Free A Cure for Night by Justin Peacock Page B

the soft bigotry of low expectations."
    "So how about you, Shelly?" Michael asked. "How's it been going so
far?"
    "Okay, I guess," Shelly said. "It's a lot to take in right away."
    "Is it what you expected it would be?" Max asked.
    "Sure," Shelly said. "It's really the number of cases more than
anything else. It's hard to even keep track."
    "So," Michael said to Shelly. "Now that you actually work here, as
compared to an interview when everybody on both sides of the desk is lying about
everything, what can we tell you about the job?"
    "I don't know," Shelly said. "I guess I just wonder, with the
pressure and everything, how people deal with it."
    "Same as people deal with anything else," Zach said. "Sex and
alcohol."
    AFTER LUNCH I was to spend a half day covering arraignments, picking up additional cases. I walked over to the courthouse, took my familiar place in the glum meeting room across from the basement holding cells. My first client was a drug case, looked to be a street dealer rousted in a sweep of Grand Avenue in Clinton Hill. Even by the standards of the streets he was fairly young, just nineteen. But Shawne Flynt's face as he sat across from me belied his age; I didn't detect even a glimmer of fear in his eyes. I could tell without asking that this wasn't his first time in the system.
    "So," I said to Shawne after doing my introductory spiel, "why
don't you tell me what happened?"
    "This ain't nothing but some shit, yo," Shawne said. He was tall and lanky, an athletic looseness about him. His face was narrow and angular, his eyes the stillest thing about him.
"All they got on me was I was parked up on the street. Wasn't no product on me,
wasn't even no cheddar. They just swoop me up when they clear the corner."
    "They're charging you with possession with intent," I said.
    "I just got done telling you I ain't possessed a goddamn thing
when they took me. All they got on me is I was there."
    "Did they sweep up a lot of people?"
    "They took in everybody who be standing on Grand Avenue," Shawne said.
    "Did they get anybody who was actually holding?"
    "You arrest enough niggers on the corner, somebody's going to be
holding, know what I'm saying? But that ain't got nothing to do with me."
    "You know the guys who were caught?" I asked. The vibe I was getting that Shawne ran the corner, and that he'd been clean when picked up because he no longer had to take the direct risk.
    "You ain't gotta worry about none of them," Shawne said dismissively.
"They soldiers. None of that is gonna come back on me."
    "Soldiers have been known to flip," I said.
    "Not on Grand Avenue they ain't," Shawne said. "You got no call to
worry about my crew."
    "Your crew," I repeated.
    Shawne smiled and offered a little shrug. If it'd been a slip it wasn't one that bothered him.
"True that," he said. "They my crew. But they ain't gonna come back on me. You
don't got to do nothing here, yo, else I'd get me a real lawyer to take care of
it."
    I ignored the offhand insult, which I'd gotten used to. "Why'd they pick you up at all then?" I asked.
    "Politics as usual," Shawne said. "They trying to clear out the
corner, fancy up the hood. They trying to do to the Hill what they done to Fort
Greene, get shit all safe for the white folks to move in. The five-oh already
shut the hotel where all the hos be trickin'; now they move on to the corners.
They already snatched me up once before; didn't nothing come of it."
    "When was this?"
    "When this nonsense all started, two months back maybe."
    "What happened to those charges?"
    "The fuck you think happened? Ain't you been listening? They don't
got shit on me."
    "Have they actually been dropped?"
    "Hell, yeah. Once they realized nobody was going to be snitchin'
they backed up off of that shit."
    "Okay," I said. "We're probably going to have to wait them out a
little, but hopefully that same thing will happen here."
    ONCE WE were out before the judge, Shawne slouched beside me, flanked by