“Then to what do I owe the honor of this telephone call, Mr. O’Hara?”
“Who’s been covering the Northwest Philly rapes?”
“Why do you want
to know, Mickey?”
“I think I’m onto something.”
“Are you?” Gerry Kennedy asked.
“Yeah, I am,” Mickey said.
“Odd, but I don’t seem to recall assigning this story to you.”
“Are we going to play games? In which case, Kennedy, go fuck yourself. I get paid whether or not I work.”
“I assigned the story to Cheryl Davies,” Kennedy said. “She’s not going to like it if I take it away from her and give it to you.”
“Fuck her.”
“I would love to,” Gerry Kennedy said. “But I don’t think it’s likely. What do you want with her, Mickey?”
“Not a goddamned thing,” Mickey said. “What I’m going to do, Kennedy, is cover this myself. And you decide whose stuff you want to run.”
“How about working together with her, Mick?” Gerry Kennedy asked. “I mean, she’s been on it for three weeks—”
He broke off in midsentence when he realized that Mickey O’Hara had hung up.
SIX
“Good afternoon, sir,” Jesus Martinez, who was of Puerto Rican ancestry, and who was five feet eight inches tall and weighed just over 140 pounds, said to the man who had reached into the rear seat of a 1972 Buick sedan in the parking lot of the Penrose Plaza Mall at Lindbergh Avenue and Island Road in West Philadelphia, and taken out two shopping bags, one of them emblazoned John Wanamaker & Sons.
“What the fuck?” the man replied. His name was Clarence Sims, and he was six feet three and weighed 180 pounds.
“Been doing a little shopping, have you, sir?”
“Get out of my face, motherfucker,” Clarence Sims replied.
“I’m a police officer,” Jesus Martinez said, pulling up his T-shirt, which he wore outside his blue jeans, so that his badge, through which his belt was laced, came into sight. “May I see your driver’s license and vehicle registration, please?”
Clarence Sims considered, briefly, the difference in size between them, and his options, and then threw the John Wanamaker & Sons shopping bag at Jesus Martinez and started running.
He got as far as the Buick’s bumper when he stumbled over something. The next thing Clarence Sims knew he was flat on the ground, with an enormous honky sitting on him, and painfully twisting his arms behind him. He felt a steel handcuff snap shut around one wrist, and then around the other.
And the little spick was in his face, the spick and a gun, shoved hard against his nostrils.
“Don’t you ever call me motherfucker, you motherfucker!” Officer Jesus Martinez said, furiously. “I ought to blow your fucking brains out, cocksucker!”
“Hay-zus,” the enormous honky said, “cool it!”
“I don’t like that shit!” Officer Martinez replied, still angry. But the revolver barrel withdrew from Clarence Sims’s nostril.
Clarence Sims felt hands running over his body. From one hip pocket a switchblade was removed, from the other his wallet. His side pockets were emptied, spilling a collection of coins and chewing gum wrappers onto the macadam of the parking lot. His groin was probed dispassionately, and then he felt the hands moving down his legs. From his right sock, fingers removed a joint of marijuana, a small plasticine bag of marijuana—known on the street as a “nickel bag,” because they sold for five dollars—and a book of matches.
“Oh, my God!” a female voice said, in shock.
“It’s all right, ma’am,” Clarence heard the spick say, “we’re police officers. Is this your car, ma’am?”