The next day was Friday, and if the weather just after sunrise was any indication, the weekend would be relentlessly hot and maliciously muggy. Anyone with plans for being outside over the weekend would probably gladly cancel them in exchange for a good thunderstorm.
By the time Jennifer sat down at her desk for the morning muster, she felt like she needed another shower. She and Daniel exchanged glances across the room when he came in, but other than that, she usually tried not to look at him too much when they were at the station. She didn’t want the other guys wondering if they were together again, or if she was there just to see him, or whatever idiotic thing some of them might think. She didn’t want Daniel embarrassed.
“Hey, Jennifer, check it out,” Anthony said as he materialized at his desk. He held up a thin package with a clear plastic front. An impossibly-tiny onesie with Sigmund & The Sea Monsters on the front, and a matching pair of cloth booties. He held a paper cup of steaming coffee in the other hand.
“Oh, my gosh,” Jennifer said, smiling.
“Leeanne at the diner gave it to us,” Anthony said. “It can go either way, don’t you think? Boy or girl?”
“I think so.”
He put the box down on his desk, took a sip of his coffee, then set it down. “Listen, Nate Palmer called me this morning. I just got done telling the Chief.”
Nate Palmer was a young black man who lived on Royal Street near downtown. He had two siblings in high school, and had been passing information along to Anthony about three men on his street who were supplying pot to junior high and high school kids and having them sell to other kids. Nate’s little sister, Annie, was one of those school-aged dealers. She was fifteen years old. Ray and the district attorney had agreed that, in exchange for Nate’s help in busting the three men, Annie would not go to jail.
Anthony had been working the case since about a week before Jennifer had come home. They knew that the guys were growing the pot somewhere outside of town, and distributing it from the house, but they had been waiting to know that there was a large enough amount of weed in the house to make a bust really worthwhile. Nobody wanted the guys back out on the street a week later because they’d only had a nickel bag on them.
“What’s going on?” Jennifer asked. She took a big swallow of her own coffee. Maybe she was going to need it.
“Nate says Annie told him the kids are supposed to pick up fresh weed after school. Instead of watching The Electric Company, these kids are gonna be picking up dime bags.”
“I don’t think junior high and high school kids watch The Electric Company.”
“Okay, Dinah Shore, whatever. Don’t bust my chops this early in the morning.”
“Aren’t these guys going to know Nate’s sister turned them in?” Jennifer asked.
Anthony shook his head. “There are four kids under sixteen working for these turkeys. We’re gonna try to bust these guys before any of the kids get out of school.” He shrugged. “If somebody skips school to go get their merchandise, we’re gonna have to charge them, but anyone under sixteen is getting probation and community service, so Nate’s sister isn’t gonna stand out. The three kids that are over sixteen would get the whole nine yards if they’re unlucky enough to be there.”
“Fair, but not fair at the same time,” Jennifer said.
Anthony shrugged. “Yeah, but the higher ups want this pot out of the schools. At least, the dealing. There’s always gonna be kids with joints in their socks.”
“So, what’s the plan?”
“Chief’s waking up the DA,” Anthony answered. “He’ll let us know at the muster.”
Jennifer nodded. “Hey, tell Michelle I really enjoyed dinner, okay?”
“You told her that last night.”
“Just tell her, would you?” Jennifer shook her head. “It was nice.”
It had been nice. Anthony and his wife had a modest home, but it had been warm and inviting, like Michelle. Jennifer had liked her immediately. She was cute without trying, and although she was quiet, she had a sharp wit and an easy and unselfconscious laugh.
“Nobody makes Johnny Mozzetti like Michelle,” Anthony said. “She had a nice time, too. We haven’t been having much company lately ’cause she gets tired pretty easily these days.”
Just then, Ray walked into the room from his office and clapped his hands a few times. “All right, people, let’s get it together. We got a busy day ahead.”
Three hours later, Jennifer squatted behind a misshapen, aluminum garden shed in Morris Graves’ back yard. Like most of the guys, she’d left her officer’s cap back in the patrol car. All of that thick, black cotton and rigid plastic trapped the heat between a cop’s scalp and the cap itself. The visor had nothing in the brim to protect an officer from the line of sweat that appeared there almost immediately, and the heat rash that followed it in what seemed like minutes.
Yes, it would have been nice to have something to keep the sweat out of the eyes, but the cap caused so much more sweat than going bareheaded, that there really wasn’t much to recommend the wearing of it on a July day.
Jennifer had been in that position, under the white-hot, late morning sun, for almost an hour. She’d been squinting across the yard all that time, her eyes moving between the dusty jalousies of the back door and Patterson, who was similarly squatting at the east back corner of the house, but facing the side and front yards. He was waiting on a radio signal from Ray, who was parked two blocks north in a Southern Bell van. Two officers were also stationed in an old pickup at the east end. They had been waiting on a maroon Nova driven by a light-skinned man with a large afro, and supposedly delivering several pounds of pot. Once the man arrived, the officers at the Graves house would be put on alert. They would move in once the delivery man, and the goods he was delivering, were inside the house.
Jennifer felt a rivulet of sweat trickle down her spine and underneath the waistband of her pants. She was almost vibrating with the need to untuck her shirt and swipe at it. The bulletproof vest she wore, one of several recently acquired by the Dismal PD, was heavy, stiff and cumbersome, and allowed no ventilation at all. Morris Graves and his associates had no registered weapons, and none reported by anecdote, either. None of them had ever been violent other than Graves being charged in a bar fight. But, men in this line of work frequently owned unregistered weapons, and it was safest to assume they’d use them if they panicked.
Though she couldn’t see him, she knew that Daniel was in the bushes of an abandoned house next door, toward the front of the yard. He and Whitney were supposed to go through the front door, followed quickly by Ray and the other guys parked on the street. Patterson, Anthony and Jennifer had the back door. Jennifer could hear Anthony breathing occasionally, from his post on the other side of the shed.
Annie had told her brother that most of the business was conducted in the dining room at the back, west corner of the house, which had a large window overlooking the back yard. The window had brown curtains pulled shut, but they’d thought it best not to try to take positions at the back door, which would necessitate them having to cross the mostly-bare yard.
Jennifer was blinking sweat out of her eyes when she saw Patterson raise his hand. The first signal, meaning the maroon Nova had turned onto Royal Street. The second signal would mean that the delivery guy and his goods were inside the house, and that Ray and the other men parked on the street were moving in fast.
Jennifer stared at Patterson’s upraised hand, afraid to blink unless absolutely necessary. What felt like maybe two minutes later, Patterson dropped his hand and started a crouching run toward the back door. Anthony beat Jennifer into the open back yard, but only by a few steps.
Jennifer had only been part of two similar busts. They were all scary, with so many known and unknown variables that it was impossible to fully prepare the mind for what would happen. Instead, she prepared her mind in terms of a r
esolute decision to do what had to be done, regardless of how it looked like it might turn out.
As she had found on the other two busts, long periods of waiting and a mental girding of the loins turned instantly into an almost slow-motion series of events, like a home movie someone had cut up and then pasted back together.
The adrenaline spike was instantaneous, and the heat, sweat, cramping muscles and almost every other physical sensation faded, while the details of the scene and everyone’s actions came into sharp focus.
She heard a commotion, and the sound of men’s raised voices from inside the house just before Patterson reached the back steps. He never got to the back door. It was flung open, and a burly man in his early twenties, wearing brown checked bell bottoms and a Fat Albert T-shirt, came roaring down the three steps. Patterson almost stopped him, but the man let out a growl and clotheslined Patterson in the chest, knocking him into a stumble. Anthony was there almost immediately, helping Patterson to wrestle the man to the ground. Jennifer was continuing toward the back door when a tall, skinny man in a slouchy hat came flying out, barreling past the clump of men on the ground and heading for the alley behind the house.
As she was changing her trajectory to follow, Jennifer saw Daniel in her peripheral vision, as he ran out the back door and jumped the steps, landing with a grunt.
Jennifer had a good fifteen yards on Daniel by the time he hit the grass, and the skinny man had at least thirty. Jennifer’s legs were not only long but strong, and she would have caught up to the skinny man with ease if she hadn’t been burdened by her twenty-pound gun belt and stiff, bulky vest.
The skinny man vaulted over the sagging chain link fence at the back and headed east down the alley. Jennifer ran over his slouchy hat before jumping onto and over the fence herself. Several strides down the dirt alley, she heard the jangle of the fence as Daniel followed. She could hear the man ahead breathing heavily with the effort of his flight. She could hear her own breath in her ears, and Daniel huffing behind her, like they were all in some airtight bubble together.
Several kids too young for school stopped their sandbox play in a yard across the alley as the skinny man passed. A heavyset black woman in pink curlers and bright blue shorts stood at her clothesline, holding up a sheet as she watched them with mild interest.
A few houses down on the right, an elderly woman with garden shears in her hand squinted after the skinny man. “Terrell White, what you done, boy?” she yelled angrily.
White veered to the left, into a smaller alley that led to the street. Jennifer did a two-second visual calculation and turned into the yard just before it. She could see flashes of White through the bushes that lined the yard. At first, he was ahead of her, then almost alongside. Jennifer pumped her legs harder than she thought she actually could, her chest screaming, and veered to the right as the bushes ended, coming into the alley inches behind White, who jerked his head to look at her, the whites of his eyes impossibly large.
Jennifer tackled him where the alley ended at a small patch of grass between two houses. White cushioned both their falls by pushing his face through the sod for a good twelve inches. Once they came to a stop, with Jennifer more or less lying on his back, Jennifer pulled her handcuffs from her belt. She was pulling Terrell White’s left arm behind him, without resistance, when she heard Daniel’s footfalls behind them, and he skidded to a stop.
“I got him!” he said breathlessly. He dropped to one knee and took White’s left arm. He reached for the right as Jennifer lifted herself up, pressed a knee into White’s back, and opened her cuffs.
“You honky mothers are killin’ me, man!” White groaned. “I can’t breathe!” His words were muffled somewhat by the dirt he was trying to spit out of his mouth.
Jennifer got the cuffs on him and stood, and Daniel helped White to his feet, then gently pushed him toward Jennifer. She grabbed the man’s arm.
An older black man, with a running water hose in his hand, watched from his yard a dozen feet away. “About time they caught y’all ass, sellin’ drugs to children,” he said. “Shamin’ your mother, God rest her.”
White bent over to spit and snort more dirt from his mouth and nose, and Daniel looked over him at Jennifer. “What were you thinking, running off after him alone?” he hissed, which Jennifer was pretty sure he wouldn’t have asked Patterson.
“That I can still outrun you,” she snapped.
He looked at her for a moment. “Oh, I don’t know. I seem to remember catching you once or twice,” he said quietly.
Jennifer felt her face warm, and she hoped the flush of exertion covered it. She deflected by reading White his rights.
A few minutes later, they met Patterson in the alley behind Groves’ house, as he was coming to find them. Behind him, the large man in the Fat Albert shirt sat in the yard with his beefy arms behind his back, as Ray and Anthony stood talking to him.
“Atta boy, Huddleston,” Patterson said, smiling.
“I didn’t catch him, she did,” Daniel answered as he passed him.
“Sure, she did.” Patterson smirked at Jennifer.
Jennifer stopped and scowled at him.
“You think he caught him for me, like blowing a bubble in my gum before giving it back to me?”
“Save it, Jennifer,” Daniel called back.
“I’m so tired of your crap, Patterson,” Jennifer said. “Why don’t you go see who set the record for the 200- and the 400-yard dash two years in a row.”
Daniel stopped and looked back at them. “Still a record.”
“Still?” Jennifer asked, surprised.
“Hey, I almost beat that record on the 200-yard dash, my junior year,” White mentioned.
“Yeah, well, almost didn’t count today, either,” Daniel said. He looked at Patterson. “You know what sucks about you hating her so damn much just because she’s a woman?”
Patterson put his hands on his hips. “No, what?”
“If you actually knew her, you’d probably like her.” Daniel kept walking.
“I doubt that,” Patterson answered, as he fell into step beside Jennifer. “And for the record, I don’t hate her, I hate her being a cop. I hate that I’m probably going to have to depend on her at some point to watch my back.”
“She’s standing right here,” Jennifer muttered. “And you just did.”
Late that afternoon, everyone that was in the station was either packing up to leave, finishing up their work, or chatting with the incoming night shift. Anthony had already gone home, and Jennifer finished putting away their carbon copies of their arrest reports, then tossed her empty coffee cup into the trash can beside her desk.
She grabbed her keys, found the tiny brass key that went to her lap drawer, and locked it. Wednesday, Patterson or Whitney or one of the other guys had left an empty birth control compact in her desk. She had no idea where they’d gotten it, but she’d started locking her desk. She wasn’t afraid of the guys who were picking on her, or of what they might leave in her desk, but she hated the idea that they would invade her personal workspace that way.
She had to jimmy the key to get it out of the scratched-up old lock, and she was doing that when the hairs on her forearms went up and her eyes squinted of their own accord. She stared at the key in her hand, and at the lock on her drawer, waiting for one of them to explain themselves.
“Now what?” Daniel asked from beside her.
She jerked her head up. She hadn’t seen him coming. “Nothing.”
She looked back down at the lock, and then felt a warm swirling in her stomach. She saw her mother’s body, in black and white. Saw the inside of her car. Then she saw it all in color, like she’d been dropped right back into 1962.
“Jen.”
She looked back up at him. “Mom’s car door.”
“What?”
“The other night, when we
were looking at the pictures, there was something, but then we were talking and I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was her passenger door. It was unlocked.”
“So?”
“She always locked it as soon as she got in the car. I can see her doing it. She’d lean over the passenger seat and push down the lock, or if I was in the car, she’d tell me to do it right away.”
Daniel frowned. “But there were cops all over that car,” he said. “I don’t doubt that one of them unlocked it from your Mom’s side to let another cop in.”
“Before the crime scene photos were taken?” Jennifer asked. “Would you do that?”
He blinked a couple of times. “No. But the picture you’re talking about could have been taken after they already had enough pictures of the scene as it was.” He held up a hand. “I know, I just thought the same thing; the keys were still in the ignition in those pictures. What cop would lean across a body to unlock the door?”
“I need to talk to Ray,” Jennifer said.
Jennifer headed for Ray’s office, and she heard Daniel follow. Ray’s door was open, and she knocked on the jamb. He looked up and waved her in, his face registering a moment’s surprise when he saw Daniel come in behind her.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Ray, were you at the scene—Mom’s scene—the night it happened?”
It took him a second to catch up. He’d obviously expected them to be there about something work-related, in the present day.
“No, I was working that night, but I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the scene or the case. Why?”
Jennifer glanced over at Daniel before answering. “In the pictures, of her body in the car, her passenger door is unlocked.”
Ray frowned at her. “I don’t understand the significance of that.”
“Do you remember that time somebody threw a dead bird through her passenger window when she was at a red light? She was always really careful after that. She always locked both her car doors as soon as she got in. She was even more careful after Jonah.”
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