“Clarissa?” This time his throat throbbed with warning.
“Drop it!”
We turned our heads together. Childs sat motionless, staring at Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler, Rick McCoy, and three uniforms standing with sidearms pointed at the woman with the shotgun. I’d called them early enough to avoid a standoff, but they must have taken the long way around the house.
“Drop it!” Thaler shouted again.
Clarissa Childs hesitated, then lowered the shotgun. The officers were advancing when she swiveled the butt down to the ground, jammed the muzzle up under her chin, and tripped the trigger with the toe of her slipper.
“We got a partial off that air conditioner knob that puts the mother on the scene,” Thaler said while my statement was being typed up. “For what it’s worth.”
“It closes the case. That must be worth something to someone.”
She was drinking tea again, from one of those mugs they sell downstairs with the police seal on it. Headquarters is running a boutique to catch up on repairs. Today she had on a grayish-pink suit; ashes of rose, I think they call it. She looked less tired. “All we’ve got on Orson Childs is attempting to destroy evidence. I don’t think we can make accomplice after the fact stick. Some mother, huh? I used to think there was something to maternal instinct. I thought I was missing something.”
“Not wanting kids and killing the one you have don’t walk under the same sun.”
“Plus three other mothers’ sons just for garnish. Sometimes I hate this town. Other times I just dislike it a little.”
“It started in Grosse Pointe.”
“It’s all Detroit.” She worked the tea bag. “I’d sure like to know how you confirmed the Childses had money troubles. If I thought you knew your way around a computer I might ask the boys in white-collar crime to keep an eye on you.”
“You don’t have to log in to run a bluff.”
“On,” she said. “You log on to the Internet, not in. But you knew that. You’re overdoing it.”
“The less people think you know, the better for you.”
“If that’s true you’ll live forever.”
I said nothing.
She said, “I know about you and Barry Stackpole. You two are the evil twins of amateur law enforcement.” She took out the tea bag and dumped it into her wastebasket. “Any questions?”
“None I can think of.”
“Well, you know what they say about curiosity.” She sipped.
Pride
by P.J. Parrish
Brush Park
Tonight I have the windows open to catch what little breeze there is, and as I lay in my damp sheets, my face turned toward the gauzy glow of the streetlight outside, I can hear them. The lions are roaring.
It starts low, a moaning prelude. Then it builds, drifting to me in my bed with the shifts of the heavy August air, until it becomes a distant but full-throated roar.
Aaaa-OUUU. Aaaa-OUUUUUU.
I listen, my body tense, until it finally dies into a series of staccato grunts.
Huh, huh, huh.
I am two miles away from the lions, safe in my basement studio apartment just a block off Woodward Avenue. I know the lions are secured behind a moat. They are fed twice a day, cosseted by their caretakers at the Detroit Zoo. They want for nothing.
So why do they roar at night?
It starts again.
Aaaa-OUUU. Aaaa-OUUUUUU.
I look toward the corner where the yellow-white beam from the streetlight falls across the bureau and brings the steel of my gun to life.
I press my palms over my ears and close my eyes.
Baker was waiting at my desk when I got to work the next morning. He had made my coffee for me.
“You look like hell,” he said, holding out my chipped white mug. The rim still had yesterday’s lipstick on it, but I didn’t care.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said.
“You need to do something about that,” he said.
I nodded as I sipped the coffee. He had even remembered the Splenda. After four years riding together, it made me feel good that he remembered how I took my coffee. My ex had never seemed to get that one down.
“Drink up, we have a call,” Baker said.
I looked at him over the rim of the mug. “How bad?”
He held my eye for a moment but didn’t say anything before he turned away to pick up his jacket off the chair. That explained the waiting coffee. It was going to be a really bad one.
We drove through a sticky morning rain, moving away from the Central District station house on Woodward. For once, I hadn’t put up a fight when Baker told me he was going to drive. I just sat back in the seat, watching the slow sweep of the windshield wipers.
Baker took a right into Brush Park. A century ago, the neighborhood had been home to the city’s elite. But now it was block after block of decaying Victorians, weedy empty lots, and the collapsing brick caverns of abandoned boarding houses. We called it The Zone, the nickname coming from the government E-Zone program that was funneling millions of dollars into Detroit’s decaying core. The E stood for Empowerment, the politicians said, and there were signs of life here and there — a new Blimpie over on Mack, an old factory being converted to lofts, a few rehabbed mansions reclaimed from ruin. And at night, when the Tigers had a home game, the southern horizon burned bright with the lights from Comerica Park. But for most of the people here, the empowerment hadn’t trickled down enough to ease the pain of their daily lives. To most people in The Zone, E still meant empty.
Literally empty, I thought as I stared out the window.
Over the past couple decades, in the name of renewal, whole blocks of blighted and burned-out houses had been demolished, leaving vast stretches of weeds and grass. Untrimmed trees formed tunnels over the pocked streets. Wild pheasants had taken to roosting in the rafters of the rotting houses. The Zone had the aching loneliness of an abandoned prairie town.
As we turned onto John R, I found myself looking for the small reminders of the lush life that had once thrived here. A set of stairs leading up to nowhere, the ornate carvings still visible in the crumbling concrete. A listing red brick chimney covered with the creeping pink blooms of wild sweet pea vines. A rusted stop sign standing sentry on a corner where no one came anymore.
But then, the surprise of a lone house, bars on the windows and plastic flowers in the yard. And another, its sagging porch strung with Christmas lights. People hanging on, barricading themselves in their homes against the drug dealers and prostitutes, waiting for the city fathers to figure it all out.
I stole a look at Baker’s Sharpei profile, with the ever-present mint-flavored toothpick hanging from his lip. None of this ever seemed to bother him. He was driving slowly, like he always did, a sharp contrast to my own gas-brake-gas-brake style. Baker kept an even flow on most everything. Even on calls like this, even when he knew what we were going to see.
“How old?” I asked.
“Four months,” he said.
The rain had stopped by the time we pulled up to the house. There was a small crowd gathered by the steps, women mostly, their arms crossed over their chests or clutching kids to their thighs. The low tire-whir of the nearby Fisher Freeway filled my ears.
Baker turned toward me. “You ready?”
Usually someone — often the mother but on rare occasions the male in the house — takes the child to the emergency room. Driven by a fleeting clarity of what they have done, they hope that the limp body in their arms can be miraculously transformed back into a baby.