My Dirkson eyes grew big and wide, but behind them was me thinking, I know that, brother, I know that you just did one. There’s a poor suffering child of God named Jackdaw, and he managed to drop through the floor of an Alabama cotton house on Sunday night, and y’all scooped him up and brought him north on an invisible plane, and now he’s stashed somewhere in this proud, busted northern city. And I’ve got Barton, and I’ve got Barton’s workroom, and I’ve got Winston Bibb and Whole Wide World Logistics, and now I’ve got you, you laughing idiot, and I know we will find him. Bridge and me. Goddamn Bridge and goddamn me.
The smug cop just kept on talking. On his feet now, moving around the room, working himself up.
“Usually, see, priest’s rule is, we do one, then we hang back. Hang back in the cut awhile. You can’t be too careful. More things we got going on, more chance there is for the soul catchers to find us.” He paced around the room, making tight circles like a tiger in a cage. “But me, see, I got a different way of thinking. I think people need help, people like you, you know, and if we’re set up, we’re set up, and we should do as much as we can. Get out the whole three million if we can. Now, this here, your woman-what’s her name?”
A half second I hesitated before I found the name. “Gentle.”
“Right, Gentle. In Carolina, right?”
“Yes.”
“Carolina. Bauxite. Yeah, see, that’s all different. Different part of the country. Different kind of job. And you know, I want to do more, to be honest with you. In our organization. And I feel like Barton was hearing you, but he wasn’t really hearing you, you know?”
He glanced over, and I gave him what he wanted. I nodded vigorously. I was still in the bed. Still had to piss and everything.
“But Barton, you know, he don’t listen to me. I could plan the whole thing, I could run it myself, but I’m not the one with the purse strings. He’s got the donors, he’s got the cash box, he’s the one running the show.” He puffed up his cheeks, blew out air. “Plus, you know, look at me, right? Look at us. The way he sees it, whites are the ones do the saving. Black folks best hang tight and wait on getting saved. He’s got what I call a Mockingbird mentality.”
He was talking about that noveclass="underline" the Alabama runner hiding in a small Tennessee town, the courageous white lawyer who saves him from a vicious racist deputy marshal. That book was one of a hundred or more I read in a Chicago library basement, in the tender, terrified early months of my own freedom, trying to teach myself the world, and I remember how it moved me. The point, though, was that the hero of the book, the hero and the heart, is that good lawyer: the white man is the saver, the black man gets saved.
“So I’m thinking, I bring you back to the father, I push you on him a little bit. We’re gonna get your wife free and move me up the ranks a little. Show the man what a brother can do, you feel me?”
“I feel you,” I said. “I feel you, brother.”
For some reason that caught him by surprise, Jim Dirkson all nervous and confused, saying “I feel you” like that. The cop laughed loudly, and I saw the little pink glob of chewing gum moving around in the dark of his mouth.
I was startled by a red flash of last night’s dream, Castle’s hovering eyes, the reek of the pile. I shoved it all away with a violent act of mind. I thought instead of my poor, dear, imaginary Gentle, in headlamp and coveralls, shackled to the cart she pushed through the darkness of the mine.
“All right, so get up, man,” he said. “Let’s get moving.”
“Oh, my goodness,” I said. “Oh, my goodness, thank you.”
I came off the bed and clasped the cop’s hands in my hands, and he looked away still chuckling while I kept on saying “Thank you” and “My goodness” and “Thank you,” while I was thinking I’m sorry and then I’m sorry, Jackdaw, I’m sorry, and something was giving way inside me, and Mr. Dirkson and me, we couldn’t hold it in anymore, and out came tears, my face just collapsed into trembling.
“Aw, come on, now,” said the cop, shaking his head, lifting me up off my knees. “No need for all that. Let’s go.”
But I kept right on saying “Thank you,” I said it over and over while he waited by the door for me to gather myself together, get dressed, use the toilet, brush my teeth. His hand still resting on his gun belt, amused at Jim Dirkson’s puppy-dog earnestness.
“Now, wait,” I said when I was ready. “Now-I don’t even know your name. What is your name?”
“Cook,” he said, and pulled open the door. “I’m Willie Cook. Now, come on. We got a meeting to get to.”
11.
Officer Willie Cook drove us south in his IMPD cruiser, tapping his fingers lightly on the steering wheel and chewing on his gum. I sat in silence, uneasy in the shotgun seat, while his eyes danced back and forth between the road and the dashboard computer, where crimes in progress scrolled by in alphanumeric cop code. As we crossed Broad Ripple Avenue we passed a small knot of black kids, laughing and walking together on the narrow sidewalk; one of them, a short kid pushing a bike, wore a hoodie pulled low over his eyes. Cook slowed down and gave a blurp of the siren, gestured at the kid to make sure his face was showing. His friends laughed while the boy obeyed, slowly, muttering curses, pissed as hell.
“Dumb son of a bitch,” said Cook, shaking his head, sighing. I caught the kid in the mirror with his middle finger aloft, a miniature of impotent rage frozen in the side-view as we drove away. “Right now they calling me a Tom, but these kids know the rules. Face has gotta be visible, that’s all. Better he get a warning from me than have one of these crackers roll up on him.” He pointed at the screen of the dashboard computer, where his fellow officers were represented by white numbers on a green screen. “Officer Peele is out here today. Peele’d knock that kid’s head off, hoodie and all, put handcuffs on the corpse. Resisting arrest, no fucking joke.”
I nodded. I murmured my agreement. I noticed things. The in-car data-communication system, I noticed, was called DPSC. Indiana’s warrant-database system, I noticed, was called IDACS, and it was linked to NCIC, the national system, and to the Marshals Service’s fugitive-database system. I watched that Marshals Service scroll for a moment, waiting for Jackdaw’s profile to come up, until Cook saw me watching.
“They could reset it, take that feed off of there,” he said, “but I told ’em don’t even worry about it. Shit kinda comes in handy, actually.”
He winked, and I marveled at Officer Cook: double life, complicated game. He wasn’t obligated to have the names and aliases of runners coming up on his screen because black cops were exempt from enforcing the Fugitive Persons Act under the Moore amendment. But Officer Cook liked having the info so he could push it to his pals in the Airlines. He wasn’t the only one, and plenty of white officers did the same, and plenty of police chiefs and public safety directors were if not sympathetic to abolition at least neutral. One of many reasons why the marshals had more or less stopped relying on local law enforcement. Why they had begun instead to use people like me. Complicated game.
Officer Cook moved his gum around in his mouth and tapped his fingers on the wheel. He had a big flat gold ring on one finger, catching the sunlight. Class ring. A whole life behind him.
“So-can I ask you, Officer…” I let my voice, Dirkson’s voice, come out in a reedy tremble. “Where exactly are we heading?”
“Monument Circle. Old Abe. I texted Father Barton to meet us.”
“About me?”
He gave me a look. “I told you, man, we gotta play a little smart on this. I told him I got new information on our open case. The kid is stashed just fine for now, but we’re working on getting him on a connecting flight. Getting him squared away up in Côte Saint-Luc.” He took a stab at the proper French pronunciation, but it sounded silly, and he snorted. “Whatever you want to call it. Little America. We’ve been waiting for word from some folks we work with, some snowmen, and we don’t know how they’re planning to get in touch. So I told Barton I had news on that front.”