He was beginning to feel pretty good when a figure came from the shadows and slanted across the street up ahead of them.
“POLICE,” Hawkins yelled. “HOLD UP!”
The man stopped and looked back, then turned away from the sight of Hawkins barreling toward him and took a couple of loping steps, without gaining any ground, before Hawkins crashed into his back and sprawled him over the hood of a Lincoln Zephyr.
“Hold up, hold up,” the man sputtered. He was lifting his arms straight above his head, like a diver. Hawkins was doubled over on top of him, catching his breath.
“Hands on the hood,” Stoner said. “Please.”
He looked around. The shouts, the whistle of Hawkins’s uniform as his thighs collided during the sprint, the tackle into the car had all sounded to Stoner like gunfire in the quiet. But no lights had come on anywhere in the block. When he glanced back, Hawkins was holding a small, wet-looking wad of money in front of the man’s hollow eyes.
“Where you headed with this, huh?” Hawkins said, panting. When he’d gotten his wind back, he pushed off the hood of the car, then grabbed the man’s arm and spun him around. “Go on.”
“My aunt’s. My aunt’s house.” The man stood there, hugging himself. Stoner could see he was waiting, halfheartedly, for his money back.
“Go on now,” Hawkins said, making a shooing motion.
The man stood a second longer, his lips working like he might cry, then he turned and walked up the street.
“Jesus Christ,” Stoner said.
“Did you see his hands?” Hawkins asked, holding up his own to look at them. “His fingertips were black, like, down to the second knuckle. Must be he’s one of them cutting the copper wire out of the streetlights and shit.”
“Fuck you!” the man shouted back at them.
Stoner jumped. The man had stopped at the end of the block, but once he’d gotten their attention, he turned away and continued walking.
Hawkins laughed.
“Let’s get out of here,” Stoner said.
“Yeah,” Hawkins replied. “Come on, let’s get a beer.”
Back in the car, Stoner drank a beer in two swallows while Hawkins started the engine and drove away. He grabbed another beer, and Hawkins pulled a pint of whiskey from beneath the driver’s seat. Hawkins took a swallow and handed it to Stoner, then flipped the wad of cash at him. “Looks like about twenty bucks. Count it.”
It was a five and thirteen ones. “Eighteen.”
“Is that all?”
The elusive on-ramp appeared suddenly on their right, and Hawkins aimed the car down it.
Stoner peered over at him. Disheveled, still winded, he looked near collapse, like he’d been up for days, yet he still seemed angry, full of determination.
For his part, Stoner felt like he’d been in a fight that ended before he was able to throw a punch.
“The problem,” Hawkins said, “is that these people don’t have a lot of money, because they spend whatever they can get on drugs.”
They exited the freeway and drove through Greektown, finding their way to Jefferson Avenue. Soon they were heading alongside the Detroit River, a mile east of the Renaissance Center; on their right, gated communities with their own shopping centers; across Jefferson, empty lots and liquor stores, hand-painted sandwichboards advertising bait.
“Did you see the artist’s drawings in the paper, the plans?” Hawkins got a cigarette going. “This is all gonna be part of the new riverfront, and here there’s gonna be office and retail and residential all together, like retail on the ground floor, offices and condos upstairs. This is where we need to put the office. I’m telling you, man, we’ve got to act now. The Super Bowl. The All-Star Game. Terrorists coming over from Canada. There’s big money to be made.”
Stoner looked out over the river. He had to admit it was a nice view. “What’s the plan?” he asked.
The crack house sat in weeds and gravel on a street off Grand River and the Jeffries. Wet trash lined the curb between the parked cars. Several newer cars and SUVs were standing, engines idling, and silhouettes moved through the dark between the vehicles. Voices, low and harsh, carried through the night air. Then someone turned up the walk to the front door of the house.
Hawkins stepped away from the window. “Here comes another,” he called.
Not so loud, thought Stoner, standing in the kitchen. He looked down at the man in the chair, haphazardly bound with bungee cords and duct tape, and caught the guy reading the irritation on his face. He’ll try to play us against each other. Stoner took a step toward the chair.
“You ain’t police,” the man said, just before Stoner forced the gag back into his mouth.
Now Stoner was truly exasperated.
“You think?”
He backed up against the wall and waited. The weight of his Maglite was dragging it slowly down out of his fist. When there was no sound from the front room for too long, he edged around the corner and stage whispered, “What’s up?”
Hawkins was back at the window, his hair standing on end. Stoner glanced around the room: Hawkins’s uniform cap lay upside down on an arm of the ratty sofa.
“I think he saw me.”
“He see the cap?”
“I think so. He turned back.”
“Ah, fuck.”
“Easy,” Hawkins said. “They may’ve just remembered they never saw the other dude come out.”
“Let’s go now.”
“And do what?”
They’d searched the house, but found only forty dollars, and no drugs at all. The man in the kitchen wasn’t talking.
“You’re right,” Stoner said. “Let’s stick to the plan. If we knock out all the runners, maybe the rich white suburbanites will hop out of their SUVs and come to the door themselves to get robbed.”
“Chill the fuck out.”
Stoner left Hawkins at the front door and went to the bedroom to check on the first guy who’d knocked on the door, the one Hawkins had hit on the head repeatedly with his Maglite. He found the man on the bed where they’d left him. He was sitting up, alert enough to mutter something about swelling, and to call Stoner a fucking cracker. He was a kid, really. He didn’t look good. His eyes kept trying to close.
“Shut up,” Stoner told him.
“Gimme back my money, you prick.” The kid sounded disgusted; then, suddenly, he slumped back against the wall and his chin dropped to his chest.
Stoner moved closer, but couldn’t bring himself to reach in and check for a pulse. He stood over the kid until he was satisfied that the kid’s chest was actually rising and falling in the dark, that he wasn’t just willing himself to see it happen.
Hawkins called his name from the front of the house, again too loudly.
He was moving toward Hawkins’s voice when something started banging against the outside of the front door.
Hawkins stood at the peephole with his palms flat against the door. Stoner put his hand on Hawkins’s shoulder, and Hawkins took one step sideways, not moving his palms, as if he were bracing the door.
“Just pulled up,” Hawkins said.
Stoner ducked between Hawkins’s arms and put his eye to the peephole, just as the man on the porch began to speak. He ducked again, instinctively, at the sound of the guy’s voice, then slowly lined his eye up with the peephole and looked out.
The man stood with his hands clasped behind his neck and his feet apart, in the stance of someone about to be handcuffed, but he was alone. The black cat between his feet, once Stoner’s eyes adjusted, became an oily-looking gym bag.
“What the point havin’ a cell you don’t answer it?” the man said.
“Fuck’s he talking about?” Hawkins hissed into Stoner’s ear.