Thrown-away Child

hissed, “You hear what that cracker called you?”
    Of course Bougart had heard it. Everybody had. Bougart pulled himself free. “Go home and chill. Unless you got a nice clean record so’s you can afford to have me run you in today on incitement charges.”
    “Haw!” The young man raised his voice. “Nigger, you must love it.”
    “Say what?”
    “Booger I say.” Several in the crowd in back of him laughed at the taunt. “My oh my—you must just love it to pieces bein’ a motherfuckin’ black in blue.“
    “You also eat with that mouth of yours?”
    “Least I don’t eat the shit straight out of white assholes like you do, Booger boy.” Now a chorus of bitter laughter from the crowd. The young man turned and grinned, acknowledging his audience.
    Officer Bougart moved up close to his antagonist, close enough to coldcock him, with complete assurance that no white cop would pay heed to a black comrade brutalizing an agitated black civilian. The younger man fell flat onto his buttocks, lost his breath, and was now sputtering. Laughter at Bougart’s expense quickly died down to nothing as the crowd realized the same, and took a collective backward step. Bougart stooped over the downed man and ripped the kufi from his hand. He eyed the label inside, laughed at the words he fully expected to find: made in taïwan. He jammed the crumpled kufi up against the young man’s lips. “Okay, let’s see how you eat, garbage mouth. Take a big old bite of your phony hat.”
    Spitting helplessly, the young man turned his head away. He struggled to his feet. Bougart let him, but snarled, “Best you leave right now— boy! Else I’ll bop you so hard your kinfolks in Africa going to feel it.” Bougart threw the kufi after the young man as he slinked off.
    The matter ended, Officer Bougart stepped down to the walkway where Mueller was kneeling over the remains of Cletus Tyler. “Looky here, Booger,” Mueller said, pointing a latexed finger at Tyler’s navel. “He’s got some kind of tattoo. See there, where it’s all welted up into letters?”
    It was not a tattoo. “The man’s been branded, like he was livestock,” Bougart said, sniffing the heavy, sour odor rising off Tyler’s body.
    Mueller asked, “Ever seen a tattoo like this here?”
    Bougart looked closely at four letters Mueller pointed out with his latexed finger. Seared into Cletus Tyler’s stomach, more than likely with a white-hot iron poker, were the letters MOMS.
    Moms. Officer Bougart knew at least one meaning for these letters. But he decided against sharing raw information with the likes of Mueller and Eckles.
    “No, Detective.”
    “Well, I was hoping you might help me on that one. Thought it might be one of them insider colored things.”
    “ ’Fraid not.”
    The television producer cued the medical examiner. Klieg lights followed the man in the white coat and the guerney bearers off the levee to the walkway. The lacquered blond reporter, deeply blue-eyed with a suitcoat to match, stood in the foreground mouthing in urgent baritone to a handheld mike, “Literally on the banks of that Old Man River, we have exclusive pictures of a little wheel in local crime who will no longer keep rolling along...”
    Down the walkway from Officer Bougart and Detectives Mueller and Eckles, meanwhile, a second team of white detectives had finished questioning the schoolboys who had discovered the body. Detective Hartman, wearing a clip-on tie and a short-sleeve shirt with sweat rings under the arms, climbed back up onto the levee and started randomly quizzing the lookers. His partner, Detective Jimmy Fontana, strolled up to Detective Mueller and talked to him from notes he had made in his leather-bound case pad.
    “Them little black kids back there,” Fontana said, his thumb indicating the three schoolboys. “They was walking along on home and come across the dead man. They say they smelled something funny, else they never probably would’ve noticed anybody in the hole.”
    “The boys drag out the body?” Mueller asked. “No. They tell me there’s a black male loitering around here. Supposed to be good-looking. Older guy, they say to me—meaning my age, which is only forty-seven for Christ’s sake.” Fontana shook his head. “Anyhow, this so-called older guy, he come down off where he was sitting on the jetty, right up overhead the dead man, just smoking a cigarette like he’s got all the time in the world. The boys say he’s the one