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 motherfucking 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.”