Stoner nodded. “I got it.”
“Just do like the flashlight stiffs on your beat,” Mitchell said, backing away. “You know. Pretend you a cop.”
Stoner’s second cousin, Hawkins, had gotten him the job. After work, Stoner waited for him at the bus stop near the corner of Woodward and Larned, on the west end of the Guardian’s block. Hawkins guarded a bank building on West Grand Boulevard in the New Center area, ten minutes north of downtown. Stoner stood around for twenty-five minutes, staring at the statues along Woodward — Joe Louis’s fist, the crouching naked man who was supposed to be the Spirit of Detroit — before Hawkins pulled up.
Hawkins’s Grand Marquis Brougham — white-on-white, rust-shot, passenger-side mirror hanging down, driver-side mirror missing — might have been one of the cars jamming Hawkins’s family’s driveway, or up on cinder blocks in their side yard, back when Stoner and Hawkins were kids.
He handed Stoner a warm tallboy in a paper bag. “How was your first night, sweetie?”
“This about the time you’ll be getting down here, man?”
Hawkins laughed. “Don’t worry about it, bitch. Nobody’s gonna fuck with you, not in this uniform.” He made a right onto Jefferson Avenue, taking the Lodge to I-75 South. “I thought you were a cop myself.”
Stoner decided to let it go. He didn’t like standing around a bus stop, but the alternative was waiting inside the building for Hawkins to pull up to one of the entrances and honk the car horn. He didn’t want Mitchell or the guards who relieved the both of them or the neighborhood patrolmen to know that he didn’t have a car of his own.
It was the Motor City, for Christ’s sake. What kind of a man didn’t have a car?
It was a temporary situation — he’d get his truck running again soon enough — but there was no need to make it worse by pissing off Hawkins.
Stoner didn’t really know him anymore.
“I think you’re gonna like it,” Hawkins said. “And remember, this is just getting a foot in the door.”
Hawkins was talking about his big plan again: to start his own security company. “There’s gonna be more call for security work than ever. First we get in the hotels Detroit’s building. Then you get contracts with the bigwigs who come to stay in the hotels. When they’re looking for a bodyguard to travel with them when they fly to China and shit, they’re gonna say: Get in touch with the people at the Book Cadillac, the Pontchar-train, their security force was the bomb.”
Hawkins was the only night watchman at his building. Stoner pictured him pacing the empty building alone, hiding his beer from the janitor, reading every inch of the Free Press or the News, listening to the radio through the night, dreaming his dream of founding a world-class security company.
They were friends in childhood, then drifted apart — helped along by Stoner’s mother, who dismissed Hawkins’s family as “country.” He barely remembered Hawkins in high schooclass="underline" a solitary figure, starting to get heavy, reading Soldier of Fortune magazine when he thought no one was looking.
Stoner felt a sudden emptiness thinking about it. He took a long swallow of his beer.
“Yeah, I’d like to get Mitchell on board too,” Hawkins said.
“Oh yeah? You talk to him about it?”
“No, dude, but he’d be great. It would be cool to get a cop on board, especially at the beginning. It’d help, too, to have a brother, you know, help us get situated in Detroit.” Hawkins lit a cigarette. “And Mitchell’s from Oakland County, too, up there with the richies, so he knows how to talk to people.”
“He thinks I’m a cop,” Stoner said. He filled Hawkins in, repeating the conversation he’d had with Mitchell, at Hawkins’s insistence, word for word.
“And you played along?” Hawkins laughed. “Well, I hear the man’s getting married soon, going over wedding shit all the time. His brain’s probably fried. You’re gonna hafta set him straight — not now, but sometime.”
Mitchell introduced Stoner to the neighborhood patrolmen as a cop too.
Red and McSmith, both high-yellow black men in their forties, stood with their fists on their hips, regarding Stoner dubiously, as Mitchell said, “Stoner’s on the job, down in Brownstown.”
“That so?” Red said.
“We’re going to the Lafayette,” McSmith said. “You want a Coney dog, Mitchell?”
That night Stoner told Hawkins he wanted to come clean before it was too late. “They didn’t buy it.”
“It’s too late,” Hawkins said. “Listen, if push comes to shove, tell everybody you’re a dispatcher.”
“What if they quiz me? What’s a seven twenty-one? ”
Hawkins was certain it wouldn’t happen.
Two nights later, Red and McSmith pulled up next to Hawkins’s Grand Marquis at the bus stop as Stoner was walking up to the car.
Stoner tensed. He could see that Hawkins already had an open beer between his legs, and was reaching down to grab a beer for Stoner out of a bag on the floor of the front seat.
They had already settled into a pattern, driving around the city after work, drinking beer in the early morning hours, Hawkins giving Stoner uninformative tours of various sights Stoner didn’t even want to see in daylight, putting off heading for the freeway home just a bit longer each day.
With the mirror on his side of the car missing, Hawkins hadn’t noticed the cops. McSmith was resting an arm on the open window in the passenger seat of the patrol car, noting the absence of the mirror, and hearing the country music that Stoner noticed was, regrettably, coming out of the stereo.
“Hey!” Stoner called, trying to draw everyone’s attention.
“Hey, rookie,” McSmith said, without looking in his direction.
Hawkins sat up and looked at the cops and killed the radio. He slowly placed his hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, a gesture meant to be ironic and hostile, lost on no one.
“Stoner, this your car?”
“It’s mine,” Hawkins said, looking out the windshield.
“You need to do something about the mirrors, my man.”
“And the body,” Red said, leaning over.
“Yeah,” McSmith laughed. “Looks like a junkyard toilet. Stoner, see your buddy gets some mirrors, y’hear?” They pulled away.
Stoner got in the Grand Marquis.
“Fucking assholes,” Hawkins said.
“Man, don’t fuck around with those guys.”
“Fucking Dee-troit police. Bunch of thugs. They just love to fuck with white people. The only time they go into the neighborhoods where their own people are killing each other over crack is when they need to make some quick cash.”
Stoner had seen the stories in the News and the Free Press lately, and Hawkins had filled him in with details that hadn’t made the newspapers. Detroit residents reporting shakedowns by cops — or people claiming to be cops. The mayor’s personal security detail — made up entirely of cops who’d been on the football team with him in high school — escorting visiting rap stars to after-hours clubs. A stripper who’d performed at a party at the mayoral residence, Manoogian Manor, turning up in a dumpster.
To Hawkins the stories were gospel truth. They explained why he’d been rebuffed whenever he tried to talk to any of the cops up in the New Center about coming on board, becoming a partner in his security company venture.
“They don’t want to get in bed with Whitey. Might knock ’em out of line for that cushy job at the motor pool, or sitting in a car outside the Manoogian on permanent overtime. Might fuck up their payments from the union in the next round of layoffs or the next strike. That’s their whole ambition, dude.”