“Get in line,” Little E said. He stamped his feet against the cold. His discomfort was making him brave. “Nobody know where Shadow stay. You think you’re the first cop to ask me that? Damn, OC.”
Maureen reached into her jacket pockets. She pulled out her leather gloves. E’s eyes got wide. She’d been standing there with her hands turning blue to preserve that effect. She slid one hand into a black glove then the other. “I’m not the first cop to ask that, but, and this I promise you, I am the most persuasive. I’m the one asking tonight.” She flexed her fingers in her gloves. The leather creaked. “Where is he?”
“Whoa, whoa, Officer.” Etienne went to step back, his hands in the air. “Preacher wouldn’t do me like this.”
“Preacher ain’t here,” Maureen said, moving in closer. “He’s laid up in a hospital bed, and Shadow knows the guys behind it.” She reached out, put her hand on E’s shoulder. Her touch was light. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know that,” Etienne said. “I don’t. There’s no way I would know that. Shadow is a player. I’m a piss stain. You know that. C’mon, now. You scaring me.”
“How many fucking times you gonna make me ask you the same fucking question?”
She twisted the shoulder of Etienne’s coat in her fist. A thought occurred to her. Solomon Heath wasn’t the only one who could’ve given Preacher away.
She said, “Preacher took three bullets. Preacher was having lunch in street clothes. How did the Watchmen know who he was unless someone told them? You ask me, that rat was Shadow. He knows who Preacher is, what he looks like. He knew the Watchmen before Scales did. It connects.”
“If you say so. I got no love for Shadow. Fuck him. It ain’t about that. I plain don’t know where he is.”
What if I beat the daylights out of him, Maureen thought, and he doesn’t know shit? She released his shoulder. Then he’s useless to me. Tonight and every other night going forward. And it’s not impossible someone finds out how he got torn up, she thought, especially if he ends up in the emergency room like the last guy she’d tuned up with the ASP. This encounter’s not anonymous like the Marigny and the Irish Channel, she thought; there are witnesses this time. Three guys saw her pull up and ask for Little E. Three guys heard her chase them away so she could be alone with E. Tonight, she was out in full uniform. She wasn’t skulking around town in a hoodie. She wasn’t sneaking up on anyone. She zipped up her jacket. Besides, odds were Little E didn’t know where Shadow stayed. But he would know someone who did. That was a fact.
Maybe there’d be two, three degrees of separation, but E would have a connection he could tap for information. He’d been around the neighborhood too long, had absorbed too much. He might not even know he had it. But she’d inspire him to find that connection. She would simply stop asking, stop giving him chances to deny her and treat him as if he’d already agreed to help.
“Come with me to the car,” she said.
Little E grumbled but he followed. At the front of the car, she said, “Wait here.”
Maureen opened the passenger door of the cruiser, grabbed a plastic shopping bag off the seat.
In the bag was a prepaid cell phone she’d bought for cash at an all-night convenience store on Broad Street. The transaction would be on the security video, but she’d done what she could to obscure the item she was purchasing. She tore open the hard plastic packaging and made sure the phone was activated. She took out her own smartphone, found the number for the Big Man Lounge, and programmed it into the prepaid. Then she handed that phone to Little E. He stared at it like Maureen had handed him a live hand grenade with no pin.
“I’m a snitch,” he said. “This is starting to feel like some kind of mission.”
“Here’s what’s gonna happen,” Maureen said. “You’re gonna go around the way and catch up to your boys, and the four of you are gonna make like messenger pigeons and get word out to Shadow that the NOPD wants to speak with him. You put it out there, no arrest, no jail. We want to talk only. Tonight only. When the meeting’s over, he walks away. It’s a chance for him to score some points with us. Points he will need to cash in one day.”