Maureen bounced on her toes. She was ready, more than ready, to start running again. “What? Why are you looking at me like that? I said I heard you.”
“Make sure you hear this, too,” Preacher said. “Tomorrow you’ll be back at work. So if there’s any business you need to finish up, anything pressing or lingering that you need to get out of your system before you come back, go ahead and let the devil out tonight. One last blowout, one last hurrah, whatever. Because tomorrow you need to be ready to be a cop again. One hundred percent.”
He waited for her response.
He knew, Maureen thought. Somehow, some way, Preacher’s preternatural cop intuition told him she’d been up to no good. Like when you were out on patrol and you talked to a guy on the street about the Saints or the weather, and you just knew somehow he had something in his pockets that he shouldn’t have. Like whatever impulse, she thought, that had told her to pull over that pickup truck with Clayton Gage at the wheel and Madison Leary in the passenger seat. Maybe Preacher didn’t know the specifics of what she’d been getting up to at night, Maureen thought, but he knew something was going on. And he knew it was wrong. Maybe he didn’t know how far she’d gone, but he knew she’d strayed from the one true path.
“And leave Solomon Heath alone,” Preacher said.
“I haven’t said two words to that man since I worked his party.”
“The man, his house, where he does his business,” Preacher said. “Stay away.”
Maureen opened her mouth to speak, to spit out some bullshit denial, but Preacher raised his hand against it. “You gonna hurt my feelings, Coughlin, you keep this up.”
“Sorry.”
“So we understand each other?”
“We do,” Maureen said.
“We’re clear, Officer Coughlin?”
“We are, Sergeant Boyd,” Maureen said. “Crystal clear.”
Preacher nodded. Maureen watched as he got up from the bench and walked down to the water, his hands buried in the pocket of his sweatshirt, his broad back to her. One more time, he was telling her, he would look away from what she did next. Once more.
5
Late that night, Maureen sat alone in the corner booth of a boisterous Magazine Street bar, called the Irish Garden, a few blocks from where she lived. She was cocooned and anonymous in the hive-like buzzing and activity of the partyers around her. She excelled at this, finding the blind spot, the blank space in an otherwise crowded room, and hiding there, looking out at a room full of strangers, watching and listening, an owl in the crook of a branch, absorbing the nighttime wilderness around her, invisible and calculating. If she ever got to do undercover work, she thought, she’d be great at it. If she could keep her job long enough to get there.
She’d also found, as best as she could figure with limited reconnaissance, a blind spot in the Irish Garden’s security cameras. That was if the cameras were on, something she doubted, considering the clumsy minor-league hand-to-hand drug deals she’d witnessed by the restrooms and around the pool tables. One of the bartenders was blatantly stealing. Still, she figured, one couldn’t be too careful while being completely reckless and endangering everything one had worked so, so hard to get.
That round, silver-crescent-over-a-star badge—like her whole future in New Orleans—had been hidden from her for six weeks, disappeared into an amorphous legal limbo and the power and whims of others. She realized that when she had thought about her badge over the past weeks, she had assigned it a mystical identity, like a lost relic in an old adventure movie, a glowing and humming talisman lost in the depths of a yawning cave or a crumbling temple. An object of power and value like Excalibur or the Ark of the Covenant or the One Ring, it waited for her, only her, to rescue it from useless oblivion. The badge had become her Precious.
But a badge wasn’t a hero’s sword lodged in a stone that she could claim, it wasn’t a mystical Old Testament talisman she could unearth, or a piece of magic regal jewelry that she could steal as she fumbled about in the dark. She couldn’t take her badge back; it had to be awarded, given to her, like a secret. She needed someone to reach a hand into that drawer and liberate that badge for her. She needed someone else to decide she deserved it, like on the first day she wore it, her graduation day that past summer from the NOPD academy. And she just hated that need of someone else’s power. Of their permission. Of their approval.
Her need made her feel small and fragile, blind and weak, her skin tingling in anticipation of being violated or betrayed, the usual outcomes, she’d learned, of need. This time of year, she found herself especially conscious of that lesson.