The Waiting

The hardest part of a homicide investigation is waiting for something to happen.

Photo by Katarzyna Urbanek on Unsplash

This story features two characters from my mystery novel The Killer Chorus. This is not an excerpt from that work but, I hope, will give you a taste of who they are and what they do for work.

The coffee always tasted worse on a stake out. More stale. Something. Detective Jed Hatcher couldn’t figure out why that was. It was the same, shitty gas station coffee that he usually drank. He took his coffee black on general principles. On a surveillance detail, his futile attempts to improve the flavor of his humble java with the variety of artificial sweeteners offered by what passed for the coffee bar at the Gas’N’Sip did not seem to move the needle in improving the taste. Hatcher decided that what made the coffee taste worse was the waiting. The man who sang about the waiting being the hardest part wasn’t wrong.

“Who sang the song about the waiting is the hardest part?” Hatcher asked his partner, breaking what had been a period of exactly twenty-three minutes of silence as measured by the clock radio in what was euphemistically called an ‘undercover car’. He then sang a few bars of the chorus in an enthusiastic but off-key lilt.

“Dolly Parton.” Pierce’s deep baritone also revealed a hint of amusement.

“Very funny.”

“You the music expert.”

“Was it Dire Straits?”

“Do I look like I would know who that is?” Montello Pierce didn’t turn to his partner, but his eyebrow arched. He reached up with a meaty hand and scratched his close-cropped, black hair, a sure sign of his growing frustration. Pierce’s dark almond eyes did not move from their fixation on the front door of a second floor apartment where they had been riveted for going on three hours.

“You don’t know who Dire Straits is? They sang Money for Nothing.”

“Was that a collab with Tupac?”

“Oh shit, I thought Kevin Hart was in Vegas,” Hatcher snorted. “I didn’t know he was in the driver’s seat next to me.”

Pierce chuckled in spite of himself. “I wish you was Kevin Hart. More entertaining. For sure.”

“Seriously, you don’t know who Dire Straits is? You never heard Money for Nothing?”

“Wazzat a collab with Tupac?”

When Pierce attempted humor, Hatcher knew that the wait was getting to his partner. Pierce was a lot of things – not least of which was an excellent homicide detective – but he wasn’t a comedian. Hatcher longed for a cigarette. Pierce hated it when he smoked in the car, to say nothing of departmental policy that forbade such indulgences in a government vehicle. Given the number of times Hatcher and Pierce had gotten into an undercover car that smelled like cigarette smoke, the policy appeared to be honored more in its breach than its observance. He considered whether he would try to smoke in the car – and risk Pierce’s wrath – or sneak out and try to find a discrete place to feed his habit. Getting out of the car drew attention and one of the bulwarks of surveillance was avoiding unwanted attention. Indecision loomed for several painful minutes but, in the end, indolence won. He stayed in the passenger seat ruminating over just how good one of the Marlboro Lights in his pocket would taste.

“It was Tom Petty,” Pierce pronounced.

“You’re goddam right it was,” Hatcher confirmed, nodding his head. “And the Heartbreakers. That’s exactly who it was.”

With that question of music lore solved, the two detectives resumed quietly maintaining their vigil over the front door of a second floor apartment in North Nashville. Assuming nothing happened, it would be a while before either detective spoke to each other. Years of surveillance work had worn a pattern of behavior between them, like the groove in a wooden church pew created by the backsides of so many faithful who sat quietly in hopes of redemption. Too much talking was bad. Not enough talking was worse. Hatcher knew that his verbal foray into the origin of a hit song from the ‘80’s had been enough to break the silence and start an unofficial, but rigorously observed, period of at least twenty minutes before he could speak to his partner again. Committed to silence, Jed Hatcher, for potentially the hundredth time, considered the quarry who they believed to be on the other side of the door of that second floor apartment.

Regina Crowley had questionable taste in men. Not that Hatcher was one to judge. Yet, facts were facts. The fathers of her two children had previously come to the attention of the Metro Nashville Police Department, and not so they could be given good citizenship awards. Franklin Booker, who had once sent Regina to the hospital with petechial hemorrhages from a strangulation attempt, was a relatively high ranking Gangster Disciple. Booker now supposedly called some shots for the GD’s from his cell in the Tennessee Department of Corrections where he was serving a twenty-eight year sentence for attempted murder and armed robbery. Hatcher was confident that Booker was not sending much in the way of child support to Regina.

It was the father of Regina’s second child, Eddie Boyd, that had parked the detectives in an unmarked police car outside a rundown apartment complex in what the Chamber of Commerce folks called an “emerging” neighborhood. Boyd had first come to the attention of the local constabulary when he had fired nine shots into a crowd of people leaving a hookah lounge in hopes of hitting a rival Vice Lord gangster who had offended Boyd by being alive. Boyd, not much of a shot, had avoided hitting the Vice Lord altogether but instead had seriously injured a young woman who had been out with her friends celebrating her twenty-second birthday. The woman had lived and, truth be told, walked without much of a visible limp thanks to fourteen months of physical therapy at Vanderbilt’s Stallworth Center. She had also shown precious little interest in telling a jury of his peers exactly what Boyd had done to give her the lifelong limp. Her understandable reticence had gifted Boyd a probation term for aggravated assault but also placed him on the watch list for the gang intelligence folks who saw him as an up-and-comer in a business where there were no winners. Now the detectives believed that Boyd had graduated to murder.

Two days earlier, Derrick “Little Man” Clancy had been shot to death on a sidewalk outside his grandmother’s house at the corner of Clay and Owen. According to gritty anthropological assessments of the gang intelligence folks, Little Man had recently ranked up with the Vice Lords and thereby made himself a target for a man like Boyd who proudly displayed a GD tattoo on his neck. Two police informants had told their handlers that Boyd had bragged about the killing. Little Man’s grandmother, a resolute if morose retired elementary school teacher, had seen a bright orange Dodge Challenger driving away from the murder scene with a Tennessee license plate that started with “BQ”. Boyd was known to drive an orange Dodge Challenger and had been stopped for speeding in one just ten days before Little Man shuffled off his mortal coil. The police report of the incident recorded the Challenger’s license plate as “BQT441”. The vehicle was registered to Regina Crowley.

Asking is Regina knew the recent whereabouts of the orange Challenger, and the identity of its driver, was why Hatcher was attempting to stomach stale gas station coffee as they sat in the parking lot outside Regina’s humble abode. Whether she would talk to them was far from certain. On paper, Regina was a citizen who appeared disconnected from gangland life. No criminal record. No wants or warrants. She worked as an X-ray technician at Vanderbilt University Hospital and posted pictures of her kids, sunsets, and Bible verses on her social media.

“Why you think she got with Boyd?” Hatcher asked. He had technically broken the unspoken pact and asked his question a mere fourteen minutes after confirming that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had indeed recorded The Waiting, but expected no reproach from his partner. He had noticed that Pierce was shifting in his seat and getting twitchy. Some light talk would return their vigil to equilibrium.

“Some girls like bad boys,” Pierce opined. “Always been like that.” For the first time in over an hour, Pierce looked at his partner, a wry grin on his face. “Explains your social life.”

“Fuck you,” Hatcher said, without rancor. He added: “She just seems like a citizen is all. I get the allure of a bad boy but she seems like she could do better.”

“Ain’t nobody ever told her she could do better. She just believed ‘em.” Pierce shrugged and settled back in his seat. Hatcher fell quiet. The broader questions of why smart young women took up with gangsters – or why anyone did anything at all – were beyond the two detectives. The exchange had served its purpose. Hatcher’s partner returned his gaze to the apartment door, the tension of waiting snapped for a bit longer.

The thing about surveillance was that you never knew when it was going to end. Sometimes it ended when those doing the watching made an internal determination that the person being waited for was not going to appear. That kind of finality was profoundly disappointing. Even if the quarry didn’t want to talk to the detectives, that was preferable to making the call to end a surveillance with no joy. The rush of waiting for something uncertain, only to have it arrive was far better than just waiting for something to happen until you couldn’t bear the waiting any longer. Hatcher decided he was going to wait thirty-two more minutes. That would be exactly four hours wasted. Yet, four hours wasted was better than five. He clung to the idea of delicious release that a cigarette would bring and watched the digital clock on the car radio advance, each minute passing with a flickering burst of gentle, artificial light.

“In nineteen minutes,” Hatcher pronounced, “I’m going to have a cigarette whether we’re out of here or not.” Pierce sighed.

“Not in this car you ain’t.”

“Like I’ve never done this before with you.”

“Then why you saying dumb shit?”

“I’m gonna get out of the car, dumbass. I figured by now –”

The apartment door opened and both detectives immediately went silent as if the fact of its opening had startled them, even though they had been waiting for it to open for over three hours. Neither spoke as time stood still. They watched an attractive young woman emerge from the apartment and walk towards the steps of the breezeway to make her way down to the ground floor. She was alone and walking quickly towards a Toyota Acura that they knew was also registered to her.

Simultaneously, the detectives pulled the door handle on their respective doors and exited the unmarked car into the warm August night. Regina would have a brutally difficult maze of choices ahead of her. Whether she would talk to them at all. What she might say. To seek the comfort of a temporary lie or draw the sharp sting of the truth right now. But for the detectives, their primary obstacle receded behind them as they walked. As they grimly approached Regina in hopes that she would ultimately provide critical evidence against the father of her child, the heft of their task seemed light compared to what they had just experienced.

The waiting was the hardest part.

If you enjoyed this short story about Detectives Jed Hatcher and Mont Pierce, I hope you’ll consider checking out The Killer Chorus which follows them as they seek to solve the brutal murder of a music legend and her famous novelist boyfriend. You can check it out here.