Let It Burn

by Steve Hamilton

  “The day is young, Alex. I’ll let you do that one, though, if you don’t mind.”

  “You really can’t run anymore, huh?”

  I could see him flexing his left knee, just at the thought of it. “If a bear was chasing me, maybe. But then I’m sure I’d end up in the hospital.”

  “So I take it you’re not going to play basketball.”

  He was taking a drink of coffee then and just about spit it out. “Are you kidding me? With Detective Jackass as the coach?”

  “Coach and star player. Don’t forget.”

  “Star player, my ass. I would have destroyed that boy, back in the day. In fact, if I hadn’t been a little better at football … I’m just saying. You might have seen me on the hardwood instead of the gridiron.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I got it.”

  “Now, if I had played baseball…”

  “Oh, don’t even start,” I said. One of our other favorite arguments.

  “I won’t. My only point is that every sport has its necessary set of physical skills.”

  “Okay. You’re right.”

  “And then there’s baseball.”

  I shook my head and looked out my side window. There was a line of apartments on my side of the street. By lunchtime there’d be people sitting out on their balconies, watching the traffic. Not exactly the best view in the world, but there were far worse places to live. Across the street was another apartment building, much older and taller. A place we knew well, from repeated visits. Thankfully there were no calls to send us there that day. We wouldn’t even set foot in that building for another month.

  The downtown buildings were looming in front of us, getting bigger with every block. We passed over the highway, then by the Fox Theater into the canyon formed by the first of the tall buildings. We were downtown now, and there were working people walking around like it was any other city in the world. This one just happened to be built on one thing. The automobile. So as that business went, so went the city. On this particular day, it looked to be holding its own.

  That took us past the Opera House and right into Grand Circus Park, with all of the statues and fountains and flowers, and God damn if it didn’t all look beautiful in the morning sunlight. Another few blocks and the road curved around another little gem of a park called Campus Martius. It’s a big jumble as five roads all converge there, a great place for fender benders, and sure enough, we made the turn just in time to see one happen. One car swinging hard to the outside of the circle, another car in its blind spot. The dull hollow sound of a passenger’s-side door being pushed in, then a terrifying moment as the two cars seemed to join together and form a single metal monster that could go just about anywhere, take out other cars or even the people on the sidewalk.

  Three wheels jumped the curb. Two front wheels from one car, one from the other. Then everything stopped dead. Franklin flipped on the lights as he pulled up behind. I jumped out and checked on the drivers. Your first priority, of course. Make sure nobody’s seriously hurt.

  There was a woman in the car to the right. She was black and heavyset, and there was a cross hanging from her rearview mirror. The car itself was a junker. An old Plymouth Horizon that was once blue, now half Bondo and primer. It was the kind of car you could buy in Detroit for three hundred dollars back then.

  Her eyes were closed, her hands folded in front of her. She jumped as I rapped on her window. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  “I’m fine,” she said as she rolled down her window. “That car just came over, Officer. Right on top of me. I didn’t have time to stop.”

  “You just relax a minute,” I said. “We’ll be right back to talk to you.”

  I went to the other car. It was a gunmetal gray Saab, and I’m pretty sure the floor mats alone were worth more than the Horizon. The driver was pounding the steering wheel with both fists. When he saw me, he threw open his door. I had to jump back to avoid getting hit in the knees.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “I never saw her,” the man said. He was wearing a suit, and his tie had been loosened. “She came out of nowhere.”

  “Well, no,” I said. “She was right behind you. I wouldn’t call that nowhere.”

  “I looked before I switched lanes. Then boom! I don’t know how it happened.”

  “You obviously didn’t see her. A turn signal might have been useful there, by the way.”

  “I did signal, Officer.”

  “We were right behind you. You didn’t signal.”

  “I assure you I did.”

  Okay, I thought, so this is how it’s going to go. Like the old Marx Brothers line, Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

  “Let me just get your license and registration,” I said. “And your insurance information.”

  Franklin had called us in as “busy with a property damage accident, no injury.” Now he was taking care of the woman in the other car. It was my luck to have Mr. Happy here. He said a couple of half-audible things about the city of Detroit and then about women drivers, and I admit that made it a little easier to write him a ticket for improper lane change. He took that about as well as I thought he would, taking down my badge number and promising me I hadn’t heard the last of him.

  The tow trucks finally came. By the time we had finished up all of the paperwork, most of our morning was done. Just another busy day in downtown Detroit.

  When we were back in the car, I sat there shaking my head for a while. Franklin kept looking over at me.

  “Nice guy, huh?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Every time somebody acts like that, you take it personally. It’s gonna eat you up, you know that.”

  “I’m not taking it personally.”

  “You’re just a badge to guys like that. You stand for something they need to get mad at.”

  “I know, okay? Can we just move on?”

  “Yeah, with you not talking for the next few hours. That’ll be fun.”

  “You sound like my wife now.”

  Franklin didn’t respond to that. Not at first. We just kept rolling down the street.

  “I know we’ve talked about this before,” he finally said. “So there’s no use going over it again.”

  Meaning that’s exactly what we were about to do. If the car had been going a little slower, I might have been tempted to jump out.

  “Seriously,” he said, “you know this job is hard enough, even if everything is squared away at home.”

  “I know. Believe me.”

  Franklin and his wife had two young daughters. It all got to be a bit too much sometimes, and I’d hear him complain about it. But I knew he went home a happy man every night. Or day or afternoon, or whenever the hell our rotating shifts would end.

  “Is Jeannie still going to school?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She’s almost done.”

  “So she’ll have her degree. In art history.”

  Oh, we’re going to get the full platter today, I thought. Art history being to real areas of study as baseball is to real sports.

  “I know I’ve kidded you about that before,” he said, surprising me, “but she’s just getting that paper, right? I get it. She wants to have a degree, finish what she started. Then go on to the next thing. I totally get it.”

  “I’ll tell her you’re on board.”

  He looked over at me.

  “I’m trying to tell you something important,” he said. “Will you just cut it out and listen for a minute?”

  “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

  “I know we work crazy schedules. I know we can bring the job home with us sometimes. No way around that. But you gotta work through that every single day and you gotta find each other. You know what I’m saying? Every day, Alex.”

  “That’s hard to do when I don’t even see her.”

  “So that’s why you call her. You set a time and you make it happen. Just see how her day is going, tell her you’re thinkin
g about her. That’s all it takes.”

  This was back before everybody had a cell phone. This was back when you had to find a phone connected to a wall and you maybe even had to drop some change into a slot before you could talk to somebody.

  “You stop talking to your woman,” he said, “you’re halfway out the door.”

  “She has an hour between classes today,” I said. “She’s usually in a lounge where I’ve called her before. So I’ll do that today, all right?”

  “Don’t do it for me. Do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do it because I’m a smart man and I know what I’m talking about.”

  I didn’t get a chance to answer that one. The sergeant came over the radio and asked if we had cruised by Roosevelt Park and the train station yet.

  Franklin picked up the transmitter. “We’re on our way, Sergeant. We had to handle an accident.”

  “Copy that.”

  We cut west on Michigan Avenue, passing Tiger Stadium. There’d be an early game that day. A getaway Thursday game before a road trip. Some of the other cops from my precinct were already out there on the street, getting ready for the sudden heavy traffic and the crush of pedestrians. I nodded to a couple of them as we rolled past.

  Then we turned down through Roosevelt Park, really just a flat open field with a few trees and walking paths around the perimeter. The park looked quiet, making me wonder what all the fuss was about. There were probably five hundred vials of crack changing hands all over the city at that moment, and here we were making sure no dogs were taking a dump on the grass.

  We made the loop in front of Michigan Central Station, eighteen stories tall, maybe the most beautiful Beaux Arts building in the city. When I came here as a kid, the main waiting room was still open, with the arcade and the shops and the mezzanine and everything else. I’d look up at the high ceilings and think this was the fanciest place I’d ever seen. My father told me this used to be the heart of the city, people arriving on those trains from all over the country.

  Now it was half closed down, with only a few Amtrak trains coming through every day. There was some talk about reopening the whole thing, making it look like it did in the glory days, but for now, it was just left hanging in limbo.

  We were about to head back out when I noticed a car parked along a side street, just west of the station, by the redbrick church, almost hidden by the high weeds and sumac trees. We pulled up behind the car and hit our lights. I got out and kept an eye on the two male occupants in the front seat. Franklin looped behind me and took the passenger’s side. I went to the driver’s window and rapped on it.

  The driver was white. Thirty-five, forty years old. He looked up at me with a mixture of fear, surprise, and feigned innocence. Like why on earth would you be bothering me when I’m sitting here in my car, minding my own business? It’s an expression I saw seven or eight times a week.

  “Can I get some ID from you, sir?”

  “What’s the problem, Officer? We’re just sitting here.”

  “Did I say there’s a problem? I’d just like to see some ID, if that’s all right.”

  The passenger was black. Franklin was asking him the same question, and it was obvious the passenger had been down this road before. He just sat there, shaking his head, like he was the most unlucky man in the city.

  We got the two men out of the car and put them in handcuffs. The white man started shaking about then and asked me why he was being arrested.

  “You’re not under arrest,” I told him. “We’re just doing this for your safety and ours.”

  “But you don’t have probable cause, Officer. You’re violating my rights.”

  I looked over at Franklin.

  “You’re parked half in the weeds in a known drug-trafficking area,” Franklin said to him. “And I’m pretty sure this young man here isn’t giving you directions back to the suburbs.”

  I searched the driver and came up empty, but Franklin started pulling little bags with white rocks out of one of the passenger’s pockets. He pulled a large wad of money out of the other.

  “That’s not mine,” the man said. “I don’t know where that came from.”

  “What, the crack? Or the money?”

  “The money’s mine. I don’t even know what that other stuff is.”

  “This is amazing,” Franklin said to me over the roof of the car. “Didn’t we just hear about the same thing happening the other day? Somebody going around slipping drugs into young men’s pockets? It’s like an epidemic around here.”

  I asked the driver if I could take a quick look through his car. He said yes, and it came up clean. Nothing on his person, nothing in his car. It was turning out to be a very fortuitous day for him.

  “So tell me the truth,” I said to him, getting close and looking him in the eye. “Were you just down here trying to buy some crack? Or was there something else going on?”

  “Hey, hey,” the passenger said. “Don’t even be saying that now.”

  “I hear this is the place for it,” Franklin said, “and you’re sitting in the man’s car. What else are we supposed to think?”

  “I don’t go in for that kind of stuff, man. That’s blasphemy.”

  “No, you just sell crack,” Franklin said as he started hauling him back to the car. “Right next to a church. That’s not blasphemy at all.”

  “I’m sorry, officer,” the driver said to me. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure we both know exactly what you were thinking,” I said, “but I appreciate the honesty. If I let you drive away, am I ever going to see you back down here?”

  “No, you’re not. I swear.”

  “All right, get the hell out of here.”

  He got back in his car and drove off. I rejoined my partner in our car. The young man in the backseat was smart enough not to say anything else. He just sat there looking out the window while we drove him back to the station. He looked like he was eighteen years old, maybe nineteen. He lived in a world I’d probably never understand. But he didn’t have to be hanging around the train station selling drugs to white men from the suburbs. He had a choice. Or at least, that’s what I had to tell myself to keep doing this job.

  *

  It was already past lunchtime when we got through processing our young dealer. I tried giving Jeannie a call, like I had promised Franklin, but I just missed her. Then I saw Detective Bateman walking down the hall, looking like he had a few more things to say about the basketball game. So I got the hell out of there and rejoined my partner in the car. My stomach was rumbling.

  Franklin had this thing about “Coneys,” which were Detroit’s version of the Coney Island–style hot dog. There were a dozen different places around town that sold them. Now, I knew all about ex–football players and how they’d often put on too much weight once they stopped playing, but I’d long ago given up. Franklin was going to have his three dogs no matter what I said or did. The diet Faygo Redpop on the side just made the whole meal that much more ridiculous.

  “Admit it,” he said. “A Coney sounds pretty damned good today. Am I right?”

  “Doesn’t mean I’m going to eat one.”

  “You don’t understand, Alex. On these short-shift days, you naturally crave comfort food. It would do you great emotional harm not to take care of yourself today.”

  So of course we ended up at one of the stands on Woodward. Franklin had three. I had two. Principles be damned when you’re standing there and you haven’t eaten since an early breakfast and you’re smelling those grilled onions. When we were done we headed back out on the beat. Back by the stadium, where the game had started. We ended up talking to a man who was pretending to be a game-day parking attendant. He was out in the street, waving cars into a closed private lot, taking ten dollars from every car. When I questioned him, he stood his ground and lied to my face and kept lying even after we got the official confirmation from the lot own
er. Yet another man telling me the sky was green. Something that would never stop amazing me.

  We would have run him off with a warning, but there was real money involved and apparently this wasn’t the first time for him, so we ended up driving him back to the station and processing him. That meant more paperwork, another solid hour and a half in the station, hoping Detective Bateman didn’t find me.

  Then finally back on the street. That was the afternoon. That’s every afternoon when you’re on the day shift. A whole lot of whatever happens next, and you never really know. I honestly don’t remember one other thing that happened, until it got close to four o’clock and we could see the end of the shift coming. Home for dinner, maybe a few words with my wife, making an effort. A night of sleep and maybe we’d all feel better the next day.

  “Swing by Roosevelt Park one more time,” I said to Franklin. “Just for the hell of it.”

  We were already halfway down Woodward Avenue again. Over the freeway and into the heart of the city, one more time before we called it a day. He made that same turn down that same road. The train station loomed above us. Here’s where time slows down for me. It stretches out like a long rubber band, and every single event is stretched out with it.

  The whole place was quiet and deserted. Even more so than the first time we had come by. Not unusual, I guess. They see the cops taking someone away in a patrol car, that tends to put a damper on their business. For the rest of that afternoon, at least.

  “Swing through the lot,” I said.

  “This place is dead.”

  “Just humor me.”

  With a sigh he pulled hard on the wheel and circled the car back toward the lot. There were maybe thirty or forty cars there. Far from the salad days, but at least there was somebody still taking the trains. There was so much room in the lot, the cars were scattered all over the place. I didn’t see anybody in any of the cars. Franklin made one loop through the lot, taking us closer to the tracks.

  That’s when I saw him.

  A young man, black, jeans and a gray T-shirt. Black baseball cap. He was walking down the tracks, right at us.

  I was out of the car before it even came to a complete stop. He saw me. He turned and ran in the opposite direction.