Let It Burn Read Online Free PDF

worse. But I was wrong. By that time I was getting a little numb, but still I’d see something like a beautiful old church turned into a half-collapsed wreck and it would hit me all over again. A park where children once played. A school with every window covered over with plywood.
    As I finally worked my way back to the heart of the city, I came down East Grand Boulevard and passed through the old Packard plant. It had already been abandoned when I was a cop here, but at least then it stood out from everything around it. Now it was just one more forty-acre postapocalyptic wasteland in a city filled with them, with yet more decayed buildings, more graffiti, more garbage, more weeds. This plant where they once made the most beautiful automobiles in the world. It was easy to see how much this one wrecked-out old plant could stand for the whole city, the way it was back in the glory days, and the way it was now.
    I hit Woodward Avenue, the center of town, the dividing line between east and west. The old Thirteenth Precinct building, with the indoor gym they were so proud of, was closed now. They had put up a fence with razor wire around the whole complex.
    I drove south, feeling a tightness in my chest as I got close to that corner. Even though I knew the building was gone now, that apartment building with the broken elevator and those stairs that Franklin had to climb, complaining with every step. Until we finally got to the top and knocked on that door.
    It was gone now, replaced with a Burger King. But it didn’t make me feel any better to see it gone, because Franklin was just as much gone himself.
    I drove downtown, past the First Precinct building, still open, at least for the moment. Past the new ballpark where the Tigers played now, to Grand Circus Park, where the streets fanned out like spokes on a wheel. It was a weekday. A working day. There were people walking around the place, enjoying the nice day. It was good to see that much. It was good to see that the whole city hadn’t been abandoned yet.
    I went down to Michigan Avenue, headed west past where the old Tiger Stadium once stood like a huge gray battleship. It was just a field now, like the sergeant said, with only the old center-field flagpole still standing.
    I wasn’t far from Roosevelt Park and the old Michigan Central Station. I looked at my watch. I still had an hour. Plenty of time to go see the station up close, to see what it looked like now. To see that empty parking lot, those tracks, that desecrated building.
    And to remember what happened there.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
    We rolled out onto Woodward Avenue. It was a Thursday, the first day of June, which meant a school day. That’s the first box you check when you’re on the morning shift, because a school day means there’s officially no good reason for kids to be out hanging around on the streets at eight thirty in the morning.
    Of course, if you do see kids hanging around on the streets of Detroit, at any time of day, there’s a good chance they’re not playing kick the can, or rolling a hoop down the sidewalk with a stick. It’s just a cold hard reality that the frontline soldiers in this city’s drug trade are almost all children. A horribly effective way to run a drug business, when you think about it, because if you ring up a thirteen-year-old for selling, what are you gonna do, put him away for ten years? Even if you did, there’d be another thirteen-year-old to take his place the very next day. The men who are making all the real money, you never touch them.
    If they didn’t invent the practice here in Detroit, they sure as hell perfected it. Young Boys Incorporated, or YBI, was formed by three teenagers on a playground. A few years later, they controlled most of the heroin trade in Detroit. They were bringing in close to two million dollars a week. In the wintertime, you could spot their runners from a block away, because they all wore the same kind of coat. That’s how brazen they