Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (33 page)

Derrick enters through the delivery door. It's secured with an old-fashioned padlock, which Derrick hammers off with the butt of the cap and ball Colt. There's only one person in the place, and it isn't Lou. It's a black boy of maybe fourteen, gripping a kitchen knife and hiding in the first place Derrick looks, behind the bar. The knife goes clattering on the floor when the boy sees his gun. “You work here?” Derrick asks.

The boy nods.

“Speak, boy,” Derrick says. He lifts a bottle of bourbon and a glass from behind the bar and then walks around and sits on one of the stools.

“I sweep up and clean the bathroom,” the boy says. “That kind of shit. Stuff. That kind of thing, sir.”

“You can cuss,” Derrick says. “It's a free country.” He opens the bottle of bourbon and pours himself a drink. “I'm going to ask you one question. If you don't answer me true, I'll hurt you. Is that clear?”

The boy nods. Emphatically.

“Good,” Derrick says. “I'm a big believer in clarity.” He feels his pacemaker hollowing out the space in his chest where his heart should be. “The name she gave me was Lou. She's tall, almost my height. Dark-skinned with an afro. No tits to speak of, and a gap between her teeth you could walk through, but hotter'n a two-dollar pistol. Your turn.”

Derrick watches the boy reach back for every lie he's ever told in his sad fucked-up little life. And somewhere behind his scared brown eyes, he knows there's not one that will work. So he just shakes his head.

“Find me a beer back there,” Derrick says. “In a glass bottle.”

The boy does as he's told. Miller High Life.

“Take the cap off and drink it. The whole thing.”

The boy's eyes are red and watery when he's done. “I think I'm gonna puke,” he says, miserably.

“Take that bottle by the neck and give it a sharp rap on the edge of the bar,” Derrick says. “Just like you see in the movies. When you hit it just right, that rim'll just pop off.”

The boy hits the bottle on the bar, but it doesn't break. “I can't,” he says.

“You gotta hit it harder,” Derrick says. “If you fuck up, it ain't the end of the world, you'll just have to drink another beer.”

The boy hits the bottle on the bar again and this time the end breaks off, the glass jagged and full of brown light.

“Now hand it to me,” Derrick says. “And don't get cute. The gun I'm holding'll put holes in you they couldn't plug with a tree stump.”

The boy hands him the bottle. Carefully. “Mister, I don't know what you're doing, but it's none of my business. I don't want no part of it.”

Derrick holds the bottle. It's like he's watching a movie he's watched a thousand times before, until its become entirely devoid of content from the watching. “Put your hand on the bar, son,” he says.

Tears leak down the boys cheeks. “I can't, mister,” he says. “Don't make me.”

“You can stop this right now,” Derrick says. “You just tell me everything you know about that gal. That's all you have to do.”

For a second or two, Derrick thinks the boy will talk. But the skin on his face seems to harden, and he spits, “You're a fucking pig. They're right about you.” He slaps his hand down on the table.

Derrick doesn't argue the point. He grips the boy's wrist and raises the broken beer bottle above his hand. “Hold your breath,” Derrick says. “It'll be over before you know it.”

“Pig,” the boy tries to say again, and fails. The skin around his mouth slackens, and drool slides out of the corner of his mouth.

Derrick reaches across the bar and takes him by the chin. “Don't pass out,” he says. “If you pass out we have to start over.”

The boy swallows and his eyeballs roll up at the beer bottle. He sobs once.

And then talks.

Lou is a longtime Cincinnati activist. The militant kind, who reads Amilcar Cabral, carries a gun, and actually practices with it. She runs workshops and reading groups. She heads up armed self-defense training for Cincinnati women. She's spent time in Palestine forging relationships.

Derrick had already figured all that. He's pretty sure there's no one in Over-The-Rhine he couldn't have got it from. But when the boy adds that she's usually seen with another activist named Everette Anderson, Derrick feels his heart kick like an electrified frog.

He sets the beer bottle on the bar and takes the boy by the back of the neck. “You done the right thing telling me, son,” he says.

“You should have done it, you motherfucker,” the boy sobs. “You should have done it.”

Derrick allows himself a few minutes to sit with the boy. This he knows from Vietnam, too, and he takes a strange comfort in it. Sitting in bars with boys sobbing about the things they've been made to do.

It takes Derrick a certain amount of wheeling and dealing to get Everette Anderson's file. The one kept by the Tac Squad for every activist in Cincinnati, not the one available to the public. It takes more to get Anderson moved into a private cell in the Cincinnati Workhouse. While he's being transferred, Derrick sits in one of the interrogation rooms and reads through his paperwork, looking for inspiration.

He finds it. When he was fifteen, Anderson was the number one suspect in a string of Over-The-Rhine rapes. According to the girls, he'd led them off the street, down into an abandoned lot, got them drunk on fortified wine, and fucked them behind a discarded washing machine. Three of the girls ID'd him, but all refused to testify in court.

Derrick closes the folder. He leans back in his chair and lights a cigarette. Then he opens the folder again and looks at the pictures of the little girls, post-rape. He looks at them until every facial bruise, black eye, and missing tooth is burnt into his corneas.

It takes more than just wheeling and dealing to get unrestricted access to Everette Anderson in that private cell. Luckily, Hamilton County Sheriff Deputies aren't any more immune to the temptations of cocaine and cash than any other cops. Nor does anyone give a shit for the Confederate greatcoat and the cap and ball revolver when he walks in. Derrick's got the reputation of showing up in worse shape, and there's something fitting about it in the great winged nineteenth-century workhouse.

Anderson is sitting on his cot, staring at the wall. He's a big sonofabitch, probably 260 pounds, with a wandering left eye and teeth that look like somebody's made a pass over them with a chainsaw. “Get lost,” Derrick says to the deputy after the cell door clanks shut.

“It's your head,” the deputy says, and leaves.

Anderson starts to laugh. “They issuing new uniforms?”

“You know how much I had to spend to get you alone in this cell?” Derrick asks.

Anderson doesn't say anything.

“It was your money. If I was you I'd hazard a guess.”

The muscles in Anderson's jaw look like insects crawling under his skin.

Derrick pulls a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket and tosses them at Anderson. “Cuff your right hand to the post of the cot.” When he's done, Derrick cuffs his other hand so that he has to sit in a childlike lean, both his hands cuffed on the same post. “You know, I've got a little sympathy for that fracas you started out in the streets,” Derrick says. “I never felt I got a proper welcome when I come home from Vietnam either.”

“If they didn't cut your balls off and hang your ass from a telephone pole, you didn't,” Anderson says. “Bet you killed a truckload.”

“I did all I could,” Derrick says.

“You did all you could,” Anderson repeats. “You's a brutal fucking pig now, you was a brutal fucking pig then. The kind of pig you are can't be learnt. It's gotta come natural.”

“I need to know where Lou is,” Derrick says.

Anderson laughs out loud. “That's all you've got?”

“Nobody ever accused me of being too bright,” Derrick says. “You gonna answer?”

“What time is it?”

Derrick looks at his wristwatch. “About eleven-thirty.”

Anderson nods. And then shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I ain't telling you shit.”

“Good,” Derrick says. “I was hoping you'd say that.”

One of the nice things about the greatcoat is how much room there is in the pockets. Derrick draws out a sap and a pair of pliers and sets them on the cot next to Anderson. Then he pulls out the cocaine. “I figure I'll have myself a quick snort,” he says. “And then we'll get to work.”

Those little girls come to Derrick easy. He empties his mind and lets their faces flow into him, driven through the vacuum by the thin electric pulse of the pacemaker, to his sap and pliers. He works first on Anderson's right hand and then his face. Works hard. And Anderson says nothing. Or almost nothing. He's just a man, after all, he can't control the grunts and moans, the occasional yelp.

And then, when Derrick stops for his next hit of cocaine, his hands slick and beaten bruised, Anderson slurs the same question he'd asked earlier, “What time is it?” He's holding his hand in his lap, a basket of splintered bone and torn flesh.

Derrick has removed his watch and laid it on the cot. He picks it up and squints at it. “It's a little after twelve,” he says, though he has trouble believing that it can really be that early.

Anderson's face looks like it had the skin peeled off it and the flesh underneath beaten with the claw end of a hammer. His chest starts to throb, like he's choking, and there's a hoarse, locomotive grunting coming from somewhere in the ruin of his face, that Derrick finally realizes is a laugh.

Then he says one word to Derrick. Just one word. A name.

Derrick abominates corruption like he abominates mediocrity. Even the whores that he can't help visiting, he pays for out of his policeman's salary. And if he ever had any doubts about the extent of Cirillo's corruption, the size of his Georgian home in Mount Auburn takes care of them. Derrick bypasses the front door and slips down the bushes and around the house. He finds the back door, and, as expected, it's been crow-barred. Derrick gives the door a gentle shove and slides inside.

It's in the living room he finds Cirillo's wife. She was a wiry woman in her fifties, good looking enough. Now she's sprawled akimbo across the couch with her robe hanging open and her head all but split in half by point-blank gunshots. Derrick lines up in front of her, making a guess as to where the shooter would have stood, and looks to his right. There, brass glinting against the wall, three empty casings. Derrick pockets them and moves into the front hallway, then up the stairs.

Lou's in the master bedroom, holding Derrick's 1911 between her knees. She's curled up in a reading chair by the window, her lips pulled back from her teeth. Derrick feels that hollow spot in his chest swell when he sees the gap between her front teeth. He resists a hard urge to take her face in his hands and kiss it. “Put the gun down,” he says.

“I'm shot,” she rasps. “There ain't nothing you can do to scare me, pig.”