Four Blind Mice

he was picking on me. You know, singling me out because of my size. Then we hooked up again in ’Nam.”
    “He loosened up some? Once you met him again in ’Nam?”
    “No, Cooper is Cooper. He’s no bullshit, a real straight arrow, but if you follow the rules, he’s fair. That’s what he liked about the army. It was mostly orderly, consistent, and if you did the right thing, then you usually did all right. Maybe not as well as you thought you should, but not too bad. He told me it’s smart for a black man to find a meritocracy, like the army.”
    “Or the police department,” I said.
    “Up to a point,” Sampson said, nodding. “I remember a time,” he continued. “Vietnam. We had replaced a unit that killed maybe two hundred people in a five-month period. These weren’t exactly soldiers that got killed, Alex, though they were supposed to be VC.”
    I listened as I drove. Sampson’s voice became faraway.
    “This kind of military operation was called ‘mopping up.’ This one time, we came into a small village, but another unit was already there. An infantry officer was ‘interrogating’ a prisoner in front of these women and children. He was cutting skin off the man’s stomach.
    “Sergeant Cooper went up to the officer and pressed his gun to the man’s skull. He said if the officer didn’t stop what he was doing, he was a dead man. He meant it too. Cooper didn’t care about the consequences. He
didn’t
kill those women in North Carolina, Alex. Ellis Cooper is no killer.”

Chapter 6
    I LOVED BEING with Sampson. Always had, always would. As we rode through Virginia and into North Carolina the talk eventually turned to other, more hopeful and promising subjects. I had already told him everything there was to tell about Jamilla Hughes, but he wanted to hear more scoop. Sometimes he’s a bigger gossip than Nana Mama.
    “I don’t have any more to tell you, big man. You know I met her on that big murder case in San Francisco. We were together a lot for a couple of weeks. I don’t know her
that
well. I like her, though. She doesn’t take any crap from anybody.”
    “And you’d
like
to know her more. I can tell that much.” Sampson laughed and clapped his big hands together.
    I started to laugh too. “Yes, I would, matter of fact. Jamilla plays it close to the vest. I think she got banged up somewhere along the line. Maybe the first husband. She doesn’t want to talk about it yet.”
    “I think she has your number, man.”
    “Maybe she does. You’ll like her. Everybody does.”
    John started to laugh again. “You do find nice ladies. I’ll give you that much.” He switched subjects. “Nana Mama is some kind of piece of work, isn’t she?”
    “Yeah, she is. Eighty-two. You’d never know it. I came home the other day. She was shimmying a
refrigerator
down the back stairs of the house on an oilcloth. Wouldn’t wait for me to get home to help her.”
    “You remember that time we got caught lifting records at Spector’s Vinyl?”
    “Yeah, I remember. She loves to tell that story.”
    John continued to laugh. “I can still see the two of us sitting in that store manager’s crummy little office. He’s threatening us with everything but the death penalty for stealing his crummy forty-fives, but we are so cool. We’re almost laughing in his face.
    “Nana shows up at the record store, and she starts
hitting
both of us. She hit me in the face, bloodied my lip. She was like some kind of mad woman on a rampage, a mission from God.”
    “She had this warning:
‘Don’t cross me. Don’t ever, ever cross me, ever.’
I can still hear the way she would say it,” I said.
    “Then she let that police officer haul our asses down to the station. She wouldn’t even bring us home. I said, ‘They were only
records,
Nana.’ I thought she was going to kill me. ‘I’m already bleeding!’ I said. ‘You’re gonna bleed more!’ she yelled in my face.”
    I found myself smiling at the distant memory. Interesting how some things that weren’t real funny at the time eventually get that way. “Maybe that’s why we became big, bad cops. That afternoon in the record store. Nana’s vengeful wrath.”
    Sampson turned serious and said, “No, that’s not what straightened me out. The army did it. I sure didn’t get what I needed in my own house. Nana helped, but it was the army that set me straight. I owe the army. And I owe Ellis Cooper.
Hoo-rah! Hoo-rah! Hoo-rah!
”

Chapter 7
    WE DROVE