Let It Burn by Steve Hamilton Read Free Book Online

driver and came up empty, but Franklin started pulling little bags with white rocks out of one of the passenger’s pockets. He pulled a large wad of money out of the other.
    “That’s not mine,” the man said. “I don’t know where that came from.”
    “What, the crack? Or the money?”
    “The money’s mine. I don’t even know what that other stuff is.”
    “This is amazing,” Franklin said to me over the roof of the car. “Didn’t we just hear about the same thing happening the other day? Somebody going around slipping drugs into young men’s pockets? It’s like an epidemic around here.”
    I asked the driver if I could take a quick look through his car. He said yes, and it came up clean. Nothing on his person, nothing in his car. It was turning out to be a very fortuitous day for him.
    “So tell me the truth,” I said to him, getting close and looking him in the eye. “Were you just down here trying to buy some crack? Or was there something else going on?”
    “Hey, hey,” the passenger said. “Don’t even be saying that now.”
    “I hear this is the place for it,” Franklin said, “and you’re sitting in the man’s car. What else are we supposed to think?”
    “I don’t go in for that kind of stuff, man. That’s blasphemy.”
    “No, you just sell crack,” Franklin said as he started hauling him back to the car. “Right next to a church. That’s not blasphemy at all.”
    “I’m sorry, officer,” the driver said to me. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
    “Well, I’m pretty sure we both know exactly what you were thinking,” I said, “but I appreciate the honesty. If I let you drive away, am I ever going to see you back down here?”
    “No, you’re not. I swear.”
    “All right, get the hell out of here.”
    He got back in his car and drove off. I rejoined my partner in our car. The young man in the backseat was smart enough not to say anything else. He just sat there looking out the window while we drove him back to the station. He looked like he was eighteen years old, maybe nineteen. He lived in a world I’d probably never understand. But he didn’t have to be hanging around the train station selling drugs to white men from the suburbs. He had a choice. Or at least, that’s what I had to tell myself to keep doing this job.
    *   *   *
    It was already past lunchtime when we got through processing our young dealer. I tried giving Jeannie a call, like I had promised Franklin, but I just missed her. Then I saw Detective Bateman walking down the hall, looking like he had a few more things to say about the basketball game. So I got the hell out of there and rejoined my partner in the car. My stomach was rumbling.
    Franklin had this thing about “Coneys,” which were Detroit’s version of the Coney Island–style hot dog. There were a dozen different places around town that sold them. Now, I knew all about ex–football players and how they’d often put on too much weight once they stopped playing, but I’d long ago given up. Franklin was going to have his three dogs no matter what I said or did. The diet Faygo Redpop on the side just made the whole meal that much more ridiculous.
    “Admit it,” he said. “A Coney sounds pretty damned good today. Am I right?”
    “Doesn’t mean I’m going to eat one.”
    “You don’t understand, Alex. On these short-shift days, you naturally crave comfort food. It would do you great emotional harm not to take care of yourself today.”
    So of course we ended up at one of the stands on Woodward. Franklin had three. I had two. Principles be damned when you’re standing there and you haven’t eaten since an early breakfast and you’re smelling those grilled onions. When we were done we headed back out on the beat. Back by the stadium, where the game had started. We ended up talking to a man who was pretending to be a game-day parking attendant. He was out in the street, waving cars into a closed private lot, taking ten