there, but I didn’t know enough about the pattern to say what. I took a long pull of the beer and lay back, grinding on Richards’s words, trying to pull her face into focus but instead coming up with Colin O’Shea’s on the streets of Philly years ago.
I was out of my patrol car, walking the west end of my South Street beat like I’d been told not to do. The action on South was down by the riverfront where the street had recently taken on this hip revival. Artists and musicians and slackers pretending to be cre- atives had first moved in to low-rent apartments and storefronts that had been long ignored. And sure enough, the buzz that something different was happening brought more. People showed up to check it out. Capitalism followed the people. Now it was shops and clubs and restaurants and suburbanites with money and time on Saturday night. It wasn’t a new phenomenon. People cluster together, commerce breaks out. The same thing had happened up on Market Street back in the 1680s when the city was first founded and look what came of it.
Of course the other element that followed commerce and people with money in their pockets were the predators. So my shift sergeant’s orders were pretty clear: “Safeguard the tourists and business owners. Stay where the money is, Freeman, east of Eighth Street.”
So I was west of Eighth, checking out rumors of a crack-cocaine stash house that was feeding the area addicts and newbies testing out the new high. I had parked the squad car next to a hydrant, took the portable radio with me and walked down past the “art garden.” The garden was a funky strip of empty lots and old tenements that was festooned with painted designs, murals, gaudily decorated mobiles in the trees and collections of junk turned into baffling artworks. Even at night the collection of buffed aluminum and brushed tin would glitter in the street-lamp light. I ducked into a recessed entryway and frowned at the neon green color the door had been painted and peered around the brickwork. I was following my boy Hector the Collector who was dragging his cuffs a block away and didn’t even bother to check behind himself.
I had pulled up on Hector’s action in the crowds on the east side. For two weeks I’d spotted him making his surreptitious deliveries to the corner dealers and the bartender suppliers in the clubs. I’d even braced him in an alley one night, but my timing had been off and he was empty-handed but for a small wad of twenties that might have had some trace cocaine residue on them but hell, eight out of ten bills on South Street did.
“Yo, officer. What up, man?” he’d said when I spun him and pushed his face into the brick of the side wall of Mako’s Bar and Grill.
“Spread ’em out, Hector,” I said, rapping the inside of his knees with my baton and then going through his sweatshirt pockets and finding the cash. I stepped back and he snuck a look over his shoulder.
“Hey, it’s the walkin’ man,” he said, smiling with his voice.
“Business a little light tonight, Hector?” I said, holding up the roll. “Or you change your hours of collections?”
He shook his head slowly and I knew there was a grin on the other side of it.
“No, sir, officer. You got me all wrong, walkin’ man.”
“You know I’m not wrong, Hector. I’ve been watching your game for weeks. And I told your salesmen, especially your man Sam down at the Palace, not on my shift,” I said, poking the baton in his kidney for emphasis. “And not on my beat.”
Now I knew the grin was gone. I saw the kid’s scalp inch forward, pulled down by his frown. He didn’t like me knowing the name of one of his main dealers who I’d caught passing rock in small plastic bags he tucked under the hollowed-out bottoms of beer schooners. The buyers were giving him huge tips and then always cupping the glasses with their opposite hand as they slid the drink off the bar, and then slipping that hand into their pockets. They thought it was stealthy. I picked up on it in ten minutes. It took less time to get Sam to flip on Hector.
“Hey, man. Chill,” he said, trying to recover. “Why’n’t you just stay in your damn car where it’s nice and warm like the others, man?”