A Visible Darkness Read online

  “Regulation,” she said. “Got to wear the whole rig if you’re driving a squad car,” she said in greeting.

  “I remember,” I said.

  She slid a clipboard over to me with a form on top.

  “Absolves the office if you get hurt. Sign the bottom.”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong impression of me and my propensity for getting hurt,” I said.

  “No, I don’t,” she answered, grinning as she shifted into drive.

  We pulled onto the street and headed west. The strip centers were single-story and second-rate. A carpet outlet. A fish market. “Jiggles” nightclub with “Girls, Live Girls.”

  We turned north onto a side street and a block and a half off the main thoroughfare we were into residential.

  There were no sidewalks but street lamps were set every two blocks. At this time of night cars were parked in most of the driveways, some on the grassless swale. Richards punched off the headlights and swung onto another cross street. Two houses in she twisted the handle on the door-mounted spotlight and snapped it on. The beam caught the black maw of an open doorway and she swept across the windows that were boarded up with plywood.

  “Crack houses,” she said. “We try to keep them boarded up. But they rip the stuff down faster than we can get it up. The owner who lives god knows where won’t keep it sealed even if it is the law.”

  She flashed back over the doorway and the light picked up some movement inside.

  “You arrest them for trespassing or possession and they’re out by Friday.”

  She flipped off the spot and pulled the headlights back on and kept going. As a patrolman in Philly I’d done the same thing. It was exactly the same neighborhood only one-story instead of two. Less brick. More trees. Same despair.

  “Your husband work this zone?” I asked and immediately wondered why the question came into my mouth.

  The dash lights gave her jawline a sharp edge. Her nose held a small but not indelicate hump. A touch of mascara showed at the corner of her eye, which stayed focused ahead.

  “Sometimes,” she finally said. “But he preferred the eastern zones. He wasn’t much for the action. He worked a lot with kids in the Police Athletic League.”

  And got shot by a kid, I silently finished the sentence for her.

  She turned another corner.

  We rolled through an intersection and Richards slowed again to a crawl. Every city has a dope hole and this was theirs. Nearly eleven o’clock and there was a busy nonchalance that showed in the slow spin each man did as the green-and-white slid by. Drag from a cigarette. “I ain’t give a shit about no cop,” but the cupped hand helps hide the face. The older ones sitting on empty milk crates, elbows on knees, something too interesting to stare at in the dirt but proud enough to raise their jaws in defiance as the back fender glides by. The young ones who don’t hide. They goof and throw signs with twisted fingers and pull at the loose fabric in their crotch and their eyes say “Ain’t no big thing” and their justification is “All I’m doin’ is bidness.”

  We got some extra scrutiny; two new faces on the night shift. But I knew Richards wasn’t showing me this for the dealers. Dope dealers don’t kill old ladies for life insurance money. They also don’t need to rape and murder. There are enough addicts who will give it up for whatever the dealer wants. Richards was looking past them, into the back corners and at the side of houses for the desperate ones.

  “We tried to set up surveillance, watch the customers drive in and out, check the plates, run the names through NCIC looking for a hit with a sex crime conviction. Nothing.

  “We’ve got some liaison with the community leaders who are trying to clean things up, appealed to their sense of safety, hoping to pick up at least some rumor. Nothing.”

  “Too scared?”

  “And distrustful,” she replied.

  “And scared,” I repeated.

  “And probably tired as hell of nothing ever changing.”

  She tightened her jaw and we turned again. She seemed to have a destination in mind. A few more blocks and we pulled to a stop next to a dark, undeveloped field of overgrown grasses and brush. The orange glow of the street lamps had little effect on the interior of the empty land.

  “Not exactly an urban park,” I said.

  “The land was originally bought by the city for some kind of trash transfer station,” she said. “But the commissioner who represents this area fought it. So now they’re waiting for someone to come up with the money to develop it.”

  “Been waiting long?”

  “Years.”

  She flipped on the spotlight and swung it into the darkness. A few tree trunks took shape. A clump of saw palmetto. A squat bunker of gray concrete with a single black window.

  “This is where we found the last body,” she said, reaching down to grab a long-handled flashlight and her riot baton. “Take a look?” she said.

  It wasn’t really a question as she popped open the door. I got out and as I walked around she closed and locked the car, leaving the spotlight on. I followed her into the brush.

  “The report came in on a pay phone back up near the dealer’s corner. First time that line has been dialed to the police station. Patrol and a rescue responded. Girl had been dead eight, ten hours.”

  I was watching Richards’s feet, following in her tracks, wishing for a flashlight of my own.

  “She was ID’ed through fingerprints. We had her on file for some minor possession charges, loitering. She was basically a heroin addict. Her sister kept kicking her out and taking her back in.”

  Richards unsnapped the holster of her 9mm as we approached the bunker, stepped around the wall and found the doorway. Inside the squad car’s spotlight painted a square on the wall opposite the window. I stepped in and the stench hit my nose and made my eyes water. It had been a while, but the reek of stale sweat, rotting food and wet mold was not unlike some corners I’d had to stick my head in down in the Philadelphia subway tunnels. Richards’s flashlight beam sprayed across the walls and into all four corners and then settled on the mattress.

  “They found her face up, skirt pulled up and top pulled down around her waist, just like the others. This one had fresh bruises on her ankle and one wrist.”

  “Toxicology?”

  “She was high but the twist in her neck and the bruises around her throat were so obvious they knew before the M.E. got here she’d had her windpipe crushed.”

  Around our feet there were half a dozen empty plastic lighters strewn among the trash. Pipers, I thought. When I was a young cop my Philadelphia sergeant had been standing with me at a magistrate’s walk-through at the roundhouse and he grabbed the shackled hand of a guy in line and twisted his thumb up for me to see.

  “Bic thumb,” he called the clubbed and thickly callused digit. “From spinning the lighter so many times trying to keep the crack lit.”

  I reached out and pushed Richards’s light back to the mattress. Stains and burn marks and ripped fabric where the rats had gnawed holes.

  “You guys ever consider taking this thing to the lab for a DNA sampling?”

  “Jesus, Max. You want to type every scumball and user in a fifteen-block radius? They’re all in there somewhere,” she said. “A defense attorney would have a field day.”

  She had a point.

  We got back to the car and she unlocked and switched off the spot, started the engine and kicked the A.C. up.

  “That was the third of the most recent ones,” she said, reaching into her back seat and bringing out a bottle of water. Then she reached back again to get a thermos.

  “Coffee?”

  “You’re a mind reader.”

  “Doesn’t take much,” she said and I watched her take a drink and then continue.

  “The victim before that was in a stand of bushes near the overpass. One before that was in an abandoned press box at the high school. All the crime scenes were places that the addicts know and use. But nobody’s come
forward with credible information, even the confidential informants looking for a few bucks.”

  “Maybe even they’re afraid,” I offered, pouring the coffee into the plastic top of the thermos.

  She was staring out into the orange glow on the pavement ahead.

  “They’re never more afraid than they are hungry.”

  We cruised the area for another hour, down a handful of alleys, up behind an old style drive-in theater where movies were flashing away on three different giant screens and along a street that she called the border. Even in the dark you could see that on one side of the street were modest but well kept homes, trimmed grass, planted palms and nice sedans in the drives. It was, Richards said, a neighborhood where middle-class blacks had come together to make a stand and a community. On the other side of the street were the scrub-and-dirt yards, the lot with two broken cars alongside the drive, the open lot with a pile of discarded sofas and trash.

  “Don’t ask me how you get from one side to the other,” Richards said. “Smarter people than me have been trying to figure it for a long, long time.”

  We drove back to the sheriff’s building and pulled into a spot next to my truck. Light from the poles all around poured in through the windshield.

  “So that’s the nickel tour,” she said, turning off the ignition and unsnapping her seatbelt.

  “I appreciate the time,” I said.

  She leaned back into the corner of her seat and door. The light had an odd way of playing in her eyes. Sometimes they were a light gray, sometimes a deep green. The shadows in the car kept me from seeing them now.

  “So.”

  “So?” I could feel her grinning at my awkwardness.

  “You staying at Billy’s tonight?”

  “No. I need to get back out to the river.”

  “Ahh. Back to the frogs and gators.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, my time to smile. I let the moment sit for a while. “Billy says we’re dancing, you and I.”

  “Billy’s right,” she said.

  “So am I dancing too fast, or too slow?”

  “You’re being very careful, Max. I like that in a man.”

  She sat up straighter in her seat. The onboard computer was between us. She raised her eyebrows to the building façade, as if she needed to remind me where we were.

  “See you later, officer,” I said.

  I popped the handle on the door and started to put the thermos down in the seat.

  “Why don’t you just take that with you for the ride back,” she said. “It’ll keep you company.”

  “I’m not sure when I’ll get it back to you.”

  “I’m guessing soon enough,” she said and I watched her eyes, trying to find the color.

  “OK,” I said, stepping back and closing the door.

  12

  I pulled into the ranger station parking lot at 4:00 A.M. There was a single light on over the wash house door. Another burned high on a pole over the dock. When I wheeled into my usual spot, my headlights hit a small reflective sign: PARKING BY PERMIT ONLY.

  I sat staring at the words, looked around stupidly like I wasn’t sure I was in the right place, and then felt the blood rising into my ears. I put the truck in reverse, punched it and sent a spray of shell and dirt clattering through the undercarriage. I backed into a spot on the other side of the lot, clearly in a public space. I pulled out my bags and locked up. As I approached the pool of light near the dock, I saw another sign that was staked next to my overturned canoe: ALL UNATTENDED WATERCRAFT ARE THE SOLE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE OWNER. THE PARK IS NOT LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE.

  I flipped the canoe, checked for the paddle, still safe inside, and then dragged the boat to the ramp. I stored my bags and turned back to stare into the front of the ranger’s office, hoping to catch the new man, maybe at the window, awakened by my rumblings. Nothing. All I could see was a single red dot glowing inside; a security alarm indicator that had never been there before.

  I pushed the boat forward and floated the bow. With one foot in the stern and hands gripping either gunwale, I shoved off onto black water.

  I took several strokes west and then sensed the incoming tide taking me. I could feel the water through the thin hull like a shiver under a horse’s coat. A half moon was pinned high in the sky like a flat silver brooch and its light glittered on the calm water. I cleared my throat and spat once, then started paddling toward home. The moon followed.

  It took me more than an hour to reach my shack, and the thin light of dawn was already seeping into the eastern sky. I checked the stairs and went up. I stripped off my clothes and stepped back out to stand under the rain-barrel shower and used a few gallons to hose the sheen of sweat off. I pulled on some shorts and poured the rest of the thermos of Richards’s coffee into a mug, then sat in my straight-backed chair and put my heels up on the table. By the third sip I was asleep.

  I dreamed of O’Hara’s Gym, down on Cantrell, east of the school. O’Hara’s son, Frankie, had been a friend since we were boys. It was Frankie who invited me to the gym one day after football practice and let me spar with him. His father didn’t mind teaching a little to someone from the neighborhood, and after they found out I could take a decent shot to the head without going down, they didn’t mind having a six-foot-three, 215-pound sparring partner around for the real fighters to warm up on.

  I just liked the place. The heat in the winter. The odor of liniment and sweat and talcum. The rhythm of leather slapping on leather and the sting and whoosh of a jump rope. That and the silence.

  No one in O’Hara’s wasted their breath on words. A trainer might yelp instructions to his fighter in the ring, or have a low conference between the two-minute bells, but a man on the heavy bag didn’t trash talk. A guy rattling the speed bag only breathed swiftly and kept the rhythm. The shadow boxers had nothing to say to the man in the mirror.

  I’d been going to O’Hara’s for a year before my father found out. On a November evening one of his patrol buddies led him and another cop in after their shift. They’d stopped off at Rourke’s Tavern like always. They came in yapping.

  “I’ll show ya. It’s true,” said the smallest of the group. Schmitty, I think they called him.

  “Bullshit,” my father was saying, and the sound of his voice turned me just as I was climbing into the raised ring to take a few rounds with a middleweight trying to tune up for a bout that month in Atlantic City.

  Mr. O’Hara walked over to the trio, and even though they had changed out of their uniforms, he knew from their carriage and sense of ownership who they were.

  “Can I help you officers?”

  By that time my father had spotted me. His seventeen-year-old son up in the ring, without his knowledge, or his permission.

  “That’s his kid there,” Schmitty said, touching my father’s arm and pointing up at me.

  Mr. O’Hara looked into my father’s face and then back at me as if to confirm the resemblance.

  “Yeah. OK. Nice to meet you Mr. Freeman,” he said. “You want to watch your boy, OK.”

  My father had a look on his face that I’d never seen, a look of surprise, but with the narrowed eyes of his constant skepticism and an alcoholic sheen of disregard.

  The bell for the round rang and snapped my eyes off his. From the other corner, Mohammed “Timmy” Williams came bouncing across the ring. Williams was a professional and had an agenda. He moved like mercury spilled from a bottle, slipping, circling to his right, body bunched but fluid and within itself. I tried to cut off the ring on him like Mr. O’Hara had taught us but Mohammed was much too fast, bouncing on his toes, automatically anticipating the moves that I had to think about. It was like trying to pinch that ball of silver liquid. You could never seem to touch it. He slipped in close and fired two left jabs into my high right glove. The first one I blocked, the second I hadn’t even realized he’d thrown. The punch knocked my headgear askew. Now I circled and shot out a jab, just to be moving.

 
; “Atta boy, Maxey.” The one called Schmitty was yelling.

  “Long arms,” quietly rasped Mohammed’s trainer from his corner.

  The professional was there to work technique. His upcoming opponent was long-limbed like me. He was trying to perfect his ability to slip inside those long punches and punish the other fighter’s torso.

  I was there to get hit. It’s what sparring partners do. I kept my elbows down and in, knowing his intent. He fired two more jabs that snapped into my headgear, high on the forehead.

  “Come on, Maxey. Give ’em a shot.”

  The cop named Schmitty was excited. The rest of the gym was, as usual, voiceless. My father only watched.

  I threw another, instinctive left jab that Mohammed deftly stepped into and let slide by his ear before delivering a short right hook to my exposed ribs. My mouthpiece came halfway out onto my lips from the air that popped from my chest. My knees lost the connection between upper and lower legs for an instant and I stumbled back. Mohammed bounced away and waited. I tried to get my lungs to work again. We circled again. Mohammed started to throw stinging punches, combinations, left-right, left-right off my headgear.

  “Come on, Maxey,” yelled the cop. “Give some back to this homey.”

  I heard the machine rhythm of the speed bag lurch, just once, before regaining its patter. I heard someone on the heavy bag snap it with a vicious punch.

  Mohammed moved back in. His punches to my head were too quick to stop but that was not his intent. Despite that knowledge, my elbows were instinctively coming up. He dropped his guard suddenly and I took the bait, delivering my own combination. This time he slapped away my left, slipped under my right and hooked two short punches, filled with the power of his hips and legs, into my midsection, just above my hip bones.