When he finished, Rodney didn’t say anything for close to a minute. Then, very softly, the other cop went, “Aw, shit, man.”
Colin nodded. “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”
“It wasn’t your kid who bought from Pitcavage Junior?” Sure as anything, Ellis could walk barefoot through the obvious.
“No, a friend of his. I’ve known, uh, him”—Colin almost said Tim—“since they were in high school. They kinda stopped handing out brains before the guy got to the front of the line, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t make up something like that for the fun of it. The way Marshall tells it, his buddy thought it was a big old joke.”
“A joke. Uh-huh.” Rodney didn’t sound like somebody who was going to ROFL. “You believe this happened because your boy’s friend says it did. You believe darling Darren’s dealing.” Those weren’t questions, not the way he came out with them.
“’Fraid so.” Colin nodded again. He would rather have gone to Kelly’s dentist father for a root canal without Novocaine, but he did. “Would I be talking about it with you if I didn’t believe it?”
“Not fuckin’ likely,” Ellis answered, which was also the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He eyed Colin. “What do you want to do about it?”
That was the $64,000 question, all right. Colin had been thinking of little else since his son gave him the unwelcome news. Sighing, he said, “Seems to me we’ve got to find out how deep Darren’s in. If this was a onetime thing, if he scored more than he could use for a while and was selling some, then I guess we shine it on. But if he’s dealing dealing, if you know what I mean . . .”
“Then we got to drop on him.” Rodney didn’t ask that, either—he said it. Colin made his head go up and down one more time. Rodney went on, “And whatever we do, we got to do it so Chief Mike doesn’t know we’re doin’ it.”
“Probably a good plan,” Colin agreed, so dryly the other cop guffawed.
“I trot over to the chief’s office now, man, you’re fucked,” the African-American detective said.
“Yeah, I know.” Colin left it right there.
Ellis stared up at the acoustic tiles on the ceiling. He let out a sigh of his own. “And if I don’t go to Pitcavage, if I start working this like it’s a case, and he finds out, I’m fucked, too.”
“I’m sorry. Shit, I’m sorry all kinds of ways,” Colin said. “If you want to make like this entire conversation never happened, hey, I can see why you would. Long as you don’t rat me out, I won’t hold it against you.”
“Wanna know something weird, Colin? I believe you,” Rodney said. “Anybody else in the whole wide world’d be blowin’ smoke up my ass. Pitcavage sure would, Lord knows. But you, I believe. Doesn’t matter any which way, though, on account of I’m in. If Darren’s dealing, he’s got to pay the price, same as anybody else. Wasn’t for his daddy, he woulda paid some prices a while ago by now. ’Bout time he finds out the rules don’t have except for you in ’em anywhere.”
“Looks that way to me, too,” Colin said. He hadn’t been so relieved since . . . since when? Since Kelly’d said she’d marry him—that was the only answer that crossed his mind. “Thanks, man,” he added a moment later. He’d never been one for big shows of gratitude.
“It’s cool, Colin.” Yes, Rodney’d known him long enough to have a notion of how he ticked. “Anybody who deals, he ain’t no friend of mine.” He peered up at the ceiling again, as if trying to extract wisdom from the random patterns of holes in the tiles. “Talk about friends, though . . . We end up busting the chief’s kid, this whole goddamn department’ll go off like a grenade.”
“That did occur to me, yeah,” Colin said. “Be careful while you’re working on it. Be careful who you pick to help you, too. You know the old line—three guys can keep a secret as long as two of ’em are dead.”
“I didn’t, but I like it.” Thoughtfully, Ellis continued, “Not the only reason to be careful. Darren, he’ll make a lot of cops. A couple of the brothers who haven’t been here since dirt, maybe not. Let’s hope he’s one of the white guys who figure all black folks look alike.”
“That’s a bunch of bull, too,” Colin said. “You don’t look one damn bit like Halle Berry.”
Rodney laughed. “Well, you got that right, anyway. Long as we’re here, you wanna really talk about the robbery?”