King of Swords

It was like having someone in there with him. Even with

the lights off. He wanted to turn the fucking thing around, but that was a pussy thing to do. It wasn't even a card, but a picture of a card.

Fuck it! He turned the damn thing around.

After he was done, Joe locked up the garage and went to his car, parked close to the Dorsey house.

When he was a kid his granddaddy used to take him by there and point it out to him. It was a fine two-storey wooden gingerbread house, with tall trees in the back yard and red rose bushes in the front. D. A. Dorsey was Miami's first black millionaire. He'd made his fortune in real estate and done a lot of good for Overtown, including, among other things, helping build the Mount Zion Baptists church.

Joe's granddaddy told him that every black man should aspire to being a little like D. A. Dorsey — help yourself first and then, when your pockets are full, give some of it back to the people around you.

The house had long since fallen into disrepair and neglect.

The front entrance and all the windows were boarded up, the white paint was greying, bubbling, cracked and peeling.

In some places it had been replaced with gang graffiti.

A bunch of kids were hanging around on the sidewalk outside it, smoking and drinking liquor out of bottles in brown bags. They eyed Joe up, immediately made him for a cop and one by one started to disperse, shuffling off slowly, a dip in their walks, left arms swinging lower than the right.

Yeah, go on, walk off,' Joe muttered under his breath.

They didn't know shit about where they'd been standing.

He looked up at the sad old house, dirt under the slats, smashed roof tiles in the grass. There should've been a statue of Dorsey in Overtown, but the city wouldn't spring for that and who'd come see it anyway? Nobody came to Overtown any more unless they lived here, had a score to

settle or a crime to commit. It hadn't always been that way, but it sure was now.

Overtown was one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Miami. In the 1930s it had been called Colouredtown, and its entertainment district, known as the Strip or the Great Black Way on North West 2nd Avenue had almost rivalled Harlem's, right down to the Lyric Theatre, Miami's very own version of the Apollo, where all the greats had played.

His granddaddy had talked about seeing Nat King Cole, Cab Colloway, Lady Day, Josephine Baker and many others at the Lyric. The area had been home to the Cola Nip Bottling Company, as well as dozens of hotels, grocery stores, barbershops, markets and nightclubs. It had been a happening place, and a happy, prosperous one too - or as happy and prosperous as black people were allowed to get in the Jim Crow era.

Ironically, Overtown had started dying when segregation laws were repealed. There was a slow exodus of businesses and talent as people relocated to other parts of town. Then the powers that be had driven a stake right into its heart by building the I-95 Expressway right through it, which devastated the already struggling community. Now the place was barely there and easy to miss; somewhere people literally drove over on their way downtown or to get their kicks at the beach.

Joe felt angry as he pulled out and got on the road. Angry at the city, angry at the world he lived in, and mostly angry at himself for burying his emotions behind his badge and uniform. He'd looked the other way and stayed quiet when he should have been pointing his_ finger and screaming his head off. He'd played the white man's game for the sake of his bullshit career and lost. Stevie Wonder couldVe seen that coming. He couldn't help but feel that he was being punished for the way he'd done things — and for the million things he hadn't done. He'd let his people down. He'd

watched them take beatings and humiliations they didn't deserve, and he hadn't lifted a finger or raised his voice in protest. He'd lied for racist cops who would've done exactly the same thing to him, if he hadn't been a uniform. He could've taken a stand and done the right thing, but he hadn't because he'd thought he needed his job more than his soul and his pension more than his peace of mind. He thought of his granddaddy again, trying to instil those good values in him as he'd held his hand in front of the Dorsey house. He'd failed him.

And even now, with what he was doing in that garage — who was he fooling? Max, that was who he was fooling. His best friend — shit, his only damn friend. The guy had always been a straight arrow as far as he was concerned, always looked out for him, no matter how unpopular it made him.

Max just didn't care. Joe was his friend and you didn't bail out on a friend, no matter what.

Max was helping him because he thought this was about getting some proper justice and to see Joe go out in a blaze of glory. But it wasn't really. It was about Sixdeep, about bringing him down.