some swerving, some sounding their horns, but not one vehicle slowing even a little. The Mayor was fine with it, swaying as if dancing to the sound and the fury. He held open his overcoat, exposing his bare chest and shouting drunkenly, “Ole!” at the charging herd of steel bulls.
Anxious, Louise kept looking from The Mayor to the traffic signal, and back, all the while willing the light to change to red. A city bus passed slowly, blocking her view for what seemed like forever. When she finally could see him again, The Mayor was looking back toward the sidewalk from where he had begun. What was he looking at? Louise strained her one eye to see through the streaking traffic to the other side of the street. She could make out two young men, teenagers, both standing next to the No Parking sign. They look weird, she thought, wearing all black clothes and knee-high boots. Like … what do they call them? Punk Rockers, or something. One had long, impossibly black hair and the other had not-as-long impossibly yellow hair.
“What are they doing?” Louise asked aloud, watching in disbelief as the yellow-haired one motioned with his right hand for The Mayor to come back to the sidewalk, while holding up the middle finger of his left. The other waved his hands for The Mayor to continue to cross the other two lanes over to Louise’s side.
Desperate now, Louise said, “They’re confusing the old fool.” She started to step off the curb but an angry horn drove her back. “Hey, you dirty shits!” she yelled feebly. “What you think you doin’?” The light finally changed to amber. “Thank God,” she whispered.
Traffic in all four lanes accelerated to beat the light. A white delivery truck next to the curb slowed to make a turn, blocking her view. She hobbled sideways a couple of steps closer to Costello to see around it, but still it was in the way. Costello could see, though, and his eyes widened.
He shouted, but his words were drowned out by a riot of screeching tires and blaring horns from the other side of the truck.
The truck moved on and The Mayor was gone.
Off to the right, bluish-white smoke swirled around the tires of a blood-red Nissan sliding sideways into the intersection. Underneath, a human form tumbling. A flash of skin, a pajama-clad leg, a flap of brown coat. Something pinkish shot out from under a tire and bounced across the pavement toward Louise. The Nissan rocked to a stop.
At Louise’s feet: a broken denture plate.
Across the street, the teenagers walked quickly away slapping each other on the back.
CHAPTER FOUR
One just doesn’t drop in on a deputy chief for a chat. There is a protocol. An officer or detective must ask permission from a superior officer in his unit to talk with someone on the fifteenth floor. But I don’t have a superior officer right now because having been off duty for two months my name has been dropped from the duty roster in Detectives and placed back in Personnel. Since I’m in limbo, I head straight up to the Chief’s Office.
Karen smiles as I approach her desk. “You’re coming to see me again, Sam? You do know I’m married, right?”
I snap my fingers and feign disappointment. “Darn. Hey, you got a sister?”
“An older one.”
“Better yet.”
“You here to see Deputy Chief Rodriguez?”
“I am.”
“Does he know you’re coming?” When I shake my head, she keys a button on her phone. “Chief, Detective Sam Reeves is here to see you. Yes, sir. Will do.” She looks at me. “Not as nervous this time?”
I smile. “More, but it’s not about seeing Rodriguez.”
“You’ll be fine, Sam,” she says like a reassuring mother. Like most personal assistants, Karen knows everything going on in the Bureau. She nods her head toward the hallway, and whispers, “He’s waiting.”
“Detective Reeves,” Chief Rodriguez says, from his doorway. “Come on in. Sit.”
“Good morning, Chief.” I sit in the same chair I sat in yesterday.
“You asked for twenty-four hours to decide and here we are at the twentieth hour. You going to take the job?”
Rodriguez is a cut-to-the-chase kind of commander so I’m not going to annoy him with what all went into my thinking. I’m especially not going to let him know about my issues with firearms.
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good,” he says without emotion. “Your shrink cleared you?”
“It’s in the works, sir. We chatted earlier and I’m good to go. She’ll be sending her report over before noon.”
“Good,” he says, picking up his phone and tapping in a number. “Stand by. I’ll let Lieutenant Sherman know.”
BJ Sherman is the lieutenant in charge of Intelligence. Since a small unit such as Intelligence doesn’t have a captain, Sherman probably answers directly to the captain of Detectives or maybe to Rodriguez himself.
“BJ, Tony here,” the Chief says. “Sam Reeves is on board … Right, I’ll tell him. The Fat Dicks check in with you yet? Good. I’ll have Reeves’s personnel file sent over to you, and I’ll make sure he’s back on the books. Good … Okay, he’s on the way.” The Chief cradles the phone.
“Do you know Lieutenant Sherman?” he asks.
“We worked East Precinct together about ten years ago. He had a desk job.”
“He’s a good lieutenant. Savvy to the sensitivity needed to work hate crimes. He also understands the importance of you keeping a low profile.”
My new mantra: Keep a loooow profile.
“You know Angela Clemmons and Steve Nardia?”
“Angela, just to say hello. Steve has been in a couple of my in-service classes. Funny guy as I recall. Coincidentally, I talked to him about Intelligence about six months ago. Said he liked it.”
Rodriguez nods. “Sharp guy, knows what he’s doing, Angela Clemmons is a good cop—tough woman, very race conscious. Lost her mother and father to homicide about eight years ago, in Chicago, I think it was. Anyway, we just got a vacancy in Intel. You’re the replacement.”
“Thanks, sir. Appreciate being considered for the job. The last few weeks have been a rollercoaster of …” I’m not sure where I’m going with this so it’s time to shut up.
He looks at my personnel file. “You’ve been on, what? Fifteen years, coming up on sixteen.” He lays the file down and looks at me for what seems like a half minute, though it probably just feels like it He sniffs, and says, “I’ve been on twenty-five. In my third year I killed a mother and her daughter.”
What?
“I was racing to an accident on I-5, going way too fast and zipping between cars like I was in a video game. Clipped a Volkswagen Bug and sent it into a cement pillar. Killed both occupants.” The lines around the Chief’s mouth deepen and you can see in his eyes the sad place he visits too often. “Witnesses said she jerked her car into my lane as I was passing.
