The first time I heard Johnnie Bassett, I thought I was listening to a B.B. King outtake: borderline cheesy spoken-word intro, check; smooth singing and easygoing pace, check; guitar lines with enough sting to keep things interesting, check. His recent album The Gentleman is Back is distinctive enough to escape B.B.’s capacious shadow, especially on mildly smutty numbers like “Nice Guys Finish Last,” about being properly attentive to your partner’s needs. If your tastes run in King’s direction, Bassett might just be your cup of tea.

FOURTEEN

Noorie dropped her sandals on the beach and crouched to examine a squarish black object about as long as her finger. It had the texture of plastic, and black tendrils trailed from each corner. A lump of something in the middle, squishy within the black sheath. A mermaid’s purse, an egg case for something that swam. Some kind of a ray? A small shark? She couldn’t remember.

She scooped up her sandals and continued walking, enjoying the sound of the waves, the breeze on her arms and legs, the way the loose clothes moved against her body. Something stirred and she tipped sideways. She opened her eyes and watched, not fully comprehending, as Charlie dropped to his knees on the mattress and crawled up to her, almost invisible in the dark room.

“Charlie?”

“You miss me?”

She was fully awake now, yelling his name and throwing her arms around his neck. He panted as he kissed her, and she winced at his breath.

“Damn, baby, go brush your teeth,” she said, only now his hands were slipping up inside her sleep shirt. “Charlie, goddammit,” she squealed, feeling him tug her panties down.

“No time. No time for that.” He was pushing the shirt up, bunching it under her arms, getting her breasts free. “I missed you, honey. Jesus, I missed you, come on …”

“Wait a fuckin’ minute!” she snapped, only now he was pushing his pants down, getting into position between her legs. “No, no, no!” she yelled. “Where’s my car, where’ve you fuckin’ been …” She found the flashlight in the tangled blankets and clicked it in his face.

At first she was relieved that the batteries still worked. Then she saw Charlie’s face and screamed.

“What’ve you done, what happened to your mustache?” She yelped as he grabbed the tops of her calves and hauled her back, saying “Need you, need you” as he crouched, pressing her shoulders into the mattress and holding her still as he shifted into position. The strip of rubbers was no more than two feet away, coiled inside a plastic cup by the mattress, but she stopped struggling when she realized this was what the dream had been telling her. She relaxed and winced ever so slightly as he shoved into her.

She pressed her face into the side of his neck and doubled her legs back to give him the angle he liked best. As he plunged and grunted, she thought about the mermaid’s purse, and its soft, yielding core. As he came, she imagined the egg pulsing softly, somewhere deep inside her, being laved with jets of hot sperm. All that tweaker energy still throbbing as he clutched her hips and turned her over, getting her into position for another bout. This time she was ready for him.

She watched Charlie bounce around her place, completely naked and completely unselfconscious about it – one of the things she liked best about him. You might think Charlie was scrawny if you hadn’t felt his body against yours or seen him move, all speed and sinew. And stamina. Look, he still had a pretty good erection. Noorie watched it sway as Charlie accidentally kicked a stack of Styrofoam cups across the room, sending a small roach running for cover. He bobbed on his toes and studied her Najma Akhtar poster for the ten-thousandth time, tried to press its corner back against the fake paneling, then headed for the kitchen. He turned in the threshold and headed back to the mattress. Maybe he was coming for some more of Noorie.

“You got anything?” he blurted.  ”Just anything, you know?”

“The box under the sink. Half a joint.” There was a lot to cross-examine him about, but it was hard to stay mad at Charlie when he’d just spent the last half-hour moaning I need you into your ear. Now he was staring at her legs. The big black DARE shirt had ridden up her hips, and she decided to let it stay that way.

He glanced up from her legs, met her eyes. “Half a joint? That’s it?” He sounded amazed.

“Cops’ve had my car since Saturday, as I think somebody in this room probably knows. Kinda hard to go shopping, under the circumstances.” There, finally, a little spark of anger. “They got it impounded somewhere on the other side of the world and my sister’s away on a trip. Only reason I could get to my job’s Conchita gives me a lift. Can’t tell her my boyfriend’s in jail.”

“Who said anything about jail?” He was staring sideways at something only Charlie Murphy could see, rubbing his bare upper lip. He stood on his right leg and used his left foot to scratch behind his calf. She had once told him it was one of the cutest things she’d ever seen; now he was obviously using it to distract her.

Noorie got up on her knees and pulled the T-shirt down. “Why you bullshitting me? You come in wearin’ some jacket I never seen before, your mustache’s gone, your hair is fucked up – that quick-change routine is for when you pullin’ some shit. You was on a job and you got caught.”

Charlie seemed to be gathering himself for something: yell, apologize, throw furniture, maybe something neither of them could expect. It was that way with Charlie. She’d learned to recognize a certain stance, a certain facial expression, and what happened next would be a surprise to everyone, including Charlie.

He held out his hand, index finger pointing. “I’ll get the dope,” he said, “and then we’ll talk. I can see you’ve already made up your mind about me.”

“I wanna know …” Noorie piped down as Charlie disappeared into the kitchen. A tractor-trailer wooshed by overhead, so loud that one of the plywood sheets covering the windows rattled a bit. He came back with the redwood box and stretched out beside her. His penis nudged her knee. She watched it, hypnotized, as Charlie fired up the joint.

“Let’s go somewhere,” he said as she took a drag. “Someplace different for a while. We can both use a change. Change of scenery.”

“Now I know you’re in trouble,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, trying not to lose too much of the hit.

“When I met you, I told you – I like to keep moving. I wanna see everything there is to see. Used to do it by myself but now I want you with me.”

You keep moving ’cause there’s landlords and cops after your ass everywhere you go, Noorie thought. She snorted, releasing the smoke, and he gave her a black look.

“I thought you were on my side, Noorie.” His voice seemed authentically shaky. “I thought you were somebody I could count on to be in my corner.” He looked across the room, not changing his position but refusing to meet her eyes.

It was just too funny – Charlie trying to look angry and withdrawn while his purple cock strained to reach her. She caught the swollen head between her thumb and forefinger and squeezed, gently.

“Before you get where you wanna be,” she told the penis, “your boss has to tell me where he’s been.”

“I was stuck in a skeleton,” Charlie said.

“Oh shit, Charlie, that’s creepy. Why’d you say that?”

He stretched his arms – Slim-Jim bands of muscle slipped over his ribs and chest. “I was crawling through a skeleton,” he chanted. “Some huge dead animal. There were cobwebs on my face, turning me into a mummy and all I could do was keep crawling, else I’d be stuck in the dusty digestion. I fell through the rib cage and ran before the other skeletons could catch me.” He rubbed his face. “Oh shit,” he said, sounding a little weaker. “I ain’t slept in, like, six days.”

“Skeletons, gimme a break.” Her tone was light, but she’d gotten a little chill. Rib cage. Bars. Charlie’d been in jail. And if Charlie had half the record she figured he had, the only way he could’ve gotten back out of jail would be to rustle up a whole lot of bail money or give somebody the slip. The bail money part was definitely out. “Were they Grateful Dead skeletons? Did they have top hats on?”

“Noorie, I …” Charlie trailed off. His body had lost its tension; even his erection was softening. She circled her thumb and forefinger around the tip of his cock again, but it was like turning a valve the wrong way – he was losing steam, getting fainter. When he talked, he sounded like a man calling from the caboose of a departing train. “I’m crashing. I’ll sleep, then we’ll go. Go with me, OK? Go everywhere with me, OK?”

She bent to kiss him. “Everywhere.” She put her head on his chest and stroked his stomach, listening as his breathing took on a slow tidal rhythm. He was sleeping across the foot of the mattress, head resting on a pillow bunched against the wall, feet resting on the carpet. She tugged a blanket over his body, then threw her old afghan over his feet. There was no point trying to move him.

She wrapped the last blanket around her shoulders and watched Charlie sleep. The traffic noises picked up as the last daylight faded: the highway was filling up with people on their way back from work, ready to get some living done in the small amount of time allotted to them.

She thought of her father snarling as he threw her out of the house for the last time. This is how I know Indians have made it in this country. Now our kids are just as lazy and fucked up as the white kids. Shiny-headed empire builder. The real estate king of Central Jersey. Asshole.

Go with me everywhere, OK?

OK. Definitely.

They’d go west, maybe, see the prairies. See the Rockies. Tramps like us, baby, we were born to get the fuck out of Jersey.

Maybe they could both get straight once they were out of these old surroundings. Fewer drugs away from the coasts, wasn’t that true? Then she remembered Anderson, their dealer, saying he’d started out selling crank to migrant workers in the Midwest. Latinos heading north to wash people’s dishes, taking so much meth that before long they saw Jesus’ face in the drying soapsuds, telling them about the Anglos chatting in the front of the restaurant. Bikers and truckers revved for the long haul, puffs of burning brain cells trailing from their ears. No getting away from the drugs anywhere, so they’d have to tighten up and get clean with their own willpower. Fine. Noorie had enough willpower for both of them.

Her deal with Anderson was only two months old, but maybe it was time to accelerate the schedule. Offer him a package deal for the whole thing, get a nice big chunk of money to smooth out the speed bumps as they made their way west. Anderson was a man of affairs. He could find the cash for all the keys at once. A straight-up business proposition. By tomorrow they could be paid and on their way, leaving Charlie’s demons in the dust.

She thought about bones and rib cages, skeletons running. The little hairs on her forearm stirred and she went into the kitchen to make tea, wishing all the way that Charlie hadn’t planted the images in her brain. Thoughts like that could trip you up, just as you were getting ready to run. Thoughts like that could get you killed.

Stephen King reviews Carol Sklenicka’s new biography of Raymond Carver and shudders at Carver’s poisonous relationship with Gordon Lish, editor and self-appointed Svengali: “in 1973, when my first novel was accepted for publication, I was in similar straits: young, endlessly drunk, trying to support a wife and two children, writing at night, hoping for a break. The break came, but until reading Sklenicka’s book, I thought it was the $2,500 advance Doubleday paid for Carrie. Now I realize it may have been not winding up with Gordon Lish as my editor.”

Junot Diaz does a lot of writing in the bathroom. Edwidge Danticat starts with a collage. Russell Banks can only write nonfiction on a computer — fiction he does longhand. All part of How to Write a Great Novel.

THIRTEEN

The eyes were hard to believe: round and white, cueballs edged with red, bulging like some cartoon character frozen in astonishment. It took a few minutes of hard concentration before Karen was absolutely certain she was looking at a human being. But that was the whole point of this folder full of papers and photographs. This was a human being who’d been turned into something else.
Karen was in the back of the records office, sitting in a red plastic chair with a broken back, hunched over to study the crime scene report spread out on the table. The narrative covered four and a half pages, all in Sergeant Hull’s unwaveringly neat block printing. There was a separate page with a neatly drawn diagram of the Kovach house’s ground floor, with an irregular kidney shape in the kitchen to mark the body of Stacey Kovach. Hull had drawn a comic-strip balloon full of text, with an arrow to indicate the back porch, where Murphy had evidently gained entry. Spots in the hallway marked fallen pictures; in the dining room, a blob within a rectangle indicated the table and the silverware Murphy had been stealing when Mrs. Kovach came downstairs – for a drink of water, according to Thumper.
It all came back to the pictures.

The staring eyes, bulging from hydrostatic pressure. The crusted crater in the forehead – not quite dead center, a little to the left. The blood that leaked from the nostrils and dried along the twisted mouth. The paleness of the skin emphasizing the deeper red of the bruise left by the assailant’s hand. The mark left by someone out to do harm. He’d grabbed her, slapped her around … God knows what else he’d been planning to do when Thumper came down the stairs.
Her image of Murphy blurred into several other faces: boys and girls and men and women, all coming at her with that same stupid-smart gleam in their eyes. Not all predators wanted the same thing. Some came for your property, others came for your body, others came for your soul. Sometimes all three. Sometimes they made several trips, gnawed away at you over a period of time. Left you bleeding and bawling, like a sheep that had been mauled by dogs.
The protuberant eyes made it hard to interpret the woman’s expression. It could have been terror, but it also could have been the mindless spasms and twitches of a body shutting down, shriveling even as the soul within strained to get out. Maybe it had happened too quickly for Mrs. Kovach to realize what was being done to her. That would be nice to think.
She stared at the photos a few beats longer than necessary. This was what she had sworn to prevent. She had to take this image into her mind. Stare at it, then go out and make a positive contribution to the case before she was once again relegated to the sidelines. It wasn’t simply a matter of regaining her honor. She owed it to this woman.

The hands on her shoulders made her jump. The voice above her head made her grin.

“Little light reading?” Warren Peterson. His fingers worked into her shoulders, digging in under the trapezius muscles. Warren was actually pretty good at massage.

“All hunched over like this,” Warren said. “It’s not ergonomically correct.”

“Watch where you put your hands, married man,” Karen said, not looking around.

“Married at the moment,” Warren said. “Until Maria finally comes around.”

“Still with Sesame Street.” Karen sighed, shook her head. “Why don’t you lust after Snorg Tees girls, like a normal guy?”

“Don’t know ’em.” Warren’s hands gently pulled her shoulders back, then his thumbs dug behind her shoulder blades.

“You got a computer? Google it and see what happens.”

Warren’s voice lost its joking tone. “Some kind of show going on.”

“What show?”

“I just saw Weiss and Morgan running thataway with the strangest looks on their faces. You heard anything?”

“Sure, I’m the first one cops call whenever something happens.”

“I heard Mickelsson’s name. Wasn’t he bringing the asshole of the day in for questioning?”

“Huh,” Karen stood. “Is Hull around?”

“Hull’s on the road.” Peterson scratched his chin. His hair was thinning out up top, like a monk’s tonsure, so he kept it short-short and reassigned the remaining hair to the line above his upper lip. He’d sworn to keep the leanness the county training regimen had given him, but there were signs his face was filling in. “I’ll go see.” He gave her shoulders a final squeeze and took off, leaving her with the record of what Murphy had left behind.

Word of what happened started percolating through the department just after Peterson left. Karen picked up scraps of information and stitched them together: flat tire on the road, prisoner trying to escape. Pursuit ending at the river. Somebody was dead. For an hour or so, everybody thought the dead man was Murphy.

“Officer McCarthy,” Crowell said, keeping his voice neutral even as his face showed red stress and anger.
“Here, sir.” She stared straight ahead, keeping sidelong track of the man sitting next to Crowell. A beefy guy with a square face and square shoulders that moved comfortably within his tailored gray suit.
“This is Peter Donnelly,” Crowell said. “He’s an investigator with the county prosecutor’s office, and from now on we will give him every assistance and extend him every courtesy in this case. He has some questions to ask you.”
“Officer,” Donnelly said, nodding. He waited just long enough to let her know that his position carried enough authority to let him remain seated, then he stood and shook her hand.
“A pleasure, sir.”
He had a deepwater tan and enough lines to give his face the look of a well-used catcher’s mitt.  The hair, like the mustache, was going gray.
“We’ll see about it being a pleasure,” Donnelly said. The tone was jovial, but Karen knew he was giving her a bump, and a little blossom of anger bloomed. OK, she thought, I fucked up with Murphy. Looks like I’m not the only fuckup here, now. That wasn’t a very productive attitude, but it would be enough to stiffen her spine while Donnelly cross-examined her. The prosecutor’s office was no friend of the local police.
“I understand you were the first officer to encounter the suspect, this Charles Murphy.”  His hair had been cut and swept back just so; the strands over the ears almost looked woven. Karen found herself admiring the barber’s work. “Please describe that encounter for me.”
“I was Elmer Fudd … I was on pursuit duty for the Saturday night checkpoint,” she said. She spoke as simply as possible, recounting the chase, the abandoned Maverick, the search along Hansen Avenue, the scuffle in the alley.
“The head’s OK now?” Donnelly asked.
She made herself smile. “The head’s fine, thank you, sir.”
“So when the suspect jumped out of the alley at you …”
“Excuse me sir,” Karen said. “I was checking the alley and heard him disturb some bottles at the far end. I was entering the alley when he came forward.” She realized that Donnelly was deliberately jumbling facts – trying to bait her into talking too much, catch her in a contradiction. Karen paused a few beats before speaking, taking note of the way he shifted in his seat: gestures of impatience, meant to stampede her. “When he came within reach, he jumped at me.”
“Was your weapon still in its holster?”
Karen had already told him about that. “It was holstered, yes sir.”
“Was that correct?”
A chilly finger slipped along her back. It was scapegoat time. Try to trick the newbie into admitting a mistake in procedure. An awful lot of blame could be hung on a very small peg, if the brass wanted it that way. Karen might be a newbie, but she certainly understood that much.
“All due respect, sir, but I didn’t think the situation warranted the threat of lethal force.” She put a little emphasis on lethal. “He said he’d been urinating.”
“And you take what a suspicious person says at face value? Knowing that a homicide had just taken place in the area?”
“Again, sir, with all due respect, at the time I was not aware of what happened at Thump’s … uh …”
Donnelly smiled indulgently. “The chief and I went back a ways, officer. Even then we all called him Thumper.”
“Of course, sir.” She glanced at Donnelly’s big, knotty hands. “At the time I was not aware of the break-in at the chief’s house.”
“Your car was not equipped with a radio?”
“I expect the call went out while I was searching the street. I switched off to avoid alerting the suspect of my, uh, whereabouts.”
“Yes.” Donnelly stroked his chin. “Let’s go back to the beginning for a moment. You say the suspect tried to ram you …”
“Excuse me, sir.” This was getting almost comical. “Perhaps I didn’t explain it clearly enough. I turned to block the suspect vehicle …”

And so on. It ended when Donnelly, glancing at Crowell, nodded and stood up. He extended a hand.
“Thank you for your time, Officer McCarthy.” He dipped a hand into his jacket and came up with a business card. “Call me if there’s anything you think I need to know … anything you need to tell me.” His tone was perfectly polite but in keeping with the tenor of the questioning. It implied that he knew you had screwed up in some appalling way, and it would only be a matter of time before he unearthed the truth.

On the way out, Karen walked around the dispatcher’s desk and passed Mickelsson, who was hunched over in a metal folding chair, staring at the floor. Around the corner, she saw somebody leaning over the water fountain, hands braced on the wall, as though he might puke into the thin stream of water.
Mark Hanover.
Hanover noticed Karen. He straightened up, sweeping his hands up his face, patting the hair back into place. He was breathing hard. His small eyes were made even smaller by redness and swelling. He had been crying.
“Karen,” he whispered. It was a familiar sound. In her mind, she was back in homeroom with a younger, thinner Mark Hanover. A boy’s voice, denying Karen’s accusation, then not quite admitting it, then falling silent as she stared him down. And then, just before the bell rang and the spell broke, that little pleading voice: Karen.
Mickelsson came around the corner, filling the air with his blue bulk.
“Mark,” Mickelsson said. “Shut up.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” Hanover said. Then Crowell’s door opened and snapped the two of them up.

TWELVE

     “Tell me about this.” The sheriff’s officer sitting at Murphy’s left, the one with the big doughy face and the lipless mouth that never completely closed, looked past him and tried to catch his partner’s eye. When he leaned forward, his whole torso rested on the tops of his thighs. “Explain to me, in a way that I’ll understand, what you think you’re doing.”

     “What would be the point in explaining it to you?” The other officer crossed his arms and watched as a couple of young nurses hustled past. On the far side of the hall, an old guy in a wheelchair seemed transfixed by the sight of the shackles on Murphy’s wrists and ankles.

     Murphy was staring into the middle distance, keeping his field of attention wide and unfocused, taking things in, waiting for an idea. Long experience with the law had taught him to distinguish good cops from bad, and he had concluded these two were simply hacks. With a bit of ingenuity, he might be able to use that to his advantage.

     “I don’t get it,” Hack One said.

     “That’s not surprising,” Hack Two said. His weary tone carried a great weight of contempt for Hack One.

     “Don’t get insulting with me.” Hack One said. His big face was like a pear with three horizontal slits. “A sheriff’s officer running for election to take away his boss’ job, pretty good chance he’ll lose, that doesn’t seem like the smartest thing to do.”

    
    “Guess that makes you the clever one here,” Hack Two said. When Hack One got up to use the drinking fountain, he muttered “Piss boy” under his breath. Murphy shuddered and turned sideways in his seat.   “Excuse me, officer.”
     “What?” Hack Two said.
     “I hate to put you out, but I gotta go pretty bad.”
     Hack Two gave him the once-over, as if he’d just as soon tell Murphy to pee in his pants. Then he looked up at Hack One and said, “Our guest has to go potty.”

     Murphy stood and, with a great clinking of chains, walked between the officers as they led him to the men’s room.
* * * * *

     William Broadmer sat very quiet and still in the back of the police cruiser, hands in metal cuffs this time, watching the landscape change. He’d been going up the courthouse stairs with two sheriff’s officers, giggling and rocking on his feet as he thought of the courtroom farce he and Murphy were staging. Then the officers’ radios squawked. Then they were heading back down the stairs, going to the loading area where two cops waited by their cruiser. Now he was on his way to Bridgeborough, in the custody of two patrolmen who were scaring him shitless.
     Mickelsson, the one with the long leathery face and the gray pompadour, looked at him with little in the way of expression – nothing to indicate he might consider Broadmer anything more than a bug on his windshield. Bad as that was, it was preferable to the younger guy, Hanover, whose bland oval face twisted in obvious hatred whenever he looked back. Broadmer tugged at his ID bracelet, read the name – MURPHY, CHARLES J. – and tried to stay cool.
     They left Clay Point, heading south through Mill Race and Seitonville, and Broadmer watched as the suburbs gradually thinned out. The rhythm of the driving hypnotized him, so when Mickelsson said “Murphy,” he did not immediately react.
     “Um, sorry, officer,” Broadmer said. “I wasn’t listening.”
     “I know you’re listening now, motherfucker.”
     “That’s right, yeah, sorry.” Hanover was staring at him through the mesh divider. Broadmer made a last attempt to hold onto the notion that he and Murphy were playing a wild practical joke on the unfair justice system.
     “You’re a real celebrity back in Bridgeborough,” Mickelsson said. “People been looking for you for days. Whole department, in fact. Pretty slick of you, the way you slipped out the other night.”
     Broadmer was torn between saying “Thank you,” which might have seemed cocky, and saying nothing, which would seem challenging. He didn’t know much about police work, but it didn’t seem very likely that an entire department would be mobilized to run down a bad check.
     They had left the main road and were now driving through a corridor of pine trees. There was a split-rail fence on one side of the road and a stone wall on the other.
     “Isn’t this it?” Hanover asked.
     “Sure as hell is,” Mickelsson said. Broadmer was trying to figure out what they meant as the cruiser slowed. Mickelsson was turning onto a gravel service road.
* * * * *
     Murphy nodded his thanks as Hack One unlocked the handcuffs.
    “We gotta keep the bathroom door open while he’s in there,” Hack Two said.
     “Yeah, fine,” Hack One said. “I know the rules.”
     Murphy stood still. “Aren’t you gonna do my legs?”
     “No. You go in and do your business. Do it now.”
     “No, come on, man. It’s number two, OK? How am I gonna manage that with my ankles locked together.”
The hacks looked at each other, then at Murphy.
     “All right,” Hack One said. “Can’t argue with nature.” He knelt to unlock the ankle chain while the other kept his baton ready.
     “Thanks, man.” Murphy shuffled into the closest toilet stall. As he was closing the stall door, a nurse called over about the CAT scan. Murphy, hidden behind the stall door, let out a thick, pained grunt. The sheriff’s officer, shaking his head, stepped back into the hallway, letting the men’s room door wheeze shut.
As soon as the door closed, Murphy stepped out of the stall, stood on the sink and popped up a panel of the drop ceiling. He winced and gritted his teeth as the sink sagged a little under his weight. There was a small shelf below the mirror: Murphy braced his right foot against it as he stepped up, getting his left foot onto the top of the toilet stall. Then he poked his head up into the dusty space within the ceiling.
* * * * *

     The cruiser was angled to block the service road. Hanover and Mickelsson got out and looked around. Broadmer sat with his hands cuffed together in his lap. He almost cried out when Hanover jerked the door open and clapped a hand on his shoulder.
    “Look at this fucking mess you got us into,” Hanover said. Broadmer stumbled, trying to keep his feet as Hanover hauled him along. Mickelsson was standing by the rear bumper, shaking his head.
     “Look at this shit,” he said. “Fucking flat tire.”
     Broadmer had to swallow a couple of times before speaking. “There’s no flat tire that I can see, officer.”
     “Well, it sure looks flat to me,” Hanover said. “Disabled cop car in transit, that’s a difficult situation.”
     “Good time for a con to try an escape,” Mickelsson said.
     “That’s, that’s not … I got no reason to run. I am a law … law-abide … all I’m guilty of is getting behind in my child support.”
     “Gee, that’s funny,” Hanover said. “Couple a minutes ago, you were talking about passing bad checks.”
“That’s what Charlie Murphy said it was.”
     “Gee, this gets funnier and funnier,” Hanover said. “Now you’re talking like Charlie Murphy’s some guy you just met.”
     “Here we go.” Mickelsson held up a chunk of metal he’d found along the road. Something that had fallen from an anonymous passing car.
     “That’s good enough,” Hanover said. He opened the trunk and pulled out the spare tire. Mickelsson wedged the metal bit into a tread and Hanover stamped on it, pushing it down into the tire. “Come on you whore,” Hanover grunted, kicking down as hard as he could manage, until a loud ponk and a slow hiss mingled with the woodsy sounds around them: birds calling back and forth, breezes stirring branches. It was cold in the shade under the trees, but not cold enough to account for the gooseflesh stirring along Broadmer’s arms.
     “You gotta understand something,” he told them. “I switched bracelets with this guy Murphy you’re so mad at. This is a big mistake you’re making. I’m not the guy you want.”
     “That’s interesting,” Mickelsson said. “Come for a walkie and you can explain everything.”
     Each cop took an elbow. They hustled Broadmer along the gravel path, dragging him when he tripped. The sounds and sights of the world narrowed to hard breathing, scuffing feet and, up ahead, the patch of sunlight where the shade of the trees thinned out.
* * * * *

     The musty dark was lit from below by a faint gridwork of light. Some kind of power line slipped along Murphy’s face as he crept forward. A cobweb had floated into his right eye, and he kept the eye squinched shut as he moved. There was no way he could stop and rub it, not while he was keeping his sweaty hands and feet spread out along the framework supporting the ceiling tiles.
     The gnawing of the drug hunger continued, distracting him from the task at hand, and Murphy dealt with it by concentrating on something that had happened to him in the fourth grade. Creeping across the ice, trying to keep his weight evenly distributed as he worked his way toward the broken patch and the dog that splashed and yipped. Cold as a motherfucker on his hands, his elbows, his feet. Almost like the bite of metal as he set his palm along the narrow framework.
     The sounds floating up through the ceiling told him he was above the hallway, maybe right above the sheriff’s officers. While waiting for the CAT scan, he’d taken careful note of the angles of the corridor. If he could move about twenty feet thataway, he’d be around the corner and out of sight from the men’s room. The framework creaked and sagged a couple of inches. Murphy froze, then stretched to the right, trying to remove his weight from the weak spot. A bubble of gas rolled through his abdomen, and Murphy could only wait helplessly, arms and legs stretched out and trembling, as it made its escape. He hoped the noise wasn’t loud enough to be heard through the ceiling. Another spasm gripped him, and he threw himself forward, ignoring the way the ceiling buckled under his weight.
* * * * *
     Out in the sun now. The gravel trail was straight as an arrow for some thirty feet, then it made an abrupt half-circle to avoid a huge oak that dominated the center of the field. Curved pipes jutted up from the ground every few feet, and a breeze carried with it the reek of sewage.
     “Damn, that’s nasty,” Hanover said. “This is a service road for a sewer line. Kind of appropriate setting for you, don’t you think?”
     Broadmer was weeping with terror. “Hai … hyou … this is not right. This is a big fucking mistake!” He screamed as Mickelsson stepped back and slapped his face.
     “The only mistake’s the one you made in the chief’s house.” Hanover threw his weight back, keeping Broadmer off balance as Mickelsson stepped in close. “Too bad you don’t have your screwdriver with you on this trip, hah?”
     “You don’t … holy fuck.” Broadmer was panting. “I know you won’t … believe. Jesus Christ!” he screamed when Mickelsson slipped his gun from its holster and held it out to him. “No, shit no!” Broadmer wailed. Mickelsson was pressing the gun into his hand.
     “Better keep this with you here,” Mickelsson said. He was standing a little behind Broadmer, keeping a lock on his wrist. “Put your finger on the trigger, like this. Christ, asshole, don’t you ever go to the movies? This gun is your only shot at getting through this alive.”
     “Your only shot, get it?” Hanover laughed.
     “Lemme show you,” Mickelsson said. He squeezed Broadmer’s hand. The gun let out a loud crisp bang and a spray of gravel flew up near the oak.
     “That’s the ticket!” Mickelsson cried, squeezing again. Wood chips exploded from a tree trunk. A puff of smoke and an oddly musical note from one of the sewer pipes. Then more eruptions of gravel until the gun’s hammer clicked empty.
     “Shit, that was close,” Hanover said.
     “Hard to believe he got my gun away from me,” Mickelsson said. “Fortunately, these assholes don’t get a lot of firearms training.”
     Broadmer, shaking and sobbing, still held the nine millimeter in his cuffed hands. When Hanover unsnapped his own holster, Broadmer tottered forward, as if fainting, then caught himself and ran.
     Vines and sticker bushes caught at his pants; a thin branch lashed his face. In his panic, Broadmer cut around trees, trying to shake the feeling that a little red spotlight was tracking him, picking out vulnerable spots on his back.

    “That’s good!” Mickelsson shouted. “Good move!” A tall bush tried to wrap itself around him, and Broadmer burst through in an explosion of leaves and twigs.
* * * *
    The framework shifted and squealed as Murphy lifted the ceiling panel. He had enough time to peer down at the laundry hampers and the shelves loaded with towels, then the ceiling gave way. Murphy tumbled in a blizzard of chunks, dust and metal strips. rips. He had hoped to land in one of the laundry hampers, but he fell badly, catching the small of his back on the edge of a hamper. He fought back the terror-fueled need to run, made himself lie still as he checked for bad damage. Then the door opened, smacking the back of his head and making him snarl. “What the fuck?” he heard somebody say, and he pulled himself upright to look at a hospital orderly.
     The orderly flinched aside as Murphy threw himself against the door, slamming it shut. “You motherfuck …” he managed to say, before Murphy swarmed at him, getting his knee up and punching and gouging and biting.     The crystal angels still weren’t singing, so Murphy filled the silence with the orderly’s grunts and cries.
* * * *
     “You scared Charlie?” Hanover shouted through the trees. “It’s OK to be scared! I wonder how scared Mrs. Kovach was before you shot her, you sick fuck!”
     The ground sloped under Broadmer’s feet. He had run full-tilt into a thick tree branch, and now his nose was streaming blood – probably broken. The gun no longer in his hands – when had he dropped it? The trees crowded in around him, then parted like a curtain to show him the river just ahead.
    “Ho … holy fuck,” Broadmer said.
     Mickelsson thumped and crashed through the shrubs behind him. Hanover was standing a few yards down the riverbank, taking his time as he picked his way closer.
     The river was running fast, swollen with a solid week of rain. A tree trunk had gotten caught on something fifty feet from shore, and now it was angled against the whirling, bubbling current. Broadmer pictured himself clutching that tree trunk, wet and cold but safe from the cops. If he kept himself on the far side of the trunk, they wouldn’t even be able to shoot him. He might give himself to the current, let it carry him to safety.
     “Where are you, asshole?” Mickelsson shouted, still invisible behind the trees, and Broadmer took a running jump off the riverbank. The cold water soaked right through him and wrapped its fingers around his heart. Cold enough to make him scream, but he kept thrashing, trying to work out a way to swim with his hands cuffed together.
     The river wanted him even more than the cops. He was a new toy in its grip. The current spun him around, let him get close to the tree trunk and then pulled him away. Broadmer drew breath to scream, then coughed and choked as a wave reached down his throat. He wondered how to draw another breath, even as the current swirled him down to a place where breathing was no longer necessary.
* * * *
     There was an empty Snapple bottle sitting on top of one of the wastebaskets. Murphy grabbed it and stepped out the door, feeling the sun on his face and the wind on his unshackled wrists.
      Walk slowly. Don’t run. Carry the Snapple bottle as if you were taking thoughtful sips, meditating on the beauties of life on this sunny fall day. He rounded the corner and disappeared into a group of secretaries heading back from lunch. Murphy took a pretend sip and watched their asses and legs moving inside their skirts. He took another look around, marveling at the ugliness of Clay Point. Old houses and brick buildings stuck together like grimy toffees. The barrel-shaped tower of the county courthouse rose a few blocks away. Most of the houses in the immediate neighborhood were converted law offices, or branches of the county administration.
     A guy about Murphy’s height and build crossed the street, lost in his own thoughts, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his black jacket. Murphy sauntered along behind him, his gait acquiring a certain pimpish roll as he matched his stride with the other guy’s steps. He gave the street a quick three-sixty, saw they were momentarily alone, at least from ground-level scrutiny. That was all he needed.
     Murphy threw himself at the guy, pushing him sideways into an alley between two brick buildings. The vic grunted and huffed, still thrashing around and figuring out what was going on, then the Snapple bottle shattered against the right side of his head. His knees buckled and Murphy grabbed the hem of his jacket, pulling it up over his head as he fell. Murphy saw the looseness of his body, saw there wasn’t going to be a fight, so he pulled the jacket all the way up, kicked it loose from the man’s arms. A quick pat-down, get his wallet. Forty bucks and a condom. Murphy dropped the wallet, and it flapped like an injured bird on the back of the vic’s neck as Murphy continued down the alley and out the other end, through a parking lot and out to the bus stop.

ELEVEN

Borough Hall was a converted railroad hotel: a three-story wedge of chocolate bricks and stone angels, angled into the juncture of the Boulevard and Espadrille Avenue. It was an emblem of the prosperous Twenties, when bootleggers had ghosted their way down the river, into the bay and out to the ocean, where they met up with contact boats and returned laden with Canadian whiskey. Now the ridiculously ornate bootlegger palace was the seat of law enforcement for a town that couldn’t have afforded such a nice building on its own.

The ground floor was taken up by the cop shop; after 9/11, the ornate front doors had been chained shut and all visitors directed around to the parking lot, where visitors entered a two-story cinderblock annex with a doorway metal detector and a defensive perimeter of concrete planters, then a long corridor that gave the police dispatcher plenty of chances to eyeball them through bulletproof panels. Not only had the arrangement served to repel terrorists, but the leftover funds had paid for an elevator and upgraded computer system, so when municipal court was in session records no longer had to be hoisted upstairs via the old hotel dumb waiter.
Dawn was coloring the faces of the angels as Karen turned in from the Boulevard, looking for a space in the lunar-textured parking lot. The flag atop the building was at half-mast. Before getting out of her car, Karen took another glance at The Three Rivers Tribune on her passenger seat. Bridgeborough hardly ever made news, aside from police items in the back of the local section, but here they were now, the lead story for the day. Bridgeborough police chief and his wife killed by burglar. The first of many stories, no doubt. All eyes would be on the force until the bad guy was nailed.
She studied the story, stared at the picture of Thumper – an old file photo, twenty years and fifty pounds out of date. Nothing surprising in the story: tough childhood in a tough town, father worked at the shoe plant – as had just about everyone else in Bridgeborough until the mid-Eighties, when the local employers scuttled overseas and left the empty factories standing like discarded shells.

Thumper had been a Golden Gloves boxer (hence the nickname), a marksman and an avid hunter. Judging from the story, local girl Stacey Melli had done nothing of consequence aside from getting big enough to catch the eye of a young Bridgeborough police officer, at which point she morphed into Stacey Kovach. No children. The photo of Stacey had the underlit background and too-bright skin that went with old Instamatic photos. There was a sidebar story consisting of tributes from friends: Thumper’s venison chili recipe rated several mentions. The headline: A small town life, a small town death. The second line pulled at her. A small town death.

Cops entered the annex from the back. No dog collar or leash in the women’s – i.e., Karen’s – locker room this time. She manned up and tied her spit-shined shoes and tried to look hard and professional as she headed for the muster room.

The other four cops watched her come in; two nodded, two hoisted their chins. Karen felt a little coil of tension slowly unwind in her chest. The anger was there, the rage they all felt at the murder of their chief in his own kitchen, but it didn’t seem to be directed at her. Even when Sergeant Hull clumped over to the lectern and told them all to sit, the way he looked at her was subtly different. The usual faint sneer was gone. Instead, whenever he looked her way, he seemed curious.

“To answer the question on everybody’s minds,” Hull said, “the virus who killed the chief and his wife is still at large. The county prosecutor’s office is now involved, but you will all memorize the description of the suspect and work it hard whenever you’re on the street. The funeral is tomorrow morning and you’ll all be there, naturally. Weiss will give you your assignments for the funeral. After the funeral, report back here for orders.”

Karen’s anxiety returned as Hull read off the day’s schedules – traffic duty, foot patrol, in-house training sessions for the other four cops, but nothing for Karen. They all noticed it, too. When Hull dismissed them, he said, “Officer McCarthy, a minute of my precious time.”

Officer. Not Patrol Man. Now, what did that mean?

She stood at ease. “Yes, sir.”

“Acting chief Crowell wants you in his office,” Hull said.

“Now, sir?”

“Good guess.” He dismissed her, but just as she reached the muster room door, he said something to her back, making her turn.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Aikidoka, huh?” Hull was studying her. “That’s your thing, right?”

Karen’s thoughts whirled and settled. ”Yes, sir, that’s correct.”

Hull stepped around the lectern. “I’m MMA myself. I think it’s a little better suited to cop work, personally.” MMA – mixed martial arts. Two guys mauling each other in a chain-link octagon. Hull had the oddest little smile on his face as he stepped closer. “You go to that dojo in Mill Race, right?”

“Good guess, sir.”

He registered the impertinence by smiling a little wider. “I look forward to seeing you apply some of your lessons in the field,” he said softly. “I’m always ready to learn something new. The acting chief is waiting.”

Hull’s strange vibe stayed with her as she walked to Crowell’s office. The door was open. Crowell glanced up and motioned for her to come inside.
“How’re you feeling today?” Crowell asked. He was about Karen’s height, with thinning hair, owlish glasses and the pensive air of an accountant who’d found a decimal point in an unexpected place. Karen knew that ten years earlier, Bridgeborough had seen what was then the biggest crime in its history: a bank robbery gone bad, a hostage situation and, finally, a shoot-out in which then-sergeant Crowell had killed one gunman and wounded the other. The average suburban cop hardly ever used his gun outside the firing range. Crowell, who seldom raised his voice above a raspy murmur, had used lethal force and come out smelling like a rose. Not even Thumper had been able to deny him advancement.
“Thanks, sir, I’m fine,” Karen said.
“And what about the rest of it?”
“The rest of it … um … I’m anxious to work, sir. I know I have a lot to prove and a lot to live down.” Emotion made her voice huskier than usual. “I intend to do that.”
Crowell glanced across the room at Thumper’s big desk, with its perfectly arranged and dusted surface, then mused on his own comfortably cluttered work area. He picked up a set of mug shots and handed them to Karen.
“I wanted to ask you about these,” Crowell said.
She held the papers very carefully, feeling her heart race and her breath come quickly. The man of her memories.
“This is him,” Karen said. “This is the guy. Are we going to get him?”
“He’s already caught,” Crowell said. “Pretty interesting. He got snagged in that bar fight at Reilly’s and Dawson took him in. He’s in the county lockup right now. Office Hanover and Sergeant Mickelsson are going over to gather him up, bring him in for positive ID and questioning. I need you here for that this morning.”
“Of course, sir!” Karen cleared her throat. “May I volunteer to go get him?”
“This one’s coming to you. I’m telling you this because you’ll have desk work to do in the meantime, and I don’t want you to think it’s modified duty.”
Modified duty. Exactly what she’d been afraid of – a paper-pushing job, the department’s way of telling her she was going to be kept away from the show. The deputy chief himself was telling her that wouldn’t happen. Had Thumper been in his place, Karen would have been assigned to the records office for the rest of her career. Crowell was in charge for the time being, and he was giving her another chance.
“Thank you sir,” she said. The evil chorus in her head, the angry voices willing her to fail, were stilled for the moment. “Thank … thank you for the chance.”
Crowell shook his head the tiniest bit. “You’re welcome, officer. Please take this file back to records for now. We expect the suspect to arrive before lunchtime.”
As Crowell had probably expected, Karen spent about a half hour in the records department studying the folder. The suspect, Charles Jackson Murphy, had a long list of priors: breaking and entering, simple assault, drug possession. Not somebody you’d hire to babysit your kids, but neither was he somebody you’d expect to branch out into murder and aggravated assault. No doubt he’d started out on what he thought would be a burglary, but the situation had gotten out of hand and he’d lost it. Now the chief’s wife was lying in the morgue, and the chief himself was lying in the hospital. One of the bad guys had gone into the home of a cop and left blood on the floor. No matter what she thought of Thumper Kovach, Karen knew cop honor had to be preserved.
She rooted through the papers, studied Murphy’s photos, noted the stolen vehicle report on the Maverick he’d been driving. The owner was listed as Nurit Sailesh, with an address in Dawson. She checked the male-female box on the report to see if Nurit was a woman. She still had to get the hang of these Indian names. There was something familiar about Sailesh, though she couldn’t think why, not right at the moment.
Karen put the file aside and went to work. In those last few relatively quiet hours, the world changed.

As she sorted insurance forms, a man she would never know was beaten senseless and left in a storage closet.

While she photocopied an accident report, another man fell bleeding in an alley with a fractured skull.

And, as she talked about a report with the dispatcher, another man died.

This video collection of the 100 best lines from The Wire is so NSFW it isn’t even funny. Actually, it is pretty funny a lot of the time. There are easily 100 more lines just as good, too.

Back in those innocent days when publishers didn’t consider the designation “midlist” a synonym for “leper colony,” Brian Moore was the ultimate midlist writer: a producer of consistently excellent to great and near-great books, a critical fave, unspectacular but steady sales, occasionally courted by movieland — The Luck of Ginger Coffey was an early star vehicle for Robert Shaw, Cold Heaven made for one of Nicholas Roeg’s better films, and Catholics was an unlikely made-for-TV success. This fine essay reminds us of Moore’s qualities, and why his work deserves to be returned to print.

Attercop! Attercop! (Via Jeff.)

As anyone who’s ever enjoyed one can tell you, an eggcream is a drink named after the two things it never contains. The same principle applies to the upcoming memoir by Karl Rove.

Considering that Roger Corman launched the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, Peter Bogdanovich, John Sayles, and Martin Scorsese, I’d say that Oscar was waaaay overdue.

“Her domineering father was the president of Tenneco and pals with men like Sen. John Tower, she grew up with George W. Bush, she was engaged to the son of a diplomat who did the CIA’s bidding. But after years of going to war with her controlling old man, devouring seditious issues of the muckraking Texas Observer, and furtively meeting the bravest Texas progressives, she eventually decided to raise a middle finger to all of her gilded upbringing.”

It was the biggest leopard seal the photographer had ever seen. So, naturally, he dove into the frigid Antarctic waters and swam up to it. And then the strangest thing happened.

TEN

The crystal sirens were long gone, and Murphy had to feel his way through the big empty areas left by their silence. He ran his fingers over the stubble on his face and the scabs along his jaw. He started to scratch the back of his head, but his knuckles encountered cold metal. His fingers slipped around it. A bar.
Having something solid to grasp helped bring the world into partial focus. They were in a U-shaped space. The outside of the U was a series of cages. The bars were white and the walls were yellow-painted cinderblocks. The inside of the U was a command post, shatterproof glass on three sides. Murphy could see guys in uniforms chatting, drinking coffee, looking up at monitors. Of course, this was the holding pen. The basement of the county courthouse.
Murphy had spent a restless, skin-crawling Sunday in the Dawson lockup, panicking every time a cop came down the hall, certain the ice-eyed wife-killing chief pig would turn up any minute. When the county sheriff’s officers arrived for him, he began mentally preparing for trouble. But the officers handled him with the usual amount of contempt, willing to cut a minor amount of slack so long as nobody gave them any grief. The long van ride to Clay Point had been uneventful. Now he was going to be arraigned and connected with a court-appointed attorney.
The killer cop hadn’t found him yet. It couldn’t be long, though. They had his ID and his description – sooner or later, somebody from Bridgeborough would come calling. The thought of it flooded him with fear, fear that brought Murphy the rest of the way back, into full awareness and a gnawing, unappeasable pain. He stared at the bright orange plastic bracelet on his right hand, the black lettering. MURPHY, CHARLES J. Interesting, how far he could push it up his wrist. Almost completely over the mound of his thumb. At the moment, though, it was a trick without any obvious use.
A burst of laughter filtered through the glass. The sheriff’s officers were rocking in
their chairs. Maybe there was something on the monitor besides cons. Murphy concentrated and picked out what looked like a videocassette box on the counter. Beetlejuice, it said.
“I know what goin’ on here!” somebody was yelling. “I know what y’all want and I know what police stand for, too! Protectors Of Laws Insuring Caucasian Empowerment! Let me repeat that last bit of information! Caucasian empowerment!”
The need for more crystals was a roadblock Murphy couldn’t get past. It brought on the kind of implacable pain that made anything else seem bearable. In this state, you picked a fight with the nearest guy and you took your lumps smiling – smiled even more as you gave them out, because nothing could feel any worse than the need for drugs, and meanwhile you were having the fun of dishing out pain to others
He had to make a move now, while they still had him for nothing worse than drunk and disorderly. He was still inside only because he’d hit that cop and the judge had set
bail ridiculously high. Murphy didn’t dare call a bondsman – he’d jumped bail so
many times, he could no longer keep track of the people he’d screwed.
“Tell ya what, let me out now an’ I cut y’all some slack on ya share of the reparations. You best deal, ’cause we be talking about serious dollars when it come time to pay up!”
“Paid in full, muthafuckah!” another voice yelled.
“Amen!” the first voice responded.
The end of the day was the scary thing. He would be shipped out to the county jail.
The county inmates wouldn’t be too bad, but the jail would also be jammed with spillovers from the state prisons. Bloods, Crips, wannabes from both groups, Muslim offshoots, crazies looking to be identified with them. The Hispanics would include Latin Kings, Nietas and assorted other bad asses. And all the while, the Bridgeborough cops would be closing in on his scent. It wouldn’t take too long.
Great situation, Charles. Go over the last couple of days and figure out where it went wrong.
After some thought, Murphy decided it all came down to Noorie and that asshole bartender. If Noorie had stayed home and taken care of him the way a girlfriend should, instead of pulling an extra shift, he wouldn’t have gotten the idea of going out to forage. And if that asshole bartender hadn’t leaned on him, Murphy could’ve ducked the cops, found a way home and set to work settling down his nerves with Noorie.
“Shut the fuck up!” somebody yelled from another pen.
“Don’t you go getting’ sassy now, cracker!” the black guy shouted. “You think I’m crazy! I ain’t crazy! I can get crazy, though!”
The noise drilled through Murphy’s ear and ground into his brain. He thought about getting up and hitting the guy, just to shut him up, stop the blizzard of static he was generating.
The black guy looked through the bars. “What’s up with all these crackers, anyway? I never seen so many palefaces in here. Property values gonna drop.”
Murphy twisted on the bench to look at the other cells. There were indeed dozens and dozens of white guys in the pen, all doing their best to project don’t-fuck-with-me toughness while not looking so mean that somebody might decide to test them.
There were twelve other men in Murphy’s holding cell. Four were black, four seemed to be Hispanic, two were white and the last was an enormously overweight Filipino guy whose neck bulged under the weight of his sleeping head. The shouting apparently hadn’t disturbed him.
“Deadbeats, Malik,” somebody called from the neighboring cell. “White guys ain’t paying they child support.”
“Whoops! Better shut up!” Malik hunched and put his fingers to his mouth. “Got some bitches want money out of me, too.” Laughter from several cells; Malik joined in.
One of the white guys in the cell, somebody with a blond pompadour and a mustache, seemed to get a little redder in the face during each installment of Malik’s harangue. More than once he looked mad enough to step up to Malik, but whenever the yo looked his way, blondie looked the other way. He was wearing a red and white Phillies jersey. So much for the Fightin’ Phils.
Murphy watched the guy until their eyes met. Very casually, Murphy folded his arms and nodded in Malik’s direction, rolling his eyes. The guy shook his head and mimed a chuckle.
“Speaking of bitches,” one of the Hispanics said, “that one there making faces at you, Malik.”
Malik turned, saw the accusing finger pointing at the Deadbeat Dad.
“That right, bitch? There a problem here?”
“Anybody wanna trade gum for a smoke?” Murphy said.
Malik turned to look at Murphy. “You can give me that gum now, white boy, and maybe tonight I won’t make you my lady for the evening. How about that?”
“Maybe I want some of ‘im too, Malik,” his friend rumbled.
Murphy laughed. This yo looked to be mostly mouth. Physically, he was about as scrawny as Murphy, with bandy legs and a tarantula mop of braids. The main thing was for any beef that started to stay one on one. Malik’s bulky buddy seemed mostly to be enjoying the sudden air of threat in the cell. The other two blacks were listening without giving any sign of taking it further. The second white guy, the Deadbeat Dad, he might actually jump in on Murphy’s side if a fight started.
“You can laugh now, white boy, but it rented laughter. The rent come due tonight.”
“What’s all that you’ve been talking about. Repairs?”
“I’m talkin’ about reparations. The Japs got ‘em, the Jews got ‘em, now it our turn. Reparations have to be made for every tear shed in this country.”
“So how’s that work?”
“It doesn’t have to be worked out. The government pay up, that’s all.”
“So … all the blacks in America, they get a thousand dollars or something, is that it?”
“Damn right.”
“Even blacks who came to this country after slavery was gotten rid of? Or people who were freed while there was slavery?”
“True dat,” Malik said. “They still oppressed by the system. They still disadvantaged. They still owed.”
“So the Caribbeans, Jamaicans, like that, who come here and do pretty good. They get checks, too?”
“Naw, fuck them. Only descendants of slaves.”

“Jamaicans’re descendants of slaves too, right? Just not American slaves.”
“The European Causcasoid power structure put them there, and America comes from those muthafuckas too. They all from the same bullshit, so they pay up, white boy.”
“Why you keep calling me a white boy?”
Malik slapped his leg and laughed loud. “Tell ya what, go find a mirror and take a look in it, then report back to me on ya findings. We take it from there.” He laughed again and traded palms with the big guy sitting next to him.
“You got me all wrong. My great aunt was blacker’n you.”
“Bull. Shit.”
“God’s honest.”
Malik scanned him, shook his head. “Yo great aunt?” He pronounced it Ont.
“Black as ink. And I’m one-eighth Seminole on my father’s side. I got genes from all over, man.”
“Black. Seminole.” Malik’s lip curled. “You are so fulla …”
“It’s not like I came here with my family tree. Why would I lie, something like that?”
“Part brother and part Indian. S’all right. We let you cash a little check, ’cause we generous.”
“So Indians get some too?”
“Not all the Indians. Some’a y’all got reservations an’ casinos an’ shit. Reparations’re so we can buy a little piece of this green earth to call a’own.”
“But Indians who mingled with black people, they get money?”
“What the fuck ever.” Malik was getting bored. The Deadbeat Dad, Murphy noticed, was taking it all in.
“Yeah, but that’s not fair. Some Indians rolled with the whites. And some blacks, too. You ever heard of the Buffalo Soldiers? They worked for the white man, killin’ Indians.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’d rather fuck you, baby.”
“You never heard that Bob Marley song about the Buffalo Soldiers?”
“Tell me, off-white boy, would you sleep better at night knowing not every Injun would get a check? Consider it done.”
“They should pay too, right? They helped the power structure, so they should pay.”
“Uh huh.”
“And black people who worked for whites, shouldn’t they have to pay? There were a few blacks who owned slaves. Shouldn’t we trace them, so they don’t get any reparations?”
Malik stared at him.
“Maybe one of your ancestors is like that, you know? Maybe you’ll end up having to pay me.”
The Deadbeat Dad slapped his knee and roared laughter.
Malik stared death at him. “Ain’t no house niggas in my family tree, off-white motherfuckah.”
“You’re probably right, unless it was the jailhouse.” Murphy stood and stretched. “Jailhouse, that’s probably it.”
“How ’bout I slap your head through those bars?”
Murphy shrugged. He spread his arms wide and waited, not saying anything.
Malik’s friend started to get up. The blond guy was on his feet first. Malik’s friend sat down, and the blond guy followed suit. All the while, Murphy kept his arms out and Malik continued to scowl.
One of the sheriff’s officers came around from the command post. Malik saw him coming and sat down. Murphy did a chorus line kick with his right foot, grasping the toe of his sneaker with his right hand.
“I’m thinking I should have this whole cell strip-searched,” the guard said. “Give everybody here something to occupy their time.”
“Excuse me, officer,” Murphy said. “I’m just stretching. This intellectual here was only talking. I’ll sit down now, so there won’t be any misunderstanding.”
The beefy guard took his time scanning the men, who gave back bored, indifferent looks. When he went back inside, Malik shook his fist at Murphy.
Murphy extended his right middle finger, kissed the tip and made a flicking motion at Malik. Then he looked down at his hand and felt terror burning through his gut.
His palm was spotted with crumbs of dried blood. The gun went off, the woman hit the floor. Her forehead sent out a little curl that spattered the tip of his shoe.
Dried blood. All this time he’d been walking around with dried blood on his shoe.
The Deadbeat Dad came over and gave Murphy a thump on the shoulder – good hearty man-to-man stuff, just so he wouldn’t look like a punk. “Nice work, man,” he said, as Murphy tried to gather his thoughts. “I was getting’ sick of that nigger’s mouth.”
Nigger. Not a word Murphy liked to use. A guy in a bar once called Noorie a nigger, and Murphy had been obliged to smash a beer glass into his face. Dumb fuck, couldn’t tell Asian Indian from black. That had been six months ago, when he was new to the area and had just met her at a park. He had to get back to that. Collect Noorie, get out of this town, this state, this life.
“Thanks for standing up like that,” Murphy heard himself say. “I owe you one, as long as you don’t think owing you a favor means I owe you anything else, if you know what I mean. Not that I think you’d do that, but I’ve heard about these places. Name’s Murphy, by the way.”
“Broadmer, that’s mine. Bill Broadmer.”
“How they hangin’?”
“Yeah, hey. But tell me something, man, you mean you never been inside before? The way you backed him down …”
“I been in trouble, but never trouble-trouble, you know?” Murphy said. “I mean, I know how to handle myself, but this law shit – Christ, I’m a babe in the woods.” Broadmer was taller than Murphy, and his hair was a lighter shade of blond. He was probably stronger – looked that way, anyhow – but he was a fish, too green, too white and too straight to be dangerous. Just made to be used. Murphy would show him how it all was. Charlie Murphy, agent of reality.
“What’re you in for?” Broadmer asked.
“Passing bad checks. Quick Chek, can you believe it? I tried to explain that I just used an old checkbook, I was ready to pay off, but their policy is to take you to the mat. So here I am, because of twenty-six dollars, thrown in with the scum of the earth, isn’t that great? Ain’t life grand? What’re you, public enemy number one?”
Broadmer shrugged. “Non-payment of child support, just like you heard. The bitch has the kid, the new boyfriend, the car and a better job than me. I’m supposed to help pay for the bed she’s gettin’ banged on by some other guy? Fuck her. This morning the sheriff’s officers caught me in a deadbeat-dad sweep. No fucking joke!”
“Bet they’d never dream of going after deadbeat moms,” Murphy said. “Never dream of that, I bet.”
“Goddamn right!” Broadmer made a fist. “I managed to keep changing my address, keep her off my trail, you know? She’s too cheap to hire a detective, so I knew that if I kept cool, used a slightly different version of my name, I wouldn’t have much to worry about. Guess I got too cocky about it.”
“You’re still better off than me.”
“What d’ya mean?”
“At least … look, I’m not going to laugh off your problems,” Murphy said. “I just … Christ, I’m in the middle of applying for a mortgage. The last thing I need is this kind of nonsense, OK? It’s just too weird. I don’t belong in this pit.”
They brooded on each other’s misfortunes.
“Tell ya what, though.” Broadmer thumped his shoulder. “While we’re here, we got each others’ backs. Deal on that?”
“Deal on that.” They shook hands. Murphy had managed to wipe his right hand clean on the edge of the bench. He idly toyed with his ID bracelet, pulling it up over his wristbone and working it along the bottom of his hand, where the base of the thumb swelled.
“Look at this shit,” he whispered. “It stretches. Practically comes off.”
“They’re not supposed to do that,” Broadmer said. “This is interesting.”
“Wanna switch?” Murphy asked, keeping his tone light. Broadmer’s expression was unreadable. “Uh, no, I’m joking, OK?” Murphy said.

A short time later, about mid-morning, Murphy woke from his doze. Broadmer was tapping his shoulder.
“What’s up?”
“I want to ask you about something,” Broadmer said. “You being straight with me about that bad check thing?”
Murphy looked around the cell. “You think I’m trying to improve my resume here?’
Broadmer chuckled. “You know about my beef, right? You think you could stand up under that? That’s something where you wouldn’t mind being in my shoes for a while?”
“If I did, let me tell you, that’d be one for the books. Imagine your wife’s face when you appear in court for the hearing, only it’s really me.”
“That’d be more trouble for you, though, wouldn’t it?”
“More trouble for the guards than anybody. Judge’d wanna know how they fucked up. I’d brazen it out. Tell ‘em they had the wrong guy all along, demand a lawyer, threaten to sue. They’d probably give me a limo ride home, just to keep me from suing them.”
Broadmer chuckled. “Twenty-six bucks? I could pay that now. Fine and all. No sweat off my balls.”
“Well fine, buddy. Are you a magician?”
“No man, you are. Show me how you slid that bracelet.”
Murphy showed him. Broadmer turned so his back shielded them from the view of the cameras. He managed to work his bracelet up to the base of his thumb.
“Use some spit,” Murphy said.
“You understand what I’m getting at?”
“Yeah, I do, I like it,” Murphy said. “I’m just glad you were the one suggested it.”
“Aw, c’mon,” Broadmer said. “Now’s not the time to be a pussy.”
“You’re a good guy, so I’ll overlook that.” Murphy popped the bracelet loose. “I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

A half-hour later, one of the officers called out William Broadmer’s name. Murphy stood and offered his wrist for inspection, managing to shoot Broadmer a wink as the officer knelt to put the shackles on his ankles.
The control room guards buzzed them through a pair of steel doors. Two sheriff’s officers escorted him. There were two flights of stairs to the ground level. As they were about to mount the second flight, Murphy swayed and stumbled.
“I’m sick, man.”
“I would be, too, under the circumstances,” the one officer said. “Matter of fact, looking at you makes me sick as it is. Come on, your lawyer’s waiting.”
“I’m not kid…” Murphy pitched forward. Too much weight landed on his sprained wrist. He allowed his head to thock against the floor tiles, and through the rush of sparks he heard the second guard bray a string of curses.
“I’m sick,” Murphy whispered. “I get seizures. I’m supposed to take pills but you motherfuckers wouldn’t let me get my stuff.”
“I have had enough of this bullshit,” the first officer said. “Get on your feet right now.” He drew air in between his clenched teeth when Murphy started trembling and blowing air through his loose lips.
“Fuuuuuuuuuck,” Murphy cried, folding his arms so he could clutch his left arm. “Jesus Christ, it hurts so bad.” The second guard bolted. “I’m getting the captain,” he called back.
Within a half hour, Murphy was back in a cruiser, being driven the ten blocks to Clay Point Medical Center. He was waiting for a CAT scan and a chest X-ray right about the time two officers from Bridgeborough arrived at the county courthouse.

NINE

“If you was dreaming about a zoo, that could mean a couple of things,” Noorie said. Outside, motorcycle engines snarled and snuffled, loud enough to cover the mid-morning traffic noise from the highway. The two choppers appeared on her left and rounded the front of the store, passing under the pink doughnut-shaped sign.
Noorie recognized the riders. The sudden nervousness made her eyes wide and white against her toffee skin, and her hands searched for something to fuss with. “It usually means something like, um, chaos and disorder. A mess, you know?”
She kept talking as she poured coffee beans into the grinder, looking at Conchita but really looking past her, through the window and out by the blue newspaper machine, where the bikes were now being gunned a couple of times. The first rider stood and dismounted, moving his long legs and angular body with exaggerated slowness, like a praying mantis limbering up. “It could mean there’s a mess in your life that has to be cleared up before you can go forward.”
The second rider dismounted, as though he’d been waiting for his boss, and the two of them stared across the parking lot. Even though Noorie knew they probably couldn’t see her, her stomach fluttered and her hands trembled slightly as she flicked the
switch. The machine buzzed and clattered. Noorie looked at the doughnut-shaped clock, wondered if she could just slip out the back door.
Conchita bent over the counter and swabbed in tight little circles, lips pursed as she mulled things over. Noorie watched her, wondered how she kept so slim. Noorie’s body was thin verging on skinny, but that was the speed. Her face was still round with baby fat, and would probably remain so until her dying day.
“A mess, huh?” Conchita said. “S’a lot that would apply to.” Noorie chuckled, not really listening. Anderson always put on a little show when he came to visit. There would be an interval as he took off his helmet and fussed with his hair, with Danny keeping a lazy lookout. She used the time to get her thoughts in order.
“Oh boy. Here come Lurch and Uncle Fester,” Conchita said. “Hope they don’t make the milk all sour.” She made tracks for the kitchen in back.
Anderson’s heavy boots thunked on the concrete as he stepped up to the front door. He topped about six-five, all scrawny torso and legs, wearing jeans and a T-shirt under a denim vest. He gave his head a little spastic twitch and sent the blond hair back in two flowing waves. When he pulled off his shades, his eyes reminded her of two sick, wary animals glaring out of adjoining burrows.
“Hey,” Anderson said.
She nodded. “Man who gets around.”
“Always transacting. Ecstasy in Edison, schwag in Red Bank, crank for the fags in Clay Point.” He arched his back to get the kinks out. Danny slipped past him and headed for the men’s room, moving quietly, as though he wore velvet slippers instead of bonebreaker boots.
“I wasn’t sure I’d find you here,” Anderson said. “Didn’t see your ride out back.”
“Car’s stolen,” she said, not too quickly.
“Piece a shit like that?”
“Can you believe it?”
“Huh.”
Anderson smiled, then he clomped over to the far booth. Noorie paced him, keeping
the low divider between them. “Was gonna leave your rent money in the car,” he said. “Nice surprise at the end of your shift.”
“I’m just as glad you didn’t.” Three people came in and Noorie headed back to the counter. She did her dancing multi-armed Hindu goddess routine, pouring coffee and bagging doughnuts and slamming croissant sandwiches into the microwave. At one point, she noticed Anderson getting up and slouching to the back way, heading for the men’s room. Then more customers blundered in, staring at the sign above her head as they gave halting instructions. After a half-hour or so of steady work, she was able to leave Conchita to flirt with the UPS guy, who was making his regular morning stop.
Anderson waited, his coffee untouched. Danny, sitting across from him, twisted in his seat so he could stare at Noorie as she approached. With his shaved head and slightly fleshy face, Danny could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty years old. He looked like a linebacker gone to seed, but Danny could move fast when it suited him. Noorie had no idea what his voice was like; whenever she was around him, he clammed up and simply stared at her body, grinning like a butcher presented with a particularly choice carcass.
Noorie managed to keep her hands from shaking as she replaced Anderson’s coffee and served some fresh to Danny. Anderson then asked: “So why’re you glad?” Noorie had to retrace the thread of their conversation.
“All that money in the car? Definitely not a good idea.” Noorie kept her voice low – there were other people in the shop.
“Specially not with Morphin’ Murphy around. You seen him?”
“Naw.” She shook her head quickly. “Charlie goes where he goes.”
She gave the UPS guy a refill and returned to Anderson. His eyes only seemed completely in focus when he was staring at her chest. Danny kept his eyes on the highway and the bikes, occasionally glancing at Noorie’s crotch.
“Maybe I’ll slip the money into one’a the donuts,” Anderson said. “Slip you a nice long cruller, huh?”
“First place cops’d look,” Noorie said.
Anderson stared at her without saying anything, and Noorie instantly regretted making the joke. Anderson was endlessly shrewd about some things and infinitely stupid about others. Jokes usually fell into the “other” category. She forced herself to smile as charmingly as possible, silently willing him to process the remark and conclude he hadn’t been insulted. Then he smiled and went back to staring at her tits. His teeth held an awful fascination: Anderson obviously didn’t spend a lot of money on dentists.
“Yeah, right.” He gave her a long look. “So your car’s really been stolen?”
“Yup.”
“Sure Morph didn’t take it? Kind’a thing he’d do.”
“Naw, he…” Time to improvise. “I just talked to him, said he was visiting some cousin a’his up, I don’t know, Hoboken or something. Jersey City. Said he’d be away for about a week, maybe. He wasn’t too specific. You know Charlie.”
“Yeah, I know Charlie.”
Danny’s head jerked as he laughed to himself. Private joke.
Noorie watched Anderson drain his cup. She dearly hoped he wouldn’t ask any more questions. Along with the workaday suspicions that afflicted any drug dealer, Anderson had acquired the raging paranoia of a habitual tweaker. Crack could make you crazy and violent, but crank eventually sent you into a whole new plane of existence. She didn’t want to be around for the day a red angel alighted on Anderson’s handlebars and told him to chop off somebody’s head.
As if hearing her thoughts, Danny gave her a conspiratorial wink.
Goddamn you, Charlie. Once again she was bending over backward to keep Murphy from drowning in his own bullshit. Once a month she swore it would stop, but Charlie had considerable powers of persuasion. He had a knack for getting people to do what he wanted them to do, all the while making them think it was all their own idea.
“You’re working late,” Anderson said.
“Girl called in sick. I’m pulling a few more hours until the other girl gets here.”
Anderson stood, making her look up. Danny left the booth and breezed past her. She flinched, expecting a hard pinch. No, this time he was letting her get away without any bruises.
“How you gettin’ home?” Anderson asked.
“Sister’s gonna come get me.” She was actually planning to take the bus, but if she said so he would offer her a lift and there was no chance she’d ever accept a ride from
Anderson. The thought of wrapping her arms and legs around him from behind … no,
uh uh, she didn’t even like brushing against him. Riding with Danny would be even worse.
“Thought you and your family were outs.”
“Yeah, but she’s like my spy. My double agent, you know?”
“Yeah. How’s she gonna know when to come?”
“I’ll call her.”
“At home? Won’t your mom know? Your dad?”
“We got something worked out, OK? You wanna sworn statement or something?”
Another long pause as Anderson turned the remark over in his cloudy brain.
“Yeah, whatever. Later, cutie.” He put his shades on. “Your tip’s inna back.”
Noorie waited until Anderson and his enforcer were rattling off down the highway. Then another batch of customers appeared. Almost an hour had passed before Noorie could get to the break room.
The room was a peach-colored rectangle with a couple of chairs, a sticky table and four lockers at the far end. Her locker appeared untouched. She scanned the room: nothing but litter, dirty tiles and a poster of a little kid with a bowl of spaghetti on his head. Looks like it’s going to be one of those days, the poster said.
She checked the padlock and found no scratches, no signs that Anderson or Danny had fucked with it. She had to open the locker and check everything before she found the envelope. It was folded in three sections and tucked into the inside pocket of her jacket.
Noorie looked around, then counted the money. Five one hundred dollar bills, plus a pair of fifties. She remembered Anderson had said something about giving her a finder’s fee, on top of the monthly rent.
She put everything back, relocked the door and sat down. After a few minutes, her trembling stopped, though her stomach continued to burn.
All of a sudden, five hundred a month didn’t seem worth it – not even to screw over her father. Of late, her dreams had been full of scary things: spiders, crying statues, sponges that oozed blood when she squeezed. Charlie had promised to stay on her program: get straight, get money saved, get away from the life and the scary people in it. Maybe it was time to speed up the timetable.

Clan Westie surveys the squirrel demilitarized zone.