Man, so big on claiming his share—she saw his point. But what share or justice was there for Billy, for Shannell?
Pepper pulled up. “Why you just sittin’ here? Calls are backing up.”
“I just got through talking to Man,” she answered.
“I worry about you,” Pepper said. “You’re closer to people here than outside the job.”
“Come on, Pep.”
“I keep telling you, you got to let Ann fix you up. You clean up pretty good.” He reared back with that smile. “I’m not gonna get into all that girlfriend talk but as I remember, your last date was what, five years ago?” He bugged his eyes out at her.
Salt shook her head and said, “McKinzie was a jerk. I tried.”
“That was one guy.”
“I might clean up on the outside but I’m more at home here than in some club on the north side. I’m no good at small talk. I end up frozen, trying to keep from saying something that sounds freaky, cop talk or Homes talk.”
“People like to hear police stories. Sex and violence, you know.”
“I don’t like trotting out some misery from ‘Tales of The Homes’ for entertainment.” Salt shook her head. “It feels sleazy.”
Pepper turned his face to hers. “Unless there’s a point to the story, something to be learned.” He was serious.
“That’s what I’m talking about. I don’t do small talk. And I’m not getting on the precinct dating circuit.”
“Okay, Hot Pepper’s ‘Psychiatrist, Five Cents’ sign is down. But you get me worried, spending more time talking to gangers than to regular folks.”
Radio was calling for units to clear to answer a robbery in progress the next beat over. They simultaneously slammed their cars in gear. Salt switched on her blue lights and watched as the strobe found and washed over Stone. He hadn’t gone far but stood leaning against the wall in the growing shadows of the 1400 building. He was watching Man, who was laughing with someone on a stoop two rows down.
She reached to switch off the cruiser’s AC both to give the car more power and as a reaction to the sudden sensation of a chill from cold sweat underneath her vest.
10.
THE IMPRESSION
A disturbance call brought Salt to the Thirkeld Avenue buildings. Night clouds were boiling high, backlit by lightning, like some old black-and-white horror movie, rain holding off until the climax. Young teenage boys were swinging fists, sticks, rocks, whatever they could pick up or put their hands on to bash one another. It would only be months before some of them would have guns instead of having to make do.
“3306 to radio, I’ve got a fight in progress. Start me another unit.” She waded in to stop the beatings. Her hands, strong from holding sheep shears, hoof clippers, and feed bags, firmly grasped young muscles, slippery with sweat and dirt, inserting her body as a barrier between the determined combatants, their grunts and growls like those of deep-throated infants.
Stone was on the steps of a nearby apartment, his red-brown face gleeful, the rest of his tall, thin body invisible, out of the light of the porch bulb above him. “Tom-Tom, get him!” he yelled over and over.
The blue lights of Pepper’s cruiser added to the flashes from the sky as he pulled up to the brawl. “Which ones?” he shouted.
She had two on the ground, one of her boots between each set of legs. “All.” Her breath short with the fight.
He was already cuffing two together with his hand on a third. The boys, shirtless, their pants pulled or torn, still strained to get at one another. The ratcheting of the steel cuffs around slender wrists was accompanied by wincing as the metal restraints pinched skin against bone. Separation led to silence once the boys were herded into the car cages.
Stone had disappeared.
“I thought I saw the vulture,” Pepper said, referring to Stone.
“He was here.” They were writing out the detention forms on the trunk of Pepper’s car. A distant roll of thunder brought more surety of a storm.
“That guy bothers me. He always seems to be around on your calls. Where does he stay?” Pepper asked, pulling out another form from his clipboard.
“I don’t know. With anyone he can. Man takes care of him. I lost track of whatever family he had about eight or nine years ago. I’m not sure he ever had much of a family.”
Salt looked toward Shaw Street, a street on a steep hill in the project. A flash behind the clouds of the Shaw buildings lent them starkness. Her first memory of Stone, her first Christmas in The Homes. Little kids on their new bicycles and tricycles. As much to cheer herself as anything, she had started singing into the car’s outside mic, “Here comes Santa Claus. Here comes Santa Claus.” The children would laugh or hide shy smiles behind their hands. She had just turned the corner onto the top of Shaw. Two children were sailing down the hill on new Big Wheel bikes. She began to sing, then saw the boy sitting halfway down the hill on the gray stone wall that fronted the apartments. He was naked from the waist down, his skin the same color as the bricks of The Homes. His hands were in his lap, in one hand a thing that glinted. Her voice caught midnote. The kids sat quiet, watching from the bottom of the hill as she drove and stopped the car beside the boy. His pants were around his ankles, his erect penis in one hand, a mirror held close to his erection in the other hand. By the time he looked up she was out on him. His lowered pants would have kept him from running but there was no evidence of panic in his demeanor. He ejaculated immediately, as if her arrival was just the stimulus he needed. He held the cum-covered mirror up to her. She jerked his arms behind his back to cuff him and the mirror fell and shattered on the pavement. He wasn’t wearing a jacket in the bright, cold day, just a dirty tan sweatshirt that looked like it wouldn’t hold up to another wash. Wrists locked together, his already broad bony shoulders jutted up and further gained the appearance of curved vulture’s wings. She hoisted his pants and led him to the cruiser. As he climbed into the car cage he checked the interior, as if for future intelligence, in his small eyes the shine of a feral thing. Her mind worked to accommodate the experience of him. She’d been a rookie, not naive but a believer: salvation was around the corner. But that day something hard formed in her chest.
“Curtis Stone,” he gave his name when she asked. That was the first and last time she could recall hearing his first name.
“Where do you stay?”
“At 1248,” he answered, “around the corner, two buildings up, at my auntie’s.”
She took him there, looking for a guardian to accept custody so he wouldn’t have to go to detention, not on Christmas Day.
Most of the Homes residents made some attempt at Christmas decorating: a string of lights around a window, a plastic Santa in the yard, foil paper covering a door. At Stone’s auntie’s place there was nothing. Salt hit the auto lock and got out. In the back cage Stone put his lips against the window and mouthed, My auntieeeee, oooh. I’m scared, as he peered from the smeared window of the locked car.
Salt knocked and called out but couldn’t get anyone to the door. A television blared at maximum volume from inside the apartment. Her baton dented the metal door and finally got results. Two little kids in underpants and dirty shirts opened the door. Behind them the apartment was dark, the only light coming from a flickering TV, colors bouncing off the dingy walls. She shepherded the children into the apartment. Immediately inside the doorway, to the right, was a small kitchen. There was no odor of roasting turkey, only an iron skillet emitting a rancid smell from a quarter inch of congealed grease. Heat turned too high amplified the smell. The refrigerator door hung half-open, its interior light harsh among empty shelves. A roach or two dropped while families of roaches skittered from the walls.
Her eyes adjusted to the dim interior. “Hello,” she yelled. “Anybody home? Police.” Farther inside the hallway the metallic odor of crack, old sweat, dirty feet, and wet diapers overrode
the old-grease smell from the kitchen. The short hall emptied into the living room, where a large-screen TV with bad color glowed with ghosts and lines. A commercial heralded the superior qualities of beer in a pink can by featuring a blue basketball player driving a sleek purple car to a maroon ocean.
In the rainbow light from the TV two men, washed by blues, greens, then red and purple, slept sitting up on a ripped leather sofa. Across from them, a teenage girl in panties and a large T-shirt was sitting in a recliner not more than two feet away from the TV, just to the right of the blaring set, mesmerized by the screen, barely glancing at Salt before turning back to the next commercial, a lavender-haired woman earnestly preaching the importance of wise investing in a mutual fund.
Salt walked over and turned the volume down. “Where’s your mother?”
The girl stared at the TV. “She dead.”
The two little kids followed Salt’s every move, standing beside her and staring up as if she were Santa Claus. “Whose kids are these?” said Salt, pointing at the silent toddlers.
“The girl, she mine. The boy, he my auntie’s.”
“Where is your auntie?”
“She upstairs.”
The men hadn’t stirred. With the sound down on the TV the voices of other children could be heard coming from the second floor. Salt climbed the stairs to the first landing. The two toddlers from below were trying to follow her, so she had to take them by their damp, sticky little hands back down to their mother/cousin. “Watch them,” Salt told the TV girl, who reached for a pink plastic baby bottle lying on its side on the floor beside her chair. She gave it to one of the kids and the other child immediately tried to grab it.
“Is there another bottle?” asked Salt.
“I put enough in it for the two of them,” she said, turning the volume back up.
The housing authority–mandated smoke detector upstairs sounded. Neither the TV girl nor the men on the sofa stirred. Salt sprinted up the stairs and found a small stream of smoke in the hallway coming from under one of the closed bedroom doors. Kids were yipping and laughing from behind the smoking door. The door flew open, spilling five children sprinting for the stairs. “Biggie did it, Biggie did it,” they screamed. Inside the dim room there were blotches of color all over the floor. Salt’s first thought was that a Christmas toy had been left unassembled. Then she saw that broken crayons had been fed into a portable heater, which was dripping green and orange onto the worn rug. The crayon papers had produced smoke but hardly any fire, which was now out. Other than the heater, there was little else in the room except for some bare mattresses. She yanked the heater plug from the wall, then crossed over to the window to check on Stone below. She pulled back the dingy sheet that served as a curtain and found the window boarded up on the outside.
Still hoping to find a real parent, Salt followed music: “O Holy Night” coming from behind the door to another bedroom. Again there was no answer to her knock. She pushed on the door. It stuck at the top corner. She pushed harder and the door gave way suddenly and slammed into the wall. A skinny man and an even skinnier woman, both naked, jumped up from a bare mattress. The woman grabbed at a tattered curtain to cover herself, then quickly turned around to determine how much of herself she was exposing to a window. The man, seemingly relieved to see only a police officer, slumped back down on the bed. The radio on the floor beside the bed now rattled out a tinny “Here Comes Santa Claus.”
“Are you Curtis Stone’s aunt?”
“What’s that little bastard done now? No, I ain’t acceptin’ no custody. Take him to Juvenile.”
“Merry Christmas.” Salt turned, slamming the door behind her, and walked back past the now smoke-cleared crayon room and down the stairs. The scene there was just as it had been. The men slept through the smoke. The kids were screaming. The teenage girl glared at the purple-screened TV. Christmas wasn’t going to come to that apartment. The fire-starting kids who’d fled the upstairs were outside, dancing around the police car, making faces at the impervious Stone. He watched them and her without expression. “What, my auntie busy,” he’d said as she got behind the wheel. It wasn’t really a question. He flashed her a wide-eyed parody of a smile in the rearview mirror. Salt struggled to keep her face neutral while a trickle of fear prompted the beginnings of despair. She felt he’d somehow tricked her, taken something from her, let something loose or was holding a secret she should know.
On that Christmas Day she delivered Curtis Stone to Juvenile lockup. His bony twelve-year-old shoulders hunched against the cold as she walked him across the fenced, razor-wired enclosure of juvenile detention.
Salt wrote the report, notified Child Services, and was reminded that it was not against the law for kids to have no gifts at Christmas but she still thought it was a crime. That was the first holiday she had gone to buy toys in a convenience store. It was the first time she had gone to the city jail with take-out dinners. And the first time she became aware that her faith in the redemptive power of Christmas might be insufficient.
Ten years.
Now as the first hard drops of rain fell Pepper was saying, “We need to get these guys transported.”
Salt shook her head. “Right.” Then she and Pepper, cars loaded, drove through the storm, out of the projects, headed once again for juvenile detention with angry, battered boys.
11.
DOGS
They had only been one beat away, finishing another call, when radio gave out “person down/shots fired.” Now, about three minutes later, Salt watched with a sense of the absurd as Pepper in front of her almost ran over one of the bodies in the parking lot. He locked his brakes and slid on turned wheels, inches from the body of a young man. It was his beat. She would be second officer on this one. She stopped her car, blocking the entrance to the apartment parking lot on Cohen Street. The bodies of two other men lay farther into the lot. The dead men must not have been residents of the complex; no mothers or girlfriends wailing or trying, in their grief, to grab their bodies. Nothing, no one moved in the still gun-smoke-filled air.
One beater, its motor running roughly, was stopped parallel with the building, stopped not in one of the faded parking spaces but across a couple of them, three of the car doors open. The trash-strewn parking spaces, adjacent to the two-story brick apartments were empty except for a few rusted-out cars. A tattered baby bassinet with broken front legs lay crumpled against the nearest corner. Three poles, one in the middle of the lot and one at each end, provided the only lighting. Beyond the broken asphalt surface, the dingy buildings were lost in darkness.
She and Pepper got out in the otherwise quiet night, their flashlights flickering briefly over empty shadows. “God, I thought you were really gonna mess up the scene. Running over one of the bodies—not good form, Hot Pepper.”
“My lightning-quick reflexes,” he said with a short grin, wiping the sweat out of his eyes.
They cleared the idling car for possible perps and began checking the victims for vital signs, four fingers pressed under a jaw, drawing zeros on all three, no pulse, no breathing. Each young male had been shot multiple times and each had sustained at least one shot to the head. The bodies lay approximately twenty feet from one another in an almost perfect triangle around a sunken place in the pavement. The blood from each victim was seeping in slow streams toward the low spot.
Paramedics arrived, confirmed and pronounced the official deaths; flicking their cigarettes with relief, they drove away with empty buses. By the time the scene tape had been strung Homicide arrived, Gardner and Wills again, the same guys who had been on Shannell’s murder. The Homicide Unit was street-named “The Hat Squad.” Some years ago a dapper detective had started the fashion statement and it had stuck, though Gardner was sans hat as usual. They both wore short sleeves and Wills had on a red tie dotted with what looked like little femur bones. Salt and Pepper began working with them, marking the crime scen
e, collecting evidence, and trying to find, in the half-abandoned building, someone brave enough to be a witness.
Pepper was canvassing the apartments. Salt was helping Wills make the measurements, using one of the light poles in the lot for a reference point. Like shadows themselves, they all moved in and out of the light. She was holding the carpenter’s tape while he wrote the numbers. Without looking up from his notes, he asked her, “You got any dogs?”
She paused a second, uncertain she had heard him right. “Dogs?”
“Yeah, you seem like a dog person.” He smiled and looked up at her. She remembered his solid body and steady eyes from Shannell’s.
“How can you tell? I do have a dog.”
“That’s why they call us detectives. What kind? I’ve got two myself.” He moved to place the tape at the right toe of one of the victims.
“He’s a stray I found in The Homes, but I’ve been training him for three years and he’s working really well.” She called out the distance from the toe to the pole, “Eight feet, three-quarters of an inch.”
“Either you’re lucky or a good trainer. Strays can be iffy. How old was he when you found him?”
“I think he was still pretty young. I know what you mean about strays, especially from The Homes. Some have been too abused to rehabilitate.”
He moved the tape to the nose of the body. “How long you gonna stay uniform? Why don’t you put in for detective division?”
“I don’t know. I’ve still got unfinished business on my beat.” She tightened her hold on the measuring tape. “You got anything on the Shannell McCloud case?”
“Who?”
“The woman in the closet on Marcy Street. Eleven and a half feet,” she read from the tape.
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