Read Online New Jersey Noir by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page A

exhausted. Can I go home now?”
    Cash turned back to the window. “Where are your guns?”
    “The detectives took them. They gave me a receipt.” Miles produced the wrinkled paper and placed it on the table.
    Cash glanced at it. “All right, put it away, hold onto it. You know procedure. You’ll be reassigned to a desk job until you’re cleared on the shooting. Tomorrow we’ll talk again and cross the T’s and dot the I’s. Then you’ll sit for your official interview. I’ll be there personally to monitor things.”
    Miles stood up and began to leave the room.
    “One more thing,” Cash said to the man’s back. “Stay home. Let Negron take you straight home and stay there. Don’t speak to anyone about the shooting, not even Negron. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
    Miles placed a hand on the doorknob and started out. Before leaving, he turned slowly and spoke softly: “Mr. Cash, I know what everybody thinks. I know what you think. Tonight, any other cop would have been assigned some lawyer right out of school. But because of my father, you showed up personally. And I’m sure you know how grateful he’ll be for that.”
    Cash wore a neutral expression. “Yes,” he said.
    “I need you to understand something, though. I want everybody to understand something. The last thing in the world my father wanted was for me to become a cop. He tried his best to change my mind, and when he couldn’t he tried to talk me out of working for Camden PD. But he couldn’t do that, either. There are some good people in Camden, Mr. Cash. They’re trying to make a life for themselves.”
    For the first time since entering the room, a small, tired smile touched Miles’s face as he continued.
    “I just wanted to help them do it. That’s all I ever wanted. The other cops, they hardly talk to me. Negron and Sanchez have me for a partner because they pissed off the duty sergeant. But they’ve got me all wrong.”
    He turned back to the door, speaking as he left the room.
    “I was just trying to help.”
    When Miles was gone, Cash turned to the window behind him, his cold, gray eyes studying the early-morning light as it began to nudge against the slowly dying night sky.
    He stood there alone for quite some time. He wondered why Negron, from his position of cover behind the porch, had not fired.
    He wondered why Sanchez had not fired.
    And as the Camden sky grew brighter, he wondered about organs and brains, nerves and enzymes, anatomy and souls.

NEW DAY NEWARK
    BY S.J. R OZAN
    Central Ward (Newark)
    A new day was coming to Newark.
    The boy had actually got himself elected mayor.
    Miss Crawford was satisfied with this. She knew him now for some years, not just seen him on the TV, mind you, but she knew him. Not because she was his people. His people were from Harrington Park, and Miss Crawford had watched him sideways like lots of folks at the old Brick Towers back when he was a councilman and he first moved in. The boy himself went to Yale and Stanford and places like that, and besides he had those green-blue eyes. Wasn’t no other politician she could remember ever set foot in Brick Towers, and this baby-face councilman was going to live there? Something had to be up, no question. But the councilman was always polite, he learned her name right fast, and if something was going on she never knew what it was. He walked up the stairs like the rest of them when the elevator was out and one time she saw him bringing groceries for old Mrs. Green next door to him. Miss Crawford herself, she lived on the second floor, so it wasn’t no thing, but she couldn’t help noticing that since he moved in, it wasn’t like the elevator went out less often but it got fixed when it did. The lightbulbs in the halls got replaced when they burned out too, not six months later.
    So when the boy announced for mayor, that first time, she thought, Well all right. None of that with the elevator and the lightbulbs happened all the years that other boy