Hemi stroking-end of the block and I hit the corner in fourth gear, speedometer knocking on 60, an orange-red blur slicing through the night. I don’t bother looking back.
The hopeless will continue buying and selling in the streets.
The scared will continue standing still for fear of deadly retribution.
Off duty night moves. For the next two years after the day they took Audrey away from me, I burned this town to the ground. I took weeks of stored-up vacation time off and dug for names, promising anyone who stood in my way that hell would be a better choice than me in front of them, me behind them.
I got names. I got places. I formed big bad habits.
Supplication. I began praying with her book in my hands, the last thing Audrey would ever touch, begging for the reprieve I would never get.
Heading north on 16th Street South. Traffic’s late-night thin. I drop my speed down to the limit. Eyes ahead. Eyes to the rearview. A cruiser passes me going the opposite direction, the uniform’s eyes strafing my ride. Dicey. Window rolled halfway down, a blood-spattered nigger driving a boss crate with a brutally traumatized white girl in tow. No questions would be asked.
Goosebumps. The sticky warm night feels cold and I roll the window up. Jenny’s hunched down in the passenger seat, her moaning like a constant electric hum. Primal-she’s shutting the world out.
I put a hand on her arm. She flinches. She kicks and bites and claws my hand bloody. I reach across the seat and pull her close, her thin body going limp as the sobbing of incoherent words are being choked and jerked from her mouth.
My voice is placid, telling her the same untruths I told Audrey, over and over and over:
“Everything will be okay, sugar. I promise.”
There were two of them. Two second-tier crackers I’d sent to Union County for a deuce. Time served. Shyster’s working overtime.
They served six months.
I took six months from them and they ripped my fucking life apart.
I won’t make excuses to justify. I opened their stomachs while they were still alive and watched them die a slow and bloody death in an abandoned Midtown warehouse for two long days. I’d do it again. Even after the swarming greenbottle flies and the smell of men losing control and their begging, I’d do it again. I’ve already crossed the line and I’ll keep crossing it until He hears me.
Until He understands what living is doing to me.
Next morning, early.
I throw my shield on my Sergeant Brice’s desk. He’s sitting in his shirtsleeves with blue veins plumped out on his forearms and biceps, a reluctant seat shiner. He looks at the shield, lights a cigarette and then stares me down while talking in his raspy phlegmatic voice.
“Don’t let ‘em beat you like this, Mike. Don’t let this…society we live in and what happened to Audrey dictate your life.” He points at me with the cigarette crushed between two nicotine-stained fingers. “We’ve been through this a dozen times in the last two years, so just pick up your badge and walk the fuck back out that door.”
Society. Ghosts. One and the same.
In a nigger drawl, I give him a bullshit self-serving excuse. “Yeah, wouldn’t want the department to lose another token jig.” Bulge those eyes. Shuffle those feet. “What would da colored folk think then?” I shake my head, dig down deep for a grin, come up snake eyes. “Listen…it’s time, Sarge. We’ve both known it for a while now. I’m no good for this anymore. I just can’t fucking do it.”
Brice stabs out his cigarette in a heavy glass ashtray filled with two days worth of half-smoked butts. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t raise his voice. “Token-don’t lay that crap on me. I’ve never been that person, Mike. If you want to call it quits, fine. If you want to make excuses, fine.” The corner of his mouth jerks up and he leans forward on his desk, lacing his battle-scarred hands together. “But you’re not being rational. And you’re a mess, kid. I can smell you from here.”
I want to respond, but have nothing left to say. Sarge still has plenty, though. He takes a breath and lets fly.
“Don’t know if you heard, but the Hughes girl showed up last night.” A head shake. “Bad shape.”
Calm and easy. “Yeah?”
His steel-gray eyes run down and then up my body before settling back on my face. “Somebody dropped her off downtown at the hospital ER and split. Left a note with her. Just a scribbled address, but it was the right address. Fucking bloodbath. Her white trash loser cousin and a couple other model citizens. Looks like the cousin was selling her for cash and dope to his buddies. Him and a fat boy were DOA. The third guy managed to crawl outside, but bled out on the back porch steps. Femoral artery and gut shot. That’s a hard way to eat it.”
I shrug. “Doesn’t sound like much of a loss.”
“Neighbors must feel the same way.” Brice snatches up a pen and gives a rat-a-tat-tat on the desk. “At least six shots were fired but nobody heard anything. And not one person got a plate number or even noticed the make of the getaway car. Tire-burn marks for twenty feet and no one saw a goddamn thing. Sled had to be a beast to lay rubber like that.”
Blood thumping. Mouth like cotton. I dry gulp and nix the car conversation: “Say what? Telling me no one at the ER had anything worth a damn to add? Not one motherfucking thing?” I shake my head, lay it on thick. “Seems kinda hard to believe, I mean, joint’s jumpin’ all day every day. Shiiiit-cops and staff must’ve been all over that motherfucking place!”
“You’d think. But all they heard was the admittance door buzzer. Girl was sitting outside in front of the door. She was sitting there alone in her own fucking blood and just…humming to herself. One of the attendants lost his chow and set off a chain reaction. Whoever dropped the girl off slipped in and out tout suite.”
I lick my lips. “How is the-?”
Brice cuts me off. “I think you know how she is, Mike.”
My right foot starts tapping out of control. My brain’s telling my foot to play it cool. Play it Billy D. Fucking Williams cool. I spread my legs, dig my toes into the carpet and lock my knees. I don’t answer him.
Brice, chewing his lower lip bloody. “Come on, you’ve seen this kind of thing before. Jesus. You know how she is today and you know how she’ll be twenty goddamn years from now.”
I don’t push him. I put my shades on beneath the buzzing and flickering fluorescent lights. “Yeah, I know, Sarge. I’ll see ya around, huh?”
Eyes down, Brice bobs his head of thick black hair, palms flat on the desk. “Yeah.”
Through the cubicles, through the rows of questioning eyes watching me. My legs nearly give way as I step from the building’s sterile air conditioning out into the heat of a new day. I breathe deep-dig that nasty smell oozing from my pores, snuffing out the fresh summer jasmine.
I walk through the parking lot and to my car, the blood-smeared seats covered with beach towels and already frying pan hot. My stomach gurgles. I open the door and heave up yellow bile. I put my head between my knees and mutter the one word which seems to makes sense: “Hold.”
Don’t fall apart.
Don’t lose your fucking mind.
Hold it together.
Ten minutes go by before my hand is steady enough to put the key in the ignition and drive away.
Hindsight and conscience rips and tears at me. Not them, never them. Her. I’d given Audrey the worst years of my life and those same years are what I now have left to live with. I try to tell myself that if she’d left me on her own, because of the man I was, I wouldn’t feel this way because at least she would still be alive. She would have moved on and eventually, I’d have done the same.