"Go," Chris said. "And don't be short again."
"The Commissioner," Mackey said without looking up, "couldn't find his own dick with both hands and a search warrant."
Detective Sean Mackey had been a good police once. That was the tragedy of it. He cleared homicides, knew the difference between a body in a vacant and a body on a porch, and never once flinched at a crime scene photo. But fifteen years on the job had pickled him. Now he sat in the fluorescent hum of the Homicide bullpen, staring at a dry-erase board that told a lie.
That's a soldier , Mackey thought. A soldier who doesn't know he's in an army. the-wire
He looked back at the pit. Dukie was sitting on an overturned milk crate, counting crumpled bills. The boy was afraid. Mackey could see it in his shoulders.
The Detail
Chris tilted his head. He had the calm of a surgeon. "You swear on your mother?" "Go," Chris said
"Run that Yukon's cell phone data," she said, breathless. "I pulled a subpoena from a friendly judge in Annapolis. The phone pinged near June Bug's body. But it also pings every Sunday at 6 PM at a warehouse on Pulaski Highway."
"You short," Chris said. Not an accusation. A fact, like the weather.
Mackey looked at the photo of the Yukon. He thought of June Bug, a junkie who wanted to be a man, who died because he trusted a badge. He thought of all the other Junes Bugs—the bodies stacked in the corner of the board, the ones marked Closed because no one cared. He cleared homicides, knew the difference between a
Mackey slid a single photograph across the desk. It was a grainy still from a traffic camera. A black Yukon Denali, tinted windows, parked outside a public housing high-rise at 3:14 AM on the night June Bug died.
Dukie ran a package for a mid-level dealer named “Fat Face” Rick. It was a simple job: take the re-up from the stash house on Monroe to the pit on Baker. But Dukie was light. Not by much—forty dollars—but in the system, forty dollars might as well be forty thousand.
Chris was quiet for a long time. Then he reached out, not to hit, but to straighten Dukie's crooked cap. "Then you need to find new boys. The old ones are a liability. You understand liability?"