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really was on its way.
    They ran. The Buick still wasn’t going a normal speed, as if it was on the prowl for something. Clearly the driver didn’t see the two cops giving chase.
    Smith’s knee was giving him a rather clear and unadulterated warning that this whole running business had best stop soon. After another block they reached the intersection with Decatur Street, just north of the train tracks. Again the Buick obeyed a stop sign.
    Then its passenger door opened. The woman darted out, her yellow sundress a tiny flame in the dark night until she vanished into an alley.
    The Buick stayed where it was, the door hanging open like an unanswered question. Then the white man leaned over, his pale hand appearing outside the car and grasping drunkenly for the handle. He closed the door and drove on.
    â€œChase him or follow her?” Boggs wondered aloud as he and Smith stopped.
    They could have split up. Smith could have pursued the woman and Boggs could have continued his chase of the Buick. But Sergeant McInnis had warned them many times against separating themselves from each other. Apparently, the Department felt that a lone Negro officer was not terribly trustworthy, and that a second Negro officer somehow had a restraining influence on the first. Or something. It was difficult to discern white people’s reasoning.
    â€œI want to see the son of a bitch written up,” Smith said. “Or arrested.”
    â€œMe, too.”
    So although only one of them had seen her face, and that just for a second, they let her disappear into the night, which would never release her.

    Boggs sprinted east on Decatur. A half mile ahead of him, the downtown towers were dark. Nearby he could hear freight cars being hitched and unhitched, other behemoths wearily making their way through the night. Smith kept after the Buick, which was headed south now, driving into the short tunnel that cut beneath the tracks. He was losing it. Rats darted in either direction as the Buick splashed a stagnant puddle from that afternoon’s twenty-minute storm. Smith was just about to give up when he heard the familiar horn of a squad car.
    He ran through the tunnel and into a scene strobed by blue lights: the tracks curving away to his left, garbage loose on the street and sidewalk, and a squad car pulled sideways to block the path of the Buick, which had finally pulled over.
    The white cop who’d been driving jumped out of the car, left hand held high, right hand lingering on the butt of his holstered pistol.
    â€œIt’s Dunlow,” Smith said when Boggs made it beside him.
    Dunlow ranked high on Boggs and Smith’s list of most hated white officers. Not that there was an actual list. And not that there were many white cops who did not rank high. Maybe it wasn’t so much that Dunlow was worse than the others; the trouble was that he was an ever-­present problem. The colored officers were only allowed to work the 6–2 shift, and there were only eight of them, so white officers still had occasion to visit what was now the colored officers’ turf. No white cops had ever had Auburn Avenue as a beat before, they’d simply dropped by the neighborhood when they needed a Negro to pin a crime on, or when they felt like taking out their aggressions on colored victims. Otherwise, white cops had avoided the colored neighborhoods. Dunlow, however, seemed to feel rather at home here, though the residents did not feel nearly so warmly toward him.
    â€œLet me handle him,” Boggs said. He was the more diplomatic of the two, a notion Smith did not like to acknowledge. Even if he knew it to be true.
    They adjusted their caps and ties, made sure their shirttails hadn’t come out, and straightened their postures as they slowly walked up to the white Buick.
    Dunlow arrived at the driver’s door, trailed by his young partner, Rakestraw. Dunlow seemed to look at the driver longer than necessary before