Sunday and dressed in something fine.
“Why you out here drinking like this?” The lady in uniform meant business but she
wasn’t harmful.
Ella wasn’t sure where out here was. She didn’t have a way to get places. So she couldn’t
be far from her apartment in Earle Village, where she had been sitting in front of the TV
when the phone had rung earlier this evening. It was her daughter with the awful news
about Efrim, Ella’s fourteen-year-old grandson, who was in the hospital.
Efrim had been shot several times this morning. Everyone supposed the white doctors
tried all they could, but Efrim had always been stubborn. The memory brought fresh hot
tears to Ella’s eyes.
Ella told the lady cop and the detective all about it as they situated her into the back of a
police car with a partition to make sure Ella couldn’t hurt anyone. Ella mapped out
Efrim’s entire short life, going back to when Ella held him in her arms right after Eorna
birthed him.
He was always trouble, like his father. Efrim started dancing when he was two. He used
to act big beneath the streetlight out front, with those other boys and all their money.
“I’m going to get your seatbelt on,” the blond detective said, snapping her in and smelling like apples and spices.
tw The old woman reeked of stale bad hygiene and booze, triggering more images for
Brazil. His hands were shaking slightly and not as facile as usual. He didn’t understand
what the woman was muttering and gumming and crying about, and every breath smelled
like the inside of a Dumpster in the heat. West wasn’t helping a bit now, standing back
and watching, making Brazil do the dirty work. His fingers brushed the old woman’s
neck and he was startled by how smooth and warm it was.
“You’re going to be all right.” Brazil kept saying what couldn’t possibly be true.
^ West was not naive. She knew patrol was a problem. How could it not be
with Deputy Chief Goode heading it? That beat cops might be a little too rough or
simply unprofessional in general wasn’t a shock, but West couldn’t stomach it. She
approached the two patrolmen, both older and miserable in their jobs. She got in Smith’s
face and remembered being a sergeant and putting up with dead wood like him. As far as
she was concerned, he was so low on the food chain, she wouldn’t slop hogs with him.
“Don’t let me ever see or hear of anything like this again,” West said in that low tone that Brazil found scary.
West was close enough to see stubble that looked like sand, and a firestorm of broken
blood vessels caused by what Smith did when he wasn’t in a patrol car. His eyes were
lifeless on hers, for his building had been vacant for years.
“We’re out here to help, not hurt,” West whispered.
“Remember? That goes for you, too,” she added to his partner.
V9 Neither cop had any idea about the boy riding with the deputy chief this night, and
they sat inside the cruiser with its hornet’s nests on the doors, watching the midnight-blue
Crown Victoria leave. Their prisoner in back was quietly snoring.
“Maybe Deputy Chief Virgin finally found a boyfriend,” said Smith as he peeled open
two sticks of Big Red gum.
“Yeah,” said the other cop, ‘when she gets tired of Romper Room, I’ll show her what she’s missing with the big dogs. ”
They laughed, pulling out. Moments later, the scanner announced more bad news.
“Thirteen-hundred block Beatties Ford Road,” it said.
“Report of an ambulance held hostage by a subject with a knife.”
“Glad we’re tied up on a call,” Smith said, smacking a mouthful of cinnamon.
W) It was West’s bad luck that Jerome Swan had not experienced a pleasant evening. It
had begun at a fuzzy hour before the sun had gone down in this rundown part of the city.
West had no reason to be aware of the nip joint in the area known as the Basin, off Tryon
Street, very close to the Dog Pound, where she had been heading for quite some time