Where the Hurt Is by Chris Kelsey

Author:Chris Kelsey [Kelsey, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781684330713
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Published: 2018-06-27T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Kevin didn’t have any family members there to hold his hand while he was hospitalized. His mother was off gallivanting in California and his father had disappeared into thin air. I thought having Bernard stay with him overnight was the Christian thing to do. I’m not a Christian, but Bernard is.

I stopped by Bernard’s house to pick him up a change of clothes to take to the city. I have a key, not that it matters. He always leaves it unlocked. He’s unusually trusting for a cop. The only clean clothes I could find was a spare uniform. Other than socks and underwear, there were no civvies in his closet or dresser drawers. Maybe he dropped them off at the laundromat. Maybe he doesn’t own any. I can’t say I’d be surprised if that were the case, although I wouldn’t consider it healthy.

There are limits to how devoted a person should be to his job.

I took the uniform, some socks and boxer shorts, and hit the road. After fifteen minutes of driving, I got a cramp in my neck from having to contort myself to see around crack in the windshield left by the BB gun. It almost would’ve been better if he’d used a real gun and shot out the whole goddam windshield. At least that way I could see where I was going.

Folks think that since we can drive as fast as we want, run stoplights, eat doughnuts and drink beer behind the wheel, driving a police car must be a dance in the flower patch. They are mistaken. For one thing, people slow down ten miles-per-hour below the speed limit when they see you coming up behind them, meaning you have to pass them if you want to make good time. The longer I follow a fella, the pokier he gets, sometimes to the point that it feels like we’re going in reverse. You can hit your lights and get them to pull over, but I don’t like doing that. Today I decided it was necessary if I wanted to reach my destination before I reached retirement age. I expect I made a few folks crap their pants thinking I was about to write them a ticket, but I got to the city with time to spare.

My first stop was the East Side address the OSBI got from Sheryl Foster’s driver’s license.

Thanks to Jim Crow laws dating to Alfalfa Bill Murray’s governorship, the East Side has long been Oklahoma City’s semi-official colored neighborhood. I’ve been going there since high school. Marceline Hardy took particular pleasure in flaunting race laws. She called them “ignorant,” and I reckon they are. Once I turned 16, she started taking me on rounds of the area’s jazz clubs. I looked a lot older than I was, so I had no trouble. Almost always, we were the only white faces in the house. The colored folks tended to be friendly to us, or at least polite.

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