DIVA Read Online Free PDF Page B

bucket of Popeye’s chicken, extra mashed potatoes and cornbread, and swung around to the drive-up window. A siren whooped in the distance, a police car judging from the sound. Just another Saturday night in New Orleans. Thugs didn’t take weekends off.
    He didn’t either, unless he had visitors. No visitor tonight, though.
    An iron fist put a stranglehold on his gut. He wouldn’t be seeing Dana this weekend or ever again. He’d met her during a homicide investigation last year. An adolescent psychotherapist, Dr. Dana Swenson lived in Omaha. Long distance romances were tough enough, brutal since Katrina. Last week she’d called to tell him she had reunited with her ex-husband. Her hot-shot attorney husband, hospitalized with a heart attack, had wooed her back.
    He scratched the jagged scar on his chin, a gash that had taken ten stitches to close on his sixth birthday after a kid dared him to ride no-hands down a hill on his new bike. With predictable results.
    The scar was his emotional barometer, itching whenever his thoughts were in turmoil. The end of a relationship was always gut-wrenching. From past experience, he knew that work was the antidote. It didn’t end the pain but it kept him busy, too busy to fixate on what might have been.
    Two days after the Lakeview robbery they had hysterical headlines in the media, politicians demanding an arrest, and no leads. The cop was in guarded condition, unable to be questioned. Their only description of the robbers was from the clerk: a wide-body gunslinger and a skinny kid with dreads. Useless. The hostage had died after the thugs dumped her out of the getaway car, a fact the media had pounced upon, playing up the black-on-white-crime angle.
    He’d dug up some background on Chantelle. Pre-Katrina she had lived with her mother, a known crack addict, at Iberville. Six years ago her mother had born a son by the man who’d lived with them until Katrina. The man had taken his son to Birmingham. Chantelle’s mother wound up at the Superdome, then the Convention Center, finally got bused to Houston with the other refugees. Without Chantelle, no record of the girl on file.
    No arrest record, either. That was a plus, but he would never forget her desolate expression when she thanked him. Nobody gave a damn about a teenaged girl on her own or the black kid gunned down at Iberville. His parents were AWOL too, all kinds of teenagers roaming the city these days unsupervised by any adult. Nothing but bad news all around.
    The takeout window slid open, emitting odors of deep-fry cooking oil and chicken. “Big bucket of fried chicken,” said a young black woman in a Popeye’s cap, “extra mashed and cornbread.”
    He paid for the order, set the Popeye’s bag behind the passenger seat and drove off. At the next corner he turned right and parked behind a beat-up Chevy sedan. Angela hopped out and scurried to his car, a slender black woman with corn-rowed hair, dressed in cutoff jeans and a T-shirt.
    She got in and flashed him a smile. “Somethin' smells good.”
    “The usual. Fried chicken, extra mashed potatoes and cornbread.”
    Three years ago Angela had been arrested for hooking, got off with probation and got out of the life. She was a high-school dropout, but she didn’t do drugs, so he’d recruited her to be his CI, told her to get her GED and find a decent job. Now she was twenty-four, with two-year-old twins and no husband, cleaning rooms at a hotel. He never paid her for information, but he often bought her food. She and the boys lived with her mother.
    “Thanks, Frank. The kids love Popeye’s chicken.” She pulled out a cigarette and lit up.
    “How are they doing? They must be getting big.”
    She chuckled. “Doing great. Jamal’s talking up a storm. Rasheed, he’s into everything. Got a mind of his own, like his daddy.”
    The guy that left you holding the bag.
    “What’s shaking on the street these days?”
    “Not a whole lot, far as I know.”
    “You know