Our rush hours aren’t calculated in terms of time. The auto plants change shifts on a staggered schedule, carving the heavy traffic periods into quarters, thirds, halves of each day; the windows of opportunity are narrow and largely a matter of luck. I was shoehorning my way into the stream of assembly line workers from Ypsilanti and Rawsonville when my cell rang. I recognized Kopernick’s number. We were phone pals now.
I took one hand off the wheel just long enough to answer and activate the speaker. A wall of tractor-trailer rigs had me in the center of a rolling canyon and the tension cramped my knuckles and ran a stiff rod up my back.
“Something.” The cop wasn’t much for hellos. “Got a hot date tonight?”
“Not since Bush forty-one. Where and when?”
“Better write it down. Place we’re meeting, addresses don’t count.”
“Give me time to pull over. I’m in the mixing bowl.” I rang off, found my opening, and scraped out of the pocket between a Corrigan Oil tanker and a cattle truck. That gave me ten seconds to change lanes again and knock a corner off the exit onto Washtenaw Avenue. I keep the monster engine tuned up; by the time the horns responded they were whispers in my wake. I coasted into a convenience store lot and found a space around the corner of the building where the employees parked. Got out my pad and pen and called him back. “Shoot,” I said. “That’s just an expression, Detective.”
“Screw you.” He gave me the directions, as fast as I could take them down in my bastard shorthand. They weren’t nearly as complicated as a scavenger hunt in Borneo.
“You’re sure this is in Detroit?” I said when he stopped.
“Used to be. Seven-thirty.” And he was gone.
By the time I got back to the suburbs I’d recovered enough from my Carver’s experience to chance chili con carne and a beer on tap at the place in Southfield, but Claire was off duty and the waitress I got mixed up my order. I settled for tomato soup and a can of Miller Lite. You can’t go home again.
From what little I could draw from the directions Kopernick had given me, the neighborhood didn’t dress for dinner. I stopped home long enough to change into a turtleneck, corduroys, and a leather windbreaker, all in grays and browns, which blend into darkness better than cat-burglar black. When it came time to accessorize, I hesitated over my veteran Chief’s Special, then put it in a drawer, took down the Ruger Blackhawk from the top shelf of the closet, checked the cylinder, and strapped the woven nylon holster to my belt. Packing a piece is never comfortable, but the Magnum felt like a bootheel against my kidney. Maybe it was how I’d come by it and who gave it to me. But something about the place I was headed told me I might need more firepower than the .38.
After seven in early spring, Detroit from the air looks like a spill of costume jewelry with black patches in it, like blank spots on a medieval map. The lighted sections are safer than the dark, but unless you’re looking down from above, you don’t know you’ve wandered into a potential cancer spot until you’re tangled in shadow. Trust a Morlock like Stan Kopernick to stake out one of those for a meet. I drove around a four-block radius three times looking for the place. I’d lived all my adult life in the city, but where I was supposed to be that night might have been smuggled in from North Korea for all I recognized it.
Finally I pulled over to a curb that had half deteriorated into a dirt berm, fished the pencil flash out of the glove compartment, and re-read the directions from the start. When I looked up again through the window on the passenger’s side, the spill from the flash reflected off a triangle of broken glass; what was left of a window in a building as dark as the night behind it, and invisible except for that dusty glow.
I got out and locked up, taking the flash. There wasn’t a star in sight; maybe none ever visited that street. It wasn’t even a street, really: The cracked pavement ended fifty yards from the corner in a cement wall supporting the Fisher Freeway. The house—if it was a house—was the only one on that stretch of asphalt.
The grass in front, where it wasn’t leaning over every which way, was almost waist high and sopping with dew. Before stepping that direction I bent down and pulled my socks up over my pants cuffs. That might confuse some of the chiggers long enough to let me pass.
Rats were something else. The city turns them out on a conveyor, like cars, too many to know fear of man. I aimed the flash at the ground ahead and swept the beam from side to side. It glinted off shattered glass, found enough used condoms to skip a generation, and at least one pair of red eyes that dared me to approach before they turned and withdrew on tiny unhurried feet.
My toe struck something solid. I jumped—it could be a wine jug or a human rib cage—and stabbed at it with the beam. It was a twisted length of tarnished steel ending in a rectangle with block letters peering through a rash of rust:
H TI GS
Some sharpshooter had punched out three of the letters with rounds big enough to choke a frog, but a student of regional history hardly needed them to fill in the blanks.
Hastings: a collector’s item, that sign. That truncated chunk of street might have been all that was left of one of the most sinister neighborhoods in town. After decades of snipings, rapes, drug murders, and domestic wars, City Hall had eliminated the problem the way it did most of the others: demolished it to make way for a freeway. The thrum of passing traffic belonged to a planet in some other galaxy.
I’d stood in one spot too long. Something pricked an ankle, burning like a red-hot needle. I hoped it wasn’t a plague flea. I stooped and struck at it with the flash. That only barked the shin. I continued forward at a brisker pace, all the while sweeping the path for rats and snakes. I kept the flash pointed down to let my eyes adjust to the gloom.
A slab of crumbling concrete stood in for a front porch. I mounted it and trained the light on a door spray-painted with a gang sign and someone’s idea of social expression; FUCK is a hard word to misspell, but he’d managed. The place was a house, all right, a mid-century saltbox sided with asbestos tile. No illumination came from inside. Detroit Edison would have forgotten the address long ago, and if it was serving currently as a crack house—another local industry, like breeding rats—the oil lamps weren’t burning. There was a lamppost on the corner, but no city employee was coming to that neighborhood to replace a burned-out bulb.
I tried the door; it opened inward with no more resistance than grit on the hinges.
That stopped me for a second. I don’t care for unlocked doors, not where I live. They’d led me into deadfall traps more than once. The Ruger came out. I snapped off the flash, put it away, and followed the revolver over the threshold.
Spring nights are rarely warm in Michigan. They’re colder still when trapped in a damp enclosure with no light. I nudged the door shut with a heel and stepped to the side, putting a solid wall between me and the grayer dark of outside.
But even pupils slowing with age couldn’t miss a cigar-end glowing in the dark at the far end of the room. I cocked the Ruger. In that black hole on the back side of civilization, the noise was almost as loud as a blast from the barrel.