Detroit Noir

Kill the cat by Loren D. Estleman

Rivertown

It was right at dark, one of those evenings when you saw it as a black diagonal against the light, like the title sequence of the old soap opera The Edge of Night. The river smelled like iron, and the People Mover — Coleman Young’s electric train set — chugged along several stories above the street, empty as usual, shuttling around and around in its endless circle as in one of those post-apocalyptic sciencefiction stories about a depopulated world, still going about its automated business decades after doomsday, jungle vines crawling up the sides of vacant glass buildings. Detroit had a start on the last, in weedy empty lots where pheasants roosted among the rats and cartridge casings. I was thirty seconds from downtown and might have been driving through Aztec ruins.

The address I’d scribbled in my notebook belonged to a barely renovated pile in the shrinking warehouse district, one of the last places where the city still shows its muscle: miles of railroad track and a handful of gaunt brick buildings where steering gears and coils of steel once paused for breath on their way to becoming automobiles. In a year or two it’ll be gone. City Hall and the Chamber of Commerce are busy gentrifying it into riverfront condominiums. This address was poised square in the middle, the edge of the edge of night.

I was working on a teenage runaway. Mark Childs had slid through a crack in the über — upper class of Grosse Pointe, getting the boot from the University of Michigan three weeks into his first semester and then falling in with low company, in this case three boys studying at Wayne State University. I’d gotten the last from a kid who hung doors at Chrysler in order to attend classes in library science at WSU. Childs had taken his place when he’d opted out of sharing rent so he could sleep in his parents’ house and save money for cigarettes and tuition.

Where the new roomie found cash to keep up his end, I didn’t know and never did, although the family suspected an indulgent aunt. Childs was seventeen, a young high school graduate coming into a trust fund when he turned eighteen in two months. The family didn’t like that, thought if they got him back under the parental roof they could teach him some responsibility in sixty days so he wouldn’t blow it all on Internet poker or the Democrats. I hadn’t said anything to that. When work comes your way you don’t get into a debate situation with the client.

A simple job: Confirm the kid’s location and notify the parents so they could call the cops and tell them to take a mixed-up boy off the streets and deliver him to their door.

I parked on gravel off Riopelle and walked down to the river to finish a cigarette, stepping carefully over chunks of brick and Jell-O pudding tops. The lights of Windsor, Ontario made waffle-patterned reflections on the surface where the Detroit River squeezes between countries. The spot where I stood hadn’t changed since Prohibition, when rum boats docked there and men who weren’t dressed for the work offloaded the cargo into seven-passenger touring cars with a man standing sentry holding a tommy gun. It was late August and already the air felt like October. We were in for one of those winters that shut up the global-warming people for a while.

The place I wanted stood fifty yards away, with all the character sandblasted off the brick and yellow solar panels replacing the multiple-paned windows. The concrete loading dock was intact, but above it someone had substituted a faux — wrought iron carriage lamp for the original bare bulb. It was an amateur facelift, done on the cheap by a landlord who’d seen too many local renaissances fizzle out to put any faith in the current one.

The big bay doors were chained and padlocked, but decks had been built around the corner with steps zigzagging up four stories and doors cut into each level for the tenants, with small windows added to let in light and accommodate the occasional window-unit air conditioner. The only lights burned on the ground floor. The kid at Chrysler had said none of the other apartments was ready for occupancy.

When no one answered I tried the knob. It turned freely.

There might have been nothing in that; college housing is always getting burgled because the students are careless about locking up. The boxy window unit that stuck out of the nearest window was pumping full out. I didn’t like that. The damp air off the river was too cool to bother running up the utility bill. I went back to my car and transferred the Chief’s Special from its special compartment to my pocket.

Still no answer. I opened the door as quietly as I could, just wide enough to step inside around the edge with my hand on the revolver. It was like walking into a refrigerator truck.

The first one lay on a blown-out sofa near the wheezing air conditioner. He was in his underwear, lying on his side facing the back of the sofa, as if he’d been caught sleeping. I found the next one on his back in an open doorway connecting to a hallway and had to step over him to inspect the rest of the apartment. I had the gun out now.

Number three was twisted like a rag on the floor halfway down the short hallway. I eased open the door to a small bathroom, dirty but unoccupied, found an untidy bedroom with no one in it, checked out a narrow closet with sports equipment piled on the floor, and finished the inventory in another bedroom at the back. This one, more cautious than the others, sprawled on the bed with his legs hanging over the footboard, arms splayed. When I stepped in for a closer look, my toe bumped into something that rolled: an aluminum baseball bat. He’d dropped it when he fell backward. He was naked, the others nearly so. No one wears pajamas anymore.

I put away my weapon. There was nobody left to shoot.

I noticed the smell then, faint but bitter, mixed with the slaughterhouse stink. They’d all been blasted at point-blank range by a heavy-caliber shotgun.

Checking for pulses would have been redundant. I went back to the first corpse. The back of his head was a mass of pulp; stray pellets had torn fresh holes in the upholstery, but he’d taken most of the charge. The others had been struck in the chest or abdomen. Mr. Sofa was the only white victim. Mark Childs was white.

I wished it was that easy, but I had a report to make. Setting my jaws tight, I grasped his bare shoulder to pull his face into view. The skin was cold and the body turned all as one piece, stiff as a plaster cast. Death alters features, but he looked enough like his picture to give him a name. The birthmark on his upper lip settled the question.

The front room was as big as the rest of the apartment. The sofa was part of a rummage-sale set facing a home theater from a box, with a kitchen at the other end. Disposable food cartons littered a folding card table with four mismatched folding chairs around it, but plastic forks and smeared paper napkins suggested more nomadic dining habits. My breath made gray jets. I thought about turning down the air conditioner but didn’t. Whoever had touched the controls last wasn’t present.

The place didn’t seem to be wired for a telephone. I found a cell on the sticky kitchen counter and called police headquarters. I bypassed 911 and asked for Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler.

“Why felony homicide?” she asked. “Why not plain homicide?”

“It looked like a drug thing,” I said.

“It still looks like it.”

“So I called you to avoid a handoff.”

“I appreciate it. I’ve been on duty thirteen hours now.”

She sat across from me at the folding table, dangling a tea bag on a string in a big cardboard cup with a Powerpuff Girl printed on it. Now that she no longer wore glasses the tiredness showed, but she was still the best-looking thing I’d seen all day, and mine had started as early as hers. Her skin was fair, she had her light brown hair tied in a ponytail with a yellow silk scarf, and a fitted jacket and pleated slacks didn’t distract the admiring male gaze from the rest. Her SIG Sauer would be on the left side of her belt, the gold shield on the right. Her brown eyes were as big as wheel covers.

The place buzzed with assorted professionals. A happy Asian medical examiner hummed show tunes and probed at wounds with the nightmare tackle from his tin box. Young people of both sexes measured spatter patterns and bumped into a big black radio-car cop who kept grunting and moving out of their way and into someone else’s. Every light was on and a couple of arcs had been brought in for a better look.

Finally the air conditioner stopped. A fingerprint tech had lifted latents off the controls with a gizmo that took pictures like a camera phone.

“That should wrap this,” Thaler said. “The heat wave broke night before last; the tenants had no reason to crank up the cold. Whoever did wanted to keep them from getting ripe long enough to split and set up an alibi. I figure these boys have been dead since early this morning or they wouldn’t have been undressed for bed.”

She sipped tea and twisted in her chair to gesture with the cup. “Your boy Charles died in his sleep. The next two came running when they heard the noise and Shotgun popped them, one, two, like birds. Number Four stuck it out in his room in batter’s position, but rock breaks scissors. That how you see it?”

“Clear as gin. Can I smoke?”

She nodded, watched me light up while she rotated the cup between her palms. She kept her nails short and polished clear. “What else you see?”

“Not a thing. I called you right after I ID’d my runaway.” I drew in a lungful and staggered it out through my nostrils.

“You didn’t snoop around for dope? Funny money? Stolen rubies?”

“I’m not as curious as I used to be.”

“Who else you call?”

“The client. It’s all in your notebook.”

“Before or after you called me?”

“After.”

She was still deliberating my case when a sergeant or something in a sharp suit and cowboy boots came over carrying two Ziploc bags. The one he dropped on the table contained four spent shotgun shells. “Twelve-gauge double-O buck, L.T.,” he said. “Nothing surer, richer or poorer.”

“Rick McCoy, Amos Walker. Walker called it in.”

He took my hand in a hickory grip. He wore his hair to his collar and a soul patch in the hollow of his chin. I figured he was working undercover with a Wild West show.

“What else?” Thaler said.

McCoy flipped the other bag onto the table. We didn’t have to open to smell what was inside. “In the fridge.”

“Nothing harder?” Thaler asked.

“The gunner left with it if so. But if my honker is working this isn’t nickel-bag stuff. There’s right around six or seven grand in there.” He had an accent, Arkansas or farther.

“How’d he miss it?”

“Maybe he found another stash and stopped looking.”

“Okay. Tag both bags and get them to the Poindexters downtown.”

“Who’s McCoy?” I asked when he left with the evidence.

“Narcotics. He caught the squeal and hitched along. He thought the same thing you and I did when it came down.”

“I did then.”

“You saw the pot. Either a buy went wrong or word got out the stuff was here. You’ve seen it before.”

“Not over pot. Not even the premium kind. Someone who knows his way around a shotgun might stick them up, but he wouldn’t cut loose for anything less than heroin, or high-grade coke on the outside. He was methodical, if not professional.

And any idiot who’s ever seen Cops knows enough to look in the refrigerator.”

“McCoy’s people will run a check on the stiffs as we make them. One of ’em will cash back.”

“That sounds like racial profiling.”

“Not if it turns out it’s Childs.”

“His family never said anything about drugs.”

“That’s reliable.” She raised and plunged the tea bag a couple more times; the contents of her cup were nearly black. “You’re out at first base, Walker. If you think Homicide rides its fence you don’t know anything about those cowboys in Narco.”

I dragged in everything but the filter and put it out in a carton of moo shu pork. “I told you I’m not as curious as I used to be.”

“You were more convincing the first time.”

Mark Childs was the product of a broken home; the home in his case being a nine hundred square foot house in old Del-ray. At age three he’d traded it for a Cape Cod on Lake St.

Clair, with grass and clay courts and a skiff tied up at the dock out back with Childs’ Plaything scripted on its transom. Orson Childs, Swedish on one side, English on the other, with equal shares in Volvo and British Petroleum, had adopted Mark after his mother’s divorce and her marriage to Orson. If I understood right, Orson’s own mother had commemorated the occasion by endowing the boy with a trust fund that after nearly fifteen years of compound interest looked like the annual budget for the state of Rhode Island.

The houseman, a fine-featured Micronesian in a white coat, left me standing in the entrance hall while he found out if anyone was home at 11 o’clock on a weeknight. It was a room meant for standing, despite the presence of a row of straight shieldback chairs and an antique oak hall tree with a bench. I got the nod finally and followed him into a carpeted living room with a sunken conversation pit and Mrs. Childs drinking from an umbrella stand in a white leather armchair. She was a horsey-looking woman of fifty, not horsefaced but the type you pictured riding to hounds in a red habit and lack helmet, and to hell with the animal rightists, in a gray silk blouse, black stirrup pants, tasseled loafers on her bare feet; fencerail-lean with high cheekbones and straight auburn hair swept behind her ears. She’d been crying. She offered me a drink. I said no thanks and she threw out the houseman with her bony chin.

I remained standing. “I’m sorry.”

“Why should you be? You didn’t kill him. Did you?” She had a flat Midwestern accent. In those surroundings, with her features, it should have been New England, but then she’d been married to a construction worker before Orson came along.

“Have the police been here?”

“They just left. They were polite; sincere, even. They asked if Mark was into drugs. I said no. They didn’t believe me, but they were polite about it, so I didn’t throw anything at them. I suppose we owe you money.”

“We’re square. You gave me a three-day retainer but I only used two days. Actually, it’s your husband I wanted to talk to. Is he around?”

She said he was in his workshop and gave me directions.

Then she swirled the ice in her glass and drank from it and I stopped existing.

It was a metalworking shop in a small building behind the house, a shed that was supposed to be an old carriage house that had been converted into a shed but had always been a shed. It was one of the newer estates in Grosse Pointe, less than sixty years old; no vintage auto money there of the Dodge and Ford and Durant type. I knocked, but it was noisy inside, so I let myself into a room filled with blue smoke and the sharp stench of scorched metal and sparks from Childs’s cutting torch. He was a hobbyist who made sculpture from rescued driveshafts, leaf springs, and gold dental retainers scrounged from salvage yards and dumpsters behind schools. At the moment he was cutting up a length of steel pipe clamped in a vise bigger than my head.

I waited, hands in pockets, not wanting to startle him while he was handling dangerous equipment. When he saw me he jumped a little anyway, then tipped up his visor and screwed shut the valve on the acetylene tank. I said I was sorry about Mark.

“Yes.” He spoke in clipped tones: stiff-upper-lip Brit by way of Vancouver, where the American branch of his family emigrated after the colonies declared independence from England. “I consider our transactions at an end, barring outstanding expenses. If you’ll submit a statement, we can put an end to this sad business.” He produced a checkbook from a hip pocket. He had it on him with a leather apron.

“We’re fine,” I said. “I just wanted to clear up some details before I type my report.”

“Clarissa’s the detail person. Why don’t you come back when she’s in a condition to answer your questions?”

“Stepfathers tend to be more objective considering their wives’ children. Was there anything about Mark’s behavior that suggested he might have been into the drug scene?”

He tugged off his gauntlets. He was a good-looking man creeping up on sixty, with a receding hairline and a long upper lip fighting the old battle between pickled youth and premature old age. “I liked Mark,” he said. “I couldn’t really love him, because he came to me fully assembled, but I think we might have been friends if I hadn’t married his mother. It never occurred to me he had anything to do with drugs, but then I didn’t pay as much attention to that sort of thing as I suppose I should have. It would explain some things, wouldn’t it?”

“Things such as what?”

“Well, his poor academic performance and his running off. He wasn’t a rebellious boy. He was a sickly child, always on some kind of medication. Maybe that’s where it started.”

“His real father might know something.”

“Hank? I doubt it. They haven’t seen each other in years.”

“That’s what he said when I called to ask if Mark had moved in with him. Then he hung up.”

“That’s Hank Worden. I suppose I should be grateful he’s such a miserable son of a bitch. He’s made me look like the ideal husband by contrast.”

I thanked him and thought of some more words of sympathy, but he had his gloves back on and the visor down and was firing up the torch for another go at his project. People grieve all sorts of ways.

The houseman was standing in the path between the house and the workshop when I let myself out. His hands hung at his sides and his white coat glowed blue under a mercury light mounted on top of a tall pole.

“We talk,” he said.

He asked me to call him Truk. That was the name of the archipelago where he’d grown up; he said his real one was even harder to pronounce than it was to spell. His room in the walkout basement contained popular fiction on the shelves and stacks of People. I guessed he read them to improve his English. He sat cross-legged on a neatly made twin bed, showing bare ankles and the smooth brown line of his throat when he tipped his head back to draw on the cigarette he’d bummed.

I smoked and waited in a wicker armchair and wondered how old he was, thirty or sixty. His bowl-cut hair was glossy black, but Micronesians are a long time going gray.

“Police?” he asked.

“Private,” I said.

His face crumpled into a wrinkled mask. Sixty, definitely. “I don’ know what this is, private.”

“It means I can’t shoot if you run away from me. Apart from that the work’s the same.”

He smiled, showing gold teeth and smoothing out his face. Thirty, maybe. “I thought Mark is dead before this.”

“Bad habits?”

He puffed and said nothing. He didn’t inhale, just filled his mouth and let it out like cigar smoke. His grin set like plaster of Paris. Forty, probably. I got out a twenty, folded it lengthwise, and held it up between two fingers. He drew his lip down over his teeth and shook his head.

I started to put it away.

“Kidneys,” he said.

I stopped. “What about them?”

“Like he didn’t have none. None that worked.”

“He didn’t die because his kidneys failed. His kidneys failed because he died.”

“I mean before. Three year, four. He got a new one.”

“His mother and stepfather didn’t mention that.”

“He didn’t get it from them.”

“Who donated it?”

He dropped the filter into a jar lid on the nightstand and asked for another cigarette. I tucked the twenty into the pack and flipped it onto the bed. I’d guessed the answer, but I might have to come back for more later.

He pocketed the pack with the bill inside. He didn’t take out a cigarette. “His father, the real one.”

“The mother’s type didn’t match?”

He shrugged.

I said, “I heard Mark and his father weren’t that close.”

He smiled again and patted his pocket.

I misunderstood. “That’s all you get. I’m dipping into capital.”

“Money’s what I meant. They pay.”

“Hank Worden sold one of his kidneys? For how much?”

He lifted and dropped his shoulders again. I asked him how he knew about the deal.

“I didn’, then. Later, Worden comes back, drunk, loud. Mr. Childs he say, ‘I call police.’ Then he leave.”

“What was he mad about?”

“I think maybe he wants more and Mr. Childs says no. I guess. My English is not so good as now.”

“Was Mrs. Childs here at the time?’

“She is out. It is after the operation, she goes to see Mark in the hospital.”

I got up and put out my cigarette in the jar lid. “Anything else?”

“Nothing else. I hear you talk to Mrs. Childs, I think maybe you want to know.” I was at the door when he spoke again. “You no police?”

“When’s the last time a cop gave you money?”

He lifted his bangs to show me a thin white scar on his scalp. “Sixteen stitch, ten year ago. All I ever got. So why you want to know about Mark?”

“I’m more curious than I thought I was.”

The radio news had more details on the victims in the apartment. Du’an Reeves, twenty, was a sophomore at Wayne State. Gordon Samuels and LeRon Porter, both twenty-one, were juniors. Porter had done short time in County for nonpayment of child support to a seventeen-year-old former girlfriend in Redford Township. None of the others had a record, including Mark Childs. The police were still investigating drug connections. I switched off.

Hank Worden, Mark Childs’s father and Clarissa Childs’s ex, lived in a bungalow that needed a new roof on West Vernor, the old Delray section, now mostly Mexican. The disrepair wasn’t uncommon in houses where construction workers lived; the work is all outgo and no income. His lights were on at midnight, so I knocked on his door. I had my gun with me on a hunch, but I didn’t need it to get in. I accomplished that by sticking my foot in the door and pushing a twenty through the gap.

He sat in a quagmire sofa drinking Diet Pepsi from a can, a man in his middle fifties but fit, tan from rugged outdoor work, in jeans and run-down tennis shoes and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. He had all his hair, splintered with silver, and from the look of him it was easy to see why his kidney passed muster. But you don’t have to socialize with a vital organ.

“So you got the boy killed.” That’s what he opened with.

I remained standing. All the seats in the place looked like sinkholes and I didn’t want to have to wallow my way out of one to clock him. “According to the cops he was dead almost before I started looking for him. Do you want to fight? I sure don’t. It’s been a day.”

He shook the last drops onto his tongue and tossed the can toward a raveled straw laundry basket heaped over with empties. “I don’t want to fight. I been in fights and I never got a thing out of them, not even the sense to stop picking ’em. Last time I saw Mark he was in Pampers. I know I ought to feel something, but I don’t. Bastard, ain’t I?”

“Who told you, the cops?”

“They make the family rounds when something like this happens. Greasers next door get a visit every time one of their uncles gets squiffed. They got more uncles than a rabbit. Ought to loan ’em out to colored boys that got no daddies.”

“You thought enough of Mark to give him a kidney.”

“First thing I thought when they told me. ‘Well, there’s a piece of me wasted.’ You know about that, huh?”

“I told you, I’m a detective. So what about it?”

“That was strictly a business deal. Ten thousand bucks and all expenses paid. See, Mark and me was a perfect match. Is that a hoot? Clary took him when she left and she had less in common with him than me.”

“Ten grand doesn’t go as far as it used to. That was true even three or four years ago. So you went back for more, and Childs threw you out.”

His face darkened under the tan. “That what he said?”

“It’s what I heard.”

“I ought to go back up there and bash in his skull with one of them nutty statues he makes out of scrap.”

I didn’t like the way he said it. He was too calm. “If the cops heard you say that, they’d be down here tossing the place for a shotgun.”

“Go ahead, it’s in that closet. I used to bring it along when I had a job in the country, in case I saw a deer. Now I just keep it around to punch holes in the sky on New Year’s Eve.”

It was a Remington twelve-gauge in good condition. The barrel smelled oily and there was a little dust in it when I turned it toward the light. It hadn’t been fired recently. I put it back. “Of course, it could be one of a set.”

He made a kazoo with his lips. “I can barely afford to buy pop in six-packs. Get me one, will you? Take one for yourself. I ain’t had a real drink in twelve years; that’s why my kidney was so rosy pink.” He took one of the two I got from the refrigerator in the kitchenette and watched me snap the top on mine. “If Childs told you I got greedy, then he’s a liar on top of a deadbeat. I only went to that barn of his to get what was promised me. That check he wrote me ought to be tied to a paddle with a string.”

“It bounced?”

“Man, I had to duck when I tried to cash it.” He popped open his can. “I guess his insurance took care of the hospital bill, but I don’t go in to get carved on just for the rush.”

“You didn’t take it to court?”

“No contract. He said it was dicey legalwise. What you think of that, man lives like that, hanging paper like some goldbrick?” He poured half the can down his throat.

“Maybe he lives better than he is off.” I sipped. No matter what they put in place of sugar it always tastes like barbed wire left to steep. “I don’t guess you told any of this to the police.”

“I would’ve, if they asked. Why should I cover up for a squirt like Orson Childs?” He spoke the name with an effete accent.

“No reason, except they might look at it as motive for murder. You made a deal to save Mark’s life, Childs reneged, so you decided to repossess.”

He paused in mid-guzzle, swallowed. “Jesus, that’s cold.”

“It should be. I just took it out of your refrigerator.”

“I mean what you said. So why’d I wait four years?”

“Murder plots have been known to stew a lot longer than that.”

He drank off the second half and flipped the can toward the basket. It wobbled but didn’t fall off, as some of the others had. “Do I look like somebody who’d wait that long?”

I drove away from there, yawning bitterly and hoping Barry Stackpole’s lights would be out so I could go home and go to bed. But Barry lived without sleep, a journalistic vampire who that season had sublet lodgings downtown, five minutes from each of the city’s three legal casinos. He had a theory that the owners were building a Mafia outside the Mafia, with no ties to what the gaming commission interpreted as organized crime, but with all the benefits attendant. He might have had something, at that; the owners were exclusively male, and the mob is not an equal opportunity employer. Traditional gangsters had taken one of his legs, some fingers, and put a steel plate in his skull, so he was less than reasonable on the subject of thugs incorporated. In that vein of mind he’d hacked into every hundred-thousand-dollar bank account between Puget Sound and Puerto Rico. Thirty minutes after I dropped in on him and his computer arsenal, I found out Orson Childs had been selling off his family’s stock for five years, trying to bolster investment losses and personal indulgences, from Childs’ Plaything to a racehorse named Lightyear that couldn’t hold its own beside a California redwood. I promised Barry a case of Scotch and left him to his obsession of the season.

The rest was as glamorous as it gets. I caught a few hours’ sleep in my hut on the west side of Hamtramck, got up at the butt-crack of dawn with black sludge in a thermos, and camped out across the street from the Childs house in Grosse Pointe. That morning happened to be trash collection. I was out of the car the second Truk wheeled the household refuse bin to the curb and started back up the drive, puffing smoke from one of the cigarettes I’d given him.

I worked fast, because the trash truck was snorting its way up Lake Shore Drive, the collectors evaluating the inventory for personal aggrandizement before feeding it to the crusher. I found what I wanted among the empty single-malt bottles and plain garbage, put it in my trunk, and went home to hose off and change. Rich people are never available before 9:00 anyway; not even rich people who aren’t really rich, mathematically speaking. In America, even the broke are divided into classes.

Truk let me in with no expression on his face to indicate he knew me from anyone else who came to the door. He didn’t even glance at the red and blue gym bag I was carrying. After a little absence he came back and led me through a room I hadn’t been in and outside to a flagged courtyard where Orson and Clarissa Childs sat in fluffy white robes drinking coffee; Mrs. Childs’s out-of-focus gaze said there was as much Kentucky as Colombian in her cup.

The houseman faded and I set down my bag, which clanked when it touched the flagstones. Childs, looking up from the Free Press, glanced back at it, then at me. Portrait shots of the shooting victims bordered a grainy picture of the murder scene on the front page.

“Anything new?” he asked. “There was nothing on the radio that wasn’t there last night.”

“There wouldn’t be. The press doesn’t know yet about the kidney.”

The woman started, spilling coffee on the table. Childs folded the paper and laid it on the vacant chair. “It didn’t have anything to do with what happened. I assume you’ve been talking with Worden.”

“What happens to Mark’s trust fund now that he isn’t around to collect it?”

“It goes to his heirs and assigns. Before you go any further, you might want to consider the penalty for slander.”

“What lawyer would press the case after your retainer check came back from his bank?”

The couple locked gazes. He blinked first. She set down her cup with a double click.

Childs said, “You should be having this conversation with Worden. He’s an angry man and simple. His thought processes are easy to predict when he thinks he’s been cheated. Not that there is anything to whatever he told you. Buying organs is shaky from a legal standpoint.”

“So’s murder. His shotgun tests clean. How about yours?”

“I don’t own a shotgun.”

“Not anymore. You decided to get rid of it after you used it on Mark and then his roommates to make it look like he wasn’t the only target.”

He lengthened his upper lip. “Evidence?”

“Me, for starters. I’m a witness.” I leaned down, unzipped the bag, and took out one of the pieces I’d retrieved that morning. The barrel had been cut into eight-inch lengths, then split down the middle. When I laid it on the table, Mrs. Childs squeaked, got up, and half ran inside, holding a hand over her mouth. I let her. “If I’d known this was what you were slicing up last night, it would’ve saved me a dive in your dumpster. No wonder you jumped when I walked in on you.”

Childs turned his head slowly from side to side, as if he were trying to get out of my shadow. “Assuming that’s where you found it, what’s it prove? You can’t trace scrap.”

“You know a lot less about shotguns than you do about metalwork. Cutting up the barrel’s a waste of time; it’s smooth, leaves no striations on the pellets. In order to connect the weapon to the murder, all the cops have to do is match the firing pin to the marks on the shells found on the scene.” I was holding the bag now. I took out the heavy Browning receiver and laid it on the table. The incriminating evidence was intact.

He stared at it while I let the bag drop with the rest of the pieces inside.

“Planting that high-grade pot was smart,” I said. “It should have been coke or heroin, but maybe a man in your circumstances doesn’t know how to go about finding them. Smart, and stupid: It diverted the investigation, but it put it in the hands of a narc named McCoy, who’ll have all the upper-end dealers in the area in his data bank. The one you bought it from will turn you if it means ducking four charges of homicide.”

“It’s true,” he said. “I don’t know much about dope or shotguns.”

“Don’t say anything, Orson. All you did was buy marijuana.”

I turned around. Clarissa Childs was standing in front of the door to the house with the twin of the chopped-up Browning raised to her shoulder. The barrel looked as big as a culvert.

“He wasn’t lying to you, Mr. Walker,” she said. “Orson has never fired a shotgun in his life. My first husband taught me how to hunt. I’ve been putting game on the table for years.”

I thought about the revolver in my belt. She read my mind. The shotgun twitched. I held my hands out from my body,

“Clarissa—” Childs began.

“I said don’t say anything!” She kept her eyes on me. “Nothing that ever came from Hank was any good. His son was defective; even his kidney didn’t fix what was really wrong with Mark. After everything Orson and I did for him, he turned his back on his education and ran away. Why should he fall into money when we’ve got three mortgages on this house?”

“Clarissa?” This time his throat throbbed with warning.

“Drop it!”

We turned our heads together. Childs sat motionless, staring at Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler, Rick McCoy, and three uniforms standing with sidearms pointed at the woman with the shotgun. I’d called them early enough to avoid a standoff, but they must have taken the long way around the house.

“Drop it!” Thaler shouted again.

Clarissa Childs hesitated, then lowered the shotgun. The officers were advancing when she swiveled the butt down to the ground, jammed the muzzle up under her chin, and tripped the trigger with the toe of her slipper.

“We got a partial off that air conditioner knob that puts the mother on the scene,” Thaler said while my statement was being typed up. “For what it’s worth.”

“It closes the case. That must be worth something to someone.”

She was drinking tea again, from one of those mugs they sell downstairs with the police seal on it. Headquarters is running a boutique to catch up on repairs. Today she had on a grayish-pink suit; ashes of rose, I think they call it. She looked less tired. “All we’ve got on Orson Childs is attempting to destroy evidence. I don’t think we can make accomplice after the fact stick. Some mother, huh? I used to think there was something to maternal instinct. I thought I was missing something.”

“Not wanting kids and killing the one you have don’t walk under the same sun.”

“Plus three other mothers’ sons just for garnish. Sometimes I hate this town. Other times I just dislike it a little.”

“It started in Grosse Pointe.”

“It’s all Detroit.” She worked the tea bag. “I’d sure like to know how you confirmed the Childses had money troubles. If I thought you knew your way around a computer I might ask the boys in white-collar crime to keep an eye on you.”

“You don’t have to log in to run a bluff.”

“On,” she said. “You log on to the Internet, not in. But you knew that. You’re overdoing it.”

“The less people think you know, the better for you.”

“If that’s true you’ll live forever.”

I said nothing.

She said, “I know about you and Barry Stackpole. You two are the evil twins of amateur law enforcement.” She took out the tea bag and dumped it into her wastebasket. “Any questions?”

“None I can think of.”

“Well, you know what they say about curiosity.” She sipped.

Pride by P.J. Parrish

Brush Park

Tonight I have the windows open to catch what little breeze there is, and as I lay in my damp sheets, my face turned toward the gauzy glow of the streetlight outside, I can hear them. The lions are roaring.

It starts low, a moaning prelude. Then it builds, drifting to me in my bed with the shifts of the heavy August air, until it becomes a distant but full-throated roar.

Aaaa-OUUU. Aaaa-OUUUUUU.

I listen, my body tense, until it finally dies into a series of staccato grunts.

Huh, huh, huh.

I am two miles away from the lions, safe in my basement studio apartment just a block off Woodward Avenue. I know the lions are secured behind a moat. They are fed twice a day, cosseted by their caretakers at the Detroit Zoo. They want for nothing.

So why do they roar at night?

It starts again.

Aaaa-OUUU. Aaaa-OUUUUUU.

I look toward the corner where the yellow-white beam from the streetlight falls across the bureau and brings the steel of my gun to life.

I press my palms over my ears and close my eyes.

Baker was waiting at my desk when I got to work the next morning. He had made my coffee for me.

“You look like hell,” he said, holding out my chipped white mug. The rim still had yesterday’s lipstick on it, but I didn’t care.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I said.

“You need to do something about that,” he said.

I nodded as I sipped the coffee. He had even remembered the Splenda. After four years riding together, it made me feel good that he remembered how I took my coffee. My ex had never seemed to get that one down.

“Drink up, we have a call,” Baker said.

I looked at him over the rim of the mug. “How bad?”

He held my eye for a moment but didn’t say anything before he turned away to pick up his jacket off the chair. That explained the waiting coffee. It was going to be a really bad one.

We drove through a sticky morning rain, moving away from the Central District station house on Woodward. For once, I hadn’t put up a fight when Baker told me he was going to drive. I just sat back in the seat, watching the slow sweep of the windshield wipers.

Baker took a right into Brush Park. A century ago, the neighborhood had been home to the city’s elite. But now it was block after block of decaying Victorians, weedy empty lots, and the collapsing brick caverns of abandoned boarding houses. We called it The Zone, the nickname coming from the government E-Zone program that was funneling millions of dollars into Detroit’s decaying core. The E stood for Empowerment, the politicians said, and there were signs of life here and there — a new Blimpie over on Mack, an old factory being converted to lofts, a few rehabbed mansions reclaimed from ruin. And at night, when the Tigers had a home game, the southern horizon burned bright with the lights from Comerica Park. But for most of the people here, the empowerment hadn’t trickled down enough to ease the pain of their daily lives. To most people in The Zone, E still meant empty.

Literally empty, I thought as I stared out the window.

Over the past couple decades, in the name of renewal, whole blocks of blighted and burned-out houses had been demolished, leaving vast stretches of weeds and grass. Untrimmed trees formed tunnels over the pocked streets. Wild pheasants had taken to roosting in the rafters of the rotting houses. The Zone had the aching loneliness of an abandoned prairie town.

As we turned onto John R, I found myself looking for the small reminders of the lush life that had once thrived here. A set of stairs leading up to nowhere, the ornate carvings still visible in the crumbling concrete. A listing red brick chimney covered with the creeping pink blooms of wild sweet pea vines. A rusted stop sign standing sentry on a corner where no one came anymore.

But then, the surprise of a lone house, bars on the windows and plastic flowers in the yard. And another, its sagging porch strung with Christmas lights. People hanging on, barricading themselves in their homes against the drug dealers and prostitutes, waiting for the city fathers to figure it all out.

I stole a look at Baker’s Sharpei profile, with the ever-present mint-flavored toothpick hanging from his lip. None of this ever seemed to bother him. He was driving slowly, like he always did, a sharp contrast to my own gas-brake-gas-brake style. Baker kept an even flow on most everything. Even on calls like this, even when he knew what we were going to see.

“How old?” I asked.

“Four months,” he said.

The rain had stopped by the time we pulled up to the house. There was a small crowd gathered by the steps, women mostly, their arms crossed over their chests or clutching kids to their thighs. The low tire-whir of the nearby Fisher Freeway filled my ears.

Baker turned toward me. “You ready?”

Usually someone — often the mother but on rare occasions the male in the house — takes the child to the emergency room. Driven by a fleeting clarity of what they have done, they hope that the limp body in their arms can be miraculously transformed back into a baby.

That was not what had happened in the house on John R.

When the responding officers arrived, the child was still in its bed. By the time I entered the blue bedroom, the eyes of three stuffed animals — a bear, a rabbit, and a zebra — looked down upon an empty crib. With its broken slats, it resembled a wooden cage.

Baker nudged me, indicating I should step aside to let the photographer do his job. The camera flash brightened the blood on the yellow tangled blanket. The air smelled of sour diapers.

I heard a woman crying. Between her sobs, she whispered the name Tommy. I followed the sound back to the living room, pulling my notebook from my jacket.

The woman sat on a green sofa. When her eyes came up, she focused first on Baker, then on me, making that female-to-female connection. I knew from experience she had some vague hope that I was the one person in this group of stone-faced strangers who might understand why her baby died at the hands of her man. I resented it and I wanted to slap her. Instead, I sat down next to her.

“What was your son’s name?” I asked.

“Justin.”

“And your boyfriend’s name?”

“Tommy Freeman.” It was his name she had called out from the bedroom, not her baby’s.

“Do you know where he is right now?” I asked.

“Probably at his brother’s.”

I took down all the information in my small notebook. I wrote slowly, postponing the final part of my interview, the part that in all my years as a cop had never gotten any easier. I learned a long time ago that these woman often changed their stories when they realized that their boyfriend or husband was going to go to prison. Sometimes, they recanted everything. Sometimes, they took the full blame themselves.

I set a small tape recorder on the scarred coffee table near the woman’s knees.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“The baby stressed Tommy out. He works nights, and the constant crying …”

I nodded, my eyes closing over a burn of tears. I knew I wouldn’t cry. I had this way of absorbing tears back inside my head. Baker once told me that if I didn’t let them out once in a while, they’d back up into my brain and begin to ferment. He had meant it as a joke, but I didn’t laugh.

“Please don’t hurt him when you pick him up,” the woman whispered.

I said nothing and stood up. The creamy scent of formula was in my nose and I took a look around. A blue plastic baby bottle sat on the end table.

“You’ll need to go with the officers down to station, ma’am,” I said.

She looked to me in confusion. “But I didn’t do anything.”

“I know,” I said.

Baker was stopped at a traffic light. The heat rose in wavering vapors from the hot asphalt, dissipating into the pale yellow sky. There was a sulphurous smell in the air that pricked my nostrils even through the closed car windows.

“Can we stop at Angela’s?” I asked Baker.

He nodded and turned right, heading to an apartment building over on Winder. I had met Angela about three years ago. She was working in a strip club up on Eight Mile, trying to do the best she could for her twelve-year-old daughter. Angela had just married Curtis Streeter, a mostly unemployed construction worker with flat black eyes and the names of his two ex-wives tattooed on his bicep. As a wedding gift, he had added Angela’s name to his arm.

It was two nights after the wedding that Baker and I made our first visit to their place. We found Angela crumpled in the corner of the tiny yellow kitchen, bloody hand prints smearing the oven door. The daughter was in her bed with a split lip and her hair chopped off above her ears by dull scissors. Punishment by her stepfather for sassing back.

Angela had been strong at first, fueled by her pain and the sight of her daughter’s ragged hair. But in the days after, she began to withdraw, the pain turning to regret and self-blame. I knew that without Angela’s testimony, Streeter would walk free.

For the first time in my career, I went the extra mile for a victim. I spent nights digging into Streeter’s past, but I didn’t find anything that could send him away. Though I did find something I hoped might steel Angela’s resolve.

A few years before he hooked up with Angela, Streeter had been living with a woman who had an infant son. Six weeks into the relationship, the mother carried her dead son into an emergency room. The baby died of a head injury, like his brain had ricocheted around inside his skull, the doctors said. The mother said the baby had fallen down some stairs. No one believed her. But when Streeter’s alibi was backed up by three of his punk friends, the only thing the cops could do was charge the mother with neglect.

I pulled out the coroner’s photos of the dead child and I showed them to Angela, telling her Streeter had shaken that baby to death. A week later, Angela stood in court and begged the judge to put Streeter away. Because Streeter had a record and his battery charge on Angela violated his probation, an impatient judge gave him seven years.

In the four years I had been working the special crimes unit, I could count on one hand the number of abuse cases that came close to a successful resolution. Angela’s was one of them, and I had been keeping loose tabs on her ever since. Maybe I took a sort of pride in the fact that I had helped her turn some corner.

That’s why I had asked Baker to swing by. That, and I needed something to wipe the image of Justin’s bloody crib from my head.

The outside of Angela’s building was as bad as I remembered. But behind the triple deadbolts she had fixed up her place. Fresh mauve paint, rose-patterned curtains I knew she had made herself. The place smelled of simmering beef and green beans.

Baker posted himself at the window to watch the cruiser below. Last week on this same street a squad car had been stripped while the officer was inside taking a report.

Angela emerged from the kitchen carrying a can of Ver-nors ginger ale. She looked good, even with a few extra pounds. Her hair was bright yellow with a recent coloring. Men tipped well for blond hair, she had once told me.

When she handed me the can of pop, an odd scent drifted off her body. Someone who had given birth would have recognized it more quickly, but it wasn’t until I picked up on Angela’s expression — child-bright with a secret — that it hit me. The smell was breast milk.

“I had a baby,” she said.

I scanned the room for evidence that a man now lived here. I saw nothing except a baby seat pushed into the corner near the television.

“When?”

“Three months ago. Want to see him?”

She didn’t give me time to answer and I followed her back to the bedrooms. The first room was painted pink, adorned with posters of pop singers and kittens. The daughter’s room. She’d be fifteen or so now.

At the door of Angela’s room, I slowed, but she waved me over to the bassinet near her bed.

A halo of curls around a chubby face. Long brown lashes that fluttered with dreams. His tiny body filled only a third of the mattress.

“Who’s the father?” I asked.

Angela picked up the baby and placed a soft kiss on his cheek. “He’s out of the picture,” she said. “He was married, and I’m okay with that. He paid for everything, though. Still sends me money when he can.”

I found the news oddly comforting. “So you’re doing okay?”

Angela nodded, yet wouldn’t meet my eyes. There was something she wasn’t telling me, but I wasn’t sure I should push. Baker had said I couldn’t be both protector and friend to the victims I met. The line between the two was too thin.

“Sheffield,” Baker called out.

Something in the way he said my name compelled me quickly back to the living room. I stopped short, staring into a pair of flat black eyes.

Curtis Streeter stood there, smiling at me.

I didn’t smile back.

“Curtis has been paroled.”

Angela’s voice was small behind me. I didn’t turn to look at her, just kept my eyes on Streeter.

Angela sidled past me, still carrying the baby and going to Streeter’s side. He gave her an odd hug, his hand gently pushing the baby to Angela’s hip so he could flatten himself against her body. When he broke the embrace, his eyes came back to my face. He wasn’t smiling anymore. It was clear he remembered me.

“He doesn’t have anyplace to go,” Angela said. “I’m letting him move back in.”

My eyes flicked to Baker, still standing at the window. He wasn’t watching Streeter. He was watching me. He gave me a subtle shake of his head. I turned away.

Tonight I have the windows closed, even though it is still eighty degrees. I lay here in my narrow bed, staring at the shadows. Finally, I can’t stand it anymore and go to the window, throwing it open. The heavy night air pours over my body.

I stand at the small casement window, looking up at the ground that encloses me, and then up further to the small slice of night sky I can glimpse. No stars, no moon.

I crawl back to my bed, my head thick with sleeplessness. Just as I dare to close my eyes, it starts, a single low roar. Then another in answer, and finally a third, forming a raw chorus of overlapping, repetitive bellows.

Closer, a night bird calls, its tiny sharp pleading punctuating the roaring.

The night has awakened, and its creatures — large and small — are proclaiming themselves to the world.

“What’s with you today?”

I stayed silent. A part of me was glad that Baker picked up on my mood because I hadn’t been able to think of a way to tell him what I needed to.

“Sheffield, what the hell is wrong?”

I let out a long breath. “I’m thinking of bagging it.”

“Bagging what?”

“This. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t take it anymore.”

Baker was quiet, chewing on his toothpick, his hands steady on the wheel. The soft chatter from the radio filled the car.

“This got anything to do with Angela?” he asked.

“No. Maybe. Shit, I don’t know.”

“Sheffield, for chrissake …”

I held up a hand. “I can’t do this anymore, all right? I can’t keep telling myself that what I do makes any difference in this shithole place.”

Baker was quiet.

I was afraid I would cry. “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m tired and I just feel so alone.”

Baker still said nothing, just put the car in gear and we moved slowly forward. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

I don’t know how long I stayed like that, in a half-sleep state, lulled by the murmur of the radio and the movement of the car. When I realized we had stopped, I opened my eyes.

We were in a deserted parking lot. The peeling white fa-çade of Tiger Stadium loomed in the windshield. Baker was gone. Then I saw him coming toward the car carrying two Styrofoam cups. He slid in and handed me a cup and a pack of Splenda.

For several minutes we sat in silence, sipping our coffees.

“My dad used to bring me here for games,” Baker said, nodding toward the stadium. “We were in the bleachers for the seventh game of the ’68 series when Northrup hit a two-run rope into center to win. It was great.”

“I wasn’t even born then, Baker,” I said.

He gave me a half-smile, set his coffee in a holder, and put the car in gear. We headed down Michigan Avenue, past empty office buildings with paper masking their storefront windows. It had started to rain again, and in distance I could see the gleaming glass silos of the Ren Cen.

Baker slowed and pointed to the abandoned hulk of the Book-Cadillac building. “My mom took my sister and me to have tea there once,” he said, nodding. “I guess she was trying to give me some class. I guess it didn’t take.”

I stared at the old hotel’s boarded-up windows. There was a sign in one saying, FRIENDS OF THE BOOK-CADILLAC, with a website for donations.

At Grand Circus Park, Baker swung the cruiser around the empty square and slowed as we moved into the shadows of the People Mover overhead. “My dad used to bring us down here to the show,” Baker said. “The Madison is gone now but the old United Artists is still there. That’s where I saw Ben Hur.”

I stared out the windshield at the abandoned theater’s art deco — like marquee, now covered with gray plywood. I knew that Baker had grown up in Detroit and that after his wife died fifteen years ago, he had sold their house in Royal Oak and moved back. But he never talked about the city or its steady deterioration.

Baker pulled to a stop at the curb. We were in front of the Fox Theatre now. In the gloom of the rain and late afternoon, the ten-story neon marquee with its winged lions pulsed with light. Tickets were now on sale for Sesame Street Live.

“They almost tore this place down, you know,” he said. “But that millionaire pizza guy bought it. Fixed it up, reopened it, and then relocated his business offices upstairs.”

I looked out over the empty street. “Why would anyone with any brains invest in this place?”

“Maybe he couldn’t take seeing one more good thing die,” Baker said.

I stared at the winged lions. I heard the snap of Baker undoing his seat belt and looked over.

He reached under his seat and came up with a crumbled brown paper bag, molded in a distinctive shape I instantly recognized.

He pulled the gun from the bag and handed it to me. It was an older S&W Model 10 revolver. The bluing was chipped along the barrel. The gun was clean but it had seen its share of street time.

“Remember me telling you about Hoffner?” Baker asked.

“Your first partner,” I said. My mind flashed on the photograph of the jowly man on the memorial wall at the Beaubian station. Shot to death during a drug bust.

“That was …” Baker paused, searching for the word he wanted. Cops had a way of doing that, selectively choosing words that could be interpreted one way by other cops and another more benign way by the rest of the world.

“Hoffner and me, we called that gun our third partner,” Baker said.

I turned the weapon over. The serial number had been acid-burned away. But this gun was so old I doubted it had a registered owner anywhere. I knew why. Hoffner’s gun was a throw-down, a handy way of fixing the worst mistake a cop could make — shooting an unarmed suspect.

“Did this partner ever have to do any work?” I asked.

“Not on my watch.”

“Why are you giving it to me?”

“Because every officer should have one.”

“And you think I might need it one day?”

“No,” Baker said. “I think you need it now.”

I need to know why. I need to know why they do it.

So I find this book about lions and I read it, because I have this idea that if I can find out why they roar I can figure out a way to stop it.

I read about the lions of the Serengeti, how they have different sounds to mark their territories, to attract female lions, to find each other when they are separated, to call their cubs when they are lost.

But that awful group roaring that comes every night. What is that?

I read on.

… When a strange male lion comes into a pride he kills all the cubs too small to escape him. He kills because it ends the mother lion’s investment in her cubs and brings her back into fertility sooner.

But …

Sometimes the female lions band together and roar as a group to drive the killer male away. They roar as one to make sure their cubs survive.

That night, when the roaring builds to its crescendo, I lay there and listen. I listen, trying hard to interpret the sounds, trying hard to hear my own heart.

I was sitting in my personal car, Hoffner’s old chipped gun on the seat next to me. I hadn’t brought my service weapon or either of the other two guns I had locked up at home. I didn’t want to take any chances that I would somehow screw it up and use the wrong one.

I had never worried about things like that before.

Confusing guns or being seen somewhere I shouldn’t or worrying about performing my duties in the way I had been trained. I was a professional.

But I had never killed someone before.

Not even in the line of duty. Until now, I had been grateful for that. But somewhere in the last few days, and more so in these last few hours spent sitting outside Angela’s apartment building, I had the unforgivable yearning to know what it felt like to kill.

I checked my watch. Nine p.m.

Angela had left earlier for her job, turning to blow a kiss to her teenage daughter who stood in the doorway holding the baby.

I was relieved that Angela had not left the baby alone with Streeter, but I was worried for the daughter.

I knew I couldn’t go up there. I needed to be invisible right now, to Streeter and to my fellow cops. I only hoped that I could make my move before Streeter made his.

If he made one.

My thoughts were shifting again, drawn to that basic human hope that men were not wild animals. And for a moment, I questioned what I was doing. But only for a moment, because this job had taught me different.

I checked my watch again. Nine-twenty.

A light went out in the apartment. I knew it was in Angela’s bedroom and I let out a breath, thinking that Streeter was going to bed. I would have to wait. Wait and hope he didn’t do anything.

I had just reached for the keys when the apartment door opened and Streeter hustled out. His leather jacket caught the orange beam of the streetlight before he disappeared into the darkness.

I started my car and followed slowly, hugging the curb but keeping my distance. He seemed intent on his destination, his pace quickening as he crossed the street and made a turn south.

I thought he may be heading to the bar over on Woodward, but then he just jagged east, head down, hands sunk deep into his jacket pockets. As he entered a block of abandoned houses, he slowed, looking to the structures as if he wasn’t sure which one he wanted. I knew then what he was doing.

Out of prison three days and already sniffing out a new supplier.

He found it at the corner.

It was a listing shingle-sided house missing half its porch. The windows were boarded up but a faint light was visible behind a web of curtain in the small upper-story window.

Streeter stopped on the sidewalk, half-hidden behind a mound of trash. He stood in a glistening puddle of broken glass, his head swiveling in a nervous scan of the street. I had stopped halfway down the block and was slumped low in my seat, confident my rust-pocked Toyota didn’t stand out in the ruins around us.

He went inside.

I waited.

He was out again in less than three minutes, hand again in his pocket, unable to resist fondling the rock of crack as he walked. I slipped down in the seat but he didn’t even look my way as he hurried past. He was already tasting his high. It would be the only thing on his mind.

I rose, and in my rearview mirror I watched his retreat. I started the car and eased away from the curb.

He was going home.

And I would get there before him.

In the few seconds before he arrived, I took small, calming breaths and I hoped for things I had no right to hope for.

I hoped the T-shirt I had brought to put over the gun would muffle the sound. I hoped the people who lived here were too used to gunfire to even hear it anymore. I hoped no one had seen me move from my car to the shadows at the side of the apartment building. I hoped Angela would not grieve for this man too long.

I heard his footsteps before I saw him.

It kicked my heart up another notch and I drew what I knew would be my last full breath for the next few minutes.

I raised the gun. Kept it close to my side so it was partially obscured.

The sheen of his leather jacket caught the glow of the streetlight first. Then I saw a slice of skin and the glint of an eye that for a second looked more animal than human.

Two steps further and his entire body came into focus. He was walking straight toward me, but the emptiness of the night made me invisible to a man seeing only the weak yellow light of his front door.

He stopped at the stoop, nose and ears turned up to the air, as if he could smell my presence.

I stepped from the darkness.

I waited one second for my face to register in his brain because I wanted him to know who I was and why he had to die.

When I saw the fearful recognition in his eyes I fired. Once.

Trusting my ability to hit him in the heart. Knowing one shot would attract far less attention than six.

He fell straight down, his knees hitting the pavement with a bone-jamming thud. His hand went to his chest, and for a second he was frozen in that position, eyes locked open, blood pouring from between his fingers.

He fell face first with a fleshy smack to the concrete.

I made myself a cup of tea and took it to my bed. The television was on, the sound low but the light putting out something close to a comforting glow.

My hand trembled as I brought the cup up to my lips and took a drink.

There was nothing about Streeter on the 11 o’clock news but I knew there wouldn’t be. A crack addict getting shot on a random Detroit street didn’t merit a mention. Still, I watched.

The talking heads lobbed it over to sports. I hit the mute and leaned back on my pillows as the silence filled my small basement room.

I would go see Angela in a day or two. Give her enough time and space. Give myself enough time and space.

My head was pounding with fatigue. I set the cup aside and closed my eyes.

The ring of the phone jarred me awake. The TV was still on. I caught the green dial of the clock as I went for the receiver. Twelve-fifteen.

“Yeah, hello?”

“Detective Sheffield?”

The voice was deep but definitely female, with an authoritative calm that sent a small chill through me.

“Yes,” I said.

“Detective, this is Lieutenant Janklow over at the Western District.”

I felt my heart give an extra beat.

“We had a report tonight of a shooting in your district, a Curtis Streeter.”

I closed my eyes.

“Detective Sheffield?”

“A shooting, yes …”

“We know what you did.”

I couldn’t move.

“Don’t worry, detective, you’re not alone.”

I brought a shaking hand up to my sweating face.

“There are six of us now,” the woman said. “The others asked me to call you and welcome you to our group.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then the woman’s voice came back, softer now.

“Good night, detective.”

A click, then silence.

I opened my eyes. My hand was still shaking as I set the receiver back in its cradle.

Something wakes me. A sound in my dreams or something outside? I can’t tell. I jerk awake, my eyes searching the darkness.

But it isn’t really dark. There is a gray light in the corners of my room, creeping in from the edges of the window. I throw the sheet aside and go to the window.

Not dawn. Not yet. Still night but almost there.

And then I hear it. The roaring. But it sounds different now, still edged with anger, still deep with pain. But now with a strong pulse of relentless strength. The lions will never be quieted.

I go back to my bed. The sound is in my ears. I sleep.

Panic by Joyce Carol Oates

Chrysler Freeway

He knows this fact: It was a school bus.

That unmistakable color of virulent high-concentrate urine.

A lumbering school bus emitting exhaust. Faulty muffler, should be ticketed. He’s gotten trapped behind the bus in the right lane of the Chrysler Freeway headed north at about the exit for I-94, trapped at forty-five goddamned miles an hour. n disgust he shut the vent on his dashboard. What a smell! Would’ve turned on the A/C except he glimpsed then in the smudged rear window of the school bus, a section of which had been cranked partway open, two half-heifer-sized boys (Hispanic? Black?) wrestling together and grinning. One of them had a gun that the other was trying to snatch from him.

“My God! He’s got a—”

Charles spoke distractedly, in shock. He’d been preparing to shift into the left lane and pass the damned bus but traffic in that lane of the freeway (now nearing the Hamtramck exit) was unrelenting, he’d come up dangerously close behind the bus. Beside him Camille glanced up sharply to see two boys struggling against the rear window, the long-barreled object that was a gun or appeared to be a gun, without uttering a word or even a sound of alarm, distress, warning. Camille fumbled to unbuckle her safety belt, turned to climb over the back of the seat where she fell awkwardly, scrambled then to her knees to unbuckle the baby from the baby’s safety seat, and crouched on the floor behind Charles. So swiftly!

In a hoarse voice crying: “Brake the car! Get away!”

Charles was left in the front seat, alone. Exposed.

Stunned at how quickly, how unerringly and without a moment’s hesitation, his wife had reacted to the situation. She’d escaped into the backseat like a panicked cat. And lithe as a cat. While he continued to drive, too stunned even to release pressure on the gas pedal, staring at the boys in the school bus window less than fifteen feet ahead.

Now the boys were watching him too. They’d seen Camille climb over the back of her seat, very possibly they’d caught a flash of her white thigh, a silky undergarment, and they were howling with hilarity. Grinning and pointing at Charles behind the wheel frozen-faced in fear and indecision, delighted as if they were being tickled in their most private parts. Another hulking boy joined them thrusting his heifer face close against the window. The boy waving the gun, any age from twelve to seventeen, fatty torso in a black T-shirt, oily black tight-curly hair, and a skin like something smudged with a dirty eraser, was crouching now to point the gun barrel through the cranked-open window, at an angle that allowed him to aim straight at Charles’s heart.

Laugh, laugh! There were a half-dozen boys now crowded against the bus window, observing with glee the cringing Caucasian male, of no age in their eyes except old, hunched below the wheel of his metallic-gray Acura in the futile hope of minimizing the target he made, pleading, as if the boys could hear or, hearing, be moved to have pity on him, “No, don’t! No, no, God, no—”

Charles braked the car, desperately. Swerved into the highway shoulder. This was a dangerous maneuver executed without premeditation, no signal to the driver close behind the Acura in a massive SUV, but he had no choice! Horns were sounding on all sides, furious as wounded rhinos. The Acura lurched and bumped along the littered shoulder, skidded, began to fishtail. Both Camille and Susanna were screaming. Charles saw a twisted heap of chrome rushing toward them, tire remnants and broken glass, but his brakes held, he struck the chrome at about ten miles an hour, and came to an abrupt stop.

Directly behind Charles, the baby was shrieking. Camille was trying to comfort her, “Honey, it’s all right! We are all right, honey! We’re safe now! Nothing is going to happen! Nothing is going to happen to you, honey. Mommy is right here.”

The school bus had veered on ahead, emitting its jeering exhaust.

Too fast. It happened too fast.

Didn’t have time to think. Those punk bastards …

Had he seen the license plate at the rear of the school bus? He had not. Hadn’t even registered the name of the school district or the bus company in black letters coated in grime at the rear of the bus.

Hamtramck? Highland Park? As soon as he’d seen the gun in the boy’s hand he’d been walloped by adrenaline like a shot to the heart: rushing blood to his head, tears into his eyes, racing his heart like a hammering fist.

He was shaken, ashamed. Humiliated.

It was the animal panic of not wanting to be shot, not wanting to die, that had taken over him utterly. The demonically grinning boys, the long-barreled object, obviously a gun, had to be a gun, the boy crouching so that he could aim through the cranked-open section of the window straight at Charles. The rapture in the thuggish kid’s face as he prepared to pull the trigger.

Camille was leaning over him, concerned. “Charles, are you all right?” He was cursing the boys on the bus. He was sweating now, and his heart continued to beat erratically, as if mockingly. He told Camille yes, of course he was all right. He was fine. He was alive, wasn’t he? No shots had been fired, and he hadn’t crashed the car. She and Susanna were unhurt.

He would climb out of the overheated car as, scarcely more than a foot away, traffic rushed by on the highway, and he would struggle with the goddamned strip of chrome that had jammed beneath the Acura’s front bumper, and then with mangled hands gripping the steering wheel tight as death he would continue to drive his family the rest of the way home without incident.

Camille remained in the backseat, cradling and comforting the baby.

Comforting the baby — she should be comforting him. She’d abandoned him to death.

He laughed. He was willing to recast the incident as a droll yet emblematic experience. One of the small and inexplicable dramas of their marriage. Saying, teasing, “You certainly got out of the passenger’s seat in record time, Camille. Abandoned your poor husband.”

Camille looked at him, eyes brimming with hurt.

“Charles, I had to protect Susanna. I only—”

“Of course. I know. It was remarkable, what you did.”

“I saw the gun. That’s all I saw. I panicked, and acted without thinking.”

“You acted brilliantly, Camille. I wish we had a video.”

Camille laughed. She was still excited, pumped up.

Susanna, eighteen months old, their first and to-be-only child, had been changed, fed, pacified, lain gently in her crib. A miracle, the baby who usually resisted napping at this hour was sleeping.

She’d cried herself into exhaustion. But she would forget the incident in the car, already she’d forgotten. The bliss of eighteen months.

Camille was saying, in awe of herself, “Charles, I don’t think I’ve ever acted so swiftly. So — unerringly! I played high school basketball, field hockey. I was never so fast as the other girls.”

Ruefully Camille rubbed her knees. She was slightly banged up — she would be bruised, she guessed. Lucky for her she hadn’t broken her neck.

Yet Camille was marveling at what she accomplished in those scant several seconds. While Charles had continued to drive the car like a zombie, helpless. She had unbuckled her seat belt and crawled over the back of the seat and unbuckled the baby and crouched with the baby behind Charles. Shielded by Charles.

Charles understood that Camille would recall and reenact her astonishing performance many times, in secret.

He said, “You hid behind me, which was the wise thing to do. Under the circumstances. The kids had a target, it would have been me in any case. It was purely nature, what you did. ‘Protecting the young.’”

“Charles, really! I didn’t hide behind you. I hid behind the car seat.”

But I was in the car seat. “Look, you were acting instinctively. Instinct is impersonal. You acted to save a baby, and yourself. You had to save yourself in order to save the baby. It must be like suddenly realizing you can swim.” Charles spoke slowly, as if the idea were only now coming to him, a way of seeing the incident from a higher moral perspective. “A boat capsizes, you’re in the water, and in terror of drowning you swim. You discover that you can swim.”

“Except you don’t, Charles. You don’t just ‘swim.’ If you don’t already know how to swim, you drown.”

“I mean it’s nature, impersonal. It isn’t volitional.”

“Yet you seem to resent me.”

“Resent you? Camille, I love you.”

The truthful answer was yes. He did resent her, unfairly. Yet he knew he must not push this further, he would say things he might regret and could not retract. You don’t love me, you love Susanna. You love the baby not the father. You love the father but not much. Not enough. The father is expendable. The father is last season’s milkweed seed blown in the wind. Debris.

Camille laughed at him, though she was wanting to be kissed by him, comforted. After her acrobatics in the car, after she’d demonstrated how little she needed him, how comical and accessory he was to her, still she wanted to be kissed and comforted as if she was a wistful girl of about fourteen. Her smooth skin, her face that was round and imperturbable as a moon, maddening at times in its placidity. Charles had been attracted initially by the calmness of the woman’s beauty and now he was annoyed. Camille was thirty-six years old, which is not so young, and yet even in unsparing daylight she looked at least a decade younger, her face was so unlined, her eyes so clear. Charles, forty-two, had one of those fair-skinned “patrician” faces that become imprinted with a subtle sort of age: reminding Charles, when he had to consider it, of calcified sand beneath which rivulets of fresh water are running, wearing away the sand from within.

He was a corporation lawyer. He was a very good corporation lawyer. He would protect his clients. He would protect his wife, his daughter. How?

“Camille, don’t misunderstand me. Your instinct was to protect Susanna. There was nothing you could have done for me if one of those kids had fired the gun.”

“If you had been shot, we would have crashed anyway.

We might all be dead now.”

Camille spoke wistfully. Charles wanted to slap her.

“Well. We’re not, are we?”

Instead, they were in their bedroom in Bloomfield Hills. A large white colonial on a hill in Baskings Grove Estates, near Quarton Road. Leafy hilly suburb north of the derelict and depopulated city of Detroit where, years ago as a boy, Charles had lived in a residential neighborhood above Six Mile Road near Livernois until his parents, afraid of “coloreds” encroaching upon them, had panicked, sold their property, and fled. They were now living in Lake North, Florida. Charles thought of them as he tugged off his noose-necktie and flung it down. Some of them, they’d kill you as soon as look at you. They’re crack addicts, animals.

In the car returning home, Camille had tried to call 911 but the cell phone hadn’t worked, and now that they were home, and safe, Charles debated whether to report the incident to Detroit police, now that the emergency had passed. No one had been hurt, after all.

Camille objected, “But they — those boys — might hurt someone else. If they play that trick again. Another driver might really panic seeing the gun aimed at him, and crash his car.”

Charles winced at this. Really panic. As if he, Charles, had panicked only moderately. But of course he had, why deny it? Camille had been a witness. The swarthy-skinned boys laughing like hyenas in the rear bus windows had been witnesses.

While Camille prepared their dinner, Charles made the call. He spoke carefully, politely. His voice did not quaver: … calling to report an incident that happened at about 4:15 this afternoon on the Chrysler Freeway headed north at about the Hamtramck exit. A very dangerous incident involving a gun, that almost caused an accident. High school boys. Or maybe junior high … Charles spoke flatly describing in terse words what had happened. What had almost happened. Having to concede he hadn’t seen a license plate. Had not noticed the name of the school district. No distinguishing features on the bus except it was an old bus, probably not a suburban school bus, certainly not a private school bus, very likely an inner-city bus, rust-flecked, filthy, emitting exhaust. No, he had not gotten a very good look at the boys: dark-skinned, he thought. But hadn’t seen clearly.

In the kitchen, Camille seemed to be opening and shutting drawers compulsively as if looking for something that eluded her. She was in a fever, suddenly! She came to a doorway to stare at Charles who had ceased speaking on the phone, which was their land phone; he stood limply, arms at his sides, staring at the carpet at his feet. Camille said, “Charles?”

“Yes? What?”

“Didn’t whoever you spoke with have more to ask? Didn’t he ask for our number?”

“No.”

“That seems strange. You weren’t on the phone very long.”

Charles felt his face darken with blood. Was this woman eavesdropping on him? She’d left him to die, abandoned him to jeering black boys with a gun, now she was eavesdropping on his call to the police, staring at him so strangely?

“Long enough.”

Camille stared. A strand of hair had fallen onto her forehead; distractedly she brushed it away. “‘Long enough’ — what?”

“On the fucking phone. You call, if it’s so important to you.”

In fact, Charles had not called the police. Even as he’d punched out the numbers on his phone, he’d broken the connection with his thumb before the call went through. He hadn’t spoken with any police officer, nor even with any operator. None of what happened that afternoon seemed very important to him now. The boys (Hispanic? Black?) were punks of no consequence to him, living here on Fairway Drive, Bloomfield Hills; his revenge was living here, and not there, with them; his revenge was being himself, capable of dismissing them from his thoughts. The gun had (probably) not been a real gun and whatever had happened on the Chrysler Freeway … after all, nothing had happened.

“But I didn’t get a good look at them, Charles. As you did.”

There was nothing on the local Detroit news stations, of interest to them, at 6 p.m. But at 11 p.m. there came BULLETIN BREAKING NEWS of a shooting on I-94, near the intersection with Grand River Avenue: a trucker had been shot in the upper chest with what police believed to be a .45-caliber bullet, and was in critical condition at Detroit General. The shooting had occurred at approximately 9:20 p.m. and police had determined the shot had been fired by a sniper on an overpass, firing down into traffic.

Camille cried, “It was him! That boy!”

Charles switched stations. Film footage of I-94 near Grand River Avenue was just concluding. “Why should it be I-94? An overpass? The boys on the bus were headed in the other direction. They’d have been off the bus, wherever they were going, hours before. And miles away. It’s just a coincidence.”

Camille shuddered. “Coincidence? My God.”

“You still love me. Don’t you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Don’t you?”

“Shouldn’t I?” A pause. “I’m so tired …”

Knowing he wouldn’t be able to sleep, but he must sleep, he had an early meeting the next morning: 8 a.m., breakfast. At his company’s headquarters. Must sleep. They’d gone to bed, exhausted and creaky-jointed as an elderly couple, and Charles lay now stiff as a wooden effigy, on his back. He’d dismissed the incident (urine-colored school bus, smudge-skinned young punks, the ambiguous long-barreled weapon) from his mind, it was over. Beside him Camille lay warm-skinned, ardent. Wanting to push into his arms, to make love, with him, or wanting at least to give the impression of wanting to make love, which, in a long-term marriage, counts for the same gesture, in theory. See? I love you, you are rebuffing me. Charles was polite but unreceptive. What pathos in lovemaking, in stark “physical” sex, when life itself is at stake! Civilization at stake! Charles’s head was flooding with images like the screen of a demonic video game. (He had never played such a game. But he’d observed, in video arcades.) The ugly lumbering school bus he’d been trapped behind. The stink of the exhaust. How had it happened, had Camille been speaking to him? He’d become distracted, hadn’t seen the bus in time to switch to another lane, and if he’d done that, none of this would have happened. Seeing now the rear window of the bus: craning his neck upward, to see. What were those boys doing? The rear window was divided into sections and only the smaller panes could be cranked open. The pane at the left, directly in front of, and above, Charles, had been opened and it was through this window that the long-barreled revolver had been pointed. No! Don’t shoot! Not me! Now Charles saw vividly, unmistakably, the faces of the boys: They were probably not more than twelve or thirteen years old, with dark, demonic eyes, jeering grins, oily-dark hair. As he stared up at them, pleading with them, the gun discharged, a froth-dream washed over his contorted face like an explosion of light. Was he already dead? His face was frozen. And there was Camille screaming and pushing — at him — trying to get away from him, as he restrained her. Brake the car! Get away! He’d never heard his wife speak in so hoarse, so impatient a voice. For the baby was somewhere behind them, and nothing mattered except the baby.

Charles was alone now in the speeding car. A limping-speeding car, as if one of the tires was going flat. Where was he? One of the freeways? Emerging out of Detroit, in a stream of traffic. And there was the school bus, ahead. He’d been abandoned by his family to die in their place. You are born, you reproduce, you die. The simplest equation. No choice except to drive blindly forward even as the gleeful boys, one of them pudgy-fat-faced, a faint mustache on his upper lip, knelt on the bus seat to aim a bullet into his head.

He heard the windshield shatter. He cringed, trying to shield his face and chest with his arms.

It is said that when you are shot you don’t feel pain, you feel the powerful impact of the bullet or bullets like a horse’s hooves striking you. You may begin to bleed in astonishment for you did not know you’d been hit. Certainly you know with a part of your brain, but not the conscious part of your brain, for that part of your brain is working to deny its knowledge. The work of mankind is to deny such knowledge. The labor of civilization, tribal life. Truth is dissolved in human wishes. The wish is an acid powerful enough to dissolve all knowledge. He, Charles, would die; must die at the hands of a grinning imbecile in a black T-shirt. Yet he seemed to know, and this was the point of the dream, that he could not allow himself such knowledge for he could not bear his life under such circumstances. In middle age he had become the father of a baby girl. He had neither wanted nor not-wanted a baby, but when the baby was born he’d realized that his life had been a preparation for this. He loved this baby girl whose name in the dream he could not remember far more than he loved his own ridiculous life and he would not have caused such a beautiful child to be brought into a world so polluted, so ugly a world. As the bullets shattered the windshield of the car, a sliver of glass flew at the baby’s face, piercing an eye for she’d been left helpless, strapped in the child safety seat.

Charles screamed, thrashing in panic.

“Charles? Wake up.”

He’d soaked though the boxer shorts that he wore in place of pajamas. The thin white T-shirt stuck to his ribs and his armpits stank, appallingly.

“You’ve been dreaming. Poor darling.”

Camille understood: Her husband had ceased to love her. He would not forget her behavior in the car, her “abandonment” of him. He was jealous of her acrobatic prowess, was he? — as he was jealous of her way with Susanna who would rather be bathed by and cuddle with Mommy than Daddy.

It wasn’t the first time in nine years of marriage that Charles had ceased to love Camille, she knew. For he was a ridiculous man. Immature, wayward in emotion, uncertain of himself, anxious-competitive in his profession, frightened. He was vain. He was childish. Though highly intelligent, sharp-witted. At times, handsome. And tender. He had a habit of frowning, grimacing, pulling at his lips, that Camille found exasperating, yet, even so, he was an attractive man. He was shrewd, though he lacked an instinctive sense of others. And yet Camille herself was shrewd, she’d loved one or two other men before Charles and understood that she must comfort him now, for he needed her badly. She must kiss his mouth, gently. Not aggressively but gently. She must hold him, his sweaty, frankly smelly body, a tremulous male body, she must laugh softly and kiss him as if unaware that he was trembling. At first Charles was resistant, for a man must be resistant at such times. For his pride had been wounded. His male pride, lacerated. And publicly. He’d been having a nightmare just now, yet how like Charles not to want to have been wakened from it, by Camille.

Panic can only be borne by a man if there is no witness.

Charles’s skin had turned clammy. Camille could feel his heart beating erratically. He was still shivering, his feet and hands were icy. He’d had a true panic attack, Camille thought. She was holding him, beginning to be frightened herself. But she must not let on, of course. “Darling, I’m here. I’ve got you. You’ll be fine.”

Eventually, well before dawn when the baby in the adjoining room first began to fret and flail in her crib, this was so.

Little horses by Nisi Shawl

Belle Isle

The white candle on top of her dresser had burned dirty that morning. When she stood up from her prayers she saw its glass sooting up black. Big Momma would say that meant danger of some kind. But what? To who? Not Carter. It was after Carter’s funeral that Big Momma had made her promise to burn it.

Uneasily, Leora turned her gaze away from the boy beside her on the car’s backseat. Sometimes it was hard not to stare at him. And sometimes, for the same reasons, it hurt.

It was her job, though, keeping an eye on him. Leora did her duty. Especially today; might be him who the candle had been warning her about. If Big Momma had a phone, she could have called her and found out.

If it was her own self in danger, that didn’t matter. Not that she’d commit the sin of suicide, but it wasn’t natural she should be living on after her child.

In case her suspicions were right, Leora had stayed close as she could by the door to the boy’s room when his teacher came that morning. She’d cut his sandwich in extra tiny pieces, even lifting the bread to check the chicken salad surreptitiously with her finger for bones. Left the lunch dishes for the maid to clear while she fussed at nothing in the basement, keeping an eye on him building his boat models till his mother came and insisted they go outside.

“Take the car,” the mother had suggested, standing on the stairs in one of her floaty chiffon numbers designed to hide her weight. Against Mr. McGinniss’s wishes, his wife had hired a new chauffeur. Now she needed to prove he wasn’t a waste of money.

Outside the car’s windows, Belle Isle’s spare spring beauty waltzed lazily around them as they followed the road’s curves. The chauffeur seemed to understand his business. Not real friendly, but then he wasn’t getting paid to talk to the nanny. The 1959 Cadillac was the McGinnisses’ third best car, last year’s model. He had it running smooth and fine; she could barely hear the engine.

He had known the best way to take to the park, too, staying on course as the street name changed from Lake Shore to Jefferson, and passing up the thin charms of Waterworks Park without hesitating one second. And he had circled the stained white wedding cake of the Scott Fountain as many times as the boy asked him. Now he steered them past some people fishing, practicing for the Derby coming in June.

Without looking, Kevin’s hand sought and found Leora’s. He was all of six years old. Six and a half, he would have said. His fingers stretched to curl over the edge of her pinkish palm, the tips extending between her knuckles. Not such a high contrast in color as it could have been. His daddy was what they called “Black Irish,” which was only about his hair being dark and curly and his eyes brown and his skin liable to take a tan easier than some white folks.

A gentle turn, and the road ran between the waters of Lake Tacoma and the Detroit River. Kevin’s hand nestled deeper into her own. She let her eyes sweep slowly away from the window, over the car’s plush interior and the back of the driver’s head, the pierced-glass barrier dividing him from the rear seat, to the boy’s snub-nosed profile. A pause; then she slid her glance past him through the far window to the Canadian shore. So much the same. But different. A different country. Slaves had escaped to Ontario a hundred years ago. Some of them settled there and never came back.

The driver spoke unexpectedly. “Here’s the boat museum site coming up, Mester McGinniss.” A pile of bricks, low and flat, ugly even in the late afternoon sun, occupied the road’s left side. Holes gaped for windows. The driver honked his horn at a man sitting hunched over on a sawhorse with his back to them and turned sharply onto Picnic Way, stopping right on the road. Two red trucks and a beat-up black-and-purple sedan squatted on the muddy lot around the half-finished museum. “You want to get out, Mester McGinniss, take a look around?” What was there to look at that they couldn’t see from where they were sitting? With Kevin’s clean loafers in mind, Leora told the driver to keep driving. Time enough for them to visit when it was open; Kevin wasn’t like most boys his age, excited by earthmovers and heavy machinery.

They headed for the island’s center. The Peace Carillon loomed up, narrow and white like that black-burning candle. Usually Belle Isle’s spacious vistas calmed Leora’s spirit, but not today.

At Central they turned east again, toward the island’s wilder end. “Will we see any deer?” Kevin asked.

“No tellin,” Leora answered.

“I think we should get out when we get to the woods. They’re never going to walk up close to a car.” He took his hand back to hold himself up off the seat cushions with two stiff arms, a sure sign of determination. “We could hide ourselves behind some trees.”

Leora was about to tell him about the one time she’d seen them here, a whole herd, eight or ten wild deer, crossing Oak-way bold as you please. But the driver interrupted her thoughts. “A fine idea, Mester McGinniss,” he said, as if he was the one to decide those sorts of things. “We’ll do just that.”

No one else on the road before them or behind them, and the driver took advantage of that to step on the gas again. What was the man’s name? Farmer, she recalled, and was ready to speak up sharp to him, white or not, when he slowed down. Way down.

He grinned back over his shoulder at the boy, a nervous grin not coming anywhere near his pale eyes. “Like that?” he asked. Kevin nodded, grave as his uncle the judge. “You ever try driving?” Leora clamped her lips firmly shut to make sure she didn’t call the man a fool to his face.

“Maybe when we get safe into the woods I’ll take you up on my lap, let you to steer a bit afore we ambush them deer, Mester McGinniss.” Farmer turned to the front. “If your mammy won’t mind.”

“I ain’t his mammy.”

“Beg pardon, but I thought that’s what—”

“Mammies is Southern. I’m Kevin’s nanny.”

Farmer muttered something, his voice low, lost under the quiet engine’s. She should have kept her own counsel. She should have, but there was only so much a body could take, and after nearly thirty years of passing up on pound cake and plucking her eyebrows and creaming her hardworking hands and pressing her hair and dyeing and altering her employers’ worn-out gowns so you wouldn’t hardly recognize them, Leora was not about to sit silent while some ignorant peckerwood called her after a fat, ragheaded old Aunt Jemima. And her so light-skinned. Even at forty-two, she was better-looking than that. Not long ago, she had been beautiful.

Mr. McGinniss had called her irresistible.

Shadows covered the car hood, the road ahead, the view out of either window. Thin shadows, thickening as she noticed them, leafless branches crowding together to warm their sap in the spring sun. They were in the woods, and suddenly that ignorant driver had swung onto an unpaved side road. The car slowed to a crawl, ruts and puddles rocking it along. Farmer stopped again, for no reason Leora could see.

“Is this where we hide to look for the deer? And I can learn to drive?” the boy asked.

“Yessir, Mester McGinniss. This here’s the place. Just let me take you on my lap.” The driver got out and went around the back to Kevin’s side. As Farmer opened the door, the fear smell came off him in great stinking waves like a waterfall. Leora reached for Kevin. She got him by his waist and held him as Farmer grabbed his arm, lifting him half off the car seat.

The boy screamed. They were pulling him apart, hurting him. Leora loosened her grip, but only for a moment. Then she had him again, by his wool-clad thighs this time, and they were both out on the ground, Farmer yelling and yanking Kevin’s arm, jerking him around so that Leora rolled in the mud. Sharp pains, blows to her sides that made her sick. Someone was kicking her and she screamed, held on tighter as if the boy could keep away the pain.

“Stop.” It was a man’s voice, sounding quiet above all the noise, like smoke above a flame. Leora held Kevin solidly in her arms, sat up on the muddy ground and looked.

There were three of them. The driver Farmer, or whatever his real name was, and two more. The others wore masks, but she recognized one by his sweater, a thick gray cardigan bunched up over his broad hips. He had been sitting on the sawhorse at the construction site. He had a gun. It was aimed at her. And beside him stood a thin man in a long coat with his hands in the pockets.

“What do you want?” Leora asked. The thin man snorted.

“Shut up, mammy.” Farmer rolled his shoulder, wincing like she’d hurt him. Good.

“Bring the car closer,” the thin man said. The driver went off out of sight down the dirt road, past the Caddy. That left two. Could she run away and lose them in the woods?

“Stay down,” said the thin man. “And no more noise out of either of you.” The one with the gun lifted it, like it was something she might have missed.

She didn’t ask again what they wanted. They were kidnappers, had to be: the danger that dirty burning signified. That’s what these men were up to, like in the papers; why else would they be doing this?

Kevin started crying and shivering, and Leora turned her attention back to him. “Shush now,” she told him. “Ain’t nobody gonna hurt you, baby. They just gonna ask your daddy to give them some money is all.” She hummed the lullaby Big Momma had taught her, soft, no words, so only he would hear, and stroked his hair back from his face. No words. She had never been able to bring herself to sing them.

It worked well enough; his sobbing wound itself down to where she could listen in on their captors.

“—shoulda waited to give the signal on a day she wasn’t riding along.”

“Farmer said he’d be able to separate them. Said he’d have no problems.” A short pause. “Find a way to tie and gag her too. Give me the gun. Somebody could come along any minute.” Smart, that one in the long coat. In fact, she heard an engine now, getting louder, nearer. The police? They had a station on the island’s other side.

“On your feet, mammy.” She looked up from Kevin’s dark-lashed eyes. The sweatered man held out one hand to help her up; a dingy-looking red bandana drooped from the other. She got her legs under her and stood up on her own, the boy a soft weight in her arms. She could see through the leafless trees now, and it was only the black-and-purple sedan from the construction site coming toward them. The man took her by the elbow. The sedan stopped, and he started to steer her to its back door.

“No.” She planted her feet as firm as she could. Prepared to fight. The thin man had said it himself: Stay here and someone would come along eventually. No telling where they’d take her once they got her in the car. Not anyplace she’d want to go.

“I’ll shoot you,” the thin man said. He stepped nearer and the gun’s muzzle dug into her neck. She couldn’t tell if it was hot or cold or both. “I will. Give me half a chance,” he said, and she decided she’d better believe him. Maybe he wouldn’t; maybe a gun would make too much noise. She wasn’t going to find out.

Leora laid Kevin down on the car seat the way she would for a nap. He looked up at her accusingly, as if the kidnapping was her fault, and opened his mouth to say something, but she shook her head and put her finger to her lips. She tried to get in next to him, but the gun pressed harder. “Hold up,” the thin man told her. She stood as still as she could.

The driver got out with a short piece of clothesline hanging from his arm and went into the back on the other side.

“Farmer, my father’s going to be very angry at you.” Kevin’s voice sounded firm and fragile at the same time, like pie crust. “You’d better bring us home right away.”

“All in good time, Mester McGinniss. Give me your hands here, and put ’em together at the wrists. Don’t make us have to shoot nobody, now — yes, that’s the way. I’ll have that gag now.” The sweatered man moved to the other door. They stuck the dirty red bandana over the boy’s mouth.

When they were done with Kevin, it was her turn. The thin man stepped back but kept the gun aimed at her face. “Take your jacket off. Now put it on again, backwards. Leave your arms out.” He had Farmer jerk it down level with her elbows and tie the sleeves behind her. He searched the pockets, confiscating her keys, wadding up her gloves and handkerchief and throwing them in the dirt. Then he picked them up again and crammed the gloves in her mouth with her handkerchief on top, smashing her lips flat when he tied it in back. Farmer put her silk neck scarf over her eyes, knotted it too tight, and that was the last she saw for a while.

They shoved her in next to the boy, laying his head in her lap, she was pretty sure. That was what it felt like. The thin man crowded in beside her; she knew it was him by the gun muzzle he dug in her neck. He pulled her toward himself and pushed her face against his coat’s shoulder. He smelled like Old Spice and dry-cleaning fluid.

Somebody started the car and backed it up the dirt road to where the pavement began again. They turned left and kept driving.

She could feel when they came from under the trees. The sun was so low it struck through the sedan’s windows, warming the back of her head. Almost ready to set.

“They’ll be taking off soon.” That was the sweatered man talking.

“All right, we’ll circle around the island a few times.” The thin man. They didn’t use each others’ names besides Farmer’s. As they talked more she figured out the discussion was about the boat museum’s construction crew going home for the weekend. Farmer said something about ransom money. She had been right. Such a comfort.

Kevin began crying again. With his gag in she felt more than heard him: hot tears soaking her skirt, shoulders trembling. She tried humming the lullaby but this time her voice wouldn’t cooperate. It cracked, wanted to rise up and up, roll out of her loud and high. The gunmetal pressing into her neck muscles put an end to that before it got properly started.

Where were they going? She lost track of the turns: angles, curves, left, right, hummocks and dips that might lead anywhere. Nowhere. The boy’s weeping went on and on. She did her best to shut it from her mind and think how to escape.

The scarf was too tight. Her coat was untied and off; the wind blowing from the river cut through the thin material of her uniform. Her shoes, heavy with mud, slipped on the unseen ladder’s rungs and she held herself on as best she could, arms half-numb from being pinned to her sides. Then she reached the floor. The wind died, and the smell of earth and concrete rose around her.

A shove on her shoulder sent Leora sprawling to the side, but she stayed upright. What was happening? She had to know. She tore at the scarf, her short, blunt fingernails useless. Muffled sobs and shrieks came closer and closer, lower and lower, accompanied by the scrape of leather on wooden rungs.

“Dump him in the corner over there.” That was the thin man, the one who had forced her down the ladder by telling her he had a gun aimed at her head. He gave most of the orders. He was the one she had to convince.

She needed to get calm, get ahold of herself. She had a plan. It had come to her in the car. She willed her hands away from the knotted silk blinding her weeping eyes. Worked instead on the gag, wet with her own drool. Quickly, while they were too busy with Kevin to notice. The handkerchief was cheap, a gift from Big Momma, flimsy cotton. It tore easily and hung in damp shreds around her neck.

“I got a confession,” Leora announced. “About my boy.” Swear words and fast steps filled the darkness. Air brushed her cheek; she flinched.

“Wait.” The thin man again. No blow landed. “Let’s hear her out. Yell for help and you die,” he promised.

“You gone and took the wrong one. This here’s my son.”

More swearing. The thin man cut through it. “You’re saying Farmer made a mistake?”

“I nivver did! That there’s the McGinniss heir — on my life it is!”

“That’s what you think.” She spun them her whole sorry tale. Mr. McGinniss had got her in the family way, she said, and Big Momma sent her off to her sister Rutha’s house in Ontario to have the baby boy and leave him there.

Then Mrs. McGinniss got pregnant too. But her child never drew breath in Leora’s version of events, so Mr. McGinniss called Carter back to raise him as his son. Which he was. Had been.

It was true enough, and better than what actually happened.

“Well,” said the thin man after she finished, “that’s a very compelling narrative.”

“What?” Farmer protested. “You believe that bullshit? I wouldn’t raise some half-nigger as my kid no matter—”

“There are precedents … Of course, without proof—”

“We’ll still collect us a ransom, won’t we?” The least familiar voice, so it must be the sweatered man.

“Maybe,” the thin man answered.

And that was when Leora realized what a bad mistake she had made.

The kidnappers didn’t let them go. If the ransom never came, they weren’t about to. Ever. Her lies had nearly made Kevin and Leora worthless. Only the kidnappers’ disbelief kept them alive.

It was so cold. They had tied her arms with her coat again but that was no protection.

She and Kevin were together in the same corner. Her new understanding of the criminal mind helped her reject the notion that this had anything to do with how she or the boy felt. For whatever reason, it was simply more convenient this way for the kidnappers. Probably they had just the one gun.

The floor was cement, rough and uneven. Leora lay on her side, Kevin curled up in front of her like a question mark. His wool britches smelled like pee. His silent sobs were weak and hopeless, old-seeming.

At least no one had tried putting her gag back on. “You wanna hear a story, Kevin?” She waited while his sobs slowed. No other response came. That figured; no call for the kidnappers to take his gag off. She started anyway, her voice low and soothing. “Once there was a little boy. Now I’m talkin about real little, not a big boy like you. He lived far away, in another country, far away from his momma and his daddy … Why?” Leora made believe the boy had asked her a question, then answered it. “On account of he was a prince in disguise, and being off in another land was the best disguise his momma and daddy could come up with.”

She stopped. Was this idea any better than her last one?

She had something else to try, something maybe a little easier; it depended on which kidnappers had been left to watch them. And how many. What seemed like hours ago she’d heard feet climbing up the ladder. Now she struggled to remember: One pair? Two?

“I need to use the lavatory,” Leora said, loud enough that anyone nearby could hear her.

“That’s a shame, since we got no such facilities on the premises.” Farmer. Him she could handle. “Guess you’ll have to wet yourself.”

“It ain’t that …” Leora let her sentence trail off, pretending embarrassment she wasn’t far from feeling.

Farmer laughed, but the thin man interrupted. “Take her through to the other room.” Him she was afraid of.

“What? She shits, I’m supposed to wipe her black ass?”

“Don’t act any stupider than you are. Untie her, let her take care of it herself.” A pause. “Do it.”

A hand on her shoulder helped her clumsily up from the floor. “I’ll be right back,” she told the boy.

Her plan wouldn’t work so well with two of them there. But maybe she could overpower Farmer when she was untied and alone with him in this other room, take away any weapon he had, or do something to get him on her side. She shuffled carefully through the darkness, grit crackling beneath her feet.

By the change in the echoes around her, Leora figured they had entered a smaller space. Farmer shoved her front against a cold, damp wall and freed her arms. He was out of reach by the time she turned around. She took a step forward, another, hands extended, without connecting.

“What’s the hold up? Do your business!” It sounded like he was talking to a dog.

“It’s … I think I’m gettin my monthlies …” Leora improvised. “I won’t know just by touching myself. I’m gone hafta see—”

“Jesus Christ! I don’t— You expect me to take off your blindfold too? That’s a lot of nerve you got, nigger gal—”

“No!” He was closer now, she could tell by his voice, the noise of his breath. “No, only, how about you … reach in for me … and find out yourself.” Lord knew what she looked like, lipstick smeared off, mascara and eyeliner and rouge running all down her face, mud caking her uniform.

She smiled anyway, and when he said, “Yeah,” sounding half-strangled in spit, she opened her mouth in anticipation, as if this was something she had waited for her whole life, his callused hand hiking up her skirt and skinning down her nylon underwear, parting the tangled hair and inserting one finger where no one had been in years. She sighed and rode up and down on it a couple of times for good measure, and he said, “Jesus Christ,” again, but in an entirely different tone of voice.

He had his pants unbuttoned in seconds, and replaced his finger without even laying her on the floor.

She felt a jackknife in his pocket as he scrabbled against the concrete. The blade wouldn’t be longer than two or three inches, she judged, but good to have all the same. He slumped to one side, done. Before she could retrieve the knife he recovered and pushed himself away from her.

“You two having a nice time in there?” The thin man’s voice sounded maybe forty feet off.

“Yeah. I’ll be out in a jiffy.” He tied her arms again without saying another word, not a bit won over, and Leora had no choice but to let him.

Time to put her new plan into action.

“Well,” the thin man said as they reentered the first room, “I see you did have a nice time.” Her face and neck went hot. “Unfortunately, you’re not my type.” He laughed at his own joke.

“Listen,” Leora said. “I lied before. About the boy. I—”

“Sure you did. What happened — you had a chance to realize the consequences if it was true?”

“Well, some of it—”

“Sit down and shut up.”

Farmer pushed her to her knees.

“I’ll tell you the—”

“Shut up!” Farmer knocked her the rest of the way to the ground. “There must be something to— I’ll stuff your drawers in your mouth, I don’t care!” He rolled her back and forth, wrestling her skirt up again.

“The real one’s still alive! I know where they hid him!”

“Will you—”

“Wait a minute! Why are you so determined to keep her from saying what she wants? Something you’d rather I didn’t learn about?”

“But you told her to shut up!”

“I changed my mind. A gentleman’s prerogative.” The thin man bent over her. “All right. Upsy daisy.” He helped her sit with her back to the wall. “Now talk.”

“It … He’s my son, but if you let us go I can tell you where they took the other to be raised.”

“Let you go. That’s rich. Yeah, that’s exactly what we plan on doing, let you go and head off on some wild goose chase looking for a boy who died or don’t even exist.” Farmer slapped her hard. This time the thin man raised no objection.

Half her face was numb. She made her mouth work. “I told you the truth! We swapped them two at birth, and only they daddy ever knew. He was thinkin ahead to when some-thin like this would happen. You want the ransom or you want Mr. McGinniss to be laughin at you? You already sent him the note, right? He ain’t answered you yet, has he?” A guess. She hoped it was a good one. “And he ain’t gonna. You know why?

Cause he don’t care!”

Silence. Then the unclear sounds of them moving around — doing what? If only she could see. Their voices came from more of a distance, muffled and senseless. All she could tell was that they were angry, till they returned and the thin man said, “Here’s the deal. You tell us where the heir is. We release you, but we keep your kid till we find the real one’s hideout.”

Leora breathed huge gasps in and out. Oh God, she wanted like hell to agree, to get out of that hole in the ground where they had her; she had done her duty and then some, and what was Kevin to her anyway? Just a job, and maybe even the reason her own boy Carter had died, lost in the woods when he wandered off from Great-Aunt Rutha’s cabin because his momma hadn’t been there to take care of him, gone and disappeared while Leora watched over this white child who she owed nothing, nothing! She was crying, crying hard, she couldn’t do anything about that or what she heard herself saying, which was, “No! NO! You cain’t take him! I won’t letcha!

No, I won’t!”

Farmer hit her again, but it was the thin man’s unbelieving laughter that brought her back to her right mind.

The kidnappers were standing her on her feet. “So we believe you now about this one being your kid,” the thin man said. “Otherwise you would have taken us up on our offer. So let’s have the rest of it.”

Their test, and she’d passed it without knowing. “You gonna—”

“Tell us where the McGinniss heir is or we’ll shoot your son and throw him in the river.”

“Canada,” Leora said. “Ontario.”

“Windsor?”

“In the country. I can give you directions—”

“You’ll do better than that. Here you are, Farmer.” The thin man’s voice moved away. “Keep it trained on her. I’ll be back fast as I can. Try not to have too much fun.” The sound of his feet rising up the rungs. Then another noise: wood on wood, something dragging, scraping, then falling loudly on the ceiling, the floor above her head.

She was alone in the basement with a rapist and a helpless, tied-up white boy. Who she should have left to his fate.

At least she should have tried to. When Farmer yanked him out of the car seat like that, she could have let him. And she would have, too, if only she’d been thinking instead of feeling.

Using her brain, not her heart. If Kevin hadn’t looked so much like his brother. Carter.

She wasn’t going to cry. Leora had done enough of that already. Big Momma had taught her to be strong, to survive.

Do whatever it took, even if it went against the Bible.

One more plan.

She struggled to remember the words to that lullaby. She had always known she’d need to use it someday, in the special way Big Momma had learned her. How did it go now? Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, / Go to sleepy, little baby; / When you wake, you shall have—

“Okay, turn around so I can take this thing off,” Farmer interrupted her thoughts, tugging at her blindfold. Which was when she realized her arms were untied again. Why? She hadn’t sung a note, and anyway, it wasn’t supposed to work like that.

Maybe she wouldn’t have to, after all.

The knots in her good scarf proved too tough for Farmer as well, and he sliced them apart with his knife. She heard him open it, felt the silk give way.

Her eyes hurt. They were in a cellar, big metal buckets over in one corner with a fat flashlight standing on one. In another corner lay a short, lumpy shadow, white patches showing where Kevin’s skin contrasted with his clothes and the bandanas over his mouth and eyes.

No sign of the ladder they’d made her walk down.

She whirled quickly to find Farmer behind her but out of reach, and grinning like a natural-born idiot. He had the knife and the gun both, but the gun wasn’t aimed. “You want another fuck?” he asked. “I think there’s time before we head out.”

With a one-minute man like him there’d always be time, Leora figured. She didn’t say that, though, mindful of the weapons. She gave him her back and went to Kevin.

Farmer followed her, pushing her out of the way. He cut the line holding the boy’s legs, then his hands. Leora took them up in her own, kneeling beside him. They were cold, and mottled-looking in the dim light. She rubbed them to start the blood moving. Farmer got rid of the boy’s blindfold; she saw when she looked up at his face. Bees and butterflies, flutterin round his eyes … Those same long lashes—

“Why you doin this?” she asked Farmer. “You lettin us out of here?” She might be wrong about the man, and he’d taken a fancy to her, after all.

“So I am, after a fashion.” He brought the knife up against Kevin’s neck. “We’ll be taking a drive over the border, and you’re less likely to stick in folks’ memories without the ropes and things. Think you can convince your kid to keep his mouth shut when we cross the bridge?” Dark eyes darted to hers and away in every direction, taking in the room. Leora couldn’t talk. She nodded yes. The knife moved up to the bandana’s edge and ripped its way through the stained fabric. Not the bruised white skin.

Kevin couldn’t talk either. He’d been gagged much longer than Leora. He needed water. When she had him sitting up she asked Farmer for something to drink and got a flask of what smelled like cheap whiskey, the sort of thing the Purple Gang once smuggled in. She gave it to the poor child; better that than nothing. Then she made him walk a little. He stumbled like a baby. She held him by his arms, surreptitiously looking for the ladder or some other way out.

There were three rooms counting the main one, the one where Farmer had taken her earlier, and what amounted to a closet. Doorways opened between them without doors. None contained stairs or a ladder, and Leora suddenly recalled the sounds she’d heard as the thin man left, the scraping and bumping. Like a picture she saw it in her head: He had pulled the ladder up with him and put something over the hole he had climbed out of.

No wonder the kidnappers weren’t worried about letting loose their hands.

After helping Kevin go the bathroom, she sat down with him in the corner furthest from the stink. “Now what?” he whispered, the first words he’d spoken since the gag came out.

A hopeful sign. “We wait, I guess.”

“For what? What are they—”

“None of that now! Speak so I can hear you, or else!” Farmer stood from the bucket where he sat and took a threatening step toward them, gun up.

“He just wants me to finish the story I was tellin,” Leora lied.

“Go on then. So I can hear.”

She hadn’t gotten far past the beginning before, she was pretty sure. “So this prince was sent to a foreign land—”

“What was his name?”

“Foster.”

“That’s a dumb name.” Sounding more like himself every second.

“Anyway, he was a prince, so you don’t have to feel sorry for him. And he lived on a farm with a kindly old couple who always let him have whatever he wanted.” Even if what he wanted killed him. “They had rules, but when he broke them, those old people would never raise not a hand against him.”

“No spankings?”

“Not a swat. He was a prince; hittin him was against the law. Now one day, the little boy got up early, before anybody else was awake. And he went down to the kitchen and fixed a bowl of cereal, and then he went outside and walked off into the forest all by himself, although he had been told not to.” And told and told and told.

“Why wasn’t he supposed to go in the forest?”

“Because he wasn’t supposed to go anywheres. Remember, he was a prince in disguise. He couldn’t be runnin around where folks would see and recognize him. Then, of course, he went and got lost.” In the great Canadian wilderness, trees and rocks and marshes — miles and miles of loneliness. “Lost. And he was hungry and tired and miserable, and he wished he’d never, never left that kitchen table. But what he didn’t know was his momma—”

“The queen?”

“Yeah, that’s right, his momma the queen, she had lit a magic candle to proteck him.” Like Big Momma said to do. If only she had done it instead of worrying it was conjuring, the devil’s work. Well, that wasn’t going to stop her now. “The sun went down. Night was fallin. All of a sudden he seen a light.”

“The candle?”

“The candle! You such a smart boy!” Same as Carter. “That’s right, the prince seen the flame of his momma’s magic candle, and it led him straight home to the farm where he lived. The end.”

Kevin stayed quiet, thinking the way he usually did when she finished a story. She always knew he was thinking by the questions he would ask later, long after she’d forgotten the things she said.

The candle she lit after the funeral had been for Carter. Not to protect him. Too late for that. It was to commemorate his spirit, Big Momma had said. And to be what she called a conduit, a way they could speak with one another.

Of course, Leora had never attempted such a blasphemous thing.

Banging and a blast of cold air from the ceiling told her the thin man was back. The ladder slid down to rest its foot on the floor’s middle and the thin man descended it, aiming his thin smile and a second gun through the rungs at them.

It took her till the sweatered man came down, too, to work out what was different. No masks.

It took her till they’d exchanged some talk she didn’t follow and herded her and Kevin between them up out of the cellar and into the black-and-purple sedan to understand why this made her sick to her stomach.

No mask to prevent her from seeing the thin man’s blond mustache and the way his nose tipped up at the end and the squint lines radiating from the edges of his eyes. No mask to stop her noticing the sweatered man’s freckled forehead and the crease in his chin he didn’t look to bother shaving.

So what was to prevent her from describing them to the police when they set her and Kevin free?

But of course the kidnappers had never been going to do that, since there was nobody except Aunt Rutha and Uncle Donald at the cabin, no secret heir. No prince in disguise.

Only Leora knew that though. She had thought.

She had thought she could wait till they got there, but no telling what these white men had in mind.

As soon as Farmer stopped driving, she’d have to sing.

The black-and-purple sedan’s motor made more noise than the Cadillac. It was older too. The island looked empty for a Friday night. Then they reached the mainland, and she saw all the traffic lights flashing yellow. No reds. That late. Or early; early Saturday morning.

And when would the kidnappers stop the car? Where? Would she even have time to open her mouth before they shot her?

Kevin snuggled up against her on her right, both arms wrapped around hers at the elbow. In the regular flare of streetlamps Leora saw him staring up at her, worry and trust tugging him back and forth in nervous twitches. If she saved his life, he was truly hers. That’s what she’d heard the Hindus would say.

The thin man had stuck a gun under her left ribs. On Kevin’s far side the sweatered man crowded against the fogged-up window, flicking some switch on the gun he held. Tense or bored? Both, she decided. Wait for a change in that, then.

The lights came less often. Fewer of them; they must be near the rail yards now. Maybe here — Leora discovered she’d been holding her breath and let it go. The sweatered man stopped fiddling with his gun, but only to light himself a cigarette.

“Put that thing out,” the thin man told him. “Filthy habit.” He reached past her and snatched it away to stub it in the ashtray. A sudden sharp left. Lights ahead, low and steady. “Get the toll ready, Farmer,” the thin man ordered. He jabbed the gun harder into Leora’s side, a silent reminder to keep quiet.

They sailed through the toll booth and onto the Ambassador Bridge almost without a pause. Golden lights hanging on either side swooped their shadows across her eyes. They passed under its two signs, the red letters first facing forward, then backward.

Slaves had crossed all along here. In winter the water froze and they walked to freedom. In the darkness, on the ice, they ran over the river to the land they’d been so long dreaming of … Leora loved that freedom, the kind that came only in your sleep.

And then they were in Canada. The gun switch clicked so fast it sounded like a bent fan blade hitting its frame. A low roof lit from beneath by blue-white fluorescents chopped the horizon in half. Customs check.

Farmer pulled up to a booth. The man inside raised his eyes from his magazine, frowned, and waved them toward the parking lot.

The clicking stopped. “Shit,” swore the thin man.

“Should I go where he’s pointing at, or maybe I oughta make a run for it—”

“See those cop cars waiting up ahead? Think you can outrace them?”

The kidnappers continued to quarrel as Farmer veered off the road into a parking place. He left the engine idling, but they weren’t going anywhere for a while. Not before they got a thorough inspection.

She smiled down at the boy beside her. This would be her best bet. Big Momma had taught her, and it was not a sin — especially in self-defense. And if it worked she would light a second candle. She opened her mouth to sing the lullaby until they shut their eyes, every mother’s son.