Soul Circus

They drank off some of their beer. Sue removed her Skechers, put her feet up on the table set before the couch, and smoked a cigarette while Quinn told her about his day.

“Anything on Linda Welles?” said Tracy.

Quinn shrugged. “I passed out flyers down at the Metro station in Anacostia.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Her brother, he called the police, right?”

“Sure, but the police don’t get all that mobilized for a missing girl in the city.”

It usually was reported to Youth and Preventive Services and pretty much sat. Most were runaway and not criminal cases. The girls stayed local and moved quadrant to quadrant. So families went to people like Sue for help finding them.

“She could be shacked up with some older boy, has drug money, a nice car,” said Quinn.

“That’s right, she could be,” said Tracy, crushing her cigarette in the ashtray. “But we still need to find her.”

“I will.”

“My hero.”

Quinn put his beer bottle down on the table and slipped his hand under the tail of Tracy’s shirt and around her waist. “I’m larger than life.”

“Don’t be so boastful.”

Quinn kissed her. He unbuttoned her shirt and kissed the tops of her breasts, then pulled one cup of her bra down to kiss her darkish nipple. It hardened at the lick of his tongue, and he felt her stretch like a cat beneath him. Quinn tried to undo her bra but fumbled it.

“You got oven mitts on or something?”

“I need a manual for this thing.”

“It’s a back-loader, Terry.”

“Oh.”

Tracy’s chest was flushed pink and her hair was a beautiful mess. She sat up, undid her bra, and pulled it free. Quinn drew her shirt back off her shoulders.

“Gulp,” said Quinn.

“You look surprised.”

“I always am,” said Quinn. “And thankful, too.”

They undressed quickly, “Cowgirl in the Sand” filling the room. Quinn laughed as her panties flew past his head. They embraced and were down on the pillows and then knocking the pillows off the couch. They were all over each other and she moved him roughly to her center. She was wet there, and Quinn smiled.

“Damn, girl, where’s the fire?”

“You don’t know?”

“What I mean is, why the rush?”

“Quit fucking around.”

Soon he was all the way in her, her back arched to take it, her mouth cool on his, her damp muscled-up thighs flanking his sides. Quinn thinking, This is something God dreamed up, has to be. Something this good, it can’t be an accident.

STRANGE picked up Greco at the office and drove the dog up to the row house on Buchanan Street. Strange had lived here for many years before marrying Janine. He was perfectly content and comfortable at Janine’s place and as certain as any man could be that their marriage was going to last. But he still spent time at his old house. The house was paid for, so there weren’t any issues with money, and he had not considered selling it.

He told Janine that he needed this place to keep his duplicate case files and to work away from his primary office. But there were other reasons for his reluctance to give up the Buchanan residence. It had been his first and only real-estate purchase, and the pride of home ownership was, for him, still strong. And of course he needed to know that there was always some other place he could go to, run to, some would say, when the space between him and Janine and Lionel got too close. He had lived with women briefly, but in those cases there’d always been an exit door. He’d been a bachelor his whole life and he had married in his fifties. This new life, this whole new thing, was going to take some getting used to.

Strange went down to his basement and did three sets of ab crunches, lying on a mat. He then did a dumbbell workout and put in fifteen minutes on the heavy bag with a pair of twelve-ounce gloves, more than enough to break a good sweat. Then he showered, fed Greco, and went on up to the second floor to his office.

He tore the shrink-wrap off a couple of soundtrack CDs he had purchased through the Internet that had just come to this address in the mail today. A Morricone import called Spaghetti Western, which held six tracks from the film A Gun for Ringo, among others, had arrived in the shipment. He slipped the CD into the CPU of his computer and sat down behind his desk. The music came through the Yamaha speakers on his desktop, and he nodded his head. This was exactly what he had hoped it would be. He had been looking for this particular soundtrack for some time.

Strange filed that day’s Xeroxed records on the Granville Oliver case into the cabinets that supported the rectangle of kitchen-counter laminate that served as his desktop. He did some bills, killed more time listening to his CD, and then went looking for Greco, who was lying by the front door and ready to go. Strange grabbed some cruising music, locked the house down, and walked with Greco to his free-time vehicle, a black- over-black ’91 Cadillac Brougham with a chromed-up grille.

He popped some Blue Magic into the dash deck and drove north on Georgia Avenue. The school year had not quite ended, and night had fallen, but there were plenty of kids out, hanging on corners and walking the streets. In fact, he had seen his young employee, Lamar, heading on foot toward the Capitol City Pavilion, a go-go venue the young ones called the Black Hole, on a recent evening. Strange wondered, as he always did, what these kids were doing out so late, and he wondered about the adults who were responsible for them, why they had let them out of their sight.

Janine’s house was a clapboard colonial, pale lavender, set on a short, quiet, leafy street called Quintana, around the corner from the Fourth District police station in Manor Park. Lionel’s car, a Chevy beater he had recently purchased, was out front, and Janine’s late-model Buick was in the drive. Strange used his key to open the front door. He entered the house with Greco beside him, his nub of a tail twitching back and forth.

“It is me,” said Strange, his voice raised, not yet used to letting himself into Janine’s house.

“That you, Derek?” said Janine from back in the kitchen.

“Nah, it’s Billy Dee,” said Strange.

“Getting’ to look like him, too,” said Lionel, tall and filled out, coming down the center- hall stairs and patting his head, which barely had any hair on it at all.

“I know,” said Strange. “Didn’t have a chance to get that taken care of today. Gonna get to it tomorrow.”

“You know that album you got, has those guys with the big ratty Afros hanging out by the subway platform, talkin’ about, ‘do it till you’re satisfied’?”

“B.T. Express.”

“Yeah, them. You’re lookin’ like the whole B.T. Express put together.”

“Said I was gonna take care of it.”

Lionel reached his hand out as he hit the foot of the stairs. Strange took it, then brought him in for the forearm-to-chest hug.

“How you doin,’ boy?”

“I’m good,” said Lionel. “You gonna watch the game with me tonight?”

“You know it. What’s your mom got on the stove?”