Mamma seemed to recognize the question in my face and had said: “Earl is a man. He ain’t never gave birth to no daughters who smoked they life away and they children’s lives to ash with that crack. It’s us women who carry that burden, Mr. Max. If you can stop it. Stop it.”
That next day I’d started tracking Hector the Collector and tonight the trail was ending.
“I wouldn’t put your people in harm’s way, Mamma. I’ll be here,” I said and went to the phone and called the narcotics squad. I’d been feeding them my surveillance for a week. Now I told them one of the main players was in the building. The sergeant on the other end asked a few questions, had a quick conversation with someone while cupping the mouthpiece of his phone, and told me they’d move on it with an entry team within the hour. I winked at Mamma Blue as I left her kitchen and she narrowed her dark eyes and turned back to her simmering pot.
I told Earl to stay inside for a while and the giant man either chuckled or belched and said: “Wasn’t plannin’ nothin’ but.”
I went out on the sidewalk and took up a spot in the shadows just east of the restaurant where I could watch Hector’s stash house. The night was warm with the smell of alley trash mixed with exhaust fumes. If I smoked I would have lit a cigarette. I hated stakeouts. After twenty minutes my portable radio hummed with static and I stepped further back and answered.
“Just passed your squad, Freeman. You on foot again?” It was my narcotics friends.
“Affirmative.”
“Switching to tack four,” he said. I switched the channel on the radio to a less congested frequency where half the district wouldn’t be listening in.
“We’re calling in some patrol backup for a perimeter and we’ll be going in through the back. You’ll have some help when we go, Freeman. But you’ve got the front for now.”
“I’m ten-thirteen.”
A young couple came out of Mamma’s and got in their car. When they pulled out, I saw their headlights slide over a dark figure across the street who was moving down the east side alley, the word police stenciled onto his back in bold yellow letters. I walked back down to Mamma’s entrance where Earl was standing, watching his customers drive away.
“Do me a favor, Earl,” I said. “Keep everybody inside for the next few minutes.”
He nodded his head, but his eyes stayed level, focused on something over my shoulder. I turned and saw Hector coming out of the west side alley, just starting to pull his sweatshirt hood up over his head, and he looked into my face.
“We’re going in,” the entry team’s leader spat out from the radio at my side and the crackle was like a starter’s pistol. Hector bolted.
“I got a runner,” I barked into the radio and started sprinting.
Most foot pursuits are useless. Belts and radios and handguns and batons flailing on your hips. And most cops won’t muster the kind of adrenaline it takes to outrun the fuel of fear that is jacking up the guy they’re chasing. But Hector had become a special case for me, and he wasn’t much of a track star. Within a block I was gaining on him. He made a stupid move no non-athlete should attempt by trying to hurdle and slide over the hood of a parked car to make the corner. He went down and I heard that ugly snap of leg bone when he hit the street. He’d gained one knee when I got a fistful of hood and hair and yanked him back down to the ground.
The kid reacted to the pain by squirming, but I put my own knee into the middle of his back and pushed his face into the asphalt with one hand while using the other on my radio.
“This is Freeman. My runner is in custody,” I said, then had to catch my breath and look around. “Uh, corner of South and Thirteenth.”
Hector had smartened up and quit struggling when the headlights of a car caught us from the north and stopped. I squinted into the brightness and heard the car door slam.
“Goddamn, Freeman. What kinda squirrelly animal you got there?”
When the uniform and the face stepped up I recognized Patrolman O’Shea. He was too handsome to be a real cop, and every time I saw him he had a bemused look on his Irish face.