Those Bones Are Not My Child (71 page)

“You clowns,” Dave said. “Next time I’ll issue little permission slips for you mugs and take you to the playground.”

“Oh, wow.” Jonesy curved his body around and aimed two index fingers toward the asphalt. “That’s cold. That’s really cold, Mr. Morris.” He hugged his waist with his elbows and twisted around to mask the view, angling his thumbs and pinkies down toward the base of the hedges. “Ain’t that cold, y’all?”

“Yeah, Big Dave,” Raymond said, ramming Eddie’s head in the bushes. “You really know how to hurt a person.”

“It’s like a bad marriage, isn’t it?” the former SAFE worker asked the college girl. They let another bus go by, their eyes glued to the door of the State Police building. “You know he’s cheating and he knows you know, but he tells you it’s your imagination. Says he loves you. Says, ‘Trust me.’ And maybe he does love you, but it’s not important to him that you doubt yourself. You see the signs but you talk yourself out of it. You go on cooking the food and washing the clothes and coming to bed like a good wife.”

“I can’t make love to a man I’m mad with,” the young student said,
walking over to drop the newspaper into the trash bin. A red-haired man came out of the gray metal door with a tripod. She signaled the Blood in dreads parked at the curb. Mason had already moved near the van where the redhead was unlocking the door.

When the student returned to the bus stop the worker continued. “What’s going on in this town is really frightening to me because, getting back to the bad-marriage analogy, say your husband’s girlfriend is a very violent sort of person. She’s bought a gun and is hanging around your apartment building. She could call up your job and say something to make them fire you. You won’t even know how to protect yourself. ‘I love you.’ Trust me.’ He wants your loyalty but he don’t care about your safety. And you cooperate. It’s stupid and crazy. What else can you call that?”

“Feudalism,” Speaker said, passing by them and crossing the street.

The student laughed. “First of all, my man come at me with some simple shit like that, I’d shoot him in the foot.”

“You’d shoot him?”

“In the foot. To get his attention.” She jotted down a description of the van. “He’s got to know we’re about to have a serious discussion and that there are consequences for lying.”

“I see what you mean. Maybe when people run for office, they should be shot in the foot first.”

“To remind them that they’re accountable.”

“That’s probably a good idea. Because you can’t know who they’re holding hands with. I love Maynard. I think Lee Brown is a fine person. I don’t know George Napper but I hear he’s very nice.”

“My sister took a course from him. He’s real decent.”

“That’s what I mean. But who knows what kind of people they’re holding hands with—on the force, I mean, or in the FBI, or with the state bureau. They tell us to remain calm and everything.”

“ ‘Trust me. I love you. I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about it.’ ”

“That’s just how they do, don’t they? Meanwhile, somebody’s out there with guns and ropes.”

“And bombs,” the student added as they headed to the car. “And now with these,” she said, shoving over, placing the stack of pamphlets on her lap to make room.

“That’s why I had to leave SAFE. I liked my job, but you can’t love the people if you lie to them.”

The student drew the safety belt across her lap, glad to see the brothers coming. It was just a matter of time before the sister she was cooped up with started to cry.

“I think I know where he’s headed,” Mason said, climbing in. “Either back to Lakewood Heights—” he roamed his finger over the map—“or to that room in the City Hall Annex.”

“I don’t think so.” Speaker leaned his head in the window, reached in, and spun the map around. “He’ll steer clear of the feds. I think he’ll make contact with an informant. Maybe here,” he said, tapping a marked-up portion on the route.

“Let’s go,” the student said, focusing. “That light won’t stay red forever. And these binoculars can’t see around corners.”

The near-collision of the Camaro and the two lead cars of the McDaniel-Glenn patrol left Preston shaken and with a welter of questions. Zala took the wheel before Dowell could speak up. With Preston climbing in back to straighten up the pamphlets the patrol had dumped through the window, Dowell had no choice but to ride in the bucket seat. No matter how many levers he was directed to lift, push, punch, yank, the seat wouldn’t lock. Zala turned onto Georgia Avenue and Dowell pressed his feet against the hump in the floorboard in a futile effort to keep the seat from bucking.

“I don’t get it,” Preston said. “All the cruisers in the area and not one stopped to see what was going on. Those guys were really pissed off with you, buddy. Worse than with me. A cracked reflector’s no sweat. But you, you didn’t look too good back there. They expect you to be on top of things. Oh yeah, the cop on top of things.”

“At the moment,” Zala said, heading for Cap’n Peg’s, “the police are more interested in gathering up those copies. Besides, nobody was going to jump anybody. The men are trying to get the youngsters off the street, that’s all.” She glanced at Dowell as she pulled up in front of the fish joint. The seat was still sliding on its track. “I want to see if there’s been any word here. I’ll meet you back at the Hyatt or hook up with you at the last checkpoint.”

“Well, I still don’t get it,” Preston said, climbing in front when Dowell took the wheel and headed for I-75/85. “What’s so hot about a bunch of ungrammatical rags?”

“No one knows where they came from.”

“So?”

“You think you’ve got the neighborhood secured, then something like this happens, a mass delivery right under your nose.”

“Right under
your
nose,” Preston cracked. “No, you really looked pretty bad back there. And why’d they unload their copies in this car? They want you to hold them in case the police stop them? I don’t get it.” He leafed through the booklets, glancing from time to time at Dowell, who was keeping his eyes peeled for cars that might be traveling together. He changed lanes and tailed a Galaxy that seemed to be following a brown-and-beige Chevy.

Once before, the city had been swamped by a phantom delivery of booklets. The Weather Underground’s
Prairie Fire
had turned up one morning on stoops, in mailboxes, slipped under the doors of student unions, and left by the bundle in shopping malls, at Street Academy sites, and at Jobs Corps centers. No one knew how they had done it. But their manifesto hadn’t produced nearly the flurry this anonymous little booklet was causing. Dowell tried to recall what the political climate had been like five years ago when
Prairie Fire
appeared.

“Subversive literature pop up much in your neck of the woods?”

“Oh yeah. Was some leafletting back in December when the Beatle got killed, especially in Miami, but nothing out-and-out political like this. A few peaceniks. Biggest thing I can remember was down in Key West when I was in school. Big scandal about the water supply. That ring a bell, Dowell? Experiments down at the naval base? It was a big stink.”

“I think I heard tell.” Dowell changed lanes again, keeping the blue Ford and a two-toned station wagon in view. “Flu virus, wasn’t it?”

“Germ-warfare testing was the charge. A lot of paper got thrown around the streets behind that one. I remember it because a navy recruiter came to speak in our assembly and got booed.”

“That was the Korean War era, wasn’t it?”

“The tail end.” Preston’s fingers tapped rapidly on the cover of the pamphlet as he tallied up the years. “I’ll be putting in for retirement soon.”

Dowell ended pursuit when the Galaxy exited and the two-tone continued on. He took the ramp and looked over at his colleague from Florida. That morning, Dowell would have said forty at most, a boozer,
red veins prominent in the cocoa brown of his face, slightly flushed, thoroughly inflamed around the nose. Not particularly clean. But hardly middle-aged-looking.

“You get women out on the streets sometimes handing out flyers in front of the triple-X movies. But not like these things. There’s no logo, no sponsor, not even a printers name. What do you make of it, Dowell?”

“What you just said gives me an idea. Someone you might know. Once we find out who’s going over the murder route, managing to stay a jump ahead of us.”

“Something I said?” Preston folded the visor down and leaned into the mirror, searching the oily area under his lower lip for pimples. “Porno movies, you mean? I guess you guys had trouble up this way a few years back with that flick where the actress gets it in the end? I didn’t see any booklets, but there sure was plenty of flyers about it.”

“I don’t get movies like that,” Dowell said, heading for the Lake-wood-Stewart strip. “I don’t see how tormenting women can be arousing. I know a little about this business they spoke of in the films too, people so-called adopting poor children from overseas and using them in sex-hate films. You hear all sorts of things in the squad room. Children. That’s what I don’t get.”

“Sex hate.” Preston laughed, lumping his cheek out with his tongue. “That’s a new one. I never heard that expression before.” It seemed to amuse him, or maybe it was squeezing his face that gave him so much pleasure. Dowell kept his eyes front.

“Look at that.” Preston leaned out the window. A shoving match was taking place in front of a grocery store. “Going to kill each other defending a street corner. My people, my people. Bad as down my way. Miami is where you really see it, though. I was on a three-week assignment there after the riots in Liberty City. I was nowhere near northwest Fifty-fourth or Brownsville. What a mess. Lot of political leafletting then too. Yeah, they had demands, but that was something else. Talking drugs, you’d die laughing, Dowell, to see them dudes out there killing each other defending turf for ‘the man.’ ”

“Same here,” Dowell murmured. “Breaks your heart to see our young men caught up in that.”

“Breaks
your
heart,” Preston corrected. “Nobody forcing them into it. They see the bodies in the street every day, dealers slumped over the
wheel with a bullet between the eyes. Nobody forcing them to get in the life.”

“They think it can’t happen to them.”

“No, they know it can. They know it
will
—just a matter of time. But they don’t care.”

“The money’s that good?”

“The money’s that good. Live it up for two years—three if they’re lucky and halfway smart. Then, if they got to go down, well, it was beautiful while it lasted.”

The two men in Dowell’s rearview wore armbands on their sleeves. “I don’t think that tussle back there is drug related. Those are neighborhood patrollers. Probably having a difference of opinion about whose turn it is to go on night watch.”

“If you want to believe that.” With two hands, Preston squeezed the enlarged pores at the base of one nostril. Dowell turned his eyes front and kept them there.

“I’ve seen some of those films,” Preston confided. Leaning back, he rubbed his hands along his thighs. “Let’s be honest, a naked body is a turn-on whoever it is.”

“A child? Maybe that’s true for some people, but you check that kind of feeling, you control yourself.”

“Why?” Preston braced his legs to keep the bucket seat from riding. “Don’t kid me. You see these young schoolgirls flipping their asses around,” he said, clutching the air with both palms, “and oh yeah, you want to get into some of that.”

“I can’t get to that,” Dowell said with finality. The rest he left unsaid. He had an ongoing discussion with some of the junior officers about capital punishment. Despite the way the death penalty had been applied to the poor and the colored, some people needed killing, badly. Those who enjoyed murdering. And those who thought exploiting children was a turn-on and made no effort to check themselves.

“So this is the Lakewood-Stewart area,” Preston said after a while. “Personally, I think we ought to shake this committee tour and follow through on what I’ve done so far. With the tips from Lee Gooch, we could be sitting pretty, Dowell. You and me. We pool our information and nail the perverts. What do you say?”

“Same’s I’ve been saying.”

Preston held his legs still for a moment and looked out at the houses
and stores. “I understand the district we just left was once an affluent neighborhood. It’s hanging on by the fingernails now same as around here.”

“This piece of real estate has had more than its share of sorrows,” Dowell said. “You’ll notice how the highway separates the shopping plaza from the customers who might have made it a go. No accident.”

“Now you sound like that character with the militant hair. The Committee of Inquiry,” he said with a sneer. “Funny company you keep.”

“That’s true.” Dowell hoped that would hold Preston for a while. He didn’t like a lot of gab while on assignment, even unofficial assignments.

“I still think we could join up and maybe go see the Gooch kid together, or take another look in his neighborhood.”

“There’s a team covering the Cape Street section of the route,” Dowell said. The young reporter with the good diction knew that area well. Just as Dowell knew the Lakewood-Stewart area from growing up there. Since the division by the highway, those neighborhoods were going down a little year by year, definitely not part of Atlanta’s boom-town show.

“Damn shame,” Dowell murmured, cutting through the parking lot of the shopping plaza.

“Yeah, it’s pret-ty grubby,” Preston said, looking around.

The sodium streetlights cast a sci-fi spell over the area. Deserted, the stores looked grim, sour. A scatter of paper bags and broken-down boxes were in the lanes for handicap parking. Poles installed to prevent the removal of shopping carts were plastered with “Keep Our Children Safe” stickers. No one was around, Dowell was pleased to see. No children vending tapes, batteries, car deodorizers, jelly apples. No youths coming up to the car with an armful of watches for sale, or sidling over with two-for-one bargains—jeans, killer weed, or “buffet” at the motel.

“Looks pretty quiet,” Preston agreed as Dowell nosed the car around the back of the supermarket for a shortcut to the street. “But who are they kidding over there?”