The Never Game

Shaw dodged the risk of singe and Carole ran, screaming, to her cabin. Shaw debated pursuit, but the crescent of grass on the shoulder was burning crisply and getting slowly closer to tall shrubs. He vaulted the chain-link, sprinted to his RV and retrieved one of the extinguishers. He returned, pulled the pin and blasted a whoosh of white chemical on the fire, taming it.

“Oh my God. Are you okay, Mr. Shaw?” Carole was plodding up, carrying an extinguisher of her own, a smaller, one-hand canister. Hers wasn’t really necessary, yet she too pulled the grenade pin and let fly, because, of course, it’s always fun. Especially when the blaze is nearly out.

After a minute or two, Shaw bent down and, with his palm, touched every square inch of the scorch, as he’d learned years ago.

Never leave a campfire without patting the ash.

A pointless glance after Rodent. He’d vanished.

A patrol car braked to a stop. Oakland PD. A large black officer, with a glistening, shaved head, climbed out, holding a fire extinguisher of his own. Of the three, his was the smallest. He surveyed the embers and the char and replaced the red tank under his front passenger seat.

Officer L. Addison, according to the name badge, turned to Shaw. The six-foot-five cop might get confessions just by walking up to a suspect and leaning down.

“You were the one called?” Addison asked.

“I did.” Shaw explained that the person who’d thrown the cocktail had just run off. “That way.” He gestured down the weedy street, handfuls of trash every few yards. “He’s probably not too far away.”

The cop asked what had happened.

Shaw told him. Carole supplemented, with the somewhat gratuitous addendum about the difficulty of being a widow running a business by herself. “People take advantage. I push back. I have to. You would. Sometimes they threaten you.” Shaw noted she’d glanced at Addison’s left hand, where no jewelry resided.

Addison cocked his head toward the Motorola mounted on his shoulder and gave Central a summary, with the description from Shaw. It had been quite detailed but he’d left out the rodent-like aspect, that being largely a matter of opinion.

Addison’s eyes turned back to Shaw. “Could I see some ID?”

There are conflicting theories about what to do when the law asks for ID and you’re not a suspect. This was a question Shaw often confronted, since he frequently found himself at crime scenes and places where investigations were under way. You generally didn’t have to show anybody anything. In that case, you’d have to be prepared to endure the consequences of your lack of cooperation. Time is one of the world’s most valuable commodities, and being pissy with cops guarantees you’re going to lose big chunks of it.

His hesitation at the moment, though, was not on principle but because he was worried that his motorbike’s license had been spotted at the site of yesterday’s transgression. His name might therefore be in the system.

Then he recalled that they’d know him already; he’d called 911 from his personal phone, not a burner. So Shaw handed over the license.

Addison took a picture of it with his phone and uploaded the details somewhere.

Shaw noted that he didn’t do the same with Carole, even though it was her trailer court that had tangentially been involved. Some minor profiling there, Shaw reflected: stranger in town versus a local. This he kept to himself.

Addison looked at the results. He eyed Shaw closely.

A reckoning for yesterday’s transgression? Shaw now chose to call it what it was: theft. There’s no escape in euphemism.

Apparently the gods of justice were not a posse after him today. Addison handed the license back. “Did you recognize him?” he asked Carole.

“No, sir, but it’s hard to keep track. We get a lot of people here. Lowest rates in the area.”

“Did he throw the bottle at you, Mr. Shaw?”

“Toward. A diversion, not assault. So he could get away.”

This gave the officer a moment’s pause.

Carole blurted: “I looked it up online. Molotov secretly worked for Putin.”

Both men looked at her quizzically. Then Shaw continued with the officer: “And to burn the evidence. Prints and DNA on the glass.”

Addison remained thoughtful. He was the sort, common among police, whose lack of body language speaks volumes. He’d be processing why Shaw had considered forensics.

The officer said, “If he wasn’t here to cause you any problem, ma’am, what was he here about, you think?”

Before Carole answered, Shaw said, “That.” He pointed across the street to the vacant lot he’d noted earlier.

The trio walked toward it.

The trailer camp was in a scruffy commercial neighborhood, off Route 24, where tourists could stage before a trip to steep Grizzly Peak or neighboring Berkeley. This trash-filled, weedy lot was separated from the property behind it by an old wooden fence about eight feet tall. Local artists had used it as a canvas for some very talented artwork: portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and two other men Shaw didn’t recognize. As the three got closer, Shaw saw the names printed below the pictures: Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, who’d been connected with the Black Panther Party. Shaw remembered cold nights in his television-free childhood home. Ashton would read to Colter and his siblings, mostly American history. Much of it about alternative forms of governance. The Black Panthers had figured in several lectures.

“So,” Carole said, her mouth twisted in distaste. “A hate crime. Terrible.” She added, with a nod to the paintings, “I called the city, told them they should preserve it somehow. They never called back.”

Addison’s radio crackled. Shaw could hear the transmission: a unit had cruised the streets nearby and seen no one fitting the description of the arsonist.

Shaw said, “I got a video.”

“You did?”

“After I called nine-one-one I put the phone in my pocket.” He touched the breast pocket, on the left side of his jacket. “It was recording the whole time.”

“Is it recording now?”

“It is.”

“Would you shut it off?” Addison asked this in a way that really meant: Shut it off. Without a question mark.

Shaw did. Then: “I’ll send you a screenshot.”

“Okay.”

Shaw clicked the shot, got Addison’s mobile number and sent the image his way. The men were four feet apart but Shaw imagined the electrons’ journey took them halfway around the world.

The officer’s phone chimed; he didn’t bother to look at the screenshot. He gave Carole his card, one to Shaw as well. Shaw had quite the collection of cops’ cards; he thought it amusing that police had business cards like advertising executives and hedge fund managers.

After Addison left, Carole said, “They’re not going to do winkety, are they?”

“No.”

“Well, thanks for looking into it, Mr. Shaw. I’d’ve felt purely horrid you’d gotten burned.”

“Not a worry.”

Carole returned to the cabin and Shaw to his Winnebago. He was reflecting on one aspect of the encounter he hadn’t shared with Officer Addison. After the exasperated “Really?” in reference to the 911 call, Rodent’s comment might have been “Why’d you do that shit?”

It was also possible—more than fifty percent—that he’d said, “Why’d you do that, Shaw?”