“I don’t like being used.”
“You weren’t used.”
“Yes,” says Worden. “I was.”
“You’re still angry about Monroe Street, right? We disagreed about that and that’s okay, but that’s-”
“No. This isn’t about Monroe Street.”
“Then what?”
Worden grimaces.
“This Larry Young thing?”
“That’s part of it,” says Worden. “That’s definitely part of it.”
“Well, that was fucked, I have to admit.”
“They used me,” Worden repeats. “They used me to do their dirty work. I don’t need that.”
“They used you,” McLarney agrees reluctantly.
Worden turns his head slightly, catching the kid in the gray hoody out of one eye. Like a shark circling the raft, the kid is once again edging down the opposite side of the cross street, hands still deep in his pockets, watching the two men without seeming to watch them.
“Enough is enough,” says McLarney. He drains the can in one fluid motion, then reaches into his jacket pocket while starting across the lot. The kid has changed directions again, moving toward the detectives from the other side of the street.
“Don’t go and shoot him, Terry,” says Worden, mildly amused. “I don’t wanna spend the first day of my vacation writing.”
At McLarney’s approach, the kid slows, suddenly confused. The sergeant pulls the silver shield out and waves it once in a way that suggests nothing more than irritation. “We’re cops,” he yells at the kid. “Go rob someone else.”
One flash of silver and the kid is off on a new vector, bounding back to the other side of the street. He throws his hands in the air, palms open, as if to surrender.
“I ain’t about robbin’ nobody,” the kid yells over his shoulder. “You got it wrong.”
McLarney waits long enough for the kid to disappear onto Madison, then walks back to the conversation.
“We’re cops and you’re not,” says Worden, amused. “That was good, Terry.”
“I guess we pretty much fucked up his night,” says McLarney. “He wasted half an hour on us.”
Worden yawns. “Awright, sergeant. I think it’s about time to be heading down the road here…”
“Guess so,” says McLarney. “I’m outta beer.”
Worden gives his sergeant a light chuck on the arm and begins sorting through the key ring.
“Where’d you park?”
“Up on Madison.”
“I’ll walk you.”
“What’re you? My date?”
McLarney laughs. “You could do worse.”
“Not really.”
“Listen, Donald,” says McLarney abruptly. “Just give it some time. You’re pissed off now and I don’t blame you, but things will change. You know this is what you want to do, right? You don’t want to do anything else.”
Worden listens.
“You know you’re the best man I’ve got.”
Worden shoots him a look.
“Really, you are. And I’d hate like hell to lose you, but that’s not why I’m saying this. Really.”
Worden shoots him another look.
“Okay, okay, maybe that is why I’m saying it. Maybe I’m full of shit here and I just don’t want to be alone in the office with a mental case like Waltemeyer. But you know what I’m saying. You really should give it some time…”
“I’m tired,” says Worden. “I’ve had enough.”
“You’ve had a terrible year. Monroe Street and the cases you got… You definitely haven’t caught the breaks, but that will change. It’ll definitely change. And this Larry Young thing, I mean, who the fuck cares?”
Worden listens.
“You’re a cop, Donald. Fuck the bosses, don’t even think about the bosses. They’re always going to be fucked up and that’s all there is to it. So what? So fuck them. But where else are you going to go and be a cop?”
“Careful driving home,” says Worden.
“Donald, listen to me.”
“I heard you, Terry.”
“Just promise me this. Promise me you won’t do anything without coming to me first.”
“I’ll tell you first,” says Worden.
“Okay,” says McLarney. “Then we can have this discussion a second time. I get another chance to practice my speech.”
Worden smiles.
“You’re off tomorrow, right?” asks McLarney.
“For ten days. My vacation.”
“Oh yeah. Have a good one. You planning on going anywhere?”
Worden shakes his head.
“Staying around the house, huh?”
“I’m doing some work on the basement.”
McLarney nods, suddenly speechless. Power tools, drywall and all other facets of home improvement have always been a mystery to him.
“Careful driving home, Terry.”
“I’m fine,” says McLarney.
“Okay then.”
Worden climbs in the cab, pumps the ignition and edges the truck into the empty lanes of Madison Street. McLarney walks back to his own car, hoping against hope, wondering whether anything said tonight will make even the least bit of difference.
SEVEN
Summertime and the living is easy, says Gershwin. But he never had to work murders in Baltimore, where summer steams and swelters and splits open wide like a mile of the devil’s sidewalk. From Milton to Poplar Grove, visible heat wriggles up from the asphalt in waves, and by noon, the brick and Formstone is hot to the touch. No lawn chairs, no sprinklers, no piña coladas in a ten-speed Waring; summer in the city is sweat and stink and $29 box fans slapping bad air from the second-floor windows of every other rowhouse. Baltimore is a swamp of a city, too, built on a Chesapeake Bay backwater by God-fearing Catholic refugees who should have thought twice after the first Patapsco River mosquito began chewing on the first pale patch of European skin. Summer in Baltimore is its own unyielding argument, its own critical mass.
The season is an endless street parade, with half the city out fanning itself on marble and stone stoops, waiting for a harbor breeze that never seems to make it across town. Summer is a four-to-twelve shift of night-sticks and Western District wagon runs, with three hundred hard cases on the Edmondson Avenue sidewalk between Payson and Pulaski, eyefucking each other and every passing radio car. Summer is a ninety-minute backup in the Hopkins emergency room, an animal chorus of curses and pleas from the denizens of every district lockup, a nightly promise of yet another pool of blood on the dirty linoleum in yet another Federal Street carryout. Summer is a barroom cutting up on Druid Hill, a ten-minute gun battle in the Terrace, a daylong domestic dispute that ends with the husband and wife both fighting the cops. Summer is the season of motiveless murder, of broken-blade steak knives and bent tire irons; it’s the time for truly dangerous living, the season of massive and immediate retaliation, the 96-degree natural habitat of the Argument That Will Be Won. A drunk switches off the Orioles game in a Pigtown bar; a west side kid dances with an east-sider’s girl at the rec center off Aisquith Street; a fourteen-year-old bumps an older kid getting on the number 2 bus-every one of them becomes a life in the balance.
In a detective’s mind, the beginning of the summer can be marked with precision by the year’s first warm weather disrespect murder. Respect being the rarest of commodities in the inner city, its defense by homicidal assault on an 85-degree-or-better day can suddenly seem required. This year, summer begins on a warm Sunday night in May, when a sixteen-year-old Walbrook High School student dies of a gunshot wound to the stomach, sustained during a fight that began when his friend was punched and forced to relinquish a 15-cent cherry Popsicle.
“This had nothing to do with drugs,” says Dave Hollingsworth, one of Stanton’s detectives, in a statement meant to reassure reporters and, through them, the sweltering masses. “This was over an ice cream.”
Summertime.
True, the statistics show only a mild increase in the homicide rate during the hot months, at least if you consider a 10 or 20 percent jump worthy of the term mild. But in the mind of any homicide detective, the statistics can’t say a goddamn thing until they get out in an Eastern District radio car for a Fourth of July weekend. Out in the streets, summer is something to be reckoned with no matter how much meat the shock-trauma units manage to salvage. To hell with the ones who die, a veteran detective will tell you, it’s the assault-by-shootings and cuttings and beatings that can keep a squad running all summer long. Beyond that there are the suicides and overdoses and unattended deaths-routine garbage detail duty that suddenly becomes unbearable when the cadavers are going ripe in 90-degree weather. Don’t even bother showing a homicide detective the charts and graphs because he’ll shake them off. Summer is a war.