Stress by Loren D. Estleman Page A

don’t have no statistics from the morgue, on account of dead folks don’t answer the census. Take my word for it, though, we ain’t no minority there neither.” His voice rose. “And I don’t need no numbers in a column to tell me we got one more vote there than we should. Junius Harrison’s stretched out in a refrigerator tray with three holes in his back, and all because he crashed the white man’s party New Year’s Eve.”
    The tape stopped there, and newsman Jac LeGoff’s long weary countenance filled the space. Behind him on the blue background appeared a clean-cut-looking head shot of Harrison, a relaxed, smiling picture that Battle hadn’t seen, while LeGoff read Police Chief John Nichols’s statement that the shooting was under investigation and the department wouldn’t comment pending the outcome.
    Heating up , thought Battle as he turned off the set. When the media stopped using police mug shots, it meant their sympathy was swinging the dead man’s way. But then they had been cranking up the burners under STRESS almost since its inception. In the locker room at 1300, he himself had heard the unit referred to as SANESS: Shoot A Nigger, Eliminate Stinking Shines. The Harrison thing showed signs of becoming just the glue required to bond the Springfields and the LeGoffs and the Coleman Youngs against the administration in an election year. Battle had no great love for either Roman Gribbs or John Nichols, but he had seen enough of revolution even in his young life to know that a lot of babies wound up floating in discarded bath water.
    One day on the shooting team and he already felt wet.
    “Everything okay?” asked Thea when he slid into bed beside her.
    “Just my ass on the line. Nothing new.”
    “What?”
    He realized she was asking about Anthony. “He’s asleep. He just got confused. Thought he was late for a match.”
    “He’s getting worse.”
    “He just woke up foggy. We all do that.”
    “I think we ought to start thinking about a place for him.”
    “No.”
    When she propped herself up on one elbow, the sheet fell away from her left nipple. It was chocolate brown in contrast to her dusty-beige skin. Before they were married he used to call her his personal Hershey’s kiss. It had embarrassed her, even though his listeners didn’t know what he was talking about, and he had stopped. “Charlie, you work. I work. He’s here alone all day. What if he wanders away and gets hurt?”
    “Fat chance of that. Fifty-eight and he can still bench press a Chevy.”
    “Even worse. He might hurt someone else. He was in a violent line of work.”
    “No more violent than the ballet. When I was just a kid he showed me how he could Atomic-Drop the Beast of Borodino, set him down on the canvas as gentle as an egg and make it look to the suckers like he busted every bone in his body. He was the best there was.”
    “ Was .”
    He pretended she hadn’t spoken. “Last year when I was pulling double shifts I sat on the edge of the bed one morning with one sock on for ten minutes, trying to figure out if I was getting dressed to go to work or getting undressed to go to bed. You going to put me in a home?”
    “It’s not the same thing. Charlie, I know it’s hard. You’re like father and son.”
    “Not like.” He scrunched himself into a sitting position and wedged his pillow behind his back. The moonlight in the room glowed like hoarfrost and he could see their reflections in the glass of his framed group cadet photo on the wall opposite the bed. He’d attended the funerals of two whose faces shared the frame, dress blues and a rifle salute; if anything was getting worse, if anything had a violent past, present, and future, it was Detroit. The whole city belonged in a home. “I was a year old when my old man went to Jackson for life. Anthony could’ve let me go to a state house, but he took me to his apartment the day the cops came and I never left till I signed up downtown. I don’t give a