LITMIR.BIZ

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      That would never happen again. His arms had been more like spindles than steel cables in those last years of his life. His chest had been a pitiful rack. And now he was gone forever.

      She heard the sound of a network talk show from the living room. Her mother was home from work and relaxing. Marvia made her way upstairs, her legs heavy and fatigued. Even the energy she’d got from the shower had been only temporary. She passed Jamie’s room—once her brother, Tyrone’s—and heard the squeaks and bleeps of a Nintendo. She paused for a moment and heard Jamie’s voice, and his friend Hakeem White’s.

      She managed a weary smile and opened her own bedroom door. She closed it behind her and caught a glimpse of herself in the old oval mirror on her chiffonier. She looked away.

      She slipped the revolver from her waistband and locked it in a case that she replaced on her closet shelf. She didn’t sleep with the gun under her pillow or in her night table drawer. Even a cop could make a mistake. Especially a sleepy cop, awakened in the middle of the night, seeing a silhouette in her room.

      Only once in her career had Marvia fired at a human being, and she knew cops who went their entire careers without doing so. The incident had been almost banal—at the outset. She’d been on patrol duty, had parked her cruiser and stepped into a convenience store on College Avenue to use the bathroom. She was on the graveyard shift and it had been the quietest night in weeks.

      She froze with her hand halfway to the glass door. Three thugs in ski masks and hooded sweatshirts were pointing Uzi’s at a terrified clerk. There wasn’t time to call for backup. She had her gun in her hand and took a step inside the store before the bandits turned. The smallest of the three started firing and Marvia put two .40 caliber rounds into the largest body mass, the robber’s torso, exactly as she’d been taught.

      That robber went down, the others dropped their weapons and scampered past the clerk and out the back door. Marvia called in help and the robbers were caught. The one she had shot was dead.

      The two robbers who’d run were boys of fifteen and sixteen. The dead one was a girl of twelve, the sister of the fifteen-year-old. Marvia made it to the parking lot before she threw up. She’d spent six months with the department headshrinker after that and she still had flashbacks. Thank God, not very often.

      She crossed the hall again and knocked on her son’s door and let herself into his room. Jamie let Hakeem finish the Nintendo game. He bounced across the room and hugged Marvia. “Can Hakeem stay for dinner?”

      Marvia smiled and said he could. Then, reluctantly, she went downstairs.

      Gloria Plum looked up when Marvia walked into the living room. “I didn’t hear you come in. You could have said hello.”

      “You were watching TV. And I just needed a minute to myself. You wouldn’t have wanted to see me in the shape I was in.”

      Gloria clicked the TV remote and the screen went black. “You going to cook tonight, Marvia?”

      “I was hoping you would. Mom, I caught a homicide today. Probable homicide—I have to hear from Bisonte.”

      Gloria looked up at her daughter. Gloria wore her hair in a blond permanent wave. Her fingernails clicked on the plastic body of the remote. They were long and red except for one that was gold with a simulated diamond in its center. Every time Marvia looked at her, she vowed to keep her own weight down.

      “You’re home now, Marvia.”

      “I know. Jamie’s friend Hakeem is staying for dinner.”

      “Nobody asked me,” Gloria said.

      Marvia sighed. “I’ll order pizza.”

      Gloria pointed the remote at the TV and the screen sprang back to life. Marvia picked up the cordless telephone and dialed a pizza delivery. She knew everyone’s preference, including Hakeem’s; there was no need to survey the household.

      When she’d given the order she went out onto the porch and sat down. At least she didn’t have to worry about drive-by shootings in this neighborhood. Berkeley was holding its own. She’d been away only a few months, but when she returned she was afraid of the changes she would find. But there were few of them.

      She felt a pang and realized she was missing her father again. Marcus’s death had been more a release than a loss. It had broken Marvia’s heart to see him fading, to hear his labored breathing in those last months. Worst of all, she had seen the fury on his face when he became too weak to care for himself and had to be helped.

      She was over it now, especially when she stayed focused on other things in her life. But once in a while she let her guard down and then she would feel the catch in her throat and the sting in her eyes.

      Maybe that was why she had dumped sweet, timid Hobart Lindsey and married Willie Fergus. Fergus had been her mentor in Europe, and when their paths crossed again, he as a sheriff’s department sergeant in Reno and she as a cop in Berkeley, she had been quick to accept his offer of marriage.

      What an old-fashioned concept. Accepted his offer of marriage.

      She didn’t know that he expected to own her.

      A pair of headlights turned onto Bonita, and Marvia hurried down the steps and to the curb before the driver could cruise past.

      * * * *

      Gloria and Marvia sat at the head and foot of the dinner table; Jamie and Hakeem faced each other across its width. They talked about their schoolwork and Nintendo games and the NBA playoffs and about trying out for the Benjamin Banneker Junior High baseball team. They’d been friends all their lives.

      They were a shortstop-second base combination and they were going to play together for Berkeley High and UC and then go to the big leagues as a team.

      “So you caught a homicide?”

      Marvia was startled. She’d been listening to the boys make their plans, she was a million miles away from Barbara Jordan Boulevard and the crimson-faced corpse sprawled on the table in front of the microphone. She’d have to call in a consultant to tell her what Radio Red’s last script said. What the little Braille dimples meant.

      “Marvia?”

      “Mom. I’ve been getting caught up. I was lucky to get my job back. And my stripes.”

      “A good thing you did. How did you think you were going to meet your responsibilities, Marvia?”

      Marvia clenched her teeth. She wasn’t going to get drawn into this argument again. Gloria had never forgiven her for divorcing James Wilkerson, Jamie’s dad. There had been no end of cutting remarks when Wilkerson made major and won his Distinguished Flying Cross in the Gulf War, and since he’d remarried and moved to Texas and won a seat in Congress, Marvia had the feeling that Gloria would rather have kept her ex-son-in-law and disposed of her daughter than the other way around.

      “They had it on the early edition of the news.” Gloria lifted a slice of pizza and nibbled at its pointed tip. “They showed the radio station and they had a telephone interview with the manager, that Sunny woman.”

      “Sun, Mom. Sun Mbolo. She’s from Ethiopia.”

      “Had to be something like that. She was dressed like an Egyptian queen.”

      “She’s Falasha, Mom. Anyway, it looks like a homicide but it might not have been. I mean, the man must have weighed three hundred pounds, and he was old.”

      Gloria raised one eyebrow. “How old?”

      Marvia shook her head. She looked at the pizza in its corrugated carton. She stood up and went to the kitchen for a beer. She opened the bottle, picked up a glass and carried them back to the table with her.

      Gloria waited.

      Jamie and Hakeem were reliving a sandlot game their team had won.

      “An old man, Mom.”

      “You said that.

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