Ten-year-old Tommy Brink rolled past the small grocery, his wheelchair bumping over the uneven pavement and making his knees rock back and forth in his white shorts. He looked at his watch, Donald Duck pointing at the eight and eleven. The sun was just now topping the brick tenements on the other side of the street.
“Hey, Tommy,” he heard over his shoulder. “Get over here, boy.”
Tommy spun to see Mister Teddy, the owner of the grocery, its door and windows barred to keep the crackheads out. Tommy grinned and rolled close.
“Mornin’, Mister Teddy.”
Ted Simmons was a tall and skinny black man in his forties with an outsized smile. He was wearing a white tee and blue uniform pants, a butcher’s apron around his waist. He’d been in his store wrapping sandwiches, his hands in clear plastic mittens.
“What you doin’ out here, boy?” Simmons said. “Ain’t you s’posed to be at school?”
“School’s out,” Tommy grinned. “I won’t see no more school ’til August.”
“You lyin’ to me, boy,” Simmons mock-scowled. “I’m gonna call that truant officer and he’s gonna slap your skinny butt back in your desk.”
“I’m gonna call the truant officer and make him put you in your store,” Tommy said, mimicking Simmons’s scowl. “Ain’t you s’posed to be working and not out here botherin’ me?”
Simmons leaned back his head and laughed. Tommy lifted his hand and the two slapped palms. “I been fixin’ san’wiches, Tommy Brink,” Simmons said, “an’ I made too many. What kind you want?”
“You got that Cajun egg salad?”
Simmons dove inside his store and Tommy studied the street, always the same this time of day. Ol’ Man Wombley rooting through the gutter trying to find decent-sized cigarette butts he could finish. Teritha Mapes on her stoop, a bagged forty of Colt in her hand. By noon she’d be passed out. Down the street Wesley Johnson was sweeping outside his little second-hand shop.
All of the furniture in Tommy’s room had come from Mr Johnson’s store. It might not be new, but it was strong and good. His bed, his chest of drawers, a big soft chair to sit in and look out the window. A radio, a television, a ukulele to strum his fingers on and make music, all were from the store.
His aunt, Francine Minear, had gotten the good things for him. They’d made a big deal out of looking at the stuff in Mr Johnson’s store.
“Slip up into this chair over here, Tommy,” his aunt had said. “It looks soft.”
“It cost a hundred-twenty dollars, Auntie.”
“Whose money gonna buy this chair?” his aunt frowned. “Yours or mine?”
Mister Teddy stepped outside and Tommy’s thoughts of his aunt disappeared, leaving only a smile. She visited every weekend, and sometimes during the week. Tommy knew the surprise visits kept his mother closer to home.
“Here’s your san’wich, boy,” Simmons said, handing Tommy a bag. “An’ apple juice to wash it down.”
“Thanks, Mr Teddy,” Tommy said.
The pair slapped a high five again and Tommy wheeled toward home with the bag in his lap. Yep, everything about the same on the street this morning, just like always.
’Cept maybe over there, Tommy noted, looking down to the corner. That white guy in sunglasses and a big, low-cocked hat parked outside the laundrymat and reading a newspaper like waiting for his clothes to get clean. I ain’t seen him before.
“The bolt punctured the artery that supplied blood to the liver,” Clair said. “Dead within three minutes, but conscious for one at the most.”
I leaned against the morgue wall. Clair had run home at three in the morning to grab a few winks, returned at seven thirty to meet me. Harry was interviewing friends and colleagues of the victim. Despite almost two decades as a detective, Harry never felt comfortable in the morgue, with its astringent air, shining walls and tables, the long wall holding the cabinets of the dead. I always experienced a quiet thrill as I entered: this was where questions were answered.
“No helmet,” I said. “Not that it would have guarded against an arrow.”
“She was nineteen. At that age they feel invulnerable. I’ve seen bicycle accidents where someone tipped over and hit his head, dead of aneurysm in minutes. Don’t get me started on helmetless riders – bikes or motorcycles.”
Clair got a call and excused herself. The door opened, Gillian Fortner moving my way. She was a new evidence tech, in her mid-twenties, short and spiky ’do, huge green eyes behind frame-heavy glasses. She wore black jeans and black tee under the white lab jacket. The former head of the forensics unit had demanded dark slacks, white shirts or blouses and, for the men, ties. The current head, Wayne Hembree, didn’t care, hiring the best young minds he could find, dress and eccentricities be damned.
“What’s up, Gilly?”
“Scraps from the scene.” She tossed plastic evidence bags onto a white marble counter. “Got a couple bottle caps, a rotting hair band, probably been there a year. Pieces busted off the bike. Crumpled cigarette pack that’s weeks old. A few coins. The usual detritus.”
I sorted through the findings, the coins at the bottom of the pile. Two nickels, a dime, a quarter. One shiny penny.
“You printed the coins, of course.”
“Smudged partials on all the coins except the penny. It was as fresh as from the mint.”
“No help from the coins,” I said. “No help from anything.”
Gilly returned to her department, one building down the block. Clair entered, her face serious. Behind her was a slumping man in his sixties, his mahogany face bespeaking a lifetime in the sun. He was big-boned and wearing a gray work shirt and Levi’s tucked into battered Wellingtons. Though strong and fit, sorrow had shrunken him and his clothes could have been hung over strands of vapor.
“Carson, this is Mr Silas Ballard. He’s come to …” She caught herself, the words identify the body harsh and final. “To tell us what he can,” she amended.
Clair led the man to the coolers. I saw his knees tremble and stepped to his back. When Clair opened the door Ballard went down, slowed by my hands under his arms. He began weeping and I helped him to a chair.
The standard meme is, I’m sorry for your loss. But years of repetition on cop shows and the like have turned it into parody, same as asking someone How are you? then turning away because an answer isn’t expected.
“You’re from Shuqualak, Mississippi, sir?” I said, taking another road. “Is that what I heard?”
For a moment the man did nothing. Then he seemed to hear my words and nodded at the floor.
“I’ve been through that area,” I continued, trying to picture the region, to make it my link with the broken man beside me. “I hear it’s some of the richest land to be found in the whole Delta. That seeds will sprout just being waved over the dirt.”
Ballard cleared his throat. “My great grandaddy bought a eighty-acre parcel there in 1887. He planted fifty acres and Ballards been working that land ever since, adding a few acres here and there.”
“How many acres is your place today, sir?”
“Over a thousand.” Even through his grief there was pride in his words.
“Do other family members work the place?” I asked.
Ballard lifted his eyes from his hands. “It’s been said the Ballards could grow anything ’cept more Ballards. I got one brother gone twelve years. A couple cousins up north, no interest in farming. All I had was Kayla. But we had each other.”
“Kayla was going into farming?” I asked.
“She loved …” His voice broke and he swallowed hard. “She loved making things grow, was here getting her agriculture degree. I know all the old ways, Kayla was studyin’ all the new. We figured together we could, we …” His voice broke.
“Did Kayla have a boyfriend, Mr Ballard?” I asked. “A special someone?”
“Tyler Charles, as fine a young man as you’ll find. They was gonna get married when they got out.”
“Where’s Mr Charles today?” I asked. The boyfriend always got the first look. Often it was where we stopped.
“He’s been three months in England. A place called Middlesborough College in North Yorkshire, wherever that is. Tyler got a prize … got to go there free …”
“A grant?”
Ballard nodded. “Ty’s studying botany. He and Kayla was gonna get married in the Fall. I been building them a house on the land. Four bedrooms to handle the kids they wanted.” He looked up. “Finally we was gonna have a bumper crop of Ballards.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“It’s all over,” he whispered to the air.
“Pardon me, sir?”
Ballard swiped tears from his eyes with thick and callused fingertips. He pushed to his feet and shuffled to the window, staring into a wall of gray rain.
“I’d gotten to looking out over the land and seeing the future: fresh crops pushing up year after year. Grandkids playing, a big party at harvest time. Now all I’m ever gonna see is dirt.”
There was little left to say. Clair and I walked Mr Ballard to the door and watched the rain wrap his form. He seemed oblivious to the downpour, shuffling into the forever wreckage of his dreams.
“You all right, Clair?” I asked.
“The worst part of my job,” she said. “Watching lives change for the worse.” She nodded out the door and into the rain, Silas Ballard’s form a dark smudge disappearing into gray. “Everything in that poor man’s life is gone, Carson,” she said quietly. “It’s like the killer got him, too.”