Drama City

TWENTY-FIVE

Lorenzo Brown entered his apartment. Nigel Johnson and Lawrence Graham followed. Jasmine, as always, was waiting just inside the door. She backed up and growled at the sight of Nigel.

Lorenzo crouched, patted her belly, and rubbed behind her ears. His touch calmed her down.

“Dogs don’t like me,” said Nigel, taking a seat on the hope chest behind the living-room sofa. Graham stood with his back against the wall.

“That’s ’cause they know you’re scared of ’em,” said Lorenzo.

“I can’t forget that shepherd in the alley behind Princeton, took a piece out my hand.”

“That was twenty years ago.”

“I just told you I can’t forget it.” Nigel pointed to the hallway. “Do me a favor and put that animal back in your bedroom.”

“Yeah, okay. C’mon, girl.”

Lorenzo went down the hall, Jasmine behind him. Nigel and Graham exchanged a glance. They heard the sound of Lorenzo’s bedroom door closing and the footsteps of Lorenzo coming back down the hall.

“Where your hardware at?” said Nigel.

“You’re sittin’ on it.”

Nigel got off the hope chest. Lorenzo moved it aside and pulled up the throw rug that lay beneath it. Under the rug was a rectangular cutout that was fitted in the hardwood floor. Where two sides of the rectangle had been grooved out, Lorenzo grasped the cutout and lifted it from its place. He leaned it against the chest.

In the space beneath the floor were two large metal toolboxes. Lorenzo lifted them out one by one. The muscles of his forearms rippled against the weight.

Lorenzo opened one of the toolboxes. Its inner tray had been removed to accommodate three handguns wrapped in oiled shop rags. Lorenzo unwrapped one of the guns, a Glock 17, and showed it to Nigel.

“It’s live,” said Lorenzo.

“What about the others?”

“They’re carrying full loads too.”

“Where you get these?”

“Remember Hoppy, stayed over there on Lamont?”

“Thought he was out of it.”

“He back in.”

“They clean?”

“Straw buys out of Virginia. Never been fired. Serial numbers still on ’em.”

“Why?”

“Why I have ’em?”

“Yeah.”

“For the reason I been sleepin’ on the same side of the bed my whole life. It feels right.”

“What else you got?” said Nigel.

“Forty-five Colt and a thirty-eight Special.”

“And in the other box?”

“Extra magazines and bricks. Couple clean rags. A box of latex gloves.”

“Lemme see the thirty-eight.”

Lorenzo replaced the Glock in the toolbox and withdrew another gun. He unwrapped a Taurus seven-shot revolver with rubber grips and handed it to Nigel.

Nigel hefted the Taurus and turned it in the light. He released the cylinder, spun it, checked the load, and snapped the cylinder shut. He holstered the Taurus in his waistband.

“This is me right here.”

“Let’s do it, then,” said Lorenzo.

“I need some water before we go.”

“What, you want me to serve it to you? Water in the kitchen, same place it is in every house you ever been in.”

Nigel went back to the Pullman kitchen. They listened to him bang a glass against another and heard the faucet run and the cry of the old pipes as the water ran through. It seemed as if Nigel was running the water for a long time. Lorenzo looked at Graham, and Graham shrugged.

Nigel returned, gun in hand.

“Let’s go,” said Lorenzo.

Nigel pointed the gun at Lorenzo’s chest. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son.”

Lorenzo stood motionless. Back in the closed bedroom, Jasmine began to bark.

“Dog knows,” said Graham. “Funny how that is.”

“Dogs don’t like me nohow,” said Nigel.

“Don’t play,” said Lorenzo.

“I’m not,” said Nigel. “I’d rather see you dead than see you go back to where you were.”

“That’s a lie. You couldn’t use that on me if you wanted to, Nigel.”

“No,” said Nigel, making a head motion to Lawrence Graham. “But he could.”

Graham pushed away from the wall, stepped across the room, and took the gun from Nigel’s hand.

“He tries to follow me,” said Nigel to Graham, “you pull that trigger, hear?”

Graham nodded.

“Pull it seven times, you got to.”

Graham nodded again. His eyes smiled.

Nigel closed both toolboxes and made certain they were secure. He picked them up and headed for the door. Graham, holding the gun on Lorenzo and not taking his eyes from him, backed up and opened the door for Nigel.

“Ni gel, ” said Lorenzo.

Nigel stopped walking but did not turn his head. “What?”

“You can’t, not without me. You my boy.”

“I never was,” said Nigel. “But I’m gonna do you right this one time.”

He walked out of the apartment. Graham closed the door with his foot and pointed his chin at the sofa.

“Have a seat,” said Graham.

Lorenzo sat down on the sofa as Graham settled into the worn armchair beside it. He held the gun loosely, its barrel pointed at the hardwood floor.

“And don’t try and act like you gonna rush me, either,” said Graham.

They stared at each other and spoke no further. They listened to Jasmine barking in the other room.

Rico Miller had downloaded an electronic version of “In da Club” to his cell phone, so that the song played when someone called. Someone was calling him now. He picked the phone up off the folding table in the living-room area of his bungalow and answered. It was Deacon Taylor.

Miller listened to Deacon as he watched Melvin Lee. Lee, slouched on a sofa Miller had spotted by a Dumpster one day, held a live cigarette between his fingers. The ash was long and about to drop. Smoke hung heavy in the air, turning slowly under the light of a naked bulb.

Lee’s eyes, bugged in their sockets, had no life. His arms were thin and knotty, coming out of his shirt like twigs. Miller did not remember Melvin being so small.

Deacon talked on, smooth and precise. Miller’s eyes narrowed as he listened to his voice. When Deacon was done, Miller said, “Yeah, all right,” and hit “End” on his phone. He closed the phone’s lid and placed it back on the table.

“Deacon,” said Miller.

Lee stared straight ahead.

“He said he couldn’t get you on your cell…”

“I been had it off.”

“… so he tried mines.”

“He angry, right?”

“No. He’s actin’ real nice. Said he knew about the parole lady. I told him I had to, ’cause she was fixin’ to violate you. He said that shit was unfortunate, but it had to be done. Said he understood.”

“What else?”

“Told us to stay right here till he figures out how to put us somewhere safe.” Miller licked his lips. “‘You sit tight right where you at,’ he said, like he knew where we was.”

“What’re you sayin’, Rico?”

“Deacon be talkin’ out the side of his mouth, Melvin. He done with us. Maybe he know where we at or maybe he tryin’ to find out. Either way, he gonna send someone over here eventually. And when that someone come, he ain’t comin’ as a friend.”

Lee put his cigarette to his lips and dragged on it hard. A rope of ash dropped to his lap. He made no move to brush it away.

“We need to move,” said Miller. “Gotta lay up somewhere else.”

Lee exhaled smoke. His cigarette hand shook as he moved it down to rest on his thigh.

“You stay here and keep an eye on the front,” said Miller.

Miller walked back into the bedroom. Lee stared at the plaster wall before him, chipped and water stained, and the bedsheets covering the windows.

There ain’t no place to run to, thought Melvin Lee. Lee felt the heat of his cigarette as it burned down toward his fingers, but he made no move to put it out.

Entering his bedroom, Miller kicked aside a PS2 controller and some magazines. He stepped on a game case and crushed it, not caring, as he crossed the room. None of his possessions had ever made him happy. They had no value now.

Miller went to the closet and parted the shirts and jackets that hung on its rod. He freed the false wall, a sheet of particleboard fitted behind the clothing, and dropped it behind him. He removed his cut-down Winchester pump-action shotgun from the rack. He retrieved his Glock, his S amp;W. 38, several bricks of bullets, a box of low-recoil shotgun load, and his harness and holsters. He placed everything on his bed.

Miller went to a dresser he’d bought for twenty dollars at the Salvation Army store. On top of the dresser sat the shoe box containing the count taken from DeEric Green’s Escalade. Beside the shoe box was Miller’s knife. He’d cleaned it and secured it in its sheath. He looked at his nickname, burned from top to bottom into the leather.

Creep.

His mother was the first one to call him that. That was, when she wasn’t calling him a punk or worse. Berating him, slapping him in public at every drugstore or grocery they went to when he’d ask for an action figure or just a pack of gum. When he cried, she only slapped him harder.

“Gonna teach you not to cry,” she said. “I ain’t raisin’ no sissies.”

There was one time at this department store, around Christmas, when Rico was six or seven. He saw these ornaments, silver balls with people’s names painted on them, hung on this big old tree they had set up in the middle of the store. He was standing beside the tree, trying to find his name on one of the balls, when he saw one had Ricky on it, right in front of him. He knew it wasn’t his name exactly, but if he could take the ball with him, he believed his mother could paint over the k and the y, make them into an o somehow. Make it so it said Rico.

“There go my name, Mama,” he said, pointing happily at the tree.

“That ain’t your name.”

“Can I have it? We can make it my name when we get home.”

“Your name Creep,” she said, yanking on his hand. “And I ain’t got the time to be paintin’ over shit. You don’t need that thing no way.”

He reached for it and pulled it from the tree. The ball fell and shattered on the floor.

“Now you gonna get somethin’,” she said, slapping him so hard the store and all the Christmas lights in it began to spin. “You fuck up every goddamn thing you touch.”

He cried, and hated himself for crying, as she dragged him through the store. He couldn’t even look at his weak self in the mirror for the next few days.

That was out in public. In private, in their apartment in a rodent-infested, drug-plagued government housing project that someone had the nerve to call the Gardens, down near the Navy Yard in Southeast, his mother was worse. When she was drinking or sucking on that glass pipe, she beat him with her fists. Sometimes she whipped him with a belt. She never did beat on his little sister. Miller couldn’t step to his mother, but he found a way to wipe that grin off his sister’s face.

“My sister don’t scream when you fuck her,” he’d said to Melvin the day before this one, and Melvin had laughed.

Yes she do, thought Miller. She scream and sob, both at the same time.

He was on the street by the time he was twelve. Staying with a bunch of older boys in Southeast, working the corners, learning the game. In and out of schools, courtrooms, and juvenile facilities. The last was Oak Hill, out there in Laurel. Couple of tough ones had tried to step to him there, and he showed them who he was. He walked out of that motherfucker one day, just climbed the fence and went over it where some other kids had cut the razor wire down. Far as he knew, no one was looking for him. Since he’d left the Hill, he’d been in the wind.

Staring at his name burned into the sheath, he thought of his mother, and then that parole woman. How good it felt when he’d cut her across the face, plunged the blade into her chest, and stuck it through her hand when she’d raised it to protect herself. Thinking on it, his dick grew hard.

Miller slipped the knife into the shoe box alongside the money. He went to the bed and loaded the guns. As he worked, he ground his teeth. The sound was like a whisper in the room.