Free Let It Burn by Steve Hamilton Page B

arrive, and be glad that part of the operation isn’t my job. Go home, maybe get drunk. It sounded like the right kind of night for it.
    A sergeant approached me. Not Sergeant Grimaldi, but another man from another squad. He was probably on his way in for the afternoon shift when he heard the call, and he was close enough to be the first supervising officer on the scene.
    “I’m Sergeant Schuman,” he said, shaking my hand. “I believe we’ve met before. You okay?”
    I nodded. I still didn’t quite have my voice back yet.
    “We’ve got a Ronald Jefferson in the backseat,” he said, looking at the driver’s license in his hand. “We found a few rocks and a fair amount of money on him as well.”
    I looked over and saw the evidence on the hood of the vehicle. A handful of small Baggies, each one containing a marble-sized chunk of white powder. Next to that was a thick roll of currency.
    “Wait a minute,” I said, going over to the vehicle. “Why would he still have this on him? I saw him throw something on the tracks.”
    “Maybe he didn’t have time to get rid of it.”
    “He did,” I said, thinking back to the sight of him standing on the other side of that fence. The look of utter calm on his face when he realized I couldn’t catch him. “He had all the time in the world. For that matter, why even bother throwing away drugs if he just killed somebody? Unless it was something else entirely…”
    I think I already knew what I was going to find when I opened the back door to that squad car. A two-bit dealer who just so happened to be wearing jeans and a gray shirt that day.
    I opened the door. I grabbed the kid and turned his face to me.
    “Hey, what are you doing, man?” Attitude all the way, even now that he was in handcuffs. Especially now that he was in handcuffs.
    He was around the same age, same build, and wearing, as I had already figured out, the same clothes. Although this kid’s shirt was a slightly different shade of gray now that I looked at it. And he didn’t have a torn sleeve like my suspect.
    I let go of him. I slammed the door shut.
    “It’s not him,” I said.
    “McKnight,” the sergeant said, “are you sure?”
    “I’m sure. It’s not him.”
    “Then where the hell is he?”
    I took a quick scan through the other people still milling around on the sidewalk. Then I came back to the car and looked north, up the street. It went up to Pine and Spruce and Perry and a dozen other side streets. He must have gotten across before these cops closed off the bridge.
    “He could be anywhere by now,” I said. “Pretty much goddamned anywhere.”
    “Come on,” the sergeant said. “Get in my car.”
    I got in the passenger’s seat. He flipped on his lights and headed north on Trumbull.
    “Give me a guess here,” he said. “Use your gut instinct and tell me where he went.”
    It was useless. There were blocks and blocks of houses on either side of the street. If we turned down one street we’d see another block and then another intersection. Right, left, or straight, it would just be more of the same. The whole west side of Detroit, all those brick houses lined up in rows. He could have been in any one of them.
    “Keep looking,” the sergeant said. “But tell me what happened.”
    I gave him the basic facts. Seeing the young man on the tracks, chasing him when he fled, his escape through the fence.
    “You called for backup then,” the sergeant said.
    “Yes, but at that point it was just trespassing, then evading. I had no idea that…” I didn’t finish the sentence.
    The sergeant shook his head, but before he could say anything the radio squawked, looking for Unit Forty-one. The sergeant picked up the transmitter.
    “I’ve got him right here,” he said. “I’ll bring him back to the scene.”
    He put the transmitter back and swung the car south at the next intersection.
    “You’re the only one who saw this guy. Am I right?”
    “I’m the only one who got a good