CHAPTER 5

Bourbon doesn’t cure insomnia. That’s what Detective Virgil Tibbs told Chief Gillespie in In the Heat of the Night. One of my favorite characters. Tibbs is the reason I wanted to be a cop, but circumstances changed that.

Tibbs is right though.

I’m into my fourth glass, still wide-awake, watching the sun creep up my south-side apartment through the slits of the roll-up shade covering my front window.

Insomnia isn’t my problem. I can typically close my eyes and fall straight to sleep, but not when I’m ramped.

Why am I ramped? Because my old prison mentor hired me to find a woman for an associate of his, and the job ended in a bloody mess.

Nobody told me the woman was a serial killer. Nobody told me I’d be dogging a celebrated private investigator named Kelly Reed—that gal’s got stones. And nobody told me I’d be involved in a double homicide.

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CHAPTER 8

“Brother, you’re overdressed.” LC’s eyes gleam under his tired gray afro. His big belly bounces with every chuckle. “But that sure is a nice suit.”

I can’t help but laugh with him.

LC’s Barbeque is small. I’ve driven by the place a hundred times over the last few years, but never thought of eating here until this afternoon.

“I ain’t never had a customer who looked as sharp as you. You lost, brother?”

“No, but I could eat a sandwich.”

“Come on, then. Let’s get you fed.”

He whips a grease-stained towel off his shoulder and wipes the cracked linoleum countertop. There are only three stools at the six-foot-long counter. I take a seat on the wobbly one against the wall so I can see out the front window.

The place is a pigsty, but all that smoked meat and hickory-flavored sauce smells like heaven. Who cares if the place doesn’t have a health permit hanging anywhere? If the cockroach exploring behind the toaster doesn’t mind, neither do I. It’s not like I’m planning on being a regular.

LC sets two paper plates in front of me. One full of crisp potato wedges, the other loaded down with brisket and burnt ends doused in thick sauce, and four slices of white bread.

The brisket is good, the kind of good you only find off the beaten path in some hole in the wall.

I suck the sauce off my fingertips and ask, “What do you know about that club across the street?”

LC frowns and points with his tongs. “Fuck that club. That’s what I know about that club.” He taps the tongs on the countertop. “I don’t want trouble in here. I don’t go in their club, and they don’t come in here.”

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CHAPTER 28

For a moment, I let myself forget what is going on and how serious my situation is as I lose myself in the image of the vibrant red sunlight streaking low across the emerging gray backdrop blanketing the city’s horizon. The air feels cool as the EMTs wheel me out of the garage to the ambulance parked on the street.

Piping sirens swarming the block smother my bit of serenity.

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CHAPTER 30

It’s close to lunchtime, and the city streets are starting to congest. Outside the courthouse, I find a street vendor selling tacos.

“A beef and cheese burrito, and Dr. Pepper.”

“I’ll have a burrito too,” a plummy voice says.

I glance sidelong at the middle-aged woman standing beside me. She isn’t entirely unlovely, but she’s far from ordinary. Beneath her tired, nut-brown pompadour and heavy-lidded turquoise eyes, sharp black freckles spot her coffee-colored face. A tacky-styled overcoat hides the details of her Rubenesque body. But the luxurious bling decorating her fingers and wrists, and dangling from her ears reveals her vast worth.

She hands a twenty to the vendor, wiggling it at the both of us. The five-dollar bill I have in my hand she tells me to keep, she’s buying.

I’m not ready for a new client, and I sure don’t like being approached in the middle of the street.

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