Split Black /#Wattys 2021

Chapter Six

You're spat out cold in your birthday suit and slapped good and hard, and it only gets worse from there. John Robin had been thinking that a lot this year, but the last place he needed that butt-naked feeling was at the wrong end of a gun, with his partner holed up God-knows-where.

After an uneasy fall and winter which the local paper had proclaimed "Open Season on the Richmond PD," his world was finally trying to right itself. No leads had ever panned out in either Bill Pride's shooting or his own brutal attack, something he swore would have been different if he'd been around to participate in the investigations. The lack of progress on the attacks hadn't looked good in the press, but nowhere did it sting more fiercely than within the walls of police headquarters.

John himself had spent nearly two months of that time in the hospital, and the doctors considered him amazingly lucky—a crossbow bolt through the torso generally killed you a lot deader than that. It had taken weeks of physical therapy just to stand up and walk again.

Getting back to work had been a personal triumph. However, the post "Open Season" PD and even his own squad room felt like a foreign country.

The Canal Walk mugging was a case in point. John worked Little over about it all the way out of the court building and into the car.

"For Christ's sake, Miguelito—" Mike Little had not a drop of Hispanic blood in him, but lately the diminutive fit—"what in hell were you doing stowing the cigarette butt in your desk?"

Little shook a headful of short red curls, freckles deepening in a flush of crimson. "It was only in there five minutes before I checked it into evidence, we knew this was coming, you've known about this for weeks, and there's nothing we can do about it now, so will you please piss off!" Avoiding John's gaze, he threw a hand up as if to toss the whole fiasco like a bomb into the crowd of pedestrians crossing Eighth Street at lunch hour.

"It was a slam dunk! Somebody from the French diplomatic corps, for Chrissakes! And we looked like idiots."

"I looked like an idiot. Everybody knows whose screw-up it was."

The light turned green and John turned east onto Broad. The tall roofs ascended like stair steps as they headed toward MCV Hospital. "The whole department looked like idiots," said John.

A dispatcher's honeyed voice broke a hollow silence. "One-two-five, respond to three hundred Virginia Street in reference to an armed mental party."

Vistas on the James. Right on the damn Canal Walk, where both these bumblefucks had happened. John turned the blue flashers on and had just thumbed the transmitter when—

"What are you doing?" whined Little. "Let the uniforms get that, it's their call."

"What?" John paused, mike in hand.

Little's eyes made two innocent green saucers in a bland baby face. "It's their call."

"It's a police call," John said.

From the radio a patrol unit squawked, "One-two-five. I copy. Code one. En route from Cary and Nineteenth."

John thumbed the talk button and said, "Unit seven-eight-one. We'll be on scene in thirty seconds. Hold the air!"

"Seven-eight-one, additional information on the call: Caller described a loud argument between her two neighbors. Male subject now has a gun and is threatening suicide."

"Aww, Jesus, John," Little exploded, arms flapping like a marionette's. "We don't have to take this call. Whyn't you let the harness guys pull the wagon?"