Rhozier Brown - DC Noir 2 - The Classics

The desk man had been following her little breadcrumbs of innuendo and found himself ending up face to face with Mount Bitterman. The explosion wouldn’t be that bad. Bitterman had made enough enemies that if he declared you one, you’d as likely be toasted as shunned. Bitterman never forgot and never forgave.

The desk man had endured too much inexplicable disappointment and loss to risk an angry Bitterman.

As Sharnella turned to walk away, the desk man said: “Hold your horses, bitch. This is his number at headquarters.” He wouldn’t write it down for her, hoping her memory would fail. She’d be fucked and Bitterman would have no cause. As she backed away, mouthing the numbers to fix them in her disloyal mind, the desk man said, “You know Bitterman only listens to the dead. I hope you find him soon.”

Across town, Detective Avery Bitterman reached down and pulled on his dick. One of the advantages of a closed front desk. He’d notice himself doing this more since his divorce. A dispassionate review told him that it wasn’t for pleasure but rather to reassure himself that he was still all there, a feeling he had less and less often these days.

The receptionist at headquarters told him that he had a call from a Sharnella Watkins and that she said it was an emergency. “Put it through,” he said.

“Is this Detective Bitterman?”

“Yes, it is. How may I help you?”

“You probably don’t remember me, but I remembers you. You arrested my boy Rondell. You was the only one who didn’t beat up on him. You wouldn’t let nobody hurt him.”

Bitterman shook his head, remembering. That’s right, ma’am. I wouldn’t let them lynch him. I thought it would be more fitting if your son got sent to Lorton, where he could meet the two sons of the woman he raped, sodomized, and tortured to death. Those mother’s sons and some friends tied him down, inserted a hedge shears up Rondell’s ass, opened him up and strung his intestines around him like he was a Christmas tree. When, to their delight, this didn’t kill him, they poured gasoline over him like he was a sundae and set him on fire.

“No, I do remember you, Sharmella.”

“SharNella.” She knew she was right to call this man. He remembered her. He would help her.

“It’s my baby, Dantreya. He’s gone, Mr. Bitterman. I know he’s in some kind of trouble …”

What a fuckin’ surprise. “Ma’am, I’m a homicide detective. You want to go to your local district house and file a missing persons report. I can’t help you with this.”

“Please, Mr. Bitterman. They won’t do anything. They’ll just say, ‘That’s what kids do,’ and with me as a mother why not stay out all night. But he’s not like that. He’s different than my others. He’s a good boy. He goes to school. He’s fifteen and he never been in no trouble. Never, not even little things. He likes to draw. He wants to be an artist. You should come and see what he draws. Please, Mr. Bitterman, he’s all I got left. It’s Christmas tomorrow. I just want my baby home.” Wails gave way to staccato sobbing.

Sharnella’s tears annoyed Bitterman. I’m a homicide detective, that’s what I do, he said to no one. I can’t deal with this shit. It ain’t my job. Come back when he’s dead. Then I’ll listen.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry. I understand how you feel. But the beat cops can keep an eye out for him. You tell them where he’s likely to go. That’s your best bet, not me. I’m sorry. I gotta go now.”

Bitterman hung up over her wailing “No’s.” Where was he going to go? He was head of the cold case squad. These days, everything was a cold case. Arrest and conviction rates were lower for homicide than for jaywalking. The killers were younger, bolder and completely without restraint. The law of the jungle, “an eye for an eye,” would have been a welcome relief. The law of the streets was “an eye for a hangnail.” Everything was a killing offense. Motive was nothing, opportunity and means were ubiquitous. Children packed lunchbox, thermos, and sidearm in their knapsacks for school. The police were the biggest provider of handguns. Three thousand had disappeared from the city’s property rooms to create more dead bodies that the medical examiner’s office couldn’t autopsy, release or bury. That for Bitterman was the guiding symbol of his work these days. Handguns on a conveyor belt back to the streets, and the frozen dead serving longer and longer sentences in eternity’s drunk tank.

The phone jerked Bitterman back from his reverie.

“Mr. Bitterman, this is Sharnella Watkins. Don’t hang up on me. I can help you. My boy’s gone, ’cause they want to kill him.”

“Who’s they, Sharnella?”

“The 6th and O Crew.”

“Sharnella, you said your son had never been in trouble. The 6th and O Crew is nothing but. Why am I listening to this?”

“He didn’t do nothing. He was coming home from school with a trophy he got at a art show, and Lufer tried to take it from him, but my baby wouldn’t give it to him and when Lufer tried again he hit him with it and knocked him down and my baby ran off. He said Lufer went to get his gun and was yellin’ that he’d kill him for sure. And he would, that boy’s purely mean. He kill you for no reason.”

“Sharnella, this still doesn’t help me. Get to the help-me part or I’m hangin’ up.”

Sharnella had never given a policeman a straight answer in her life. But her baby was in danger. Sharnella never stopped to think why she felt so differently about this child, her fourth, than any of the others, only that she did and that his death, after all the others, would kill her too.

“This boy, Lufer Timmons. He’s killed a bunch of people. That’s what everybody says. Everybody afraid of him. They say he’s the Crew’s main shooter. But he does it when it ain’t business, just ’cause he likes it. And he said he’ll kill my boy. Doesn’t that help you, Mr. Bitterman?”

The Crew favored death as a solution to all its problems. Giving the delivery man a name was a help. “Tell you what, Sharnella. You go over to the station house like I said and give ’em all the information about your son. Bring a picture, a list of all of his friends and where they live, and where he’s been known to hang out. Tell them to fax me a copy of all that. I’ll look into it.”

Her story was probably 90 percent bullshit and 10 percent horseshit for flavor, but Bitterman knew he’d check it out. You turned over every rock and picked up every squiggling thing. That was his motto: No Corner Too Deep, No Corner Too Dark.

Bitterman tried to remember Sharnella from her second son’s trial. She’d started dropping babies at fourteen and was done before twenty. That’d make her around thirty-five now. She looked fifty. Flatbacking and mainlining aged women with interest. Beginning as a second-generation whore, Sharnella’s childhood had been null and void; her prime had passed unnoticed, one sweaty afternoon in a New York Avenue motel.

Bitterman was more aware of time than ever before. He’d lifted and run and dragged his ugly white man’s game to basketball courts all over the city. Elbow and ass, he rebounded with the best even though he couldn’t jump over a dime. No one ever forgot a pick he set or an outlet pass that went end to end, but he remembered not to shoot too often or try to dribble and run at the same time. His twenties and thirties didn’t seem all that different, but now at forty-five he knew he wasn’t the same man. Bald by choice, rather than balding. Thicker but not yet fat, slower both in reflexes and foot speed. Maybe mellowing was nothing more than realizing that he couldn’t tear the doors off the world anymore. The long afternoon of invincibility had passed.

Sharnella’s second son, Jabari, had killed a rival drug dealer in a rip-off attempt that also killed a nursing student driving by. Her only daughter, Female, with a short “a” and a long “e,” so named by the hospital and then taken by Sharnella, who liked the sound of it, had died of an overdose of extremely good cocaine at the age of sixteen. Everything she delivered died or killed someone else.