'So we don't have anything?' she reiterated.
'Nope,' Cantrell said.
'The witnesses give a description?'
'Vague. Average height. Average weight. Average age. Black. Male.' Lee smirked after emphasizing the color. 'You could've poked out my eye and fucked my socket after that revelation.'
'This file isn't vague. The body in the morgue isn't vague. I'm tired of vague. Get me something concrete.' Octavia slapped the report on her desk. 'Any ballistic matches?'
'None.' Lee leaned against the wall, his face a mix of smug and bitter. His hands fidgeted in his lap as if he didn't know where to place them to give off an air of command and control. He hated the way she squeezed into her office jacket whose buttons threatened to pop whenever she moved. He hated the way she flipped through paperwork rather than look at him. He hated the way that when she did look at him, she peered over her glasses. Stared down at him over the rims. Dismissed him with a glance.
'Different shooter for each vic?'
'Maybe. All the wounds were through and throughs. No shells or bullets recovered. And there were some questions about the wound tracks.' Cantrell faced the captain, the desk between them a respectful gulf, his arms folded.
'What sort of questions?'
'They didn't specify. Said they'd get back to us.' Cantrell hid his frustration with his partner's unnecessary button pushing of their boss. He'd heard they used to be partners. The smart play meant they had someone upstairs in their corner. Leave it to Lee to sour that relationship to curdled milk.
'One other thing, this isn't just street guys,' Lee said. 'We're talking lieutenants, wholesalers… the infrastructure of the organization.'
'Professional and clean,' Cantrell concurred.
'For now. Only a matter of time before a civilian catches a stray bullet.'
'The problem with a street war is that someone always wins.'
'And we're left to clean up the mess.' Lee shrugged to mask his disgust. He hated the power vacuum left by Night's demise and Dred having faded so far into the background, so damn untouchable he was reduced to being strictly a rumor. It felt like unfinished business.
'What's your next step?' Octavia asked.
'Going to tap my informant.'
'Reliable?'
'The best.' Lee grinned. A boy's gleam at being trapped in a toy store, though it had a lascivious edge to it. Though Lee had a way of making even talking about cotton candy sound lascivious.
'Work your cases. Hard,' she emphasized. 'We need to see some movement sooner than later. Something to reassure the public.'
'And the bosses.'
'Them, too.'
'We'll get right on it, ma'am,' Cantrell said.
''We'll get right on it, ma'am.' You ever get tired of bowing and scraping?' Lee asked.
The neon bloodshot eye logo of the Red Eye Cafe seared Cantrell Williams' already tired retinas. A 24hour bar and breakfast joint, though the cafe couldn't serve alcohol on Sunday mornings because of Indiana's blue laws. Small burgundy lights blinked along the window ledges as he stewed at his faux wood table. The place was the province of the young and used-up, as the hookers and strippers of downtown Indianapolis often strolled in here after their shifts. Cantrell ignored him as he bit into his Red Eye Chili Omelette.
Life as a detective was mostly this: inaction as they waited for a body to fall, paperwork, and figuring out where to eat. The murders played on his mind though; despite his cynical bravado, there was a grain of truth to Lee's sentiment. Soon this would be yesterday's news. As it was, three teen males slain in a shooting in a neighborhood no one cared about only rated a page three mention. Though he had no feel for Captain Burke: in his experience, all bosses cared about was to keep things local. If feds came in, things had a way of getting stupid. A high enough profile murder or too many bodies dropping or someone gets it in their head that there was a nefarious ganger of some sort to make their bones on, all bets were off and stupidity reigned.
Until then, Cantrell would work things his way. Build relationships with the community. A Pastor Winburn had been steadily building a rep as a community activist. Some knucklehead named King was busy taking a more direct approach, staying just this side of being a vigilante. Or at least being charged as one. Maybe he could rap with some of the local gang leaders, lean on them to lower the temperature in the neighborhood. That was Cantrell's vision.
'… place is a toilet. Always has been.'
'Not always.' Cantrell didn't even have to make the pretense of catching up on the white noise his partner's chatter usually faded to. He always came back to his favorite topic: the Phoenix Apartments.
'Even when it was the Meadows, it was a cockroach-infested sewer filled with rats who thought of little else but eating, slinging drugs, and shitting all over the place.'
'My moms didn't seem to have a problem raising us here.' Eyes at half-mast, his body knotted with frustration and anger. Cantrell planted his palm on the table and leaned toward Lee.
'Oh, what, so… we gonna have a thing now?'
'Ain't no thing to be had.' Cantrell relaxed and let loose a long sigh.
Lee turned away in a paranoid sulk. He wasn't racist. He didn't care how many times he was called cracker or peckerwood, he knew what he was and how he worked. Citizens got a fair shake, but animals were treated as animals. Police — true po-lice — dealt with the worst each culture had to offer and it had a way of coloring a person's view on that culture. Including his own, though, more often than not, he was summoned to black neighborhoods, not his own. That wasn't his fault, just the cold, hard real of his life. No point in bullshitting it.
Like this one time, this black student — honor roll, track star, showed real promise — got killed by three white kids. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong side of them tweaking. Lee hunted those bastards down as if they'd killed his own kin. Didn't care how long it took, how many sessions in the box, how many times he had to pull them in, he was going to get them. And he did. He wasn't a racist.
'Unclench, motherfucker. Damn. You let this stress get to you and it'll kill just as surely as a bullet.'
CHAPTER THREE
Rellik stared into the mirror as he buttoned up his shirt, a simple white collared thing left from his last court appearance. Yet he dressed with the solemnity and attention of a man of occasion preparing for an evening out. Freckles collected in clusters on each cheek, offset by his light skin. Reddish-brown braids draped to his shoulders. Perpetual and bloodshot, his black eyes fixed straight ahead while the prison guard waited impatiently at his cell door. Though the day was slow in coming, it wasn't as if Rellik served the entire amount of time he could've. Should've. Guilty of many crimes he wasn't tried — much less been convicted — for, he followed the simple belief that confession wasn't as good for the soul as people would have him believe. He'd confessed only to as much as the state could prove, and even then, only to shave a few years off his bid. He strode toward the guard, who stepped back and allowed him to lead the way.
Allisonville Correctional Facility, a Level Four prison. The A-V. The Ave. Prison. Projects. Projects. Prison. Either way, cram too many desperate motherfuckers into a place and things were bound to jump off. Rows of white metal bars formed a gauntlet, one he'd run every day for seven years. The voices of his fellow inmates fell silent as he walked by. Cunning, private, unhousebroken, he was just another animal in a cage and the only thing the cages were good for was to better train animals. Breed them for contempt. Of themselves. Of each other. Of authority. Of society. Then cut them loose with bus fare, severed freedoms, and dim hopes to make a real fresh start in life. Because no one forgot and no one lets you forget.
'Gavain Orkney,' the face behind the bulletproof glass said through a microphone.
Rellik bristled. It had been more years than he could remember since anyone called him by his slave name. And not since elementary school since anyone emphasized the pronunciation of 'vain' rather than correctly as
