Burning Time by Leslie Glass Read Free Book Online

thewindows weren’t boarded up. They were just holes. She could see the pigeons flying in and out.
    What scared April was getting a call about a dead body in one of those buildings and having to go in and find it. Down an elevator shaft, or just lying on the floor in a room upstairs. She used to dream about it every night. Getting that call and having to climb the stairs looking for it, having no idea which room it was in. Or what else she might find. On the night shift when she was a rookie she confessed this to one person, and then everybody knew.
    Long-ago advice from her mother: Never tell your weak place. People can break you from there. After she told about her weak place, April worried that they would get her there when that body turned up.
    They didn’t, though. When she finally got the call she had known would come because she dreamed it too many times for it not to happen, her supervisor told her she didn’t have to go in. He didn’t break her in her weak place after all. He told her to wait for backup. It was on the third floor of a walk-up. Boarded up except for the front door.
    April stood downstairs that day, thinking they would make her go in when they got there because you weren’t supposed to have any weak places in NYPD. If she didn’t go in when they asked her to, she wouldn’t get promoted. She’d have to stay on foot patrol in Bed-Stuy all her life. That was another scary prospect.
    April knew whenever she was really frightened from deep inside it always came from something her mother told her, something Chinese that didn’t make sense in America. Her mother talked constantly, and couldn’t seem to stop. Her father hardly spoke at all. Sai Woo said she had to fill the silences her husband made or else ghosts would come in and fill them with wickedness. April saidthere weren’t any ghosts in America, and her father might have something to say if Sai Woo gave him a place to let his thoughts out.
    This was when her mother looked at her with the greatest scorn and dropped another one of her priceless pearls that had nothing to do with anything.
    “Sun rises in the East, goes down in the West,” like April was supposed to know what that meant.
    Still, April did know what it meant. It meant there
were
ghosts in America, and you were supposed to eat the ones that plagued you just like in China. If you devoured them, they healed you. In China they would devour anything at all. If it was hairy or bony or truly awful, they ground it up into powder, put it in boiling water, and drank it.
    As April stood outside the Bed-Stuy building waiting for backup that day, she felt old China crowding all around her. If she were a true American cop, she’d have no trouble climbing those stairs and looking at the body. So what? How bad could it be? But if she were truly Chinese under everything, she’d have to consume some little something, a hair or a piece of dust, something from the scene. If she didn’t do that, the weak place would always be there inside of her.
    But something magical happened when her supervisor showed up and said, “All right, April, you stay down here and secure the area.”
    “No, it’s okay. I can do it,” she had assured him.
    She climbed up the three flights of stairs, not first maybe. But she was there when they found it. It had been there for months. There wasn’t even any smell anymore, nothing like a dead animal decaying behind a wall. There was just a pile of rags and hair and bone with some dried skin that looked like leather covering it. Was this what Iwas afraid of, she asked herself. She decided she was all American and didn’t have to consume it.
    So this was what I wanted, she thought now, going up the stairs into the dorm where Ellen Roane lived. The place was gloomy and looked almost deserted. The girl would have been better off living at home. Better address downtown. But not the freedom to do as she pleased. April went inside. There was a fat guard sitting at a