Laura Lippman - Baltimore Noir

“Oh brother,” I mumbled, and she was quiet.

“I thought it was going to rape me.”

Struggling to her swollen knees, spine throbbing, Leini crawled toward the stove, raised herself up on it, and grabbed a wooden spoon for protection.

She did not hear the New Year arrive, the clang of the pie plates and bark of the air horns down on the avenue; did not see the pot that flew across the room to crack her brow.

Blinded by the flow of blood, she falls backward, landing in a hot puddle of souse juice on the linoleum, flecks of flesh and boogers of fat soaking through her dress, sticking to her legs.

Did someone fire a gun through the window?

Some drunk on the street hurl a cast-iron pot at her?

The junkman gone beserk?

“Tell me,” I said. “I’ll find who did this to you.”

Bleeding, confused, and afraid, she was somehow calm enough to think that George would understand this. He saw things sometimes. Swore that he did. But she didn’t call out for George.

“I’m frightened,” she cried. “ Ya-ya, I’m frightened.”

All of the heat in the house rushed out through the broken window and Leini is cold again, freezing; the skull of the pig resting against the soaked hem of her black dress, a hole the size of a half-dollar behind a wilted ear.

She kicks it away and is alone again; the phantom swirling down the drain in the sink to the bowels of the city; making its way down the storm drains with lost balls and bags of shit before falling into the harbor from the Fallsway; settling into the sleek bed of chrome and magnesium on the bottom of the Patapsco to be held there forever.

“You didn’t call the police?”

“No.”

“An ambulance?”

“No.”

“You…”

“Got to my feet and started cleaning myself up.”

I closed my notebook and told her she could come down to the morgue to see the body if she wanted, but only if she wanted.

We had plenty of other ways to deal with it if she didn’t.

Sandtown-Winchester

He fought the dragging wheel all the way across Saratoga, then down through the park on St. Paul and over to the viaduct. Rush-hour traffic played around him, the people in the cars seeing him but pretending not.

The boy trailed a few steps behind, lost in a daydream, tossing off some freestyle, trying for some flow. Boy thought he had something with his rhymes, but Tate, being so much older, couldn’t really say one way or the other.

“Ain’t no one ’bout a song no mo’?” he asked.

The boy smiled. It was a thing between them.

“Singin’ an’ shit, you know. Key of whatevah.”

“Nigga, please.” The boy shook his head, as if Tate were beyond hope. “’Cause you old school, I gotta be?”

Tate leaned into the cart, fighting the wheel. The boy followed, still in his flow until Tate made a point of throwing out a loud line or two of back-in-the-day sanctified music.

“Oh happy day…”

“Country-ass songs,” the boy said. “Please.”

Halfway across the viaduct, the bad wheel flopped left, pulling the cart off the sidewalk, hanging it on the edge, spilling some of the aluminum strips onto the asphalt. A parcel delivery truck in the close lane had to slow and wait for them to set things right. The deliveryman stayed off his horn, patient enough, but from the cars behind came all kinda noise.

“Lean down on that side,” Tate told the boy.

“Huh?”

“Naw, put weight on it an’ I’ll lift.”

The boy stared at him as more car horns sounded.

“Stand on the motherfuckin’ shoppin’ cart. Lean on that bitch.”

Daymo got it, finally, putting his weight on the front corner of the cart. He was sixteen and maybe 5’9", but built solid, a boy who would tend toward weight if he didn’t start adding some inches. He also began wheezing from the asthma. But with the boy standing on the cart, leaning toward center, there was enough counterweight to right themselves on the sidewalk.

Traffic moved again as Tate grabbed the fallen strips of aluminum, tossing them back in the cart. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then stole a look at the boy, who turned away, wounded.

Tate had raised his voice. Cursed, too.

“Didn’t mean to yell. I was feelin’ pressed, you know, with cars an’ such.”

The boy nodded, wheezing.

“We cool?”

“It’s all good.”

They rolled down Orleans in silence, crossing near the hospital and then down Monument to the metal yard. Tate tried to get Daymo to throw out more rhymes, but the boy kept inside himself.

“At least forty here, maybe fifty if that door be stainless steel, which I believe it is.”

The boy said nothing and ten more minutes passed. By the time they reached the scales, Tate felt his heart would break from the silence.

The aluminum window strips brought twenty-six dollars, steel belts from a couple radials another six, but the man at the scales said the broken half a door from a warehouse locker was lead, not steel. Bulk metal, meaning only four for all that weight.

“Naw,” Tate told him, “that’s stainless right there.”

“Shit no. Do it look stainless?”

“Yeah, it do. Dirty from the pile where I found it is all.”

“Bulk weight,” the man said wearily, and Tate snatched the last singles, feeling punked, especially in front of the boy. He walked away calling the metal man everything but a child of God.

“Thirty-six. Ain’t bad for the first run of the day.”

The sound of the boy’s voice took the anger from Tate. He stopped and pulled the cash from his pocket, counting out eighteen and handing it to Daymo, who looked at the bills, then back at Tate.

“You need twenty to get out of the gate, right?” the boy said.

Tate said nothing and grabbed the empty cart, rattling away from the scales with the boy trailing.

“Ain’t you need one-and-one to start?”

Tate shook his head. Dope alone would get him right; he could wait on the coke until the next run. “Fair is fair,” he told the boy.

“You can have the twenty, man. I make due with the rest.”

Tate looked at Daymo, suddenly proud of the moment.

“We partners, ain’t we?”

The boy nodded, still wheezing, coming abreast on the other side of the cart. The sun was high now and they rattled down Monument Street feeling the summer day.

“Even split. Always.”

Corelli had no patience for this anymore. He had to admit that much. When he was younger, he could wait the wait, sitting in whatever shithole where he was needed, staying awake with black coffee and AM radio. Once, when he worked narcotics, he stayed put in the Amtrak garage for thirty hours, watching a rental car until a mule returned from a New York run.

He fucking made that case. Yes he did. Hickham had come out on midnight shift to relieve him, but Corelli was young then and wanted to show the senior guys in the squad a little something extra.

“I’m spelling you,” Hickham had said. “You can still catch last call.”

“Fuck it. I’m good.”

Corelli tossed the line away like it was nothing to sit in a fucking car for a day and a night and more. He could still see the look on Hickham’s face, that fat fuck.

“You wanna sit some more?”

“I said I’m good.”

Corelli thought he’d made a point until he got back to the squad office the following afternoon to learn Hickham had pronounced him an idiot. The fuck kind of braindead goof won’t take relief after twenty hours in a parking garage?

“Proud to know you, kid,” Hickham had said, the sarcasm thick. And the rest of those guys just laughed. Never mind that it was him who eyeballed the mule. Never mind that the case went forward because of it. The joke was on him.