Unburying Hope (13 page)

“It’s this car, I think,”
Celeste said, walking around the front of one navy blue 4-door sedan.
 
“Then he pushed me and we fought and we
ended up over where he is now.”

The woman steered two
approaching police officers to the junky navy car, its paint was peeling off
near the bottom of the chassis and its windows were each half opened, the
driver’s door had a dent in it.

“You sure?” one of the
Detroit cops asked.
 
Celeste could
feel his cagey caution, his quickly gloved hands were ready to open the car to
start a drug search.

Surprised at how little
detail she’d noticed about the car when the man raced out to it from the closed
off hallway, she walked over and quickly reenacted her attack by the now
handcuffed man, taking the three or four backwards steps as she’d tried to
avoid his crazed clawing, then she showed how she’d tripped him, gotten a lock
on his neck and then kneed him in the groin.

“Damn, you’re a ninja,” the
antsy cop said, yanking the blue car door open.
 
He pulled a long flat tool out of a leather holder hanging
on his belt.
 
It looked like half a
crow bar, half a nail file.
 
He
opened the glove compartment, which was empty.
 

Celeste wondered if the car
would be clean.

Within seconds, with his
tool, the cop had jimmied off the plastic dashboard, side panels of the doors and
then yanked up the soft underbelly of the blinker housing and the floorboard
near the seats.

The second officer had a
small video camera out, trained on a now visible bag of white powder next to a
crunched mess of hundred dollar bills.

The first cop moved deftly
out of the car, kneeling to pull white filled bags out of each of the four
wheel wells.
 

“Quite a fucking haul,” the
camera cop said.
 
“What do you
think, $300,000?”

Celeste gasped out loud.

“Get out of here, get back
in the hospital,” the cop motioned to her, holding his camera down towards the
ground, its green light switched to flashing red.
 
“We’ll come in to take your statement.”

Celeste felt her arm
grasped by the tall slender security guard, who was now grinning from ear to
ear.
 
“Jesus, you probably got us
promoted.
 
That dumb bastard must
have had a quarter million bucks worth of meth in there.”

“So what happens now?”
 
Celeste asked, turning for a last look
at the now jubilant cops who were manhandling the drug addict into the backseat
of one of the police cruisers.

“Suspicion of possession
and transportation of methamphetamines, importing a controlled substance into
the state.
 
He’s going away for a
very long time.”

“How do you know he’s not
local?”

“Plates on the car say
Wisconsin.
 
And he’s got two window
stickers for parking lots in Florida.
 
There are pill stores in Florida where you can get months of
prescriptions filled, addicts go there to stock up.”

“You noticed all
that?”
 
Celeste stood as the
automatic doors opened up.
 
Thank god,
she felt the thought crush her windpipe, it hadn’t really been Eddie.
 
She wouldn’t have grabbed him, she
would have let him go.
 
But it
wasn’t him.
 
It wasn’t.
 
The similarity had been in the fallen
cheeks, the exhaustion in the eyes.

“That’s my job.
 
At least you didn’t screw up picking out
the car.
 
You would have looked
like an idiot if DPD had been rifling through a couple of cars.
 
Some of the doctors who park here would
have been pissed off to come out to find their rides ripped to hell.”

“Doctor cars don’t carry
drugs,” Celeste scoffed.

“You are too naive,” the
guard said, motioning her to a seat outside the pharmacy.
 
“Sometimes, it’s who you least expect.”

“I found this bottle, he dropped it after he
took a few, before he started fighting.
 
It fell on the ground.”
 
She
reached into her dress pocket, careful to extract the unlabeled bottle, not
Eddie’s.
 
There was no white label
stuck to its exterior.
 
She picked
up a few of the pills and looked closely at them.
 
They had a word imprinted on them.
 

The tall security guard stood and walked with
Celeste towards the plexiglas window of the pharmacy.
 
The ponytailed nurse came to face them.
 

“Who was that?”
 
Celeste asked.

“A patient.
 
You are here for a prescription?”
 
The nurse cocked her head.

“No,” Celeste leaned in, “What’s his name?”

“Oh, I don’t know, honey.”
 
The nurse turned away and nervously
pushed wayward hairs flat against her head, redoing her ponytail.

“What is Percocet?”
 
Celeste opened the palm of her hand where she was holding
three white pills, ‘Percocet’ spelled out on each pill.

A pharmacist walked behind the clerk and
looked through the window past her to the security guard, said ‘It’s a narcotic
pain killer, you do have a prescription for those, don’t you?
 
They’re a controlled substance.”
 

“Oh no, I don’t,” Celeste said, “they were on
the ground outside in the parking lot.”
 
She stared at the nurse, who turned as pale as the pills Celeste held.

“Crap,” the pharmacist said, “damn druggies
are selling their pills again.”
 
He
motioned for her to pass the pills to him and he grabbed at them as they
clattered into the pass-through well at the plexiglas window.
 
“You’d better get the cops on this,” he
motioned to the security guard.

“They’re already outside,” the guard answered.
 
“Don’t touch that pill bottle, it’s
evidence.”
 
She extracted the pill
bottle carefully with gloved hands.

“I’ve got to get back to
work,” Celeste rubbed her forehead.

“Nope, you’re sitting
here.
 
Until DPD comes in to chat
with you.”

Celeste texted Frank, ‘please
please tell bossman I got into something with DPD, I’ll be back as soon as they
question me.
 
I caught a perp
stealing drugs, turned out he’s loaded with meth.”

“WTF?” Frank texted back.

“Can’t talk,” she
replied.
 
She leaned back in her
chair, remembering the confusion she’d felt as she’d launched herself down the
first hallway, angry that Eddie might be two timing her, hitting on the lying
pharmacy employee with the bad ponytail.
 
Who’d probably, she was sure, do some hard time herself.

“I’m coming over,” Frank
texted her.

“Don’t get fired, I’ll be
back in half an hour.”

“I told bossman you with
police, he said I could sit with you so I’m coming.”

She leaned back in her
chair, rubbing her sweaty palms onto her pants.
 
How would she tell this story to Eddie?

Chapter
Fifteen

“What’s your experience
with cops?” Frank asked her.

“I used to flirt with them
in my early twenties.
 
A man in
uniform is a beautiful thing, especially when they wear those black boots.”

“Yeah, looks aren’t
everything though,” Frank said.
 
“I
can’t believe those words just came out of my mouth, but I’m serious.
 
I’ve been shoved aside too many times,
they run by you to bust someone and it’s like a swarm of locusts.
 
There’s no one and then suddenly there
are four or five of them, eyes forward, tasers or guns out.
 
Anything can happen.”

“I know what you mean,”
Celeste nodded.
 
“Once I saw three
cops slam a guy’s head on the ground, like on a TV show, and the guy started
bleeding.
 
When they lifted his
head, I could see it was an old homeless guy.
 
One cop rifled through an empty battered guitar case the guy
was carrying.
 
The other cop yanked
everything out of the old guy’s backpack and there was nothing there but a
sleeping bag.
 
They manhandled him
like he’d robbed a bank at gunpoint.
 
It was so out of proportion.”
  

Frank held her hand, “I
can’t help it, cops scare me and I didn’t want you to be alone.”

“You are so sweet,” she
said, her voice quavering.
 
“It’s
not over though, they’re going to have to pick off that chick inside the
pharmacy window.
 
The one with the
ponytail.
 
She was giving him
meds.
 
I’m scared now, she keeps
looking at me.
 
Why hasn’t she taken
off?
 
I’m going to have to tell the
cops about her when they come in.
 
She should leave.”

Frank’s face turned
imperceptibly towards the windowed wall to Celeste’s right.
 
His gaze downward, he caught a glimpse
of a shadowy woman staring out at them.
 
“Look, I know we need cops, but street drugs are so damn common that
half the city is already in prison.
 
So what do you do?
 
Do you
have to tell them about her?”

“Don’t I?”

“I had a cop boyfriend
once.
 
He loved being a cop but he
didn’t like the way people looked away from him, people avoided him.
 
So he took his breaks near schools and
stood out in the playground during recess.
 
He left his guns and taser locked in his squad car and he’d
play foursquare or climb those geodesic domes with little kids.
 
That way, when he was on duty later on
in a burger joint or walking down the street between calls, kids would shout
out to him.”

“Did he do it so kids would
tell him things?”

“No, that kind of informing
is only in the movies.
 
Neighborhood loyalty runs deep.
 
Those kids would never invite him in for dinner.
 
But at least the little ones didn’t
spit at him.
 
He told me his
favorite kid was a little girl who’d walk along with her brothers and her eyes
would brighten when she saw him, and then she’d hold up her middle finger as a
salute.
 
He thought it was so
funny!
 
She had this little two
inch finger, flipping him off, then she’d pass with her brothers and turn
around and wave at him when her brothers weren’t looking.”

“What a little badass.”

“I know.
 
Queen of the Hood, he called her.”

“That’s the only kind of
kid I’d like,” Celeste laughed, relieved for a moment.

“Of course you would, the
devil’s spawn.
 
No ordinary kid for
you.”

Celeste felt a prickly
current race up her spine as the whooshing sound of the automatic sliding doors
caught her attention.
 
The two
police officers were walking over to her.

Frank tensed up, holding
her hand.

“So, how did that go down?”

Celeste, aware that both
cops were wearing their tasers and their small caliber pistols on their belts,
looked one more time towards the pharmacy window, thinking that she still had
Eddie’s unfilled prescription bottle in her pocket but that she hadn’t said his
full name to the clerk with the ponytail.
 

She answered their
questions, telling the story starting with her confusion about who the man was.

“You thought he might be
your boyfriend?
 
Flirting?”
 
The cop was incredulous.
 
“You chased down a perp thinking he was
your boyfriend?”

“No, that’s not it,”
Celeste said, realizing how jealous that sounded.
 
“He was getting prescriptions, she wouldn’t tell me who he
was, so I followed him.
 
I only
fought him when he started attacking me.”

“Did you know then he
wasn’t your boyfriend?”
 
The cop
smirked, “Jesus, I’m glad I’m married.
 
Don’t have to be chased down by crazy single girls anymore.”

“That’s just rude,” Celeste
said.

“What were you doing here
at the pharmacy?”

“Filling out a prescription
for my boyfriend,” Celeste said sheepishly.

The cop put his hand out,
waiting expectantly.

Celeste looked at Frank,
then at the cop.
 
“What do you
want?”