Her head was fuzzy from the lingering effects of the afternoon’s three Percocets. She wasn’t entirely sure the buzzing in her ears came from the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. She headed for the intake and information office, separated from the lobby by a wide window of bulletproof glass and a locked metal gate.

Seated at a squat metal desk on the other side of the window was a short, heavyset black woman about Maureen’s age, clad in a dull green-and-gold sheriff’s uniform. Her cheeks were high and square, her features reminding Maureen of an Egyptian statue. Her dark hair was pulled tight over her scalp and clipped in the back. Her uniform strained around the folds of her soft body. Maureen couldn’t read her name tag. She tapped on a smartphone, not looking up as Maureen spoke.

“Excuse me, I’m Officer Maureen Coughlin, from the Sixth District.”

The sheriff’s deputy said nothing, fixated on her phone. The clicks of her nails on the screen of the phone set Maureen’s teeth on edge.

“I’m here to see about a prisoner,” Maureen said. “A woman I brought in last night. I need some additional info for my paperwork.”

“I wasn’t here last night,” the deputy said.

“No, but that computer you’re getting paid to babysit, it was here last night.”

“What I meant was,” the deputy said, “I wasn’t here last night, so I don’t remember you, or your prisoner, so I’m gonna need some information
from
you before I can help you. Did you check the screens?”

Maureen turned, reading the flat-screen monitors hanging high on the lobby wall. The names and processing status of prisoners flashed ten at a time. The city certainly had enough people in custody, she thought, working their way through the system. She didn’t see Madison’s name. Could she have bonded out already? Once she was gone she wouldn’t be on the screens.

Maureen turned back to the deputy. “I don’t see her. I’d like to get back on the street as soon as I can. Maybe you can help me?”

The deputy, expelling a long sigh, set down her phone, and rolled her chair to the computer. “Item number?”

Maureen flipped open her notepad. “Twenty-six fourteen one nine.”

The deputy moved her mouse around, clicking a few keyboard keys. She frowned at the screen. “You sure it was last night?”

“I guess technically it was this morning,” Maureen said. “Between three and four. Has she bonded out?”

“She’d be off the screens, but she’d be in the system. I should be able to see her. Gimme that number again.”

Maureen did so, but all she got was another shake of the head.

“You lost my prisoner,” Maureen said.

“Hold up. Item number probably went in wrong, is all. Let’s try it another way. The prisoner’s name?”

“Last name Leary. Madison Leary.”

“Nope. DOB? Social?”

“Didn’t have either of them. She had no ID on her. That’s the info I’m here for. I thought maybe y’all could get it from her.”

“She might have gone in as a Jane Doe.”

“That shouldn’t be,” Maureen said. “I just told you her name was the one thing we did have.”

The deputy lifted her hands from the keyboard as if it had burned her. “I’ll unlock the gate and you can go around the other side, have a look at what we got wandering around in holding.”

“I shouldn’t have to. She shouldn’t be in holding. I brought her in eighteen hours ago.”

“This your first arrest?” the deputy asked.

“Hardly.”

“Then you should know,” the deputy said, “that a lot of things ’round here shouldn’t be, but are. If she ain’t in the computer and she ain’t on the screens, then she must be in holding and hasn’t been processed yet, probably because you left us with no information on her.”

Another deputy, this one an obese white male with a sweaty shaved head and tiny ears, pink splotches coloring his neck, wandered over in the direction of the window. He clutched a giant plastic Saints mug in his hand. He nodded at Maureen when she caught his eyes. He waddled over to an empty desk where he started a phone call he conducted in a hushed voice.

The female deputy looked up from her computer, lips pursed and a skeptical frown on her face. “So I’m guessing no driver’s license number for this mystery prisoner, nothing like that.”

“She wouldn’t give us anything but her name. I got the impression she’d been through the system already, so I thought y’all would have information on her. I guess I was wrong.”

“I guess you were.” The deputy used her long nails to pick at something in her teeth. She glanced at her companion, then back at Maureen. “Gimme what else you got. I’ll call her ’scrip over to LE intake.”

“White female, about five-eight, one-ten. Brown hair, long and straight, one blue eye, one green. No visible tattoos or scars. Blue T-shirt and black jeans. I brought her in on possession of stolen property and robbery charges. The eyes. You’d remember her eyes.”

“Wait a sec.” The deputy swiveled around in her chair. “Theriot, didn’t you work last night? In the back?”

Theriot listened as Maureen repeated the description. “I remember her,” he said. “She was a live one at first, screaming crazy shit when we first touched her. Spitting, clawing, like a cat in a bathtub.” He shrugged. “Then the lights went out. She went limp on the floor. Like someone had thrown a switch. For just a second I thought she’d stroked out or something.”

“The lights went out, or you put ’em out?” Maureen asked.

Theriot raised his hands. “I did no such thing. Neither did my partner. She was giving us trouble then she collapsed. Lying on the floor, staring off into space like a zombie. Wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t even stand up.” He shrugged again, as if instantaneous catatonia made a curious footnote to an otherwise bland story. “We thought it was some kind of seizure, or, like, psychotic episode. We put her down as a ten-fifteen M, called an ambo for her. That crazy shit is above our pay grade. We don’t have the resources.”

He tilted his head at the computer. “Could be we never got her in there. ’Specially since y’all gave us so little to work with, information-wise.” He sipped his soda, shook the cup, rattling the ice. “The EMTs strapped her down on the gurney and took her away. Paperwork’s around here somewhere, I’m sure. My partner filled it out before end of shift.”

“They took her to LSU Public?” Maureen asked.

“It’s the only game in town anymore,” Theriot said.

“Has she come back?”

“Why would she do that?” Theriot asked.

The female deputy looked over one shoulder, then the other, twisting way around in her squeaky chair as she did it. She stared right at Maureen. “You see her here, Officer?”

Outside, Maureen found Preacher waiting for her by the cruiser, gazing up at the unfinished jail like a man alone in a museum wrangling with a work that eluded him, his hands in his pockets. His Bronco was parked a few spaces away. She was surprised to see him, and not in a good way. Twice in two days he’d arrived in her orbit unexpectedly. Not only was he on the streets, this time he had left the district. She felt like he’d caught her up to no good, and like he somehow knew her prisoner had gone haywire, despite the fact she had only just learned about it herself. Like it was her fault. What was worse, she knew he could tell at first sight how guilty she felt.

As he turned to face her, hearing her boots on the wooden ramp, the ringing in her ears intensified, she felt light-headed again, and the bitter taste of her ill-gotten Percocets returned to her tongue. Like her body was trying to rat her out. Preacher could always tell, often before she could, what she was really after. She’d gotten the same “I see through you” vibe from the therapist she’d seen, the main reason she’d stopped going, no matter what she told Nat Waters.

She felt being the first to speak was of vital importance. “What’s up, Preach?”

Preacher frowned. “You’re listing to starboard. Your ankle acting up?”

“It’s good,” Maureen said, convinced she was not favoring her injured foot. “Fine. Stiffens up now and again. What brings you out here?”

“What’re you doing for it?”

“Not much I can do,” Maureen said. “Rest, ice. It’s one of those things.” She smiled, pained by how fake she knew it was. “You got someone inside?”