Free Man with an Axe by Jon A. Jackson Page B

more attractive. But who could afford to move there? Only white people, particularly since (and here is really where racism came into play) black people were largely discouraged to do so, especially by the realtors, who probably told their consciences that they were simply acting in a businesslike manner. I'm being a little facetious, but not completely. Realtors widely believe that white people don't like black people—they don't look beyond conventional notions—and so they exacerbate real racism (i.e., deeply held notions of some white people about the inferiority or undesirableness of blacks) by adopting an economic racism to protect their business interests.
    No doubt the problem was much more complex than this, but I won't dilate on it. For now, my problem was to accommodate to the new reality. My boss was under pressure to bring his department into compliance with the regulations. Specifically, that meant enforcing the residency requirement for white officers. Jimmy was not accusatory. But he was the lieutenant. I was the sergeant. It was time for me to move to town or resign.
    “So, I'll move to town,” I said. “I knew it was coming. I'm sorry I didn't do it on my own.”
    “Good. Thanks, Mul. But.” He hesitated, then plunged on. “It has to be soon. No delays. They're talking ninety days.”
    “Ninety days. You got it. There's lots of vacancies in town. Rents are low. Shouldn't be a problem. What else you got?” He was carrying a sheaf of papers.
    What he had, he said, was a “grounder,” which is what one might call a nonjob. Some kid was getting a weird transmission on his computer and he was worried about it. He thought it might be criminal in some way. But it didn't seem criminal, on the face of it.
    The transmission was a message, from some kind of cover name or alias, it looked like. Somebody named Hexam. Gaffer
    Hexam. The transmission featured a crudely animated cartoon, or “graphic,” that depicted a woman being killed. She was being killed in a series of buffoonish ways, as if it were a Road Runner cartoon, except that the cartoon wasn't anything like as slick as the Road Runner. A sort of generic stick-figure woman with exaggerated pyramidal breasts and a cloud of white or blond hair, in a triangular skirt, stalks jerkily along a city street, a business district of tall buildings, arms swinging. A huge chunk of concrete, part of a building, falls on her. Her hands and feet stick out from under the concrete slab. In another sequence, the woman is walking on a bridge over what appears to be the Detroit River, judging by the skyline in the distance; in fact, it seems to be the Belle Isle Bridge. She stops to talk to a much larger figure, a man in a dark outfit of some kind—a cloak, or maybe just a long overcoat. Suddenly, the man's arms fly up—there's no other way to describe this—and then the woman tips over the railing of the bridge and disappears. In the third and final sequence, the woman is smashed by a speeding limousine that flattens her. After that, a question mark rises on the screen, followed by the words, “Where? When?”
    The kid had recorded this on a little square disk. He seemed like a nice enough boy, about sixteen, a student, tall and gawky but nice looking. “It seemed kind of weird,” he told me. “You see weird stuff on the Net sometimes, but this seemed so direct.”
    “Is there any way of checking back, through the channels or something?” I asked. I wasn't familiar with the system, as you can tell. The kid, whose name was Kenty, didn't think it could be traced. Or maybe it could be, but it would be very difficult and time-consuming and if it wasn't of any interest to the cops then he sure wasn't going to waste time on it. But he thought it might be interesting because it had what seemed to be a specific person's name attached and it bothered him because it had been sent directly to his E-mail.
    The “graphic,” as the boy called it, was directed to “Sgt.