She drew her gun anyway, tapped it against her thigh, contemplating.
She glanced over her shoulder at Detillier. She saw that he continued talking into his radio, one hand held up in the air to direct the others to his location. People more important than her were coming to take control of the scene. The thing to do here, she thought, the thing I should do, seeing as this guy is alive, is tell Detillier, have him call EMS to the fishing department. Today we don’t have to wait for the crypt-keeper to come with the keys. Those glass doors slide right open. This guy would give the NOPD and the FBI a living witness to use against the Watchmen. If he could be saved.
Leaning forward, hands on her thighs, Maureen noted that the blood appeared to be leaking from under the man’s head or neck. She reached out her foot, with the tip of her boot moved the man’s chin a couple of inches. Ah, she thought, there it was. He’d taken a bullet, at least one, right at the base of his throat. I could, she thought, get in there, find and apply pressure to those wounds. She’d tried it for Leary. This guy, though, Maureen thought, he wasn’t going to make it, either. She didn’t have to be a doctor to see that, with the amount of blood he’d lost. She could see it laid out in front of her on the tile floor.
And, truth be told, she much preferred he died instead of lived.
She sniffed, watched as his feet twitched. His fingertips, too. The last primal circuits in his brain prodding his extremities to do something about the hole in his throat, Maureen figured. Was this guy one of the men who’d shot up her house a month and a half ago? Was he one of the cowards wearing masks and firing automatic weapons from a van in the street who had tried to kill her in her bed? Not enough nerve to get out of the getaway car to finish the job, not having the balls to meet me at my door. I bet that’s how you killed those cops today, she thought. A sneak attack. An ambush. Like the fucking coward you are.
Maureen moved closer to the dying man. He didn’t seem to be breathing, she thought. She must’ve imagined that gurgle she heard. Standing over him, she could see one of his eyes. It was blue. It moved.
Surprised, she moved closer to him, not caring that she’d now stepped in the blood. She’d wash it off later. Wouldn’t be the first time. Detillier would be pissed, not that there was anything he could do about it. Crime scene integrity and all that.
Maureen squatted beside the man’s head, careful not to get down on one knee. Blood on her boots was one thing, no sense staining her pants again. The eye flicked in her direction, seemed to track her as she hovered. She thought of Madison Leary’s heterochromic eyes, how they had popped open as if at the sound of her name, and how soon they’d gone motionless and cold after that last flash of awareness, of life.
She thought of the man she’d followed from the Irish Garden, the one she’d left bleeding in the ginger. The one, according to Preacher, she’d nearly killed. She had looked into his eye, too. That eye had been blue like this man’s, like one of Leary’s had been, but also wild and alive. She had seen everything he was feeling from moment to moment, the agony and the fear broadcast across the surface of that one wild eye. She had seen his life, miserable and terrifying as it was to him at the moment. This dying man’s eye was not the same animal. It moved away from her. Came back to her. Moving in tiny increments, it seemed to search the ceiling. A broken thing. What do you see? Maureen wondered. Are there demons coming for you? Do you think you see angels? Or is your dying eye like your feet and your fingers? Unconscious firing of dying nerves. The last of your loose electricity going to waste trying to jump-start your dying brain.
Or maybe, she thought, you know I’m here, and I am all you see. Maybe I am, to you, the devil let out of hell come calling for her due.
“Can you see me?” she teased, whispering. She could hear the smile, the taunt, in her voice, and somewhere deep inside, that smile scared her. She thought of Preacher’s talk of the scorpion and rage bloomed inside her. “Do you see me here?” She wiggled her finger at his eye. “Is that why this eye thing is happening?”
She leaned in closer, forearms on her knees. “Can you hear me? Are you hanging on in there, asshole? Good. Don’t leave me just yet.” She leaned down right above his ear, close enough to whisper. “I’m the one you people wanted the most. Now I’m here to watch you die.” She looked at the flag on his back. “Don’t tread on me? Fuck you. I’m standing in your blood, you motherfucker, and you are dying at my feet.”
Maureen watched his eye, stared right into it, as the last of the life remaining in him departed. She saw it go. Nothing on or in him moved. He was as dead as the woman who’d shot him. She stood. She waited for the sensations that had come when Leary had died, the parts of her breaking free and fading. She felt none of that this time. She missed Preacher.