Flood

I acted like I was making up my mind, but of course it was no contest. His life wasn’t worth the ninety days in jail it would cost me. The girl was still in the corner, her painted mouth open and slack, but she wasn’t going to scream. I grabbed her arm and shoved her out of the apartment in front of me, half-throwing her down the stairs. A white face stuck itself out of a first-floor apartment as we went past-I showed the.38 to the face and it disappeared behind a slamming door. We hit the sidewalk-me walking fast and pulling the kid along with me. Her arm felt like a twig in my hand. She didn’t say a word.

I found the Plymouth untouched, pushed her inside ahead of me and climbed in behind, punching down the switch so she couldn’t unlock her own door. We were rolling in seconds, heading for the highway.

I pulled into one of the parking areas under the overpass where I know the manager. I told the girl, “Sit fucking still,” locked the car, and walked over to the little booth where the manager sits. I tossed a twenty on his desk and he walked out like he had an appointment someplace. I picked up his phone, dialed the number of NYPD’s Runaway Squad, for my money the only damn cop operation in New York worth the price of a city councilman.

“Runaway Squad, Officer Morales speaking.”

“Detective McGowan around?” I asked.

“Hold on,” said Morales. Then McGowan’s strong Irish voice came over the wire. “This is Detective McGowan.”

“Burke here. I got a package for you-about thirteen. She just left her pimp, okay?”

“Where’s the kid?”

“At a parking lot under the West Side Highway on Thirty-ninth. Can you move now?”

“Be there in ten minutes,” he said, and I knew I could count on it.

In the car waiting for McGowan, I lit a cigarette, looking over at the girl. A real baby-her skinny legs hadn’t even grown calves yet. I couldn’t do McGowan’s job-I’d end up doing life for wasting one of those dirtbag pimps. McGowan has four daughters-twenty-five years on the job and he just made detective last year. I heard the brass was going to close down the whole Runaway Squad too. I guess they need all the cops they can get to protect visiting diplomats. New York’s got an image to protect.

The girl said, “Mister-”

“Just keep your little mouth shut and your eyes down. Don’t look at me-don’t say nothing.” Maybe I should have been a social worker.

She kept quiet until McGowan and his partner, a guy they call Moose for good reason, pulled up. I unlocked and he reached over and opened the girl’s door. He held out his hand and she took it immediately. McGowan put his arm around her shoulders and started crooning to her in that honey-Irish voice and walking her back to his car. By the time they got back to the stationhouse he’d know where she had run away from-and probably why. I put the Plymouth into gear and pulled out. If anyone asked McGowan, he’d say he got an anonymous call and never saw the deliveryman.

But the Cobra was running-and I didn’t know how far he’d gone. I used a pay phone on Fourteenth and called the warehouse number.

“United States Attorney’s office,” came back Michelle’s bubblegum voice.

“I thought I told you to clear out,” I told her.

“I called Mama-she’s going to call me when Max shows.” Did any woman in the world do what I told her?

“Okay, babe-stay there. When Mama calls, tell her to send Max by, okay?”

She blew a kiss into the phone and hung up.

15

THE PLYMOUTH PURRED its own way back to the warehouse, oblivious to my depression. This case was certainly going to do wonders for my reputation-a bit more of my skillful detective work and I’d be known as Burke the Jerk. Fuck it, I thought (my theme song), no point crying over spilt milk. I had seen babies in Biafra too weak to cry, and mothers with no milk left to nurse them. I had gotten out of that-I could get out of this.

When I let myself into the warehouse Michelle was sitting by the phone box with her legs crossed, reading her book next to an ashtray stuffed with about two packs’ worth of butts. Her eyes flashed a question and my face gave her the answer.

“Thank God you’re back, anyway,” she said. “This place was beginning to smell and I didn’t want to leave the phones.” She picked up the ashtray and headed for the bathroom in the back. I heard the toilet flush, then a rush of air as she opened the ventilation shaft for a minute to clear out the room.

When she came back, patting her face with one of those premoistened towelettes every working girl carries, she asked me, “So?”

“He was there-and now he’s not. Gone. I have to start over.”

“Too bad, baby.”

“Yeah. Well, it wasn’t a total loss. I found another kid for McGowan.”

“McGowan’s a doll. If I was a runaway I’d turn myself in to him in a flash.”

“You were never a runaway?” I asked, surprised.

“Honey, my biological parents packed my bags and bought me the bus ticket.”

There was nothing to say to that-I knew what Michelle meant by biological parents. Once I had a teenage girl come to my office and offer to pay me some money to find her “real” parents. She said she was adopted. It made me sick-these folks adopted her, paid the bills, took the weight, carried the load for her all her life, and now she wanted to find her “real” parents-the ones who dumped her into a social services agency that sold her to the highest bidder. Real parents. A dog can have puppies-that doesn’t make it a mother. I took her twenty-five hundred and told her to come back in a month, when I gave her the birth certificate of a woman who had died from an overdose of heroin two years after the girl had been born. The phony birth certificate said “Unknown” next to the space for “Father”. I told her that her father had been a trick, a john. Someone who paid her mother ten bucks so he could get off for a few minutes. She started to cry and I told her to go talk it over with her mother. She wailed, “My mother’s dead!” and I told her that her mother was home, waiting for her. The woman who had died had just been a horse who dropped a foal, that’s all. She left hating me, I guess.

Mama still hadn’t called, which meant Max wasn’t at the restaurant. I told Michelle I’d drop her wherever she wanted, and we packed up the stuff together.

When I pulled the Plymouth up in front of her hotel Michelle leaned over and kissed me quickly on the cheek. “Get a haircut, honey. That shaggy look went out ages ago.”

“You always told me my hair was too short.”

“Styles change, Burke. Although God knows, you never do.”

“Neither do you,” I told her.

“But I’m going to, honey… I’m going to,” she said, and bounced out of the car toward the steps.

Michelle had a place to live, and so did I. But we had the same home. I drove past mine to the place where I live.

16

YOU CAN WALK out of prison and promise yourself you’ll never be back, but it’s not such an easy promise to keep. You always take some of the joint with you when you go. The last time I got out, I told myself it would be great to get up when I wanted to-not when the damn horns went off in the morning. But it’s still hard for me to sleep late. Besides, Pansy isn’t the kind of cellmate who’s willing to sleep in and forget about hitting the chow line.

While she was out on the roof I looked out the back door toward the river. It was quiet up there, but I knew things were happening on the street. I’d never be able to live high enough up to not know that.