“Dumb son of a bitch,” said Cook, shaking his head, sighing. I caught the kid in the mirror with his middle finger aloft, a miniature of impotent rage frozen in the side-view as we drove away. “Right now they calling me a Tom, but these kids know the rules. Face has gotta be visible, that’s all. Better he get a warning from me than have one of these crackers roll up on him.” He pointed at the screen of the dashboard computer, where his fellow officers were represented by white numbers on a green screen. “Officer Peele is out here today. Peele’d knock that kid’s head off, hoodie and all, put handcuffs on the corpse. Resisting arrest, no fucking joke.”
I nodded. I murmured my agreement. I noticed things. The in-car data-communication system, I noticed, was called DPSC. Indiana’s warrant-database system, I noticed, was called IDACS, and it was linked to NCIC, the national system, and to the Marshals Service’s fugitive-database system. I watched that Marshals Service scroll for a moment, waiting for Jackdaw’s profile to come up, until Cook saw me watching.
“They could reset it, take that feed off of there,” he said, “but I told ’em don’t even worry about it. Shit kinda comes in handy, actually.”
He winked, and I marveled at Officer Cook: double life, complicated game. He wasn’t obligated to have the names and aliases of runners coming up on his screen because black cops were exempt from enforcing the Fugitive Persons Act under the Moore amendment. But Officer Cook liked having the info so he could push it to his pals in the Airlines. He wasn’t the only one, and plenty of white officers did the same, and plenty of police chiefs and public safety directors were if not sympathetic to abolition at least neutral. One of many reasons why the marshals had more or less stopped relying on local law enforcement. Why they had begun instead to use people like me. Complicated game.
Officer Cook moved his gum around in his mouth and tapped his fingers on the wheel. He had a big flat gold ring on one finger, catching the sunlight. Class ring. A whole life behind him.
“So—can I ask you, Officer…” I let my voice, Dirkson’s voice, come out in a reedy tremble. “Where exactly are we heading?”
“Monument Circle. Old Abe. I texted Father Barton to meet us.”
“About me?”
He gave me a look. “I told you, man, we gotta play a little smart on this. I told him I got new information on our open case. The kid is stashed just fine for now, but we’re working on getting him on a connecting flight. Getting him squared away up in C?te Saint-Luc.” He took a stab at the proper French pronunciation, but it sounded silly, and he snorted. “Whatever you want to call it. Little America. We’ve been waiting for word from some folks we work with, some snowmen, and we don’t know how they’re planning to get in touch. So I told Barton I had news on that front.”
I nodded. I noticed all the details. Jackdaw’s anticipated itinerary (Little America; suburbs of Montreal; a new life); I noticed the offhand status update on him (stashed just fine for now; waiting for a Canadian connection to come through). I knew more than Cook thought I knew. I knew more than he did. I nodded meekly. The wiper blades pushed thin lines of rain off the windshield.
I framed my questions with care. “So is that how it works, usually? Get a person settled in the North? Would that be—that would be for a woman, too?”
I readjusted my posture in the seat, sat as Dirkson would sit, thinking about his beloved Gentle, imagining her in a parka and winter gloves in the snowy reaches of Little America.
“Yeah, usually.” He frowned. “Well, I think so. Not my department.”
“Barton handles that part?”
“No.” Cook rolled his eyes. “Father Barton does a whole lot of nothing, most of the time. A lot of speeches. A lot of passing the fucking hat. But other folks do the rescues, other folks run ’em north, other folks sit on ’em till they ready to move ’em on. See? Nobody talks to nobody.”
I nodded. This was classic underground: distinct, discontinuous cells. Cutout operations. Everything clean and careful and strictly need-to-know. The road turned into an overpass, spanning a muddy tributary down below, then back into a road, with fast-food chains and small office buildings slipping past my window. Homeless people on bus-stop benches. Storefronts available for lease. Same thing everywhere. Every northern city.
“And this poor young brother,” I said, hushed and hesitant. “The one y’all just took. How is he adjusting to his freedom?”
“Ah…well.” Cook gritted his teeth, gave his head a quick shake. A passing pain or a reflection of pain. “He’s a special case, that one. A special kind of kid.”
“Oh, yes?” I said, but Cook didn’t seem to want to elaborate, and I didn’t want to push.
We parked downtown, across from a tall monument that sat at the center of a traffic circle. It was an imposing white obelisk topped with a statue of a man in an old-fashioned long coat, standing slender and erect, with his arms extended. The man was tall and made taller by his long face and long top hat, and he was surrounded by shorter white columns and tiers of white steps. A nine-foot-tall, bearded, rail-thin white man, stone-faced and stoic, staring out over the downtown, hands out with palms up, as if imploring.