Bad Break: A Novel

Chapter Seven

Most mornings I'm not a breakfast guy. There are exceptions for occasional egg and avocado sandwiches from Pueblo.

But usually, I'm good with coffee till early afternoon.

So, I haven't rolled up on Momma's Kitchen, a popular South Side soul food joint because I'm hungry. Don't get me wrong. I treat myself to Momma's biscuits and gravy or pork chops and okra, from time to time. Not today, though.

I'm staking out the place — just the way that my first editor and Allah taught me years prior. Slouched in the back seat of my bland newsroom Taurus, wearing a dull shade of grey to match the car's upholstery and paint. The only way I could have melted better into the background is if my skin had been grey, too.

Mercifully, I don't have to wait long before Chief of Police Randolph Watson and Cook County Sheriff Robert Sharpe exit together.

The pair are a sight to behold — Watson in what I call full parade regalia, his dress uniform and patent leathers, and Sharpe in pointy-toed cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat and dinner plate-sized belt buckle to match. His ornately patterned shirt would make Conway Twitty proud, and its collar is unbuttoned four slots. Like a TV detective, Sharpe wears his gold badge clipped to his belt.

If there's an odder couple on the streets today, I haven't seen 'em. Both the chief and the sheriff are African American, male, and roughly the same age in their late fifties. But that's where the similarities end.

Watson grew up in a gritty community in Detroit with his mother and three siblings in a one-bedroom apartment. He made it out for college and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in sociology and public policy from Ivy League schools before moving to Chicago and working as a community organizer until he entered the police academy.

In countless media interviews, Watson, a short, stout man with a wisp of a mustache and mutton chop sideburns, has insisted that he never wanted to be a cop.

"I never had that itch like some people who claim they were born to enforce law and order or to protect and serve," he once told me. "To be honest, I joined the police department as a protest gesture. I thought then and still think that there is no criminal justice without an element of social justice in law enforcement policy. Once I was in, I saw that I actually was able to do some good and stuck with it."

Sharpe, on the other hand, was the only child of a veteran school teacher and church secretary and was raised in a predominantly white suburb of Milwaukee. Though he was a high school football star, Sharpe eschewed college, moved ninety miles south, and entered the Chicago police academy at eighteen — one of those enthusiasts-from-youth that Watson alluded to.

After rising through the police department ranks till he was in charge of the intelligence bureau, Sharpe's political and career fortunes skyrocketed, when the previous long-time sheriff of Cook County abruptly retired to avoid an investigation into alleged misappropriation of office staff for his political campaign.

Illinois's rare Republican governor, eager to earn a few points with African American power brokers on the city's west and south sides, quickly appointed Sharpe to the sheriff's office. That was seven years ago. Sharpe has since won election to two full terms in the office, and the rumor mill says he has his eye on the governor's mansion.

He may get there too. Sharpe goes the way the wind blows. And right now, he's convinced Donald Trump occupying the White House means the winds are blowing at his back and against men like Watson.

That they were dining together when they usually can't stand to be in the same room, suggests they had serious business to discuss and needed to do so on neutral territory, where neither man would feel used.