“Nuthin’ t’say, officer. I don’t know a thing.”
“Nothing? What about heroin, Mr. Rawlins?”
“No thanks.”
“This is no joke, man,” Sanchez said. “We got a serious drug problem here. The Gasteau twins were selling drugs.”
“Really?”
“We found traces in a wax paper bag in the hole in the garden. He had everything there he needed to cut drugs and package them.”
“What difference does it make?” I asked. “Those men are dead. Unless you think they gonna be sending drugs up from hell then that case is closed.”
“This is serious,” he said again. Maybe he was going to say something else but I cut him off.
“Naw, man. What’s serious is you got four or five dozen kids in this neighborhood climbin’ up under the bushes in front’a the school ev’ry night disintegratin’ their brains on airplane glue.” I was mad. “Every mornin’ you walk right over the rags. You see the kids stalkin’ an’ staggerin’ around and what you do? You come in here an’ try’n scare me because of somethin’ that happened years ago. I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no heroin. I do know about glue though. You wanna hear about that?”
“That’s just penny-ante,” Sanchez said. He was dead serious.
“So what you worried ’bout is how much the drugs cost, you don’t care about what they do.”
Sanchez probably cared about what was happening to the glue sniffers. Many of them were his own people as well as mine. But there was no budget to stop the flow of wine and glue in the ghetto streets.
“So you don’t know anything about the drugs?” he asked.
“Man, I never even met either one’a them men,” I proclaimed. “It’s you who think I’m in it. It’s you come on out to my house and trick me down to a lineup on some lies. I’m just doin’ my job, sergeant. I’m just livin’ my life.”
“I got you on more than that, Rawlins,” he said darkly.
I gritted down, intent on silence.
“We got a call down at the station, Ezekiel. About all those burglaries from your school and other ones too.”
“Yeah. Somebody blamed it on me, I know.”
“This time they told us where you hid the loot.”
I stood up. “Come on, man.”
“Sit down.” The steel in his voice told me that it was all true. “I think that you better come on over to the station with us.”
Right on cue two cops came in from the hallway.
“I’m under arrest?”
“It’s just questioning for the moment, but I will arrest you if you refuse.”
THE SEVENTY-SEVENTH STREET STATION hadn’t changed much. The same yellow wax covered the dark-green-and- white-tile floor. The furniture hadn’t aged well.
“Down the hall past the sergeant’s desk—to your left,” Sanchez said.
I knew the way.
I knew the room.
I still remembered the corroded plaster and the mildewed floorboards. I took a quick glance at the corner to see if the mouse, crushed fifteen years ago, was still there.
It wasn’t a clean room.
“Sit down,” Sanchez said.
There were two wooden chairs. I took the one facing the door.
As I sat a tall white man came in, closing the door behind him. He wore dark gray pants and a white shirt with sleeves rolled high above his elbows. He took his place behind the seated Sanchez, and practiced making fists with his left hand.
Sanchez’s smile told me that he’d been waiting for this moment. I tried to look brave but that only made him gloat harder.
“You see, Drake?” Sanchez seemed to be talking to me.
The white shirted man nodded, clenching his fist hard enough to pop a knuckle.
“Okay,” Sanchez said. I didn’t know who he was saying it to. “Now we’re going to have a serious talk with some serious answers.”
My mouth opened—I wanted to speak—but there were no words to say.
Sanchez did a meaty drumroll against thighs with open hands.
“Just to show you that I’m an okay guy,” he said, “I’ll answer your question.”
I hadn’t asked any questions but maybe Sanchez thought that he could read my mind.
“You asked me how I got my stripes.”
