Okay then, she thought. Let’s do this.
At most the club was an implied threat, she decided, not an actual one. He’d have to do better than that, Maureen thought, considering what his son and his friends had already put her through. She drifted across the track in his direction. She might leave the running track, she decided, but she wouldn’t stray far enough from it to cross from public property onto his. But if Solomon was going to approach her on park property, she wasn’t going to stop him. She welcomed the interaction. She was glad she’d finally reached him, and without her once knocking on his door or invading his private space in any way.
Then, on one of the benches ahead of her, Maureen saw a familiar sandpaper-colored head. The head turned and Maureen saw the full-cheeked, green-eyed, red-pepper-flaked face of Sergeant Preacher Boyd, her former field training officer and her duty sergeant at the Sixth District. He turned on the bench and waved at her. Preacher wore civilian clothes: pressed dark jeans and a black Saints hoodie, and a dark knit hat. A group of white ducks crowded about his feet, complaining, Maureen figured, that they weren’t getting fed. A single massive goose stood off to the side, observing the proceedings. Now this, Preacher being here, Maureen thought, this could fuck things up with Heath. She slowed to a walk. She looked over at Solomon.
He had stopped, maybe ten yards away from her. Close enough that Maureen could hear the clink of the ice in his glass. He tapped the head of the golf club on the toe of his shoe, watching her. He sees Preacher, too, Maureen thought. But does he know who Preacher is? He must, she decided. The two of them were both so deeply woven into the tapestry of the city, they had to know each other.
Preacher rose from the bench, narrowing his eyes at Solomon, frowning when he realized who he was observing. They knew each other, all right. The three of them stood, looking at one another, the points of a triangle. It wasn’t Solomon putting the frown on Preacher’s face, Maureen realized. It was her.
She felt caught out, embarrassed, as if she’d been busted meeting a boy she’d promised her friends she’d left behind. In reality, she had been caught doing, or been caught about to do, something technically much worse than meeting a bad-for-her boyfriend. According to her superiors at the NOPD, Maureen was banned from having anything to do with Solomon Heath. The excuse that he’d approached her in a public place would never wash. Not with them and not with Preacher.
“Coughlin,” Preacher said. Not loud, but authoritative enough that Maureen didn’t want to hear him say it again. He would never order her to do something in public, not when she was out of uniform, but when he spoke to her like that, the command was implied.
Maureen glanced at Heath one more time. He stood his ground, staring at her, swinging the golf club through the dead leaves at his feet like a pendulum.
She sighed, turned her back on him, and jogged in Preacher’s direction, her head hung low like a ballplayer on her way back to the dugout, upset with the umpire’s decision. She could feel the heat of her blood as her neck and cheeks flushed. She was not happy, very not happy, about being brought to heel by Preacher in front of Heath. Part of the point in her running by his house so often, she thought, had been to demonstrate her freedom; to imply that she might be more dangerous on the loose than she had been on the job. Now, this moment she had been waiting for, that she had so carefully orchestrated, was backfiring on her. Not the first time that’s happened, she thought.
Maureen and Preacher had been meeting in the park for the last month. They didn’t communicate beforehand to set up the meetings. She ran through the park at about the same time every day. When Preacher needed to see her, he went to the park and waited on the bench. If Maureen saw him there, she stopped and they talked. Usually, he’d have some tidbit of department gossip for her. He kept her apprised of daily life in the Sixth District. Sometimes he had something he’d heard about the Leary case and things surrounding it. What he had most often was no news about that case at all.