Blackbird Read Free Page B

a pound of gold hanging from each earlobe. Her hair was piled up in ringlets that flashed with opal-coloured highlights. I knew that if we were out chasing leads or doing interviews there’d be nothing grabbable attached to her ears and nothing at all on the fingers of her gun hand, but on this call she was dressed for working inside the tape.
    The plastic ID she’d just used a corner of to winkle out a popcorn hull stuck between her incisors said Mouncey, Jacquanda S., Detective II-CID, but everybody called her M. She didn’t look much like police, but she had been a major-crimes detective for almost ten years and earned three commendations for things she’d done while being shot at, two of the shooters having had to settle for obituaries.
    Looking over her outfit, I said, ‘You put me in mind of a fleeing felon.’
    ‘The job just a day gig,’ she said. ‘Nights, I out perpetrating.’
    The passing landscape of miscellaneous storefront businesses started phasing into classier re-zoned conversions, upscale shops and finally older homes set back on spaciouslots under mature oaks, sweetgums and longleaf pines, surrounded by acres of tailored, unseasonably green lawns with automatic sprinkler systems. Maybe money didn’t buy happiness, but it bought lots of grass.
    M said, ‘How the single life treating you, Lou?’
    Listening to the dull cardiac thumping of the wind-shield wipers for a minute, I took in a deep breath and blew it out along with the half-dozen bullshit answers that had occurred to me. I wasn’t much good at casual social lies and hardly ever wasted time or energy on them any more.
    ‘I don’t seem to be very good at solitude, M.’
    ‘Like to see the man that is,’ she said. ‘Y’all just be layin’ around suckin’ Bud Lite till you stufficate under all them dirty socks and pizza boxes.’ She looked at me with some expression or other for a couple of seconds before deciding to go directly for the throat. ‘Seen them two girls of yours waiting for they ride after school yesterday,’ she said. ‘Both of ’em lookin’ a little floopy, Lou.’
    The only replies that came to mind were defensively self-serving and useless, and I didn’t respond. Knowing Mouncey would have used one of the tac frequencies to talk to somebody on Wayne’s crew as she was bringing the car around, I said, ‘Get anything at all from out there?’
    ‘Uniform name Hardy catch it and buzz Wayne,’ she said. ‘Call from a pre-pay, sound like a white lady, most likely local, but wouldn’t give ’em no name. Crime Scene up there a half-hour now. It that field across the interstate, west side the tracks.’
    I visualised the area, which I remembered as being mostly deserted, and started pawing around in my pockets in search of camphor.
    Noticing this, Mouncey said, ‘Told me this a fresh one, Lou.’
    I stopped pawing and said, ‘Any civilians at the scene when Wayne got there?’
    ‘’Bout a bo-zillion of ’em, way he carryin’ on. Man just cain’t handle people jackin’ with his clues. I told ’em leave ev’thing like it is till we get there and e’body stay sharp cause the Man on his way.’
    ‘Why the hell’d you do that?’
    ‘Keep they sphincters tight,’ she said. ‘Discipline crucial, got a outfit like this one.’
    Humming a tune from ‘More Than A Woman’, she swung left through the red light at Hancock, setting off a massive chorus of horns and squealing brakes, made a hard right under the trestle and took Springer north between the lake and the wooded railroad right-of-way to the zigzag below the double bridges of the expressway.
    Coming out from under the vaulted concrete, we rounded the curve under a high billboard and saw what looked like every patrol car, fire truck and EMT unit in town parked at random angles along a quarter of a mile of the access road shoulder and out across the field wherever the ground was solid enough, their red and blue roof lights twinkling.
    ‘Be a good