I watched it for too long. That’s what screwed me over. I shoulda just ran.
He could see it. The brick had passed through the frozen air slowly, completing a single backwards rotation as it left his fingers. His shoulder cracked when he threw it. The spongy red stone approached its trajectory’s apex, slowing as if pulled by invisible claws. It began its plunge towards the dirty window.
His eyes jolted open. The seat tossed him forward and his face smacked against the harsh metal net between him and the driver. His hands snapped up reflexively to brace the collision but could not move. A taut plastic shackle held them behind his back.
“What the hell? You didn’t see that light? They not teach cops how to drive?”
The officer didn’t respond, but glanced over her sunglasses into the rear view mirror. She scanned the back seat sternly, almost amused, a hawk teasing some wounded rat. She snorted and pushed her glasses up, hiding her eyes needlessly in the late afternoon as she rolled down the window and spat into the street.
He struggled armlessly back into the seat, swung up his legs and half rolled over, until he was on his knees watching buildings recede through the back window. The road carried them backward, an asphalt conveyor painted with grimy sleet transporting banks and libraries into unreachable haze.
“Who you think you are, boy?”
He had tripped on the curb. She grabbed his arm. Hell with it. He let her shove him against the wall. His shoulder slammed into the sandstone rump of the church he’d been running past when he fell. The bones of his wrists ground together as she bound them in cheap plastic ties with a rapid series of clickclickclickclilcks.
Wordlessly she pushed him into the car. Don’t I get rights?
“Don’t I get—” his head knocked against the car frame and he shut up.
She slammed his door, hopped into the driver’s seat, and then slammed hers. They drove.
“Don’t I get rights?” He was still glaring out the back window, the shattered glass and barren walls drifting away from him like dropped coins rolling into a sewer.
“What?”
“You’re supposed to read em to me. You didn’t read em to me.”
She did not answer.
He was tired now. “I got rights,” he said weakly and yawned. He cursed himself for not concealing it.
The dead neons of a strip joint popped into his periphery and he turned to behold the dark breasts and contorted legs of a woman’s silhouette on the club’s sign as it passed from the rear windows on his right into the back window and off down the street towards the groping dusk. Parking meters, dog-walkers, chilly smokers all followed into the gloom.
He hadn’t seen the police car parked on the other side of the street. It was one of those undercover jobs that looked like a beat up hulk of rust somebody had abandoned on the roadside, yet in reality it guarded the block with grim patience.
The brick punctured the window.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
The glass tinkled to the pavement, the cop screamed, and he started running all at the same instant. He bolted left, then right down a short alley behind the church.
The car pulled a U-turn and shot off down another street. When he emerged on the other side, she was waiting.
They stopped.
“Get out, we’re at the station.”
She opened the door for him and dragged him up concrete steps that seemed absurdly high. His shadow stretched far beyond and above him. When they reached the top, he could see the setting sun framed in the station’s glass door.
His reflection in the paint shop’s window was too clear, given the evening light. The scar on his right cheek leapt easily back at him from the glass, purple and hideous. He had gotten it in there, two weeks ago, the day the shelves collapsed and tumbling paint cans brought him to the ground beneath wood beams and loose nails. The boss had hit him that day.
“What the hell you doing? You keep on dicking around, you don’t start caring, you’re gonna land your ass in jail. I’ve seen it before.”
The advice came late, like everything. Like in Iraq: the jets that raced ahead of their own sonic waves or the market in Diyala that exploded and was gone before the sound of the bomb reached the ears of men standing down the street. He hadn’t been there; his big brother had told him about it in the letter that appeared in the mailbox like a sick prank, a week and a half after two uniformed men had presented a flag to his mother and told her I’m sorry for your loss.
His reflection confronted him. The sun was beginning to set. Let’s get this over with. He had to be home soon.
He threw the brick.