He sat there looking at me as I drove back to the precinct.
“Hot damn, Alex,” he finally said. “Just when I thought you took too many foul balls off your mask.”
The mother’s name was Jamilah King. The son named Tremont was in the public school system. So was the daughter, Naima.
So was the other son, at least until recently. He was two years older than Tremont. His name was Darryl. He hadn’t been in school since turning sixteen. He didn’t have a driver’s license. There was no employment record for Darryl King, or any other public record at all, but then that wasn’t unusual for a young black male in Detroit, where it’s so easy to just disappear into the streets.
Detective Bateman looked at the name on the high school transcript, the last official documentation of his existence before he dropped out.
“Darryl King,” he said. “Pleased to meet you, young man. I’d like to introduce you to our SWAT team.”
“I don’t think that’s the right play,” I said. “It’s possible that this kid is inside that house right now, but it’s just as possible he’s somewhere else. If there’s a record for him at that address, it wouldn’t be smart to be there.”
“Look at this transcript and tell me this kid is smart.”
“You know there’s more than one brand of smart, Detective. He’s done a great job of staying off the radar, and obviously he has his mother working hard to keep it that way. You try to flush him out now and he might disappear for good.”
“So what do we do? Watch the house? Wait him out?”
“That’s how I’d approach it, yes.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “That’s the way we do it. Did you see a good spot to park a van?”
“The street comes to a dead end, just a block away. Actually, there’s a locked gate there. On the other side is the back of the parking lot for one of those apartment complexes on MLK.”
“Perfect,” he said. “We put our van in that lot. Use the plumbing and heating sign. Or the cable sign, either one. Have that gate unlocked so we can move through it quickly.”
He picked up the phone to make the arrangements. At one point while he was on hold, he looked up at me with a smile on his face.
“What is it?” I said.
“It’s my new mission in life. Once we catch this guy.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Get you your gold shield. You said you’re taking the test, right?”
“Eventually.”
“Next test, you’re taking it. You’ll do great, of course. The rest is politics. That’s where I come in.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s just catch this guy. Then we can talk about gold shields.”
They rolled the van over that very evening. They parked it in the back of the parking lot, with a direct sight line to the house. We were lucky to have a streetlight on the corner as well, so there was no problem watching for people going in or out.
I was immediately approved for overtime duty again. I spent the evening shift in the van with Detective Bateman. We didn’t see anything happening at the house.
We turned it over to a single night-shift officer while we went home to sleep. Nothing happened. The detective and I were back in the van the next morning, holding large cups of coffee. We’d arranged with the apartment complex to use one of the empty units for bathroom breaks.
It was the first time I’d ever done several consecutive hours of surveillance. My first experience with such a new level of how to do absolutely nothing, with a single thread of anxiousness running through it so that you’re never completely comfortable in your boredom.
The day shift passed. The woman had come and gone, with the daughter, Naima. The son Tremont had come and gone. That was it.
It was evening now. I was going on fourteen straight hours of this, wondering if my sanity would hold if I had to come right back here the next day. They could have done this without me, theoretically. Just wait for a stranger to show his face and then call out the dogs, drag him in and bring me down to identify him. But I was the one person who could pick out this kid before blowing our cover. That was an advantage nobody else could bring to the van.
“I’m gonna be pissed if that kid’s been inside the house this whole time,” Bateman said. “He could be eating pizza and watching television.”
“I admit,” I said, “I’m starting to rethink my original idea. Even if he’s not there, the mother would have to give him up eventually, wouldn’t she?”
The detective looked away from the little observation window. “The long hours are making you delirious, Alex. Like she’d ever do that in a million years.”
I took my turn at the window. It was getting close to midnight. Time for the night-shift officer to relieve us.
Then I saw the headlights.
A beat-up old car came rolling down the street, slowly. It stopped in front of the house. The headlights were turned off.
The driver waited a full minute to get out. When he did, he was just a shadow in the darkness, backlit by the streetlight behind him. But I recognized the body type. I recognized the way he moved.
“Hey, Detective,” I said, not taking my eyes off him. “I thought you said this kid didn’t have a driver’s license.”
“He doesn’t.”
“Well, then we’ll have something else to charge him with.”
He came over to the window and looked out at the house. “Is that our man?”
“He must have missed his mother’s home cooking,” I said. “Let’s go get him.”
We called for backup first. No sense doing anything stupid, now that we had him pinned in the house. As soon as the squad cars rolled up, Bateman dispatched units to all four sides of the house. Then he went up on the front porch and banged on the door.
“Open up! Police!”
Silence.
“Darryl, we can do this the easy way or the hard way! Just come on out and nobody will get hurt!”
The door opened. A figure stood in the doorway.
“Get on the ground!” Bateman yelled, his gun pointed right at the kid’s chest. “Turn around and lie face down! Right now!”
I don’t know if you can give the kid credit for this or not, but he kept standing there, calling the detective’s bluff. Like he was saying, go ahead and shoot me.
In the end, the detective walked right up to him and tackled him. A dozen other officers swarmed the house then, guns drawn. A police dog was barking. The radios were all squawking in unison. I stood back by the sidewalk, watching the pandemonium, feeling oddly out of place. All of these officers belonged to another squad, after all. They were virtual strangers to me. Now they were all working together to back up Detective Bateman on the big arrest.
I was finally called inside to make the official ID. I walked up the porch steps and looked down at the young man lying on the floor. His hands were cuffed behind his back. There was a fresh scrape on his forehead from where he’d been pushed down onto the hardwood floor. He looked up at me.
It was him. This was the man I’d chased down the tracks.
The mother was screaming. The little sister was crying. I saw the brother running down the hallway into the bathroom. If you had anything resembling a human heart, you knew that this was another family devastated by the crime.
Darryl King was picked up off the floor and taken away.
I filled out some paperwork while Darryl King was booked, fingerprinted, and put in a holding cell. He hadn’t said a word yet, not to anybody. Not even to his mother. She had been brought down to the station with her son, because of course you can’t interrogate a minor without a parent or guardian in the room.
I waited around for a couple more hours. The mother was doing all of the talking, telling us all we had made a big mistake. She didn’t want a lawyer for her son. She said Darryl didn’t need a lawyer because he hadn’t done anything. It was a mistake I’d seen play out again and again over the years, and it never stopped surprising me. If the police arrest you, put you in a room, then ask you if you know anything about anything, don’t say a word until you have a lawyer at your side. Even if you know you haven’t done anything wrong.