2

 

 

BROKEN WINDOWS

 

 

 

Danny Cavanaugh was bleeding. He watched the blood roll into a big drop and fall from his hand onto a dirty rag. He put the wounded finger in his mouth and kept working.

He’d cut himself reaching through a broken window in the back of his home. He was pretty handy thanks to his father, Robert, who claimed to know how to fix everything in the world. Robert had taught him as much as he could between working as a cop and keeping the whiskey makers in business.

“You done yet?” asked a woman’s voice from another room. It was Vinny, his live-in girlfriend.

“Working on it,” said Danny. “Cut myself.”

Vinny entered the room. She was a tall woman who had slimmed down since leaving the police force. Danny didn’t mind this weight loss. Vinny still had plenty of curves. She had just put braids into her hair, which framed her brown face nicely. He had made sure to say that he liked them even though he didn’t really care how she wore her hair. But he knew women.

“Cut?” she said with a touch of alarm. “Let me see.”

“It’s fine,” said Danny.

“Gimme it,” said Vinny in a very motherly way. Danny stopped working on the window and raised his hand, showing the cut on his finger.

“And I suppose you just sucked it and now it’s better. More germs in your mouth than on the glass that cut you.” Vinny walked out of the room.

Vinny had been his partner when they were both in uniform. They became friends and then lovers in an almost imperceptible turn of fate. Danny could see now that one of the relationships was doomed right from the beginning.

The police partnership ended when Vinny was shot in a robbery and Danny beat the man who shot her within an inch of his life.

Vinny returned with a small first aid kit and in a minute had his finger cleaned and dressed. Danny smiled through the process, understanding that these moments when you needed your girl were the kind that bonded you.

Vinny had a big family and most of them liked Danny but some didn’t, especially Vinny’s older sister, Renitta. It was a combination of being white and being a cop with a spotty past, well mostly it was being white, he mused.

This attitude only got worse when Vinny enrolled in, then graduated from, Wayne State Law School. Some of her clan felt that she was now too good for her white boy, too grand for the violent cop who once had the nickname Danny Two Gun.

“You come out of a shots fired chase without a scratch but almost cut your finger off fixing a window,” said Vinny, now sounding just like his deceased mother, Lucy.

“Been thinking about the across the street neighbors,” said Danny. “Mind was wondering I guess.”

“Nothing we can do about that,” said Vinny with concern. “God knows that boy of Bevia’s was headed to the penitentiary anyway.”

“I just feel funny about it. I mean, you got two cops right across the street.”

“One cop,” Vinny corrected. “And a lawyer,” she added with a smile.

“All proud of being a court hound, huh?” said Danny and he kissed her. “Once a cop, always a cop.”

“I’m retired,” she said.

“You still carry your gun,” said Danny. “That means you’re still a cop.”

“Shit, everybody carries a gun in Detroit these days,” said Vinny.”

Vinny was now a junior associate at one of Detroit’s more prestigious law firms, Johnson, Franks & Kincaid, which everyone called JFK. Danny didn’t care much for the hours. They worked her like a dog, but as long as she was happy, he was, too.

Danny was a detective in the Special Crimes Unit. It was called The Sewer by the cops and the name fit. All the worst cases in the city, all the shit, went there and in Detroit, that was saying something.

“There,” said Vinny finishing his finger. “Bullets mean nothing in your life, but beware of the windows.”

Vinny was referring to Danny’s recent bust of a big drug buy. It was a new millennium mix of black, white, Latin and Middle Eastern scumbags. Most of the men involved had surrendered, hoping their high-priced lawyers could get them out of it, but one man had pulled a weapon and tried to shoot his way out.

Danny and his partner, Erik Brown, had gone after him and brought him in, but not without a little more gunplay.

Danny had pulled both guns, the S&W .45 and the .9mm Glock, even though he had been warned many times about the dangers of carrying two weapons. But Danny had a gift. He could perceive multiple targets in different directions at once. He often walked the gun practice range with both weapons, astonishing his peers.

Danny had fired the Glock and missed the scruffy man’s head by inches. The .45 hit the man’s upper chest, which caused him to drop his gun and surrender.

“Fixing a window is more dangerous,” said Danny with a sly smile. He took a moment, knowing that what was on his mind now was potentially explosive. In a way, he feared this more than any criminal or window. “A lot of people are moving out of this neighborhood,“ he said.

“I’m not moving, Danny,” said Vinny in that hard-tinged tone that meant not to push forward. “I thought we were over this.”

Danny started the conversation about moving after a new KFC, Wendy’s and Taco Bell were built in the area. He tried to tell her how this spelled trouble for a neighborhood. Too many fast food joints meant powerful men had targeted the neighborhood for destruction, knowing that the poor, fatherless households would never have time to make regular meals. Wayward youth and criminals were known to live off the stuff.

When the car thefts started and the dealers staked out the side streets, the neighborhood had gotten together and asked for more police patrols. They got them because there were a few cops and city workers in the area. Still, the creeping sickness was slowly encroaching around them and then Bevia bashes her son’s head in right across the street from his house.

Vinny thought running was stupid because someone had to stand up to the lowlives. Danny thought only of her safety. If it were just him; he wouldn’t care where he lived.

In the end, he’d dropped it. Vinny was in love with the city. She was too tied to this place to run away.

“Just keeping our options open,” said Danny. “I’m playing the Devil’s Advocate anyway. I don’t want to leave Detroit, I just worry about you.”

“I know,” she said, “but like you said, once a cop. Anyone messes with me and I’ll give it to them good.” Vinny’s faced showed a little sorrow for snapping at him. She smiled. “Sorry for being so mean,” she added.

A sure sign of a good relationship was arguments that ended quickly, Danny thought. It was unnatural to never argue, but it was death when the fights persisted and lingered for days.

Danny finished fixing the window and cleaned up the mess. He hopped into the shower to get ready to meet his friend downtown.

He was in for just a moment, when he saw Vinny enter the room and disrobe. She loved to have sex in the shower. Danny didn’t, but she was so turned on by it, that he never resisted.

Vinny slipped into the steamy shower and went to him eagerly.

“I just realized how dirty I am,” said Vinny.

“You ever get tired of that joke?” asked Danny.

“Do you?” She kissed him lightly.