After her dealings with Sebastian, she’d made it through the New Year before her first meltdown. It caught her by surprise. She thought she was doing great. She hadn’t even known what a panic attack was until she’d been having them for two weeks. Once, she had passed out on the staircase in her mother’s house, the fall leaving her with a bump the size and color of a plum on her hairline above her right temple.
And days before that accident another attack had left her staggering across busy Amboy Road, fighting to stay conscious and upright, finally crumpling to the sidewalk when she made the other side. A year should feel like a long time, especially because so much had changed. That had been the whole point of everything she had done in the past twelve months.
Yet, right at that moment, standing on a nighttime New Orleans street, a cop leaning against a police car, she could reach back and hear the tires screeching from the cars on Amboy Road that had barely missed her. She could feel the cold concrete of the sidewalk against her cheek as she lay there with her heart fluttering inside her like a dying hummingbird. She almost missed it, the breathless emptiness. The forced surrender of the complete collapse. She thought she might die right there on that Staten Island sidewalk. She remembered thinking she should feel more afraid of death than she did.
But then her breath had returned and her heartbeat had settled. The bird inside her either died or escaped. Her limbs had gathered underneath her of their own volition and she’d stood, unsteady and wet-eyed like a foal. And something told her she had to get up and get away from the scene of her collapse before the ambulance came. She didn’t know what kind of hospital the men in white would take her to should they get their hands on her. She wanted no one strapping her down on the gurney. She’d been captured once in her life. Never again.
Nat Waters, who had been there through the days of the silver-haired man, who in his decades in the NYPD had seen more people short-circuit than he cared to remember, had convinced Maureen to start seeing the shrink early that spring. He was the first one to use the acronym PTSD. The shrink had been the second.
Maureen rubbed her hands over the backs of her arms. PTSD. She’d thought she’d left those letters in the doctor’s office. She thought she’d left them, all those names, her diagnosis, her condition, the reason for her prescriptions, thirteen hundred miles behind her on Staten Island. On the banks of the Arthur Kill where she’d lost her favorite switchblade slicing open one man’s throat and stabbing another’s leg, where Sebastian’s blood had run hot down her arms to her elbows, stinking like copper and steaming off her hands in the cold night air.
This was why, she thought, no one understood her pursuit of Caleb and Solomon Heath, and why she didn’t know if she could ever make anyone else understand. Atkinson. Detillier. Even Preacher. She wanted Caleb, she needed him, she had to have him because no one else could, no, because no one else was willing, to see his future like she could. And she could see his future as clearly as she could see her past. Heath was the larva. He needed to be crushed and smeared before he got too big and too quick to catch.
The trunk of a car. The stink of the Arthur Kill. The roar of the oncoming train.
Maureen had already seen what Caleb Heath would become.
She had already killed him once.
And for the life of her, Maureen couldn’t think of a sane way to explain everything she knew to Preacher, or even to Atkinson. Forget Detillier. There was no talking to any of them without sounding like she had Poe’s beating heart under her floor. Not without telling them that, on a cold November night very much like this one, she had killed two men with her bare hands. She didn’t know how to talk about what she had done. Or how it had made her feel. Not without revealing that deep, deep down inside her, in places where no man’s breath or body, where no doctor’s probing fingers or questions, where no other human being had ever reached, in the abyss inside her where the darkest things with the sharpest teeth lived and swam and hunted, she missed that killing feeling, the blood running over her hands, through her fingers. The unassailable power of being the one who lived.
Not everyone gets to be the killer. Most don’t. Most women who’d been where she had, they became the killed. The dead. The forgotten parts of someone else’s story.
*
Maureen’s phone buzzed in her pocket, calling her back to Magazine Street. She checked the screen. The number was private. She answered anyway; she had an idea who it might be. “Coughlin.”
“Officer Coughlin, it’s Agent Detillier. I thought I’d hear from you tonight. We need an answer from you about meeting with Gage. We want to keep him interested while he’s in town.”
“I understand,” Maureen said.
“I’m sorry,” Detillier said. “I have another call coming in. Hang on.”
“Sure,” Maureen said.