Sharky's Machine

care of me.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I don’t know, but I’ll be safe. Can’t talk anymore. Goodbye.’

She put the phone down very softly.

In his suite, Hotchins stared at the buzzing telephone for a moment and then slowly replaced it.

‘It was her,’ he said.

‘Where is she? Is she at home?’ DeLaroza was standing beside him.

‘Yes, but the police are into it now. Apparently they’re taking Domino into protective custody.’

‘Who? I need a name,’ DeLaroza said.

‘A cop named Sharky.’

DeLaroza sighed with relief and then smiled. ‘Excellent. Now you can go back to the others. I’ll handle this.’

Chapter Twenty-Four

At thirty-four Hazel Weems had begun to show the hard lines of a hard life. She had grown up in the South Georgia cotton country and had started to work in the fields when she was seven. Her father, a sometime preacher, sometime fieldhand, bad sent her to live with an aunt in Atlanta when she was fourteen. It was her father’s intention to give her a chance at a decent life, but the aunt had turned out to be an alcoholic who drank up the tea dollars a week that was sent for Hazel’s upkeep and who frequently beat her in a drunken rage.

On one particularly brutal night neighbours had called the police and one of the investigating officers was Duke Weems, a kind, sympathetic ex-football coach who was twenty-five years older than Hazel. Soon after the beating Weems found her a foster home with a West End grocer and after that was a frequent visitor. After two years of courting they were married. Hazel was seventeen and Duke was forty-two. Two years later be dropped dead of a heart attack chasing a purse snatcher through Five Points.

A year after that Hazel passed the police examination and was inducted into the force as a meter maid. It took her seven more years to make the regular force and another two to become a third-class detective, one of the first women investigators on the force.

Duke’s ex-partner, Arch Livingston, bad talked Hazel into taking the police exam and had worked tirelessly with her to prepare her for it. It was Livingston too who had fought to get her transferred to the uniformed squad and then badgered his superiors until she was permitted to take the exam for detectives.

If Livingston had asked her to cut off her nose and send it to him for Christmas she would have done it.

She lived on the South Side of Atlanta in a predominantly black neighbourhood, her small, tidy two-bedroomed house the kind they once called a bungalow. There was an island at the end of her street that was pruned, plucked, and planted religiously by the Parton Place Garden Club. Hazel was not a member.

Hazel met them at the door and sized up Domino with the eye of a widow studying a prospective daughter-in- law. No hat, a roughouse shearling coat, blue jeans, and scruffy boots. She liked what she saw.

‘These two ain’t bullying you, are they, honey?’ she said, steering Domino into the house.

‘I’m not sure yet,’ Domino said and smiled.

‘If they give you any slit, you just tell Hazel. I’ve known this one since he was a rookie directing traffic on Five Points and this one here, I’ve just seen him around, but all he’s good for is raisin’ hell and drivin’ the captain bug- house. You caught yourself quite a pair, lady. I’ll put some coffee on.’

‘I’ll help,’ Livingston said and followed her Into the kitchen.

‘Look here, Hazel,’ Livingston told her. ‘1 got you fixed up with a room at a first-class hotel. Just for a couple of days. Won’t cost you a dime.’

She turned on him.

‘Move outs my own house! What the hell you talkin’ about? You got free board. Why don’t you go to the hotel?’

‘Too much traffic. Too public. ‘This lady’s on somebody’s hit list.’

‘What did she do?’

‘I don’t think she knows. And that’s for real. T don’t think she can tell us, ‘cause I don’t think she’s figured it out herself yet.’

‘Well, anyway I ain’t goin’ to no Lysol-smellin’ hotel. What the hell, Archie, I ain’t the Avon Lady; I’m a cop just like you. If there’s trouble, I’m as good as anybody else downtown. Don’t come at me with that macho shit.’

‘It ain’t macho shit, lady. We’re gonna be in the middle of the goddamndest interdepartmental ass-hittin’ you ever saw. You want to get caught in the middle of that?

‘Between you and who?’

‘Right now I’d say between us and Riley and Jaspers and D’Agastino.’

‘God damn, you do things in a big way.’

‘You get my point. You get out and when It hits the fan all you got to know is that I asked to use your place for a cover for a coupla days.’

‘It ain’t any of my business, Sergeant, but ain’t you been in enough shit through the years? You got to stick your foot in it again?’