“Where are these motherfucking uniforms?” Garvey says, replacing his glasses and looking in both directions on Calhoun. “I don’t want to spend all fucking day hitting this house.”
“Sounded like you fuckin’ had to wake that goddamn dispatcher up,” Kincaid says from the passenger seat. “Now he’s trying to wake up some other poor motherfucker.”
“Well,” says Garvey, “a good police officer is never cold, tired, hungry or wet.”
The Patrolman’s Creed. Kincaid laughs, then jerks open the passenger door and pushes himself up and out to stretch his legs on the sidewalk. Two more minutes pass before one radio car, then another, then a third, pull behind the Cavalier. Three uniforms gather on the corner, conferring briefly with the detectives.
“Anybody here know where your DEU is today?” asks Garvey. It would help to have the district drug enforcement unit around in the event the raid produces dope for the simple, selfish reason that submitting narcotics to evidence control, even in small quantities, is a pain-in-the-ass process.
“Dispatch said they won’t be available,” says one officer, the first to arrive at the intersection. “Not for an hour or so.”
“Fuck it then,” says Garvey. “But that means somebody here is going to have to submit whatever drugs we find in there.”
“So let’s not find any,” says the first officer’s side partner.
“Well, I wanna take it if it’s there, just to have something on the guy,” says Garvey. “Normally, I wouldn’t care-”
“I’ll take the dope,” says the second patrolman. “I gotta run by headquarters anyway.”
“You’re a gentleman and a scholar,” says a third uniform, smiling. “I don’t care what them other guys say about you.”
“Which house is it?” asks the first officer.
“Fifth house in. North side of the street.”
“Three-seven?”
“Yeah, one family in there. Mother, daughter and a young boy named Vincent. He’s the only one we might have to worry about.”
“Is he getting locked up?”
“No, but if he’s there, he’s going downtown. We’re here for search and seizure.”
“Gotcha.”
“Which one of you is taking the back of the house?” Garvey asks.
“I got the back.”
“Okay, then you two go in the front with us.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s do it.”
And then the district men are back in their cars, wheeling around the corner and onto Fayette. The first car rolls around the block and into the back alley that leads to the rear of the rowhouse; the other two screech to a halt in front of the stoop, with the Cavalier in between. Garvey and Kincaid race the younger patrolmen up to the marble stoop.
If this were an arrest warrant, if Vincent Booker were now charged with the murders of his father and Lena Lucas, the detectives would be wearing their vests, their guns drawn, and the front door to Vincent’s home would be answered on the first knock or it would come down hard under a steel maul or patrolman’s boot. So, too, would the raid be an act of controlled violence if the warrant had been written by a narcotics detective. But at this moment there is no reason to think Vincent Booker will play the role of desperado. Nor is the evidence sought in this warrant likely to be swallowed or flushed down a toilet.
Loud knocking brings a young girl to the door.
“Police. Open up.”
“Who’s there?”
“Police officers. Open this door now.”
“What you want here?” asks the girl angrily, opening the door halfway. The first uniform pushes the door full open and a crowd rushes past the girl.
“Where’s Vincent?”
“Upstairs.”
The uniforms race up the center steps to meet a lanky, wide-eyed young man at the second-floor landing. Vincent Booker says nothing and takes the handcuffs without protest, as if he long ago readied himself for this moment.
“What you want to arrest him for?” shouts the girl. “You supposed to be arresting the man done killed his father.”
“Calm down,” says Garvey.
“Why you lockin’ him up?”
“Just take it easy. Where’s your mother?”
Kincaid gestures toward the middle room on the first floor. The matriarch of the Booker clan is a fragile, diminutive woman sitting in one corner of a worn, flower-print sofa. She is watching beautiful people coupling and uncoupling on a black-and-white television. Against the background noise of a soap opera, Garvey introduces himself, shows the warrant and explains that Vincent is going downtown.
“I don’t know nothing about all that,” she says, waving the paper away.
“This just says that we can search the house.”
“Why you want to search my house?”
“It’s here in the warrant.”
The woman shrugs. “I don’t see why you got to search my house for anything.”
Garvey gives up, leaving a target copy on an endtable. Upstairs, in Vincent Booker’s room, drawers are jerked open and mattresses upended. By now, Dave Brown, the primary on the Booker murder, has arrived, and the three detectives move slowly, methodically, through the room. Brown guts the boy’s dresser as Garvey begins pushing each ceiling tile upward, probing for any objects hidden above. Kincaid takes apart the closet, pausing only to leaf through a skin magazine hidden on the top shelf.
“This thing didn’t get much use,” says Kincaid, laughing. “Ain’t but a couple pages stuck together.”
They strike gold after a little less than fifteen minutes, lifting the box spring of the double bed and shoving it against the long wall to reveal a locked metal tackle box. Garvey and Brown begin scanning every key ring discovered in the search, looking for anything that might match the small padlock.
“This one here.”
“No, that’s too big.”
“How ’bout the brown one next to it?”
“Shit on this,” says Brown. “I’m about to open this bitch up with a thirty-eight bullet.”
Kincaid and Garvey laugh.
“Did he have any keys on him?”
“Those are them right here.”
“How ’bout this one?”
“No, try the silver one.”
The padlock slips open, and the tackle box comes apart to reveal several banded packages of glassine bags, a portable scale, some cash, a small amount of marijuana, a healthy collection of jackknives, and a plastic soap dish. Pried open carefully, the knives show not a sign of red-brown residue, but the soap dish opens to reveal a dozen or more.38-caliber rounds, most of them ass-backward wadcutters.
When the detectives are nearly ready to leave, Garvey takes the knives and the soap dish down to Mother Booker, who remains bathed in the blue-gray glow from the television.
“I just want you to see what we’re taking with us. So there’s no problem later.”
“What is that you got?”
“These knives,” says Garvey, “and these here in the dish are bullets.”
The woman briefly contemplates the contents of the plastic dish, glancing for a second or two at stubby lead lumps of the same sort used not a dozen blocks from here to murder her estranged husband, the father of her children. The same type of bullets that killed a mother of two in a rowhouse just around the corner.
“You takin’ those with you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why?”