Maureen rose up on her knees, lashed down again with the ASP on the man’s injured knee. Something shattered in it this time, and something broke in him. He sobbed.
She leaned her face down to his ear. She was hunched over his body as if he were felled prey, which, she supposed, he was. She could smell the cheap vodka on his breath, sweating out of his pores. Her ankle throbbed. She hated him, blamed him, for the pain she felt. She could smell her own whiskey breath on his skin. He cried underneath her, biting his bottom lip to stifle the sound. She could feel his chest pulsing with sobs between her thighs. She’d lose him soon to the pain and the damage she’d done. She was losing her chance to talk to him, to deliver the rest of the message she’d prepared.
“I know you,” she said. “I know what you are. I know what you do. I know what you want, what you think. I see you. You ever try this shit again, and I will know. It will come to me like a dream and I will reappear. Things won’t go down like this next time. There won’t be any pain next time. This time you saw stars. Next time the lights go out.”
She rose to her feet. She glanced up and down the block, gave the cottage windows the once-over. She settled her sore foot on the small of the man’s back. She leaned more of her weight on it to increase the pain she felt. She listened for sirens, heard none. No one was coming. Not for him. Not for her. “Stay here. Stay here and count to one hundred before you move a muscle.”
If he’d heard, he didn’t acknowledge her. Didn’t much matter, Maureen thought. With what she’d done to his knee, he wouldn’t be following her, or making an effort to get into that girl’s house. Hell, he might be lying there in the crushed ginger in the morning. She didn’t much care. She backed away up the walk, collapsing the ASP and slipping it into her back pocket. She’d clean it off when she got home.
She passed through the gate and out into the street. She pulled her hood close around her face. Her rolled ankle would hurt like a bitch in the morning, swell up to grapefruit size if she didn’t get ice on it soon. She couldn’t exactly load up on Percocets before her sit-down with the district commander. But right then and there, having left a would-be rapist sobbing in the shadows, her insides felt right. The engine that tremored in her belly twenty-four-seven had gone quiet, like it had those other times. She didn’t care about anything that had happened before that very moment. She didn’t care about the future. What she cared about was the quiet. The past was so very far away. The entirety of her future was her walk home.
The satisfaction was a dangerous feeling. She knew that.
I could do this every day, she thought.
Well, no, she corrected herself. Starting tomorrow, you can’t do this ever again. You’ll have to find another outlet, another answer, sweet as this one has been.
Her first time really going after someone had just kind of happened. She wasn’t looking for it. An opportunity arose in front of her, an accident, even, in the form of some dumb boy. So she did it. To see what it would feel like. And she found she liked it.
*
She’d been in the Marigny most of that night, skipping dinner, catching a band at the Apple Barrel. She’d had a few during the set, which ran late. After the drinks and the music, she’d stayed out and hung around Frenchmen Street, chatting up the street musicians and the homeless kids, looking for Madison Leary. Maybe for Dice, too.
A few blocks away from Frenchmen, across the wide lanes of Elysian Fields, behind the warehouses, the Marigny neighborhood turned more residential. The narrow streets were dark with the shadows of crepe myrtles and banana trees.
In those shadows, Maureen spotted a drunken kid standing between two cars in the unmistakable wobbly posture of someone trying not to piss on his own shoes.
She’d shouted out to him, “Why don’t you go home and piss on your own neighborhood?”
The boy hadn’t looked over, hadn’t altered his posture or pinched off his stream, but he’d responded, “This is my neighborhood, bitch.”
That had stopped her in her tracks. “That makes it worse, not better, you asshole,” she said. And then she crossed the street in his direction.
The original plan was to tell him she was a cop, and that she could have him locked up for what he was doing. That he could’ve used one of the dozen bathrooms available to him only blocks away back on Frenchmen Street. She wanted to intimidate him, maybe shame him for being confronted by a grown woman while he stood there with his limp dick in his hand. But then she thought, as she got closer, her boots crunching on the crackled asphalt, why tell him anything? Why waste her time and her breath? He’d had his chance to do the right thing when she’d yelled at him, and he’d chosen not to. He’d had his chance to be a decent human being, she thought, before he’d ever unzipped his pants, and he had passed.