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Overview
The award-winning first book in the series featuring black LAPD homicide detective Charlotte Justice.
Meet Detective Charlotte Justice, a black woman in the very white, very male, and sometimes very racist Los Angeles Police Department. The time is 48 hours into the epochal L.A. riots and she and her fellow officers are exhausted. She saves the curfew-breaking black doctor Lance Mitchell from a potentially lethal beating from some white officers—only to discover nearby the body of one-time radical Cinque Lewis, a thug who years before had murdered her husband and young daughter. Was it a random shooting or was Mitchell responsible? And what had brought Lewis back to a city he'd long since fled?
Charlotte's quest for the truth behind Cinque's death will set her at odds with the LAPD hierarchy, plunge her into the intricacies of everything from L.A.'s gang-banging politics to its black blue-bloods, and lead her into deep emotional waters with Mitchell's partner (and her old flame), Dr. Aubrey Scott.
In Charlotte Justice, Paula L. Woods has created a tough, tart, but also vulnerable heroine sure to draw comparisons to such classic figures as Easy Rawlins and Kinsey Milhone, but a true original as well.
Winner of the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel from Mystery Readers International.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780393346336 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2012 |
| Series: | Charlotte Justice Series , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 456,631 |
| File size: | 665 KB |
About the Author
With Felix H. Liddell, Paula Woods is the author/editor of the best-selling I, Too, Sing America: The African American Book of Days; Merry Christmas, Baby: A Christmas and Kwanzaa Treasury; and I Hear a Symphony: African Americans Celebrate Love, the last of which won Fiction Honors from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for multicultural literature. Woods and Liddell are also the co-founders of Livre Noir, a book packaging and marketing firm.
Ms. Woods's writing has appeared in Essence, Emerge, and Mary Higgins Clark Mystery magazines as well as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Dallas Morning News, among other newspapers. She hosts a monthly radio segment, "The Book Doctor," which airs in Los Angeles on KPCC 89.3 FM's program "Ebony," and has served on the Author Committee of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books since its inception.
A native of Los Angeles, she lives with her husband, over a thousand books, and an eleven year-old boxer, Sampson, who serves as a model for Detective Justice's dog, Beast.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
MESSING UP
MY CHA-CHA
Twelve years, eleven months, and fifteen days into living out my Top Cop fantasies--Christie Love with a better hairdo--my Nubian brothers down on Florence and Normandie had to go and pitch a serious bitch and mess up my cha-cha. Since May of '79, when I stood in the graduating class at the Police Academy, I had survived my years with the LAPD with little more than a few bruises, a shoulder prone to dislocation, and a couple of badly torn fingernails.
Survived the early years in patrol cars with partners whose every joke began "There was a white man, a Mexican, and a nigg ... uh ... black man ..." Survived my first assignment as a gang detective in Southwest, where I learned more about L.A. homeboys in the first three months than I had in three years of graduate study in criminology. And let me not forget the edu-mo'-cation I got when I went over to South Bureau Homicide, where I saw more dead bodies in five years than detectives in other parts of the country see in their whole careers.
I had survived stun guns and choke holds; Afro puffs and Jheri curls; floods, fires, and medflies; the '84 Olympics and the Whittier quake. At thirty-eight, I weighed thirty pounds less than I had in high school, had all my teeth, and had never, until getting caught near ground zero on a fine spring day, seriously been in fear for my life.
But thanks to twelve decent, Gates-fearing residents of Simi Valley and its pro-cop environs, I spent the days leading up to my thirteenth anniversary in the Department back in uniform dodging bullets, new jack Molotov cocktails, and more Pampers tossed through broken grocery store windows than I care to remember.
As I watched the city I loved go to hell in a handbasket, I kept reminding myself that the Los Angeles I wanted to protect and to serve was basically composed of law-abiding citizens, not mad looters dragging microwaves down Pico Boulevard--near my house, no less.
There was a deadly carnival atmosphere in the air. Gang members and grandmothers, who usually gave each other a wide berth, were united in their rage over the verdict and the stench of despair that had hovered in the air since Watts blew up in 1965. But unlike the Watts riots, which were confined by segregation to a much smaller area, the alliance of the poor and the befuddled yearning to live large was everywhere, of every color and economic class, all wanting to bring down some particularly offensive part of the system in their corner of the city. So it didn't matter if it was beating Reginald Denny in South Central or looting a jewelry store in Long Beach--anything and everything was fair game.
I had to do something to keep the peace, so even though it was against Department policy, I'd finagled a way to stay on duty almost forty-eight hours. And while it was the most stressful thing I'd done since joining the force, I was getting through it okay. But it was Friday, May 1, the day after the National Guard set up housekeeping in shopping centers all over the city, that the last straw, blown in on a warm Santa Ana wind from a most unexpected direction, broke this camel's back.
A motley crew of twenty of us--street cops and desk jockeys from Parker Center, South Bureau, and a couple of the divisions--had been deployed by bus to a strip mall on Rodeo Road. Spelled exactly the same as Rodeo (as in Ro-day-o) Drive in Beverly Hills, the running joke in some parts of town was how far apart the two streets really were. Rodeo Drive's sleek boutiques and Mercedes-Benzes epitomized the Southern California good life, and the chief of police and residents there made damn sure everyone knew Beverly Hills was not in the City of Angels. I bet most of the tenants on Rodeo Drive didn't even know about their poor relations that runs through what black folks call "the Westside," less than five miles southeast as the crow flies.
My Rodeo--although pronounced the way the cowboys do--was no less treasured than Beverly Hills's. Shopping centers and moderately priced planned communities on the western end of the street gave way to soul-food joints, strip malls, and solidly middle-class homes to the east. At the corner of Rodeo and La Brea was a busy commercial district. I bought my first forty-five (record, that is)--Fontella Bass's "Rescue Me"--at the record store that sat on the corner, and down the street on La Brea was the Baldwin Theater, where I went on my first real date.
Rodeo forked to the left at Dorsey High School and through a neighborhood of postwar tract houses whose identical twins in what white folks call the Westside would command at least a hundred thousand more. A little farther east were blocks of vintage Spanish homes, including the original residence and beautiful rose gardens of Mayor Tom Bradley and his wife, Ethel.
Two streets separated by a few miles and lot of money, in those days the Rodeos were competing in a grimly fought battle to see who would survive the hell of the last forty-eight hours. With a chief of police who served as a former aide to Chief Gates, I was betting well-staffed and well-patrolled Beverly Hills's Rodeo would be the hands-down winner this time around.
That day my Rodeo looked more like a war zone than a major thoroughfare through middle-class black L.A. Its smoldering rubble was a symbol of the largest civil insurrection in modern American history, and I had been powerless to stop it.
I couldn't stop the torching of my record store, up in flames that first night along with several black-owned businesses.
I couldn't stop the multiracial looters who scrambled for merchandise at the Fedco store, giggling like kids fighting for candy from a piñata.
And I couldn't stop what faced the score of us who pulled up in our armored bus, a day late and a bullet short, to another devastated strip mall whose windows gaped at us like a toothless drunk and whose erstwhile customers were removing their and everybody else's dry cleaning without presenting a ticket.
It was a little after three in the afternoon when we arrived, and by four we had apprehended and restrained a rainbow coalition of looters with the plastic handcuffs we were using faster than Kleenex in flu season. After the suspects were transported by prison bus to the emergency holding facility, I threw myself onto our bus and stretched out in the first row.
Opposite me was my new partner/trainee and the only other female on the bus. Genoveva Cortez was an entry-level detective--a Detective I or D-I, we called them--and a recent transfer to headquarters from South Bureau. Cortez was a lot like me when I got my first assignment at Parker Center, the LAPD's headquarters, over eleven years ago--intelligent, assertive, naïve as hell. But my first assignment at Parker Center was as a grunt in Press Relations, not the LAPD's renowned Robbery-Homicide Division. And my baptism by fire came by assisting the Press Relations commander with the media on a VIP homicide, not trying to work homicides while the whole city went up in smoke at the rate of three fires per minute.
Cortez was dealing with it, though. Made me understand why they chose her to be the second woman to join RHD'S homicide unit, which up until my arrival was a very exclusive--as in white-only--boys' club. But homicides--even the demanding, high-profile ones RHD handles--have a way of ignoring gender and color lines. And female homicide detectives had made contributions everywhere else in the Department--why not RHD? So it was finally determined, after much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands, that even the LAPD's crème de la crème had to change to keep up with the times, ugly as they were.
But the kind of thing Cortez and I were doing during the riots was without precedent, even if we were of the right "persuasion" for the job. That was because there were so many riot-related murders to investigate that the homicide detectives in the Bureau and divisional operations were completely overwhelmed. And so it was somebody downtown's bright idea to loan out Robbery-Homicide Division detectives--including Cortez and me--on a temporary basis, to provide detectives to process as many homicides on the scene as we could safely and quickly manage.
I guess it's like the song says--some gifts have all the luck. Shopkeepers murdered in their burned-out stores. Looter-shooters killing each other over CDs. Gang members whacking their rivals, High Noon style, just because they could get away with it. In forty-eight hours, Cortez and I had personally investigated nine crime scenes in what is usually the South Bureau's jurisdiction, more than we would usually handle in RHD in a year.
And we weren't getting much sympathy from our bus mates, either. "You downtown divas work so many celebrity cases you forget what it's really like in the streets," Mike Cooper snorted. "This shit is what we gotta deal with all the time."
He suggested we cruise King Boulevard. "Bound to be some more `bidness' for you ladies over there," he said with just a hint of sarcasm in his voice.
As the bus made its way east, Cortez and I sat staring at each other across the aisle, our heads propped up against the windows. My reflection played back to me in the glass behind Gena's head gave the illusion we were cheek to cheek. Gena was darker than I, the deep sheen of her hair and eyes marking her as a Latina much quicker than my pale skin and light brown hair would tip some people off that I was black. And while I knew Gena was a full seven years younger than I, you wouldn't have known it that day. We were too tired to talk, too tired even to acknowledge each other. We looked more like chimney sweeps than cops.
At first I only half-heard Mike Cooper's voice. A detective out of South Bureau, Cooper worked what used to be called the gang detail, before some acronym-happy police administrator christened it CRASH--Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. As he droned on, I looked behind me to see what all the hoopla was about.
Despite his religious devotion to weightlifting, Cooper was still a rodent of a man, weasel-eyed and mousy-haired, who reminded me more of the before than after pictures at Gold's Gym. He was whining about how he hadn't seen his family for two days, as if it were any different for the rest of us. Cooper was clearly exhausted, but something in the tone of his voice had the hairs on the back of my neck standing at attention and straining to whisper urgent warnings in my ear.
"Goddamn it, I'm sick of this shit! These fuckin' bangers out here might as well have been the V.C. some of us saw in 'Nam, the way they ambushed Denny. These animals don't give a fuck about human life, so why should we?" The supportive murmuring drifted toward Cortez and me like a foul wind, carrying Cooper's words with it. "We're supposed to be the best-trained law enforcement agency in the world, not some fish in a barrel for these mud-brown niggers and spics to pick off. I'm telling you, I don't give a shit about no fuckin' prime directives--the first little jungle bunny who looks at me cross-eyed is gonna get a cap in his ass! I know how to get this city in order!"
We were all tired and a little crazed, but Cooper was having a bona fide out-of-body. It wasn't his anger or racism that surprised me, but the fact that the fool had the nerve to be this open about it.
Although Chief Gates had proclaimed after the Rodney King beating that the LAPD saw no color except blue, every black or brown-complexioned cop knew otherwise. It was a part of their job, so went the thinking of some of our paler brothers in blue, to provide a running commentary on the race of every suspect we ran in. Or to type out gorilla-in-the-mist jokes on their mobile digital terminals (as in "What do you get when you put Mike Tyson in a steam room?"). And a comment on how they'd love to see Anita Hill's pubic hairs (or mine, or Cortez's) in their Coke cans was always good for a laugh--theirs, not ours.
Women and minority officers knew that to protest the casual racism and sexism of our co-workers singled us out as difficult, opening the door to an even more rigorous dosage of fun and games at our expense. If you complained of racial or sexual harassment to the Internal Affairs Department, it would automatically trigger an investigation and no one would work with you. And without a partner you could trust at your back, your ass would be grass, left out to dry in the Santa Ana winds.
But even with the built-in protection the system gave him, for Cooper to go this far in mixed company was way, way over the line. Cortez and I both came out of South Bureau. Cooper had known and had worked with both of us there. Besides, there was no mistaking Cortez as a Latina, and despite the fact that my coloring could be misleading to some, Cooper knew damn well I was black.
Still pointedly ignoring us, Cooper ranted and raved while a few others, some of whom I could trace back to my days in the Academy, grunted their approval and nodded their heads like newly saved sinners at a tent revival. Cortez's eyes darted between Cooper in the back and me; our Latino driver's eyes were fixed icily on the road ahead.
The encouragement from the choirboys in the back of the bus made Cooper all the bolder. "You split tails think you're makin' a difference in the Department with all that community outreach you do," he called out, slipping into the derogatory terminology too many of our colleagues use for female officers, "but I'm tellin' you, these bastards out here will kill you just as quick as they would me. Maybe quicker. And them penny-ante Berettas you're carryin' ain't gonna make a fuckin' bit of difference against the firepower they've got out here."
He damn sure was right about that. We had all heard that morning about three officers, including the brother of Dodger player Darryl Strawberry, who were ambushed by a gang-banger with an AK-47. Luckily the shooter was brought down and the men weren't badly injured. Still ...
The sinews in Cortez's neck tightened as Cooper strode up front and sat on the edge of my seat. I didn't move my feet to accommodate him or even look at him directly. He pushed my feet aside and gestured out the window. We had just passed the burned out hulk of Aquarius Book Center, the first and oldest black bookstore in the city. I had just bought Toni Morrison's latest novel there a few days before the world went crazy.
"Tell me, Justice, do you think these homies and pachucos give a rat's ass about you?" His whispering breath bore the sour surprise of stale whiskey. "Do you? Do you think if we put you off this bus right here you'd make it to the end of the block without these fuckin' animals rippin' you to pieces? They won't even see you; they'll just see the uniform and those gray eyes you got and figure you for one more honky bitch cop out to oppress their lazy asses."
Cooper's eyes lingered over my body. "Or maybe they will recognize their sistuh"--he ran his tongue over cracked lips and drawled out the word in his own version of redneck-from-the-hood--"and get themselves a little piece of that sweet-cream ass before they put a bullet through your head."
Sergeant Burt Rivers, a veteran I'd known since joining the Department, called out for Cooper to lighten up. We were under Burt's direct command, so Cooper should have listened. But he was too far gone to turn back now.
I gently put my left hand on Cooper's shoulder, easing him back so I could look him in the eye and he could see my hand on my gun. Said as calmly as I could, "Mike, I know you're tired. So am I. But if you don't get off my bra strap right now, I'm going to aim this gun at Mister Willy there and change that Waco twang to a West Hollywood falsetto. So why don't you save the drama for your mama before somebody gets hurt?"
The bus reverberated with catcalls and "She sure told you's," in four-part harmony. Cooper glared at the chorus in the back and then leaned in a little closer toward me.
I unsnapped my holster. I could have smoked him right then and there if he pushed me.
Cooper's beady eyes had taken on a new gleam, but I realized he was no longer looking at me, but through the window behind me. "Pull over, Guillermo," he called out to our driver. "Looks like we got us a curfew violator."
By that time the gaze of everyone on the bus had shifted starboard to take in a male the color of cafe au lait sprinting west on King Boulevard. Sporting three days' worth of beard on his angular face, a Raiders cap, black leather jacket, and wrinkled dark green cotton pants, the man appeared skittish and agitated amid the graffiti-covered apartment buildings and lengthening shadows.
He approached an Infiniti Q45 parked mid-block on the almost-deserted street. With its glistening, white metallic paint job and gold rims, the car was an easy target. The man peered through the car's window, peeled off his jacket, and wound it around his fist. He looked around as if he were trying to determine who would notice if he smashed the passenger's window.
"Looky here, Justice, we got us a 487.3 in progress." Cooper sounded almost gleeful to be quoting the California Penal Code number for grand theft auto. "Let's wait 'til he makes a definitive move." As if on cue, the man dropped to his knees, feeling around for something underneath the car. He stood up with a smile, one of those magnetic key holders in his hand. "Now ain't that a bitch?" Cooper exclaimed to the guys in the back. "Some poor bastard's dumb enough to leave his keys under the car for this nigger to find. Come on, fellas."
Cooper, a pimply-faced boot named Amundsen, and four others clambered off the bus, their riot helmets snapped into place, rifles in hand. A little older and slower off the mark, but at six-six and in his early fifties more commanding in stature and presence, Sergeant Burt Rivers brought up the rear, John Wayne with a mustache.
Gena slid across the aisle to my side of the bus. "Es muy peligroso." She glanced at the apartment buildings on either side of the street. A tic hopped in her left eye.
Very dangerous was right. I watched as Cooper and Burt approached the car; Amundsen and the others stood back about ten feet and waited, rifles clasped across their chests. The man, tall, trim, and younger-looking than I suspected he actually was, didn't run or back off but started gesturing toward the car. He seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place him. The Raiders cap he wore rang a bell--a football player coming from the Coliseum? If so, he must've had some kind of shock; the stadium was being used as an emergency jail facility. Besides, the team's practice field was fifteen miles away in El Segundo, and it was the off-season. This would be the last place you'd expect to see a football player.
A camera was slung over his shoulder. A news photographer? Or maybe just a Looky Lou, one of a score we'd seen since the riots started, capturing the fiery moments on everything from video cameras to disposable thirty-five-millimeter Kodaks and Fujis.
I slid the window down in time to hear, "Gentlemen, I'm Dr. Lance Mitchell. I just finished my shift over at California Medical Center's Emergency Room, and I locked my keys in the car. I came over here to drop off some medication with a patient."
He started patting his pockets. "I know I've got my ID is somewhere ..."
"Hold it right there!" Amundsen bellowed. The boot eased up to the man, patted him down nervously. "He's got no ID, sir," he told Rivers.
The man looked up with what tried to be a charming smile. "Maybe I locked it up in the car, too."
Something about that smile clicked in my head--this was the doctor who treated me in the hospital's ER last fall! I struggled to get the window down farther, to warn Cooper and company to ease up.
"Sir, step away from the vehicle!" It was Sergeant Rivers, polite but firm. I was probably the only one to see his mustache twitch.
When Mitchell didn't move Cooper shouted, "Goddamnit, nigger, get away from the car! You ain't no fuckin' doctor and you know it! You were tryin' to cop a G-ride, just like you probably stole that fancy camera you're carryin'."
Now why, I remember thinking, did Cooper have to go there? I started banging on the windows, but no one heard me. I might as well have been screaming underwater for all the good it was doing.
"But you ain't stealin' this car, you Mandingo-assed mother-fucker!" Cooper said. "Now put your hands on the hood of the car."
Cooper prodded Dr. Mitchell on the collarbone with his baton. The doctor's hand flew up reflexively, batting the baton away from his face. Amundsen stepped forward and put the butt of his rifle in the doctor's gut before Rivers, his training officer, could stop him. My stomach churned in response and I anxiously fell in line behind Cortez and the others rushing off the bus.
Please, God, not this. Since Rodney King, black men from all walks of life had risen up to complain about their treatment at the hands of the LAPD. It had caused the Department a lot of embarrassment. We didn't need to go through it again, especially not now. I had to do something to stop this.
When people watching from the nearby apartments saw the first blow, they could have reached for their Uzis or their video cameras, but most of the stream of thirty or so Latinos and blacks being disgorged from the buildings were brandishing forty-ounce bottles of Schlitz Malt Liquor, lengths of lead pipe, and brooms. They stood jeering at the officers, who by then were arrayed in a half circle around Dr. Mitchell and the car, facing the oncoming crowd. Cortez and I joined them and started ordering people back inside.
We stood that way for some time--cops yelling at citizens, citizens cursing at the top of their lungs. The stalemate was broken when a shot echoed from somewhere nearby. In the second of hush that followed someone threw a bottle at Amundsen, who, rookie that he was, impulsively waded in before anyone could stop him. After that, it was on--tire irons and empty forties crashing and clanging with aluminum police batons and riot helmets.
I was hoping Guillermo had radioed in for backup because things had gotten completely out of hand; if it persisted, somebody was going to get killed. A smaller group of men, women, and more than a few kids broke for the bus and tried to rock it. A half dozen officers headed back across the street to secure it and Guillermo's butt.
Cooper was only partially right about my people trying to rip me to pieces. I could have been any color from sunshine white to shoeshine black, could have been their mama's best friend, but it was the dark blue uniform that made me a target that day. Despite their best efforts to kick my ass, though, I still managed to find Mitchell and drag him to his feet.
But I could have sworn it was a fellow officer who grabbed my right arm and gave it a gut-wrenching twist as I strong-armed my way through the surging crowd of my black, brown, and blue brothers, Mitchell in tow. Cortez saw us from the other side of the crowd and moved in to watch my back. Somehow we made it past Cooper and the others, who had just about stabilized the situation with help from a couple of extra patrol cars from the nearby Southwest Division station and an air unit thrumping overhead.
We had moved Mitchell away from the melee, past the boarded-up taco stand at the corner, past the McDonald's, and almost to the intersection, when my arm got too heavy for me to carry and my back began to spasm. Dr. Mitchell hustled me into a storefront's recessed doorway while Cortez went around the corner to see if she could flag down some help.
We stayed crouched in that doorway, amid the empty wine bottles, forties, and the smell of urine, for what felt like forever. But probably only a few minutes elapsed before Cortez returned, tailed by a redheaded reporter I recognized as Neil Hookstratten from the Los Angeles Times. Riding with him was the also-redheaded but dreadlocked Fred "F-Stop" Stoppard, a former LAPD crime scene photographer who now worked for the paper.
Cortez explained Hook would transport us to the temporary jail facility at the Coliseum. "To hell with jail," snapped Mitchell. "You've got an officer here who needs medical care!"
My partner ignored him and continued to confer with the reporter.
"This is ludicrous," Mitchell broke in. "I'm a doctor, goddamn it, and I'm telling you your partner needs medical attention and she needs it now!"
I was in no shape to argue, but we had a suspect to consider. Cortez was watching the melee we had just left behind us, fingering her handcuffs like a rosary. Finally she returned them to her belt and asked Hookstratten to drive us to the hospital.
Dr. Mitchell was visibly relieved as he got into the backseat of the Taurus to attend to me. Cortez got in back, too, her eyes on our suspect. "Let's get her over to California Medical Center," Mitchell suggested to Hook. The reporter turned on the car's emergency flashers and whipped a U-turn on King, turned left at the corner, and flew north on Vermont like a bat out of hell.
Mitchell was fighting a losing battle to make me comfortable as we were jostled about in the back of the car. "Haven't we met before, Officer ...?"
"Justice ... Detective Justice," I corrected. "Out of Robbery-Homicide Division downtown." The puzzled expression on the doctor's face only intensified. "Everyone's in uniform and on the street until this thing is over," I explained.
"No ... no ... that's not it." His face scrunched up in concentration. "We've met before. Was it the Vineyard last summer? Were you a patient at California Medical Center? I'm sure I remember ..."
"This isn't about Detective Justice, it's about you, Doctor," Cortez interrupted. "What in God's name are you doing here?"
Mitchell ran his fingers through what looked to me like chemically straightened hair. "I hadn't heard anything on the radio about any trouble in this part of town. So I assumed it would be safe to run some extra hypertension meds over to one of the elderly women I treated yesterday."
"`Assume' makes an ass of you and me," I reminded him. "How could you 'assume' with a riot going on that there wouldn't be trouble everywhere, especially in South Central? Just because you didn't hear it on one of the all-news radio stations doesn't mean ain't nothing going down."
Cortez was equally testy. "And acting like you were about to break into that car only made matters worse."
"It was my damn car! I just locked my keys in it." The words slipped out of Mitchell's mouth before he could catch himself. He apologized quickly, his words tumbling over themselves in his haste to make us understand. "You have no idea what kind of madness we've been dealing with at the hospital. Mrs. Rucker's pressure was one sixty over one ten yesterday. She should have been admitted, but we didn't have the beds. Didn't even have enough antihypertensive medication to give her--so many nonpatients had been begging to get prescriptions filled, the pharmacy had run dangerously low. And with all the local pharmacies burned down and our suppliers afraid to send trucks into the area, what was Mrs. Rucker going to do?"
"Are we missing something here?" Hookstratten's eyes widened into the rearview mirror. F-Stop, who got his nickname for the near-artistic precision of his crime scene photographs, turned in his seat, dreadlocks bristling, and looked, puppy-alert, at the three of us in the back.
"Not a thing," I warned the redheaded duo. They both caught my drift, hunkered down in their seats, and pretended not to listen.
Mitchell inhaled deeply and let the air shudder out in a rush. "I'm sorry. I've been on a forty-eight-hour shift at the hospital. I guess I'm not thinking too clearly." He looked down at his hands, then defiantly at me. "But that was my car! Didn't you see the license plate?"
How could I miss it? It was one of those notice-me vanity plates in a red frame that proclaimed, "ER doctors do it STAT."
I avoided answering his question by asking the fellas up front for their cell phone. They were making such a show of not listening to our conversation that I almost had to say it twice before F-Stop responded. As he passed the phone back to me, he noticed the Nikon that Mitchell was carrying, and the two began a sotto voce pantomime about the model they both evidently used.
Whatever mercy mission he'd been on, Lance Mitchell was probably also on a little expedition to take pictures of the war zone to show off to his buppie friends on the golf course or his summer house in Oak Bluffs at the Vineyard. I had seen that kind of behavior all day, mostly from whites who drove in from the Valley or the Westside--slumming, my Aunt Winnie in Harlem would call it--but to think of a brother doing it really fried my ass.
I dialed the unlisted land line for the com center and told the radio telephone operator we had two officers-need-help situations. I gave her the location of the altercation and made sure that adequate backup had been dispatched to the taco stand. It had--five more patrol cars with four men each and a National Guard unit were already en route. Then I told her my status, our present location and destination. I also gave her the license plate to get the DMV status on the Q45 Mitchell claimed was his.
"I know my driver's license number, too, if you need it," Mitchell offered.
I motioned him to be quiet. "Never mind, Doctor. I remember ... you reset my shoulder last fall."
And the way it was feeling, he might be doing it again.