Mean Woman Blues

herself.
    “I didn’t think I’d be sad, but I am; you only get one father. Terri, he never had a chance.”
    She was flabbergasted. The truth was, he’d never given anyone a chance, including his two sons. “I don’t follow.”
    “He could have been a good person— a normal, regular, happy person. Something happened, and he just never was; I don’t know what.”
    “You mean, like something in his childhood?’
    “Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe he was born the way he was. Which makes you wonder—” He left the thought unfinished, apparently unwilling to venture into philosophical territory. “Terri, imagine having to live that way! Always suspicious, always afraid, always scheming, seeing enemies everywhere. Never having someone to love. God, it’s just so sad.”
    Terri thought his father was the personification of evil. Isaac might be crazy, he might be in denial, but you couldn’t say he wasn’t generous. She’d never loved him more.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
    Skip awakened to a fine May morning, with a kiss of breeze off the river and hardly a drop of humidity. She and Shellmire stopped at PJ’s for a
grande
to go and one for Abasolo.
    Afterward, Shellmire took off his seersucker jacket and tucked it into Skip’s backseat.
    “Hot day,” she said.
    “But lovely, isn’t it? Too bad old Errol isn’t here to enjoy it with us. Swear to God, I miss him already.”
    “Spare me the black humor, Turner.” Skip spoke more sourly than she intended.
    He raised an eyebrow as she got in and started the car. “I thought you’d be in a great mood this morning.”
    “Couldn’t sleep,” she said, and barely said a word on the drive to Mid-City. She was still trying to process the news: that her old enemy was really dead, the years of threat and fear truly over.
    By the time they got Abasolo, the coffee had started to kick in. It was almost farther to the sergeant’s house than to the East itself. On the Interstate, it’s no more than seven minutes away, far, far closer than the hour’s drive to the North Shore, though the psychological distance is the length of California.
    As she took the high-rise to the East, across the Industrial Canal, she listened to the men banter and noticed that, though it didn’t grate on her particularly, she still wasn’t ready to contribute. She was in the mood that had caused her mother to inquire, when she was a kid, whether she had ants in her pants.
Termites
, she thought. She’d dreamed about them again.
    Still joking when they turned onto Bettina’s street the men missed seeing the young woman approaching her building. Skip snapped, “Hey! Something’s going down. Let’s see if that woman goes to Bettina’s apartment. I’m going to cruise by and then stop. Y’all watch her.”
    But Skip could see too, out of the corner of her eye. The woman went to Bettina’s door, rang the doorbell, and waited, not even slightly nervous, as if she belonged there and wasn’t expecting cops for breakfast.
    Skip cut her motor and parked, still attracting no attention.
    Abasolo said, “Let’s go.”
    “No, wait. Let’s see if she gets in.”
    The woman rang the bell again and knocked. For good measure, she hollered something they couldn’t hear, and even held her ear to the door. When she turned around and for the first time, Skip saw her face, she yelled, “Oh, shit. Let’s get her!”
    She got out of the car and started walking. The woman, realizing someone was in the street, looked in her direction and registered nothing.
    Skip heard the men get out behind her, and suddenly the woman took off running. Must have looked scary as hell, Skip realized.
    She hollered, “Halt! Police!” but the woman wasn’t about to halt. It was a fairly neat little block, mostly single-family homes with front yards unencumbered by fences. Provided there were no cars in driveways (at the moment there weren’t), you could race across them at will, and the woman did.
    “Fuck!” Skip muttered to herself and pounded after her. She didn’t hear the men behind her. The woman was younger, smaller, and faster. She rounded the corner, slowing down only a second, but that, and the fact that the girl was not a sprinter, not in shape at all, began to give Skip an advantage. She yelled again, “Halt! Police!” and wondered why she bothered.
    But another half block and… yes! A running tackle. She had the girl on the ground, and she was just realizing she was too exhausted to cuff