Free Every Brilliant Eye by Loren D. Estleman

Amigo Fuentes’ junkyard was located. I cleared my desk into two drawers—the one on top was too shallow to hold Barry’s memories of Vietnam and Cambodia—and rolled on out of there. My wino was curled up in a fetal position on the floor next to the stairwell, snoring and hugging his green bottle.
    Montcalm. The name conjures up images of crisp blue snow on a craggy peak with pines carpeting the slopes. The reality is a stretch of broken pavement with the lines rubbed off and the signs on the corners, where there still are signs, rusting around bullet holes. Three out of five Detroiters own guns, and one of them is going off somewhere every night. The curbs are lined with long low cars with tailfins and syphilitic decay around the wheel wells, a clot of gaunt young blacks in bomber jackets and Levi’s gone the same greasy shade of gray leaning on the fenders of every third one. They are there every hour of the day and night, cuffing one another’s shoulders and laughing through their noses with their eyes hooded. They live in a world where time is measured in empties and scar tissue.
    I cruised with my foot off the pedal, letting the slant of the street pull the Olds along and flicking my eyes right and left, looking for official cars. The scenery was mostly the backs of buildings with rough yellow concrete stoops and green and black plastic garbage bags leaning in doorways. Nothing ever fronts on streets like Montcalm. It’s as if sixty years ago the architects knew there would be nothing to look at.
    After six blocks I spotted a county wagon backed into an alley with its big red dome rotating lazily. A cruiser from the Tactical Mobile Unit was parked across the street, and on that side a black unmarked car with twin whip antennas blocked a hydrant. There were plenty of other places to park, but if they can they will leave them where no one else is allowed to leave his. Give some guys a cap and a whistle.
    I pulled up behind the blue-and-white and crossed the street on foot just as a lot of suit and coat with a man inside came out of the mouth of the alley. His face was a weak lime tint and everything about him said cop except the color. “Got a cigarette?” he demanded.
    I shook one out of the pack and lit it for him. He took a deep drag and started hacking. Then he puffed again, coughed some more. Spat phlegm.
    “Bet you’d quit if you didn’t enjoy them so much,” I suggested.
    His eyes moved over me for the first time. They were watering in a narrow young-old face under a snapbrim hat with a wide silk band. He wore a thin matinee moustache that looked inked-on against his pallor. He said, “I don’t smoke.”
    I played with it a moment, then put it away. “Sergeant Grice?”
    “Down there.” He jerked the crown of his hat toward the alley. “You with the department?”
    “I’m private.”
    “Okay. I had to ask. One more set of footprints won’t make any difference on this one.”
    I put that away next to the other and walked past him. The alley fell off at a thirty-degree angle from the street, running out of pavement at the bottom, where it curved into a welted parking area behind a drugstore with a padlock on its back door and plywood where its windows belonged. Deep ditches lined the drive, making it too narrow to admit anything but foot traffic. A group of men stood at the bottom. Halfway down I lit a cigarette for myself, and I didn’t want it any more than the guy I had just finished talking to had.
    I had smelled that stink a couple of times before. That meant nothing; when it comes to that particular odor you are always a virgin. Every man in the group had a cigarette in his mouth and was puffing up thick clouds. I was still coming when one of them, an officer in uniform, broke and strode past me double-quick time. He lost his smoke as he came but didn’t stop to crush it out, letting it roll. As he passed I could hear him breathing through his mouth in little sobs.
    The trio remaining