“Here.” He pulled out his wallet, extricated a twenty, and passed it over. “That oughta cover it.”
The older man tucked it away. The crowd buzzed again, the anger turning toward the shop owner now.
“Go on back to your market,” Rafe told him. “You got enough money to pay for what was stolen. And you shouldn’t leave the place unattended.”
The shop owner turned and trotted away, and I think it was spurred just as much by a desire to get away from the crowd as the need to see if his place was all right.
“Anybody else got something they wanna say?” Rafe inquired. When nobody spoke up, he grabbed for the car door again. “Go on home. We’re done.”
He folded himself into the car and snapped his seatbelt in place. And drove away, careful not to get too close to anybody. The cell phone cameras stayed on the car until we were out of sight, and it took that long for Rafe to let out the breath he’d been holding.
“Shit.”
“Tense situation,” I said.
He rolled his head back and forth, loosening the no doubt tight muscles in his neck, and then he glanced at me, his lips curving. “Coulda been worse. In the past, I’d be the one on the ground.”
With Tucker’s knee in his back. “Did you ever…?”
“End up on my face on the pavement with some cop’s boot on my neck? More than once, darlin’. Lucky for me, none of’em had an itchy trigger finger.”
Lucky, indeed.
“You handled it well,” I said.
“Easier when you’ve been the one on the ground,” Rafe answered. And shook his head. “Stupid kid.”
“Do you think he was telling the truth? About his friends taking off and leaving him?”
“I don’t imagine he’d be stupid enough to let himself get caught if he’d known what was gonna happen,” Rafe said, maneuvering the car back in the direction of home, for the second time that night. “He’d have been outta there with the others if he’d known. And I don’t imagine what’s-his-name…”
“The store owner?”
He nodded. “—woulda let him get away if he’d had anything in his pockets that oughtn’t have been there.”
Probably true.
“So justice was served. More or less.”
“If you wanna call it that,” Rafe said. “Curtis went home. The guy got his money back. I’m twenty bucks poorer, and my name and face’ll be all over social media tomorrow. But it coulda been worse.”
Very easily. “What’s going to happen to Tucker?”
“Not much,” Rafe said. “He was only doing his job. The kid wasn’t damaged. Tucker wasn’t killing him, or even hurting him much. I don’t see him doing that even if I hadn’t shown up.”
“So Grimaldi—?”
“Didn’t want the bad press,” Rafe said, leaving the lights of Columbia behind as we headed south on the Pulaski Highway toward home. “The optics—” his tone made quote marks around the word, “are bad any time a white cop has a black man on the ground. And with what happened last month…”
I nodded. What had happened last month, was the discovery of a small, local, white supremacist cell that held target practice in Laurel Hill Wildlife Area in the next county over, and that had staged a mass shooting right near the square in Columbia. The leader was in prison now, and so was his right-hand man, but the discovery of a neo-Nazi group operating out of Columbia hadn’t made the optics, as Rafe called them, any prettier. Especially not since said neo-Nazi group’s big gesture had been to shoot up a gathering of black people that were celebrating the raising of a monument at the site of the 1946 Columbia Race Riots. Including Civil Rights era icon Mordecai Lawson, who had marched on Selma and Washington with Doctor King.
The Reverend Lawson was fine, by the way. Healthy and hale and back in Memphis, where he lived.
“So Grimaldi wanted you to make the situation look better for the cameras,” I said.
Rafe smirked. “I’m sure she figured I’d get some personal satisfaction out of being the one to deal with Tucker, too.”
No doubt. “Did you?”
“It didn’t suck,” Rafe said.
I settled more comfortably into the seat now that we were outside the city limits and it looked like we’d make it home this time. “Any idea what murder scene Grimaldi’s at? Have you heard anything about it?”
“Not a word,” Rafe said, “but I’m sure I’ll find out tomorrow.”
I was sure he would, too.
As it happened, though, we didn’t have to wait until tomorrow. About thirty minutes after we’d made it home, while I was