“Sheffield,” Baker called out.
Something in the way he said my name compelled me quickly back to the living room. I stopped short, staring into a pair of flat black eyes.
Curtis Streeter stood there, smiling at me.
I didn’t smile back.
“Curtis has been paroled.”
Angela’s voice was small behind me. I didn’t turn to look at her, just kept my eyes on Streeter.
Angela sidled past me, still carrying the baby and going to Streeter’s side. He gave her an odd hug, his hand gently pushing the baby to Angela’s hip so he could flatten himself against her body. When he broke the embrace, his eyes came back to my face. He wasn’t smiling anymore. It was clear he remembered me.
“He doesn’t have anyplace to go,” Angela said. “I’m letting him move back in.”
My eyes flicked to Baker, still standing at the window. He wasn’t watching Streeter. He was watching me. He gave me a subtle shake of his head. I turned away.
Tonight I have the windows closed, even though it is still eighty degrees. I lay here in my narrow bed, staring at the shadows. Finally, I can’t stand it anymore and go to the window, throwing it open. The heavy night air pours over my body.
I stand at the small casement window, looking up at the ground that encloses me, and then up further to the small slice of night sky I can glimpse. No stars, no moon.
I crawl back to my bed, my head thick with sleeplessness. Just as I dare to close my eyes, it starts, a single low roar. Then another in answer, and finally a third, forming a raw chorus of overlapping, repetitive bellows.
Closer, a night bird calls, its tiny sharp pleading punctuating the roaring.
The night has awakened, and its creatures — large and small — are proclaiming themselves to the world.
“What’s with you today?”
I stayed silent. A part of me was glad that Baker picked up on my mood because I hadn’t been able to think of a way to tell him what I needed to.
“Sheffield, what the hell is wrong?”
I let out a long breath. “I’m thinking of bagging it.”
“Bagging what?”
“This. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t take it anymore.”
Baker was quiet, chewing on his toothpick, his hands steady on the wheel. The soft chatter from the radio filled the car.
“This got anything to do with Angela?” he asked.
“No. Maybe. Shit, I don’t know.”
“Sheffield, for chrissake …”
I held up a hand. “I can’t do this anymore, all right? I can’t keep telling myself that what I do makes any difference in this shithole place.”
Baker was quiet.
I was afraid I would cry. “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m tired and I just feel so alone.”
Baker still said nothing, just put the car in gear and we moved slowly forward. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.
I don’t know how long I stayed like that, in a half-sleep state, lulled by the murmur of the radio and the movement of the car. When I realized we had stopped, I opened my eyes.
We were in a deserted parking lot. The peeling white fa-çade of Tiger Stadium loomed in the windshield. Baker was gone. Then I saw him coming toward the car carrying two Styrofoam cups. He slid in and handed me a cup and a pack of Splenda.
For several minutes we sat in silence, sipping our coffees.
“My dad used to bring me here for games,” Baker said, nodding toward the stadium. “We were in the bleachers for the seventh game of the ’68 series when Northrup hit a two-run rope into center to win. It was great.”
“I wasn’t even born then, Baker,” I said.
He gave me a half-smile, set his coffee in a holder, and put the car in gear. We headed down Michigan Avenue, past empty office buildings with paper masking their storefront windows. It had started to rain again, and in distance I could see the gleaming glass silos of the Ren Cen.
Baker slowed and pointed to the abandoned hulk of the Book-Cadillac building. “My mom took my sister and me to have tea there once,” he said, nodding. “I guess she was trying to give me some class. I guess it didn’t take.”
I stared at the old hotel’s boarded-up windows. There was a sign in one saying, FRIENDS OF THE BOOK-CADILLAC, with a website for donations.
At Grand Circus Park, Baker swung the cruiser around the empty square and slowed as we moved into the shadows of the People Mover overhead. “My dad used to bring us down here to the show,” Baker said. “The Madison is gone now but the old United Artists is still there. That’s where I saw Ben Hur.”
I stared out the windshield at the abandoned theater’s art deco — like marquee, now covered with gray plywood. I knew that Baker had grown up in Detroit and that after his wife died fifteen years ago, he had sold their house in Royal Oak and moved back. But he never talked about the city or its steady deterioration.
Baker pulled to a stop at the curb. We were in front of the Fox Theatre now. In the gloom of the rain and late afternoon, the ten-story neon marquee with its winged lions pulsed with light. Tickets were now on sale for Sesame Street Live.
“They almost tore this place down, you know,” he said. “But that millionaire pizza guy bought it. Fixed it up, reopened it, and then relocated his business offices upstairs.”
I looked out over the empty street. “Why would anyone with any brains invest in this place?”
“Maybe he couldn’t take seeing one more good thing die,” Baker said.
I stared at the winged lions. I heard the snap of Baker undoing his seat belt and looked over.
He reached under his seat and came up with a crumbled brown paper bag, molded in a distinctive shape I instantly recognized.
He pulled the gun from the bag and handed it to me. It was an older S&W Model 10 revolver. The bluing was chipped along the barrel. The gun was clean but it had seen its share of street time.
“Remember me telling you about Hoffner?” Baker asked.
“Your first partner,” I said. My mind flashed on the photograph of the jowly man on the memorial wall at the Beaubian station. Shot to death during a drug bust.
“That was …” Baker paused, searching for the word he wanted. Cops had a way of doing that, selectively choosing words that could be interpreted one way by other cops and another more benign way by the rest of the world.
“Hoffner and me, we called that gun our third partner,” Baker said.
I turned the weapon over. The serial number had been acid-burned away. But this gun was so old I doubted it had a registered owner anywhere. I knew why. Hoffner’s gun was a throw-down, a handy way of fixing the worst mistake a cop could make — shooting an unarmed suspect.
“Did this partner ever have to do any work?” I asked.
“Not on my watch.”
“Why are you giving it to me?”
“Because every officer should have one.”
“And you think I might need it one day?”
“No,” Baker said. “I think you need it now.”
I need to know why. I need to know why they do it.
So I find this book about lions and I read it, because I have this idea that if I can find out why they roar I can figure out a way to stop it.
I read about the lions of the Serengeti, how they have different sounds to mark their territories, to attract female lions, to find each other when they are separated, to call their cubs when they are lost.
But that awful group roaring that comes every night. What is that?