Old Bones

by Trudy Nan Boyce

  A dreadlocked young man on the ground raised his torso, hands inches off the ground, mouth moving, his voice also lost in the noise. Arm circling above her head, Fellows then stretched her arms in a V down by her sides. The squad responded, forming a wedge and moving in formation, weapons drawn, shields in position, toward the people on the ground, halting at each person in order to pat down for weapons, systematically and tactically making their way to the semicircle of cars. Four of the squad took control of those searched, lining them up, hands behind their heads on the curb. The helicopter continued to hover.

  Salt and Fellows, out front, advanced, shields raised, then lowered, then raised again, as they approached the cars. Salt was first at the beater out of which she thought the shots had been fired, approaching from the rear of the car, Pepper and the rookie following. She quickly peeked into the rear compartment. Nothing but a baby seat. “Backseat clear,” she shouted, moving forward to the inch of frame between the back and the front doors. “In the car, don’t move,” she shouted, gun pointed at the back of a person who lay facedown across the front seat. Pepper opened the car door while Salt covered. He nudged one leg and the young man turned a side of his face up. “Stay cool,” Pepper said. “Let me see your hands.” Barely audible above the ambient noise, he shouted again, “Keep your hands up and sit up.” The man complied, sitting upright, hands touching the ceiling of the car. Pepper, covered by Salt and Fellows, holstered and began a pat-down, waistband, torso, down the guy’s legs to his high-top shoes. “Move one muscle and you’re gone, dude,” Pepper said, nodding at Fellows’ pistol and backing out of the car with a silver-tone gun in his hand. He tucked the gun in his waistband, leaned back in the car, cuffs in hand. “Turn your back to me, hands in back, too.” He cuffed the man, lifted him from the car, and led him to sit with the others, who inched away, staring at him wide-eyed.

  Fellows looked up at the news copter, took out her phone, and, finger in her other ear, began trying to talk over the noise above, ducking her head and wincing in frustration.

  The group, all of whom now sat on the curb, seemed a happenstance coming together of two separate parties, one local bunch from The Bluff, Atlanta’s most blighted neighborhood, the other from an out-of-state college in town to support the march. The girls, who were with the out-of-towners, knew nothing of the locals, including the guy with the gun, who had stopped to admire the dancing girls.

  The helicopter finally swirled off, its lights sweeping the gold dome of the state capitol building. The press conferees, oblivious to the close call on the corner above and recovering from the backfire, began their presentation on the City Hall steps, cables and news trucks lining both sides of the street, which left only a single lane open for traffic, along which now crept a single vehicle driven by a young white woman leaning on the car’s horn. Heads turned from the spokesperson behind the bouquet of microphones. Mouth twisted in this-has-gotten-on-my-last-nerve disgust, Fellows nodded Salt toward the motorist. Stepping into the street next to the young woman’s now blocked car, Salt tapped on the driver’s window with her knuckles. “Ma’am?”

  The window slid down, driver in midsentence. “. . . instead of harassing black people, how about clearing the streets so people can drive. I’ve been sitting in traffic for over an hour,” said the girl, the familiar odor of alcohol rising with every slurred word from her mouth.

  “On your way home?” Salt asked, rolling some of the tension of the prior moments off her shoulders.

  “I would be. What’s going on? There are fire hoses blocking the street back there.” She pointed to the block below.

  “May I see your driver’s license?” Salt’s flight-or-fight breaths returning to normal; relief from the threat, quick decision making, and muscle-memory reactions kicking in.

  “What?”

  “Your license.”

  “I’m on my way home.” The woman reached down and the window began to scroll up. Salt stuck the baton in the window and it automatically retreated. “Ma’am, please turn your car off and step out.”

  “I will not. I’m tired and ready to go home. You don’t have any reason to stop me.”

  “I can smell alcohol on your breath from here and your speech is slurred. I’d like to make sure you’re safe to drive.”

  The woman began to cry. Salt opened the door and hoisted her by her elbow. “Why can’t I go through?” She fumbled with a tiny clutch bag from which she retrieved her license. “Janine Sanders” was twenty-two years old and had an address that explained the current year’s Lexus she was driving.

  “As you can see”—Salt nodded to the squad and the former partyers now in custody—“we have what we call a ‘situation’ and our resources are limited. Do you have someone who can come get you and your car?”

  “My car?”

  “I can’t let you drive, suspecting as I do that you’ve had too much to drink.”

  The girl sniffed and turned her mascara-smudged face up to look at Salt. “I went to a shitty party.” She began to cry harder. “Now you are completely ruining my night.”

  “Park your car there.” Salt pointed to the yellow curb.

  Janine did as she was instructed, crying and wiping her nose on her sparkly T-shirt. Once she was parked, Salt took the keys to the Lexus, made her put on the coat she had in the backseat, and called the girl’s father, to whom she gave instructions on how to avoid most of the melee to get to them. “He’s on his way,” Salt told her.

  “He’s a bastard, too,” Janine said.

  “Stay strong, Janine,” Salt said. “Stay strong.”

  • • •

  Pepper and Salt sat together in the back of the van at four a.m. There was little conversation; all of them were so tired, the constant state of alert catching up to them, their bodies exhausted. “Those shots—we were lucky.” Pepper leaned back against the wall of the van. “Dude.” Salt patted his knee.

  LIL D

  “Why you ain’t ever got no money?” Latonya punched clothes down into one of the black plastic garbage bags. “Man be payin’ you.”

  Lil D was sure she was in a bad mood because she hadn’t eaten. He was hungry, too. Danny T was sitting on one of the bags eating potato chips. Lil D looked for a towel for around his neck, to cover the mark, trying to stay cool. “We ain’t makin’ no street money now. We be goin’ straight. He still get a cut but he don’t want no dirty money. And he still got all his kids and they mamas.”

  “You got a child, too, Lil D. And me.”

  Most of the lightbulbs in the apartment were burned out and since they were moving nobody bothered to replace them. The bags with their clothes, sheets, and towels were everywhere waiting to be stumbled on or to suffocate Danny T, running from bag to bag, climbing on or trying to crawl into them, their contents spilling.

  “Just go to the new place for now.” He jerked a towel from the bottom of a pile. “Man say we savin’ money for the business. An’ I ain’t wearin’ no old clothes, neither. He say we got to maintain a image.”

  “What kind of playa you be, D? You work three jobs, Sam’s, at the club, and you still slingin’ a little dope.”

  Danny T ran and flopped across Lil D’s lap, spilling his bag of chips. “Damn, T.” The toddler looked up at his dad, laughed, and started scooping the chips into his mouth and smearing some on the floor. Lil D picked up one of the books Man had given him for Danny, one about trains. “Come on, boy.” He picked him up to get him out of Latonya’s way and opened the book. The card fell out, Salt’s card. He’d put it in the book when he’d found it in his pants, the ones he’d been wearing when she’d come by to tell him about Mary. “I got to go downtown to do the DNA test,” he said to Latonya.

  “You ain’t care ’bout Mary.”

  He knew right where the building for the DNA lab was, near the MARTA on Peachtree. Sometimes he’d called Mary M ’n’ M, the times they’d be
together like brother and sister, like family. “Wasn’t like me and her had no kind of regular life.”

  SHAME

  “So you think you understand the reason he committed suicide, just not why on that day, on your birthday?” The old wooden office chair creaked as Dr. Marshall, arms crossed, leaned back.

  “I think it was pain and shame—depression and stigma. So much so that he had to give up, his kids, me and my brother, to rid himself of it. Maybe he lost track of what day it was, or maybe—I just don’t know.” Salt stiffened her arms on the seat cushion of her chair across from Marshall and looked down at her uniform. She’d taken off the gear belt and set it beside her on the floor.

  “Why do you think he didn’t get help? Why didn’t your mother insist?”

  “My mother? She would have fought against it. Going to a shrink? Sorry, psychiatrist. She believed in church healing but wouldn’t even do that because she was ashamed.”

  “Lot of shame in your family.”

  “I know that’s right.”

  “What about you? How do you feel about your father having killed himself on your birthday? Could it be that you feel shame?”

  She was hyperaware of the belt, holster, and gun on the floor at her right side. Her throat closed up so tight she felt she might pass out trying to keep the tears at bay.

  “There have been some who theorize that our childhoods end or start to end with the first experience of shame. I’m wondering if, in all your attempts at saving, you aren’t trying to save childhoods?”

  She rose up, grateful to be off the issue of her personal pain. “This city might find peace if it didn’t keep shaming itself. Murders show the city for what it is, has done, or has failed to do. Murders point fingers. Murders are shaming. Peace is what I want for them. Peace.”

  • • •

  From the top deck of the parking garage where she and Wills sat in her car they had a view of the black night and diamond-starred city. “As soon as I wear it to work, it will get out and either you or I will get transferred,” Salt said. “You’ve worked Homicide for years. It’s what you love. It makes sense that I’d be the one to go, to another assignment or another shift, and then we’d never see each other.” She kept her eyes on the city, afraid of ruining the feelings between them, of ruining how they felt about the engagement. “We also need to discuss where we’re going to live—whose house. This seems too hard, harder than getting engaged should be.”

  “‘The course of true love . . .’ and all. I’ve been around the block. We’ll work it out.” He reached over for her hand, holding it down on the seat between them.

  “Wills, I want to tell everyone, to announce our relationship, but we need to decide at least where I should ask to be transferred.” She felt ready to cry again. In little more than a few hours she was becoming a weeper.

  OFFICE CALLS

  There were no further planned protests, but the city was on edge. Any incident could reignite smoldering frustrations. So for now detectives were still in uniform and on twelve-hour shifts, but Salt was back to Homicide.

  Flanked by the Things, Huff stopped beside her desk. He’d seemed a little stiff and standoffish since the brownies. “Guy keeps calling me. Wants me to get you to call him. I figure you wanted to talk to him you’d have given him your mobile.”

  “Thanks, Sar . . . , uh, Huff.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Huff?” Behind him the Things mimicked his quizzical hands-on-hips posture.

  “It’s your name?”

  He laid a pink callback note on her desk. “Jim Britton. Says he talked to you at the quarry, on Felton’s case.”

  She looked at the note. “Why’s he calling me?”

  “He didn’t say. I asked him if he wanted to speak to Felton. He said you.” Huff turned and caught the Things miming him. “You clowns got nothing to do? I’m sure some of those files need packing.” He nodded toward the back. Barney and Daniels did a Road Runner exit, ducking down the nearest row of cubicles.

  Salt leaned into the aisle watching Huff scan the tops of the cubicles for the two detectives. Her desk phone rang its broken-short-circuit-sounding ring.

  “You owe me,” said an angry voice.

  “Mr. Makepeace.”

  “I’m makin’ this call anonymously.”

  “Suits me.” She leaned back and propped the phone with her shoulder.

  “There is no honor among thieves.”

  “Say again.” She pressed the buzzing earpiece closer.

  “You dug up your family’s silver yet, white girl?”

  “Any day now.”

  “That’s all you got to say?”

  “How can I help you, Sugar Pie?”

  “That’s what I like about you, Snow. You listen more than you talk. What I’m callin’ about is ’cause a them college girls got shot.”

  Salt sat up.

  “See, ’cause I’m crippled and homeless, none a these boys out here in the street care if I hear their business. So here’s the deal, the ones sellin’ flex in the trap at Sam’s, they sell to them white boys in the truck they showin’ all over TV.”

  “The truck? The one with the guys that gunned down the Spelman girls?” She slid a pad over and picked up a pen. “They were selling fake?”

  “They showin’ some other truck on TV? Yeah, fake, flex.”

  “Why would the dealers not give up the truck?”

  “They flexin’, man. They don’t want word out they sell fake shit to white folks. Damn! I got to explain everything.”

  “Who was in the trap? Who sold them the flex?”

  “Man’s brother. The one they call ‘Johnny C.’ It was his little runners.”

  “Was it a drive-through or a to-go order? They got a phone number?”

  “You the detective! Expect me to do all your work?”

  “I will owe you if this pans out.”

  “How ’bout some silver, knives and forks, or a silver platter? Yeah, that’s it, a silver serving tray.”

  “Or maybe you’ll just have to be at peace knowing you’ve done the right thing.”

  “Shut up, whitey. They called ahead for an eight-ball.” He hung up.

  Salt held the phone, thinking how to go about verifying Makepeace’s information and what she should do with it. Unconsciously, she’d been sliding Britton’s callback note with her fingers. She dialed the number. “Maybe lightning will strike twice,” she said to herself.

  “Britton.” He answered on the first ring, his voice sharp-tempered, irritated, not at all like the meek man who’d helped them at the quarry.

  “This is Detective Alt. You left a message for me to call.”

  “Oh. Thank you.” He paused, switching gears before continuing. “This isn’t about the case.”

  “Oh?”

  “At least not that case.”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t say much.”

  “Someone just told me that was a good thing.”

  “Detective, the reason I’m calling is my two children—two very good children.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Britton. I’m not following you.”

  “The brickworks.”

  “What? The mass grave?”

  “It’s going to come out about my great-grandfather, the mayor, the conditions, the abuses.”

  She didn’t know what to say.

  “Detective?”

  “We can’t control what the media reports, Mr. Britton.”

  “I’ve spent my life learning how to clean up waste, taking care of the environment, cleaning up land. My father was a good man.” His voice was fading. “We inherited a deplorable legacy.”

  “Why me? How can I help?” She swiveled her chair, a little frustrated trying to figure out what Britton’s call was all about.

  “I know—
first-world angst, right?”

  “I’m not sure what to tell you.”

  “Couldn’t you blather some cant about how I shouldn’t feel guilty for something that happened a long time ago?”

  She’d turned to her coat hanging on the peg behind her desk. “Mr. Britton, I was born and still live in the rural South. The ghosts never seem to rest. They’re always rising.”

  It was Britton’s turn at silence.

  She took a long breath, then exhaled. “You do good work, the environmental thing. That’s good.”

  “Good luck, Detective.”

  • • •

  They sat around a table in the break room. Detective Chatterjee looked beleaguered, exhausted. The dark semicircles under his eyes had deepened, giving him a hangdog look. Huff had stayed after their shift so they could meet with the midnight-shift sergeant, Sergeant White, Chatterjee’s supervisor, about the information from Makepeace. Chatterjee’s jacket hung more loosely than ever, his white shirt puckering around his waist. Sergeant White was in uniform, having come directly from working his extra job at the Fox Theatre. Midnights for a sergeant could be a good gig to catch up on sleep.

  “Couple ways to work this. ’Course it’s your call. Salt can stay over or Chatterjee can come in early, go out with her. Maybe you guys want to work it on your own?” Huff said.

  “I’m already having to coordinate with the feds,” Chatterjee said.

  “If it were me, I’d let Salt do her thing. She knows that beat. If there’s anything to this guy’s story, she can suss it out,” Huff said.

  “You don’t talk much,” Sergeant White said, looking at her. “You still got head problems?”

  Salt, realizing she’d been fingering the wave of hair over the scar on her forehead, gave the coil of hair a quick tug and dropped her hand. “I’m just tired, I guess.”

  “I could use the help, Sarge,” Chatterjee said to his sergeant.