Tunnel Vision by Brenda Adcock

been your partner?”
    “Three or four years. Since he finished his training.”
    “Were you his training officer?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Sort of unusual for a TO to become the trainee’s partner, isn’t it?”
    “You ask too many fuckin’ questions, Weston.”
    “I’m a detective,” Maggie quipped. “It’s what I get paid to do.”
    Brodie smiled slightly and then said, “Well, the truth is, Detective, Curtis Nicholls is a semi-racist, homophobic hot-dogger with a tendency to believe he’s God’s gift to women and the police department. I got stuck with him because no one else wanted to work with him.”
    “Does he know you’re gay?”
    Brodie glanced across the car at her. “Yes. But he doesn’t know you are and if you’re smart it will remain that way.”
    BRODIE EXITED THE Interstate onto Cesar
    Chavez Boulevard and turned into an older, rundown neighborhood within sight of the freeway. The majority of the houses were in need of paint, which gave them the overall appearance of weathered gray wood. Occasionally, someone had made an attempt to beautify their property, but the effort had obviously been hampered by a lack of money or a lack of interest. What once passed for grass was generally dying from a scarcity of water. Periodic green patches appeared to have been mowed but not edged, leaving long tendril of grass crawling across the cracked sidewalks. She followed Maggie’s directions through a series of turns that carried them deeper into economic depression. Brown faces stared at the Camaro as it moved slowly through the area, searching for a house number. It didn’t help that the many of the street signs were missing. The city had replaced them for years before finally giving up. Although she never caught them doing it, she suspected local gang kids or illegals removed them to confuse the authorities.
    Eventually, she was forced to stop and ask directions from a juvenile who was walking lazily up the street. The kid looked about fourteen years old and was dressed in baggy tan work pants that fell across the tops of expensive looking tennis shoes in multiple folds virtually obscuring his feet. A white tshirt, and long-sleeved blue and black plaid shirt buttoned only at the neck completed his gang-banger attire. The boy’s hair was wavy and neatly trimmed, held in place by a hairnet which was pulled together in a small knot in the middle of his forehead. The beginnings of a skimpy moustache sprouted along his upper lip. He stared appreciatively at the car as it pulled to the curb next to him. Brodie rolled the window down and motioned for the boy to approach the car. He sauntered over to the car and rested his hands on the window frame.
    “I’m lookin’ for Val Verde,” she said.
    “What for?” the boy asked.
    “Well, if I wanted you to know that, I’d have told you,” she said.
    “You a cop, right?”
    “And you’re an upstanding citizen who’s always happy to help out the police,” she answered with a grin.The boy chuckled and looked into the car at Maggie. Then he looked back at Brodie. “She a cop, too?”
    “Yeah. So where’s the street, jefe ?”
    “I ain’t you fuckin’ jefe ,” the boy spat, backing away from the car, gesturing with his hands. Opening the door of the car, Brodie took a deep breath and stepped out, grabbing the kid by the shirt. She dragged him to the back of the Camaro as Maggie heard long strings of Spanish flying between Brodie and the boy, most of it recognizable in almost any language as profanity. Eventually, she heard laughter and watched the boy stroll away at the same speed he had been going when Brodie stopped him.
    “What the hell was all that about?” she demanded as Brodie settled back behind the wheel. “This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where you can just grab one of the locals and hassle him. He could have twenty armed friends watching from the windows around here.”
    “Relax. There wasn’t going to be any trouble. Just a lot of