The Bottom by Howard Owen Read Free Book Online Page B

out. Maybe we ought to back off a little.”
    “Stay the course, Chief,” I tell him. “You can’t let that fat fuck push you around.” I can tell that he likes it that I call him “Chief.” Sounds a little more John Wayne than “Wheelie.”
    “Easy for you to say,” he mutters. He’s right. I’ve been nearly fired so many times, in addition to being demoted back to night cops, that they pretty much expect me to screw up. They expect better things from Wheelie. The difference between him and me? Wheelie still thinks he has a capital-C career. I’m just trying to keep drawing a paycheck for doing what I like: Sticking my big honker into other people’s business until the bullshit is dispersed.
    I leave.
    I know Wheelie is troubled. If he’s on the same side as me, he knows something must be terribly wrong.
    I CHECK WITH Peachy Love, calling her on her private cell rather than her phone at headquarters, and find out that either the police have no new information on the latest Tweety Bird murder or—more likely—they don’t choose to share their information with me.
    I don’t press Peachy on it. I don’t want to impose on the good nature of my old friend, former colleague, and sometime playmate. Peachy was a good night cops reporter herself before she decided she’d rather work with the police than follow them around with a notepad and a digital camera. She often feeds me information that a good media-relations person really should keep to herself, but she and I know she has to pick her spots. If something’s in the works, Peachy probably will find a way to let me know. Stonewalling me on the day-to-day stuff is how she keeps her credibility.
    “Don’t leave me in the dark, Peachy.”
    “Have I ever?”
    AT ELEVEN THIRTY, when I’m about to call it a night and make an appearance at Penny Lane in time for a beer or three, we get word of a shooting, and I’m scrambling down to the Bottom. When I get there, I suss out the sad but too-familiar story. A party celebrating a birthday was stumbling out of one of our finer establishments just as another group, celebrating Saturday, emerged from the one next door. Somebody bumped somebody, maybe scuffed his shoe. Words were spoken. The testosterone kicked in. At least one of the participants had a gun. And someone’s nineteen-year-old, underage drinking son is in the VCU Medical Center, clinging to a life that ought to have been good for another sixty years.
    The gut-shot boy’s friends are still there, leaning against cars, scared and pissed off.
    “If I’d had a gun,” one of them says, his eyes red, “I’d of shot the son of a bitch.”
    It is our answer to everything. The shooter, already caught and locked up, has a right to carry a people-popping firearm. All hail the Second Amendment. And since he has one, the kid who might have a confrontation with him outside some bar has to have one, too. A gun for a gun. Old Testament meets the Wild West.
    When I was a kid, back in the day, we had fights in Oregon Hill all the time. I’d had my nose broken twice by the time I was fifteen. Almost all of the fights involved fists, so much so that the Hill has turned out more than its share of boxers over the decades. It was considered the street equivalent of going nuclear if one of you pulled a knife.
    It takes more balls than most of our young studs possess to cut somebody to death. It gets a little messy. And it’s damn near impossible to beat somebody to death with your fists.
    Whoever is perpetuating our street-level arms race, I’m thinking there’s a toasty little corner of hell that has their names all over it.
    I’M ABLE TO get the folks at Havana 59 to let me sit at a table with my beer and e-mail my story back on my laptop. I mishit the tiny little keys about every fourth time. Still it’s better than driving all the way back to the paper. I look up after I’ve sent my story, and there’s Andi, behind the bar. I didn’t think she was working