and rolled down his window. A man sat on the stoop of a row house, watching a young boy dribble a basketball on the sidewalk.
“He’s out kinda late, isn’t he?” said Blue.
The man smiled. “Aw, he’s just hyped. You know kids.”
“I hear you,” said Blue, smiling back. “But you need to get him inside.”
“Aiight then,” said the man.
Blue drove away. Strange noted how relaxed he was behind the wheel. Blue had always liked working midnights. He said that the danger in these hours was greater, but the respect between the citizens and cops actually increased between midnight and dawn. The squares had all gone home and were sleeping, leaving an uneasy alliance for those who remained.
Blue took a call on a domestic disturbance at 13th and Randolph. He asked the woman if she wanted the husband, whom she had accused of striking her, to spend the night in jail. She said she didn’t want that, and this call, like most domestics the police answered, ended in peace.
“How’s Terry doing?” said Blue, as he cruised east toward the Old Soldiers’ Home.
“He’s been quiet,” said Strange. “Got a new girlfriend, I think, and he’s been spending time with her. It’s been good for him to be with a woman this week.”
“And you and Janine?”
“Fine.”
“Good woman. That son of hers is a fine young man, too.”
“I know it,” said Strange.
“Lionel gonna be at the game on Saturday?”
“I guess he is.” Strange hadn’t thought much on the game.
“You know we got to play it.”
“Right.”
“Think we ought to have a short practice tomorrow night. Talk to the kids.”
“That’s what we ought to do.”
“They need to pick themselves up, right about now,” said Blue. “They’re gonna see a lot of death in their young lives. I want them to remember Joe, but I don’t want this to paralyze them. You agree?”
“Yes,” said Strange.
Blue looked over at his friend. They had hugged and patted each other’s backs when they’d first seen each other after Joe Wilder’s murder. The both of them felt extreme guilt, Blue for tying Strange up after practice, and Strange for letting Joe out of his sight. But they had been tight since childhood, and this was not something that needed to be apologized for or discussed. Blue was dealing with it in his own way, but he wasn’t sure about how deeply it had burrowed into Strange.
“Listen, Derek—”
“I’m okay, Lydell. Just don’t want to talk about it much right now, all right?”
Blue turned up Warder Street in Park View. They passed a group of row houses, all dark. Inside one of them, Garfield Potter, Carlton Little, and Charles White slept.
BLUE drove around the Fourth. They bought coffee at the all-night Wings n Things at Kennedy Street and Georgia, and drove around some more. They stopped to tell some kids to get off the streets, and answered a domestic. Blue answered another domestic on 2nd but was called suddenly to a disturbance a block away.
A fight had broken out in a bar on Kennedy at closing time, and it had spilled onto the street. Several squad cars were already on the scene. Officers were holding back the brawlers and trying to quiet some of the neighbors and passersby who had been incited by the police presence. The patrolmen carried batons. A guy shouted “cracker motherfucker” and “white motherfucker” repeatedly at the white policeman who had cuffed him. The policeman’s partner, a black officer, was called a “house nigger” by the same man. Blue got out of the car and crossed the street. Strange stepped out and leaned against the Crown Vic.
Down the street was the Three-Star Diner, Billy Georgelakos’s place. Strange’s father had worked there as a grill man for most of his career. A riot gate covered the front of the diner. Nearby, concertina wire topped the fence surrounding the parking lot of a church.
Blue returned to the Crown Vic with sweat beading his forehead. Most of the bystanders on Kennedy had disappeared. Whatever this had been, it was over without major incident. It would go unreported to the majority of the city’s citizens, safely asleep at home in their beds.
Strange asked Blue to make a pass through Park Morton, where Joe Wilder had lived, and Blue agreed. In the complex, few people were out. A boy sat on a swing in the playground of the dark courtyard, smoking a cigarette. Dice players and dope smokers moved about the stairwells of the apartments.
“We put flyers with the artist’s renderings of the suspects in the mailboxes here,” said Blue. “Gonna post them around the neighborhood as well.”
“That’s good.”
“Most of the time we don’t get much cooperation up in here. Drug dealers get chased by the police, they find a lot of open doors, places to hide, in this complex.”
“What I hear.”
“They even got community guns buried around here somewhere. We know all about it, but it’s tough to fight.”
“You sayin’ you think no one will come forward?”
