Isle of Dogs (25 page)

“Responding to Patterson Avenue,” Andy said.

“Ten-four, former unit three-thirty.”

“You know exactly where in the alleyway?” he asked into the mike.

“Ten-ten, three-thirty,” which was the city’s way of saying, “Negative, Officer Brazil or whoever is riding around pretending to be Officer Brazil.”

Dispatcher Betty Freakley turned around to the 911 operators sitting behind her and shrugged.

“I thought he’d gone and signed up with the state police. What’s he doing riding around in the city again?” she asked.

All the 911 operators were busy. Things were hopping in Richmond this night. An intoxicated white male had fallen down in the yard while taking his dog out. A black female was lying in the middle of the street near Eggleston’s grocery store. An infant had eaten all the little beads inside a purple Beanie Baby Millennium Y2K bear. There were several car wrecks, and most officers were tied up looking for a Hispanic male suspect driving a Grand Prix with New York plates. But the urgent matter that caught Hammer’s attention was the report of a male with a bag over his head who was trying to rob Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits on Chamberlayne Avenue.

“I wonder if that’s the same man who tried to rob the tollbooth last year,” Hammer said. “What’s his name? He ran into the tollbooth because the holes he cut in the bag were in the wrong place and he couldn’t see.”

“Goes by the street name Stick,” Andy said. “He’s got an endless rap sheet and has tried the bag thing for years.”

“You would think he’d figure out his M.O. is obvious and isn’t working,” Hammer replied, never failing to be amazed by the stupidity of most criminals.

“He hit the Popeye’s on Broad Street a couple months ago,” Andy recalled, speeding through a yellow light on Cary Street. “Walked in with the bag over his head, tripped over the railing where people wait in line, and made off with an eight-piece chicken dinner, then walked into the glass door and broke his nose. We got his DNA off the blood on the paper bag.”

“Does he use a gun?”

“That’s the problem. He’s never armed, and just walks in with the bag over his head, asking for whatever. So we can’t get him on any charges that stick, which is why he never spends much time in jail. According to him, he asks for something and people give it to him without protest, so that really isn’t a crime and there’s nothing in the Virginia Code that says it’s illegal to walk around with a bag over your head. So the judge always throws it out when Stick shows up for arraignment.”

“Any officer in the area,” the dispatcher came over the air. “Report of a white male with a bag over his head, down in the parking lot of Popeye’s on Chamberlayne Avenue. An ambulance en route.”

“I guess he tripped again,” Andy said.

S
TICK
wasn’t the only one to trip that night. When Barbie Fogg got out of her minivan in the carport, she stepped on the Barbie doll of one of the twins. As usual, it had been left where the child had played with it last.

“Oh my!” Barbie cried out as she picked herself up from the concrete floor and checked for injuries.

Barbie, who very much believed in signs from The
Universe, interpreted what could have been a serious accident as a signal that she had misstepped and overlooked something important. Oh, of course! she thought as she remembered the very special thing that had happened before she’d stopped off to visit the nursing home where she made the rounds visiting infirm and forgetful old women she didn’t know. Barbie believed The Universe had chosen her to be a healer, and at last, The Universe was about to reward her, which was why Hooter had given Barbie the special gift.

Minutes later, her neighbors, the Clot sisters, watched Barbie apply a rainbow bumper sticker to the back window of the Fogg family minivan. Uva Clot was shocked as she peered out from behind the kitchen blinds.

“Come here and look!” Uva yelled at her spinster sister, Ima, who was watching TV in the living room, the sound blasting. “Lord have mercy, she’s falling down drunk and putting that thing on her car with chirren inside the house. What’s gonna happen to those little chirren when all the world sees what they momma just put on that minivan a hers? I always wondered about her, didn’t I tell you I always wondered about her, Ima? Get on in here and look right this minute!”

Ima shuffled in with her walker and squinted through the opening in the blinds. She stiffened at the sight of Barbie Fogg in her lit-up carport across the street. Ima couldn’t quite make out what Barbie was doing, but it looked like she was walking around her minivan and kicking a doll across the concrete, and she kept smoothing something on the back window and admiring whatever it was. Ima barely made out a few bright colors.

“What she up to?” she asked her sister.

“Don’t you see what she put on the window, Ima? She got her one of them rainbow stickers! ’Member all them rainbow flags and stickers when we was living in the French Quarter?”

Ima gasped with such a start that she lurched forward with her walker and fell into the blinds. She grabbed them to steady herself, and they crashed to the floor. Barbie Fogg peered at the Clot sisters peering at her through the suddenly transparent kitchen window and waved at them as they scurried out of view.

“Lennie,” Barbie called out when she walked through the
mudroom into the kitchen, where her husband was rooting around inside the refrigerator. “You’ll never guess what happened tonight.”

“You’re probably right,” Lennie testily replied as he popped open a Budweiser. “And I’m not going to guess.”

“A figure of speech.” She said what she always did.

“What took you so long? I thought you’d be home hours ago.”

“Traffic and those poor people in the nursing home,” she said. “Oh, Lennie, I made a new girlfriend tonight and have a rainbow on my minivan!”

“What’d you do, drive through a thunderstorm and now you’re gonna find a pot of gold?” Lennie gulped the beer and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

“Are the girls asleep?” Barbie inquired as she looked inside the refrigerator, too, deciding she would celebrate her rainbow with a Mike’s Hard Lemonade. “Wouldn’t a pot of gold be wonderful?”

“Yeah, yeah. Listen,” Lennie said, “you know, one of my clients has got extra tickets for Saturday night’s race, and as you know, I got to be in Charlotte at that real estate conference. So you want the tickets, or should I give them to someone else?”

“I’ll get a sitter and maybe take a girlfriend,” Barbie replied, failing to add that she wouldn’t miss a race for the world and was delighted that her husband couldn’t go.

Barbie had a secret passion for driver Ricky Rudd, who had the most flawless creamy skin and cute blond hair. Whenever she saw pictures of him wearing that big Texaco star on the front of his colorful racing suit or watched his number 28 bright red Monte Carlo roar around on TV, she felt tingles all over her body and would send him another letter. She had been writing to him for years, sending him weekly epistles when he lived in North Carolina and then trying to figure out how she might get his phone number after he moved back to his home state of Virginia. He never answered, of course, but she believed he would if she didn’t use a pen name and fail to include a return address.

Along with Ricky, Barbie enjoyed an obsession with Bo Mann, whom she’d noticed when he was driving the Monte
Carlo pace car at the 2000 Chevrolet Monte Carlo 400 last year. When Barbie made numerous inquiries in the pits and begged for her photograph to be taken with Bo, she was clever enough to trick him into giving her his address.

“If I send you the photo with a stamped return envelope, will you autograph it?” she had said to Bo as they posed together in front of the pace car, after the race.

“Sign the envelope or the picture?” he had asked, and oh how Barbie loved a man with a sense of humor.

“I heard a man got blowed up by the river tonight,” Lennie was saying. “I guess that means there’s another psycho on the loose. Let’s go to bed and have sex.”

The lemonade was mounting straight to Barbie’s head.

“Oh dear,” she sighed. “I don’t think I’m up for it tonight, Lennie. I’ve got rainbows on the brain and just want to relax a little and bask in it, if you don’t mind.”

Lenny did mind. Frustrated, he finished the beer and got out another one. He popped the top and eyed his wife’s trim figure. She spent so much time taking care of herself, but then she didn’t want him to snatch her clothes off and explore what she worked so hard to maintain. It didn’t make sense. Why does a woman bother looking good if she doesn’t want sex?

“I think I need to check on the girls and go to bed,” Barbie announced. “Oh my! This lemonade’s making me swoon.”

“Glad something does,” he muttered as he thought of how seldom he complained about his wife’s shopping sprees or what she spent on cosmetic surgery and injections and God knows what all she did when she visited that doctor of hers once a month. Lennie was good about sending her flowers, too, even when there was no special occasion, and he never complained about babysitting the twins, Mandie and Missie, who were almost five. He just wanted his wife to let him touch her and at least pretend she liked it or didn’t mind.

Lennie got her another lemonade and helped himself to another beer. Getting her drunk used to work, but now all it did was make her groggy and distant.

“I can’t keep on living like this,” he said. “I work my ass off selling real estate and half the time come home and babysit while you visit with invalids or your lady friends up and down
the street. Then you’re too damn tired for me, or maybe you’re just tired
of
me.”

“A girl needs her girlfriends, you know.” Barbie was having a hard time enunciating. “I don’t think men understand about our need for our girlfriends. How many extra tickets did you get?”

“Yeah, well, maybe I need a girlfriend, too,” he said in a sharper tone.

Barbie began to cry. She simply could not endure his temper or ugliness, and she wilted in the heat of his fury. “I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry, Lennie. I try so hard to please you, honey. But ever since I turned forty, I just haven’t felt like it, you know, like doing it at all. It’s not your fault. I’m sure it can’t be your fault. Maybe I need to see someone and talk about it.”

“Oh God.” Lennie rolled his eyes. “Now I’m going to pay for a therapist, I guess! And what sense does that make? Here you are a volunteer counselor. Why can’t you talk to yourself?”

She cried harder and he felt awful. Lennie hugged her and begged her to be happy.

“You need to talk to someone, sweetpea, you go right ahead,” he softly assured her. “I got two tickets and could probably get a few more from that General Motors executive who just retired down here and bought that big house on the river.”

A
NDY
and Hammer turned into the alleyway behind Freckles and noticed that all the streetlights were out. Trader, covered in filth, was sitting on a package by a Dumpster that was spilling over with sour-smelling garbage. Trader was out of ammunition and still fighting with his zipper, near hysterics and desperate to pee.

“For God’s sake,” Hammer said to her least favorite government official. “What the hell are you doing sitting out here on a package and firing a gun? And why is your suit so dirty?”

“My zipper’s stoppered shut!” Trader exploded in rage.

Hammer bent over to inspect the problem as Andy noticed a woman lurking in the shadows a safe distance away.

“That’s because you’ve managed to zip your underwear in it,” Hammer said. “How’d the little slide get all dented up?”

“I been trying to shit it off!”

“Now settle down,” Hammer ordered. “Let me see what I can do.”

She touched Trader’s zipper slide, careful not to touch anything else. Within seconds, she had unsnagged Trader’s underwear and the zipper smiled open. Trader darted behind the Dumpster and began to pee like a horse.

“Jesus Christ,” Andy said in disgust.

He inspected the package and shook his head as he counted five high-powered pistols and several boxes of ammunition.

“Looks like he’s got all kinds of little businesses on the side,” Andy said.

“Huh,” Hammer remarked angrily. “What a disgrace.”

“Hey!” Andy called out to the woman hanging back in the shadows, unable to make out anything except a silhouette of dreadlocks and high heels. “Come here!”

Hooter wobbled through the dirt, a little nervous that she might be in trouble, too, but not sure for what.

“Oh, I recognize you two,” Hooter said in surprise. “You that woman police chief, only you ain’t the chief no more ’cause you took over the troopers. And you the nice trooper who tried to help me when that man with the bag on his head tried to stick me up at the tollbooth last year,” she declared to Andy.

“What do you know about this?” Andy nodded in the direction of Trader, who was still relieving himself.

“I just know I come out the bar and he was hopping around in the alleyway and then sat hisself on a package. Oh my Lord, look at all them guns! Why he was out here sitting on guns by a Dumpster, I’ll never know. I told him it was dangerous, but he wouldn’t get off the package and was holding hisself. So I don’t know nothing more than that ’cept all a sudden he started shooting all over the place and I ran for cover and yelled for help.”