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Detective Arnold Carson was a portly, middle-aged white man of average height. He was raised by hardworking, poor parents in Burbank. He never liked Blacks until he had a chance to meet some of them and work with them. He never considered himself bigoted, but his partner, Detective Almeta Winters, a Black woman, had helped him over the years to dispel his prejudicial tendencies.

Almeta Winters was a horse of a different color—an eternal optimist and perennial do-gooder. The soft-spoken, dark-skinned woman was tough, cunning, and fair. Her skill at interrogation was renowned in their division, whereas Carson would resort to brutal methods to obtain confessions and information. Together they made a dynamite team of homicide detectives. The differences in their techniques complemented instead of hindered one another.

Lonnie listened to the detectives talk until he fell asleep. When he woke again he felt stronger than before, but he was still in quite a bit of pain. Gathering up all his courage he opened his eyes. He wiggled his fingers and toes to make sure he could feel them.

Neither detective noticed Lonnie's movements. Carson was engrossed in a game of solitaire and Winters was staring out of the window, daydreaming about her upcoming vacation. The sound of Lonnie's voice surprised both of them.

“What a nigga got to do to get a cup of water in this
motherfucka?” Lonnie rasped. His tongue felt swollen and sluggish in his mouth.

Carson jumped to his feet, knocking over the small table he had been playing cards on, and rushed over to Lonnie's bedside. “I'm Detective Carson and I need to ask you a few questions, boy.”

“First thing you need to know is that boys run from the age of one to twelve,” Lonnie said. “Second, I don't give a fuck if you was Commissioner Gordon, I ain't got shit to say to the police. Now like I said before, I want a cup of water.”

Carson laughed at Lonnie's sarcasm. He toyed with the teen's IV as he said smoothly, “I bet you think you sounded tough saying that, little punk. They told me you was crying like a baby when they brought you in here. That's okay though, we won't tell any of your gangster friends that you shitted your pants when you got shot in the stomach.”

Detective Winters stood quietly by the window and watched. “Detective, can I see you out in the hallway for a minute?”

“Sure, no problem. Make sure you don't go nowhere; we'll be back.”

In the hallway they walked down by the elevators because the nurses’ station was close to Lonnie's door.

Winters asked, “How you want to crack this egg?”

“I don't care,” Carson said with a bored expression on his face. “It really don't even make a difference.”

“How 'bout a little good cop, bad cop?”

“No way, Winters. You always get to play the good cop
and I've got to come off like the racist bastard every time.

Not this time. It's my turn to play good cop.”

Winters twisted her lips.

“What, you don't think I can play good cop? I've got a good-cop routine. You just never give me a chance to use it. Remember the little girl that was killing johns? I went in there with my good cop and she told me all about killing those two tricks for their wallets. My good-cop routine got that confession.”

“Man, that don't even count. You didn't have to do nothing on that one but be white. That inbred daughter of a Ku Klux Klan sharecropper didn't want to talk to me 'cause I'm Black. That didn't have nothing to do with your good-cop routine. I've seen you use it before and it's lacking at best. Just face it, I'm the good cop and you're the evil white devil.”

“Yeah, whatever, sister girl. I'm going to get me some coffee.”

“Don't put too much cream in it, Nazi.”

Carson laughed as he punched the button for the elevator. “Sounds like you want this cream in your coffee.”

“You got to be kidding me,” Winters laughed.

Carson stepped onto the elevator. Winters replaced her grin with a kind, concerned look. She entered Lonnie's room and pretended to ignore the belligerent boy. She righted the card table and gathered the deck of cards from the floor. She shuffled them and dealt herself a hand of solitaire.

Lonnie couldn't take the silent treatment.

“What the fuck you want, Miss Piggy?”

Winters placed a red six on a black seven. “Don't pay me no attention. I won't bother you. I know that you're in a lot of pain.”

“This ain't shit,” Lonnie said bravely. “This little shit ain't gone stop me. Where did yo honkey-ass partner go?”

Winters continued her card game. “He went to get some coffee. He hasn't had much sleep in the last few days, you know. Plus he's a little uptight. You would be too if you hadn't had pussy since pussy had you.”

Her witticism sponsored a throaty laugh from Lonnie that triggered a coughing fit. Winters jumped up and poured him a glass of water from the bedside pitcher and helped him drink it.

Lonnie wouldn't say it, but he was grateful for her act of kindness. He had already decided that for a cop she wasn't half bad. He could see that she was really pretty in an understated way and her brownish-black hair had to hang to the middle of her back even though it was swept up in a neat ponytail. Plus she had a body. Even with her blazer on, he could see that she had some nice breasts and her blue jeans hugged her butt.

Sensing she had his full attention, Winters returned to her seat and dealt herself another hand of solitaire. Lonnie thought she had forgotten about him when she said, “Lonnie, I just want to help you.”

“How you gone help me, cop?” Lonnie growled, trying to maintain his tough-guy act.

“I just want to know who killed your friends and shot you. I know that by the code of the streets you guys don't like to talk to the police, but I swear it's different this time. This guy doesn't deserve your silence. Not for what he did to your friends and to you. By you remaining silent all you're managing to do is protect this guy from what he's got coming to him. It doesn't make sense for you to protect this guy.”

“You don't give a fuck about me or my homies, so I wish you would stop acting, cop. This shit is yo job! We live this shit every day! It's our lives! Now you sitting up in here acting like the white man's justice is gone do my homies a bit of good. Bullshit! Fuck the white man's justice! The best way is street justice. You and that cracker partner of yours ain't finta get no promotion off my nigga's blood.”

Winters acknowledged Lonnie's remarks by nodding her head. She dealt herself another hand of solitaire. This kid was turning out to be a little deeper than she had gauged. She decided to try another angle. She still hadn't used her secret weapon. She hated to use it, but this thing needed to be wrapped up so the lieutenant would get off their backs and she could pack for Aruba.

She continued to play solitaire. “Okay, Lonnie, let me put it in the raw for you. You got bigger problems than this little shit. You and all the rest of them hustling over at Harper Court are about to be indicted. You geniuses and entrepreneurs have been serving drugs to the feds for the last eighteen months. The feds, baby. Y'all aren't going to be at
the courts down at 26th and California. Dirksen building. Federal court all the way. They don't even give you your time in years. They give you your sentence in months. You're going to have to go back to your cell and get a piece of paper and a pencil to figure out just how much time they gave you.

“Y'all have been out there serving that shit like it was legal. I must admit it was a good operation, but you boys forgot that you were less than a thousand feet from a school. Tsk, tsk. I've seen the paperwork on this one. They are going to lose you guys in the system—the whole crew. That is except for the big mouths that they've already flipped. Yeah, that's right. It's amazing just how much the thuggiest nigga will tell when he faced with all that time. A thousand months at least is a guarantee on this one. Your boss Diego is lucky he got killed. They were going after him on a kingpin beef. That means they could execute him. The rest of you guys they just wanted to park for the rest of your natural life.”

Suddenly Lonnie felt sick and it didn't have anything to do with his bullet wound.

Without looking up from her game, Winters moved in for the kill. “Now before you start talking that innocent shit, think about this. You need me. I can make this thing with the feds go away. And I'm the only one that can do it. But you've got to scratch my back before I can scratch yours. If I get the name of the shooter, the feds will forget they ever heard of you. If I don't, you can look forward to
life in the fed pen. But we can avoid all that if you give me a name and run down the whole scene to me. You can't incriminate yourself because we need you to testify against this asshole.”

Lonnie was sweating. Everything Detective Winters said dropped on him like an anvil. Drug indictments of the sort she mentioned were numerous in the ghetto, but he never thought he would see the day his name was on one of those lists. It was a given he didn't want to sit in the joint for the rest of his days. The choices she gave him really weren't choices at all; no matter how cleverly she disguised them, they were ultimatums.

“I'll tell you whatever you want,” Lonnie conceded, sensing this was one jam he couldn't bluff his way out of. “I'll give you this stud's name, but you got to hold me down. I know all about this cat—where he lay his head and all that. Just give me a minute to think this shit over.”

“Okay,” Winters said, adjusting the straps of her shoulder holster as she left the room. It was all she could do to hide her smile of triumph.

If Lonnie would have seen the smile on her lips, his ghetto instinct could have warned him against trusting her. It didn't take long for him to mull over the situation. He really didn't have any alternative but to tell her the truth.

“Detective Winters!” he called out in a slightly, shaky voice.

Winters peeked into the room. “You ready to let me know something? Or are you still wasting my time?”

“Is you sure the feds gone forget about me?” Lonnie asked.

Winters stepped into the room and shut the door. “As sure as my asshole points toward the ground.”

“Alright, the nigga name is Donald Haskill. They call him Don-Don or Don. He stay over on 64th and Langley. The house number is 6417.”

Winters pulled a small notebook and pen out of her pocket and flipped it open. “I got the name. How's about a description?”

“He 'bout six feet, I think. Caramel complexion. No real face hair with short, wavy hair on his head. I'd say the nigga wear about 160 pounds.”

“That's good enough. Now tell me what happened in that backyard and don't lie. We already know that it was drug related.”

Lonnie took a sip of water. “The shit went down like this. Don called Diego and told my man he had a slab of some good shit for sale. We checked it out and the shit was super-tight, so we agreed to buy it for twenty gees. He told us to meet him at the building at twelve that night and bring the scratch. When we got there it looked like everything was straight. We made the buy and we was about to leave when Don grabbed Sajak and blew his brains out. Next he shot me in the stomach, then I guess he killed Diego.”

“You're lying,” Winters said, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Huh?”

“I said you're lying. First off, we found a shotgun with Sajak's prints all over it in the garage. It hadn't been fired. The slug that we dug out of Diego and the one out of your stomach didn't match the one from Sajak. We found your gun with your prints and blood all over it. Also there was gunpowder residue on your hands. We know that either you or Diego shot Sajak. From what we could patch together it looks like you guys tried to rob this kid. All the time, you smart guys underestimated him.” Detective Winters stood, buttoned her blazer, and headed for the door. “Thanks for your cooperation. We'll be in touch.”

“That's all!” Lonnie shouted. “I spill my motherfucking guts and that's all! How I'm gone know if you cleared my damn name! Come back here! This shit ain't right!”

His words fell on deaf ears. As Winters walked to the elevator she could still hear Lonnie ranting and raving. In the cafeteria she purchased a cup of coffee and sat with her partner.

Carson folded the
Tribune
he had been reading and waited for his partner to speak.

Winters blew on the cup of steaming coffee. “Hold on to your shirt. The kid we're looking for about that fire is really popular. Lonnie says that Don shot him and killed our two victims. We know that's a lie. The kid had to be the one that did Diego, though. Little asshole is up there lying his ass off.”

“Shit!” Carson exclaimed. “One kid did all that in one night. He was pretty busy. There must have been some serious money involved.”

“Yeah, twenty thousand and a kilo of coke. It was the kid's coke. From Lonnie's story and the way it was laid out, they tried to rob the kid and he outsmarted them. He must have had some help, but Lonnie didn't mention it. Don't forget about the girl that was hit by the truck by the house fire. It was coke all over the ground. Not enough to get much of anything for the lab, but the wrapping let us know it had to be a kilo. I'm thinking that the girl had his drugs too. She gets chased out into traffic by him. He's trying to get his drugs or kill her or both. Tow truck hits her, that's the end of that kilo. I don't think it was the same kilo that they tried to rob him for. I think it was another kilo. That makes two kilos. Two kilos, twenty-thousand bucks, and Don-Don. I can see why this kid was on the warpath. It looks like he was being crossed out of his drugs from all sides.”

Carson shook his head. “You had to do something special to get that out of the kid. What did you do, promise the little punk your hand in marriage?”

“It didn't take all that. I simply told the little punk about the feds’ case against him and his friends. I told him I could get his name off the feds’ list.”

Carson looked confused. “What case are you talking about?”

“The one I made up.”

“And he fell for that shit?” Carson asked, chuckling heartily. “Damn, Winters, I'm proud of you. You're getting downright sneaky.”