Daniel: “You taking it?”
Lucas ran his hands through his hair, walked a tight circle around the office, then said, “Yeah, I’ll take it-I’m taking it. Right in the ass. I oughta be on the girls, because I’m all over that. But I’ll take it.”
Sloan came back: “We’re pulling the team together. They’re coming in. Dick and Tim are down on his door, so there’ll be eight or ten of us; should be enough for one guy.”
“Let me just come for the entry,” Lucas said to Daniel.
Daniel said, “Lucas, just… help me out here. Get on over to XTC. There’s not a damn thing you could do when we pick him up. You’d just be another guy standing there with his thumb up his ass. Go see Del.”
He did, still pissed.
The XTC was a gentleman’s club that used to be a strip joint on a side street where Minneapolis turned into St. Paul. During the day, it looked like a piece of shit, a purple-painted concrete-block single-story building with a cracked-blacktop parking lot that usually had a couple of used rubbers cooking on the tarmac. At night, it looked only slightly better. Lucas had been there a few times, called by the bouncer when a gentleman got too rowdy or was suspected of carrying a gun, or objected too strenuously to the champagne bill.
He’d never been there in civilian clothes, and felt a little sleazy as he went slinking down the street toward the entrance, hoping that no past, present, or future women friends saw him going in.
When the strip joint became a gentleman’s club, the owner took down the NUDE-NUDE-NUDE red-blinking neons and put up a green one that said, “Gentlemen.” Other than that, not much had changed; the first bar stool by the door still had a strip of duct tape covering a slash in the vinyl cover, and it still smelled of cheap disinfectant, layered over by even cheaper lilac perfume.
Del was in the back, playing shuffleboard bowling with a tall, heavyset man with a drunk-red face under a white Sparkle Drywall hat with the bill turned up. A dozen empty Bud bottles were sitting on a table behind them. Lucas marched past the three main poles, two with active dancers, one down to her G-string. The other peeled a pastie as Lucas went by, then cupped her breasts and pointed them at him.
“Stick ’em up,” she said.
He kept going, not amused.
Del was looking at a six-seven split on the shuffleboard machine, and Lucas came up, crossed his arms, and stared at the back of his head. He’d worked with Capslock a couple of times as a drug decoy, and he’d seemed a little out there.
After a couple of practice strokes, Del let the puck slide, took out the six and cleanly missed the seven, said, “Rat poop,” and without turning around, reached for his beer.
The drywall guy, peering through small drunk eyes at Lucas, asked, “What’re you looking at, college boy?”
Lucas, still pissed at being pulled off the Jones kidnapping case, snapped, “Not you, fat man. I got better taste.”
The drywall guy put down his beer and started around Del, as Del straightened, saw Lucas, put his arm across the other man’s chest, and said, “Whoa. Slow down, Earl. He’s a cop, he was third team all-Big Ten in hockey, he can press three twenty-five and he likes to fight.”
“And if you keep coming, I’ll beat your ass into one big bruise and then put it in jail,” Lucas said. “I am not in a good mood right now.”
Earl saw it in Lucas’s eyes, and slowed down. “I’d kick your ass if I wasn’t so drunk,” he said.
“Go away,” Lucas said. “I got business with this clown.”
Earl picked up his beer and went to stare at a pole dancer. Del said, “Clown?”
“Third team?”
Del smiled, his teeth still yellow in the subdued light: “So we’re even.”
“I didn’t know if the fat guy knew you were a cop,” Lucas said. “Or I woulda called you Ossifer Capslock.”
“Well, thank you.”
Del was a thin, middle-height man with salt-and-pepper hair that seemed premature, and a short, neatly trimmed beard. His face was weathered, and his arms were dark with the sun. He was dressed in jeans and an antique Bob Dylan T-shirt ripped at the neckline, with a silver Rolex on one wrist. He led the way out of the bar to his vehicle, a ’77 Scout pickup convertible that somebody had painted white with a brush. He settled in his seat and said, “We’ve got four interviews-friends and relatives.”
“Why in the middle of the night?”
“Because that’s when they’re home and we can find them,” he said, as he put the truck in gear. “They don’t have straight jobs.”
They found friends and relatives, but nobody knew anything about the killing, and Lucas tended to believe them. Smith, they said, was out doing his thing, which mostly involved wandering around, talking to his homeys. Everybody knew he’d been pounding the crack, and sometimes sold it, and was often holding. So the belief was, somebody needed some crack and they took it.
One guy angrily told them that “That shit is everywhere and it’s fuckin’ up everybody and you ain’t doing a damn thing about it. Not a damn thing.”
Del told him, “I don’t know what to do. You tell me what to do.”
“Do something,” the guy said. “Anything. Arrest them. Put them in jail. They’re a buncha animals, they’re fuckin’ up the whole neighborhood. If we were white, you’d be all over it.”
His wife was standing behind him, arms crossed, nodding.
Moving around with Del felt weird.
As a uniformed cop, Lucas generally assumed that the people with whom he came in contact were the enemy, until proven different. In the course of covering traffic accidents or making traffic stops, breaking up fights, chasing down robbers or burglars, calling ambulances, talking to victims, uniforms really didn’t need to project much empathy. They were like the army: not there to make friends. And sometimes, rolling through the dark across hostile neighborhoods, inside a car filled with weapons, radios, and lights, he felt like he was in an army, and in hostile territory.
Del, on the other hand, solicited help, listened carefully, displayed great patience, and when the guy went off about crack, he was nodding in agreement, and when the guy finished, he said, “Don’t tell the boss I said this, but I agree with you.”
And he got some cooperation, but no real information, probably, Lucas thought, because nobody had any.
At ten o’clock, Del had gotten involved in a convoluted discussion with a minister who’d once run a church that Smith and his mother had gone to. Lucas had drifted off down the street, toward the corner where they’d parked, when he saw a thin young white man walking toward the same corner, from the right-angle street. The man was wearing what cops had called a pimp hat, a widebrimmed fuzzy thing that had gone out of fashion sometime in the seventies, when disco died. Long knotted Rasta braids flowed out from under the hat, and Lucas said, aloud, “Randy.”
The man stopped, saw Lucas, did a double take, turned, and started running. Lucas went after him, fifty yards behind.
The thing was, Randy Whitcomb could hoof it, like skinny people often can. He wasn’t in the same class athletically as Lucas, but he wasn’t carrying the weight, either. Lucas heard Del shout, “Hey! Hey!” as he went around the corner, and then the race was on. Lucas could close by ten yards or so every short block, but there was traffic. Sometimes he caught it wrong, going across the street, and Randy stretched his lead, and sometimes Randy caught it wrong, and lost ground. Five blocks and Lucas was getting close, fifteen yards back, and Randy swerved into an alley and as he turned, Lucas caught a flash of plastic going over a hedge; so Randy had off-loaded his crack, coke, or grass, hoping that Lucas hadn’t seen it.
Toward the end of the block, Lucas was four feet behind him, then two feet: Randy glanced back in desperation, hearing the footsteps, and lost another foot in looking, and Lucas hit him between the shoulder blades.
