New Jersey Noir by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page A

Street, heading east, just rolling past the broken-down houses along there.”
    “Where is Line Street?” Cash asked.
    Miles shrugged. “’Bout six, seven blocks south of here, just east of Broadway.”
    “What neighborhood is that?”
    Another shrug. “I don’t know. Whitman Park, I guess.”
    “Go on.”
    “So we’re just rolling along, real slow—maybe ten, fifteen tops. The street is narrow, a few parked cars here and there, some just abandoned. So we cross South 6th Street heading toward Roberts. Northwest corner of Line and 6th is an empty lot where some condemned buildings got demoed. There’s a fence around it, chainlink. Even though we’re kinda looking around as we roll, none of us saw this old lady till she was right in front of us, like she just appeared out of the dark, you know? Negron almost ran her over. Well, she makes us for cops and starts banging on the hood of the car and screaming at us.”
    “Was she black? Hispanic, Caucasian, what?”
    Miles glanced briefly at Cash. “Hispanic.” He paused for a moment before continuing. “Anyway, she’s all excited, so Sanchez gets out of the backseat and approaches her. He tins her and starts talking in Spanish, and she starts bawling and pointing to the only house on the north side of Line Street that’s still standing. It was the house she had come out of.”
    “Had you seen her come out of it?”
    “No, like one second the street was empty, the next second there she was, in front of the car.” Cash noticed the trembling begin to intensify, apparently overcoming the dosage of Xanax the cop had received. When Miles spoke again, there was a rise of pitch in his voice. “So anyway, I get out of the car and Sanchez winks at me and makes a face, like he’s saying, Look at this old bitch, do you believe this? ”
    “How old would you say she was?”
    Miles shifted in his seat and leaned forward slightly, still directing his words at the black rectangle of the window. “Old. Pushing sixty. I don’t know.”
    Cash smiled slightly. “Go on.”
    “So when I reach them, she starts speaking English, telling us there’s a black guy up on the second floor of the house, been acting crazy all night, people coming and going and she was trying to sleep and told him something and he cursed her and tried to hit her, and she got scared and ran out and saw us. So by now, Negron is standing there too, and he asks her if she called the cops. She says no, there’s no phone in the house, no water, no electricity, nothing. We can see it’s boarded up, abandoned, and we figure her for a squatter. She tells us the black guy deals H, sometimes crack, the building is his base, everybody is afraid of him and all this kind of shit. So Sanchez starts writing it down, you know, to sort of appease her a little. We figure maybe she’s stoned, you know, old and stoned and half nuts. So then Negron says he feels like a little action, let’s check it out. Well, I’m a little bored myself, it was a slow tour and I figure, what the hell. So Sanchez stays at the car with the old lady to call in our ten-twenty. Me and Negron start walking toward the house.”
    “Describe the house.”
    “Two-story brick, like all of them around there. Most of the windows boarded up. There was a narrow, covered front porch with side steps leading up to it. The front door was missing, it was just a dark open hole. The east side of the house was just like the west, another empty lot.”
    “All right. Go on.”
    “Well, me and Negron get to the house and I walk around the porch to the side steps. Just as I reach them, I hear Negron cursing. He stepped in dog shit. At least he hoped it was dog shit. The place really stinks—piss, garbage, shit, everything. The nearest streetlight is burned out, it’s dark as hell …”
    Now Miles’s body seemed to tighten on itself, the trembling turning sharply into a steady shake. He tried desperately to moisten his mouth before speaking again.
    “So,