All I Did Was Shoot My Man

23

Though it was early evening the summer sun still shown down on Brooklyn. I reached the address on Poindexter a little after seven. What looked like a homeless man in gray clothes sat in the doorway of the boarded-up brownstone.

I say he looked like a homeless person because, even though he had the clothes and state of dishevelment down pat, he wasn’t doing anything; not sleeping or reading, drinking or eating, rifling endlessly through his belongings or engaged in an endless diatribe with some imaginary friend — or enemy. For that matter, he didn’t have any belongings — no backpack or grocery cart filled with the necessities and diversions that all humans (homeless or homed) need to survive.

I walked up to the doorway, where the tousled and unkempt black man lounged, and looked down at him.

“Wha?” he said, looking up with eyes both clear and unafraid.

He was in his thirties and fit underneath the loose garments. I could see what was probably the outline of a pistol in his right front pocket.

“Lethford,” I said.

His nostrils flared.

“Get the fuck outta here, main,” he replied.

“I don’t think Captain Kitteridge would like that.”

The pile of gray clothes rose up more like a panther than a broken man. He stared hard at me and then stepped aside.

The door seemed to be boarded, but all I had to do was push and it swung open.

The hallway was dark and narrow. At the far end a faint radiance hinted at but did not necessarily promise light. I walked in that direction, running my left hand against the wall. At the end I turned left, finding myself at the foot of what might have been a stairway.

Two silhouettes came from the sides of the barely visible steps. A bright light shone in my face, blinding me.

“Who are you?” a gruff voice demanded.

“McGill for Lethford.”

“What for?” the other man, who held the torch, said.

I reached out, pulled the heavy-duty flashlight from his hand, and threw it down on the floor.

“What the fuck?” one of them said.

Another light snapped on up above. I took a step backward so that the two shadow men could not grab me.

They were both in street clothes with badges and holsters at their belts. The man on the left, the one I’d taken the flashlight from, looked quite angry. His close-cut hairline was receding and his blue-gray eyes were sparks looking for an accelerant.

“McGill?” a voice from above said.

“That’s me.”

A very large dark-skinned man descended halfway down to the first landing of the stairway. Looking up at him, I remembered a time thirty years before when I let Gordo talk me into climbing in the ring with a natural heavyweight.

The guy’s name was Biggie Barnes and he had fists like anvils.

Don’t let him hit ya was the only advice Gordo gave me at the bell announcing round one.

“Come on up,” the big man said.

I followed in the wake of the giant up four flights. It was a dimly lit journey and my fever made it feel like a ride in a rocking boat. These two elements brought a flicker of fear into the center of my chest.

At any other time I would not have gone to some unknown destination just because Kit asked me to. He was my enemy, my opponent, not a friend.

But I was sick, in love, and seeking redemption. I should have been under the care of two doctors and a Zen monk. Instead I was in Brooklyn with no real way out.

On the fifth floor there were three doors. One of these had a thick dark green curtain hanging over it. The big man pushed the fabric aside and went through. I followed... coming into a good-sized room that was lit by bright incandescent fixtures. There were six desks, here and there, with no rhyme or reason; each had a monitor on it and a plainclothes cop to study it.

The windows were sealed with thick black paper. I counted a dozen small digital cameras, supported on poles of various heights, attached to the walls. The video feeds were routed to the monitors.

The images on the screens were of a social club on Pox Street, one over from Poindexter. Black men and women, many bearing dreadlocks, were coming in and out of the storefront establishment.

I had passed the club on my way to the meeting because I decided to walk around the block before approaching Number 26.

The members of the street-level society sounded like Jamaicans. They seemed rather tough.

“Drug dealers,” the big man said, noticing me staring at a screen.

“You Lethford?”

“Come into my office.”

He led me through a real door this time, into a smaller space that had two wooden folding chairs and a peacock blue phone on the pine floor. No carpeting. He shut the door behind us.

“Sit,” he said in a tone that was neither friendly nor hostile.

The big black man wore a short-sleeved black shirt, black cotton pants, and black shoes. I could tell by his right ankle that his socks were white.

“So,” he said, “do you know why I wanted to see you?”

“Who are you, man?” I replied.

He bit the left side of his lower lip and so refrained from slapping me for my insolence.

The cop had a long face and almost no hair except the few sprouts of white that showed on his chin. He was my age, more or less, and the whites of his eyes were no longer that color.

“Captain Clarence Lethford,” he said, “Special Investigations Unit.”

“Huh.”

“Do you know why I wanted to see you?”

“We’re not gonna get anywhere with you treating me like a trainee,” I said. “I’m here because Carson Kitteridge asked me to come. Now, if you have something to say, then say it.”

Big men throw around their weight from an early age. At some point they assume this is a God-given right. Every now and then it’s good for a short guy like me to disrupt that surety.

“I expect some civility out of you, McGill.”

“Is that it? Because you know absence is the ultimate form of bein’ civil. If I’m not there, I can’t insult you.” I stood up.

“Sit down.”

“Fuck you.”

That was the moment we had to get to. He was either going to hit me, let me leave, or get down to the business at hand.

“I was the chief NYPD liaison officer on the Rutgers heist,” he said.

I sat down.

“I was working that case,” he continued, “until Zella Grisham was charged with complicity.”

“Oh.” I crossed my right leg over the left, lacing my blunt fingers around the knee. This made me think of Mirabelle Mycroft and so I released the joint.

“Yeah,” Lethford agreed. “Oh.”

I think he expected me to start shaking and confess or something. It would take more than one confrontation to break him of his big-man complex.

When he saw that I wasn’t made of straw he continued. “They got me to look over the case again when Breland Lewis got her cut loose. First thing I did was go to the shylock’s file. I found a flag there with your name on it.”

“He hired me to help her decompress into civilian life.”

“Kit says that Lewis is your boy.”

“And that means?”

“It means that maybe you had something to do with the heist,” Lethford said, holding up his thick left thumb. “It means that even if the brass says to lay off you, I’m gonna crawl up your ass until I see brain. It means that maybe I was wrong about Grisham, that maybe you got her out because she knows something that can make your retirement plan shine.”

Every time he said the word means he showed another finger — not necessarily in proper order. He put up the pinkie for the retirement plan.

“No, Captain,” I said. “The only thing to glean from my involvement and her freedom is that she did not commit the crime and that the real culprits are still out there.”

“Why would they fake the money wrappers and make her the patsy?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I said, falsely answering the perfectly sensible question. “My job was to help prove that she didn’t have any connection to the heist. I accomplished that end.”

“You’re dirty, McGill.”

“That’s the general consensus,” I agreed.

“And I’m the one who’ll take you down.”

“That brings us to the reason I’m here,” I said. “Kitteridge said that I might be in some kind of trouble... and not necessarily from arrest and conviction.”

“Bingo,” the big cop replied. It was not the exhortation of victory.

At that moment the door to the little meeting room slammed open.

“Captain!” a young white cop shouted. She seemed both angry and afraid. “They’re shooting out there!”

Lethford surged up so violently that his chair fell over. He rushed past me into the observation nerve center.

I followed.

“Get the hell out there!” he shouted. “Hurry up!”

I glanced at the screens as the men and woman gathered what weapons they had and rushed out of the room. Some of the cops were already wearing their bulletproof vests; others lugged theirs along.

On the monitors I could see that a black van had crashed into the storefront social club and a cadre of men had jumped out, using semi-automatic weapons against the residents.

On my journey around the block I had noticed a slender alley that led from Pox to Poindexter. On a monitor I saw a young boy, maybe eight, run down that artery with a skateboard under his arm. A few seconds later a tall man with a pistol in his left hand went the same way...

I got to the street maybe ninety seconds later. The police had used another route. The guards for the stairway and door were gone. The pretend homeless man/sentry was also absent.

I made it to the alley just in time to see the back of the tall man. He was carrying the boy like a shield in front of him as he backed toward the possible safety of Poindexter.

There was a lot of shouting and gunfire coming from the POX TURF WAR, as the papers called it the next day.

I moved in low and relatively quietly. The man wasn’t pointing the gun at the young boy and so I hit him hard in the right kidney and left ear. It was a combination attack, but the punches were so fast as to seem simultaneous.

The boy hit the ground, bounced up, and tore out of there, leaving the unconscious man, his pistol, and even the rainbow-colored skateboard in the alley.

I picked up and pocketed the gun so that no other child might retrieve it. Mission accomplished, I walked away from the noise and turmoil.

It wasn’t my fight, not at all.