“Goes by the street name Stick,” Andy said. “He’s got an endless rap sheet and has tried the bag thing for years.”
“You would think he’d figure out his M.O. is obvious and isn’t working,” Hammer replied, never failing to be amazed by the stupidity of most criminals.
“He hit Popeye’s on Broad Street a couple months ago,” Andy recalled, speeding through a yellow light on Gary Street. “Walked in with the bag over his head, tripped over the railing where people wait in line, and made off with an eight-piece chicken dinner, then walked into the glass door and broke his nose. We got his DNA off the blood on the paper bag.”
“Does he use a gun?”
“That’s the problem. He’s never armed, and just walks in with the bag over his head, asking for whatever. So we can’t get him on any charges that stick, which is why he never spends much time in jail. According to him, he asks for something and people give it to him without protest, so that really isn’t a crime and there’s nothing in the Virginia Code that says it’s illegal to walk around with a bag over your head. So the judge always throws it out when Stick shows up for arraignment.”
“Any officer in the area,” the dispatcher came over the air. “Report of a white male with a bag over his head, down in the parking lot of Popeye’s on Chamberlayne Avenue. An ambulance en route.”
“I guess he tripped again,” Andy said.
Stick wasn’t the only one to trip that night. When Barbie Fogg got out of her minivan in the carport, she stepped on the Barbie doll of one of the twins. As usual, it had been left where the child had played with it last.
“Oh, my!” Barbie cried out as she picked herself up from the concrete floor and checked for injuries.
Barbie, who very much believed in signs from The Universe, interpreted what could have been a serious accident as a signal that she had misstepped and overlooked something important. Oh, of course! she thought as she remembered the very special thing that had happened before she’d stopped off to visit the nursing home where she made the rounds visiting infirm and forgetful old women she didn’t know. Barbie believed The Universe had chosen her to be a healer, and at last, The Universe was about to reward her, which was why Hooter had given Barbie the special gift.
Minutes later, her neighbors, the Clot sisters, watched Barbie apply a rainbow bumper sticker to the back window of the Fogg family minivan. Uva Clot was shocked as she peered out from behind the kitchen blinds.
“Come here and look!” Uva yelled at her spinster sister, Ima, who was watching TV in the living room, the sound blasting. “Lord have mercy, she’s falling down drunk and putting that thing on her car with chirren inside the house. What’s gonna happen to those little chirren when all the world sees what they momma just put on that minivan a hers? I always wondered about her, didn’t I tell you I always wondered about her, Ima? Get on in here and look right this minute!”
Ima shuffled in with her walker and squinted through the opening in the blinds. She stiffened at the sight of Barbie Fogg in her lit-up carport across the street. Ima couldn’t quite make out what Barbie was doing, but it looked like she was walking around her minivan and kicking a doll across the concrete, and she kept smoothing something on the back window and admiring whatever it was. Ima barely made out a few bright colors.
“What she up to?” she asked her sister.
“Don’t you see what she put on the window, Ima? She got her one of them rainbow stickers! ‘Member all them rainbow flags and stickers when we was living in the French Quarter?”
Ima gasped with such a start that she lurched forward with her walker and fell into the blinds. She grabbed them to steady herself, and they crashed to the floor. Barbie Fogg peered at the Clot sisters peering at her through the suddenly transparent kitchen window and waved at them as they scurried out of view.