She tilted her chair back against the building, her face turned up into the sunshine, her eyes closed behind her sunglasses, her back pressed against the warm wall of the coffee shop. The air was cool but the sun warmed her face, the cotton stretched over her chest, and the denim stretched over her thighs. She felt as if she hovered slightly above her own body, lifted skyward, lightened by the autumn sun. Not asleep, but not entirely present. This is what it’s like, she thought, to wake up without a hangover. To wake up not wondering who saw what you did last night. Remember this? This is what it’s like, she thought, to relax. Having that back, even for a few short moments, was serious progress. Maybe now that she was a cop again she’d fight her way back to sane.
At the next table along the wall, not five feet away, sat Preacher. She’d called him last night, told him about the meeting with Skinner. He’d agreed to sit in on her meeting with the FBI before she’d finished asking the question. He wore civvies like Maureen, dressed in an olive Guevara shirt and matching pants, sandals and thick black socks on his feet, a black felt porkpie hat on his head. He sat with his wide face held at the same angle as Maureen’s, soaking up the sun. Taken together they gave the impression of two beach bums wasting away the day, as if the concrete sidewalk they sat on was instead white sand, and the parking garage across Girod Street was a green and rolling ocean that smelled of salt instead of car exhaust.
“You feeling okay?” Maureen heard Preacher ask.
“Never better.”
“Long night?”
“Nope. Quiet. I talked to my mother. I read. Slept like a stone.”
“Sounds nice,” Preacher said. “You look pale, though. Even for you.”
“I’m redheaded Irish, Preach. And a Yankee. Cadaverous is my natural look.”
“I see you’re limping again,” Preacher said.
“It’s that ankle thing. It comes, it goes.”
“I don’t know if you heard,” Preacher said. “I’m guessing you didn’t, but some guy in the Irish Channel had a rough time of it the other night.”
“I’m sure there’s more than one of them out there.”
“Young man took a hell of a beating,” Preacher said. “Got left bleeding in the bushes. Couldn’t talk much since he had a couple of cracked ribs. Punctured lung, as it turned out. Could’ve gone way worse for him. He woulda died there in those bushes if he’d been left there much longer. Wouldn’t have made it to dawn. We’d be calling your buddy Atkinson for him.”
Maureen willed herself not to look at Preacher. Instincts, or was it her guilty conscience, warned her that he was fishing. He had instincts of his own, she recalled, and they were much better than hers.
“What saved him?” she asked.
“Girl who lives in the house where he took the beating, her dog wouldn’t stop barking. She finally went out to check, found the poor bastard in the bushes. Girl called nine-one-one. Turns out she was a witness to the beat-down.”
“Good for her for making the call,” Maureen said. “She’s a fine citizen. And why would I have heard about this?”
“It happened in your neck of the woods,” Preacher said. “On Philip Street. Only a few blocks from your house. You must’ve heard us coming out, the sirens.”
“I miss the job,” Maureen said. “I’m eager to get back to work tonight, but I haven’t been sitting home listening to the scanner. I hear sirens every night, up and down Magazine, Tchoupitoulas, all over Uptown.”
“The girl with the dog,” Preacher said. “She’d had a few at the Irish Garden. She said the guy was attacked right there in the front yard. He appeared out of the dark. Like he’d been there in the bushes waiting for her to get home.”
“Or like he followed her home,” Maureen said. Nailing the guy had taken strong detective work. Having to hide that part of what she’d done gnawed at her professional pride.
“So this guy appears and then, boom, out of the shadows leaps contestant number two, who then proceeds to kick this guy’s ass six ways to Sunday.” Preacher shrugged. “Girl did say she might’ve walked into a fight that had already started before she got there. She couldn’t say for sure the order of what happened. One of them yelled at her to get inside. She was scared enough to listen. Never got a good look at either the victim or the assailant.”
“If she’d had a couple of drinks,” Maureen said, “her facts might be off. Even so, it’s a shame we couldn’t get any kind of description from her on the guy giving the beating.”
Preacher raised his hands. “Yeah, a shame.”
Maureen reached for her coffee, lifted the lid, and sipped, content to let the subject drop. Where in the hell, she thought, was this FBI stooge?
“It got me thinking,” Preacher said.
Maureen’s stomach dropped. She did not want Preacher thinking about crimes she had committed. “Were you at the scene? Did you work this?”
“I was at the St. Charles Tavern,” Preacher said. “I caught the details on the radio. Figured I might as well swing by. It was you that put the idea in my head. Those calls you were asking me about last week at the park, with the girls getting followed home from the bar. It was that Irish Garden bar, wasn’t it?”
“Is there a point to this?” Maureen asked.
“The address, it was another one not far from the bar.” Preacher rolled out his plump bottom lip. “I wanted to see what I could see. I’m curious, I’m thinking, what if maybe that was our guy? Maybe somebody caught on to him, lit him up on their own.”