I drove back into the off-limits zone. My posse had been good to me once. They knew the streets. Their chances of digging out the junk man were better than anyone's. I was looking for them when I pulled onto Ms. Thompson's street. Their shady spot on the corner was empty. But when I passed the Thompson house, a rental car was parked in the swale instead of up in the empty driveway. I realized that in my earlier meetings with McCane I had never seen the kind of car he was driving and wondered if it had been intentional. The easier to tail you with, bud.
I pulled up in front of the rental, nose to nose, and got out. I was shifting into cop mode, tasting a bubble of adrenaline in my throat. Thrill of the chase, a thrill I once wanted to believe I could leave in the past.
Ms. Thompson's house had a southern exposure and the sun was bright on the front windows. As I walked up I couldn't see any movement behind them. The front door was closed tight and I stood there for a second, listening. I instinctively reached down to my hip but my 9mm had long been retired. After the ranger shootings the gun had been retrieved from the river and bagged as evidence. I had never asked for its return.
I knocked. It was quiet. I knocked a second time and this time I heard a shrill but composed answer come from around the corner.
"Round back here. On the patio," came the old woman's voice.
I passed through the open carport and found them there, McCane and Ms. Thompson, sitting at a wrought-iron table, cups of coffee before each of them. An old photo album was opened between them.
Ms. Thompson looked at me and I could tell from her eyes that she was searching to recognize where she had seen me before. McCane saw it, too.
"Well, Mr. Freeman. What a pleasant surprise," he said, pushing his chair back. "Ms. Thompson, this is Mr. Max Freeman, an associate of mine. I believe you two may have met the day of your very unfortunate situation."
He smiled up at me, showing his big, blocked teeth. I could imagine it had been a false smile seen by many clients and inmates in the past.
"Why yes, I do believe I recall now," said Ms. Thompson, who had lost some of her rough exterior in McCane's presence. "Would you care to join us, Mr. Freeman? Mr. McCane has stopped by to discuss an insurance policy I have with ya'll's company, but we have been a bit sidetracked on this lovely day."
"No doubt," I said, looking from one to the other.
"May I get you some coffee, Mr. Freeman?" she said, starting to get up.
"No, please, don't bother yourself," I said, but she was already motioning me to sit.
"It is never a bother to be a gracious hostess, sir," she said, moving slowly toward her back door."
"Thank you, ma'am."
I continued to stand, putting my back to the house and facing McCane. He crossed his thick ankles and did not look up.
"Y'all didn't do much of a job interviewing Ms. Thompson here," he started, slipping back into his good ol' boy cant. "You and your detective girlfriend ought to learn how to lay on a little sugar when you're trying to get something out of these folk."
"Do tell," I said.
"Specially the old ones. Trick is to get them using their memories to kind of loosen their stopped-up brains a little. Oh yes, we been reminiscin' 'bout old times, all her pickaninnies and her poor deadbeat husband.
"Hell, she even pulled out the old pictures here," he said, touching the photo album with the blunt tips of his fingers. "Showed me the one of her mother sittin' at a nightclub in Overtown with Cassius Clay long before he become the droolin' and shakin' poster boy for the Olympics."
The adrenaline had soured in my mouth and been replaced by a warm anger that was spreading into my neck. Still he did not look up.
"So the old lady didn't see a damn thing the night her boyfriend. got his throat crushed. But she did recall smelling something, Freeman. You've got to remember all the senses in this line of work, bud," he said.
"She smelled the garbage can in her bedroom after he left is the way she put it. And a man's hand pushin' down on that pillow that had to be the size of a big 'ol catchers mitt how it fit over her entire face and head.
"That fit with anybody you and your girlfriend been trackin'?"
I was counting to myself again, swallowing a growing rage.
"You've been tailing us, McCane. You see anybody that you were hoping we'd lead you to?" I said.
He continued to smear his fingers on the plastic cover of the album.
"No. I didn't think so," I answered myself. "If you had, you wouldn't be here."
Richards had been right getting Hammonds to call in an overtime squad to step up the BOLO on Baines while she and Billy tried to get a lock on the doctor's hard drive.
Ms. Thompson reappeared and McCane stayed quiet. She put a cup down in front of the empty chair and said, "Oh mercy I have forgotten our milk, Mr. McCane. Please, please, sit down Mr. Freeman. I'll be right back."
McCane took a long sip of his black coffee while the woman tottered away.
"You ought to know by now, Freeman. These are just simple minds you're dealing with."
"And you ought to know how to manipulate them, Milo, considering the practice you've had," I said, holding his eyes and watching the twitch behind them at the mention of his old prison nickname. He sat quiet for a minute, glancing out toward the alley.
"I see your boy Manchester been busy checking my past," he. said, trying to sound unfazed.
"And your boy Marshack's, too," I said. "You have some interesting coffee hours up at the Georgia state pen?"
He surprised me with a short laugh that came from deep in his chest.
"Ol' doc, he never was one for small talk, always pullin' that philosophical shit on you, trying to impress how smart he was. But the boy just could not hold a job," he said. "You know how far a guy gotta tumble to end up being a shrink in a prison?"
"I wouldn't know, McCane, but the good doctor sure did know how to keep some damned immaculate records. And if they tie you to it, McCane, the cons at Moultrie are going to throw an interesting homecoming."
My words stole the smugness from his face. I could see his knuckles whitening around the coffee cup. Again he cut his eyes to the hedges along the back lawn where some movement seemed to have caught him.
"Well, gentlemen. Excuse my absence," Ms. Thompson said, stepping carefully onto the patio. She froze when she saw the look on our faces.
"Get your ass back inside, old woman," McCane snapped, pushing his chair back and standing.
The words were like a slap and a warning that I had gone too far. Don't put him in a corner, I thought.
"Well, I never," Ms. Thompson spouted, starting to get her feistiness back. But I looked in her eyes and she saw a warning there. Shed seen enough in her years to keep from getting between two angered men. She turned, hissing, and retreated back into her house.
I watched McCane pulling himself back down, the flex of the hand, the loosening of the jaw. He started to chuckle.
"Freeman, Freeman, Freeman. You are some kinda big city detective, bud, with all this conspiracy talk. Hell, I thought I was just helpin' you boys out down here, and now you all cookin' up this wild-ass conjecture."
He was shaking his head. The ol' southern boy perplexed by it all.
"Hell, if that's the way it is, Freeman, I will be glad to get on back to the home office and leave this all to you smart folks," he said, getting up with a bemused look on his face.
"I'm glad you can find the humor in it, McCane. You may very well be right," I said, moving past him toward the side of the house, hoping he would follow me into the open.
"I'm sure you've got all your financials in shape. Money in, money out. Your salary from the insurance company will match up with all your expenditures. You know how these things go, McCane-follow the money."
"But you haven't done any of that yet, have you, Freeman?" he said, moving up behind me. I could feel his closeness, hear the heavy shoes shuffling in the blades of grass. "And your boy can't get that kind of information without a subpoena, and you don't get that without an official investigation. And from what I seen, you're far from official, bud."
"It would probably be a hell of a lot easier on you, McCane, if it didn't get that official."
I'd turned to him and was walking backward now, holding his eyes as we came around the corner of the house to the front lawn. Then I saw his face change.
When I looked around, the three street guardians were leaning up against the rental car. The leader in the middle, his head turned down, watched our approach from under the edge of a Marlins' ball cap. He was poking at his teeth with a toothpick. His friends had their hands in their pockets. While I hesitated, McCane stepped past me.
"Get y'all dusty asses off my car, niggers," he said, striding toward the group.
Without a word all three of them nonchalantly flexed their leg muscles and bent forward, bouncing their rumps off the fenders and taking one step forward. Their eyes followed McCane as he passed them and walked around to the driver's side.
McCane got in, started the car and pulled around my truck, driving slowly and with as much dignity as one could in a tiny rental. We all watched him turn the first corner and disappear.
"Tell me that cracker cop ain't workin' wit you, G," said the leader without turning to me, his words directed in the direction of McCane's car.
"He's not working with me," I said.
"Then what's he doin' round Ms. Thompson's?"
It was my turn to hold a response.
"I think he's looking for the junk man," I finally said.
The leader was quiet while he poked at an upper tooth.
"Ahh," he said, a grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. "A unified goal."
"You call me if you find him," I said, climbing into my truck.
Eddie was out in the street. He couldn't wait under the bridge forever. He had two more days to wait out Mr. Harold, and the ache in his veins was too much. He needed his heroin.
He had waited in his concrete corner through the daylight hours, listening to the cars overhead, trying to ignore the twisting in his stomach and the ache in his muscles. Just after nightfall, he heard the voices of the homeless men nearby, and their tone sounded oddly satisfied. He uncurled himself and approached them. He could smell gravy.
Three men were crouched in a huddle with white Styrofoam boxes in front of them. They looked up when Eddie came close. The light from the overpass lamps kept his face in darkness and cast a shadow large enough to cover them all.
"You can go down to the Salvation Army yonder and get you some," one offered, pointing to the east with a plastic fork.
Eddie stood silent. He had never gone to the feeding programs anywhere in the city. He'd seen the men, sometimes women and kids, lining up when the traveling kitchens stopped in the park on the west side. But he stayed away, his momma's voice in his head: "We ain't no welfare case, an' we don't take nothin' that ain't our deservin'." Eddie didn't try to figure why then she mostly took her dinner at the church in the last few years. "That's from God," she would say, bringing home leftovers. "And we are all deservin' from God."
Eddie determined that he was hungry now, and took a step closer to the men. When the headlights of a tractor-trailer swept through the bushes and momentarily lit his face, the three men got up and backed away, leaving their meals behind.
After he had eaten Eddie sidestepped his way down the steep embankment to his cart. He still had a hundred-dollar bill deep in his pocket, and he needed his bundle. One bundle would get him through, he convinced himself. Just one until Mr. Harold came again.
The thought of the heroin had warmed his veins and set him to pushing up the empty street toward the train station that was always empty at night. From there he could slip into the neighborhood, where he would again be invisible. And now he was out in the street.