“Black with the silver lettering? Where’s he cut?”
“Just his arm. Yeah, he love them Raiders. They go to jail almost much as he do.”
“Where on his arm?” Salt pictured Big D in his old Raiders shirt, old OG.
“His top arm, near his pit.”
“How long since he was cut?”
“Just a minute.”
“Who cut him?”
“I diiiid.” Shannell dragged out her last word, just like a kid, sampling the consequences of a partial confession.
“Why this time?”
“We just always fight.”
“Get in the car and help me find him. Where’s the knife?” There was no place on her skinny body to conceal much of anything.
“D took it.” She grabbed the door handle before Salt could press the automatic lock release. Then she had one leg in the open window of the back door before Salt saw what she was doing. “Aw, Shannell, don’t come through the window, let me get the door unlocked.”
“Oh, I can.” She had one leg in and one out, all jittery, she couldn’t be still even when stuck. Finally, she got all the way back out. “I can’t never decide which way to go.”
“Just get in the backseat on the other side so I can see and talk to you while we look for Big D. I don’t know why you stay with him.”
“I’m not scared of him. He the one cut.”
“He’s always the one cut. Why doesn’t he move out?”
Shannell passed in front of the headlights to get to the other side of the car. “’Cause I’m Shannell and he luuuvv my cooda potpie!” she sang, grabbing her crotch, hoochie dancing and laughing. When the skin-and-bones woman opened the back-right door and plopped onto the seat, Salt was overwhelmed by Shannell’s odor: metallic crack, recent sexual encounters, and the reek of days without proximity to any body of water larger than a shot glass. She tried not to smile or breathe in the “cooda potpie.” Salt exhaled as she tripped the auto lock system, the simultaneous clicks of the four locks ensuring Shannell’s containment in the caged backseat. She turned her head to the open window, scanning the street while she took in air.
Everyone in and around The Homes knew Shannell cut Big D on a regular basis. Big D never showed for court because he almost always had warrants out on him for some crime or other, usually receiving stolen autos. But now he had to be found quick. With a cut to the upper arm he might be bleeding heavy. Shannell might go down for his murder tonight rather than next week or next year, though the opportunity would probably come to her again.
Salt’s hands on the steering wheel were still just for a moment before she shifted the gear arm to go into the urgent search for Big D. As she checked the rearview mirror something in her own reflection, in her eyes, reminded her of the skinny kid she’d been when she’d needed that prayer. Along with an adrenaline surge, she saw herself watching from the twilight woods, her hands on rough tree bark, the lights of her own home. Lead me through the darkness.
The call log, open on the console beside her, was going on three pages long now. It was almost time for the shift to be over. The gun belt cut into her hips. Her water bottle in the console had been empty since around eight, when the zone busted into violence. Calls rolled, one not over before they were called for the next, every one somebody’s emergency. Her bladder shot her a sharp reminder. Unlike the men, she couldn’t just unzip behind an abandoned building. And now she and Shannell would be tracking Big D and there would be reports, tickets, and the logs to finish after either finding D dead or something close to dead.
Shannell’s funk stewed in the patrol car. It was hard to keep watch for D and roll fast enough to get fresh air through the window. They crawled through The Homes trying to pick up a blood trail or a sighting of D in his Raiders shirt. Back to the alley where the fight had ended, asking each corner gang, passing the dope traps, asking after D, bloody minutes dripping away. These five- or ten-block streets were filled with the scrapings of the young who had nothing to lose and the old who’d already lost everything. Here blood was cheap. People had stopped taking much note of it when it was splattered on the ground. While a halo of bright city lights illuminated the sky above, the lights of these sorry streets were either shot out or so few and far between that there were more shadows than light. At the corner of Moury and Thirkeld, Shannell shrieked, “I see him, there he is, look by the barrel.” Salt turned the exterior spotlight over the vacant lot and there beside a rusted fire barrel was a huge mound, Raiders silver dimmed by dirt. D, on the ground, not moving. She pressed the accelerator, tires grabbing the curb, undercarriage scraping metal against concrete, driving the car into the lot as glass popped and cracked in the short weeds beneath the tires as they crossed over to D. Shannell screamed to be released to get to the man she’d stabbed. “Deeee.” Salt caught glimpses of her in the rearview mirror, twisting in and out of the reflection. Swiftly she refocused the spotlight on D, then manually lifted the single lock on the driver’s door and left all other doors locked. Shannell screamed again when she saw that she was being left in the prisoner compartment.
In a couple of strides Salt was out, leaning over D, her fingers feeling for a pulse in the sweaty rolls of his neck. She was both relieved and furious when D groaned and tried to push up with one hand. Blood left his brain again and full consciousness eluded him. He rolled and slumped back toward the ground. Keying the radio mic on her shoulder, Shannell’s muffled screams in the background, she called out the location for the ambulance: “Emergency Code 3.”
“3306, raise 3394. Sarge, I’m out on a person stabbed. Ambulance en route.” D went still again, his eyes rolling back under half-closed lids. Salt sprinted to the cruiser for the first-aid kit and scene tape. She snatched the keys off her belt and popped the trunk. The lid jumped up, blocking Shannell’s smeary face, plastered to the rear window. The car rocked with Shannell’s attempts to change her status, to argue her case to get out.
“3306, you okay?” Sarge checking on her.
“Af-firm.”
Inside the trunk she found a ridiculous plethora of highway flares, a garbage bag of stuffed animals, a bicycle wheel, no kit, and no yellow ribbon. “Shit fire,” she muttered. The car had been to too many crime scenes and no one had mustered the energy to replace supplies. She fantasized briefly about lighting the flares around Big D. If he went south, Homicide would give her hell about not stringing the tape and preserving physical evidence. Again, she hoped D would live.
Over the radio she heard the Code 8s announced for other cars going out of service. Her shift was en route to the precinct, their night over, done. The next shift would be in no hurry to enter the melee. She was now officially on overtime, slogging through a haze. If she had to run it would be slower; perps could catch a corner sooner. Her brain on overload, she registered the checklist of crime scene duties. There wasn’t much benefit to police overtime. She needed to pee worse than ever.
Salt slammed the trunk. Shannell’s face strained toward the dark crumple of Big D. She would cross the t’s and dot the i’s to make sure Shannell would spend at least the next month in jail, before the judge would get tired of D not showing up for the hearings. During that month or so Shannell would cool down and be off the pipe, and Big D would stay alive and his wound would heal. Then they would have a fresh start at the same games all over again. Unless D died. Then Homicide would take it and Shannell would never have another chance.
Salt walked around Big D, reminded of his large circumference, needing to turn him to check his breathing. He just might survive, and if he was not in shock but just passed-out drunk, he could still have the knife Shannell stabbed him with. Although the ursine-looking man was normally gregarious and easygoing, he could be a mean drunk, and at three-hundred-plus pounds he could do damage. She’d once seen him tear a door off its hinges with a single swipe.
“Where are you hurt, Big D? Can you
hear me?” She hoped he was conscious enough to recognize her voice. No response, just his labored breathing. Blood was pooling under his body. “D, it’s Salt.” Carefully she knelt closer. “D?” She touched his arm, thick as a ham. “D, it’s Salt.” Keying the mic again she asked for the ETA of the ambulance. She pulled at his meaty shoulder to turn him but he didn’t help her, his dense body was close to deadweight, his left cheek stayed pressed to a patch of dusty weeds. She succeeded only in moving his torso half an inch forward and back. His old Raiders jersey was torn and losing pieces of the luminescent lettering. Then he groaned, opened his eyes, and said, “Bitch, I’ll—” and then lost his words as the blood ebbed in his brain. But his hand had inched to the ground under him.
Finger on the radio transmit button, it occurred to her to ask for a backup. But she couldn’t see a knife, just bright blood soaking into the dirt. Shit, she didn’t need this. She rubbed at her gritty eyes and reminded herself to keep her hands off the itchy scar. Tired, hungry, and on her last nerve, she was too near to having the night done, ready for relief, and here was D reaching underneath his chest.
“He done dropped the knife.” The voice, bitter and strained, came from behind her. Darrell, aka Lil D, son of the D on the ground. She’d seen him earlier at the dope hole near Sam’s Chicken Shack. Lil D, named after his father, Shannell and Big D’s twenty-four-year-old, on a sure path to dying in the streets and unlikely to reach twenty-five. He showed what he had—a smeared butcher knife. “He done dropped it and I picked it up after him.” Small, thin, and shirtless, he held the knife, blade out. His body, like that of his mother, was small but muscles tensed and twisted beneath his deep brown skin. With one hand he held a towel, ever present around his neck, covering a port-wine mark; with the other he kept swinging the knife forward and back in the same rhythm as his mother’s arms when she’d flagged Salt down earlier. Lil D was a holder for the dope boys, lowest rung on the crack ladder, paying off his mother’s debts when she couldn’t.
“Put the knife on the ground,” Salt ordered. This family couldn’t stay still. Lil D kept moving and saying that D had dropped it. “Lil D, put it on the ground!”
Shannell yelled something sharp; Salt could just make out “D” and “My baby.” The big car rocked with her exertions.
Lil D stopped where he was and, still holding the knife, looked toward Shannell’s muffled screaming. “What you pick her up for?”
“Lil D, knife on the ground.”
Last thing Salt wanted was to tell Lil D his mother was under arrest. Big D began moaning again.
“My daddy just laying there like a dog. Where’s the ambulance?”
“I called. It’s on the way. Put the knife on the ground.” Salt was trying to keep her eyes on the blade as well as on Big D’s attempts at regaining consciousness, hoping that Big D didn’t have anything else under his huge belly that could be used as a weapon.
Now she keyed the mic, asking for backup. “3306 to radio, start me a unit,” and then, talking to Lil D, “Lil D, he’s okay. I need you to put the knife on the ground.”
“My mama ain’t goin’ to jail.”
Salt kept close hold of the mic, her safety net, the antenna biting into her cheek, everyone at the precinct changing shifts, worst time for trouble and she was calling, “Radio, give me a backup.” She really didn’t want to start a move to her holster.
“She ain’t goin’ to jail,” repeated Lil D. Several more members of the gang and gang wannabes came up from the street.
“You know she won’t stay more than a month. She’ll get rehab.” Salt tried to reassure him.
A crowd was forming. People came to watch. Word was out. Shannell was still screaming in the car but wasn’t visible because the windows had fogged over; Salt added possible heatstroke to the growing crisis. Big D moaned louder. Lil D still held the knife. Rocks, bits of glass, and the rough stubble of weeds bit into Salt’s knees as she knelt at Big D’s back. She kept her eyes on the crowd, on their eyes, all wide and glittery, reflecting light from the cruiser’s headlights. The crowd grew: gangbangers, dopers, users, children, all watching, turning eagerly to one another with predictions, excited to see how it would play. One of the gang members, Stone, his face permanently frozen in anger, jaw muscles bulging, eyes squinting, brow furrowed, called out like a hellfire preacher, yelling to Lil D and for the crowd’s benefit, “You gone let your daddy just lie there? You gone let Miss Poleese take your mama to jail?” He walked closer, four yards and closing, crowd following, mouths moving, necks straining. Someone, a man’s voice in the middle of the group, testified back, responding to Stone’s excitations, “That’s right.” Several women loudly joined the call and response: “They don’t care,” in support of Lil D, identifying with the too-long wait for an ambulance and D on the ground in the broken-bottle grass. The crowd now closer, within stride distance, arms gleaming with sweat, hands making whirling gestures.
“Y’all, please, give him room to breathe, let some air get through.” She swept space with her arm.
A far-off siren wailed; it was hard to approximate distances because of echoes off the city hills.
Careful not to interact with Stone; one wrong word, one stupid move, by anyone, could ignite the scene. One misjudgment could tip her hand toward her holster; she already had the “in jeopardy” reason to draw her gun. But it wouldn’t go over well with the crowd. She was on empty and desperate, grabbing for anything. She thought of the prayer and Shannell, dancing in the headlights. “Cooda potpie,” Salt said out loud.
“What?” said Lil D.
“Cooda potpie. Big D loves her cooda potpie.”
“That bullshit.” Lil D looked toward the car and his mother.
“Listen, Lil D. She said he loves her cooda potpie. Big D is going to make it, again. He’s going to be okay. He’s more drunk than cut.”
From the crowd, someone laughed, and seized the chance to have a speaking part. “Tha’s right, she always says he loves her ‘pie.’”
The prayer, the way her father would calm her when she was little, when she was scared something would happen to him, when she was on the edge. “Lead me,” Salt said to herself again. She said to Lil D, “He’s okay. Your daddy’s okay. He’s okay.”
A close siren yelped as blue lights spangled the block—Pepper. His cruiser spun up, slinging dirt, grass, and gravel as he slid the car into the lot. The car rocked from the sudden stop and Pepper jumped out, leaving the car door swinging—cool. The crowd loved his entrance and began yelling, “Pepper, Pepper, it’s Pepper,” calling out his street name. The ambulance, on the tail of his cruiser, turned and crossed the curb. The kids in the crowd got louder, sing-songing the street names of the two cops, “Salt and Pepper, Salt and Pepper,” laughing at each other.
“Now! Lil D! Put down that knife. The paramedics need to get to Big D. You can talk to your mother, let her know Big D is going to be okay,” Salt kept telling him, watching for his shoulders to lower, watching for the slack in his arm.
Lil D let it go, slung the knife to the ground, close enough to where Salt could grab it. And the paramedics were on Big D in an instant.
Pepper joined the inner circle, pointing to Salt’s holster. “Sometimes you too cool. You didn’t even unsnap? Must have been hot what with the crowd and all. Girl, you can’t cut shit so close, so soon.” He tapped her head with his knuckles.
“You’re the cool one. Great entrance. Thanks,” she said, and went to catch up with Lil D, walking toward his mom in the car.
Lil D’s head tilted forward as they walked, pulling the towel to wipe his face. Though his skin was a shade of dark mahogany, the port-wine birthmark, darker, stood out clearly from below his left ear to his collarbone. Salt and he both reached for the door handle at the same time. Shannell jumped out and up against her son.
As they lifted Big D onto a gurney, Pepper stood by with the parame
dics, one of whom gave a thumbs-up that Big D would make it. Lil D dashed from his mother to the ambulance. The gang members, including Stone, walking backward, still watching, began to leave the scene.
The crowd filled the hot air with a chorus of, “Cooda potpie, Salt and Pepper, cooda potpie, Salt and Pepper.”
Pepper, grinning, walked up to Salt at the patrol car. “What’s that they’re yelling?” he asked, motioning toward the crowd. “‘Pie’?”
5.
FADED LIGHT
It had been two a.m. by the time Shannell was booked and the paperwork completed. Except for the 9mm on the seat beside her, Salt’s gear, uniform shirt, belt, and all its accessories were stowed in the trunk of her Honda. With her T-shirt drying from the wind coming in the car’s open windows and the city lights fading in the rearview mirror, Salt concentrated as the rest of the prayer came to her:
Jesus, tender shepherd, lead me
Through the darkness be Thou near me
Guide thy little lamb tonight
Wake me with the morning bright.
Halfway into the late-hour commute, flashbacks inserted themselves between the words of the prayer: Big D’s ragged shirt, Shannell coming through the darkness, her “cooda potpie,” and the birthmark on Lil D’s thin neck—a regular Homes family. She’d arrested every one of them, except a daughter who was young, living with a grandmother. She’d tried to get social services for them, particularly for Lil D, when he was young and she’d been, what, naive?
“Ten years now,” she said out loud. “My first night back. What difference will I have made, Pops?”
As one of the tires bumped over something, Salt jolted back from her altered state, slowed, looked in the rearview mirror but couldn’t see anything except a change in the hue of the pavement. The dark trees in the distance, backlit by some dim source, seemed foreign, one of those moments when, even though the road is right, the mind doesn’t recognize a familiar way. Then the sign appeared that announced the little town, Cloud, whose rural address was hers and she felt a quick flutter of relief. Construction of a new mini-mart presented itself, a skeleton on the country landscape. The city was spreading toward her small town and its fields and farms.
The Policeman's Daughter Page 3