King's Justice: The Knights of Breton Court, Volume 2 by Maurice Broaddus Page A

street war is that someone always wins."
      "And we're left to clean up the mess." Lee shrugged to mask his disgust. He hated the power vacuum left by Night's demise and Dred having faded so far into the background, so damn untouchable he was reduced to being strictly a rumor. It felt like unfinished business.
      "What's your next step?" Octavia asked.
      "Going to tap my informant."
      "Reliable?"
      "The best." Lee grinned. A boy's gleam at being trapped in a toy store, though it had a lascivious edge to it. Though Lee had a way of making even talking about cotton candy sound lascivious.
      "Work your cases. Hard," she emphasized. "We need to see some movement sooner than later. Something to reassure the public."
      "And the bosses."
      "Them, too."
      "We'll get right on it, ma'am," Cantrell said.
     
    "'We'll get right on it, ma'am.' You ever get tired of bowing and scraping?" Lee asked.
      The neon bloodshot eye logo of the Red Eye Café seared Cantrell Williams' already tired retinas. A 24hour bar and breakfast joint, though the café couldn't serve alcohol on Sunday mornings because of Indiana's blue laws. Small burgundy lights blinked along the window ledges as he stewed at his faux wood table. The place was the province of the young and used-up, as the hookers and strippers of downtown Indianapolis often strolled in here after their shifts. Cantrell ignored him as he bit into his Red Eye Chili Omelette.
      Life as a detective was mostly this: inaction as they waited for a body to fall, paperwork, and figuring out where to eat. The murders played on his mind though; despite his cynical bravado, there was a grain of truth to Lee's sentiment. Soon this would be yesterday's news. As it was, three teen males slain in a shooting in a neighborhood no one cared about only rated a page three mention. Though he had no feel for Captain Burke: in his experience, all bosses cared about was to keep things local. If feds came in, things had a way of getting stupid. A high enough profile murder or too many bodies dropping or someone gets it in their head that there was a nefarious ganger of some sort to make their bones on, all bets were off and stupidity reigned.
      Until then, Cantrell would work things his way. Build relationships with the community. A Pastor Winburn had been steadily building a rep as a community activist. Some knucklehead named King was busy taking a more direct approach, staying just this side of being a vigilante. Or at least being charged as one. Maybe he could rap with some of the local gang leaders, lean on them to lower the temperature in the neighborhood. That was Cantrell's vision.
      "… place is a toilet. Always has been."
      "Not always." Cantrell didn't even have to make the pretense of catching up on the white noise his partner's chatter usually faded to. He always came back to his favorite topic: the Phoenix Apartments.
      "Even when it was the Meadows, it was a cockroach-infested sewer filled with rats who thought of little else but eating, slinging drugs, and shitting all over the place."
      "My moms didn't seem to have a problem raising us here." Eyes at half-mast, his body knotted with frustration and anger. Cantrell planted his palm on the table and leaned toward Lee.
      "Oh, what, so… we gonna have a thing now?"
      "Ain't no thing to be had." Cantrell relaxed and let loose a long sigh.
      Lee turned away in a paranoid sulk. He wasn't racist. He didn't care how many times he was called cracker or peckerwood, he knew what he was and how he worked. Citizens got a fair shake, but animals were treated as animals. Police – true po-lice – dealt with the worst each culture had to offer and it had a way of coloring a person's view on that culture. Including his own, though, more often than not, he was summoned to black neighborhoods, not his own. That wasn't his fault, just the cold, hard real of his life. No point in bullshitting it.
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