May 3
Masjid As’halah Hal’an
972 West 32nd Street
East Orange, New Jersey
3:37 P.M. EDT
He made another circuit around the block, his pace in no way casual—but not fast enough, he hoped, to draw attention.
Arab neighborhood or not, he told himself, wry even at the hard truth, folks see a black man running down their street, you damn well know first thing comes to their minds. Even just walking, I’ve been out here checking cars for a couple of hours; miracle somebody hasn’t called in to 911 that some black dude’s casing the neighborhood for a break-in…
Morgan Jameson had been a cop for eleven years, first in uniform and now in plainclothes; but he had been black all his life.
There had been no incidents, nothing to report. The only people he had talked with—some damn reporter and probably his girlfriend; fuck is a ‘freelance research assistant,’ anyway?—seemed harmless enough to Jameson. He had dutifully jotted down their license plate in his notebook, but only to be consistent: He had done likewise for all the vehicles along his route, noting the time he spotted any new arrivals, adding an “x” behind any plate numbers that had left between his passes.
Jameson had just done so for the Lexus, after a glance down the alley had shown no sign of the car, the reporter, or the “freelance research assistant.”
One less potential car bomb, he told himself. Guess the guy got his ‘story.’
Jameson lip curled, a knowing cynicism.
More likely just got what he wanted from his ‘assistant’ and drove home to his wife to tell her one.
He turned the corner, circling around the mosque once more.
Most of the vehicles he passed were now familiar to him, many of them older and dented and dappled with rust on doors or trunks or around wheel-wells.
But down the street, just short of the opposite end of the same alley, one stood out: a snow-white Mercedes, New Jersey plates, immaculate condition. It also stood out because it was, as it had been for the past two hours, parked arrogantly under a sign that read “Tow Zone - No Parking To Corner.”
Jameson was a tolerant man, particularly on weekend parkers, more particularly when a new month had dawned and the distasteful—to him—pressure for all officers to meet that month’s parking-ticket quota could be delayed until the last week thereof.
But he was only human too, and the sheer chutzpah of a wealthy driver blatantly ignoring the posted restriction in a less-advantaged neighborhood had finally pissed him off mightily.
Worse, during his army tour in Iraq, he had seen more than one Mercedes, charred and torn from the IED that it had contained. Today, after the events of the week, those memories were vivid indeed.
He tugged the radio from his belt under his plaid sports coat.
“Dispatch, Officer 8712,” he said, and when the dispatcher acknowledged, added: “Need a tow truck, Thirty-Third at Scottsdale Drive. Behind the mosque. Violator is a late-model white Mercedes. City tax-sticker says it’s registered in Short Hills.” He read off the plate number.
“Ten-four, 8712,” the radio crackled. “Tow is on the way.”
“Just to be on the safe side, let’s have a bomb tech check it out too,” Jameson said. “These days, can’t be too cautious, right?”
He smiled at the vision of the owner seeing that notation on the citation he was preparing to write.
Teach the fucker to ignore the law on my watch, he said, but only to himself.