Detroit Noir

by E. J. Olsen

  I stepped from the darkness.

  I waited one second for my face to register in his brain because I wanted him to know who I was and why he had to die.

  When I saw the fearful recognition in his eyes I fired. Once.

  Trusting my ability to hit him in the heart. Knowing one shot would attract far less attention than six.

  He fell straight down, his knees hitting the pavement with a bone-jamming thud. His hand went to his chest, and for a second he was frozen in that position, eyes locked open, blood pouring from between his fingers.

  He fell face first with a fleshy smack to the concrete.

  I made myself a cup of tea and took it to my bed. The television was on, the sound low but the light putting out something close to a comforting glow.

  My hand trembled as I brought the cup up to my lips and took a drink.

  There was nothing about Streeter on the 11 o'clock news but I knew there wouldn't be. A crack addict getting shot on a random Detroit street didn't merit a mention. Still, I watched.

  The talking heads lobbed it over to sports. I hit the mute and leaned back on my pillows as the silence filled my small basement room.

  I would go see Angela in a day or two. Give her enough time and space. Give myself enough time and space.

  My head was pounding with fatigue. I set the cup aside and closed my eyes.

  The ring of the phone jarred me awake. The TV was still on. I caught the green dial of the clock as I went for the receiver. Twelvefifteen.

  "Yeah, hello?"

  "Detective Sheffield?"

  The voice was deep but definitely female, with an authoritative calm that sent a small chill through me.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Detective, this is Lieutenant Janklow over at the Western District."

  I felt my heart give an extra beat.

  "We had a report tonight of a shooting in your district, a Curtis Streeter."

  I closed my eyes.

  "Detective Sheffield?"

  "A shooting, yes …"

  "We know what you did."

  I couldn't move.

  "Don't worry, detective, you're not alone."

  I brought a shaking hand up to my sweating face.

  "There are six of us now," the woman said. "The others asked me to call you and welcome you to our group."

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then the woman's voice came back, softer now.

  "Good night, detective."

  A click, then silence.

  I opened my eyes. My hand was still shaking as I set the receiver back in its cradle.

  Something wakes me. A sound in my dreams or something outside? I can't tell. I jerk awake, my eyes searching the darkness.

  But it isn't really dark. There is a gray light in the corners of my room, creeping in from the edges of the window. I throw the sheet aside and go to the window.

  Not dawn. Not yet. Still night but almost there.

  And then I hear it. The roaring. But it sounds different now, still edged with anger, still deep with pain. But now with a strong pulse of relentless strength. The lions will never be quieted.

  I go back to my bed. The sound is in my ears. I sleep.

  PANIC

  BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

  Chrysler Freeway

  He knows this fact: It was a school bus.

  That unmistakable color of virulent high-concentrate urine.

  A lumbering school bus emitting exhaust. Faulty muffler, should be ticketed. He's gotten trapped behind the bus in the right lane of the Chrysler Freeway headed north at about the exit for I-94, trapped at forty-five goddamned miles an hour. n disgust he shut the vent on his dashboard. What a smell! Would've turned on the A/C except he glimpsed then in the smudged rear window of the school bus, a section of which had been cranked partway open, two half-heifer-sized boys (Hispanic? Black?) wrestling together and grinning. One of them had a gun that the other was trying to snatch from him.

  "My God! He's got a—"

  Charles spoke distractedly, in shock. He'd been preparing to shift into the left lane and pass the damned bus but traffic in that lane of the freeway (now nearing the Hamtramck exit) was unrelenting, he'd come up dangerously close behind the bus. Beside him Camille glanced up sharply to see two boys struggling against the rear window, the long-barreled object that was a gun or appeared to be a gun, without uttering a word or even a sound of alarm, distress, warning. Camille fumbled to unbuckle her safety belt, turned to climb over the back of the seat where she fell awkwardly, scrambled then to her knees to unbuckle the baby from the baby's safety seat, and crouched on the floor behind Charles. So swiftly!

  In a hoarse voice crying: "Brake the car! Get away!"

  Charles was left in the front seat, alone. Exposed.

  Stunned at how quickly, how unerringly and without a moment's hesitation, his wife had reacted to the situation. She'd escaped into the backseat like a panicked cat. And lithe as a cat. While he continued to drive, too stunned even to release pressure on the gas pedal, staring at the boys in the school bus window less than fifteen feet ahead.

  Now the boys were watching him too. They'd seen Camille climb over the back of her seat, very possibly they'd caught a flash of her white thigh, a silky undergarment, and they were howling with hilarity. Grinning and pointing at Charles behind the wheel frozenfaced in fear and indecision, delighted as if they were being tickled in their most private parts. Another hulking boy joined them thrusting his heifer face close against the window. The boy waving the gun, any age from twelve to seventeen, fatty torso in a black T-shirt, oily black tight-curly hair, and a skin like something smudged with a dirty eraser, was crouching now to point the gun barrel through the cranked-open window, at an angle that allowed him to aim straight at Charles's heart.

  Laugh, laugh! There were a half-dozen boys now crowded against the bus window, observing with glee the cringing Caucasian male, of no age in their eyes except old, hunched below the wheel of his metallic-gray Acura in the futile hope of minimizing the target he made, pleading, as if the boys could hear or, hearing, be moved to have pity on him, "No, don't! No, no, God, no—"

  Charles braked the car, desperately. Swerved into the highway shoulder. This was a dangerous maneuver executed without premeditation, no signal to the driver close behind the Acura in a massive SUV, but he had no choice! Horns were sounding on all sides, furious as wounded rhinos. The Acura lurched and bumped along the littered shoulder, skidded, began to fishtail. Both Camille and Susanna were screaming. Charles saw a twisted heap of chrome rushing toward them, tire remnants and broken glass, but his brakes held, he struck the chrome at about ten miles an hour, and came to an abrupt stop.

  Directly behind Charles, the baby was shrieking. Camille was trying to comfort her, "Honey, it's all right! We are all right, honey! We're safe now! Nothing is going to happen! Nothing is going to happen to you, honey. Mommy is right here."

  The school bus had veered on ahead, emitting its jeering exhaust.

  Too fast. It happened too fast.

  Didn't have time to think. Those punk bastards …

  Had he seen the license plate at the rear of the school bus? He had not. Hadn't even registered the name of the school district or the bus company in black letters coated in grime at the rear of the bus.

  Hamtramck? Highland Park? As soon as he'd seen the gun in the boy's hand he'd been walloped by adrenaline like a shot to the heart: rushing blood to his head, tears into his eyes, racing his heart like a hammering fist.

  He was shaken, ashamed. Humiliated.

  It was the animal panic of not wanting to be shot, not wanting to die, that had taken over him utterly. The demonically grinning boys, the long-barreled object, obviously a gun, had to be a gun, the boy crouching so that he could aim through the cranked-open section of the window straight at Charles. The rapture in the thuggish kid's face as he prepared to pull the trigger.

  Camille was leaning over him, concerned. "Charles, are you a
ll right?" He was cursing the boys on the bus. He was sweating now, and his heart continued to beat erratically, as if mockingly. He told Camille yes, of course he was all right. He was fine. He was alive, wasn't he? No shots had been fired, and he hadn't crashed the car. She and Susanna were unhurt.

  He would climb out of the overheated car as, scarcely more than a foot away, traffic rushed by on the highway, and he would struggle with the goddamned strip of chrome that had jammed beneath the Acura's front bumper, and then with mangled hands gripping the steering wheel tight as death he would continue to drive his family the rest of the way home without incident.

  Camille remained in the backseat, cradling and comforting the baby.

  Comforting the baby—she should be comforting him. She'd abandoned him to death.

  He laughed. He was willing to recast the incident as a droll yet emblematic experience. One of the small and inexplicable dramas of their marriage. Saying, teasing, "You certainly got out of the passenger's seat in record time, Camille. Abandoned your poor husband."

  Camille looked at him, eyes brimming with hurt.

  "Charles, I had to protect Susanna. I only—"

  "Of course. I know. It was remarkable, what you did."

  "I saw the gun. That's all I saw. I panicked, and acted without thinking."

  "You acted brilliantly, Camille. I wish we had a video."

  Camille laughed. She was still excited, pumped up.

  Susanna, eighteen months old, their first and to-be-only child, had been changed, fed, pacified, lain gently in her crib. A miracle, the baby who usually resisted napping at this hour was sleeping.

  She'd cried herself into exhaustion. But she would forget the incident in the car, already she'd forgotten. The bliss of eighteen months.

  Camille was saying, in awe of herself, "Charles, I don't think I've ever acted so swiftly. So—unerringly! I played high school basketball, field hockey. I was never so fast as the other girls."

  Ruefully Camille rubbed her knees. She was slightly banged up—she would be bruised, she guessed. Lucky for her she hadn't broken her neck.

  Yet Camille was marveling at what she accomplished in those scant several seconds. While Charles had continued to drive the car like a zombie, helpless. She had unbuckled her seat belt and crawled over the back of the seat and unbuckled the baby and crouched with the baby behind Charles. Shielded by Charles.

  Charles understood that Camille would recall and reenact her astonishing performance many times, in secret.

  He said, "You hid behind me, which was the wise thing to do. Under the circumstances. The kids had a target, it would have been me in any case. It was purely nature, what you did. 'Protecting the young.'"

  "Charles, really! I didn't hide behind you. I hid behind the car seat."

  But I was in the car seat. "Look, you were acting instinctively. Instinct is impersonal. You acted to save a baby, and yourself. You had to save yourself in order to save the baby. It must be like suddenly realizing you can swim." Charles spoke slowly, as if the idea were only now coming to him, a way of seeing the incident from a higher moral perspective. "A boat capsizes, you're in the water, and in terror of drowning you swim. You discover that you can swim."

  "Except you don't, Charles. You don't just 'swim.' If you don't already know how to swim, you drown."

  "I mean it's nature, impersonal. It isn't volitional."

  "Yet you seem to resent me."

  "Resent you? Camille, I love you."

  The truthful answer was yes. He did resent her, unfairly. Yet he knew he must not push this further, he would say things he might regret and could not retract. You don't love me, you love Susanna. You love the baby not the father. You love the father but not much. Not enough. The father is expendable. The father is last season's milkweed seed blown in the wind. Debris.

  Camille laughed at him, though she was wanting to be kissed by him, comforted. After her acrobatics in the car, after she'd demonstrated how little she needed him, how comical and accessory he was to her, still she wanted to be kissed and comforted as if she was a wistful girl of about fourteen. Her smooth skin, her face that was round and imperturbable as a moon, maddening at times in its placidity. Charles had been attracted initially by the calmness of the woman's beauty and now he was annoyed. Camille was thirty-six years old, which is not so young, and yet even in unsparing daylight she looked at least a decade younger, her face was so unlined, her eyes so clear. Charles, forty-two, had one of those fair-skinned "patrician" faces that become imprinted with a subtle sort of age: reminding Charles, when he had to consider it, of calcified sand beneath which rivulets of fresh water are running, wearing away the sand from within.

  He was a corporation lawyer. He was a very good corporation lawyer. He would protect his clients. He would protect his wife, his daughter. How?

  "Camille, don't misunderstand me. Your instinct was to protect Susanna. There was nothing you could have done for me if one of those kids had fired the gun."

  "If you had been shot, we would have crashed anyway.

  We might all be dead now."

  Camille spoke wistfully. Charles wanted to slap her.

  "Well. We're not, are we?"

  Instead, they were in their bedroom in Bloomfield Hills. A large white colonial on a hill in Baskings Grove Estates, near Quarton Road. Leafy hilly suburb north of the derelict and depopulated city of Detroit where, years ago as a boy, Charles had lived in a residential neighborhood above Six Mile Road near Livernois until his parents, afraid of "coloreds" encroaching upon them, had panicked, sold their property, and fled. They were now living in Lake North, Florida. Charles thought of them as he tugged off his noose-necktie and flung it down. Some of them, they'd kill you as soon as look at you. They're crack addicts, animals.

  In the car returning home, Camille had tried to call 911 but the cell phone hadn't worked, and now that they were home, and safe, Charles debated whether to report the incident to Detroit police, now that the emergency had passed. No one had been hurt, after all.

  Camille objected, "But they—those boys—might hurt someone else. If they play that trick again. Another driver might really panic seeing the gun aimed at him, and crash his car."

  Charles winced at this. Really panic. As if he, Charles, had panicked only moderately. But of course he had, why deny it? Camille had been a witness. The swarthy-skinned boys laughing like hyenas in the rear bus windows had been witnesses.

  While Camille prepared their dinner, Charles made the call. He spoke carefully, politely. His voice did not quaver: … calling to report an incident that happened at about 4:15 this afternoon on the Chrysler Freeway headed north at about the Hamtramck exit. A very dangerous incident involving a gun, that almost caused an accident. High school boys. Or maybe junior high … Charles spoke flatly describing in terse words what had happened. What had almost happened. Having to concede he hadn't seen a license plate. Had not noticed the name of the school district. No distinguishing features on the bus except it was an old bus, probably not a suburban school bus, certainly not a private school bus, very likely an inner-city bus, rust-flecked, filthy, emitting exhaust. No, he had not gotten a very good look at the boys: dark-skinned, he thought. But hadn't seen clearly.

  In the kitchen, Camille seemed to be opening and shutting drawers compulsively as if looking for something that eluded her. She was in a fever, suddenly! She came to a doorway to stare at Charles who had ceased speaking on the phone, which was their land phone; he stood limply, arms at his sides, staring at the carpet at his feet. Camille said, "Charles?"

  "Yes? What?"

  "Didn't whoever you spoke with have more to ask? Didn't he ask for our number?"

  "No."

  "That seems strange. You weren't on the phone very long."

  Charles felt his face darken with blood. Was this woman eavesdropping on him? She'd left him to die, abandoned him to jeering black boys with a gun, now she was eavesdropping on his call to the police, staring at him so strangely?<
br />
  "Long enough."

  Camille stared. A strand of hair had fallen onto her forehead; distractedly she brushed it away. "'Long enough'— what?"

  "On the fucking phone. You call, if it's so important to you."

  In fact, Charles had not called the police. Even as he'd punched out the numbers on his phone, he'd broken the connection with his thumb before the call went through. He hadn't spoken with any police officer, nor even with any operator. None of what happened that afternoon seemed very important to him now. The boys (Hispanic? Black?) were punks of no consequence to him, living here on Fairway Drive, Bloomfield Hills; his revenge was living here, and not there, with them; his revenge was being himself, capable of dismissing them from his thoughts. The gun had (probably) not been a real gun and whatever had happened on the Chrysler Freeway … after all, nothing had happened.

  "But I didn't get a good look at them, Charles. As you did."

  There was nothing on the local Detroit news stations, of interest to them, at 6 p.m. But at 11 p.m. there came BULLETIN BREAKING NEWS of a shooting on I-94, near the intersection with Grand River Avenue: a trucker had been shot in the upper chest with what police believed to be a .45-caliber bullet, and was in critical condition at Detroit General. The shooting had occurred at approximately 9:20 p.m. and police had determined the shot had been fired by a sniper on an overpass, firing down into traffic.