Excerpt from The Marauders by Tom Cooper, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Hanson turned again and considered the sagging house. Paint was peeling off the clapboards in great leprous swatches and the front porch steps were spavined and weather-warped. Off to the side was a carport with a corrugated tin roof. No car, only buckets and paint cans and pallets of lumber, shovels and rakes and other gardening tools leaning against the walls.

"I'm no carpenter," Hanson said.

"Man of your mental caliber can manage a little sanding and painting, I'm sure," said Lemon. "You have any trouble with the hammer and nails, ask Cosgrove. He'll tell you which pound which."

Deputy Lemon got into the van and lurched away into the morning traffic. Hanson sidled up next to Cosgrove and watched the van turn down Magazine Street. Cosgrove, six foot two with a lumberjack beard, felt like a grizzly bear next to the little guy.

"Bet that son-bitch is on his way to fuck somebody's wife," Hanson said, gripping his belt buckle.

Up close the house looked even worse than from the street, beyond hope of repair. The front windows were cockeyed, many of the panes broken and covered with scraps of cardboard. Here and there the porch boards were missing, and from underneath the house the ammonia stink of animal piss wafted up as strong as poison.

Cosgrove and Hanson got to work with their scrapers. Lavender scabs of paint fell from the stanchions and motes of plaster swirled in the air. The only sounds for a while were the scratching of their tools, the rattle and groan of traffic on Napoleon. Ambulance and police sirens wailing in the distance. When Hanson's rhythm slowed, Cosgrove, feeling watched, glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, the man was looking at him askance. Cosgrove asked him what he wanted.

"Not very friendly, are you?"

Other people, mostly women, had told him the same. "Why don't you talk?" they asked. "Why don't you listen?" Because he liked silence, he wanted to say. Because there was nothing he wanted to say and nothing he wanted to hear. At first they found his silence alluring, mistaking it for mystery, depth. But then they learned there was nothing behind it except indifference, maybe a low-grade depression.

"Just trying to work," Cosgrove said. Already his white V-neck T-shirt was stuck to his back with sweat.

"Work. Shit. We're a corporation now?"

Cosgrove hadn't wanted to seem unfriendly, just quiet. The less conversation, the better. Some guys never stopped once you let them get started. This guy already seemed one of them.

"Why you here?" he asked Hanson.

"Forged autographs."

"Who?"

"Presidents. They busted me for selling pictures with fake autographs on them in Jackson Square. Some tourist got his dick in a pretzel because I was selling signed photographs of George Washington. Went to the cops."

"There're no photos of George Washington."

"Bullshit. How'd they have painted those pictures?"

They got back to work. After a while Hanson asked Cosgrove how he ended up here.

"Public drunkenness," Cosgrove said.

Hanson shook his head and snorted incredulously. "In New Orleans?" he said. "That's like cops going out to the cemetery and arrestin' folks for being dead."

* * *

The next few days of Cosgrove's community service were much the same. In the morning Deputy Lemon dropped them off and left them to their business. In the late afternoon he returned and surveyed their work like a plantation dandy, touring the house with his hands clasped behind his back. Whether Cosgrove and Hanson put in two minutes or two hours of work, his reaction was always the same. "All right, gentlemen," he said, "that'll do." Sometimes Lemon even gave them coupons. For laser tag, for free pancakes and car washes, for complimentary admission into a Bourbon Street strip club called Love Acts.

Lemon seemed to give even less of a shit than other cops in New Orleans, which Cosgrove had thought impossible.

Excerpted from The Marauders by Tom Cooper. Copyright © 2015 by Tom Cooper. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.