Cold City Streets Read Free Page B

you ever been hit with a stun gun before, Paul?”
    His body relaxed, his face suddenly shifting from anger to worry. “Look, I didn’t do nothing. I swear. I just picked up the piece, man; I swear to God!”
    His wife had had enough. “Get off him!” she screamed. She dove at the constable with her hands in claw form, trying to rake his face with her nails as she screamed like a banshee. “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!”
    But she was tiny, with bird-like limbs, and the detectives pulled her off of the pile and held her down with ease, the pain written across her face more from the anguish of the moment than the restraint, her eyelids clenched firm. Mariner pulled a wrist tie from his coat pocket and slipped the loop over her hands, quickly pulling it tight so that she was immobilized.
    It took just a few moments to read the couple their rights before leading them back through the house to the street outside, up the sidewalk with their heads hung low, to the back seat of the detectives’ unmarked brown sedan. The neighbors continued to watch as the blue-and-red-and-white strobe light of the adjacent police cruiser spun its pattern across the darkened street.

3
     
    The legal clinic sat on a side road just off of Ninety Seventh Street, in an unofficial part of Chinatown. The attached brown brick building had a big front window from its long period as a retail store. Its neighbors were an herbal remedy shop on one side, with green window script in both English and Chinese, and a storefront evangelist on the other. It was on the tougher end of the long street’s downtown section, just north of the graffiti-strewn railroad underpass, a block from One Hundred Seventh Avenue.
    Sensibly located, the adjacent Boyle McCauley neighborhood had been lower income since its founding at the turn of the last century. It was mostly small bungalows, rooming houses or walkup apartments over aging storefronts. Little Italy dialed up the neighborhood pride a few blocks to the east, but as a whole, the area needed help. It started life in the earliest days of the twentieth century, as the neighborhood where the “less desirable” immigrant population could be housed while fulfilling service roles in the new downtown business core, which separated it from the early west side of the city and Inglewood, once the domain of politicians and career makers, now recovering itself.
    Crime was always higher around Ninety Seventh, particularly in Norwood, a residential neighborhood north of One Hundred Eleventh Avenue that was slowly being reclaimed, gentrified. There was a push on a plan to mix income levels in areas around downtown, to end the concentration of poverty. Lots of folks thought it was a great idea, while just as many worried about how the poor would be able to afford so much improvement, or how they’d feel about potentially being moved into subsidized housing halfway across the city. They feared, maybe rightfully, that it would be difficult for the social assistance agencies concentrated near the neighborhood to offer the same level of service. Relationships and trust would be lost.
    It weighed on Jessica Harper as she drove downtown from her townhouse in Castledowns, near the city’s northern border. Her clients were usually destitute, often uneducated or with poor English skills. They needed her nearby, she reasoned.
    She followed the business- and strip-mall-laden Ninety Seventh most of the way, six-lane traffic heavy and slow, most people smart enough to drop their speed to account for the slippery conditions. The occasional young guy driving like suicide was on his mind cut around other cars like they weren’t there. The practical brown sedan had winter tires, and Jessica was in no great rush. New blades kept the windshield clear. A small dreamcatcher totem hung from her rear-view mirror.
    The drive gave her time to think, to plan ahead. Her non-profit had a lease on the clinic’s building for another decade. But she