'Hey!' Weed pounded the metal door with his fist, standing on his tiptoes to see through the grate.
Suddenly a deputy was in his face, nothing but a crisscross of metal between them. Weed could smell cigarettes and onions on his breath.
'You got a problem?' the deputy asked.
'I wanna see my police officer,' Weed told him.
'Yo!' the deputy called out. 'He wants to see his po-lice officer!'
Laughter and bad-mouthing followed.
'What, you got your own personal po-lice officer?' the deputy smarted off to Weed. 'Now ain't that something.'
'He's the one who brought me in,' Weed said. 'Tell him I got to talk to him.'
'You can tell him in court.'
'When's that?'
'Nine in the morning.'
'I need to find out if he called my mama!' Weed exclaimed.
'Maybe you should've thought about your mama before you broke the law,' the deputy said.
Chapter Thirty-Three
At shortly after three A.M. a SWAT team raided the Pikes' clubhouse at the Southside Motel and found the room abandoned. Police recovered no guns or ammunition. They found nothing but liquor and trash and filthy mattresses.
Brazil was on one phone, West on another, each of them in a cubicle inside the detective division. Brazil had called Godwin's principal, Mrs. Lilly, at home, and when she realized what it was about, she met the registrar at the high school and they started going through records.
Eventually they figured out that Smoke's real name was Alex Bailey, but the address listed in his school records didn't exist, the phone number didn't work, and there was no photograph of him on file. Although the yearbook wasn't out yet, a check of those who had gotten their pictures taken for it did not include him. All anyone really knew was the classes he had been in and that last summer he had moved here from Durham, North Carolina, where the obscure private high school he supposedly had transferred from didn't exist.
Brazil called every Bailey in the city directory, waking people up. No one seemed to have a family member named Alex who went to Godwin High School.
'How the hell did he get away with it?' Brazil said to West. 'He uses a bogus address, phone number, name of his former high school and who knows what else.'
West was smoking a Carlton. She'd sort of quit months ago, but at times like this she needed a friend.
'Who's going to check?' she said. 'You ever had your high school call you at home or come see you?'
'I don't remember.'
'Well, I sure as hell didn't. Most people don't unless they get in trouble. And it sounds like he was just your average kind of keep-to-yourself nobody until a couple weeks ago. Then he cuts classes or doesn't show up at all. Maybe the school starts calling. But guess what? By then it's too late.'
'I wonder what his parents know.' Brazil reached for his Styrofoam cup of what once was drinkable coffee.
'Denial. Maybe protecting him. Don't want to face it and never have. No question in my mind this kid's not new to the system. No pictures of him anywhere, including the yearbook, just like all these other little felons, so we don't know what they look like. I bet you anything he's got a record in North Carolina, probably transferred from Dillon High School.' She sarcastically referred to the juvenile training school in Butner, North Carolina. 'His fucking family probably moved him here when he turned sixteen and all his records were expunged. So the asshole gets to start all over again, clean as a Boy Scout.'
Brazil swirled the coffee in his cup. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
'So. You going to bother going to bed tonight?' West said.
'There's no night left,' Brazil said.
'You want to come over, maybe scramble up a few eggs or something?'
Sadness walked through Brazil's eyes.
'As long as we stop at my house first,' he said. There's something I've got to get.'
The Azalea Motel on Northside's Chamberlayne Avenue was not where the police would have expected to find Smoke. He also liked the irony of the name, since the Azalea Parade was the day after tomorrow. Smoke had big plans.
He sat on his single bed in his single room and thought where he was staying wasn't much better than the clubhouse. The Azalea Motel was the sort of place where people did drugs and got murdered and nobody cared. Smoke got room 7 for twenty-eight dollars a night. He stared blankly at the TV and drank vodka from a plastic cup. Smoke had been monitoring the news. At five after six A.M., his phone rang.
'What,' he answered.
It was Divinity.
'Baby, they raided our place just like you said they would,' she told him in an excited voice.
Smoke smiled as he stared at the trash bags full of guns and ammunition in the corner.
'Sick and me parked the car at the dirty bookstore and we was in the woods watching, you know, baby. It was all we could do not to laugh. Them busting in there with all their stuff on and big guns and all. You sure was right about getting out when we did, sugar. But I wanna know when I'm gonna see you, huh?'
'Not now,' Smoke told her without much interest as he spun around the cylinder of a Colt.357.
'I sure could do with a little more / miss you enthusiasm.' Divinity's voice was hurt on the way to being mad.
Smoke wasn't listening. His mind wandered back to the old woman and her fear. Smoke had never scared anybody that much. He was awed by his power and as drunk from it as he was from vodka. He loved the way it felt to squeeze the trigger. He had been so high he barely heard the explosions when he blew apart her head. He threw back another swallow of vodka.
'What'cha gonna tell the others?' Divinity was asking.
Smoke came to.
'About what?' he said.
'You ain't even listening.' Her voice was getting sharp.
One thing Smoke avoided was fighting with Divinity. She could make a scene, and that was what he didn't need right now.
'I'm just so tired,' he said, sighing. 'And I miss you and it makes me crazy I can't see you until Saturday night. That's when we'll be free and clear.'
'How?'
'You'll see.'
'What about Dog and the rest of them?'
'I don't want them anywhere near me,' Smoke said. 'None of you come anywhere near the Azalea Parade.'
'I don't understand this big shit about some little parade named after a bush.' Divinity hadn't softened much.
'Baby, I'm gonna be the king of it,' Smoke said.
'What'cha gonna do, ride on a float?'
He couldn't stand it when she got sarcastic. He slammed down the vodka bottle and snapped the revolver's empty cylinder in place. He dry-fired at the TV.
'Shut up!' he said in his voice from hell, that tone he got when the change came over him. 'You just do what I say, bitch.'
'I always do.' Divinity backed down.
'Don't you call anymore. Don't you come around, and the others don't know where I am, right?'
'I ain't told 'em nothing. So you dumping me?'
'For two days.'
'Then we're good?'
'As good as it gets,' he said.
Brazil ran into his house for only a moment and when he returned to West's car, he was carrying a grocery bag with something in it. He had a strange look on his face.
'What's that?' West asked.
'You'll see,' he said. 'I don't want to talk about it right now.'
'You got a body part in there or something?'
'In a way,' Brazil said morbidly.
West knew about Ruby Sink. The word had traveled like electricity. Everyone in the police department found out Miss Sink was Brazil's landlady, and when West heard the truth, she felt sick with guilt. She felt stupid and ignorant. Brazil's so-called girlfriend had been a seventy-one-year-old woman who rented a row house to him. West felt absolutely terrible and for hours had been trying to think of what to say.