Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)
Bill Loehfelm
Once again, for AC
The hardest thing in the world isn’t to refrain from committing an evil, it’s to stand up and stop one.
—DON WINSLOW, The Power of the Dog
1
Late November. The time of the silver-haired man.
These past weeks, every gray cloud charcoaled across the pale sky brought him back to her. Every cold breeze coming down the Mississippi felt like his hands under her coat. His shadow walked before her everywhere she went, painting the buildings and the sidewalks of New Orleans like the shadow of a great carrion bird. When she awoke in the mornings, she felt he’d only just stepped away from the foot of her bed. The bed with bullet holes in it. Late at night, he whispered the names of the dead, his victims and others, in her ear during her last conscious moments, when she felt helplessly paralyzed by the coming sleep.
Which meant that most nights, Maureen did her best to stay awake until morning.
*
Maureen sat alone at a corner cocktail table at d.b.a., a Frenchmen Street bar, thinking about the silver-haired man speaking names into her ear. So, she figured, sipping her drink, she was now officially hearing voices. So be it, then.
Maybe that was for the best. Maybe they would help. Hearing voices gave her something in common with one of the women she was out here looking for: Madison Leary, the woman who killed men with a straight razor and who sang old folk songs about death and the devil into Maureen’s voice mail. Maybe the connection, this new empathy, would inspire an idea. Maybe it would change her luck. Lord knows, she needed something to shake things up. She needed something to break. A break in the case, as they say. At this point, she’d take going half-crazy, even if it was the second half, even if it meant she was going the rest of the way crazy. As long as Madison Leary was there at the finish line.
She lowered her eyes to the table, avoiding the faces in the barroom, and sipped her drink again, embarrassed even though no one was looking at her.
The time of the silver-haired man, she thought. Oh, please, girlfriend.
What bullshit. Melodramatic bullshit, Maureen. You know better. Get over it.
He was just a man, she told herself, over and over again. Just a man. Repeating that sentence as if it were a stone she threw again and again at the great black bird overhead. Of course, she could never throw it high enough. And the bird never got frightened and never flew away. But that didn’t stop her from trying.
She thought of the Greek god condemned to roll his stone up a hill, condemned to repeat the same meaningless task for eternity. She couldn’t recall what his sin had been. Or his name. Didn’t much matter. It wasn’t much of a story, and Maureen knew what her own sins had been. The silver-haired man was just that, a man. Not a devil. Not a god. Not a ghost. He’d had an ordinary name. Frank Sebastian. And he was dead. Maureen knew this for sure. She’d been ten feet away from him when he’d died.
The time of the silver-haired man? His time was over. She had seen to that.
Sitting at her table, Maureen tried imagining herself as someone else. A different person. With a different voice. This was a new thing she’d been trying in her head. A way to hear herself tell the story of what had happened to her before she had come to New Orleans. She studied her pack of cigarettes. American Spirit. A chief in a headdress was on the front of the box. He smoked a peace pipe. Maureen lit up.