Exhausted from my lawsuit and trial, the immeasurable harm it had caused my already dying mother and the 24-7 media circus surrounding it all, I’d urged G to drop the whole thing so I could just get on with using the money to slowly kill myself via cirrhosis of the liver in a world tour of high-class boozeries and deeply funky foreign dives.

Now, while the corroded gears of the city government continued to grind in a pitiable effort to move Detroit forward, Tomás and I devised our own “neighborhood watch” plan for both Clark Park and Authentico Foods: For the next two weeks, we would surveil both locations, three hours during the day, two or three hours at night. If we were lucky, maybe one of us would spot any wannabe drug kingpins or the illusive Mr. Sloane, which would offer Tomás and me the opportunity to lean on either. If nothing popped up in two weeks, we would sum everything up as either a hiccup or someone somewhere (Duke Ducane?) having gotten the message that we weren’t fucking around.

Not much of a plan but more than what had been on the table.

Tomás was still pissed that I’d taken the word of an old gangster like Ducane over his rather sizable reservations, but he begrudgingly agreed to my two-week surveillance plan.

“You do, of course, know you’re dumb as shit,” he said as we drank beer at my kitchen island.

“Yeah.” I took a slug of my Negra Modelo. “I know.”

Neither of us thought our neighborhood-watch self-assignment merited a trip to Tomás’s gun locker. My Glock and his S&W 610 revolver would be enough to scatter any rats or roaches we might encounter.

I’d been on a number of stakeouts during my career as a Detroit cop, and I’ll say this much: for all the wacky bullshit Hollywood tries to sell you when it comes to cop movies and TV shows (Black-white buddy cop comedies, cowboy-cop-in-the-big-city stories, precinct musicals, vampire detectives, etc.), there’s one thing they do manage to get right—stakeouts are the closest thing to actually, truly being bored to death.

A cold November week had passed with me huddled inside my Oldsmobile 442 and Tomás hunched over a thermos of hot coffee in his classic Ford F-150. Elena—not a fan of our late-night/early-morning surveillance scheme—usually packed Tomás an enviable cooler assortment of sandwiches; soft-shell chorizo, beef and fish tacos; tortilla chips; and hot green salsa, all of which she commanded him to share with me.

Which he didn’t.