Thrown-away Child

plastic told me I had to leave the area. He smirked at me, and twirled his nightstick, wishing I would make his day.
    I do not like cops who smirk. I thought very seriously about dropping Officer Redneck with a well-deserved punch to the middle of his chest, and how such a thing would make my own day for the second time. But then, far off in the distance, where I had left Claude Bougart waiting in his car, I saw somebody waving at me—Claude himself.
    “Yes, sir—I’ll be moving right along, sir,” I told the redneck. I shuffled, he smirked.
    When I reached Claude, after losing a shoe in my slog through the mud, I saw that he was not alone. In the car, making a fine mess of the backseat, was a black man maybe thirty years old. He wore denims, sunglasses, and a blue rag around his head. That was all I could see of him through the fat rain, except that he was smoking a cigarette and shaking like a junkie two days into trying to kick.
    Claude grabbed my shoulder when I was near enough and shoved me into the front seat of his car.
    “Man in back of you, his name’s Kenny,” Bougart said. I glanced back at Kenny while Bougart ran around the front of the car and jumped back into the driver’s seat. Kenny looked away. Claude rubbed spit-tied rain off his mouth. “This man’s a witness.”
    “Let’s get him the hell out of here.”
     

FORTY

     
    “So, what’s your husband like?”
    “What do you think, Janny?”
    “Sort of cute, talks funny.”
    “Where he’s from, they think we talk funny.” Ruby looked up at the clock on the wall, the one that read central standard. The other clocks were set for New York time and Los Angeles time—also for London, Moscow, and Tokyo, for what it mattered. “You know, Janny, I haven’t got a whole lot more time. You want to go over this again?”
    “These are sure interesting in light of these new murders—and where they all just so happen to be.” Janice riffled through the pile of photocopied documents that Ruby had brought her. “I can go on air with this much. But what you’re concluding from it all—well, I don’t know.”
    “Tell me something you do know, Janny. Where’d you hear about MOMS?”
    “I got that from Alderman Giradoux. Hippo called me aside after that press conference of his the other day to give me a police news tip.”
    Ruby tucked away this information.
    “I haven’t figured it out about the brandings,” Ruby said. “Maybe Hock has.”
    “Let me know what he thinks, will you?”
    “I will.”
    “Okay, I guess I’ve got everything here.” Janice closed her notebook and stood up from her desk. “I’m thirsty.” She stepped over to the little refrigerator in the corner of her cubicle in the WDSU newsroom, opened it, and pulled out two cans of diet Coke. “Thanks,” Ruby said, accepting one.
    “I’ll whip up something in plenty of time for the eleven o’clock news,” Janice said. “Let’s talk about your husband some more.”
    “What can I tell you?”
    “I already asked, what’s he like?”
    “When I first met him, he was living like any other man—like a bear with furniture. But he’s trainable.“
    “You love him a lot?”
    “I love him crazy.”
    “You must. He’s not that cute. Is he as good a man as Daddy?”
    “That’s going to be hard to answer for a while. It’s an easy and natural thing for me to love Daddy—and to respect him objectively as a man. It’s so different with a husband. I love my husband, and I respect him, but I’m freshly married. And so in a funny way that I’m just learning about, Hock doesn’t measure up to Daddy. Not yet anyway.”
    “How come?”
    “Because I know the transparent devices I used to snare him. I can’t imagine Daddy falling for such tricks. But Hock, he doesn’t have a clue.”
    “La, now that’s what I call a woman thing.”
    “I guess so.”
    “Ruby, can I ask you something else?”
    “Okay.”
    “What’s it like being married to a cop?”
    “A good cop is a brooder and a dreamer. Hock does both, all the time. It’s catching. I dream about funerals sometimes, the kind where I’m sitting next to the mayor. Every tin wife has that dream.”
    “So that’s what they call it?”
    “That’s right, tin wife.”
    Janice said nothing.
    Ruby said, “Why do you ask?”
     

FORTY-ONE

     
    “You got a last name, Kenny?”
    “Not that I be telling you. Even a nigger got a right to his privacy.”
    Kenny had taken a hot shower, and Joe Never Smile