True Blue

CHAPTER 7

MACE KNEW that D.C. was the sort of town where on one block you were as safe as you would be in the middle of a small town in southern Kansas on Sunday afternoon in front of the local Methodist church. Yet one block over, you better have Kevlar covering every square inch of your body because chances were very good that someone was going to get shot. That was where Mace wanted to be. Her brain was wired to run toward the gunfire instead of away from it. Just like her sister.

She’d been working another assignment when a slot had opened with the Narcotics and Special Investigations Division. She’d applied. Her arrest record was stellar, her late-to-work and tardies nonexistent. She’d impressed the brass board and gotten the position. She’d worked 4D Mobile Force Vice, though it was now called Focused Mission Unit, which to her didn’t sound nearly as cool.

She’d started doing jump-outs as a plainclothes, which basically meant you cruised looking for dealers and when you saw them you jumped out and arrested as many as you could. In certain areas of D.C. you couldn’t miss them. She could hang as many as she wanted. The only thing holding her back was how much paperwork she wanted to do and how much court OT she could stomach.

She’d cut her teeth on street-level dealers hand-selling rocks and making two grand a day. They were small fish to be sure, but they also shot people. Then there were the scratch-offs. They were either checking a rock of crack in their palm or doing a lottery card, it was virtually the same hand motion. And lots of lottery tickets were sold where Mace worked. Yet she’d gotten so good that she could tell by the motion of the index finger at twenty feet whether it was a rock or merely Lotto. Later, she’d gone undercover in the drug and homicidal hell of the Sixth and Seventh districts. That’s when all the trouble really began. That’s why two years of her life had vanished.

Mace flew through block after block enjoying her first free day in nearly twenty-four months. Her dark hair whipped out from under the racing helmet as she quickly moved from the fortress of solitude around her sister’s house, to fairly decent and safe D.C., then to a neighborhood whose turf battle had not yet been fully decided between cops and bandits, and finally onto ground where the thin blue line had failed to establish even a beachhead.

This was the Sixth District, or Six D in the MPD’s carved-up fiefdom. If Mace had a hundred bucks for every time she’d seen a PCP zombie running naked screaming through the streets here at midnight, she wouldn’t have been so ticked about losing her police pension. In certain sections of Six D there were shuttered houses, trashed buildings, and cannibalized cars on blocks. At night on virtually every corner here something bad was going down and gunfire was as ubiquitous as mosquitoes. All of the honest hardworking citizens-and that constituted most of the folks who lived here-just stayed inside and kept their heads down.

Even in daylight people moved around on the streets with furtive looks. It was as though they just knew stingers launched from nickel-plated Glocks with drilled-off serial numbers or else hollow-points exploding out of virgin pistols looking for first kills could be heading their way. Even the air here seemed to stink, and the sunlight felt degraded by a cover of hopelessness as thick as the carbon emissions eroding what was left of the ozone.

She slowed the Ducati and watched several of the people walking by on the street. The homicide rate in D.C. was nowhere near what it used to be in the late 1980s and early 1990s when young drug kingpins wearing brutish crowns formed from the tendrils of the crack cocaine era enjoyed their reign of terror. Back then a body violently dropped on average over once a day, every single day of the year, including the Sabbath. Yet currently nearly two hundred mostly young African American males every year required a medical examiner’s certification as to their cause of death, so it wasn’t exactly violence-free either. The men around here craved respect, and they seemed to believe they only would get it in increments of nine-millimeter ordnance. And maybe they were right.

She stopped the bike, lifted off her helmet, and shook free the static from her hair. Normally coming here on a fat-cat motorcycle at any time of the day or night was not smart, particularly if you were white and weaponless, as Mace was. Yet no one bothered her, no one even approached her. Maybe they figured a woman not of color coming here alone on a Ducati was obviously psychotic and thus apt to blow up herself like some suicide bomber.

“Hey, Mace! That you?”

She twisted around on her seat to look behind her.

The gent coming toward her was short and stick-thin with a shaved head. He had a pair of two-hundred-dollar LeBron James sneakers on his feet minus the shoelaces.

“Eddie?”

He approached and looked over the bike.

“Nice, nice shit. Heard you were in.”

“I got out.”

“When?”

“About five seconds ago.”

“Just a deuce, right, so you just be an inmate.” He grinned at this insult.

“Just two years, that’s right. Not a con. Just a lowly inmate.”

“My little brother’s already done ten, and he’s only twenty-five. No family court crap for little bro. Hard time,” he added proudly.

“How many people did he kill?”

“Two. But them assholes both had it coming.”

“I bet. Well, two years was plenty long enough for me.”

He patted the Ducati’s gas tank and grinned, showing teeth so white and perfect that she assumed he’d gotten a nice deal on some veneers, probably bartering some prescription pills for them. Being seen talking to even a former police officer was not smart around here. However, Eddie was just a bottom-level huckabuck, a street thug. Not too bright and not connected at all, and the most illegal thing he’d ever done was to retail bags of processed weed, a few Crocks, and handfuls of stolen OxyContin pills on the street. The real players here knew that, and they also knew that Eddie had no information about their operations that he could possibly sell to the cops. Still, Mace was surprised he was alive. The dumb and the weak around here were usually eradicated extremely efficiently. So maybe he was wound tighter than she thought. Which could make him useful to her.

“Neighborhood all the same?”

“Some things don’t change, Mace. People pop and drop. You know that.”

“I know someone screwed me.”

His grin faded. “Don’t know nothing ’bout that.”

“Yeah, but maybe you know somebody who does know.”

“You out now, girl. Ain’t no good looking in the rearview mirror. There might be something you ain’t want to see. Besides, your sister already had her boys come down through here with a fine-tooth comb. Hell, they were just down here last week.”

“They were? Doing what?”

“Asking questions, doing their CSI thing. See that’s the cool thing having a police chief in the family. Cold case don’t never go cold. But I bet she gets some shit for it anyway. Not everybody loves the top blue, Mace.”

“Like what shit?”

“How the hell I know? I just on the street getting by.”

“Her guys talk to you?”

He nodded. “And I told ’em the truth. I ain’t know nothing ’bout nothing.” He patted the Ducati’s gas tank again. “Hey, can I take it for a ride?”

She removed his hand from the Ducati. “There’s an old saying, Eddie, to go forward, you have to go back.”

“Whoever said that ain’t from ’round here.”

She eyed his windbreaker, the way his left elbow was clenched tight to his side, and how he leaned ever so slightly that way because of the weight of what was in his pocket. “You know, bro, if you want to carry a gun and not have the cops know, you’re gonna have to learn to walk a straighter line and loosen up your arm.”

Eddie glanced down at his left pocket and then looked up, grinning. “Got to protect yourself ’round here, Mace.”

“You find out anything, you let me know.”

“Uh-huh,” Eddie said, his veneers no longer visible.

Mace drove through the neighborhood, drawing more stares from folks sitting on their tiny porches or clustered on the street corners or peering out windows. A lot of peering went on around here, usually to see what the sirens were coming for.

She was not making this circuit just to celebrate her release. She wanted to let certain powers-that-be know that Mace Perry had not only survived prison but also was back on her old turf even if she no longer had a badge, gun, and the might of the MPD gang backing her.

But what Eddie had told her was troubling. Beth had apparently continued to investigate the case long after Mace had gone to prison, devoting scarce police resources to the matter. Mace knew several people who would use that if they could to attack Beth. Her sister had already done enough for her.

She finally turned around and rode back to the house. One of the cops on protection duty waved her down as she approached the barricade. She braked to a stop and lifted her visor.

“Yeah?” she said to the man, a young cop with a buzz cut. She could easily tell that he was an egg, meaning a rookie.

Sit on them until they hatch.

She remembered her T.O., or training officer. He was a vet, a “slow walker” who wanted to pull his shift as easy as possible and go home in one piece. Like many cops back then, he didn’t like women in his patrol car, and his rules were simple: Don’t touch the radio, don’t ask to drive, and don’t complain when they went to what cops referred to as the hoodle. It was a gathering place, usually a parking lot, where the police cruisers would cluster and the cops would chill out, sleep, listen to music, or do paperwork. The most important rule of her T.O., however, had been to just shut the hell up.

She’d endured that ride for one month before getting “checked out” by a sergeant and certified to roll on her own. And from that day forward Mace’s call signal had been 10-99, meaning police officer in service alone.

“I understand you’re the chief’s sister.”

“Right,” she said, not desiring to volunteer anything more than that.

“You were in prison?”

“Right again. You got another personal question or will two do it for you?”

He stepped back. “Look, I was just wondering.”

“Right, just wondering. So why’s a young stud like you pulling barricade action? You oughta be running and gunning and locking up and getting some court OT so you can buy a new TV or a nice piece of jewelry for your lady.”

“I hear you. Hey, put in a good word for me with the chief.”

“She doesn’t need any help from me on that. You like being a cop?”

“Until something better comes along.”

Mace felt her gut tighten. She would have given anything to be a blue again.

He twirled his hat and grinned at her, probably thinking up some stupid pickup line.

Her teeth clenched, Mace said, “Piece of advice, don’t ever take your hat off while on protective duty.”

The hat stopped spinning as he stared at her. “Why’s that?”

“Same reason you don’t take it off when you’re on a suspect’s turf. Just one more thing to get in the way of you drawing your gun if something hairy goes down. Egg.”

She double-clutched, popped a wheelie, barely avoiding his foot as he jumped back, and roared on into the garage.