Everybody knew Officer Harris was out to get me. Blond haired, blue eyed, and a total asshole, he was the beat cop who worked on Ashby Grove. His signature move was slowing down his patrol car and leaning out the window with his fingers curled like hooks, pointing at his eyeballs and then at me. “I got my eyes on you,” he’d say. Like that was supposed to scare me.
He’d do this corny-ass move so much that at home the girls and I would point to our eyeballs and back at each other, like, “Gimme the remote. I got my eyes on you.” Or “These your dirty tennis shoes on the sofa? I got my eyes on you.” Officer Harris was a joke. At least that’s what I thought, until the day he decided to take me down.
It was June, a few weeks before school let out for the summer. I was getting the babies ready to drive them to day care and the older girls were heading out to school. Except Tata. “There’s no school today,” she announced. “I don’t have to go.”
I rolled my eyes. Tata was going through a stage where she was trying all kinds of bullshit just to see if she could get away with it. “For real,” she insisted. “It’s a school holiday.”
“I guess it’s Tata Day,” Ashley muttered to herself as she passed me on her way out to the car. Ashley was only four years old, but even she knew Tata was full of shit. I didn’t have the energy to argue so I told Tata, “If you not going to school, you coming to Ashby Grove with me.”
I didn’t drive my Cadillac that morning. I took my new car, a dark-green station wagon that I’d bought at the car auction a few weeks before. It wasn’t flashy like my Caddy, but it had more room for the kids. It was my Big Mama car.
I dropped Nikia and Ashley at day care, then drove to Ashby Grove and parked at my usual spot in front of the laundromat. “Get out the car,” I told Tata, instructing her to take care of any customers who came by while I walked over to Lilly’s Soul Food around the corner to get us something to eat.
I couldn’t have been gone more than twenty minutes. I was headed back, carrying a takeout container of biscuits and gravy, when Jerome, one of my regulars, pulled over in his beat-up white Corolla and flagged me down, waving frantically out his car window. “Rabbit, get in the car!” he yelled. “Get in the car!” Jerome was always jittery, but now he was hollering like some body had been shot. “Girl, you better hurry up!”
“What’s going on?” I asked, leaning into his car.
“I was just over by your spot and I seen Officer Harris hiding in some bushes.”
“What you mean ‘hiding’?”
“Rabbit, him and his partner got binoculars like they’re doing surveillance. Girl, they watching your trap like they finna bust your ass!”
All week long I’d felt like eyeballs were watching my every move. Now I knew why. Officer Harris was a sneaky-ass muthafucka. He was just the type to lurk in the bushes. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what he did on his day off, just for fun.
I opened the car door, slid into the passenger seat, and told Jerome to drive up the road and pull over at the top of Ashby Grove. The street was on a hill and I knew I could get a clear view of what Officer Harris was up to from the top of the block. While Harris was watching my trap, I’d be watching him.
“I feel like that nigga Eddie Murphy,” Jerome said as we pulled up to the curb.
“Huh?” I asked, not taking my eyes from the road.
“Beverly Hills Cop! You know, like we on a stakeout.”
I ignored Jerome and slid low in my seat. Through the dusty front window I could see down the block to the mailbox where I used to stash my dope, the bushes where Harris and his partner were hiding, and my green station wagon parked outside the laundromat.
I’d bought that car because it had more room for the kids, but lately I’d been catching Tata with her boyfriend in the back with the seats laid down, and the two of them hugged up side by side, their faces pressed together.
“You better be using protection,” I told her at least once a day.
“Nah, we just kissing,” she always said.
Tata was fourteen, the same age I was when I had Ashley. I knew more than anyone how a boy can whisper in your ear and take you places you don’t want to go and the next thing you know you got two kids and no way to take care of them. Sitting in Jerome’s car, staring down at the street, I made a note to myself that maybe it was time for me to give Tata a “you better not get pregnant” talk. When I was younger, all I had was Sweetie telling me I owed it to Derrick to give him some ass. But Tata was lucky, she had me. I could give her the kind of sex talk I wish I’d had before I met Derrick. I started making a mental list of everything I wanted to tell her.
One: Respect yourself
Two: God does not want you to be no ho.
Three: I will beat the stone cold shit out of you if you turn up pregnant.
Just in case, I decided I’d also bring her to the Free Clinic and get her some birth control. After all, I couldn’t be with her every second of the day telling her to keep her legs shut.
“Hey,” whispered Jerome. “Ain’t that him? He’s moving!”
I’d been so focused on the talk I was gonna give Tata, I’d taken my eyes off the bushes where Officer Harris had been hiding. Jerome was right. Harris and his partner had left their hiding spot and were running down the block, crouched down low, their hands on their holsters. My heart jumped into my throat. The two of them were running right toward my station wagon. Only, Tata wasn’t on the sidewalk where I’d left her. She was inside the car.
Harris and his partner must have had it all planned out, because they moved down the block like it was choreographed. Harris took out his baton and rapped on the rear window. In one swift motion, he pulled open the car’s back door and he and his partner dragged Tata and her boyfriend out by their legs. I watched my cousin get pushed to the ground and handcuffed. Then Harris crawled into the back of my station wagon and started tearing up the place, searching for drugs.
At the other end of the block, a patrol car pulled up, with its siren blaring. A female cop stepped out. She had a word with Harris’s partner, then walked over to Tata, yanked her to standing, and did a pat-down, running her hands up Tata’s pant legs, across her back, and over her arms. The officer reached into the front of Tata’s jeans and pulled out the baggie filled with fifty rocks I’d given Tata to hold that morning.
“Gotdamn,” said Jerome under his breath. “Caught red-handed.”
The two of us watched in silence as Officer Harris shoved Tata into the back of his patrol car and drove away.