We All Fall Down by Michael Harvey

out. Except someone beat you to it.”
    “Maybe you?”
    I shook my head. “You know I used to be a cop. Not sure how, but you know. So you figure I came down here to hijack the dope. Maybe steal it back for the cops who sold it to you in the first place.”
    “My man over there.” Ray Ray motioned with my gun to the lean one with the shaved scalp. He held an iron shovel in his hands. “Jace getting ready to dig a hole in that tunnel. Dig it special for you.”
    “Why would I shoot a man, steal his shipment of cocaine, then wait for you guys to show up?”
    “People do stupid shit every day.”
    “If you thought I took the dope, I’d already be dead.”
    There was a low groan as a furnace kicked on somewhere.
    “How do you know me, Ray?”
    He thought about that, then waved a hand. Jace went into the tunnel and began to dig. Ray Ray nodded toward the stairs. The other three drifted up until they disappeared. We were alone.
    “Nineteen ninety-eight,” Ray Ray said, studying a long, winding crack in Lee’s basement floor. “I was just a kid. Seen you at the Lots.”
    “I drove by there on the way in. Someone’s turned them into condos.”
    “I’m talkin’ ’bout back in the day.”
    I knew what Ray Ray was talking about. I’d gotten the tip in April of ’98, just as the weather was starting to soften. I showed up with a forensic team and some shovels. We taped off the Lots and began to dig. I uncovered the first body under a pile of black and green plastic bags. I didn’t know her, but her lips were peeled back to the gum line and turned up in a permanent rictus. We dug some more and found a second body, then a third. There were nine in all—women, some strangled, most beaten to death with what the coroner guessed was either a sharp-bladed shovel or an ax.
    “Hot for April that year,” Ray Ray said, his voice approaching the past with the respect it deserved. “First time I really smelled dead people.” A pause. “Lot of reporters. Watched you talk to ’em.”
    We met the press every afternoon at three in a parking lot owned by a funeral home. I picked three o’clock because it was the warmest time of the day, the funeral lot because it was downwind from the dig. Ten minutes into the Q and A, the TV guys would wrap things up, hauling their cameras into the shade and watching from a distance that smelled a lot better. The print reporters were tougher. A couple would usually stick it out, but that was okay. No one gave a shit about print. It’s the pictures cops worry about.
    “You were good, Kelly. Treated the thing with respect.”
    I remembered that first day most of all. We had pulled out two bodies and tried to cordon off the area with a couple of squad cars. First the locals came, rubbernecking. Then the media. Pretty soon there were Mexicans, some on foot, others on bikes, selling corn dogs and soda out of blue and red coolers. Everyone crowded close, eager for a peek, treating the carnage like an early summer street festival. Back then, that sort of thing bothered me.
    “You telling me that’s why I’m alive?” I said.
    “My moms was one of the bodies they dug out of there. So yeah, I guess it is.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “Don’t be. She was nothing but a crack ho.” Ray Ray got up from his chair and walked. Ten feet one direction. Ten feet back. “She was one you never identified.” He stopped by my shoulder so I could feel the weight.
    “There were three of them,” I said.
    “That’s right.” Walking again. Boots cracking on the hard floor. “Three hookers no one put a name to. But I knew it was my moms. She been off the street a week and a half. Besides, I got a look at her dress when they pulled her up.”
    Somewhere, the shoveling stopped.
    “You shouldn’t have seen that,” I said.
    Ray Ray crouched, face level with mine, voice carrying the stain of a child’s memory. “Don’t tell me what I shouldn’t have seen.” Up and walking some more. “Not