David Simon - Homicide - A Year On The Killing Streets

“You know,” he blurted during one four-to-twelve shift. “I understand that the beaches in Borneo are made of black sand.”

At the time, the statement might have seemed like a lonely non sequitur, but McLarney had recently read a five-hundred-page tome on the island of Borneo, his first conquest of a Howard County library book in perhaps three years. A fact is a fact, and McLarney had been trying to work this one into conversation for maybe a month.

“That’s right,” said Nolan. “They’re black from the volcanic ash. Krakatoa did a number on all the islands around there…”

McLarney looked as though his dog had just died.

“… but only on the western part of the island is it completely black. We practiced amphibious landings there when I was in the Corps.”

“You were there?”

“In sixty-three or so.”

“Well,” said McLarney, stalking away, “that’s the last time I ever bother reading a book.”

For a career cop, Roger Nolan is positively scary and a force to be reckoned with in any game of trivia. Still trying to find comfort in that metal chair, Garvey succumbs to his sergeant’s academic dissertation on the John Wayne mystique. He listens quietly because what else can he do. It’s too hot to type that prosecution report. Too hot to read the Evening Sun sitting on Sydnor’s desk. Too hot to go down to Baltimore Street and pay for a cheesesteak. Too goddamn hot.

Whoa. Incoming.

Garvey pushes the chair toward Edgerton’s desk and grabs the receiver on the first bleat, fastest on the draw. His call. His moneymaker. His ticket out.

“Homicide.”

“Northwest district, six-A-twelve unit.”

“Yeah, whatcha got?”

“It’s an old man in a house. No sign of wounds or anything like that.”

“Forced entry?”

“Ah, no, nothing like that.”

Garvey’s disappointment seeps into his voice. “How’d you get in?”

“Front door was open. The neighbor came over to check on him and then found him in the bedroom.”

“He live alone?”

“Yeah.”

“And he’s in bed?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How old is he?”

“Seventy-one.”

Garvey gives up his name and sequence number, knowing that if this officer has misread the scene and the case comes back from the ME as a murder, Garvey will have to eat it. Still, it sounds straight enough.

“Do I need anything else for the report?” the cop asks.

“No. You called for the medical examiner, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s everything then.”

He drops the receiver back onto the phone and separates the sticky wetness that is his shirt from the back of the chair. Twenty minutes later, the phone rings again with a west side cutting-cheap stuff, too, with one kid in the University Hospital ER and the other in the Western lockup, staring out of his cell at Garvey and Kincaid through a cocaine haze.

“He just walked in here and said he stabbed his brother,” says the Western turnkey.

Garvey snorts. “You don’t think he’s on drugs, do you, Donald?”

“Him?” says Kincaid, deadpan. “No way.”

The cutting call keeps them on the street for no more than twenty minutes, and when they return to the office, Nolan is dismantling the VCR; all else is three-part snoring so regular that it takes on a hypnotic quality.

Edgerton has returned from videoland and the squad soon settles in for the worst kind of sleep, the kind where a detective wakes up more exhausted than before, covered by a layer of liquid homicide office that can only be scraped away by a twenty-minute shower. Still, they sleep. On a slow night, everyone sleeps.

At five, the telephone finally rings again, although now everyone is two hours past the desire to get a call-the general reasoning being that anyone inconsiderate enough to relinquish his life after the hour of three A.M. does not deserve to be avenged.

“Homicide,” says Kincaid.

“G’morning. Irwin from the Evening Sun. What’d you have last night?”

Dick Irwin. The only man in Baltimore with a work schedule more miserable than that of a homicide detective. Five A.M. calls for seven A.M. deadlines, five nights a week.

“All quiet.”

Back to sleep for a half hour or so. And then a moment of pure terror: some sort of thunderous machine, some kind of battering ram, is heaving against the hallway door. Metal hitting metal in the darkness to Garvey’s immediate right. Shrill, high-pitched noises as a violent, nocturnal beast clatters toward a sleeping squad, bulling its way through the dark portal. Edgerton remembers the.38 in his top left drawer, a firearm fully stocked with 158-grain hollow-points. And thank God for that, because the beast is now entering the room, its steel lance projected, its leaden armor clanging against the bulkhead on the far side of the coffee room. Kill it, says the voice in Edgerton’s head. Kill it now.

A sheet of light falls upon them.

“What the…”

“Aw, hell, I’m sorry,” says the beast, surveying a room full of cowering, bleary-eyed men. “I didn’t see you all in there where you was sleepin’.”

Irene. The monster is a cleaning woman with an East Bawlmer accent and yellow-white hair. The steel lance is a mop handle; the clanging armor, the larger half of the floor buffer. They are alive. Blind, but alive.

“Turn out the light,” Garvey manages to say.

“I will, hon. I’m sorry,” she says. “You go back to sleep. I’ll start out here ’n leave you alone. You get on back to sleep an’ I’ll tell when the lieutenant comes in…”

“Thank you, Irene.”

She is the ancient janitress with a heart of gold and a vocabulary that could make a turnkey blush. She lives alone in an unheated rowhouse, earns a fifth of what they do and never arrives later than 5:30 A.M. to begin shining the sixth-floor linoleum. Last Christmas, she took what little money didn’t go for food and bought a pressed-wood television table as her gift to the homicide unit. No amount of pain or aggravation could cause them to yell at this woman.

They will, however, flirt with her.

“Irene, honey,” says Garvey, before she can shut the door. “Better watch out now. Kincaid had his pants off tonight and he was dreamin’ about you…”

“You’re a liar.”

“Ask Bowman.”

“It’s true,” says Bowman, picking it up from the rear of the office. “He had his pants off and he was calling your name…”

“You can kiss my ass, Bowman.”

“You better not say that to Kincaid.”

“He can kiss my ass too,” says Irene.

As if on cue, Kincaid returns from the bathroom, albeit fully dressed, and requires only a little prodding from Bowman before he’s once again wooing the hired help.

“C’mon, Irene. Gimme a little somethin’.”

“Why should I, Donald?” she says, warming to the game. “You ain’t even got anything I’d want.”

“Oh yeah I do.”

“What?” she says, looking down disdainfully. “That little tiny thing?”

The entire squad cracks up. Twice a midnight shift, Kincaid talks dirty to Irene. Twice a midnight shift, Irene manages to keep up with him.

Beyond the darkness of the main unit office, the coffee room and the outer offices are brightening with the lighter blue of morning. And like it or not, every man in the room is now wide awake, rattled from sleep by Kincaid’s determined courtship.

But the phones stay quiet and Nolan cuts Bowman loose just after six; the rest of the squad sits quietly, trying not to move until the air conditioning kicks up again for the dayshift. The men lean back in their seats in some kind of communal trance. When the elevator bell rings at twenty after, it’s the sweetest sound in the world.