“I ain’t one of your homies, Clance. You best come see who it is.”
This can’t be good, I thought. The last time I heard the voice of Detective Sergeant James Task he was the county prosecutor’s puppet. A starched white shirt and a ten-year-old’s haircut, dealing law jargon to a jury of my non-peers, knowing full-on that his technical words connoted expertise and truth. I was guilty as hell, but that didn’t mean he had to be so proficient, writing my upstate ticket to puff his tin-badge image. Four years later, I needed to kick myself for bad ears, for a lazy warning system. Not that my mental alarm could’ve ejected him from the porch, but his knock had been all cop and staccato and I might have offered a less jubilant invitation. I finished the pour and used a two-inch polyester brush to dab rim drips and squish paint out from behind the can label. I took my time, gathered a few yard smarts as I stood, muted my CD player, and ambled out to face the fucker.
Half the foyer back from the door, I waited for Task’s opener. He was shorter than I remembered, maybe 5’6″ or 5’7″, but built thick like a lifter. His forehead was an inch taller than it had been that day in court. His remaining hair was slicked back as if he had just showered and was a perfect shoe-brown, a screaming admission of a dye job.
“Clancy Whidden, smack in front of me,” he said. “’Sup, dawg? Same ol’ same?”
“You jump off by strokin’ me, take your salesman dance down the road.”
“I thought I was coming in clean.”
“I can do without that dumb-ass inside lingo the rest of my life.”
Task gave me a loser’s shrug. “I took a cram course last winter.”
“Selling door-to-door?”
“Being inside.”
“Start over,” I said.
“A few months earlier, I could’ve been your cellie.”
“I won’t buy that shit either.”
“Straight up,” he said. “I had an ugly accident on 836. You must’ve heard about it.”
I hadn’t heard and I wasn’t interested. My paint was drying in the pan and I hadn’t even dipped the roller. “I broke my newspaper habit while I was reading ceilings,” I said.
“My brake foot slipped, the lady ahead of me spun and got upside down in her Saturn. I bolted and made it about four miles, then they wedged me to the shoulder. I didn’t think I was toasted but I blew a 1.8. They smeared me all over the TV. Perp-walkin’ with hat-hair and blood streaming out my ears.”
“I broke that television habit too,” I said. “I couldn’t buy a chair in the prison rec room and now I can’t afford cable.”
“Anyway, four months,” he said, “I did it holding my breath.”
“So that means you went...”
He looked away and shook his head. “They offered, but I couldn’t go that low. Rob a bank, do your time, you stop being a bank robber. But protective custody...”
“Right,” I said. “You’re a weasel forever.”
“So I opted to mingle with the population. It was known that I’d nixed PC, so I got slack, but I kept that grommet tight as a lug nut. I still walk like a duck.”
“No slash scars on your belly?”
He stared cold for a flash, then shook his head.
“And you’re here because...”
Task stuck an index finger into his ear, gave it a twist, pulled it out, and inspected for goo. “I need help on a wash job.”
“Not my expertise. Never was, never will be.”
“Money’s money,” he said. “You went up on a money crime, that sales-tax beef.”
“Because you never proved what I sold was stolen.”
“We had a semi-trailer full of Korean DVD players and a storage shed — two hundred toasters with Washington Mutual logos. The state attorney opted to streamline and go the tax route. His decision, believe me — I had no input. What were those toasters, for people who opened new accounts?”
I shrugged, shook my head. I didn’t know, never thought of it. “None of that means I can launder a damn thing, Task. Cars are cars, you don’t get a brake mechanic to replace your headliner.”
He peered through the screen, toward the room to my right. “That living room suite, you’re doing something.”
“Nothing that’ll pull me away from blue sky.”
“Can we at least talk?”
He’d parked a dark red four-door at the curb, a Town Car with its own long history. I weighed the chance that the state would put a badge in the joint for four months to build his undercover cred. It might, I decided, but not a small man like Task. Still, the dude had seriously screwed my life, kept me from attending my stepmother’s funeral.
“Some other year,” I said. “These days I’m on a problem-avoidance kick.”
“No way I’m here to create—”
“You just standing there is shit I didn’t have ten minutes ago.”
He tried to look righteous, like I should take him at his word. “No peril to your renovated moral code, you follow me? Nothing illegal on your end.”
I looked up the wall, decided the foyer would be my next project. “So, I like make your coffee?”
“Be my introduction.”
“And if you go south, I take your strain?”
“That direction isn’t built into this trip.”
The foyer ceiling would get priority attention. Maybe a crown molding. Not too fancy but a class touch. “I got work to do, Task. My paint’s drying in the pan.”
“I smell that fresh latex,” he said. “How long you got left on probation?”
“Fuckhead keeps bumping me. No reasons, no end in sight.”
He said, “They got a name for it, those lame-duck POs. They laugh and talk about Perpetual Pro. After I tell you how come, you’re two-thirds the way to getting off.”
“This is just wonderful.”
“More judges are sentencing full boogie, going stingy on probation,” said Task. “Even with overcrowding, it’s the wave of the future. Maybe the prisons-for-profit have judges in their pockets, I don’t know. Anyway, the caseload’s dropping, and Miami-Dade is cutting back. The longer a PO keeps your case active, the better his job security. You, my man, are the key to that asshole’s free checking and health insurance. He keeps the ring in your nose, his kids see the orthodontist. We live in a great country, don’t we?”
“I’m not feeling that two-thirds vibe.”
Task looked away. “They scarfed my badge but I still got numbers to call.”
“I’m into gaming it my way.”
“You got a point.” He peered again through the screening. “This furniture showroom paradise...”
“Triple paradise compared to thirty-eight—”
“—months, one week, and two days,” said Task. “Surrounded by tender loving curly-cues of razor wire which day and night makes for a sparkly view.”