Black Lace (10 page)

She could see the trooper in charge giving her the high sign, so she excused herself and she and Ida went to see what he wanted. She saw Drake standing a few feet away, talking to a group of reporters, but she was intent on the trooper. She’d get with Drake later.

The blue-uniformed state policeman had bittersweet news. “Your tipster was pretty accurate. According to my dispatcher, six more sites have been found not far from here. It’s gonna be a long night.”

And it was. In addition to the medical waste behind the Chaldean grocery, the troopers found barrels beneath an expressway overpass, others behind a school and in the parking lot of a rest home. The HazMat workers weren’t sure what was in the barrels, but preliminary tests showed the liquid waste to be toxic. Lacy was furious that the polluters would target the health of children and senior citizens.

When she finally got a chance to talk with Drake, he was as upset. “I’m with Lenny Durant. Let’s just shoot them. What kind of sick person leaves toxic waste on a playground?”

As the night got longer, Drake and the troopers suggested she and Ida head home, but they refused and followed the HazMat unit from site to site. By the time they finally did head home, it was 1:00
A.M
.

Once there, an exhausted Lacy fell across the bed. All she could think about were the heartless polluters and their toxic surprises. With so many barrels found within that one specific area, did it mean all the stuff
was the work of one crew, or were there multiple polluters at work? She didn’t know. Everytime she thought about the barrels at the school and the old people’s home she got mad all over again.

Myk handled NIA’s day-to-day operations from an upstairs room in his house the organization called the War Room. It was jammed with computer monitors, satellite equipment, and everything else needed electronically to oversee NIA and its missions. Drake, Myk, and Myk’s personal driver, Walter, were huddled in the room now. Walter was one of the organization’s top lieutenants.

Drake handled all of the computer programming, graphics, and charts. At the moment, the three men were gathered around a monitor showing a map of the city. Drake was keying in markers on the streets and businesses where the illegal dumping had taken place. He was trying to determine if there was a pattern, but other than the fact that all the incidents were confined to the southwest side, no other similarities could be seen. He also wanted a copy of the map for his own files for future reference.

He turned to Myk and Walter. “If we can pull some NIA crews from other projects and let them patrol the area, maybe we can catch somebody in the act.”

Myk agreed.

Walter said, “I’ll see who can be freed up.”

Drake input a few more locations and told his brother, “I had a real ugly meeting with Parker yesterday.”

“About what?”

“A new magistrate’s office we’re setting up to prosecute blight code violators.” Drake then told him Parker’s reasons for opposing the new office.

Myk asked, “So what does the councilman have his dirty fingers in that he’s concerned about?”

Drake shrugged. “I wish I knew. Maybe then I could get him off my back permanently. He asked about the recent Dope Busters sighting. Wanted to know why I wasn’t more concerned about a gang of vigilantes terrorizing the citizens.”

Walter asked, “Did you wash his mouth out with soap? He’s the biggest terrorist in the county.”

“It was like he was looking to see how I’d react.”

“Do you think he knows something?”

“That’s how it felt, but?…” Drake shrugged, unable to make it any clearer.

“Well,” Myk said, “if I were Parker, I’d be more worried seeing vans from the Federal Prosecutor’s Office.”

“How’s it going?”

“Nothing on Wheeler, still. We’re assuming he’s dead at this point.”

Drake turned from the screen. “Since Parker is in the trash business, when are you going to start searching the landfills?”

“Soon as we can convince a judge to issue the order. Right now, the courts keep telling us we don’t have enough evidence.”

Walter said, “The judge thinks our mole may have disappeared on his own. Las Vegas. The Bahamas.
Turns out Wheeler had a large offshore shell corporation set up. Had almost fifteen mil stashed away.”

“Wow! Did his wife know about this?”

“Nope, and she’s hopping mad. Apparently, she was working midnights as a waitress to help out with what her husband told her were their financial problems.”

“Why’d he drop a dime to the feds on Parker if he was embezzling?” Drake asked.

Myk shrugged. “Maybe Parker was threatening him. I don’t know. The feds said he showed up one day and wanted to talk.”

Walter said, “Maybe he didn’t think they’d be interested in his embezzling if they were too busy trying to fry Parker.”

Myk said, “Who knows? The only thing in stone right now is Wheeler has disappeared and one of Parker’s trucks was carrying marijuana.”

“Knowing what we know about Parker,” Drake said, “Wheeler’s disappearance looks real suspicious to me.”

“That’s what we tried to tell the judge.”

Drake did a zoom on some of the intersections to get the street names. He wanted these people caught, if he had to catch them himself. He made a mental note to track down Lenny Durant to see if his people had come up with anything new.

Myk, changing the subject, asked, “So, now that the woman you ran off the road is talking to you, have you had dinner with her yet?”

Drake smiled.

Walter laughed. “I’ve seen that look before. He must’ve gotten lucky.”

“Luck, no. Charm and game, yes.”

Myk rolled his eyes. “Bet you didn’t tell her you were still writing back all those crazy women from the magazine article.”

“I did.”

Walter said, “And what’d she say?”

“That she thought the women were crazy too.”

Myk howled.

Drake took the teasing good-naturedly. “Laugh if you want, my dragon brother, but she’s coming to Gran’s party with me.”

“Good for you. Can’t wait to meet her.” Then Myk added, “Bet you didn’t tell her you had a brother cloned from Inspector Gadget, coat and all.”

Drake thought about their half-brother Saint with his coat full of tricks, and he admitted freely, “That, I didn’t tell her.”

Walter said drolly, “I don’t blame you, man. Things like that have to be seen to be believed.”

The War Room echoed with laughter.

Lacy and her officemates spent the
rest of the week dealing with the dumping incident. Calls from residents sent her and the HazMat techs scrambling to check out new sites, and while the techs evaluated, tagged, and hauled the evidence away, Lacy added the information to her reports and fumed over the rising number of incidents.

Drake was in Chicago for a three-day Great Lakes Regional Water Commission meeting, and although he’d called her, her late night forays with HazMat made her so tired, their conversations were short. By Friday evening she was so glad to leave work she wanted to yell “Hallelujah.” She was really looking forward to the dinner with Drake on Saturday night.

Saturday afternoon, Drake drove slowly through the distressed southwest neighborhoods where the dumping had taken place. Although he’d gotten updates on the situation from Lacy and Rhonda while
he was in Chicago, he wanted to make sure the tape cordoning off the areas was still intact. It wasn’t his job, but he was the mayor and he felt a certain responsibility. Guided by the map he’d printed out at Myk’s, he checked out the Chaldean store, the elementary school playground, and the parking lot of the tired-looking rest home. The tapes were all intact, and Drake’s jaw tightened at the thought of polluters using poor neighborhoods as their toilets, while keeping their own communities clean. According to Lacy’s Blight Court report, polluters had all kinds of excuses for justifying dumping their toxic loads in the city’s alleys. They blamed high taxes, tariffs, endless red tape, and the sometimes business-strangling laws governing transportation, packaging, and disposal. Some of the dumpers were convinced that the struggling neighborhoods of big cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia were sewers anyway, so a few more tons of toxins and polluted waste wouldn’t make a difference. That attitude, more than anything else, was why groups like BAD wanted to take these people out by any means necessary. The polluter’s disrespect and their assumption that it was okay to dump barrels of syringes and bloody toweling on school grounds and in the parking lots of nursing homes made Drake angry too. The last time he’d been this angry, he’d formed NIA, and the city’s drug dealers had been looking over their shoulders ever since. He wanted to give the polluters the same kind of hell, but he had to find them first.

Frustrated by the fact that there was nothing more
he could do about the dumping for now, he drove his cobalt blue Mustang out of the southwest side and headed east. He needed a haircut, and the only place in town where he could be himself was at Clyde’s on Baldwin and East Forest. He put in his new favorite CD,
The House of Urban Groove
, and let it soothe the savage beast. Over the sounds of the jamming horns and thumping bass, he cruised his city.

Drake drove around whenever he had the chance; sometimes late at night, other times at dawn. Medical school and the vampire hours of residency and interning seemed to have permanently lessened his need for sleep, so while everybody else in the city not working midnights were home snug in their beds, he would be out driving. He rarely took his bodyguards, Lane and Cruise, with him, something his lady police chief didn’t like, but Drake never worried about his safety. Number one, who was going to mug the mayor? And two, anybody foolish or brave enough to try would learn that the mayor, like a good portion of the city’s residents, rolled armed.

But Drake especially liked driving around on sunny Saturday afternoons like today. Sometimes he’d stop and talk to folks waiting for the Dexter bus, or stop and say hey to a bunch of brothers hooping in one of the city’s parks. He’d also been known to stop and buy a chicken or a rib dinner from a storefront church selling the food to raise money. Invariably his arrival would bring on a stunned silence, and then all hell would break loose as the kitchen ladies fluttered and tried to feed him like a prodigal son. So far, none
of these close encounters had ever shown up in the paper, and for him, that was the best part because the interactions were between him and the citizens, and had nothing to do with the newspapers at all.

Drake pulled into the tiny lot behind Clyde’s Barbershop and sat there a moment to look around. The old neighborhood was still hanging on. There were a few more boarded-up buildings, but there were also a few formerly boarded-up places that now held new small businesses. Drake was determined to make the neighborhoods part of the city’s renewal. Past administrations had focused on reviving downtown. He thought that was okay, but the neighborhoods needed to be revitalized if Detroit was to have any chance of regaining its stride.

His arrival at Clyde’s was greeted with applause, signifying, and back-thumping hugs from the regulars. Clyde Miller, the owner, had been cutting Drake’s hair since Drake’s mother moved the family to the east side when he was nine. Clyde was no longer the player he’d been back then. Over the years, the fast-living hustler life had been replaced by the strict life of diabetes. Clyde’s once string-bean frame now resembled a ham hock.

Seeing Drake, he came out from behind his chair. His light brown face peppered by freckles held a wide smile. He gave Drake a big hug. “How you doing, boy. Ain’t seen you in so long thought maybe you had put us down.”

“Never,” Drake promised. “How are you?”

“Not bad. Still trying to get the forty-eight-year-old
wife to let me trade up to two twenty-four-year-olds, but she ain’t buying it.”

The six customers laughed. Everybody knew Clyde’s fiery wife Glenda, and that if there was any trading to be done more than likely it would be Clyde’s fifty-two-year-old self being exchanged for two twenty-six-year-olds. Drake shook everybody’s hand then took his seat to wait his turn.

In any other shop he could probably have pulled rank and been the next person in the chair, but at Clyde’s it had always been First Come, or Wait Your Turn, just like the sign said on the wall. Clyde didn’t care if you were President of the United States, or the mayor of Detroit, for that matter.

Duke Givens, the other barber, and Clyde’s brother-in-law, asked Drake over the balding brown head of his customer, “How’s that pretty mama of yours?”

Drake picked up a sports magazine, one of many spread out on the rickety table in front of the old comfortable couch he was seated on. “She’s doing just fine. I talked to her this morning.”

“Tell her I said hello.”

“Will do.”

Duke, a widower, had been trying to hit on Drake’s mama for the past ten years, but Mavis Randolph wasn’t feeling him. Even though she was sixty-three now, Mavis could still make the men of her generation walk into trees when she passed by. Duke was one of the ones with a permanent knot on his forehead.

While Drake waited his turn to sit under Clyde’s clippers, he leafed through the magazines and added
his two cents to the myriad conversations in the shop that touched on everything from what the Detroit Tigers needed to do to having a winning baseball season to what was wrong with the fools in Lansing, the state capital, and in Washington. Drake found himself laughing more than a few times as the opinionated Clyde verbally got into it with the “I voted for the President” Duke.

By the time the freshly cut Drake drove away from Clyde’s, his spirit had been renewed. He also had more than enough time to go home, take a shower, and hook up with Lacy.

Just thinking about her made him smile. In his mind’s eye he could see the sexy little twists and the expressive eyes. The sweetness of her kiss came back too. He couldn’t wait to show her off at Gran’s party because he knew his grandmother, Eleanor, and the rest of the Vachon family would like her. His mother wanted to meet Lacy too. Although he’d tried to tell Mavis that a dinner date in no way meant wedding, he was certain she was already picking out names for her new grandchildren.

Lacy was dressed. She wasn’t one of those women who spent years deciding what to wear. A pair of black linen pants, a dark purple linen twin set, and her short-heeled black mules had done the trick. She looked at herself in her mirror and was pleased by what it reflected. She hadn’t always embraced herself, as the psychobabble folks called it. As a teenager, she’d wanted to have her mother’s voluptuous curves
instead of the skinny B cup body she’d been given. Now at the age of thirty-two she’d long ago made peace with her lack of bosoms, as her grandmother used to say. Her body was her body, and it was serving her well. She turned in the mirror and looked at the fit of her pants. She thought she had a pretty good butt, too.

The buzzer rang. Lacy strode confidently to the intercom. “Who’s there?”

“Hey, baby.”

“Hey,” she said softly. “Come on up.”

He knocked on her door a few minutes later, and when she opened it, their eyes met, and then their lips.

“Missed you,” he whispered.

Seeing stars, Lacy murmured, “Missed you, too.”

Drake could see that the kiss had shaken her a little bit, and he liked that. “You look nice. Purple is the color on the Vachon crest.”

Lacy closed the door and wondered if the kiss had affected her hearing. “What crest?”

“Our family crest.”

“You’re talking about the crests you can by for 29.99 in the magazines?”

He laughed. “No. My family has a
real
crest. It has two dragons with their necks entwined. One purple, the other gold.”

“What do the dragons represent?”

“My really great-grandfather, Galen Vachon, and his wife Hester.”

Lacy was impressed. “I love that.” She’d never
heard of such a thing before. “How far can you trace your people back?”

“France. Seventeen hundreds.”

Lacy stared. She studied his handsome face. Then she gave him a look. “You made this up, right?”

He shook his head. “Nope.” He raised his hand. “Scout’s honor. I was an Eagle Scout, you know.”

She smiled. “No, I didn’t know. Altar boy too, I’ll bet.”

“Yep. St. Mattie’s on Woodward.”

Lacy found him so interesting. “So this dragon great-grandfather came from France?”

“His father did. Galen was born in Louisiana.”

“Okay. I’ll bite. You can tell me all about this family of yours over dinner.”

“I’m not making this up.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Mayor.” Lacy grabbed her purse and keys. “I’m so interested that I’m going to let you ride in my new car.”

Drake, being a Vachon said, “But—I brought my Mustang.”

Lacy just looked at him. “Please. Once you see my mother’s birthday present, you’re going to take that ’Stang back to the dealer.”

Drake drawled, “Them’s pretty strong words, ma’am.”

She tossed back, “And I got the horses to back ’em up, Your Honor.” She beckoned a coy finger. “Come with me.”

As she locked up her place and led Drake back
down the hall to the elevator, he watched the swing of her behind in the black pants and knew he’d follow that sweet walk anywhere.

The garage was underground. They walked for a few moments, then Lacy pointed like Vanna White at her new car.

Drake’s jaw dropped. “Damn!” He couldn’t decide where to look first. “I apologize.” Mesmerized, he took a slow walk around her Crossfire while the pleased Lacy looked on. “I saw one of these at the Auto Show back in January. Your mother bought this?”

“Yep. She drives a Porsche Boxster, so she’s into speed.”

Drake shook his head. He couldn’t wait to meet her. “And it’s a stick?”

“Only thing I drive. My mother calls it my only walk on the wild side.”

“What’s that mean?”

“My mother is a true creative person. She takes risks, isn’t afraid of anything this side of the Lord, but I was a real timid child. For a while, there, I was afraid of anything that lived outside the house.”

Her bittersweet smile hit Drake dead in the heart. “You’re certainly not timid now.”

“No, but I’m not as flamboyant or as open as mama thinks I could be.”

“When did the timid girl turn into the Lacy you are now?”

“Around the year I turned nine, when she forced
me to be a Girl Scout. Hated it, at first. Hated the leader, the other girls, and then we went to camp.”

“Thought you didn’t like the outdoors,” he said, watching her with a smile.

“I thought I didn’t either, but once I figured out that the leader wasn’t going to send me home no matter how hard I cried, and that if I didn’t participate in the activities the other girls in my cabin wouldn’t get their badges, and would probably hate me for life, I stopped being such a spoiled pain in the butt and actually started to enjoy myself. Scouts turned me around in so many ways. Shoot, by the time I was thirteen I was going hunting with my daddy. Had my own rifle too.”

She took out her keys and hit the clicker to open the coupe’s locks.

Drake said, “Can’t see you as a spoiled brat.”

Lacy got behind the wheel. “Please. I was the only child of Valerie Garner Green. By the time I was seven years old, I’d been to Paris, Rio, and seen the pyramids. You couldn’t tell me a thing.”

Laughing, he got in on his side. While buckling himself in, he checked out the silver satin interior. “Nice. It’s like a cockpit in here.”

“It is nice, isn’t it? We’ll take a quick ride so you feel this smooth ride, then we’ll come back and pick up your Mustang.”

She turned the key in the ignition and the engine roared to life. The garage door lifted, and Lacy threw the stick into reverse. Looking over at the mayor, she
gave him a grin and headed for the exit. Once she was on the street, she told him, “You know, I wasn’t sure about this car when I first saw it, but then I said, ‘Why not? I have a new job in a new city. I’m having a whole new life. Maybe Mama’s right. Maybe it’s time to let the old, staid, Escort-driving, scientist Lacy go, and act like her for a change.’” Then she added, “But only to a point. I don’t think I’ll be dancing on table tops in Morocco like she did when I was thirteen.”

“She dances on tables?”

Lacy headed the car up Jefferson Avenue toward the freeway. The evening traffic was fairly light. “Yep, and this particular time it was with some man claiming to be a prince. He wanted her to marry him.”