The Bottom of the Pile
by Gary Clifton
The captain was thoroughly imbued with a double load of righteous indignation. “The three of you will get up on this murderin’ jackass till you either develop some kinda evidence of murder or at least enough probable cause to search his rathole. We clear on that?”
The “murderin’ jackass” was a dime-bag dealer, known on the street as “Detroit Jack.” Captain Logan Oliver was addressing Dallas homicide detectives Davis McCoy, Margaret “Maggs” Williams, and Red Harper. All were homicide cops relegated to the basement, to the cold-case squad commonly called “The Dead Bin.” They were assigned cases in the regular rotation, but most cases were dogs. This one, McCoy had earlier quipped, could be heard barking from out in the parking lot.
McCoy said, “The handle ‘Detroit Jack’ doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. This mope’s name is Leroy Cletus Gilroy, born and raised, in South Dallas, interrupted only with two trips to the joint.”
“Maybe he visited Detroit,” Harper surmised with a chuckle as they strolled out.
Maggs smiled. “Well, Captain America in there and most of the brass think he sold the fentanyl that killed the only son of the chief judge of the appellate court. We’re ordered to screw with him until his nose bleeds.”
By week’s end, they’d busted a couple of Jack’s mules and squeezed a snitch or two hard enough to develop enough probable cause for a search warrant. The judge, an associate of the dead boy’s father, granted the warrant without delay.
The captain decreed they serve it at daybreak and that McCoy be volunteered to arrive at around three a.m. to “watch.” Jack’s rathole was lost in bushes and broken-down vehicles on a pot-holed road that dead-ended at a state mental hospital two blocks down. Parking without being seen in the sparsely settled area was tricky.
The druggie would hear the engine idling, so McCoy sat in the pitch blackness of pre-dawn August swelter with no A/C. The security lights of the hospital were visible in the murky distance, but McCoy couldn’t see any activity.
He heard the slippers shuffling first. Then, when the person stumbled into sight, the white gown was clear; someone had wandered away from the mental hospital.
By habit, McCoy stepped out. “Where you headed?”
She froze. She had a prematurely aged face chiseled in abject hopelessness. McCoy, a lifelong player in the world of despair, studied her as she winced in his flashlight beam. He saw the bottom of the ass-kick pile; hard to appear more screwed over and forgotten.
“Home.... to see my mama.” Terrified, she gasped for breath from her two-block escape trek.
“Where’s home?”
“Longview.”
“You’re goin’ the wrong direction.”
“Huh?”
“Longview, it’s the other way.” He pointed.
She stood, panting.
“What’s your name, miss?”
“What...? Shonda, I’m Shonda. You gonna hurt me?”
“No.” He opted against telling her was a cop. She appeared to have encountered all the cops she needed in one lifetime. “Wanna Coke?”
“No foolin’. What I gotta do to get it?” She slumped against the front fender of his car, her withered face hinting of another atrocity.
McCoy, practiced in a patient trade, had long learned to carry necessities when business required waiting. He reached into the rear seat and pulled a can of Coke from his cooler. She snatched it when he popped the top, guzzling until she choked.
“Your mama live in Longview, Shonda?”
“Yessir,” she started on the Coke again. “She s’posed to.” Her voice trailed into a sob.
McCoy doubted Mama existed or, if she did, she didn’t give a nickel’s worth of damn about a mentally troubled daughter locked up in a “nervous” hospital.
She’d nearly finished her Coke when a van whizzed up, headlights on bright. Two men in white uniforms got out.
The driver, fiftyish and obese, waved a rubber truncheon. “Bitch, this is the second damned night in a row,” he snarled, lunging at the terrified Shonda.
McCoy stepped in front of Shonda and wrested the club away, tossing the man to the asphalt. He flashed his badge. “Hurt her and it’s that thing in your ass, dude.”
The passenger evaporated back out of the glare of the van headlights.
The driver struggled to his feet. “You ain’t gotta chase these freaks. That make you pretty damned tough, copper?”
Up close in the artificial light, McCoy recognized the tattoos on the man’s forearms; they were of pure homespun penitentiary origin. “Matter of fact, I am.” He supposed the state had to drag a sack to find enough people to chase deep-night walkaways from a mental hospital. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the other man, but it occurred to him that both men acted as if they’d dealt with cops in the middle of the night before.
“We gotta load her,” the driver said, warily eyeing McCoy.
McCoy turned and shot a look at Detroit Jack’s place. Apprehending runaway Shondas was probably a common activity not worthy of the neighborhood dope king’s switching on a light. Jack would keep.
Stunned and subdued, Shonda climbed into the back seat of the van. With vacant eyes of pathetic resignation, she clutched her can of soda pop like the mother she’d never see.
McCoy stepped to the van driver’s window.
“You got no jurisdiction on state property,” the driver snapped. “This chick is just another nut case. Ya’ never know what they gonna say.”
“That a fact?”
The pair, pissed at having to venture out of their air conditioning to chase Shonda in the dark, would toss her soft drink in the first fifty feet, then smack her around... or worse.
“Let Shonda finish her Coke.” Cokes were hard to come by inside, he figured.
A klaxon alarm sounded in McCoy’s gut. He understood what kind of abuse caused Shonda’s fear. A plan appeared. In a couple of hours, bust Detroit Jack’s useless ass, then pay a visit to the hospital honcho’s office to confront a pair of serial rapists. He was about to rain on more than one loser’s parade.
“Day’s lookin’ pretty good, after all,” McCoy said and smiled in the darkness.
Copyright © 2022 by Gary Clifton
