It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to
entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle (384-322 BC), Greek philosopher
Tracey emerged from the police headquarters locker room for women after showering off the Belle Isle run and putting her school clothes back on. Her wet red hair was pulled back into a tight dance bun and her sleek profile was draped in a tailored suit that was slightly looser under the right shoulder to allow for a shoulder holster.
She looked more like a millionaire CEO of a downtown tech start-up than a veteran Detroit homicide detective sergeant with twelve years on the job. It was a national legend that Detroit homicide detectives were some of the best-dressed cops in the nation. Tracey did her part.
“You rang, Babe?” she said to the squad’s receptionist. Ruth Figelski was a retired street cop from the ethnically Polish enclave of Hamtramck, a pocket city surrounded on all sides by Detroit. Ruth retired from the streets after twenty-two years, and within weeks came into the Detroit homicide section as its civilian administrative boss and den mother.
Ruth took inbound telephone calls, greeted the curious, the lost, and other citizenry, and kept the shifts humming as efficiently as possible. Her nickname was Baby Ruth, after the candy bar, but most everyone shortened that to just Babe.
“Yeah, I did ring,” Babe said. She reached forward and grabbed familiar pink message forms tucked under a clip with Tracey’s name and badge number on it. “You know Jeff O’Brien, right? Sergeant-type, uniform, eastside radar cop? He says he knows you, anyway. Left his number. Said he thought he had something for you, from a traffic stop.”
She handed the first one to Tracey.
“Then, you got a call from the M.E.’s office. That City-County jumper guy or whatever, the well-dressed one that smashed his head on the pavement last week? Turns out he was cleverly hiding a bullet in his brain.”
Tracey took the messages with a tingle of excitement. The message from the medical examiner’s office was thought-provoking but not shocking news, and the well-dressed man from Homeland Security was already dead. He could wait until her partner arrived.
“Would you reach out to Amber and ask her to call or swing by, please?” Baby Ruth nodded and reached for her desk phone without looking.
Tracey looked at the first slip of paper and recognized the number. It was indeed Sergeant Jefferson O’Brien, The Grim Reaper. They had been in the same academy class, though she made sergeant earlier; O’Brien occasionally had a little friction with authority. Tracey walked a few steps over to her desk and called him back. He answered his phone on the second ring.
“Hey sarge, what’s goin’ on over there where the big, ah, you know, brains live?”
She snorted. “Yeah sarge, big brains. That’s us. I got your message, Jeff. What can I do for you?”
“Just some heads up,” he said. “I stopped a kid two days ago, gangbanger, speed-drivin’ a piece-of-shit Monte Carlo. Too bad for him he was speedin’ past my spider hole.”
O’Brien was nicknamed The Grim Reaper for the shadowy place adjacent to Gethsemane Cemetery, off Gratiot south of Conner, where he lay concealed until the unwary on the street drove too fast into his traffic radar beam.
“I policed him up and we impounded the car. No insurance, bad registration, and so on. He went downtown, the car went out to impound. By the time it had been dragged over there across some of the finest urban crop of potholes in the Midwest, some interesting personal property was shooken loose from under the front seat and into plain view.”
Tracey made a skeptical face at the slang and the plain view remark, but put the phone between her ear and shoulder and reached forward to wake up her computer terminal. She logged in and opened a notepad page on her computer.
“Go ahead,” she said, and started typing.
“Well, turns out my gangbanger had some dope and some guns with him when he decided to blow through a thirty-mile-per-hour zone at seventy-seven miles per hour. Givin’ those guys tickets never gets old. I had the POS towed to impound, and a gun was discovered on the floor, a Glock 19. What is it about nine-mil handguns that appeals to gangsters, anyway?”
Tracey laughed. “I dunno, man. I blame Hollywood.”
“Yeah, dig it. So, we got a warrant to search the rest of the car, and his front seat had been modified with horizontal pouches. One was for a dope stash, fuckin’ idiot. The other was for the prettiest little all-pink Kel-Tec .380 you ever did see.”
“Ha,” Tracey said, “a petite gun for his ladies. Why do I care about this?”
“The three-eighty smelled like it had been fired. Just wanted you to know Ballistics has the guns in their queue, and I put you down as a contact if any firing results match up. ’Cause, you know, thinkin’ a’ you, bud.”
“Okay bubba, thanks for that. We can use all the help we can get closing cases around here. I’m even taking a couple, and I’m JTF. Jones Two retired in January, you heard that, right? So we’re catching more cases since Chief didn’t replace him. We only got Baby Ruth because she’s way cheaper than Jones was. Budgets are eatin’ the man alive.”
“Yeah, heard that. How’s old Baby Ruth workin’ out? I worked with her some when she was still on Hamtramck. She’s a tough one.”
“Pretty great so far. You wanna not get caught calling her ‘old,’ though. You know she still gets to carry a gun, right?” Tracey saw Amber enter the squad bay.
“Okay mister, gotta go. Thanks again. Talk to you soon, okay? You owe me baby pictures.”
Jeff promised to post some photos of his newest baby boy to his Facebook account, and hung up.
“Hey,” Amber said, ignoring the creaky wooden chair and instead perching on the side of Tracey’s ancient wooden desk. “I was headed up here anyway. Heard you were looking for me.”
“Yeah. Got a call from the M.E. on the Well-Dressed Guy. They found a bullet in what was left of his brain.”
“Yeah? That’s kinda interesting in a wow-I-didn’t-see-that-coming sort of way,” Amber said with a grin. “Ask them to email you the autopsy report and copy my office address, okay?” Tracey nodded as she typed.
“I reached out to DHS about the creds and business cards,” Amber said. “Man, you’d think those cats were all sitting around their computer terminals dressed like the Men in Black, the way they won’t tell you nothing about anything. They admitted al-Taja was one of theirs, but stonewalled anything more. How about they get the TSA squared away before lording it over us real law enforcement types, huh? They said they’d ‘get back to me’ as soon as they could. So yeah, I’m sitting quietly waiting for my phone to ring.”
Tracey laughed. “Or naw?”
“Yeah, naw. How was your weekend?” Amber asked.
“Ehh, about the same,” Tracey said. “Nothing much.”
To Amber, that meant Tracey spent too much time in the Sweetwater Tavern again, her hang-out joint across the street from her downtown apartment building, and then lurched home. Alone. Fridays were the worst.
The Sweetwater was always packed with potential dating subjects after work, especially on Fridays, but the vibe Tracey broadcast from her reserved place at the far end of the bar facing the door was so don’t mess with me that few dared approach her. All who did were denied, or they excused themselves when they learned she was a cop. So, Tracey drank a little too much, a little too often, and was a little too lonely.
The job was her world. She loved it and it loved her back, by way of a fast promotion to sergeant on her first look, and the kind of autonomy, first in Homicide and then in the JTF, envied by some of the men in the detective unit who had been there longer. The demands of her job and a few years of finishing her degree at night had already killed a starter marriage.
That was a mercy killing, but still. She detested the cliché that she was becoming. It would be time for more Belle Isle therapy soon. She needed more hard runs and fewer hard rums.
“And your weekend was?” Tracey asked.
“Pretty great, actually,” Amber said. She leaned back on Tracey’s desk and kicked her taut legs in the air. “Yow!”
“You. Are. Gross,” Tracey muttered, but she smiled. The other detectives were all out on cases, but Baby Ruth turned in her office chair at Amber’s brief disturbance and looked sternly at the women over her half-eye reading glasses.
“Gross, huh? Really? When’s the last time you got some, little girl? I mean, I’m just a poor little college-educated woman, tryin’ to make my way alone in the world. I have no babies, no husband, and no time or patience for either. You know my boy makes me feel good. He was able to come down here this weekend, bless his youthful and muscular little heart. If you and I hadn’t been stuck with the Well-Dressed Guy last weekend, we’d have had this conversation sooner.”
“Great, terrific. Enough with the sharing, please. Separately, what was your buddy Benoit’s take on the Homeland Security connection?”
Amber made a sour face. “He pinged on his DHS butt-buddy in town, and they had a long meeting from which I was disinvited to attend. He took my notes and the case file and said he’d let me know where to go from there. If past practice is any prelude, I know where he intends to tell me to go.”
“Ha, really. That guy just loves him some spotlight, don’t he? How can he keep grabbing cases like he broke them himself and get away with that?”
Amber smiled. “Well, given that I have thirty-one years on the job in one form or another, and given that I dropped my retirement papers last Thursday, I’ll give you that I don’t give a rat’s ass what he does.”
Tracey spun to face her friend. “No you didn’t put in for retirement! You knew this last week and I’m just hearing about it now?”
Amber tilted her head and a wry oops! smile creased her face.
“Well, hell!” Tracey said. She looked at her watch and saw that it was past four in the afternoon, her unofficial personal bug-out time when circumstances permitted. “This calls for a drink.” Tracey got up and dropped a preps handset radio into the bank of chargers as the women walked out of the door. “Babe, I’m out. Text if you need me, okay?”
In the Sweetwater Tavern, Tracey and Amber picked up their glasses and clinked them once.
“Prosit!” Amber toasted. Her Army history in Germany was never too far from her thoughts.
“Sláinte!” Amber replied with a faked Irish accent. “May ye be in heaven ’aff an’ hour bee-far the debbil knows yer gone.”
They sipped the drinks, Dortmunder Union draft for Amber and Stroh’s for Tracey. Stroh’s Beer was a Detroit legend, but it hadn’t been brewed in town for decades until a microbrewery licensed the recipe and brought it back to the city. Few places carried it. The Sweetwater did, and that was one of the reasons Tracey liked the place. Its devotion to things Detroit matched her own.
The Sweetwater Tavern literally was a short stumble across the street to the lobby door of the Millender Center apartment building where she lived. That helped, too.
“So, what’s this retirement stuff all about?” Tracey asked.
“It’s about putting down the sword and enjoying my life,” Amber said. “One way or another, I’ve been kicking in doors my entire adult life, first in the Army, then ATF, then FBI. Our task force has been a nice change from FBI office work, but even this is getting old.” She gently rubbed the glass on her bottom lip, a pre-drink tic. “Like me.”
She took a sip of the beer. “And if I have to go much longer working for Benoit, I swear I’m gonna get up on a water tower with a high-powered rifle.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Tracey said. She doodled figure-eights in the rings of condensed water that formed around her beer bottle. “I hate to see you go, though. I like working with you, and who knows what jerk I may get next? I just got you trained up.”
Amber smiled. “Honey, we are friends for life, and I’m a Michigan girl. I’m staying around here. My boy works out of the Traverse City state police post now, up north. I like that place, but it’s just too damn far from everything. Plus, I gave the Bureau a ninety-day notice of intent, so it isn’t like I’m going anywhere right away. We gotta see where this Well-Dressed Guy thing goes.”
“Your buddy Benoit has that now, though, right?”
“Okay, number one? I know you’re joking, but fercrissakes please stop calling him ‘my buddy.’ Second, I’m still the case agent on paper, and you have your case open for now, or until your boss gets a call from my boss. So let’s see what we shall see. Separately, I know Benoit has been pushing for a full operation between the FBI and DHS, concentrating on Dearborn. Lotsa suspected terrorist cells there, and now the damned right-wing militias are talking about ‘taking action’ there. We’ve been watching them for years. Do you know Dearborn has the largest concentration of Arabs outside the Middle East?”
“I do. And I know a guy who knows a guy who works for Dearborn PD,” Tracey said. “If we’re going to get any traction, we’re going to start getting it sooner over there. Lemme give my guy a ping and see if he can get us an introduction tomorrow.”
“Good idea,” Amber said. “The Bureau has assets there too, but I’m probably not going to be able to tap them. I don’t swing a big enough bat—and pending retirement hasn’t strengthened my standing with the team any.”
Tracey reached for her iPhone and got into the Favorites menu. “It’s okay, fam. We got this.”
She touched the listing for GRIM REAPR and raised the phone to her ear.