Maureen stammered. Atkinson chuckled. “C’mon, Maureen. I thought you wanted to be a detective?”
“Some day,” Maureen said. “In the way, way distant future, apparently.”
“All right, I gotta go,” Atkinson said. “The music never stops. Don’t forget to keep me updated on the apartment. Keep up the good work.”
“Will do,” Maureen said. She ended the call.
She eased off the hood of the cruiser, her whole body humming with what Atkinson had said to her. She felt high. She knew that when she got back to work, when the car started rolling and the radio chatter started, the spell would be broken. She wasn’t ready to give it up just yet.
Instead of getting into the car, Maureen walked over to the abandoned house where she’d found Little E. She sat on the concrete steps. She tilted her head back and howled at the stars. A yard dog in the neighborhood answered. She rubbed her palms on her thighs, looked at her hands. What inside her, she wondered, had stayed her hand in the bar? She didn’t really care about Shadow’s welfare. She hadn’t cared about Bobby Scales’s at the river. That wasn’t why she’d tried to save him from Quinn. Complete exhaustion had done her in, then? Maybe. The fact that other cops were watching her? Could be. But they didn’t care about Shadow, either. They knew the stakes. They’d done things like she was doing. There was more to it than that.
She’d done a lot of damage over the past six weeks, she realized, to others, to herself, and the result of her efforts had been only the desire and the opportunity to do more and greater harm. She’d been here before, she realized, snared in this ugly cycle of using pain to justify pain. Like an alcoholic. Like a junkie. The snake eating its tail. In New York, she’d done it with married men and cocaine. Now, in New Orleans, it was pills and violence. Eventually, she knew, sometimes it took weeks, sometimes it took months, but eventually she came back to wielding her weapons at the same old target. Herself. She broke her own heart. She bloodied her own nose. Sabotaged herself. Over and over again. Too many ways. Too many times.
She thought, of all things, of what Solomon Heath had said about Leon Gage. People like that never get less angry.
What had Nat Waters said to her on the day they’d met? You have to protect yourself, Maureen, he’d said. Nobody else can do it for you.
She rested her elbows on her knees, folded her hands in front of her. She closed her eyes. There wasn’t a sound on the street. She took a deep breath and held it, listening for the grinding gears of the machine in her belly. She couldn’t hear it.
She released the breath, pulled in another. She heard the rattle in her chest, the one she got late at night from too many cigarettes. Nothing after that. A cat screamed in the distance. But nothing happened inside her. When had that quiet started? When she saw Preacher? When she’d seen the look in Wilburn’s eyes? All bad things must end, she thought. She had to stop killing herself sometime. Now seemed as good a time as any. She had already started being a better cop. Atkinson’s words were proof of that. She took one more deep breath, made the sign of the cross, and came down the steps. Back to work. She couldn’t live on magic spells.
She lit a cigarette and climbed into the cruiser, started the engine. She felt good, very good, but that didn’t mean she didn’t need coffee, and need it bad. She thought of Solomon Heath and his thermos. She had an idea. She’d promised him she’d be back. She hadn’t necessarily meant that night, but, she thought, she had given Little E and Shadow the chance to do the right thing, and they had, in their way, come through. She wanted to give Solomon Heath the same choice, the same chance.
He’d told her unbidden that the Harmony Oaks apartment complex was under Caleb’s supervision. It was possible that Solomon didn’t know about the apartment the Watchmen had used. Would she tell him what Shadow had said about Caleb? What he did when he heard the news that the NOPD had a living witness connecting his son to the Watchmen, a witness who had spilled in front of not one but three cops, would tell her an awful lot. Solomon’s next decisions after that would tell her everything she needed to know about him.
She was on a roll, doing the job Preacher had told her to do. There was only one thing to do, Atkinson had said so herself. Keep up the good work.
She put the car into drive and pulled away from the curb.