Black Water Transit Read Free

studies his face in the rearview mirror. Nothing. Still, they are there. This is a thing he knows. He can feel them, thousands of them, a tide of little red spiders the size of pinpoints, crawling along the dome of his skull, moving in steady columns under his skin.
    Pike had been told by men he respected—army shrinks at the rehab center in Bethesda—that the spiders weren’t real, that they were a kind of post-traumatic stress reaction to the thing that happened in Ecuador, but right now he still has to deal with the distraction they present. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a plastic container of small orange-and-blue caplets, pops the lid, dry-swallowing two, and then two more. They go down slowly, scraping at his throat: he wishesfor water. The Jimmy reaches the crest and disappears. Two more minutes pass. He takes his foot off the brake, exhales and then inhales, rubs the bullet wounds in his belly, and presses down hard on the gas. In less than fifteen seconds he’s doing eighty miles an hour, and ninety by the time he clears the crest of the hill and comes down onto the straightaway on the far side. The flatbed trailer is up ahead.
    He tops ninety as he overtakes it and now he sees the black Jimmy far up the road. It’s just a tiny little spot in the hazy blue distance, no bigger than a spider, but at this point it has filled up Earl Pike’s mind completely.
    HARLEM
NEW YORK CITY
1015 HOURS
    On the same lovely day, the very first day of summer, down in Harlem, in a shaft of sunlight cutting through a space between two project towers, a girl in a bottle-green dress and ruby-red sneakers got pulled right off the sidewalk in front of the Wagner Houses on Paladino. Two—maybe three—white males in a rusted, navy-blue van. A witness got a partial on a Jersey marker. The girl’s name was Shawana Coryell. She was nine. Cassandra Spandau was catching for the Two Five Sex Crimes squad that morning.
    Cassandra—known as Casey—was just another black PW—a policewoman—but people remembered these strange Chinese eyes she had, pale amber with tiny slivers of gold, and high cheekbones, skin as brown as a gun dog’s eye. She wasn’t what you’d call a beauty—way too tight around the eyes and her lips were too thin—but when you met her, she stayed with you: how shemoved, her voice, and the way a vein in her neck pulsed when she spoke. She had what the academy boys called command presence, but she wore her skin like an armadillo, had nothing outside of business with any of the white cops at the Two Five, male or female. She would tell you, if you let her, that the DEA ran the crack trade and that AIDS was a CIA plot to kill blacks and that Maya Angelou was a great American poet. But she was young, and the young have always been a pain in the ass.
    The point here is, the Two Five CO liked her anyway—who knows why—but it turned out to be important later. About where she came from or what her childhood had been like, the guys at the Two Five never heard a word from her, but her sheet from the academy had her down as born upstate, some little town called Carthage, and the space for the father’s name had
deceased
scrawled across it in big blunt letters, an angry scrawl, somebody pissed off just at the thought.
    Now the Two Five Sex Crimes Unit worked out of a puke-green and baby-shit yellow squad room at the top of a flight of wooden stairs in the back of the house. It had no windows, so it was always lit by two banks of fluorescent tubes. All the white folks looked lime-green and all the black folks looked purple. Sex Crimes at the Two Five was eight guys and two women, all white shields, a couple or more years out of the academy.
    Casey and her partner—a no-neck ex-linebacker named Levon Jamal, who had washed out of a Jets walk-on four years back—were on a domestic dispute at the Taft Houses when they got a 10-10 call just after ten o’clock, a male witness had just seen a young black girl get