Millikin pointed his chin in the direction of the Chevy. “Just about.”

Vaughn stepped forward, closing the space between himself and Millikin, intending to crowd him. Millikin did not react.

“A homicide occurred a few nights ago involving a red Galaxie or Fairlane, sixty-three, sixty-four. Might be damage to the grille or the hood. Headlights, quarter panels…” Vaughn looked at the colored guy, whose eyes had flashed up again, then back at Millikin. “I was wondering if a car like that might have come through.”

“No, sir.”

Millikin picked a shop rag up off the cement floor and rubbed at his hands. The ember flared on his cigarette as he drew on it, Millikin squinting against the smoke coming off its tip. He dropped the rag, ashed the cigarette into his palm, and rubbed the ashes into the thigh of his coveralls.

“You sure, now,” said Vaughn.

“Haven’t seen a car fitting that description.”

“You talk to the other garage owners around here, don’t you?”

“Sometimes.”

“Any of them mention a car like that?”

“No.”

“Nothin’, huh?”

“Not a thing.”

“You got a brother in the joint on a manslaughter beef, right?”

“He don’t know about no red Ford, either.”

Millikin dragged on his smoke, double-dragged, pitched the butt out the open bay door. His pale freckled face had gone pink.

“You’re a funny guy,” said Vaughn.

“I was just sayin’ he don’t know.”

“Well, I mention prison ’cause… hell, Mr. Millikin, I know all about the code. How people like your brother and some of the people you might, uh, associate with now and again don’t like to talk with the police. But see, this isn’t one of those honor-among-thieves things.”

“That’s nice. But I still ain’t seen the car. Now look, I gotta get to work. I promised the man who owns this Chevy here that I’d have it for him this afternoon.”

“Here’s the deal,” said Vaughn, taking another step forward. “The driver of the car I’m describing, he ran this colored boy down in the street for no reason at all. Broke his neck, severed his spinal cord… left his brain fluid all over the street. Boy had a steady job, was off to college in the fall, the whole nine. Looked to me like this driver, he was havin’ fun doing it. Boy wasn’t hurting no one.”

Millikin’s eyes had lost some of their light. “That’s rough.”

“Someone spray-painted ‘Dead nigger’ on the asphalt, too, with an arrow pointing to where the body dropped. Can you imagine?”

“Damn shame,” said Millikin, looking away from Vaughn.

“Yeah,” said Vaughn. “It’s just wrong.” He reached into his pocket, retrieved his badge case, and withdrew a card, doctored to include his home phone. “You hear anything about a red Ford, sixty-three, sixty-four, damage to the front, you give me a call.”

“I surely will.”

Vaughn looked to make eye contact with the colored guy before he left, but the man’s face was buried in his work. He walked from the garage, the lousy music trailing him like a bad joke.

Outside, he stopped by the plum-colored Dart. He withdrew another business card from his badge case, reached into the open window, and dropped it onto the driver’s bucket. He knew that the call-letter decal on the back window was for one of those local radio stations played soul, R amp;B, race music, whatever they were calling it this week. It was all jungle-jump to Vaughn. What the sticker meant was, this here had to be the vehicle of the colored mechanic, had the prison tattoos. Maybe the lie Vaughn had told, about the spray paint in the street, would get the guy going. Maybe not. Anyway, it was all scatter shot. Once in a while you got a hit.

Vaughn got into his car and headed back into D.C. He had promised Linda Allen he’d drop by.

Back in the garage, Pat Millikin and Lawrence Houston waited for the sound of the cop’s engine to fade.

“Stupid sonofabitch,” said Millikin, lighting another smoke. “He backed my brother on the inside, so it was on me to back him, too. But after this, I’m done.”

“You finished with his car?”

“I got it over in Berwyn Heights, workin’ on it nights. Gonna be a few days before I’m done.”

“That big boy he was with, you say he wanted a rental, too?”

“Buzz Stewart. Well, he ain’t gettin’ one now. I’m gonna call him at that gas station he works at right now and give him the news. Make it simple: I got no cars to rent.”

“You gonna tell him about our visitor?”

“Not my lookout. We didn’t say nothin’ to that cop, so Stewart’s got no reason to know. I want as little contact with those two as possible.” Millikin looked at Houston. “Listen, Lawrence… brother or no brother, if I had known what those guys did, I never would have took in that car.”

Houston shrugged. “Ain’t no thing to me.”

He tugged at the pump hose, testing the strength of the clamp. He reached to close the Chevy’s hood and saw the tremble in his hands.

You hit a monkey, huh?

His hands shook when his blood was up.

TWENTY-THREE

FIVE MINUTES INTO meeting Billy Dolittle, Strange marked him as lazy, incompetent, and “that way.” The man wearing his seersucker suit, red-and-blue rep tie, and cheap brown shoes, writing things down in a notebook, one of those schoolkid tablets, black with white spots. Talking down to him, speaking slowly and repeating himself as if Strange were a child. Dolittle chewing on wintergreen Life Savers during the interview, Strange wondering if he had been drinking this early, ’cause he sure did look the type. Also wondering how much to tell him: what to give up and what to hold back.

It was Dolittle who suggested that Strange officially ID his brother, that, as a cop, he could “handle it” and in the process spare his parents the pain of seeing their son “like that.” By then his father had arrived at the house and, as Strange knew he would, insisted on coming along. So together they went to the alley and stood over Dennis and saw him “like that,” and neither of them got sick or turned his face away. Instead, Darius put his hand on his younger son’s shoulder and said a low prayer, and Derek Strange closed his eyes, not thinking of God or his brother’s spirit but instead thinking, I will kill the motherfucker who did this to my brother, and, That man is going to die.

Back in the kitchen of his father’s house, both of his parents seated at the table in the living room, his father holding his mother’s hand, Strange talked to Dolittle and told him some of what he knew about his brother’s life. He told him about Dennis’s stint in the navy, his disability, and how he had no current job, and he mentioned his running boys, Alvin Jones and Kenneth Willis, and suggested that Dolittle definitely speak to them, because both of them were wrong. He did not tell Dolittle that Dennis moved small amounts of marijuana for the neighborhood dealer, James Hayes, because he had no desire to taint his brother further or to get Hayes, a nonviolent man who had hurt no one, in trouble with the law. Also, he wanted to talk to Hayes himself.

“Where can I find Jones and Willis?”

“Jones stays with this woman name of Lula Bacon, down in LeDroit Park. Far as I know, he has no job. Willis is a janitor in some elementary school up off Kansas; I don’t know which one. He’s got an apartment over on H, in Northeast, above a liquor store. Eighth, Ninth, around there. My mother might have Kenneth’s number.”

Dolittle scribbled in his notebook, his lips moving as he worked. “Anything else you can think of?”

Strange shook his head. “Not now.”

Dolittle handed him a card. “You can get ahold of me here.”

Strange saw that there was only the precinct house number on the card. When Dolittle was off the clock, he was off.

“I’m gonna call you this afternoon,” said Strange, “see if there’s been any progress.”