It is just a shame that this scoundrel, who for now will remain nameless, offered no warnings when he applied for a high-level state position and was subjected to the usual background checks. But background checks are largely ineffective these days. They do not reveal motivation, which in this person's case, like that of his ancestor Anne Bonny, is to have control, adventure, and access to military and police power, and to know the rules well enough to break them whenever he pleases.
Be careful out there!
Eighteen
Paramedics did not try to resuscitate Caesar Fender, who remained unidentified as he smoldered and smoked near his smashed tackle box. The body was charred in a very odd pattern. Only the chest had burned, and there was no evidence of a fire in the local vicinity that might account for his appalling death.
"It's like his heart caught on fire," Detective Slipper said. "Or maybe his lungs. Could smoking do that?"
"You mean, if you was smoking and somehow your lungs caught on fire?" said Treata Bibb, who had been driving an ambulance for fifteen years and had never seen anything like this. "No," Bibb then answered her own question upon reflection. "Not hardly. I don't think smoking's got a thing to do with what killed this unlucky guy." She squatted to get a closer look. "It's like he's got a crater burned in him all the way through, from front to back. Look, you can see the pavement through this big hole. See here?" She touched charred flesh with a gloved finger. "Even the bones in the middle of his chest burned up. But the rest of him is fine." She was amazed and disturbed, wondering who had done this and how and why.
Cars were pulling off the road, and people lined the street as if waiting for a parade. Police were having a difficult time controlling the gathering crowd of sightseers and reporters as word spread that a fisherman had exploded into a ball of fire just off Canal Street, very near where Trish Thrash's mutilated body had been found on Belle Island.
"What's going on?" a housewife named Barbie Fogg asked through the open window of her minivan.
"You'll have to read about it in the paper." An officer motioned with his flashlight for her to move on.
"I don't get the paper."
She shielded her eyes from his waving flashlight and wondered why on earth all these big helicopters were flying around with searchlights probing the city and neighboring counties. "There must be some violent serial killer that broke out of jail or something," she decided with horror as a chill tickled up to the roots of her frosted hair. "Maybe the same one who murdered that poor woman the other day! And now I won't know enough to protect myself and my family because I don't get the paper and you won't tell me the smallest detail. And you wonder why people don't like police."
She sped off, and another car stopped, this one occupied by an old woman whose night vision wasn't what it used to be.
"Excuse me, I'm trying to find the Downtown Expressway," the old woman, whose name was Lamonia, said to the officer with the flashlight. "I'm late for choir practice. What's all that racket up there?"
Lamonia peered up at Black Hawk helicopters she couldn't see. But there was nothing wrong with her hearing.
"Sounds like a war going on," she declared.
"Just a little situation, but we're handling it, ma'am," the officer said. "The Downtown Expressway's over there." He pointed the flashlight. "Turn left on Eighth and it will run you right into it."
"I've run into it before," Lamonia said with a pained, humiliated catch in her voice. "Last year, I hit the guardrail. To tell you the truth, officer, I probably shouldn't be driving at night. I can't see at night. But if I keep missing choir practice, they'll kick me out, and it's really all I have left in my life. You know, my husband passed on two years ago, and then my cat died when I accidentally backed the car over him."
"Maybe you'd better pull over."
Lamonia stared blindly to her left and right and thought she detected a speck of light that reminded her of those eye tests that required her to center her face in a machine and push a clicker every time she saw a little light in her peripheral vision. Last week, she had hit the clicker randomly and often in hopes she could fool the eye doctor again.
"I know exactly what you're doing," the eye doctor had said as he put drops in Lamonia's pupils. "Don't think you're the first one who's tried," he added.
"What about laser surgery again?"
According to the eye doctor, there was no hope for Lamonia's bad night vision. She had been managing all alone only because she had a pretty good memory and knew how many steps led up to the porch and exactly where the furniture was. She could tell by feel which skirt or dress she was putting on in the dark, but driving at night was another matter. The city streets had not changed, but memory could not help Lamonia when cars switched lanes or stopped in front of her, or pedestrians decided to cross to the other side. She was explaining all this to the police officer, who was no longer there.
"So if you can just point your flashlight, I'll follow it and pull over," Lamonia said as another helicopter thundered into a low hover and its searchlight blazed on the crime scene.
She detected an illumination and headed toward it, bumping over a curb and then something that crunched under a tire.
"Now what was that?" she muttered as she hit a stretcher and sent it sailing into the river right before she rear-ended the ambulance.
"Stop! Stop!" Voices all around her Dodge Dart screamed.
Lamonia slammed on the brakes, even though she was already stopped. Confused and frightened, she shoved the car into reverse and backed up through a perimeter of crime-scene tape and felt another bump under her right rear tire.
"STOP!" The shouting voices were more urgent. "STOP!"
Hooter Shook sensed something urgent was going on when Trooper Macovich showed up with a trunk full of traffic cones and flares.
"Hey! What you doin' closing off all these lanes?" Hooter called out to him as he arranged the blaze orange cones that always reminded her of the Cap the Hat game she used to play as a child.
"Setting up a checkpoint," Macovich informed her as he dropped hissing, lit flares across 150 North, a busy four-lane interstate that led in and out of the city.
Hooter watched with interest and a little anxiety as Macovich barricaded every lane with a wall of blaze orange plastic and fire, leaving only her Exact Change lane open, forcing all northbound motorists by her window, where they would directly place money in her glove. She was a senior tollbooth operator for the city and remembered the days when she didn't have to wear surgical gloves that were always getting punctured by her artificial nails. In modern times, all the operators seemed to worry about was coming in contact with a driver's fingers, when in truth, cash and coins were far dirtier than some stranger's hands.
Money was touched by millions of people, Hooter knew. It was picked off the ground and rubbed up against other money inside dark wallets and little coin purses. Coins jingled against each other inside pockets that may not have been laundered in recent memory. Cash was porous paper that absorbed bacteria like a sponge, and in local topless bars, men stuffed dollar bills into skimpy clothing and the money came in direct contact with diseased body parts.
Hooter could talk for weeks about all the places money visited and how filthy it was. So she was happy to wear gloves when she finally realized the city didn't mind if she switched to cotton ones that her nails couldn't tear. But it did make her feel bad when she stuck a gloved hand out of her booth, as if the driver were Typhoid Mary. She hurt thousands of feelings every shift and never had time to explain to the driver that in her mind, the glove wasn't about him or her, but about the unsanitary condition of the economy.