Dead of Night by Barbara Nadel Read Free Book Online Page A

crazy,
     unless . . .
    ‘You wouldn’t be lying to me, would you, Zeke?’ Martha said.
    ‘Lying?’
    ‘Going up to Brush Park and yelling at Miller,’ she said.
    ‘No!’
    She looked at him with an expression of doubt on her face. ‘Because it don’t do no good,’ she said. ‘One day it’ll get you
     into trouble. You know how he is!’
    Zeke lowered his head and said, ‘I know it.’
    ‘And anyway, Samuel wouldn’t like it,’ Martha said. ‘And you don’t want to make no trouble for him, not after all what he
     done.’
    Zeke lowered his head still further. Then he said, ‘But I ain’t going to Brush Park, Martha.’
    ‘Ma! I’m late for school! Can we go!’ Keisha ran into the kitchen in a whirlwind of thick scarves, school bags and gloves.
    Martha raised her eyes to the ceiling and then quickly put her coat on and grabbed her car keys. ‘I have to go,’ she said
     to Zeke. ‘Go to the river if you must, but be careful.’
    ‘Ma!’
    Keisha was running to the front door. Martha followed her.
    ‘Don’t you even think about going to Brush Park, old man!’ Martha yelled just before she followed her daughter out into the
     snow.
    ‘I won’t!’ Zeke called out after her. Then he said softly to himself, ‘I promise, no Brush Park, honest injun.’
    The convention centre where the police were doing all their talking and entertaining of foreigners wasn’t in Brush Park. It
     was indeed down by the Detroit River. Zeke took a can of Coke and a sandwich from the refrigerator for the journey, and then
     put on his coat, hat and gloves. Downtown things were expensive, and he didn’t want to spend any money on fancy food.
    ‘Here in Detroit we call it “white flight”,’ the tall and imposing black officer said as he looked up at the PowerPoint statistics
     displayed on the screen above his head. ‘But when the manufacturing base moved out of the city of Detroit and work shifted
     to the suburbs, it wasn’t just white people who deserted the centre. White flight is a catch-all term that covers all the
     mainly skilled auto workers who came to constitute Detroit’s middle class. They wanted to be near the new car plants and they
     wanted to move away from neighbourhoods that had become colonised by gangs and drug-dealers. But this isn’t just a feature
     of Detroit.’
    Çetin İkmen shifted rather uncomfortably in his seat. There were few advantages to having a very thin behind. Süleyman, now
     rested and no longer jet-lagged, looked by contrast finally at his ease. He’dtold İkmen that morning at breakfast that now he was accustomed to it, the snow didn’t seem to fill him with so much dread.
     But İkmen suspected that he was probably happy because he was in pursuit of a woman. Sergeant Ferrari had most definitely
     caught his attention.
    ‘In New York City, parts of Manhattan had become almost no-go areas because of escalating crime rates. People moved out of
     areas like SoHo and Tribeca, now very fashionable places, because they just weren’t nice. Then the NYPD instituted their policy
     of Zero Tolerance, and all that changed. Now we’ve got other areas coming into line: Queens, the Bronx. Cities can come back
     to life, but law enforcement must play its part, and that part must be based on Zero Tolerance.’
    Çetin İkmen had heard about Zero Tolerance. Some forces in Turkey, albeit patchily and not in name, applied it. Zero Tolerance
     was a policy whereby even the most minor infringement of legislation was punished to the full extent of the law. This meant
     that people would be booked for dropping litter, vagrants would be moved on without regard to their condition or state of
     health, every cannabis joint would be confiscated and the offender punished. Zero Tolerance meant no hiding place. It also
     meant, so İkmen had read in newspapers back home, that the criminals and their activities simply moved location. Around New
     York, in parts of New Jersey, those who had