Double Deuce

CHAPTER 29

It was nearly noon when Erin and I pulled into a fast-food hamburger place on Lister Way. Three kids were sitting in a gray and black Aerostar van with the doors open and the tape deck blaring. The parking lot was crowded and the restaurant was full of people getting out of the rain. Nobody was over twenty.

“This time let’s try you stay in the car,” Erin said.

“Okay.”

I sat while she got out and went to the van. Again she put out her hand, again the gentle slap.

Then she got in the backseat of the van and I couldn’t see her. The two kids in front turned to talk with her. The rain made the bright colors of the pseudocolonial restaurant shiny and clean looking. There was a litter of hamburger cartons and paper wrappers and cardboard cups among the cars, and the trash barrel near the front door of the place was overfilled. With Erin out of sight I was the only white face in a sea of black ones. If I weren’t so self-assured it would have made me a little uncomfortable. If I had been uncomfortable no one would have noticed. No one paid any attention to me at all.

I shut the motor off. The rain collected on the windshield and made the colors of the restaurant streak into a kind of impressionist blur. Here’s looking at you, Claude Monet. The restaurant and its parking lot stood alone, the only principle of order in a panorama of urban blight. There were vacant lots on both sides of the place. Each one littered with the detritus of buildings long since dismantled. Across the street was a salvage yard with spiraling coils of razor wire atop a chain-link fence. Even prettified by the rain this was not the garden at Giverny.

Erin got back in the car. “Want a cheeseburger?” she said.

“Too far from medical help,” I said.

Erin smiled and closed the car door.

“These kids know Devona Jefferson,” she said.

“And?”

“She had a boyfriend named Tallboy.”

“In a gang?”

“They’re all in gangs,” Erin said. “It’s how they survive.”

“Know which gang?”

“Yes,” Erin said. “Tallboy’s a member of the Dillard Street Posse.”

“Progress,” I said.

“More than that,” Erin said. “I know him.”