Maurice Broaddus - King's Justice

"We?" Wayne asked. "We been tearing around all over town. Feels like we the only firemen in a city full of brush fires."

"Why do we do the work of the gendarmes?" Merle asked.

"Ain't that why we pay their salaries? What's my tax dollars getting me?" Wayne asked.

"Like you've ever paid taxes," Lott said.

"To Caesar, render unto Caesar. And to all a good night," Merle said.

"It's not enough." King raised his voice to cut through the burgeoning chaos. "I don't think we've made a bit of difference."

"What do you want us to do?" Wayne asked. "Keep in mind, I'm on full-time with Outreach Inc. now. They got me going into schools, building relationships with kids, trying to get them on the right track. Lott here just got promoted at FedEx. Finally getting a decent shift. And Lady G is earning her GED and preparing for college."

"I know. Damn it. It's just not enough."

"Come on, King." Lady G took his hand. With her touch, he began to calm down. "Let's take a walk."

Locked in dark thought, King believed dreams to be important. Merle more so. His dreams lingered with him, coming unbidden between moments. Snatches of images. Dragons took to the air against smoke-filled skies. Razed buildings. Cars on fire. Only the occasional person seen running. Like an owl on a field mouse, a dragon swooped down and gobbled them in a single swallow. Slick and coiled, serpents writhed, their bodies filling the streets, crushing everything in their path. Their sides bulged with digesting bodies. The grass slick with blood, men fought with futility, their hollowed faces tired of grieving. The dragons and serpents crowded the land and kept coming. Inexorable.

It was why King rarely slept and drove himself and those around him so hard. Each day brought a new task. A new crew to get information on. A new openair market to disturb with his presence. A new head to bust if things got out of hand. Lott especially warmed to the task, loving to fight. Given a just cause, he perfectly rationalized his violence.

Wayne, however, wanted no part of that; and the blind relish the two of them took to their operation, the more uncomfortable he became. They were an unchecked fire and inevitably, the wrong person would be caught up in it. King felt responsible, burdened, and now refused to hear advice. Not Wayne's. Not Merle's.

"King is kind of closed off." Wayne watched King and Lady G skulk off. "I've known him longer than anyone. The man is a living wall." They were on the verge of something, something potentially transformative. Wayne sensed it and wanted to be a part of it, but hated the hound-dog way King sometimes carried himself. There was a fine line between being real and being seen as weak. And this was an inauspicious start to whatever it was King had planned.

"Child of the morning, I have the same old wound," Merle said, "but I believe he is the right man."

"Something made him hard. He guards himself and won't let anyone in. I know that I'm his boy and all, just like I know King is ride or die," Wayne absently brushed dirt from the table, not wanting to meet anyone's eyes. "Not to go all female or anything, but I have no emotional sense that King even cares about us."

"It's not good for brothers to fight one another."

The moody silence allowed King a retreat to his grim thoughts as he locked himself away in darkness. He grew sickened by his own rage. The hallway led from what was once the church foyer to what was once the nursery. Charted memory verses littered the wall. A pictogram of a white Noah on a huge boat, animals popping out from all over, sailed merrily across a sea of blue. Forty days and forty nights, God sent the waters to flood the earth to cleanse it of all unrighteousness. That was probably the only time the land knew peace. The kids sang a story about Noah collecting animals two by two. All King pictured was all the dead bodies the storm left in its wake.

"What are you doing, King?" Lady G slipped her hand into his and rested her head on his shoulder.

"You know what I'm doing. I'm trying to make a difference."

"Right. All cause a raggedy homeless guy says you have a grand destiny. An important role to play."

"We all do."

"I know, baby. But…" Lady G took his delicate, knobbed hands and ran hers along them. "You all over the place. You run from this to that, no rhyme or reason, just always running. Just caught up in the idea of being important. You don't have a plan. You don't have an endgame. It's like as long as you keep moving, keep doing, that's enough for you. You don't see how lost you are."

King only half-listened to what she said. He took comfort more in the idea of her. The warmth of her hand. The realness of her proximity. King saw himself taking shape in her eyes. She made him braver, more sure. Everything simply made sense when she was around. The two understood each other if neither knew why. Years of solitude made them secretive, selfprotected, with that closeted fear that the more they revealed about themselves, the more folks won't like them. Years of pain and scars haunted them. Maybe they simply recognized the reflections of their own haunted expressions in each other's eyes. All he knew was that she held his demons at bay. She was the light to his dark. When he gazed into her eyes, he saw the faithful and honorable man he wished to be. They worked. But he couldn't escape the feeling that they weren't real.

"What do you suggest?" King asked.

"When was the last time you spoke to Pastor Winburn?"

The name caught him off guard. He couldn't even remember mentioning him to her. In a lot of ways, King was raised by Pastor Ecktor Winburn, the father he thought he wanted.

"I ain't spoke to him in a minute," King said in halting measures.

"Don't you think it's about time?"

"Do you?" King asked.

"I only want one thing."

"What's that?"

"For you to be true to yourself and come home safe."

"Go on off to school." King squeezed her hand.

"Bye, love." She raised their entwined hands and kissed them.

"Bye, baby."

Detective Lee McCarrell scanned the periphery of the scene, not listening to anyone in particular: the chatter, the radio squawks, the idling engines, the occasional horn or siren blare dissolved into a susurrus of a crime scene symphony. Though he hadn't had a drop all shift, his mean, green eyes appeared liquorheavy. His protruding jaw dominated his profile followed by his high forehead. His long, slack hair threatened to bloom into a full-blown mullet, a hairstyle choice which did not combine well with his thin mustache, which made him look like he stepped right off a porn set.

"You're up."

"I know." As much as his last partner, Octavia Burke, put him off, better her patient brand of ballbusting than the too-eager grind of his latest one. Of course, bumping Octavia up to captain left a "brother" slot available which they quickly filled with one Cantrell Williams. African-American. Average height. Shaved bald. Clean-cut. Cigarette smoker, Kools his brand of choice. Leather hat. Leather trenchcoat. Young, smart, and arrogant — worse, he was good enough natural police to back up his arrogance. He handled each case as if it might serve as an opportunity for a grade promotion. The only things he lacked were people skills and experience. His "aggressive assertiveness" — evaluation speak for pushy — earned him a rep as a glory hound, a rep he did little to dispel. He doubleparked in front of the playground at the Phoenix Apartments, his face caught in the slightly haloed gleam in the emergency lights.

"You ready to handle this on your own?" Lee turned off the ignition and let the engine cool for a minute.

"Am I ready to go solo after being under your capable tutelage for a few cases? Yeah, I think I got this."