“And your guy is going to want one or the other.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“How soon?”
He shrugged. “Maybe a day before he gets too antsy to put off.”
“Who is this guy?”
“Nobody.”
“Andy-”
“It don’t matter,” he said. “What matters is I’ve got to figure a way out of this mess and I need you to help me.”
“How?”
“I need to find out who took my stuff and get it back.”
“Andy, you’re asking me to go steal back dope that someone stole from you. Think about that. I was a cop for twenty-one years-”
“Yeah, I know!” he snapped. “Mom and me know all about how you were a cop for however many fucking years, all right? That’s how come you didn’t come see me, ain’t it?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t come around your Mom because of what she was into. And you-”
“Funny,” he said, “because it sure felt like you weren’t coming to see me.”
The waitress arrived and refilled our cups. Andy glared at me across the table. When she walked away, he leaned forward again. “I don’t even know why I called you. I guess I figured-”
“You figured I could help,” I finished for him.
He nodded slightly and then shrugged. “It was stupid.”
“No,” I said. “It was the right thing to do. I’ll help.”
“You will?” His eyebrows rose and the corners of his mouth relaxed.
I nodded.
He took a deep breath and let it out. “Thanks.”
“On one condition.”
His eyes narrowed warily. “Condition?”
“You go into rehab. Get clean.”
He snorted and looked away.
“I’m serious, Andy. You have a drug problem, and if you want my help-that’s the price.”
He shook his head. “The only drug problem I have is that someone stole my drugs and the guy who fronted me the money is going to kill me over it. Now, are you going to help me or not?”
“What’s your mother say about all this?”
He met my gaze, disbelief in his eyes. “Man, you really are out of touch aren’t you? Who do you think put me in contact with this guy in the first place?”
We sat in silence while I ground my teeth and mulled over what he’d said. I’d known that Maureen fell into a partying crowd after our divorce, but I didn’t figure it went past some recreational use. If it’d become anything more serious, I’d have heard about it from the other guys on patrol. Still, if she was careful and never got caught-
“Who’s the guy, Andy?”
My son sucked on his teeth, ending with a clacking sound. It was a terrible habit that methamphetamine users all seemed to develop.
“Why do you want to know? Why can’t we just stick on whoever jumped us and stole my stuff?”
“Options,” I told him. “We need as many options as we can get.”
He sighed, cursing under his breath. “It was Paco.”
“Who’s he?”
“Mom’s boyfriend.”
My eyes widened. “Her boyfriend’s a drug dealer?”
“Duh.”
I sat in silence and steamed for a while, clenching my jaw. Maureen told the judge that I had a violent temper and that having the boy live with me would be an unsafe environment.
Violent temper, my ass! If I was such a danger, how did I manage to stay on the job for so long? But Judge Petalski bought every conniving word of it and only allowed me one weekend a month of visitation. One lousy weekend. For the other twenty-eight days a month, Maureen spewed all kinds of poison about me to Andy. After a few months of her propaganda, Andy started vetoing the visitations. He was twelve. By the time he was fourteen, I didn’t know my son anymore.
What a bitch. All high and mighty with the judge and using the system and our son to her advantage-she goes and turns the boy into a drug addict and shacks up with a dealer? I wanted to smash her face in.
“Dad?”
I looked at Andy. For a moment, he was twelve again, a scared little boy who needed me. “What?”
“What’re we gonna do?”
The theatre manager hesitated a little bit when he saw Andy’s beat-up face, but I flashed my badge. I snapped the wallet shut before he could read the word ‘retired’ emblazoned across it, but he didn’t look that closely anyway. He remembered me from patrol.
“Just don’t let them see you,” he said, issuing the same warning he always used to. “Those animals will vandalize my theatre and scare off my customers.”
“We’ll be careful,” I assured him.
“Like ninjas?” he said with a hint of a grin.
In spite of everything, I grinned at the familiar banter. “Exactly.”
Up on the roof, I pulled out my binoculars and scoped out The Block. Dopers, hookers and dealers were scattered all along First Avenue, each keeping a healthy distance from the other. I strained to make out a familiar face, but found none. That surprised me. On patrol, it seemed like I always dealt with the same old people over and over again. I wondered briefly if the faces had changed quickly, though, and maybe my perception was based on how often I had to deal with them. Even so, I marveled at how much had changed since I left. And how much was the same.
I lowered the binoculars, handing them to Andy. “Take these. Find the guy you bought from.”
Andy scanned The Block with the binocs. “He’s not there.”
“What’s this guy’s name?”
“I only know his initial. It’s D.”
“White, black, brown?”
“Black.”
“Banger?”
Andy lowered the glasses. “Probably.”
“Which gang?”
“Crips. He wore blue.”
I started to reply, but closed my mouth. Of course D was a Crip. River City was a Crip town, ever since the mid ’90s. The Bloods never managed to get a toe hold up here in Eastern Washington. So the Crips maintained an uneasy truce with all the Crip sub-sets and warred mostly with the Hispanics and the Russians.
We stood on the roof as the afternoon heated up. The sun reflected off the white brick that rimmed the edge of the roof. I stood and sweated and waited while Andy searched the street through the binoculars.
“Back when I worked patrol,” I told Andy, “I used to come up onto the theatre roof several times a week.”
He grunted.
“I’d watch the drug dealers and hookers do their deals and then radio down descriptions to the other patrolman. They’d swoop in and hook them up.”
He grunted again.
“Without me sweating my balls off up here, we’d have never caught half the dealers we did…” I trailed off, and Andy didn’t reply.
I was quiet for a moment, remembering the few times I’d taken him fishing as a kid. We drove up to Fan Lake, eating fried chicken along the way and then fished the day away. We sat for hours, not speaking a word. It was a comfortable silence, unlike this one.
“The funny thing was,” I told him, “none of the dealers ever believed me when I testified in court about seeing everything from up here.”
Andy glanced over, then back through the binoculars. “Why’s that?”
“I guess since they never spotted me up there, it easier for them to believe I was lying rather than up on the roof.”
Andy didn’t reply right away. An uncomfortable ten minutes passed in silence.
“Black guys selling meth?” I finally asked. “Isn’t that a little out of character?”
“What do you mean?” Andy asked.
“Meth is more of a biker drug, that’s all. The black gangs tended more toward selling crack.”
“Meth is the new crack, I guess,” Andy muttered.
I didn’t reply. We fell silent again.
“There he is,” Andy said, almost two hours later. “That’s him.”
He handed me the binoculars and directed me to the corner. I spotted a black male I didn’t recognize, dressed in baggy, casual clothes and leaning against the wall. A blue bandana hung from his pocket.
“That’s D?”
“Yeah.”