conversation… just not with Lee.
'I just get tired of it is all.' Lee continued the thread of conversation from his usual quilt of gripes. He'd roll his list of slights around in his head until they built up enough steam to sputter out his mouth like a leaky bowel. It was never too difficult to follow him.
'What? Black folks not showing your peckerwood ass enough love?' Cantrell studied the passing scenery. He avoided looking at Lee whenever possible. Lee's kind of ugly from the inside out, hurt him like staring into the sun.
'Ain't no love coming from-'
'Watch yourself now.'
'… the hood. It's respect I want.'
'What every man wants.' Cantrell knew he'd regret asking the question which threatened to pass his lips, but the sheer weight of the misery Lee carried with him today had him slumped over, his thin face twisted into an expression passing for pensive. 'What's the matter?'
'Just thinking about my girl.'
'Please don't tell me about the two of you having sex. I don't even want the tangential possibility of the hint of the image of you naked.'
'I think we're breaking up.' The gentle green from the dashboard lights and the monitor of their computer cast a melancholy pallor on Lee's face.
Cantrell remained silent in commiseration. Though he had little interest in hearing a peckerwood go all emo on him, he turned his head back to the street to give Lee the space to continue.
'Yeah. Think she's bored with me. She been distracted lately.'
'What she do?' A tentative halt hitched Cantrell's voice. He still feared the conversational thought was going to go straight into their sex life.
'Don't know.'
'How could you not know?' Cantrell turned to him. His instinct stirred within him, suddenly making him very aware of his partner. 'It's our job to know.'
'You know women. One great mystery after another. And if you're lucky, you get a memo letting you in. So, it's not come up yet.'
'How could…?' Again, the willfulness of Lee's ignorance troubled him. Still, the answer to that question probably involved them and positions Lee would take too much delight in detailing. 'Sounds like your relationships may have other significant problems if you don't even know what she does.'
'I know. But I been afraid to know.'
'Why?'
'I think she might be a pross. Or worse.'
Cantrell's mouth started to form a question, but it collapsed on his lips. Every scenario he imagined suddenly involved Lee handing him a flaming bag of shit for him to clean up. 'Dating' a suspected prostitute was bad enough. The 'or worse' part had him especially concerned. Either way, Cantrell was at ground zero, too much at risk of being collateral damage. When the shit exploded, if he didn't know more about what was going on, there'd be no way to determine the blast radius. The idea of a partner became less and less appealing. 'What do you mean by 'or worse'?'
'She tells me things.'
Intuition was a police detective's Holy Spirit. It guided and formed them. Helped them make leaps of faith. And warned them as long as their conscience was not too seared to hear its gentle whisper. And right now, its soft voice spoke to him with a disconcerting clarity. 'Please don't tell me she's your CI.'
'Not registered,' Lee said.
'Oh fuck.' Cantrell pictured a bag being lit and left on his porch.
'I run all her info through another CI and put his name on the warrants.'
'Why. The Fuck. Are you telling me this?' Cantrell wanted to smack the shit out of Lee. This cracka-ass fuckup held his career in his peckerwood palms and he better not be enjoying the jackpot he was putting him in.
'I just got a feeling is all.'
'About what? No point in holding back on me now.'
'I don't know. I just think she's more of a player in all of this shit than she let on.'
'This bust a set-up?' Intuition. It spoke to all police. A gift, even to the worst of them.
And while Cantrell believed himself to be in tune to the whispers of intuition, he far from trusted the voices whispering in his erstwhile partner's head. Lee struck him as the type who spent hours practicing looking hard in the mirror.
'I don't think so. But I've had the feeling for a long time that she was pulling my strings for her own agenda. And the sex…'
Here we go.
'…was the price of my services.' Lee let the words hang in the air to settle in, smug about his services rendered. Oblivious to the overriding fact that he may have been played.
'But the intel has been good.'
'Spot on. Perfect.'
'Too perfect?' Cantrell's eyebrows arched in suspicion.
Lee studied his hands and mumbled. 'Yeah. Maybe.'
'So 'or worse'… she some sort of player? Dealer?'
'Don't know.'
'Thief?'
'Don't know.'
'Hitter.'
'Don't know.'
'What do you know?'
'She's a wild ride. Enough to make a man turn a blind eye to whatever else she's doing.'
Lee's face caught the strobe of the cruiser lights as they stepped out of the car. With great restraint, he managed to not make a wisecrack. It was time to put his game face on. He affected a pose of authority without a worry in the world.
Naptown Red put it on the vine that he wanted to get up with Garlan, Rellik's number two. The man proved more difficult to connect with than anticipated. He had a way of just showing up, his crews suddenly much more productive as they never knew when he'd show up or how long he'd been among them. Listening. Invisible. He was a ghost.
Not that Red was much better.
He roamed the streets, each night finding a new spot to lay his head. By his metric, his life was his own. He lived as he wanted, where he wanted, answerable to no one and no schedule except his own. He was the god of his own world.
And he needed to go to the library.
The Indianapolis Public Library reminded him of a southside hilljack who decided to build onto his house. The original structure was a simple brick mason box matching many of the buildings and memorials built downtown at the time. A couple dozen steps led up to its entrance. In the last couple years, a metallic and glass state-of-the-art structure was added, five shiny stories of computers, cafes, and escalators. The bank of computers smelled of body funk and light smoke. The air circulation always turned up to high as many homeless folks killed afternoons there. Some days there was a four-hour wait to get on a computer. Most days Red went up there to check his e-mail and cruise the internet. The security guards eyed him as he passed by. As they did Garlan.
'What up, G?' Naptown Red asked.
'I don't like folks coming up on me.' Garlan didn't glance up from the computer screen.
'I bet not. You got my message?'
'I'm here ain't I?'
Their conversation drew the eyes of the library workers. Some of the neighboring computer stations peeked up at them like prairie dogs on a savannah.
'Come on, let's go somewhere we can talk in private.'
