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I said, “Hey, Flash, you doin’ okay?” I had never asked him how he got his street name. I probably didn’t want to know. It was my hope he was just a fast runner.
He merely nodded and scratched his neck with both hands. He looked frantic.
I said, “Can’t score anywhere?”
He said, “Does it look like I scored? Everyone come down so hard on pain pills, can’t find nothin’. H is easier to score. Don’t make no sense.”
I liked that he was comfortable enough with me to discuss felonies. But if cops only dealt with Boy Scouts as informants, nothing would ever get done. It wasn’t the seventies and I wasn’t in Narcotics, so I wouldn’t let him shoot up even if he had some. It was
a tough part of the job that no one ever talked about: dealing with informants meant you were dealing with criminals and drug users.
I said, “Did you find out anything about the guy named Tight?”
“Could be I know him. Skinny as me. A little shorter. Dude’s wrapped way too tight. That’s how he got his street name.” He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair, then scratched it. He dug in his ear, too. I waited as he inspected whatever had come from his ear.
I said, “Real name?”
He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Who knows?” His brown eyes took another look around the green space. “I seen him around. He likes the pills just like me. He hit ’em a lot harder than I do. Says it’s his medicine.”
I didn’t think I had to add that technically it was medicine. It was just that people like him had ruined a useful tool for people in pain.
I said, “You know anything that could help me find this Tight?”
Flash shook his head.
We stood in an awkward silence until he said, “Ain’t you goin’ to ask me about the kid you shot? Ronald Timmons Junior?”
“Nope. Separate investigation. I’m just a subject in that one.”
“The Reverend Caldwell sees it different. He’s got everyone in the Bronx thinking you just kilt that boy. I knew RJ. He wasn’t a bad kid.”
“He made a bad choice.”
“The good reverend says you’re a killer.”
I thought, At least I’m not dead. It was hard for anyone to understand a police shooting. Cops make mistakes. They’re human. But they also have to deal with something like fifty thousand assaults a year. How many of those would result in police fatalities if not for training? No one would ever convince the Reverend Caldwell of that line of reasoning.
I walked out of Convent Garden feeling down again.
CHAPTER 17
HARRY GRISSOM WAS curt on the phone. He said he’d pick me up at my apartment in twenty minutes. I told him I needed forty-five to get ready. Really, I needed to race home and act like I hadn’t done any unauthorized investigations today.
Harry was his usual gruff self when I slid into the front seat of his Suburban. “No questions. No smart-ass comments. And show some respect.”
I had to ask, “Where are we going?”
“What did I just tell you? Enjoy the ride.”
“That’s what they used to tell inmates on their way to Sing Sing.”
“That’s a good metaphor. Even if you just made it up.”
That didn’t make me feel any better as we drove south on West Street. Like a little kid, to make sure I didn’t ask stupid questions, I tried to occupy myself. I guessed where we were going. We had passed the building that housed the DEA, which eliminated one choice.
Of course One Police Plaza was the most likely stop. That’s where the big brass could really lay into me if they thought it might help their position. The public opinion shift on cops was slow to sweep over the profession. But now that it had, some politically minded managers would do anything to make the department look better. That could mean sacrificing a detective like me. Oh, they’d say it was based on facts and evidence, but I’d know better. And there would be little I could do about it.
This line of thought raised my anxiety. A lot. Now I was nervous.
