Hell To Pay

Synopsis:

Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, the team of private investigators who made their stunning debut in Right as Rain, are hired to find a 14-year-old white girl from the suburbs who’s run away from home and is now working as a prostitute in some dangerous neighborhoods. The two ex-cops think they know the dangers, but nothing in their experience has prepared them for Worldwide Wilson, the pimp whose territory they are intruding upon. The situation is compounded when one of the young stars of a community pee-wee football team — which Strange and Quinn spend their evenings coaching — is killed by a drug dealer while riding in a car with his uncle. Tracking down his killers becomes a point of honor for Strange and Quinn, and their off-the-Books investigation leads them back to Wilson. Soon, the two detectives are forced to sort through the pieces of evidence to put together the puzzle and solve the crime. Combining inimitable neighborhood flavor, action scenes that rank among the best in fiction, and a clear-eyed view of morality in a world with few rules, Hell to Pay is another Pelecanos masterpiece to be savored.

HELL TO PAY

George Pelecanos

The second book in the Derek Strange and Terry Quinn series

Copyright © 2002 by George P. Pelecanos

To Dennis K. Ashton Jr., seven years old, shot to death on June 27, 1997, by a criminal with a handgun in Washington, D.C.

“Don’t Look down

On a man . . .

Unless you gonna

Pick him up.”

Written on a mural outside Taylor’s Funeral Home, on the corner of Randolph Place and North Capitol Street, NW, Washington, D.C.

chapter 1

GARFIELD Potter sat low behind the wheel of an idling Caprice, his thumb stroking the rubber grip of the Colt revolver loosely fitted between his legs. On the bench beside him, leaning against the passenger window, sat Carlton Little. Little filled an empty White Owl wrapper with marijuana and tamped the herb with his thumb. Potter and Little were waiting on Charles White, who was in the backyard of his grandmother’s place, getting his dog out of a cage.

“It don’t look like much, does it?” said Potter, looking down at his own lap.

Little grinned lazily. “That’s what the girls must say when you pull that thing out.”

“Like Brianna, you mean? Your girl? She ain’t had no chance to look at it, ’cause I was waxin’ her from behind. She felt it, though. Made her forget all about you, too. I mean, when I was done hittin’ it she couldn’t even remember your name.”

“She couldn’t remember hers either, drunk as she had to be to fuck a sad motherfucker like you.” Little laughed some as he struck a match and held it to the end of the cigar.

“I’m talkin’ about this gun, fool.” Potter held up the Colt so Little, firing up the blunt, could see it.

“Yeah, okay. Where’d you get it at, man?”

“Traded it to this boy for half an OZ. Was one of those project guns, hadn’t even been fired but once or twice. Short barrel, only two inches long, you’d think it couldn’t do shit. But this here is a three fifty-seven. They call it a carry revolver, ’cause you can carry this shit without no one knowin’ you strapped. I don’t need no long barrel, anyway. I like to work close in.”

“I’ll stick with my nine. You don’t even know if that shits works.”

“It works. Yours jams, don’t be askin’ me for mines.”

Potter was tall, light skinned, flat of stomach and chest, with thin, ropy forearms and biceps. He kept his hair shaved close to the scalp, with a small slash mark by way of a part. His irises were dark brown and filled his eyes; his nose was a white boy’s nose, thin and aquiline. He was quick to smile. It was a smile that could be engaging when he wanted it to be, but more often than not it inspired fear.

Little was not so tall. He was bulked in the shoulders and arms, but twiggish in the legs. A set of weights had given him the show muscles upstairs, but his legs, which he never worked on, betrayed the skinny, malnourished boy he used to be. He wore his hair braided in cornrows and kept a careless, weedy thatch of hair on his chin.

Both wore carpenter jeans and button-down, short-sleeve plaid Nautica shirts over wife-beater Ts. Potter’s shoes were whatever was newest in the window of the Foot Locker up at City Place; he had a pair of blue-and-black Air Maxes on now. On Little’s feet were wheat-colored Timberland work boots, loosely laced and untied.

Little held a long draw in his lungs and looked ahead, exhaling a cloud of smoke that crashed at the windshield. “Here comes Coon. Lookit how he’s all chest out and shit. Proud about that dog.”

Charles White was walking his pit bull, Trooper, past a dying oak tree, its leaves nearly stripped bare. A tire hung on a chain from one of the branches. When he was a puppy, Trooper had swung on the tire for hours, holding it fast, strengthening his jaws.

“That ain’t no game dog,” said Potter. “Coon ain’t no dog man, neither.”

White had Trooper, brown with a white mask and golden-pink eyes, on a short leash attached to a heavy-ringed, wide leather collar. Trooper’s ears were game-cropped at the skull. White, of average size and dressed similarly to his friends, moved toward the car, opened the back door, and let the dog in before getting inside himself.

“S’up, fellas,” said White.

“Coon,” said Little, looking over the bench at his friend. Others thought White’s street name had something to do with his color, dark as he was. But Little knew where the name had come from. He’d been knowing Coon since they were both kids in the Section Eights, back in the early nineties, when White used to wear a coonskin hat, trying to look like that fool rapper from Digital Underground, that group that was popular then. There was the other thing, too: White had a nose on him, big and long like some cartoon animal. And he walked kind of pitched forward, with his bony fingers spread kind of like claws, the way a critter in the woods would do.

“Gimme some of that hydro, Dirty.”

Dirty was Little’s street name, so given because of his fondness for discussing women’s privates. Men’s, too. Also, he loved to eat all that greasy fast food. Little passed the blunt back to White. White hit it deep.

“Your champion ready?” said Potter.

“What?” said White.

It was hard to hear in the car. Potter had the music, the new DMX joint on PGC, turned up loud.

“I said, is that dumb animal gonna win us some money today?” said Potter, raising his voice.

White didn’t answer right away. He held the smoke down in his lungs and let it out slow.

“He gonna win us mad money, D,” said White. He reached over and massaged the dense muscles bunched around Trooper’s jaw. Trooper’s mouth opened in pleasure and his eyes shifted over to his master’s. “Right, boy?”

“Sure he’s strong enough?”

“Shoot, he was strong enough to drag a log down the block yesterday mornin’.”

“I ain’t ask you can he do circus tricks. Can he hold his shit in a fight?”

“He will.”

“Well, he ain’t showed me nothin’ yet.”

“What about that snatch we did with that boy’s dog over on Crittenden?”

Potter looked in the rearview at White. “That dog at Crittenden wasn’t nothin’ but a cur. Trooper a cur, too.”

“The hell he is. You’re gonna see today.”

“We better see. ’Cause I ain’t wastin’ my time or my green paper on no pussy-ass animal.” Potter slid the Colt under the waistband of his jeans.

“I said, you’re gonna see.”

“C’mon, D,” said Little. “Let’s get a roll on, man.”

Garfield Potter’s street name was Death. He didn’t care for it much since this girl he wanted to fuck told him it scared her some. Never did get that girl’s drawers down, either. So he felt the name was bad luck, worse still to go and change it. His friends now called him D.

Potter turned the key in the ignition. It made an awful grinding sound. Little clapped his hands together and doubled over with laughter.

“Ho, shit!” said Little, clapping his hands one more time. “Car’s already started, man, you don’t need to be startin’ it again! Maybe if you turned that music down some you’d know.”

“Noisy as this whip is, too,” said White.

“Fuck you, Coon,” said Potter, “talkin’ mad shit about this car, when you’re cruisin’ around town in that piece-of-shit Toyota, lookin’ like a Spanish Cadillac and shit.”

“All this money we got,” said Little, “and we’re drivin’ around in a hooptie.”

“We’ll be gettin’ rid of it soon,” said Potter. “And anyway, it ain’t all that funny as y’all are makin’ it out to be.”

“Yeah, you right. It just hit me funny, is all.” Little took the blunt that White handed to him over the front seat and stared at it stupidly. “I ain’t lyin’, boy, this chronic right here just laid my ass out.”

THE dogfights were held in a large garage backing to an alley behind a house on Ogelthorpe, in Manor Park in Northwest. The fights went down once a week for several hours during the day, when most of the neighbors were off at work. Those neighbors who were at home were afraid of the young men who came to the fights, and did not complain to the police.

Potter parked the Chevy in the alley. He and the others got out of the car, White heeling Trooper to his side. They went down the alley, nodding but not smiling at some young men they knew to be members of the Delafield Mob. Others were standing around, holding their animals, getting high, and drinking from the lips of bottles peeking through the tops of brown paper bags. Little and Wright followed Potter into the garage.

Ten to twenty young men were scattered about the perimeter of the garage. A group was shooting craps in the corner. Others were passing around joints. Someone had put on Dr. Dre 2001, with Snoop, Eminem, and all them, and it was coming loud from a box.

In the middle of the garage was a fighting area of industrial carpet, penned off from the rest of the interior by a low chain-link fence, gated in two corners. Inside one corner of the pen, a man held a link leash taut on a black pit bull spotted brown over its belly and chest. The dog’s name was Diesel. Its ears were gnarled and its neck showed raised scars like pink worms.

Potter studied a man, old for this group, maybe thirty or so, who stood alone in a corner, putting fire to a cigarette.

“I’ll be back in a few,” said Potter to Little.

“’Bout ready to show the dogs,” said Little.

“Got a mind to put money on that black dog. But go ahead and bet Trooper, hear?”

“Three hunrid?”

“Three’s good.”

Potter made his way over to the cigarette smoker, short and dumpy, a raggedy-ass dude on the way down, and stood before him.

“I know you.”

The smoker looked up with lazy eyes, trying to hold on to his shit. “Yeah?”

“You run with Lorenze Wilder, right?”

“I seen him around. Don’t mean we run together or nothin’ like that.” But now the smoker recognized Potter and he lost his will to keep his pride. His eyes dropped to the concrete floor.

“Outside,” said Potter.

The older man followed Potter into the daylight, not too fast but without protest. Potter led him around the garage’s outer wall, which faced the neighboring yards to the west.

“What’s your name?”

“Edward Diggs.”

“Call you Digger Dog, right?”

“Some do.”

“Lorenze called you that when we sold him that hydro a few weeks back. You were standing right next to him. Remember me now?”

Diggs said nothing, and Potter moved forward so that he was looking down on Diggs and just a few inches from his face. Diggs’s back touched the garage wall.

“So where your boy Lorenze at?”

“I don’t know. He stays in his mother’s old house —”

“Over off North Dakota. I know where that is, and he ain’t been there awhile. Leastways, I ain’t caught him in. He got a woman he cribs with on the side?”

Diggs avoided Potter’s stare. “Not that I know.”

“What about other kin?”

Diggs took a long final drag off his cigarette and dropped it to the ground, crushing it beneath his sneaker. He looked to his right, out in the alley, but there was no one there. Everyone had gone inside the garage. Potter spread one tail on his shirt and draped it back behind the butt of the Colt, so that Diggs could see.

Diggs shifted his eyes again and lowered his voice. He had to give this boy something, just so he’d go away. “Lorenze got a sister. She be livin’ down in Park Morton with her little boy.”

“Maybe I’ll drop by. What’s her name?”

“I wouldn’t . . . What I’m sayin’ is, you want my advice—”

Potter open-handed Diggs across the face. He used his left hand to bunch Diggs’s shirt at the collar, then yanked Diggs forward and slapped him again.

Diggs said nothing, his body limp. Potter held him fast.

“What’s the sister’s name?”

Diggs’s eyes had teared up. He hated himself for that. All he meant to do was advise this boy, tell him, don’t fuck with Lorenze’s sister or her kid. But it was too late for all that now.

“I don’t know her name,” said Diggs. “And anyway, Lorenze, he don’t never go by the way or nothin’. He don’t talk to his sister much, way I understand it. Sometimes he watches her kid play football; boy’s on this tackle team. But that’s as close as he gets to her.”

“Where the kid play at?”

“Lorenze said the kid practices in the evenings at some high school.”

“Which school?”

“He live in Park Morton, so it must be Roosevelt. It ain’t but a few blocks up the street there—”

“I ain’t asked you for directions, did I? I live up on Warder Street my own self, so you don’t need to be drawin’ me a map.”

“It ain’t too far from there, is all I was sayin’.”

Potter’s eyes softened. He smiled and released his grip on Diggs. “I didn’t hurt you none, did I? ’Cause, look, I didn’t mean nothin’, hear?”

Diggs straightened his collar. “I’m all right.”

“Let me get one of those cigarettes from you, black.”

Diggs reached into his breast pocket and retrieved his pack of Kools. A cigarette slid out into his palm. He handed the cigarette to Potter.

Potter snapped the cigarette in half and bounced the halves off Diggs’s chest. Potter’s laugh was like a bark. He turned and walked away.

Diggs straightened his shirt and stepped quickly down the alley. He looked over his shoulder and saw that Potter had turned the corner. Diggs reached into his pocket and shook another cigarette out from a hole he had torn in the bottom of the pack.

Diggs’s boy Lorenze was staying with this girl he knew over in Northeast. Lorenze had kind of laughed it off, said he’d crib with that girl until Potter forgot about the debt. Didn’t look to Diggs that Potter was the type to forget. But he was proud he hadn’t given Lorenze up. Most folks he knew didn’t credit him for being so strong.

Diggs struck a match. He noticed that his hand was shaking some as he fired up his cigarette.

BACK in the garage, Potter sidled up next to Little. The owner of the garage, also the house bookie, stood nearby, holding the cash and taking late bets.

In one corner of the pen, Charles White finished sponging Trooper down with warm, soapy water. Diesel’s owner, in the opposite corner, did the same. Many dogs were treated with chemicals that could disorient the opponent. The rule in this arena was that both dogs had to be washed prior to a fight.

White scratched the top of Trooper’s head, bent in, and uttered random words into his ear with a soothing tone. The referee, an obese young man, stepped into the ring after a nod from the owner of the garage.

“Both corners ready?” said the referee. “Cornermen out of the pit.”

White moved behind his dog into the space of the open gate, still holding Trooper back.

“Face your dogs,” said the referee. They did this, and quickly the referee said, “Let go!”

The dogs shot into the center of the pit. Both of them got up on their hind legs, attacking the head of the other with their jaws. They snapped at each other’s ears and sought purchase in the area of the neck. In the fury of their battle, the dogs did not make a sound. The garage echoed with the shouts and laughter of the spectators crowding the ring.

For a moment the dogs seemed to reach a stalemate. Suddenly their motions accelerated. Their bodies meshed in a blur of brown and black, and the bright pink of exposed gums. Droplets of blood arced up in the center of the ring.

Diesel got a neck-hold and Trooper was taken down. Trooper, adrenalized, his eyes bright and wild, scrambled up and out of the hold. One of his ears had been partially torn away, and blood had leaked onto the dog’s white mask. Diesel went in, back to the neck. And now Trooper was down again, in the jaws of Diesel, squirming beneath the black dog.

“Stop it!” shouted White.

Potter nudged Little, who nodded by way of reply.

“That’s it,” said the referee, waving his arms.

White went into the ring and grabbed Trooper’s hind legs, pulling back. Diesel’s owner did the same. Diesel relaxed his jaws, releasing Trooper to his man. The spectators moved away from the pen, laughing, giving one another skin, already trying out stories on one another that exaggerated the details of the fight.

“You were right,” said Little. “That dog was a cur.”

“What I tell you?” said Potter. “Dog’s personality only as strong as the man who owns it.”

White arrived with Trooper, back on his leash. “I need to fix him up some,” said White, not looking into his friends’ eyes.

“We’ll do it now,” said Potter. “Let’s go.”

A COUPLE of blocks away, near Fort Slocum Park, Potter pulled the Chevy into an alley where there seemed to be no activity. He cut the engine and looked over the backseat at White; Trooper sat panting, his hip resting against his owner’s.

“Dog needs to pee,” said Potter.

“He went,” said White. “Let’s just take him to the vet place.”

“He already bleedin’ all over the backseat. He pees back there, too, I ain’t gonna be too happy. Gimme the leash, man, I’ll walk him.”

“I’ll walk him,” said White. His lip quivered when he spoke.

“Let D walk him if he wants to, Coon,” said Little. “Dog needs to pee, don’t make no difference who be holdin’ the leash.”

Potter got out of the car and went around to White’s side. He opened the door and took hold of the leash. The dog looked over at White and then jumped his lap and was out of the car.

Potter walked Trooper down the alley until they were behind a high wooden privacy fence. Potter looked around briefly, saw no one in the neighboring yards or in the windows of the houses, and commanded the dog to sit.

When Trooper sat, Potter pulled the .357 Colt from his waistband, pointed it close to the dog’s right eye, and squeezed the trigger. Trooper’s muzzle and most of his face exploded out into the alley in a haze of bone and blood. The dog toppled over onto its side and its legs straightened in a shudder. Potter stepped back and shot the dog in the ribcage one more time. Trooper’s carcass lifted an inch or two off the ground and came to rest.

Potter went back to the car and got behind the wheel. Little was holding a match to the half of the White Owl blunt he had not yet smoked.

“Gun works,” said Potter.

Little nodded. “Loud, too.”

Potter put the trans in gear, draped his arm over the bench seat, and turned his head to look out the rear window as he reversed the car out of the alley. White was staring out the window, his face dirty from tears he had tried to wipe away.

“Go on and get it out you,” said Potter. “Someone you know see you cryin’ over some dumb animal, they gonna mistake you for a bitch. And I ain’t ridin’ with none of that.”

POTTER, Little, and White bought a kilo of marijuana from their dealer in Columbia Heights, dimed out half of it back at their place, and delivered the dimes to their runners so they could get started on the evening rush. Then the three of them drove north up Georgia Avenue and over to Roosevelt High. They went into the parking lot at Iowa Avenue and parked the Chevy beside a black Cadillac Brougham. There were several other cars in the lot.

Potter looked in the rearview at White, staring ahead. “We straight, Coon?”

“Just a dumb animal, like you said. Don’t mean nothin’ to me.”

Potter didn’t like the tone in White’s voice. But White was just showing a little pride. That was good, but he’d never act on his anger for real. Like his weak-ass dog, he wasn’t game.

“I’ll check it out,” said Potter to Little.

He walked across the parking lot and stood at the fence that bordered the stadium down below. After a while he came back to the car.

“You see him?” said Little as Potter got back behind the wheel.

“Nah,” said Potter. “Just some kids playin’ football. Some old-time motherfuckers, coaches and shit.”

“We can come back.”

“We will. I’m gonna smoke that motherfucker when I see him, too.”

“Wilder don’t owe you but a hundred dollars, D.”

“Thinks he can ignore his debt. Tryin’ to take me for bad; you know I can’t just let that go.”

“Ain’t like you need the money today or nothin’ like that.”

“It ain’t the money,” said Potter. “And I can wait.”

chapter 2

DEREK Strange was coming out of a massage parlor when he felt his beeper vibrate against his hip. He checked the number printed out across the horizontal screen and walked through Chinatown over to the MLK library on 9th, where a bank of pay phones was set outside the facility. Strange owned a cell, but he still used street phones whenever he could.

“Janine,” said Strange.

“Derek.”

“You rang?”

“Those women been calling you again. The two investigators from out in Montgomery County?”

“I called them back, didn’t I?”

“You mean I did. They been trying to get an appointment with you for a week now.”

“So they’re still trying.”

“They’re being a little bit more aggressive than that. They’re heading into town right now, want to meet you for lunch. Said they’d pick up the tab.”

Strange tugged his jeans away from his crotch where they had stuck.

“It’s a money job, Derek.”

“Hold up, Janine.” Strange put the receiver against his chest as a man who was passing by stopped to shake his hand.

“Tommy, how you been?”

“Doin’ real good, Derek,” said Tommy. “Say, you got any spare love you can lay on me till I see you next time?”

Strange looked at the black baggage beneath Tommy’s eyes, the way his pants rode low on his bony hips. Strange had come up with Tommy’s older brother, Scott, who was gone ten years now from the cancer that took his shell. Scott wouldn’t want Strange to give his baby brother any money, not for what Tommy had in mind.

“Not today,” said Strange.

“All right, then,” said Tommy, shamed, but not enough. He slowly walked away.

Strange spoke into the receiver. “Janine, where they want to meet?”

“Frosso’s.”

“Call ’em up and tell ’em I’ll be there. ’Bout twenty minutes.”

“Am I going to see you tonight?”

“Maybe after practice.”

“I marinated a chuck roast, gonna grill it on the Weber. Lionel will be at practice, won’t he? You’re going to drop him off at our house anyway, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“We can talk about it when you come back by the office. You got a two o’clock with George Hastings.”

“I remember. Okay, we’ll talk about it then.”

“I love you, Derek.”

Strange lowered his voice. “I love you, too, baby.”

Strange hung up the phone. He did love her. And her voice, more than her words, had brought him some guilt for what he’d just done. But there was love and sex on one side and just sex on the other. To Strange, the two were entirely different things.

STRANGE drove east in his white-over-black ’89 Caprice, singing along softly to “Wake Up Everybody” coming from the deck. That first verse, where Teddy’s purring those call-to-arms words against the Gamble and Huff production, telling the listener to open his eyes, look around, get involved and into the uplift side of things, there wasn’t a whole lot of American music more beautiful than that.

His Rand McNally street atlas lay on the seat beside him. He had a Leatherman tool-in-one looped through his belt, touching a Buck knife, sheathed and attached the same way on his right hip. His beeper he wore on his left. The rest of his equipment was in a double-locked glove box and in the trunk. It was true that most modern investigative work was done in an office and on the Internet. Strange thought of himself as having two offices, though, his base office in Petworth and the one in his car, right here. His preference was to work the street.

It was early September. The city was still hot during the day, though the nights had cooled some. It would be that way in the District for another month or so.

“‘The world won’t get no better,’” sang Strange, “‘if we just let it be . . . .’”

Soon the colors would change in Rock Creek Park. And then would come those weeks near Thanksgiving when the weather turned for real and the leaves were still coming down off the trees. Strange had his own name for it: deep fall. It was his favorite time of year in D.C.

FROSSO’S, a stand-alone structure with a green thatched roof, sat on a west-side corner of 13th and L, Northwest, like a pimple on the ass of a beautiful girl. The Mediterranean who owned the business owned the real estate and had refused to sell, even as the offers came in, even as new office buildings went in around him. Frosso’s was a burger-and-lunch counter, also a happy-hour bar and hangout for those remaining workers who still drank and smoked or didn’t mind the smell of smoke on their clothes. Beer gardens in this part of downtown were few and far between.

Strange made his way through a noisy dining area to a four-top back by the pay phone and head, where two women sat. He recognized the investigators, a salt-and-pepper team, from an article he’d read on them in City Paper a few months back. They worked cases retrieving young runaways gone to hooking. The two of them were aligned with some do-goodnik, pro-prosti organization that operated on grants inside D.C.

“Derek Strange,” he said, shaking the black woman’s hand and then the white woman’s before he took a seat.

“I’m Karen Bagley. This is Sue Tracy.”

Strange slid his business card across the table. Bagley gave him one in turn, Strange scanning it for the name of their business: Bagley and Tracy Investigative Services, and below the name, in smaller letters, “Specializing in Locating and Retrieving Minors.” A plain card, without any artwork, Strange thinking, They could use a logo, give their card a signature, something to make the customers remember them by.

Bagley was medium-skinned and wide of nose. Her eyes were large and deep brown, the lashes accentuated by makeup. Freckles like coarse pepper buckshotted her face. Sue Tracy was a shag-cut blonde, green-eyed, still tanned from the last of summer, with smaller shoulders than Bagley’s. They were serious-faced, handsome, youngish women, hard boned and, Strange guessed — he couldn’t see the business end of their bodies, seated at the table — strong of thigh. They looked like the ex-cops that the newspaper article had described them to be. Better looking, in fact, than most of the female officers Strange had known.

Tracy pointed a finger at the mug in front of her. Bagley’s hand was wrapped around a mug as well. “You want a beer?”

“Too early for me. I’ll get a burger, though. Medium, with some blue cheese crumbled on top. And a ginger ale from the bottle, not the gun.”

Tracy called the waitress over, addressed her by name, got a burger working for Strange. The waitress said, “Got it, Sue,” tearing the top sheet off a green-lined pad before turning back toward the lunch counter.

“You’re a hard man to get ahold of,” said Bagley.

“I been busy out here,” said Strange.

“A big caseload, huh?”

“Always somethin’.” A glass was placed before Strange. He examined a smudge on its lip. “This place clean?”

“Like a dog’s tongue,” said Tracy.

“Some say that about a dog’s hindparts, too,” said Strange. “But I wouldn’t put my mouth to one.”

“Maybe they ought to put that on the sign out front,” said Tracy, without a trace of a smile. “Good food, and clean, too, like the asshole on a dog.”

“Might bring in some new customers,” said Strange. “You never know.”

“They don’t need any new customers,” said Bagley. “The regulars float this place.”

“I take it you two are numbered with the regulars.”

“We used to come here plenty for information,” said Tracy. “Here and the all-night CVS below Logan Circle.”

“Information,” said Strange. “From prostitutes, you mean.”

Bagley nodded. “The girls would be in the CVS at all hours, buying stockings, tampons, you name it.”

“Them and the heroin lovers,” said Strange. “They do crave their chocolate in the middle of the night. I remember seein’ them in there, grabbing the Hershey bars off the racks with their eyelids lowered to half-mast.”

“You hung out there, too?” said Bagley.

“Back when it was People’s Drug, which must be over ten years back now, huh? Used to stop in for my own essentials when everything else was closed. I was a bit of a night bird then myself.”

“The demographics have shifted some the last couple of years,” said Tracy. “A lot of the action’s moved east, into the hotel cluster of the new downtown.”

“But this here tavern was a known hangout for prostis, wasn’t it?”

“More like a safe haven,” said Bagley. “Nobody bothered them in here. It was a place to have a beer and a smoke. A moment of quiet.”

“No more, huh?”

Bagley shrugged. “There’s been an initiative to get the girls out of public establishments.”

Tracy moved her mug in a small circle on the table. “The powers that be would rather have them shivering in some doorway in December than warm in a place like this.”

“I guess y’all think they ought to just go ahead and legalize prostitution, right? Since it’s one of those victimless crimes, I mean.”

“Wrong,” said Tracy. “In fact, it’s the only crime I know of where the perp is the victim.”

Strange didn’t know what to say to that one, so he let it ride.

“What about you?” asked Bagley. “What do you think about it?”

Strange’s eyes darted from Bagley’s and went to nowhere past her shoulder. “I haven’t thought on it all that much, tell you the truth.”

Bagley and Tracy stared at Strange. Strange turned his head, looked toward the grill area. Where was that burger? All right, thought Strange, I’ll have my lunch, listen to these Earnest Ernestines say their piece, and get on out of here.

“You come recommended,” said Bagley, forcing Strange to return his attention to them. “A couple of the lawyers we’ve worked with down at Superior Court say they’ve used you and they’ve been pleased.”

“Most likely they used my operative, Ron Lattimer. He’s been doing casework for the CJA attorneys. Ron’s a smart young man, but let’s just say he doesn’t like to break too much of a sweat. So he likes those jobs, ’cause when you’re working with the courts you automatically got that federal power of subpoena. You can subpoena the phone company, the housing authority, anything. It makes your job a whole lot easier.”

“You’ve done some of that,” said Bagley.

“Sure, but I prefer working in the fresh air to working behind a computer, understand what I’m saying? I just like to be out there. And my business is a neighborhood business. Over twenty-five years now in the same spot. So it’s good for me to have a presence out there, the way—”

“Cops do,” said Tracy.

“Yeah. I’m an ex-cop, like you two. Been thirty-some-odd years since I wore the uniform, though.”

“No such thing as an ex-cop,” said Bagley.

“Like there’s no such thing as a former alcoholic,” said Tracy, “or an ex-Marine.”

“You got that right,” said Strange. He liked these two women a touch more now than when he’d walked in.

Strange turned the glass of ginger ale so that the smudge was away from him and took a sip. He replaced the glass on the table and leaned forward. “All right, then, now we had our first kiss and got that over with. What do you young ladies have on your minds?”

Bagley glanced briefly over at Tracy, who was in the process of putting fire to a cigarette.

“We’ve been working with a group called APIP,” said Bagley. “Do you know it?”

“I read about it in that article they did on you two. Something about helping out prostitutes, right?”

“Aiding Prostitutes in Peril,” said Tracy, blowing a jet of smoke across the table at Strange.

“Some punk-rock kids started it, right?”

“The people behind it were a part of the local punk movement twenty years ago,” said Tracy, “as I was. They’re not kids anymore. They’re older than me and Karen.”

“What do they do, exactly?”

“A number of things, from simply providing condoms to reporting violent johns. Also, they serve as an information clearinghouse. They have an eight-hundred number and a Web site that takes in e-mails from parents and prostitutes alike.”

“That’s where you two come in. You find runaways who’re hookin’. Right?”

“That’s a part of what we do,” said Bagley. “And we’re getting too busy to handle all the work ourselves. The county business alone keeps us up to our ears in it. We could use a little help in the District.”

“You need me to find a girl.”

“Not exactly,” said Bagley. “We thought we’d test the waters with you on something simpler, see if you’re interested.”

“Keep talking.”

“There’s a girl who works the street between L and Mass, on Seventh,” said Tracy.

“Down there by the site for the new convention center,” said Strange.

“Right,” said Tracy. “The last two weeks or so a guy’s been hassling her. Pulling up in his car, trying to get her to date him.”

“Ain’t that the object of the game?”

“Sure,” said Bagley. “But there’s something off about this guy. He’s been asking her, Do you like it rough? Telling her she’s gonna dig it, he can tell she’s gonna dig it, right?”

Strange shifted in his seat. “So? Girl doesn’t have to be a working girl to come up against that kind of creep. She can hear it in a bar.”

“These working women get a sense for this kind of thing,” said Bagley. “She says there’s something not right, we got to believe her. And he doesn’t want to pay. Says he doesn’t have to pay, understand? She’s scared. Can’t go to the cops, right? And her pimp would beat her ass blue if he knew she was turning down a trick.”

“Even a no-money trick?”

Strange stared hard at Tracy. Her eyes did not move away from his.

Tracy said, “This is the information we have. Either you’re interested or you’re not.”

“I hear you,” said Strange, “but I’m not sure what you want me to do. You’re lookin’ for me to shake some cat down, you got the wrong guy.”

“You own a camera, right?” said Tracy.

“Still and video alike,” said Strange.

“Get some shots for us,” said Bagley, “or a tape. We’ll run the plates and contact this gentleman ourselves. Trust me, we can be pretty convincing. This guy’s probably got a wife. Even better, he has kids. We’ll make sure he never hassles this girl again.”

“Damn,” said Strange with a low chuckle, “you ladies are serious.”

The waitress came to the table and set Strange’s burger down before him. He thanked her, cut into it, and inspected the center. He took a large bite and closed his eyes as he chewed.

“They cooked it the way I asked,” said Strange, after he had swallowed. “I’ll say that for them.”

“The burgers here are tight,” said Bagley, smiling just a little for the first time.

Strange wiped some juice off his lips. “I get thirty-five an hour, by the way.”

Tracy dragged on her smoke, this time blowing the exhale away from Strange. “According to our attorney friend, he remembers paying you thirty.”

“He remembers, huh?” said Strange. “Well, I can remember when movies were fifty cents, too.”

“You can?” said Tracy.

“I’m old,” said Strange with a shrug.

“Not too old,” said Bagley.

“Thank you,” said Strange.

“You’ll do it, then,” said Tracy.

“I assume she works nights.”

“Every night this week,” said Tracy.

“I coach a kids’ football team early in the evenings.”

“She’ll be out there, like, ten to twelve,” said Tracy. “Black, mid-twenties, with a face on the worn side. She’ll be wearing a red leather skirt tonight.”

“She say what kind of car this guy drives?”

“Black sedan,” said Bagley. “Late-model Chevy.”

“Caprice, somethin’ like that?”

“Late-model Chevy is what she said.” Tracy stubbed out her cigarette. “Here’s something else for you to look at.” She reached into the leather case on the floor at her feet and pulled out a yellow-gold sheet of paper. She pushed it across the table to Strange.

The headline across the top of the flyer read, IN PERIL. Below the head was a photo of a young white girl, unclear from generations of copying. The girl’s arms were skinny and her hands were folded in front of her, a yearbook-style photo. She was smiling, showing braces on her teeth. He read her name and her statistics, printed below the photograph, noticing from the DOB that she was fourteen years old.

“We’ll talk about that some other time,” said Bagley, “you want to. Just wanted you to get an idea of what we do.”

Strange nodded, folded the flyer neatly, and put it in the back pocket of his jeans. Then he focused on finishing his lunch. Bagley and Tracy drank their beers and let him do it.

When he was done, he signaled the waitress. “I see on the specials board you got a steak today.”

“You’re still hungry?”

“Uh-uh, baby, I’m satisfied. But I was wondering, you guys got any bones back there in the kitchen?”

“I suppose we do.”

“Wrap up a few for me, will you?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

The waitress drifted. Strange said to the women, “I got a dog at home, a boxer, goes by the name of Greco. Got to take care of him, too.”

Later, Bagley and Tracy watched Strange exit the dining room, his paper bag of steak bones in hand. Bagley studied his squared-up walk, the way his muscled shoulders filled out the back of his shirt, the gray salted nicely into his close-cropped hair.

“How old you figure he is?” said Bagley.

“Early fifties,” said Tracy. “I liked him.”

“I liked him, too.”

“I noticed,” said Tracy.

“Like to see a man who enjoys his food, is all it is,” said Bagley. “Think we should’ve told him more?”

“He knew there was more. He wanted to find out what it was for himself.”

“The curious type.”

“Exactly,” said Tracy, draining her beer and placing the mug flat on the table. “I got a feeling he’s gonna work out fine.”

chapter 3

STRANGE turned down 9th, between Kansas and Upshur, one short hop east of Georgia. He saw a spot outside Marshall’s funeral home, steered the car into the spot, and locked the Chevy down. He walked past a combination lunch counter and butcher shop, the place just said “Meat” in the window, and nodded to a cutter named Rodel, who was leaning in the doorway of Hawk’s Barbers, dragging hard on a Newport.

“What’s goin on, big man?”

“It’s all good,” said Strange. “How about you?”

“Same old soup, just reheated.”

“Bennett workin’ today?”

“I don’t know about workin’. But he’s in there.”

“Tell him I’ll be by in forty-five or so. Need a touch-up.”

“I’ll let him know.”

Strange looked up at the yellow sign mounted above the door to his agency. The sign read “Strange Investigations,” half the letters bigger than the rest on account of the picture of the magnifying glass laid over the words. Strange really liked that logo; he’d made it up himself. He made a mental note that there were smudges on the light box of the sign.

Strange stood outside the windowed door of his offices and rapped on the glass. Janine buzzed him in, a bell over the door chiming as he entered. George “Trip Three” Hastings, his hands resting in his lap, sat in a waiting area to the right of the door.

“George.”

“Derek.”

“I’ll be with you in a minute, soon as I get settled.”

Hastings nodded. Strange turned to Ron Lattimer, seated behind his desk. Lattimer wore an off-the-rack designer suit with a hand-painted tie draped over the shirt, had one of those Peter Pan–looking collars, the kind Pat Riley favored. A little too pretty for Strange’s taste, though he had to admit the young man kept himself cleaner than the White House lawn. And he made the office his home as well; Lattimer sat in an orthopedically correct chair and had one of those Bose compact units, always playing some kind of jazz-inflected hip-hop, set back behind his desk.

“What’re you workin’ on, Ron?”

“Faxing a subpoena right now,” said Lattimer.

“You still on that Thirty-five Hundred Crew thing?”

“Many billable hours, boss.”

“Shame, clean as you look, can’t nobody see you in here. I mean, you go to all that trouble to be so perfect, how’s anybody gonna know?”

“I know.”

“Let me ask you somethin’. You ever walk by a mirror you forgot to look into?”

“SUVs are pretty good, too,” said Lattimer, his eyes on the screen of his Mac. “The windows they got in those things, they’re just the right height.”

Strange passed a desk topped with loose papers and gum wrappers and stood in front of Janine Baker. He picked up the three or four pink message slips she had pushed to her desk’s edge and looked them over.

“How was lunch?” said Janine.

“Nice women,” said Strange. “C’mon in the back for a second, okay?”

She followed him back to his office. Lamar Williams, a gangly neighborhood boy of seventeen, was emptying Strange’s wastebasket into a large garbage bag. Lamar took classes at Roosevelt High in the mornings and worked for Strange most afternoons.

“Lamar,” said Strange, “need some privacy for a few. Why don’t you get yourself the ladder and Windex the sign out front, okay?”

“Aiight.”

“You comin’ to practice tonight?”

“Can’t tonight.”

“You got somethin’ more important?”

“Watchin’ my baby sister for my moms.”

“All right, then. Close the door behind you on your way out.”

The door closed, leaving Strange and Janine alone. She came into his arms and he kissed her on the lips.

“Good day?”

“Now it is,” said Strange.

“How about dinner tonight?”

“If we can eat right after practice. I got a job from those women and I’m gonna try and knock it out late.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Strange kissed her again and went behind his desk. He had a seat and noticed the PayDay bar set beside his phone.

“That’s you,” said Janine, her liquid eyes looking him over. “Thought you’d like to cleanse your palate after that lunch.”

“Thank you, baby. Go on and send George in.”

He watched her walk to the door in her brightly colored outfit. She was the best office manager he’d ever had. Hell, she ran the damn place, he wasn’t afraid to admit it. And, praise God, the woman had an ass on her, too. It moved like a wave beneath the fabric of her skirt. All these years, and it still stirred Strange to look at her. The way she was put together, some people who knew something about it might say it was poetry. He’d never been into poems himself. The best way he could describe it, looking at Janine, it reminded him of peace.

GEORGE Hastings and Strange had known each other since the early sixties, when both had played football for Roosevelt in the Interhigh. In those days he ran with George and Virgil Aaron, now deceased, and Lydell Blue, also a football player, a back who was the most talented of the four. Strange and Blue had gone into law enforcement, and Hastings had taken a government job with the Bureau of Engraving.

“Thanks for seeing me, Derek,” said Hastings.

“Ain’t no thing, George. You know that.”

Strange still called Hastings George, though most around town now called him Trip or Trip Three. Back in the early seventies, Hastings had played the unlikely combination of 3-3-3 and hit it for thirty-five grand. It was a fortune for that time, and it was especially significant from where they’d come from, but, with the exception of the new Deuce and a Quarter he’d purchased, Hastings had been smart and invested the money wisely. He’d bought stock in AT&T and IBM, and he had let it ride. By neighborhood standards, Strange knew, Hastings had become a wealthy man.

He also knew that Hastings liked to hear Strange call him by his given name. George was a name out of fashion with the younger generation of blacks. It had been a generic name used by plantation owners to refer to their male slaves, for one. And in the modern world it had become a slang name to refer to a boyfriend, as in, “Hey, baby, you got yourself a George?” So young black people didn’t care much for the name and they rarely considered it as a name for their own babies. But George Hastings’s mother, a good old girl whom Strange had regarded with nearly as much affection as his own, had thought it was just fine, and that made it all good for Hastings and for Strange.

Hastings leaned over and flicked the spring-mounted head of the plaster Redskins figure that sat on Strange’s desk. The head swayed from side to side.

“The old uniform. That goes back, what, thirty-some-odd years?”

“Forty,” said Strange.

“Who painted his face brown like that? I know they weren’t sellin’ ’em like that back then.”

“Janine’s son, Lionel.”

“How’s he doin’?”

“Finishing up at Coolidge. Just applied to Maryland. He’s a good boy. A knucklehead sometimes, like all boys tend to be. But he’s doing all right.”

“You see Westbrook the other night?”

“Boy made some catches.”

“Uh-huh. Still makin’ that first-down sign when they move the sticks. That drives the defenders crazy. He is cocky.”

“He’s got a right to be,” said Strange. “Some call it cocky; I call it confidence. Westbrook’s ready to have the season of his career, George. Gonna bust loose like Chuck Brown and all the Soul Searchers put together.”

“He ain’t no Bobby Mitchell,” said Hastings. “And he sure ain’t no Charley Taylor.”

Strange smiled a little. “No one is to you, George.”

“Anyway,” said Hastings. He reached inside his lightweight sport jacket. Strange figured from the material that the jacket went for five, six hundred. Quiet, with a subtle pattern in there. Good quality, and understated, like all George’s possessions. Like the high-line, two-year-old Volvo he drove, and his Tudor-style house up in Shepherd Park.

Hastings dropped a folded sheet of paper on Strange’s desk. Strange picked it up, unfolded it, and looked it over.

“I got what you asked for,” said Hastings.

Strange read the full name of the subject: Calhoun Tucker. Hastings had provided the tag number for the Audi S4 that Tucker owned or leased. Mimeographed onto the sheet of paper was a credit card receipt from a nightspot that Strange recognized. It was located on U Street, east of 14th. Hastings had scribbled a paragraph of other incidental character details: where Tucker said he’d lived last, where he’d last worked, like that.

“How’d you get the credit card receipt?” said Strange.

“Looked through my little girl’s purse. They went to dinner, he must have said, Hold on to this for me, will you? Didn’t like going through her personal belongings, but I did. Alisha’s getting ready to step off a cliff. I mean, young people, they decide to get married, they never do know what it means, for real.”

“I heard that.”

“My Linda, God love her, she’d be doing the same thing, she was still with us. She was harder on Alisha’s boyfriends than I ever was, matter of fact. And here this boy just rolls into town six months ago — he’s not even a Washington boy, Derek — and I’m supposed to just sit on my hands while everybody’s world gets rocked? I mean, I don’t even know one thing about his family.”

Strange dropped the paper on the desk. “George, you don’t have to justify this to me. I do this kind of background check all the time. It’s no reflection on your daughter, and as of yet it’s no reflection on this young man. And it damn sure is no reflection on you. You’re her father, man, you’re supposed to be concerned.”

“I’d do this even if I thought the boy was right.”

“But you don’t think he’s right.”

Hastings ran a finger down his cheek. “Somethin’ off about this Tucker boy.”

“You sure the off thing’s not just that some young man’s getting ready to take away your little girl?”

“Sure, that’s a part of it; I can’t lie to you, man. But it’s somethin’ else, too. Don’t ask me what exactly. You live long enough, you get so you know.”

“Forget about exactly, then.”

“Well, he’s drivin’ a luxury German automobile, for one. Always dressed clean, too, real sharp, with the gadgets that go with it: cells, pagers, all that. And I can’t figure out what he does to get it.”

“That might have meant somethin’ once. Used to be, you had to be rich or a drug dealer to have those things. But look, any fool who can sign his name to a lease can be drivin’ a Benz these days. Twelve-year-old kid can get his own credit card.”

“Okay, but ain’t no twelve-year-old kid gonna march my baby girl down to the altar. This here is a twenty-nine-year-old man, and he’s got no visible means of support. Says he’s some kind of talent agent, a manager. Puts on shows at the clubs around town. He’s got this business card, says ‘Calhoun Enterprises.’ Anytime I see ‘Enterprises’ on a business card, way I look at it, might as well print the word ‘Unfocused’ next to it, or ‘Doesn’t Want No Real Job,’ or just plain ‘Bullshit,’ you know what I’m sayin’?”

Strange chuckled. “Okay, George. Anything else?”

“I just don’t like him, Derek. I plain do not like the man. That’s somethin’, isn’t it?”

Strange nodded. “Let me ask you a question. You think he’s into somethin’ on the criminal side?”

“Can’t say that. All I know is—”

“You don’t like him. Okay, George. Let me handle it from here.”

Hastings shifted in his seat. “You still gettin’ thirty an hour?”

“Thirty-five,” said Strange.

“You went up.”

“Gas did, too. Been to a bar lately? Bottle of beer cost you five dollars.”

“That include the two dollars you be stuffin’ in their G-strings?”

“Funny.”

“How long you think this is gonna take?”

“Don’t worry, this won’t take more than a few hours of my time. Most of it we do from right here, on computers. I’ll have you happy and stroking checks for that wedding in a couple of days.”

“That’s another thing. This reception is gonna cost me a fortune.”

“If you can’t spend it on Alisha, what you gonna do with it? You got yourself a beautiful girl there, George. Lovely on the outside, and in her heart, too. So let’s you and me make sure she’s making the right decision.”

Hastings exhaled slowly as he sat back in his chair. “Thank you, Derek.”

“Strictly routine,” said Strange.

chapter 4

STRANGE dropped the paper Hastings had given him on Janine’s desk.

“You get time, run this information through Westlaw and see what kind of preliminary information you can come up with.”

“Background check on a . . .” Janine’s eyes scanned the page. “. . . Calhoun Tucker.”

“Right. George’s future son-in-law. I’ll pick up Lionel and swing him back with me after practice.”

“Okay.”

“And, oh yeah. Call Terry; he’s workin’ up at the bookstore today. Remind him he’s coaching tonight.”

“I will.”

Lattimer looked up as Strange passed by his desk. “Half day today, boss?”

“Need a haircut.”

“Next door? You ever wonder why they got the butcher and the barber so close together on this block?”

“Never made that connection. One thing I don’t need is to be spending forty dollars on a haircut like you.”

“Well, you better get on over there. ’Cause you’re startin’ to look like Tito Jackson.”

Strange turned and looked into a cracked mirror hanging from a nail driven into a column in the middle of the office. “Damn, boy, you’re right.” He patted the side of his head. “I need to get my shit correct.”

STRANGE dropped a couple of the kids off at their homes after practice. Then he and Lionel drove up Georgia toward Brightwood in Strange’s ’91 black-over-black Cadillac Brougham, a V-8 with a chromed-up grille. This was his second car. Strange had an old tape, Al Green Gets Next to You, in the deck, and he was trying hard not to sing along.

“Sounds like gospel music,” said Lionel. “But he’s singing it to some girl, isn’t he?”

“‘God Is Standing By,’” said Strange. “An old Johnny Taylor tune, and you’re right. This here was back when Al was struggling between the secular and the spiritual, if you know what I’m sayin’.”

“You mean, like, he loves Jesus but he loves to hit the pussy, too.”

“I wasn’t quite gonna put it like that, young man.”

“Whateva.”

Strange looked across the bench. “You got studies tonight, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Don’t want you to let up now, just ’cause you already applied to college. You need to keep on those books.”

“You want me to stay in my room tonight, just say it.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

Lionel just smiled in that way that drove Strange around the bend.

Janine Baker’s residence was on Quintana Place, between 7th and 9th, just east of the Fourth District police station. Quintana was a short, narrow street of old colonials fronted with porches. The houses were covered in siding and painted in an array of earth tones and bright colors, including turquoise and neon green. The Baker residence was a pale lavender affair down near the 7th Street end of the block.

In the dining room they ate a grilled chuck roast, black on the outside and pink in the center, along with mashed potatoes and gravy and some spiced greens, washed down with ice-cold Heinekens for Strange and Janine. Lionel went upstairs to his bedroom as soon as he finished his meal. Strange had a quick cup of coffee and wiped his mouth when he was done.

“That was beautiful, baby.”

“Glad you enjoyed it.”

“You want me to come back after I’m done working?”

“I’d like that. And I’ve foil-wrapped the bone from the chuck for Greco, so bring him back, too.”

“Between you and me we’re gonna spoil that dog to death.” Strange came around the table, bent down, and kissed Janine on the cheek. “I’ll be back before midnight, hear?”

STRANGE returned to his row house on Buchanan Street and hit the heavy bag in his basement for a while, trying to work off some of the fat he’d taken in from his meat consumption that day. He broke a sweat that smelled like alcohol when he was done, then showered and changed clothes up on the second floor, which held his bedroom and home office. In the office, Greco played with a spiked rubber ball while Strange checked his stock portfolio and read a stock-related message board, listening to Ennio Morricone’s “The Return of Ringo” from the Yamaha speakers of his computer.

Strange checked his wristwatch, a Swiss Army model with a black leather band, and looked at his dog.

“Gotta go to work, old buddy. I’ll be back to pick you up in a little bit.”

Greco’s nub of tail made a double twitch. He looked up at Strange and showed him the whites of his eyes.

STRANGE drove down Georgia in his Chevy, through Petworth and into Park View. The street was up, Friday night, kids mostly, some hanging out, some doing business as well. Down around Morton a line had formed outside the Capitol City Pavilion, called the Black Hole by locals and law enforcement types alike. D.C. veteran go-go band Back Yard had their name on the marquee, as they did most weekends. In a few hours, Fourth District squad cars would be blocking Georgia, rerouting traffic. Beefs born inside the club often came to their inevitable, violent resolution at closing time, when the patrons spilled out onto the street.

Strange saw Lamar Williams, wearing pressed khakis and wheat-colored Timbies, standing in the line outside the club. Strange drove on. Between Kenyon and Harvard, kids sold marijuana in an open-air market set up on the street.

Georgia became 7th. Soon Strange was nearing the convention center site, a huge hole that took up several of D.C.’s letter blocks, on his right. On his left ran a commercial strip. His hooker, wearing a red leather skirt, was standing in the doorway of a closed restaurant, her hard, masculine face illuminated by the embers of her cigarette as she gave it a deep draw. Strange did not slow the car. He went west for a couple of blocks, then north, then east again, circling back to a spot on the east side of the future center, where he parked the Chevy on 9th, alongside a construction fence. He slipped a notepad into his breast pocket and clipped a pen there before exiting the car.

Strange opened the trunk of his Chevy. He pushed aside his live-case file, his football file, and his toolbox, and found his video camera, which was fitted in a separate box alongside his 500mm- lens Canon AE-1. He checked the tape and replaced it in its slot. Strange liked this camera, his latest acquisition. It was an 8mm Sony with the NightShot feature and the 360X digital zoom. Perfect for what he needed, perfect for this job right here. He’d gotten the camera in a trade for a debt owed him by a client; the camera was hotter than Jennifer Lopez in July.

Strange went over to a place by the fence at 7th and L, just north of the hooker’s position, where there was an open driveway entrance breaking the continuity of the construction fence. He situated himself behind the fence in a position that would render him unseen by the passengers or drivers of any southbound cars. He stood there for a while, setting up the camera the way he wanted it and shooting some tape for a test. He watched the hooker talk to a potential john who had pulled up his Honda Accord beside her, and he watched the john drive off. The hooker smoked another cigarette. Strange’s stomach rumbled, as he thought about AV, his favorite sit-down Italian restaurant, just around the corner on Mass. Hungry as usual, and having just eaten, too.

A black late-model Chevy rolled down 7th, slowed, and came to a stop near where the hooker stood. Strange leaned against the corner of the fence, brought the zoom in so the car was framed and clear, and shot some tape. Cigarette smoke came out of the driver’s side of the car as the john rolled his window down. The hooker rested her forearms on the lip of the open window. She shook her head, and Strange could hear male laughter before the car drove off. The car wore D.C. plates. It was an Impala, the new body style that Strange didn’t care for.

He waited. The Impala came out of the north once again, having circled the block. The driver stopped the vehicle in the same spot he had minutes earlier. The hooker hesitated, looked around, walked over to the driver’s side but this time did not lean into the car. She seemed to be listening for a while, her face going from passivity to agitation and then to something like fear. Strange heard the laughter again. Then the driver laid some rubber on the street and took off. The hooker flipped him off, but only after the car had turned the corner and was gone from sight.

Strange wrote down the Impala’s license plate number on the notepad he had placed in the breast pocket of his shirt. He didn’t need to record it, not really; he had memorized the number at first sight, a talent that he had always possessed and that had served him well when he had worn the uniform on the street.

Anyway, the two letters that preceded the numbers on the plate had told him everything he needed to know. Bagley and Tracy must have known it, too. They had put him onto this, he reasoned, as some kind of test. He wasn’t angry. It was just a job.

The letters on the plate read GT. Plainclothes, undercover, whatever you wanted to call it. The abusive john was a cop.

chapter 5

HOLD on a second, Derek,” said Karen Bagley. “I’m going to conference you in with Sue.”

Strange held the phone away from his ear and sat back in the chair behind his desk. He watched Lamar Williams climb a stepladder to feather-dust Strange’s blinds.

“You coming with me to practice tonight, Lamar?”

“You want me to, I will.”

“I was just wonderin’ on if you could make it. If you had to sit your baby sister again, I mean.”

“Nah, uh-uh.”

“’Cause I saw you outside the Black Hole Friday night.”

Lamar lowered the duster. “Yeah, I was there. After I did what I told you I had to do.”

“Kind of a rough place, isn’t it?”

“It’s a place in the neighborhood I can listen to some go-go, maybe talk to a girl. I don’t eye-contact no one I shouldn’t; I ain’t lookin’ to step to nobody or beef nobody. Just lookin’ to have a little fun. That’s okay with you, isn’t it, boss?”

“Just tellin’ you I saw you, is all.”

Strange heard voices on the phone. He put the receiver back to his ear.

“Okay,” said Strange.

“We all here?” said Bagley.

“I can hear you,” said Tracy. “Derek?”

“I got what you needed,” said Strange. “It’s all on videotape.”

“That was quick,” said Bagley.

“Did it Friday night. I thought I’d let the weekend pass, didn’t want to disturb your-all’s beauty sleeps.”

“What’d you get?” said Tracy.

“Your bad john is a cop. Unmarked. But you two knew that, I expect. The flag went up for me when you said he was talkin’ about ‘I don’t have to pay.’ Question is, why didn’t you just tell me what you suspected?”

“We wanted to find out if we could trust you,” said Tracy.

Direct, thought Strange. That was cool.

“I’m going to give the tape and the information to a lieutenant friend of mine in the MPD. I been knowin’ him my whole life. He’ll turn it over to Internal and they’ll take care of it.”

“You’ve got a videotape of his car,” said Bagley, “right? Did you get his face?”

“No, not really. But it’s his car and it’s a clear solicitation. He might say he was gathering information or some bullshit like that, but it’s enough to throw a shadow over him. The IAD people will talk to him, and I suspect it’ll scare him. He won’t be botherin’ that girl again. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Bagley. “Good work.”

“Good? It was half good, I’d say. You two ever see that movie The Magnificent Seven?”

Bagley and Tracy took a moment before uttering a “yes” and an “uh-huh.” Strange figured they were wondering where he was going with this.

“One of my favorites,” said Strange. “There’s that scene where Coburn, he plays the knife-carryin’ Texican, pistol-shoots this cat off a horse from, like, I don’t know, a couple hundred yards away. And this hero-worship kid, German actor or something, but they got him playin’ a Mexican, he says something like, ‘That was the greatest shot I ever saw.’ And Coburn says, ‘It was the worst. I was aiming for his horse.’”

“And your point is what?” said Bagley.

“I wish I could’ve delivered more to you. More evidence, I mean. But what I did get, it might just be enough. Anyway, hopefully y’all will trust me now.”

“Like I said,” said Tracy, “there’s no such thing as an ex-cop. Cops are usually hesitant to turn in one of their own.”

“There’s two professions,” said Strange, “teaching and policing, that do the most good for the least pay and recognition. But you want to be a teacher or a cop, you accept that goin’ in. Most cops and most teachers are better than good. But there’s always gonna be the teacher likes to play with a kid’s privates, and there’s always gonna be a cop out there, uses his power and position in the wrong way. In both cases, to me, it’s the worst kind of betrayal. So I got no problem with turnin’ a cat like that in. Only . . .”

“What?” said Tracy.

“Don’t keep nothin’ from me again, hear? Okay, you did it once, but you don’t get to do it again. It happens, it’ll be the last time we work together.”

“We were wrong,” said Bagley. “Can you forget it?”

“Forget what?”

“What about the other thing?” said Tracy. “The flyer we gave you.”

“I’ve got a guy I use named Terry Quinn. Former D.C. cop. He’s a licensed investigator in the District now. I’m gonna give it to him.”

“Why not you?” said Bagley.

“Too busy.”

“How can we reach him?” said Tracy.

“He’s not in the office much. He works part-time in a used-book store in downtown Silver Spring. He can take calls there, and he’s got a cell. I’m gonna see him this evening; I’ll make sure he gets the flyer.”

Strange gave them both numbers.

“Thank you, Derek.”

“You’ll get my bill straightaway.” Strange hung up the phone and looked over at Lamar. “You ready, boy?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s roll.”

STRANGE retrieved the videotape of the cop and the hooker, wedged in the football file box, and shut the trunk’s lid.

“This here is you,” said Strange, handing the tape over to Lydell Blue.

“The thing you called me about?”

“Yeah. I wrote up a little background on it, what I was told by the investigators who put me on it, what I heard at the scene, like that. I signed my name to it, Internal wants to get in touch with me.”

Blue stroked his thick gray mustache. “I’ll take care of it.”

They walked across the parking lot toward the fence that surrounded the stadium, passing Quinn’s hopped-up blue Chevelle and Dennis Arrington’s black Infiniti I30 along the way.

Strange knew Roosevelt’s football coach — he had done a simple background check for him once and he had not charged him a dime — and they had worked it out so that Strange’s team could practice on Roosevelt’s field when the high school team wasn’t using it. In return, Strange turned the coach on to some up-and-coming players and tried to keep those kids who were headed for Roosevelt in a straight line as well.

“You and Dennis want the Midgets tonight?”

“Tonight? Yeah, okay.”

“Me and Terry’ll work with the Pee Wees, then.”

“Derek, that’s the way you got it set up damn near every night.”

“I like the young kids, is what it is,” said Strange. “Me and Terry will just stick with them, you don’t mind.”

“Fine.”

Midgets in this league — a loosely connected set of neighborhood teams throughout the area — went ten to twelve years old and between eighty-five and one hundred and five pounds. Pee Wees were ages eight to eleven, with a minimum of sixty pounds and a max of eighty-five. There was also an intermediate and junior division in the league, but the Petworth club could not attract enough boys in those age groups, the early-to-mid-teen years, to form a squad. Many of these boys had by then become too distracted by other interests, like girls, or necessities, like part-time jobs. Others had already been lost to the streets.

Strange followed Blue through a break in the fence and down to the field. About fifty boys were down there in uniforms and full pads, tackling one another, cracking wise, kicking footballs, and horsing around. Lamar Williams was with them, giving them some tips, also acting the clown. A few mothers were down there, and a couple of fathers, too, talking among themselves.

The field was surrounded by a lined track painted a nice sky blue. A set of aluminum bleachers on concrete steps faced the field. Weed trees grew up through the concrete.

Dennis Arrington, a computer programmer and deacon, was throwing the ball back and forth with the Midgets’ quarterback in one of the end zones. Nearby, Terry Quinn showed Joe Wilder, a Pee Wee, the ideal place on the body to make a hit. Quinn had to get down low to do it. Wilder was the runt of the litter, short but with defined muscles and a six-pack of abs, though he had only just turned eight years old. At sixty-two pounds, Wilder was also the lightest member of the squad.

Strange blew a whistle that hung on a cord around his neck. “Everybody line up over there.” He motioned to a line that had been painted across the track. They knew where it was.

“Hustle,” said Blue.

“Four times around,” said Strange, “and don’t be complaining, either; that ain’t nothin’ but a mile.” He blew the whistle again over the boys’ inevitable moans and protests.

“Any one of you walks,” yelled Arrington, as they jogged off the line, “and you all are gonna do four more.”

The men stood together in the end zone and watched the sea of faded green uniforms move slowly around the track.

“Got a call from Jerome Moore’s mother today,” said Blue. “Jerome got suspended from Clark today for pulling a knife on a teacher.”

“Clark Elementary?” said Quinn.

“Uh-huh. His mother said we won’t be seein’ him at practice for the next week or so.”

“Call her back,” said Strange, “and tell her he’s not welcome back. He’s off the team. Didn’t like him around the rest of the kids anyway. Doggin’ it, trash-talking, always starting fights.”

“Moore’s nine years old,” said Quinn. “I thought those were the kind of at-risk kids we were trying to help.”

“They’re all at risk down here, Terry. I’ll let go of one to keep the rest of the well from getting poisoned. It’ll school them on something, too. That we’re tryin’ to teach them somethin’ more than football here. Also, that we’re not gonna put up with that kind of behavior.”

“Way I see it,” said Quinn, “it’s the giving up on these kids that makes them go wrong.”

“I’m not giving up on him or anyone else. He straightens himself out, he can play for us next season. But for this season here, uh-uh. He blew it his own self. You agree with me, Dennis?”

Dennis Arrington looked down at the football that he spun in his thick hands. He was Quinn’s height, not so tall, built like a fullback. “Absolutely, Derek.”

Arrington gave Quinn a short look. Quinn knew that Arrington wouldn’t agree with him on this or anything else. Arrington was quick with a smile, a handshake, and a back pat for most any black man who came down to this field. And Quinn did like him as a man. But he felt that Arrington didn’t like him, or show him respect. And he felt that this was because he, Quinn, was white. Quinn had gotten that from some of the kids when he’d first started here as well. The kids, most of them, anyway, had gotten past it.

Strange turned to Quinn. Quinn’s hair was cropped short. He had a wide mouth, a pronounced jaw, and green eyes. Among friends his eyes were gentle, but around strangers, or when he was simply in thought, his eyes tended to be flat and hard. In full winter dress he looked like a man of average height, maybe less, with a flat stomach and an ordinary build, but out here in sweatpants and a white T-shirt, his veins standing on his forearms and snaking up his biceps, his physical strength was evident.

“Before I forget it, some women might be callin’ you, Terry. I gave them your number—”

“They already called me. Got me on my cell while I was driving over here.”

“Yeah, they do work quick. I brought you the information, if you’re interested.”

“Do you want me to take it?”

“It’s a money job for both of us.”

“It would mean more jack for you if you just took it yourself.”

“I’m busy,” said Strange.

The boys came back in, sweating and short of breath.

“Form a circle,” said Blue. He called out the names of the two captains who would lead the calisthenics.

The captains stood in the middle of the large circle. They commanded their teammates to run in place.

“How ya’ll feel?” shouted the captains.

“Fired up!” responded the team.

“How y’all feel?”

“Fired up!”

“Breakdown.”

“Whoo!”

“Breakdown.”

“Whoo!”

“Breakdown.”

“Whoo!”

With each command the boys went into their breakdown stance and shouted, “Whoo!” This running in place and vocal psych-out lasted for a few more minutes. Then they moved into other calisthenics: stretches, knuckle push-ups, and six inches, where they were instructed to lie on their backs, lift their legs a half foot off the ground, keep their legs straight, and hold the position, playing their bellies like a tom-tom until they were told they could relax. When they were done, their jerseys were dark with sweat and their faces were beaded with it.

“Now you’re gonna run some steps,” said Strange.

“Aw!” said Rico, the Pee Wee starting halfback. Rico was a quick, low-to-the-ground runner who could jook. He had the most natural talent of any of the players. He was also the first to complain.

“Move, Reek,” said Dante Morris, the tall, skinny quarterback who rarely spoke, only when he was asked to or to motivate his teammates. “Let’s get it done.”

“C’mon Panthers!” shouted Joe Wilder, sweeping his arm in the direction of the bleachers.

“Little man gonna lead the charge,” said Blue.

“They’re following him, too,” said Strange.

A few more mothers had arrived and stood on the sidelines. Joe Wilder’s uncle had shown up, too. He was leaning against the fence that ran between the track and the bleachers, his hand dipped into a white paper bag stained with grease.

“Humid tonight,” said Blue.

“Don’t make ’em run those steps too long,” said Strange. “Look, I gotta run back up to my car for a second. Wanted to give you the Midget roster, since you’ll be takin’ them permanent. Be right back.”

Strange crossed the field, passing Wilder’s uncle, not looking his way. But the uncle said, “Coach,” and Strange had to stop.

“How’s it goin?” said Strange.

“It’s all right. Name’s Lorenze. Most call me Lo. I’m Joe Wilder’s uncle.”

“Derek Strange. I’ve seen you around.”

Now Strange had to shake his hand. Lorenze rubbed his right hand, greasy from the french fries in the bag, off on his jeans before he reached out and tried to give Strange the standard soul shake: thumb lock, finger lock, break. Strange executed it without enthusiasm.

“Y’all nearly through?”

“We’ll be quittin’ near dark.”

“I just got up in this motherfucker, so I didn’t know how long you been out here.”

Lorenze smiled. Strange shifted his feet impatiently. Lorenze, a man over thirty years old, wore a T-shirt with a photograph of a dreadlocked dude smoking a fat spliff, and a pair of Jordans, laces untied, on his feet. Strange didn’t know one thing for certain about this man. But he knew this man’s type.

Blue called the boys off the bleachers. Exhausted, they began to walk back toward the center of the field.

“I’ll be takin’ Joe with me after practice,” said Lorenze. “I ain’t got my car tonight, but I can walk him back to his place.”

“I told his mother I’d drop him at home. Same as always.”

“We just gonna walk around some. Boy needs to get to know his uncle.”

“I’m responsible for him,” said Strange, keeping his tone light. “If his mother had told me you’d be comin’, that would be one thing . . .”

“You don’t have to worry. I’m kin, brother.”

“I’m taking him home,” said Strange, and now he forced himself to smile. “Like I say, I told his mother, right? You got to understand this.”

“I ain’t gotta do nothin’ but be black and die,” said Lorenze, grinning at his clever reply.

Strange didn’t comment. He’d been hearing young and not-so-young black men use that expression around town for years now. It never did settle right on his ears.

They both heard a human whistle and looked up past the bleachers to the fence that bordered the parking lot. A tall young man was leaning against the fence, smiling and staring down at them. Then he turned, walked away, and was out of sight.

“Look,” said Strange, “I gotta get something from my car. I’ll see you around, hear?”

Lorenze nodded absently.

Strange walked up to the parking lot. The young man who had stood at the fence was now sitting behind the wheel of an idling car with D.C. plates. The car was a beige Caprice, about ten years old, with a brown vinyl roof and chrome-reverse wheels, parked nose out about four spaces down from Strange’s own Chevy. Rust had begun to cancer the rear quarter panel on the driver’s side. The pipe coughed white exhaust, which hovered in the lot. The exhaust mingled with the marijuana smoke that was coming from the open windows of the car.

Another young man sat in the shotgun seat and a third sat in the back. Strange saw tightly braided hair on the front-seat passenger, little else.

Strange had slowed his steps and was studying the car. He was letting them see him study it. His face was impassive and his body language unthreatening as he moved along.

Now Strange walked to his own car and popped the trunk. He heard them laughing as he opened his toolbox and looked inside of it for . . . for what? Strange didn’t own a gun. If they were strapped and they were going to use a gun on him, he couldn’t do a damn thing about it anyway. But he was letting his imagination get ahead of him now. These were just some hard-looking kids, sitting in a parking lot, getting high.

Strange found a pencil in his toolbox and wrote something down on the outside of the Pee Wees’ manila file. Then he found the Midget file that he had come to get for Blue. He closed the trunk’s lid.

He walked back across the lot. The driver poked his head out the window of the Caprice and said, “Yo, Fred Sanford! Fred!”

That drew more laughter, and he heard one of them say, “Where Lamont at and shit?”

Now they were laughing and saying other things, and Strange heard the words “old-time” and felt his face grow hot, but he kept walking. He just wanted them gone, off the school grounds, away from his kids. And as he heard the squeal of their tires he relaxed, knowing that this was so.

He looked down toward the field and noticed that Lorenze, Joe Wilder’s uncle, had gone.

Strange was glad Terry Quinn hadn’t been with him just now, because Quinn would have started some shit. When someone stepped to him, Quinn only knew how to respond one way. You couldn’t answer each slight, or return each hard look with an equally hard look, because moments like this went down out here every day. It would just be too tiring. You’d end up in a constant battle, with no time to breathe, just live.

Strange told himself this, trying to let his anger subside, as he walked back onto the field.

chapter 6

THE Pee Wee offense said “Break” in the huddle and went to the line. Strange saw that several of the players had lined up too far apart.

“Do your splits,” said Strange, and the offensive linemen moved closer together, placing their hands on one another’s shoulder pads. Now they were properly spaced.

“Down!” said Dante Morris, his hands between the center’s legs. The offense hit their thigh pads in unison.

“Set!” The offense clapped their hands one time and got down in a three-point stance.

“Go! Go!”

On two, Rico took the handoff from Dante Morris, bobbling it a little, not really having possession of the ball as he hesitated and was cut down by two defenders behind the line.

“Hold up,” said Quinn.

“What was that, Rico?” said Strange. “What was the play?”

“Thirty-one on two,” said Rico, picking some turf off his helmet.

“And Thirty-one is?”

“Halfback run to the one-hole,” said Joe Wilder.

“Joe, I know you know,” said Strange. “I was askin’ Rico.”

“Like Joe said,” said Rico.

“But you weren’t headed for the one-hole, were you, son?”

“I got messed up in my head.”

“Think,” said Strange, tapping his own temple.

“You had your hands wrong, too,” said Quinn. “When you’re taking a handoff and you’re going to the left, where’s your right hand supposed to be?”

“On top. Left hand down at your belly.”

“Right. The opposite if you’re going right.” Quinn looked to the linemen who had made the tackle. “Nice hit there. Way to wrap him up. Let’s try that again.”

In the huddle, Dante called a Thirty-five. The first number, three, was always a halfback run. The second number was the hole to be hit. Odd numbers were the left holes, one, three, and five. Evens were the two-, four-, and six-holes. A number larger than six was a pitch.

They executed the play. This time Rico took the ball smoothly and found the hole, running low off a clean Joe Wilder block, and he was gone.

“All right, good.” Quinn tapped Joe’s helmet as he ran back to the huddle. “Good block, Joe, way to be.”

Joe Wilder nodded, a swagger in his step, his wide smile visible behind the cage of his helmet.

CLOSE to dark, Strange blew a long whistle, signaling the boys into the center of the field.

“All right,” said Blue, “take a knee.”

The boys got down on one knee, close together, looking up at their coaches.

“I got a call today,” said Dennis Arrington, “at work. One of you was asking me how to make his mouth guard from the kit we gave you. Course, he just should have asked me before he did it, or better yet, listened when I explained it the first time. ’Cause he went and boiled it for three minutes and it came out like a hunk of plastic.”

“Tenderized it,” said Blue, and some of the boys laughed.

“You put it in that boiling water for twenty seconds,” said Arrington. “And before you put it in your mouths to form it, you dip it in some cold water. You don’t do that, you’re gonna burn yourselves fierce.”

“You only make that mistake one time,” said Strange.

“Any questions?” said Blue.

There were none.

“Want to talk about somethin’ tonight,” said Strange. “Heard you all discussing it between yourselves some and thought I ought to bring it up. One of your teammates got himself in big trouble at school today, something to do with a knife. Now I know you already got the details, what you heard, anyway, so I won’t go into it, and besides, it’s not right to be talkin’ about this boy’s business when he’s not here. But I do want to tell you that he is off the team. And the reason he is off is, he broke the deal he made with his coaches, and with you, his teammates, to act in a certain way. The way you got to conduct yourselves if you are going to be a Panther. And I don’t mean just here on the field. I’m talking about how you act at home, and in school. Because we are out here devoting our time to you for no kind of pay, and you and your teammates are working hard, sweating, to make this the best team we can be. And we will not tolerate that kind of disrespect, to us or to you. Do you understand?”

There was a low mumble of yesses. The Pee Wee center, a quiet African kid named Prince, raised his hand, and Strange acknowledged him.

“Do you need to thee our report cards?” said Prince. The boy beside him grinned but did not laugh at Prince’s lisp.

“Yes, we will need to see your first report card when you get it. We’re especially gonna be looking at behavior. Now, we got a game this Saturday, y’all know that, right?” The boys’ faces brightened. “Anybody hasn’t paid the registration fee yet, you need to get up with your parents or the people you stay with, ’cause if you do not pay, you will not play. I’m gonna need all your health checkups, too.”

“We gettin’ new uniforms?” said a kid from back in the group.

“Not this season,” said Strange. “I must answer this question every practice. Some of you just do not listen.” There were a couple of “Dags,” but mostly silence.

“Practice is six o’clock, Wednesday,” said Blue.

“What time?” said Dennis Arrington.

The boys shouted in unison, “Six o’clock, on the dot, be there, don’t miss it!”

“Put it in,” said Quinn.

The boys formed a tight circle and tried to touch one another’s hands in the center. “Petworth Panthers!”

“All right,” said Strange. “We’re done. You that got your bikes or live close, get on home now before the dark falls all the way. Anyone else needs a ride, meet the coaches up in the lot.”

THERE were about ten parents and other types of relatives and guardians, dedicated, enthusiastic, loving, mostly women and a couple of men, who came to every practice and every game. Always the same faces. The parents who did not show were too busy trying to make ends meet, or hanging with their boyfriends or girlfriends, or they just didn’t care. Many of these kids lived with their grandparents or their aunts. Many had absent fathers, and some had never known their fathers at all.

So the parents who were involved helped whenever they could. They and the coaches watched out for those kids who needed rides home from practice and to and from the games. Running a team like this, keeping the kids away from the bad, it was a community effort. The responsibility fell on a committed few.

Strange drove south on Georgia Avenue. Lamar and Joe Wilder were in the backseat, Wilder showing Lamar his wrestling figures. Joe usually brought them with him to practice. Lamar was asking him questions, patiently listening as Joe explained the relationships among all these people, whom Strange thought of as freaks.

“You gonna watch Monday Nitro tonight?” asked Joe.

“Yeah, I’ll watch it,” said Lamar.

“Can you come over and watch it?”

“Can’t, Joe. Got my sister to look after; my moms is goin’ out.” Lamar punched Joe lightly on the shoulder. “Maybe we can watch it together next week.”

Strange brought Lamar along to practice to keep him out of trouble, but he was also a help to him and the other coaches. Both Lamar and Lionel were good with the kids.

Next to Strange sat Prince, the Pee Wees’ center. Prince was one of three Africans on the team. Like the others, Prince was well behaved, even tempered, and polite. His father drove a cab. Prince was tall for ten, and his voice had already begun to deepen. Some of the less sensitive boys on the team tended to imitate his slight lisp. But he was generally well liked and respected for his toughness.

“There’s my office,” said Strange, pointing to his sign on 9th. Whenever he could, Strange reminded his kids that he had grown up in the neighborhood, just like them, and that he owned his own business.

“Why you got a picture up there of a magnifying glath?” said Prince. He was holding his helmet in his hands, rubbing his fingers along the panther decal affixed to the side.

“It means I find things. Like I look at ’em closer so other people can see better. That make sense?”

“I guess.” Prince cocked his head. “My father gave me a magnifying glath.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh. One day it was thunny, and me and my little brother put the glath over some roach bugs that was outside on the alley porch, by the trash? The thun made those bugs smoke. We burned up those bugs till they died.”

Strange knew that here he should say that burning bugs to death wasn’t cool. But he said, “I used to do the same thing.”

Prince lived on Princeton Place, in a row house in Park View that was better kept than those around it. The porch light had been left on in anticipation of his arrival. Strange said good night to Prince and watched him go up the concrete steps to his house.

Some boys hanging on the corner, a couple years older than Prince, made some comments about his uniform, and then one of them said, “Pwinth, why you steppin’ so fast, Pwinth?”

They were laughing at him, but he kept walking without turning around, and he kept his shoulders erect until he made it to the front door and went through.

That’s right, thought Strange. Head up, and keep your posture straight.

The light on the porch went off.

Strange returned to Georgia Avenue, drove south, and passed a small marijuana enterprise run by a half dozen kids. Part of the income made here funneled up to one of the two prominent gangs that controlled the action in the neighborhood. South of the Fourth District, below Harvard Street, was a smaller, independent operation that did not encroach on the turf of the gang business up the road.

At Park Road, Strange cut east and then turned into the Section Eight government-assisted housing complex called Park Morton. Kids sat on a brick wall at the entrance to the complex, their eyes hard on Strange as he drove by.

The complex was dark, lit only by dim bulbs set in cinder-block stairwells. In one of them a group of young men, and a few who were not so young, were engaged in a game of craps. Some held dollars in their fists, others held brown paper bags covering bottles of juice halved with gin, or forties of malt liquor and beer.

“That your unit, Joe?” said Strange, who always had to ask. There was a dull sameness to these dwellings back here, broken by the odd heroic gesture: a picture of Jesus taped to a window, or a string of Christmas lights, or a dying potted plant.

“Next one up,” said Lamar.

Strange rolled forward, put the car in park, and let it idle.

“Walk him up, Lamar.”

“Coach,” said Joe, “you gonna call Forty-four Belly for me in the game?”

“We’ll see. We’ll practice it on Wednesday, okay?”

“Six o’clock, on the dot,” said Joe.

Strange brushed some bits of lint off of Joe’s nappy hair. His scalp was warm and still damp with sweat. “Go on, son. Mind your mother, now, hear?”

“I will.”

Strange watched Lamar and Joe disappear into the stairwell leading to Joe’s apartment. Ahead, rusted playground equipment stood silhouetted in a dirt courtyard dotted with Styrofoam containers, fast-food wrappers, and other bits of trash. The courtyard was lit residually by the lamps inside the apartments. A faint veil of smoke roiled in the light.

It was a while before Lamar returned. He rested his forearms on the lip of the open passenger window of Strange’s car.

“What took you so long?”

“Wasn’t no one home. Had to get a key from Joe’s neighbor.”

“Where his mom at?”

“I expect she went to the market for some cigarettes, sumshit like that.”

“Watch your mouth, boy.”

“Yeah, all right.” Lamar looked over his shoulder and then back at Strange. “He’ll be okay. He’s got my phone number he needs somethin’.”

“Get in, I’ll ride you the rest of the way.”

“That’s me, just across the court,” said Lamar. “I’ll walk it. See you tomorrow, boss.”

Strange said, “Right.”

He watched Lamar move slowly through the courtyard, not too fast like he was scared, chin level, squared up. Strange thinking, You learned early, Lamar, and well. To know how to walk in a place like this was key, a basic tool for survival. Your body language showed fear, you weren’t nothin’ but prey.

Driving home, Strange rolled up the windows of the Brougham and turned the AC on low. He popped a War tape, Why Can’t We Be Friends, into the deck, and he found that beautiful ballad of theirs, “So.” He got down low in the bench, his wrist resting on the stop of the wheel, and he began to sing along. For a while, anyway, sealed in his car, listening to his music, he found some kind of peace.

chapter 7

SUE Tracy sat in a window deuce, watching the foot traffic on Bonifant Street in downtown Silver Spring, as Terry Quinn arrived at the table carrying two coffees. They were in the Ethiopian place close to the Quarry House, the local basement bar where Quinn sometimes drank.

“That good?” said Quinn, watching her take her first sip. She had asked for one sugar to take the edge off.

“Yeah, it’s great. I guess I didn’t need the sugar.”

“They don’t let the coffee sit out too long in this place. These people here, they take pride in their business.”

“That bookstore you work in, it’s on this street, isn’t it?”

“Down the block,” said Quinn.

“Near the gun shop.”

“Yeah, and the apartments, the Thai and African restaurants, the tattoo parlor. Except for the gun place, it’s a nice strip. There aren’t any chain stores on this block, it’s still small businesses. Most of which have been wrecking-balled or moved, tucked under the rug to make way for the New Downtown Silver Spring. But this street here, they haven’t managed to mess with it too much yet.”

“You got something against progress?”

“Progress? You mean the privilege of paying five bucks for a tomato at our new designer supermarket, just like all those suckers on the other side of town? Is that the kind of progress you’re talking about?”

“You can always stick to Safeway.”

“Look, I grew up here. I know a lot of these shop owners; they’ve made a life here and they won’t be able to afford it when the landlords up the square-foot price. And where are all these working people who live in the apartments going to go when their rents skyrocket?”

“I guess it’s great if you own real estate.”

“I don’t own a house, so I couldn’t really give a rat’s ass if the property values go up. I walk through this city and every week something changes, you know? So maybe you can understand how I don’t feel all warm and fuzzy about it, man. I mean, they’re killing my past, one day at a time.”

“You sound like my father.”

“What about him?”

“He thinks that way, too, is all.” Tracy looked Quinn over, held it just a second too long, so that he could see her doing it, and then reached down to get something from the leather case at her feet.

He was still looking at her when she came back up, holding some papers in her hands. She wore a scoop-neck white pullover with no accoutrements, tucked into a pair of gray blue slacks that looked like work pants but were probably expensive, meant to look utilitarian. Her breasts rode high in her shirt, its whiteness set off by her tanned arms. Black Skechers, oxfords with white stitching, were on her feet. Her blond hair was pulled back, held in place by a blue gray Scunci, with a stray rope of blond falling forward over one cheek. He wondered if she had planned it to fall out that way.

Quinn wore a plain white T-shirt tucked into Levi’s jeans.

“What?” said Tracy.

“Nothing.”

“You were staring at me.”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t know why I mentioned my father.”

“I don’t either. Let’s get to work, okay?”

Tracy handed Quinn a stack of flyers exactly like the one Strange had given him the night before. “You might need more of these. We’ve got ’em posted around town, but they get ripped down pretty quick.”

Quinn picked up the Paper Mate sitting atop the notepad he had brought along with him. “What else can you tell me about her?”

Tracy pushed another sheet of paper across the table at Quinn. “Jennifer ran away from her home in Germantown several months ago.”

Quinn scanned the page. “This doesn’t say why.”

“She hit her teens and the hormones kicked in. Add to that, the kids she was hanging with were using drugs. It’s the usual story, not so different from most that we hear. From interviews we did with her friends out in the county, it sounds like she started hooking before she split.”

“In the outer suburbs?”

“What, you think that part of the world is immune to it? It starts out, girl will take a ride with an older guy and fellate him so she can buy a night of getting high for her and her friends. Or maybe she lets herself get penetrated, vaginally or even anally, for a little more cash. She doesn’t get beat up or ripped up those first couple of times — she doesn’t learn something, I mean — it accelerates pretty quickly after that. It gets easy.”

“She’s only fourteen.”

“I’m hip.”

“Okay, so she leaves Germantown. What makes you think she’s in the District?”

“Her friends again. She told them where she was going. But they haven’t heard from her since.”

“You said she was using drugs. What kind?”

“Ecstasy was her favorite, what we heard. But she’d use anything that was put in front of her, if you know what I mean.”

“Anything else?”

“We haven’t done a thing except interview her parents and a few of her friends. Like we told Derek, we’re up to our ears in county business right now. That’s why we were looking to hook up with you guys for the D.C. side of things. My partner wanted to meet you, but she’s out rounding up a girl she found as we speak.”

“Rounding up?”

“Basically, we yank ’em right off the street when we find them. We’ve got this van, no windows—”

“This legal, what you do?”

“As long as they’re minors, yeah. They have no domain over themselves, and if the parents sign a permission form for us to go after them it’s all straight. If there are any repercussions, we deal with it later. We work with some lawyers, pro bono. Basically, we’re out to save these kids.”

“That’s nice. But this work here, Derek didn’t say anything about it being pro bono. And on top of our hourly rate, I’m gonna need expense money.”

“Keep detailed records and you got it.”

“It could get rich.”

“We’re covered by the APIP people.”

“They must have some deep pockets.”

“Grant money.”

“Because I got a feeling I’m going to have to pay some people to talk.”

“Okay. But I’m still going to need those details.”

Tracy’s hand kept going into a large leather bag set on the table. She had been fondling something inside of it, then removing her hand, then putting it back in again.

“What’ve you got in there?”

“My cigarettes.”

“Well, you might as well stop romancing that pack. You can’t light up in here.”

“You can’t light up anywhere,” she said, adding by way of explanation, “It’s the coffee.”

“Gives you that urge, huh?” Quinn reached into a pocket and dropped a pack of sugarless gum between them. “Try this.”

“No, thanks.”

“We’ll be done in a minute, you can step outside.” Quinn tapped his pen on the notepad. “The one thing I’m wondering is, a girl runs away from home, there’s got to be good reason. It can’t just be galloping hormones and drugged-out friends.”

“Sometimes there’s an abusive parent involved in the equation, if that’s what you’re getting at. Emotional or physical or sexual abuse, or a combination of the three. Part of what me and Karen do is, we spend considerable time in the home, trying to figure out if that’s the best place for the kid to go back to. And sometimes the home’s not the best environment. But you’re wrong about one thing: It often is just hormones and peers, and accelerating events, that make a kid run away. With Jennifer, we’re convinced that’s the case.”

“Where do you suggest I start?”

“Start with stakeouts, like we do. The Wheaton mall, it’s near D.C. and it’s been good for us before. The overground rave clubs, trance, jungle, whatever they’re calling it this week. The ones play a mix of live and prerecorded stuff. What’s that place, in Southeast, on Half Street?”

“Nation.”

“That one. Platinum is good, too, over on Ninth and F.”

“I don’t like stakeouts. I’d rather get out there and start talking to people.”

“No one likes stakeouts. But suit yourself, whatever works for you.”

“Anything else?”

“Just in general terms. White-girl runaways tend to start out in far Northwest, where they’re around a familiar environment.”

“Other white kids.”

“Right. Places like Georgetown. They get hooked into drugs in a bigger way, they get taken in by a pimp—”

“They move east.”

Tracy nodded. “It’s gradual, and inevitable. Last stop is those New York Avenue flophouses in Northeast. You don’t even want to know what goes on in those places.”

“I already know. I was a patrol cop in the District, remember?”

Tracy turned her coffee cup slowly on the table. “Not just any cop.”

“That’s right. I was famous.”

“It’s not news to me. We ran your name through a search engine, and there were plenty of hits.”

“Some people can’t get past it, I guess.”

“Maybe so. But as far as you and me are concerned, this is day one.”

“Thanks.”

“Anyway, first impression, you seem like an okay guy to me.”

“You seem like an okay guy to me, too.”

“I bought a tomato at Fresh Fields once.”

“You probably spent too much for that shirt you’re wearing, too.”

“It’s a blouse. I paid about forty bucks for it, I think.”

Quinn touched his own T-shirt. “This Hanes I got on? Three for twelve dollars at Target, out on Twenty-nine.”

“I better get out there before they run out.”

Quinn tapped the stack of flyers on the table. “I’ll phone you, keep you caught up.”

“You ready for this?”

“Been a while,” said Quinn. “But yeah, I’m stoked.”

She watched him step out of the coffee shop, studying the way he filled out the seat of his Levi’s and that cocky thing he did with his walk. Talking about her father, giving up something of herself to this guy who was, after all, a stranger, it was not what she would normally do. Add to that, Christ, she should have known better, he was a cop. But there was a connection between them already, sexual and probably emotional; it happened right away like that with her if it happened at all. She had known it two minutes after they had sat down together, and, she had seen it in his damaged green eyes; he had known it, too.

STRANGE looked over the file on Calhoun Tucker that Janine had dropped on his desk.

“Nice work.”

“Thanks,” said Janine. She was sitting in the client chair in Strange’s office. “I ran his license plate through Westlaw; everything came up easy after that. People Finder gave me the previous addresses.”

Strange studied the data. Tucker’s license plate number had given them his Social Security number, his date of birth, his assets, any criminal record, and any lawsuits. Janine had printed out his credit history, with past and present employment, as well. Credit drove the database of information; it was the foundation of computerized modern detective services. It was useless for getting histories on indigents and criminals who had never had a credit card or made time-payment purchases. But for someone like Tucker, who was part of the system, it worked just fine.

Janine had fed Tucker’s SS number into People Finder, a subprogram of Westlaw. From this she had gotten a list of his current neighbors and the neighbors of his previous addresses.

“He looks pretty straight, first glance.”

“No criminal record,” said Janine. “Apart from a default on a car loan, he’s barely stumbled.”

Strange read the top sheet. “Graduate of Virginia Tech. Spends a few years in Portsmouth after college, working as an on-site representative for a company called Strong Services, whatever that’s about.”

“I’ll find out.”

“Looks like he owned a house in Portsmouth. Check on that, too, will you? Whose name was on it, any cosigners, like that.”

“I will.”

“Then he moved over to Virginia Beach.”

“Most likely that’s where he got into entertainment,” said Janine. “Got involved in promotions in clubs, hookups with fraternities, like that. Looks like that’s what he’s doing up here now, with the Howard kids along U Street and the upscale club circuit over around Ninth and on Twelfth.”

“That Audi he’s driving—”

“Leased. Maybe he’s beyond his means, but hey, he’s in a business where image is half of what you are.”

“I heard that.” Strange dropped the file onto his desk. “Well, let me get on out of here, see what I can dig up. Can’t tell much until you face-time.”

“Tucker looks pretty clean to me.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Strange. “There’s nothin’ I’d like better than to give George Hastings a good report.”

Strange got up from his chair and walked around the desk. His office door was closed. He touched Janine on the cheek, then cupped his hand behind her neck, bent down, and kissed her on the mouth.

“You taste good.”

“Strawberry,” said Janine.

Strange clipped his beeper onto his belt and picked up the file.

“Terry phoned in,” said Janine. “He was in Georgetown when he called. Asked Ron to run some girl’s name, see if she has an arrest record in the District.”

“He’s workin’ a job those county women farmed out to us. Did you bill them for that one I did the other night?”

“It went out yesterday.”

“All right, then.” Strange headed for the door. “See you later, baby.”

“Tonight?” said Janine to his back.

Strange kept walking. “I’ll let you know.”

chapter 8

QUINN parked his Chevelle on R Street along Montrose Park, between Dunbarton Oaks and Oak Hill Cemetery in north Georgetown. He walked over to Wisconsin Avenue with a stack of flyers, a small staple gun, and a roll of industrial adhesive tape that he carried in a JanSport knapsack he wore on his back.

Foot traffic was moderate in the business district, with area workers breaking for lunch, along with college kids and the last of summer’s visitors window-shopping the knockoff clothiers and chain stores. There wasn’t anything here that couldn’t be had elsewhere and at a better price. To Quinn, and to most of D.C.’s longtime residents, Georgetown during the day was a charmless tourist trap and a parking nightmare to be avoided at any cost.

Quinn went along Wisconsin and west to the residential side streets, stapling the flyers to telephone poles and taping them to city trash cans. He knew the flyers would largely be gone, ripped down by residents and foot cops, by nightfall, maybe sooner. It was a long shot, but it was a start.

South of the P Street intersection he stopped to talk to a skinny man, all arms and legs, built like a spider, who was leaning in the doorway of Mean Feets, D.C.’s longtime trendsetting shoe boutique, dragging on a Newport. Inside the shop, Quinn saw a handsome older man smoothly fitting a shoe onto the foot of a young woman as a D’Angelo tune came from the open front door.

As a former cop, Quinn knew that urban shoe salesmen spent a good portion of their day standing outside their shops, talking to women walking down the sidewalk, trying to get them inside, into their web. As it was an occupational necessity, they tended to remember not just shoe sizes but faces and names as well. They also serviced many of the city’s hookers and their pimps.

Quinn greeted the skinny man, then opened a leather holder, flashing his badge and license. To the public, it looked like a cop’s badge. Beside a picture of the D.C. flag, it actually read, “Metropolitan Police Department,” over the words “Private Investigator.” It was Quinn’s habit, suggested to him by Strange, to show the license and badge long enough for the flag and MPD moniker to register, then put it away just as fast.

“Investigator, D.C.,” said Quinn. Strange had taught him this, too. It wasn’t against the law. It wasn’t even a lie.

“What can I do for you, officer?”

“Name’s Terry Quinn. You?”

“Antoine.”

Quinn unfolded a flyer he had kept in his back pocket and handed it to Antoine. Antoine squinted through the smoke curling up from the cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“Any chance you’ve seen this girl?”

“Don’t look familiar.”

“You sell shoes to prostitutes from time to time, don’t you?”

“Sure, I got my regular ladies, come in for their evening shoes. But I don’t recognize this one. Been doin’ this a long time in the District, too. She hookin’?”

“Could be.”

“I don’t recall ever seeing one this young in my shop. Not that I knew of, anyway.”

“Do me a favor. Put this up in the back room, by the toilet, whatever.” Quinn handed Antoine his card. “You or your coworkers, they see her, even if she’s walking down the street, you give me a call.”

Antoine dropped the cigarette, ground it out. He reached for his wallet, slipped Quinn’s card inside, and retrieved a card of his own, handing it to Quinn.

“Now you do me a favor, officer. You need a pair of boots or somethin’, get you out of those New Balances you got on, somethin’ a little more stylin’, you give me a call, hear? Antoine. You walk in here, don’t be askin’ for anyone else.”

“I got a wide foot.”

“Oh, I’ll fit you, now. Antoine can stretch some shoes.”

“All right,” said Quinn. “I’ll see you around.”

“The name is Antoine.”

Quinn walked north to a strip club up the hill on Wisconsin, stopping at an ATM along the way. He entered without paying a cover and was seated by a bouncer at a table in the middle of a series of tables set tightly in a row throughout the depth of the narrow club, facing one of several stages. Three men wearing ties, their shirtsleeves rolled back off their wrists, occupied the table. The men did not acknowledge Quinn. A nice-looking young woman in a sleeveless dress quickly arrived and took his order. She cupped her ear to hear him over the Limp Bizkit, their cover of “Faith,” booming through the speakers.

Quinn checked out the dancers, working the poles on their stages, into the music, smiling politely at the audience but with their eyes someplace else. Thin, young, toned, and generally pleasant to look at. One of them was straight-up attractive, with a cheerleader’s bright face and ruby red nipples. Connoisseurs claimed this place had the finest, cleanest-looking dancers in town. It was all perception and taste; Quinn knew men who swore by that joint near Connecticut and Florida Avenues. Quinn had been there once and judged it to be a skank-house.

The woman returned with a bottle of Bud, for which he paid dearly. He showed her the flyer. She barely looked at it and shook her head. Quinn paid her, tipped her, and asked for a receipt.

There were several bouncers working the room, all wearing radio headsets. The customers could go to the stages and tip the dancers, but they couldn’t linger in the aisle, and if they did, one of the bouncers told them to get back to their seats. Patrons judged to be nursing their beers were encouraged to drink up and reorder or leave. This was the New World Order of strip clubs. To Quinn, it was all too bloodless and it didn’t seem to be much fun.

Quinn recognized one of the bouncers, a black Asian-featured guy now standing by the front door, as a moonlighting cop. He didn’t know the cop personally and didn’t know his name. Quinn waited for his receipt, left his beer untouched, and walked over to the bouncer. He introduced himself, shook the guy’s hand, and showed him the flyer.

“I don’t know her,” said the cop. He looked closely at Quinn. “Where’d you say you were at?”

“In the end, I rode Three-D.”

The cop got that look of recognition then, the clouding over of the eyes, that Quinn had seen many times.

“Keep the flyer,” said Quinn, handing the cop his business card as well. “You see her, do me a favor and give me a call.”

Quinn walked out, Kid Rock screaming at his back. He knew the bouncer would throw the flyer and his card in the trash. He was one of those guys, once he figured out who Quinn was, he didn’t want to have anything to do with him. He’d never get past the fact that Quinn had killed a fellow cop.

Quinn returned to his car and drove east, over the P Street Bridge and onto the edge of Dupont Circle. He found a spot on 23rd Street, walked past a gay nightclub that had been there since disco’s first wave, and stopped at a coffeehouse at the next intersection. It was near P Street Beach, a stretch of Rock Creek Park that in years past had been known for sunbathing, cruising, and open-air sexual activity. Quinn remembered from his patrol days that this was also an area where ecstasy could be easily scored, as the 18th Street clubs were in the vicinity. It was a perimeter that young hustlers worked as well.

He bought a cup of regular and took it out to where tables were set on the sidewalk. He found a seat and checked out the crowd. Teenagers were interspersed in the mostly adult customer base of coffee drinkers and smokers. Some of the teenagers sat with friends; others, both boys and girls, sat with older men. Quinn guessed that some of these kids were cutting school, just slumming, and some were runaways who crashed wherever they could around town. That left the few who had gone professional and were working the crowd.

Quinn had the feeling, from the eye contact he was getting, that a couple of the kids had marked him as a cop. Strange claimed you never lost the look. Quinn was way too old to be one of them, too young to be a john, and, he told himself, too attractive to look like the type who would pay for it. He was mulling over all of this, sitting there trying to decide how to approach one of these kids.

Fuck it, he thought, getting up and crossing the sidewalk patio to a table where two teenage girls sat, empty cups in front of them, ashing the pavement with their cigarettes.

“Hey,” said Quinn, “how you ladies doing?”

Both of the girls looked up, but only one of them kept her eyes on him.

“We’re fine, thanks.” The girl, who had the look of hard money, someone who had been taught never to thank the waitress, said, “Something we can help you with?”

Quinn had obviously made a mistake. “I was wondering, can I snag a cigarette from you?”

She rolled her eyes and gave him one from her handbag without looking at him further. He thanked her and returned to his table, noticing a boy and his female friend laughing at him, feeling a flush of anger and trying to stifle it as he adjusted himself in his seat. Holding a cigarette and without even a match to complete the ruse.

He retrieved his cell from his pack and phoned the office. Janine switched him over to Ron Lattimer.

“Any luck?” said Ron.

“Nothing yet. Our girl got a sheet?”

“Jennifer Marshall. Got it right here.”

“Solicitation?”

“Man wins the Kewpie doll.”

“What about an address?”

“Listed as five seventeen J Street, Northwest. You might have a little trouble finding it, unless someone went and built a J Street in the last week or so—”

“There is no J Street in D.C.”

“No shit.”

“She’s got a sense of humor, anyway.”

“Or the one who told her to write it like that does.”

“Thanks, Ron. I’ll look over the rest of it when I come in. Derek around?”

“Uh-uh, he’s out doing a background check.”

“Tell him I was looking for him, hear?”

“Call him on his cell.”

“He doesn’t keep it on most of the time.”

“You can leave a message on it, man.”

“True.”

“I see him, I’ll tell him.”

Quinn was replacing his cell in his bag when he noticed a girl standing before him. She wore boot-cut jeans and a spaghetti-string pink shirt with a cartoon illustration of a Japanese girl holding a guitar slung low, à la Keith. Her shoulder bag was white, oval, and plastic. Her dirty-blond hair fell to her shoulders. Her hips were narrow, her breasts small, mostly nipple and visible through the shirt. She was pale, with bland brown eyes and a tan birthmark, shaped like a strawberry, on her neck. She wore wire-rim prescription eyeglasses, granny style. She was barely cute, and not even close to pretty. Quinn put her in her midteens, maybe knocking on the door of seventeen, if that.

“You gonna smoke that?”

Quinn looked at the cigarette in his hand as if he were noticing it for the first time. “I don’t think so.”

“Can I get it from you, then?”

“Sure.”

She sat down without invitation. He handed her the cigarette.

“You got a light?”

“Sorry.”

“You need a new rap,” she said, rooting through her shoulder bag for a match. Finding a book, she struck a flame and put fire to the cigarette. “The one you got is lame.”

“You think so?”

“You be hittin’ those girls up for a smoke, you don’t ask ’em for a light, you don’t even have a match your own self?”

Quinn took in the girl’s words, the rhythms, the dropping of the g’s, the slang. Like that of most white girls selling it on the street, her speech was an affectation, a strange in-and-out blend of Southern cracker and city black girl.

“Pretty stupid, huh?”

“And if you was lookin’ to score some ass, you went and picked the only two girls out here ain’t even had their boots knocked yet. Couple of Sidwell Friends girls, trying out the street for a day before they go back to their daddy’s Mercedes, got it parked around the block.” She grinned. “You prob’ly don’t even smoke.”

“I tried it once and it made me sick.”

“But you want something,” she said, no inflection at all in her voice, just dead. It made Quinn sad.

“I’m looking for a girl.”

“You a cop?”

“No.”

“You have to tell me if you are. It’s entrapment otherwise.”

“I’m not a cop. I’m just looking for a girl.”

“I can get you some pussy, now.” She lowered his eyes, magnified behind the lenses, suggestively. “Shit, you can have this pussy right here, that’s all you want.”

Quinn found a flyer in his knapsack and slid it across the table. “I’m looking for her.”

He watched her examine the face and data on the flyer. If she recognized Jennifer Marshall, her eyes did not give it up.

“I don’t know her,” said the girl. “But maybe I can hook you up with someone who does.”

“You work the middle,” said Quinn.

“When I can. It’s rough out here, you know; I’m talkin’ about the competition. My looks are, like, an acquired taste. Guys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, and all that. My mother, when she was dolin’ out one of her famous pearls of wisdom, used to remind me all the time. But contacts hurt my eyes. So here I am, lookin’ like a magnet-school geek tryin’ to peddle her ass. And my tits are too little, too. White johns like that black pussy, and with this kiddie pelvis I got, the brothers just tear my shit up. So maybe I’m not cut out for the life. You think I am?”

Quinn gave the girl a chin nod. “What’s your name?”

“Stella. Yours?”

“Terry Quinn. You were gonna hook me up, Stella.”

“It’s gonna cost you fifty.”

“For a name?”

“It’s a good name.”

“How do I know?”

“’Cause I ga-ran-tee it, dude. Now how about that fifty?”

Quinn paid her discreetly. She finished her cigarette and dropped it to the concrete.

“There’s a girl dances over at Rick’s, on New York Avenue, on the way out of town, past North Capitol?”

“I know the place.”

“Black girl, goes by Eve. They call her All-Ass Eve; you see her, you’ll know why. She knows this girl.”

“How do you know that she knows her?”

For the first time, Stella’s confidence was visibly shaken. She recovered quickly, though, smiling crookedly like a child caught in a lie. And Quinn saw the little girl then, just for a moment, that someone had rocked to sleep, bought presents for, loved. Maybe not always — maybe the mother or the father had fucked up somewhere along the way. But he had to believe that this girl had been loved at one time.

“Okay, I don’t know for sure that Eve knows this girl right here, but listen to me: This is the kind of girl Eve gets to know. She cruises through this intersection, and in bus stations and malls, lookin’ for new talent so she can steer it to her pimp. Everyone workin’ this area knows who she is. The ones been around know to stay away from her and stick to this side of the creek. But the girl in this picture right here? She is fresh meat. I mean, she looks like she don’t know jack. It’s the dumb ones, the desperate ones that go with Eve. I’m just connecting things, is all. Anyway, Eve don’t work out for you, you come back, we’ll start again.”

“For more money.”

Stella shrugged. “I’m strugglin’, dude.”

“How do I reach you?”

Stella gave Quinn her cell number. He used his to phone her right there at the table. Her cell rang in her shoulder bag. She fished it out and answered.

“Hellooo? Officer Quinn?”

“Okay.” He killed the call on his cell and gave her one of his cards. “You want to talk, you call me, hear?”

“Talkin’ don’t pay my bills.” She looked him over. “I’ll suck your dick for another fifty, though.”

“This pans out, there’s another fifty in it for you just for giving me the lead.”

“I’ll take it. But don’t use my name when you’re talking to Eve.”

“You don’t need to tell me that. Eight years on the force, I never once lost a snitch.”

“Knew you were a cop.”

“In another life,” said Quinn, getting up and stepping back from the table. “Let’s stay in touch, all right?”

chapter 9

CALHOUN Tucker was tall and lean and visibly muscled beneath a crisp beige shirt tucked into tailored black slacks. He had a thin Billy D mustache and some kind of pomade worked into his close black hair that gave it shine. He wore expensive-looking shades and a small, new-tech cell clipped to his waistband. All of this Strange could see through his 10×50 binoculars as he sat in his Chevy, surveilling Tucker across the street from his residence, a rental town house near a medical park between Wheaton and Silver Spring.

Tucker went down the sidewalk toward his car, a cherry red S4, Audi’s hopped-up model in the 4-series line, their version of the BMW M3. Tucker’s complexion was a deep brown, not so dark as to hide his features, not so light as to suggest white blood. He walked with confidence, chin up, like the handsome young man he undoubtedly knew he was. He had the package women liked; the confidence thing, they liked that, too. Strange could see right away why Alisha Hastings had been attracted, surface-wise, to Tucker.

Tucker fired up the Audi and pulled out of his space. Strange followed him south, making sure there were plenty of cars between them all the way. Just over the District line, Tucker shot right on Alaska, then another right up 13th, into the cluster of “flower-and-tree” streets, where he cut a left onto Iris. He was heading for George Hastings’s house. Strange went around the block, counter to the route Tucker had taken, and parked in the alley behind Juniper. He got out of his car and left the alley on foot, his binos in his hand.

By the time Strange made it to the intersection of Iris and 13th, Alisha Hastings had come out of her father’s house and was leaning into the driver’s-side window of Tucker’s ride, idling out front behind George’s Volvo. Alisha had on some kind of casual, wear-around-the-house hookup that looked spontaneous but had probably been planned. Tucker had probably called her from his cell and told her he would be stopping by on his way into town. Strange didn’t blame Tucker for wanting to get a look at her before he started his day; Alisha was radiant and poised, with deep dimples framing her lovely smile. Tucker had his hand on her forearm and he was lightly stroking it, talking to her, making her laugh, making her so happy she had to look away. Seeing the two of them there, it reminded Strange of a girl he had loved hard back in the early seventies. He watched them kiss. A twinge of guilt snapped in his chest, and he went back to get his car.

He followed Tucker down into Shaw. Tucker parked on U Street, and Strange put his Chevy in a spot along a construction fence on 10th. He jogged up to the corner and saw Tucker walking west, carrying a briefcase of some kind. He followed Tucker until he went up the steps and into a nightclub that was a quiet bar and lunch joint during the day. Tucker came out ten minutes later and walked farther west to a similar club. He entered, and Strange stood back and leaned against a parking-meter pole stripped of its head. Back from where he’d come, he could see the lunch crowd going in and out of Ben’s. His felt his mouth water and a rumble in his stomach, and he looked the other way.

It took Tucker a while to come out of the club. Strange knew the place. He used to drink there occasionally when it was a neighborhood bar, just a few short years ago. In the summer the management had strung speakers outside, and on some nights, driving slowly down U Street, Strange could hear James Brown doing “Payback,” or a Slave tune, or Otis and Carla singing “Tramp,” and that was enough to cause him to pull over and stop in for a beer. All types were in the bar then, even a few whites; you could wear what you wanted to, it was cool. But then they changed things over, instituting a dress code, and a race code, it seemed, as one night Strange had seen some fancy brothers punk out this one young white dude who was sitting at the bar quietly drinking a beer. The white dude, he wasn’t bothering anyone, but he wasn’t the right color and he wasn’t wearing the right clothes, and they hard-eyed him enough to make him feel like he wasn’t wanted, and soon he was gone. Strange hadn’t gone back since. The truth was, he was too old for the crowd himself, and he preferred a working-class atmosphere when he sat down to have his drinks. Mostly, he didn’t dig that kind of intolerance, no matter who was on the giving or the receiving end. He’d seen too much in his life to excuse that kind of behavior from anyone, even his own people. If this was the New U, then it wasn’t for him.

Strange retrieved his car and kept it running on the street, waiting for Tucker to come out of the bar. Soon Tucker walked down the steps of the club, slipping his shades on, and went to his car. He pulled out onto U, and Strange followed.

Tucker went east, over to Barry Place, parking his Audi between Sherman and 9th, not far from Howard University. Strange kept going and circled the block.

He parked on the Sherman / Barry corner and got his AE-1, outfitted with a 500mm lens, out of his trunk, keeping his eye on Tucker, who was now walking down the street, talking on his cell. Strange returned to the driver’s seat of his Chevy, where he had a clear view of Tucker, and snapped several photographs of him walking up the steps of a row house and waiting at its door. He got a last shot of Tucker going though the open door, and of the woman who let him in. He used the long lens to read the address off one of the brick pillars fronting the porch of the house. He used his cell to phone in the address to Janine. Janine had a reverse-directory program on her computer that would give them a phone number and name for the residence.

Strange sat there for an hour or so, sipping water from a bottle, listening to Joe Madison’s talk show on WOL, while he thought of what was going on in the house. Maybe that was a business appointment in there, or it was a friend and the two of them were having lunch. More likely, right about now Tucker was knocking the back end out of that woman Strange had seen in the open door. Strange was disappointed but not surprised. Thinking about that young man and woman in there, it stirred something in him, too. He’d done enough today. He was hungry and he had to pee.

Strange ignitioned the Chevy and drove over to Chinatown, where he parked in an alley behind I Street. A man whom Strange recognized, a heroin addict who worked the alley, appeared like a phantom, and Strange handed him a five to look after his car. Then he went in a back door next to a Dumpster, down a hall where he passed a kitchen and several closed doors, and through a beaded entranceway into a small dining area where dulcimer music played softly. He took a deuce and ordered some hot-and-sour soup and Singapore-style noodles from an older woman who called him by his name. He washed the lunch down with a Tsingtao.

“Everything okay?” said the hostess.

“Yes, mama, it was good. Bring me my check.”

“You want?” she said, her eyes moving to the beaded curtain leading to the hall. “Your friend here.”

Strange nodded.

He paid cash and went down the hall to a door opposite the kitchen. He went through the door and closed it behind him. He was in a white-walled room lit by scented votive candles. The music from the dining area played in the room. A padded table was in the center of the room, with a small cart set beside it holding lotions, towels, and a washbasin.

Strange went through another door, turned on a light, and undressed in a room containing a toilet, sink, and tiled shower stall. He hung his clothing on a coat tree and took a hot shower, wrapping a towel around himself when he was done. Then he returned to the candlelit room and lay facedown on the padded table. Soon he heard a door open and saw light spear into the room. The light slipped away as the door was closed.

“Hello, Stwange.”

“Hello, baby.”

Strange heard the squirt of an applicator and next felt the woman’s warm, slick hands. She kneaded the lotion, some sweet-smelling stuff, into his shoulder muscles and his lats. He felt her rough nipples graze his back as she bent in to whisper in his ear.

“You have good day today?”

“Uh-huh.”

She hummed to the music as she massaged his back. The sound of her voice and the sensation of her touch made him hard. He turned over, the towel falling open. She massaged his chest, his calves, his upper thighs, working her way up to his balls. The lotion was warm there; Strange swallowed.

“You like?”

“Yeah, that’s good right there.”

She applied more lotion to her hands and fisted his cock. Her movement was slow. As her hand went up his shaft, she feathered the head with her fingers. Strange opened his eyes.

The woman was in her twenties, with carelessly applied lipstick and eyes like black olive pits. She wore red lace panties and nothing else. She was short and had the hips of a larger woman. Her breasts were small and firm. He brushed his fingers across one nipple until it was pebble hard, and when the fire rose up in his loins he pinched her there until she moaned. He didn’t care if it was all fake.

“Go now,” he said, and she pumped him faster.

His orgasm was eye-popping, his own jism splattering his stomach and chest.

“You need,” said the woman, chuckling under her breath.

As she wet-toweled him, Strange said, “Yes.”

Dressed again, he left forty-five dollars in a bowl by the door.

Out in the alley, his beeper sounded. It was the office number. He debated whether or not to return the call. He got into his car and used his cell to dial the number. Quinn’s voice came through from the other end.

“I stopped by the office to pick up Jennifer Marshall’s sheet from Ron,” said Quinn. “Where you at?”

“Chinatown,” said Strange.

“Uh-huh.”

“Had some lunch.”

“Okay.”

Strange had spilled his guts to Quinn one night when both of them had put away too many beers. Giving up too much of himself to Quinn had come back to him in a bad way. It was always a mistake.

“I’m headed down to Rick’s, on New York Avenue,” said Quinn, then explained the reason. “You wanna join me?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“C’mon over to the office. We can drive down together.”

“I’ll meet you at Rick’s,” said Strange. “Say, half hour?”

“Fine,” said Quinn. “Bring some dollar bills.”

Strange cut the line. He didn’t want to go back to the office and have to small-talk Janine. He was relieved it hadn’t been her on the phone when he’d called in.

On his way east, he drove by the row house on Barry Place, the site of Calhoun Tucker’s afternoon tryst. Tucker’s Audi was gone.

chapter 10

RICK’S was a stand-alone A-frame establishment located a few miles east of North Capitol on New York Avenue, a bombed-out-looking stretch of road that was the jewel-in-the-crown introduction to Washington, D.C., for many first-time visitors who traveled into the city by car.

The building now holding Rick’s had originally been built as a Roy Rogers burger house. It had mutated into its current incarnation, a combination sports bar and strip joint for working stiffs, when the Roy’s chain went the way of corded telephones.

The conversion had been simple. The new owners had gutted the fast-food interior, keeping only a portion of the kitchen and the bathroom plumbing, and hung some Redskins, Wizards, and Orioles memorabilia on the walls. The omission of Washington Capitals pennants was intentional, as hockey was generally not a sport that interested blacks. The final touch was to brick up the windows that had once wrapped around three sides of the structure. Bricked windows generally meant one of three things: arson victim, gay bar, or strip joint. Once the word got around on which kind of place Rick’s was, the owners didn’t even bother to hang a sign out front.

Rick’s had its own parking lot, an inheritance from the Roy’s lease. A couple of locals had been shot in this parking lot in the past year, but pre-sundown and in the early evening hours, before the liquor turned peaceful men brave, then violent, the place was generally safe.

Strange pulled his Caprice alongside Quinn’s blue Chevelle, parked in an empty corner of the lot. Quinn got out of his car as Strange stepped out of his. They met and shook hands. Quinn made a show of sniffing the air.

“Damn, Derek. You smell kinda, I don’t know, sweet. Is that perfume?”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, man.”

It was the lotion that girl had rubbed on him back in Chinatown. Strange knew that Quinn was remarking on it, in his own stupid way.

They walked toward Rick’s.

Strange nodded at the JanSport hanging off Quinn’s shoulder. “What, we goin’ mountain climbing now? Thought we were just gonna have a beer or two.”

“My briefcase.”

“You been waitin’ on me long?”

“Not too long,” said Quinn.

“You coulda gone inside,” said Strange, giving Quinn a long look. “I bet I would have spotted you right quick.”

“I’d be the one on the bottom of the pile.”

“With the red opening in his neck, stretchin’ from one ear to the other.”

“Not too many white guys in this place, huh?”

“Seeing a white guy at Rick’s be like spottin’ a brother at a Springsteen concert.”

“I figured I’d just wait for you to escort me in.”

“No need to tempt fate. It’s what I been telling you the past two years. You’re learning, man.”

“I’m trying,” said Quinn.

They went into Rick’s. Smoke hovered in the dim lights. The place was half filled, just easing into happy hour. A bar ran along one wall where the order counter for Roy’s had been, and beyond it was a series of doors. Guys sat at the stick, watching the nostalgia sports channel, Packers uniforms dancing in a flurry of snow, “Spill the Wine” playing on the stereo throughout the house. In two corners, women danced in thongs, nothing else, for groups of men seated at tables. Waitresses wearing short shorts and lacy tops were servicing the tables. Big men with big shoulders and no headsets were stationed around the room.

Floor patrons fish-eyed Strange and Quinn as they stepped up to the bar. Those seated at the bar barely noticed their presence, as their eyes were glued to the television set mounted on the wall.

Strange nodded up at the set. “You want to get a man’s attention, put on any Green Bay game where it got played in the snow. Guy’ll sit there like a glassy-eyed old dog, watchin’ it.”

“It’s like when they run The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on TNT.”

“You mean, like, every week?”

“Tell me the truth; if you’re scanning the channels with the remote and you see Eastwood, or Eli Wallach as Tuco—”

“‘Otherwise known as the Rat.’”

“Right,” said Quinn. “So, when you recognize that movie, have you ever been able to scan past it? I mean, you always sit there and watch the rest of the film, don’t you?”

“The Wild Bunch is like that, too,” said Strange. “How many times you figure you’ve seen that one?”

Quinn pumped out two short strokes with his fist. “With my pants on, or with them around my ankles?”

Strange chuckled as the bartender, a young guy with a hard face, arrived before them. “What can I get y’all?”

“I’ll take a Double R Bar burger and a saddle fulla fries,” said Quinn, but the bartender didn’t smile.

“Heineken for me,” said Strange.

“Bud,” said Quinn.

“In bottles,” said Strange. “And we’re gonna need a receipt.”

The tender returned with their beers. Quinn paid him and dropped a heavy tip on the bar, placing his hand over the cash. “Which one of the girls is Eve?”

“That’s her right there,” said the bartender, chinning in the direction of a big-boned dancer working one of the corners of the room.

“When does she stop?”

“They work half hours.”

“Any idea how long she’s been at it?”

“’Bout ten years, from the looks of her.”

“I meant tonight.”

“Ain’t like I been clockin’ her.”

“Right,” said Quinn. He took his hand off the money, and the bartender snatched it without a word. He had never once looked Quinn in the eye.

Strange saw two men get up from their table near Eve’s corner. He folded the bar receipt, put it in his breast pocket, and said to Quinn, “There we go, that’s us right there.”

They crossed the floor, one of the stack-shouldered bouncers staring hard at Quinn as they passed. “Sweet Sticky Thing” came forward from the house system. Quinn and Strange had a seat at the deuce. Strange leaned forward and tapped his beer bottle against Quinn’s.

“Relax,” said Strange.

“I get tired of it, is all.”

“You expect all the brothers to show you love, huh?”

“Just respect,” said Quinn.

They drank off some of their beers and watched the work of the woman the bartender had identified as Eve. She was squatting, her back to a group of men, her palms resting atop her thighs, working the muscles in her lower back. Her huge ass jiggled rapidly, seemingly disconnected from the rest of her. It moved wildly before the men.

“Someone ought to give that a name,” said Strange.

“She does have a nickname: All-Ass Eve.”

“Bet it didn’t take long to come up with it.”

“You like it like that?”

“Is seven up?”

“She doesn’t hold a candle to Janine.”

“That’s what I know. You don’t have to tell me, man.” Strange smiled and pointed to one of the speakers suspended from the ceiling by wires. “Listen to this right here. The third verse is comin’ up.”

“So?”

“The horn charts behind this verse are beautiful, man. The Ohio Players never did get much credit for the complexity in their shit.”

“That’s nice,” said Quinn. “You know, Janine was askin’ where you were when I was back in the office.”

“You tell her I was in Chinatown?”

“I don’t like lying to her.” Quinn’s eyes cut off Strange’s stare. “No, I didn’t say where you were.”

Strange had a sip of beer. “You met with Sue Tracy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d you think?”

“She’s a pro. She’s nice.”

“Bet you didn’t find her all that hard to look at, either.”

“Knock it off.”

“Just wanted to make sure you still had some red blood runnin’ through your veins. While you’re sittin’ over there judgin’ me with your eyes.”

Quinn didn’t respond. Strange said, “Ron give you the sheet on the Marshall girl?”

“I got it.”

“What did it tell you?”

“She got popped for solicitation. It’s a no-paper, so we won’t be finding her in court.”

“She put an address on the form?” said Strange.

“A phony. But the spot where she wrote down her contact was interesting. A guy named Worldwide Wilson.”

“Worldwide.”

“Yeah, looks like she gave up the name of her pimp.”

“She give out his phone number, too?”

“She did write one down. But it’s got one of those number symbols after it.”

“Must be his pager.”

“Genius.”

“Just tryin’ to help you out, rookie.”

“Anyway, I’ll find out tonight.”

They watched the rest of Eve’s performance. The music programmer stuck with the Ohio Players and moved into “Far East Mississippi” and “Skin Tight.” Strange and Quinn ordered two more beers. Eve finished her shift and walked off through one of the doors behind the bar, accompanied by the stack-necked bouncer who had hard-eyed Quinn. A woman arrived, built similarly to Eve, and she began to dance in the same way Eve had danced, this time to a tune by the Gap Band. The woman’s behind rippled as if it were in a wind tunnel.

“This here must be strictly an ass joint,” said Quinn.

“And they asked me when I took you on, Will he make a good detective.”

“It’s like their signature dish.”

“Ledo’s Pizza got pizza. The Prime Rib’s got prime rib. Rick’s got ass.”

“You black guys do love the onion.”

“Was wonderin’ when you were gonna get to that.”

Soon Eve came out of the back room wearing a sheer top with no bra and matching shorts showing the lines of her thong. She was going around to the tables, shaking hands with the men, some of whom were slipping her money in appreciation of her performance. The stack-necked bouncer was never far from Eve. He had braided hair and a gold tooth. Quinn thought he looked like Warren Sapp, that football player. He was big as one.

“She’ll be here in a second, Terry. I’ll ask the questions, you don’t mind.”

“My case. Let me handle it, all right?”

Eve was a large woman, in proportion with her backside. Her nose was thick and wide, and her lips, painted a bright red, were prominent; her hands and feet had the size of a man’s. She had sprayed herself with some kind of sweet perfume, and it was strong on Strange and Quinn as she arrived at their table.

“Did you gentlemen like my performance?” she said, giving them a shy smile, her hand out.

“I did,” said Strange.

Quinn extended his hand, a twenty-dollar bill folded in it so that she could see the denomination. He pulled it back as she reached out for it.

“C’mon back when you have a minute,” said Quinn. “My friend and I want to talk to you.”

Eve kept her smile, but it twitched at one corner. Strange noticed her bad teeth, a common trait among hos.

“Management says I can’t sit down with the customers,” said Eve, “’less they buy me a cocktail.”

“Bet you like those fruity ones,” said Strange, “loaded up with all kinds of rums.”

“Mmmm,” said Eve, licking her lips clumsily.

“We’ll see you in a few,” said Quinn.

The bouncer gave him one long, meaningful look before he and Eve went off to the next table full of suckers.

“That drink’s gonna cost you, like, another seven,” said Strange.

“I know it.”

“Won’t even have no liquor in it.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Make sure you get a receipt. We’ll charge it to your girl Sue.”

Eve returned after a while and pulled a chair over from another table, sliding it in between Strange and Quinn. She carried a collins glass filled with pinkish liquid and held it up by way of salute to her new friends before taking a sip. The bouncer had a seat on a stool positioned a table away and stared at Quinn. Kool and the Gang’s “Soul Vibration” played loud on the sound system. Strange watched the dancers bring it down a notch to catch the groove of the song.

“Thanks for the drink,” said Eve. She wiped her mouth and placed the drink on the table. Her lipstick had made a kiss mark on the glass. “You two wouldn’t be police officers, would you?”

“We’re not with the police,” said Quinn, pushing the yellow flyer he had taken from his pack across the table. He dropped the twenty on top of the flyer, careful not to cover the photograph of Jennifer Marshall. “You recognize this girl?”

Eve’s eyes held their neutral vacancy. “No.”

“You sure?”

“I said no. Was I talkin’ too soft for you?”

“I can hear you fine. I don’t believe you is what it is.”

Eve’s smile, like a death rictus, remained upon her face. “You’re cuttin’ me deep, white boy.”

Strange looked over at the bouncer, then around the room. He recognized one guy, an older cat with a cool-fish handshake he’d seen at church now and again. Anything went down, this cat would be no help at all.

Quinn leaned forward. “You never seen her, like at a bus station, nothin’ like that? How about over by P Street Beach?”

Eve’s smile faded, and with it any facade of love.

“Ever hear of a guy named Worldwide Wilson?” said Quinn.

Eve’s eyes were dead now, still on Quinn. She shook her head slowly.

“You steer girls over to Wilson, Eve. Isn’t that right?”

Eve reached for the twenty on the table. Quinn put a hand over her wrist and pushed his thumb in at her pressure point. He pressed just enough for her to feel it. But if she felt it, it didn’t show. In fact, the smile returned to her face.

“All right, Terry,” said Strange. “Let her go.”

The bouncer was still staring at Quinn but hadn’t moved an inch. Eve slowly pulled her hand free. Quinn let her do it.

“You know why you still conscious?” said Eve, her voice so soft it was barely audible above the sounds in the club. “’Cause you don’t mean a motherfuckin’ thing to nobody up in here.”

“I’m lookin’ for this girl,” said Quinn just as softly, tapping his finger on the flyer.

“Then look to the one who gave you my name.”

“Say it again?”

“Do I look like I hang on P Street to you?” Eve took the twenty off the table and slipped it into the waistband of her shorts. “White boy, you got played.”

Eve stood out of her chair, letting her eyes drift over Strange, then walked away.

“You done?” said Strange. “Or you want another beer?”

“I’m done,” said Quinn, looking past Strange into the room.

“We could buy the house a round. Sing some drinking songs with all your new friends, like they do in those Irish bars—”

“Let’s go.”

As they moved toward the bar, Quinn’s and the bouncer’s eyes met.

“Check you later, slim,” said the bouncer, and Quinn slowed his step. It was something you said to a girl.

Strange tugged on Quinn’s T-shirt. At the stick, Strange settled the tab while Quinn kept his back at the bar, watching the patrons in the house, many of them now staring at him. Some were grinning. He felt the warmth of blood that had gone to his face. He wanted to fight someone. Maybe he wanted them all.

“We’re gone,” said Strange, handing the receipt to Quinn.

Vapor lights cast a bleached yellow on the lot outside the club. They walked the asphalt to their cars.

“That was good,” said Strange. “Subtle, like.”

Quinn kept looking back to the door of the club.

“Wanna go back in, huh?”

“Drop it.”

“Terry, one thing you got to learn to do is, don’t take all this bullshit too personal.”

“Guess I ought to be more detached, like you.”

“You need to manage some of that anger you got inside you, man.”

“Tomorrow’s Wednesday. We got practice in the evening, right Derek?”

“Six o’clock on the dot,” said Strange.

“I’ll see you then.”

Quinn drove his Chevelle out of the lot while Strange killed some time, fumbling with his car radio and such. When Quinn was out of sight, Strange locked up his car and walked back into Rick’s.

chapter 11

“GIRL,” said Strange, “you gonna bleed me dry.”

“House rules,” said Eve with a shrug. “You want me to sit down with you, you gotta buy me one of these drinks.”

“Tell the truth, though. There’s no liquor in that glass, right?”

“You know it ain’t nothin’ but sugar and juice.”

“Figured it was some kinda hustle,” said Strange.

They were seated at the far end of the bar, away from the sports junkies, near the service station. Eve’s bouncer was nearby, talking to one of the dancers, keeping one eye on the house, one on Eve.

“That your man?” said Strange.

“Yeah. You got to have one, and he’s as good as any I’ve had. Never has raised a hand to me once.”

Eve slid a cigarette from a pack the bartender had placed before her as she took her seat. Strange struck a match and gave her a light.

“Thank you, sugar.”

“Ain’t no thing.”

“Say your name again?”

“Derek Strange.”

She dragged on the smoke, then hit it again. Strange took a ten from his wallet and placed it on the bar between him and Eve. Eve’s head was moving to the Tower of Power coming from the house system as she slipped the ten into her shorts.

“‘Clever Girl,’” said Strange.

“I ain’t all that. Would I be here if I was?”

“I’m sayin’, that’s the name of this song. Lenny Williams up front. Ain’t no question, he was the best vocalist this group had, and they had a few.”

“Little before my time.”

“I know, darling.” Strange leaned in close to Eve. “Let me just go ahead and ask you straight up, you don’t mind. Do you know the girl in the flyer?”

Eve shook her head. “No.”

“I didn’t think you did.”

“I told your boy.”

“But you do know this cat Worldwide.”

“He was my pimp at one time.”

“Was?”

“I stopped trickin’ last year. I can make a better living doing this right here. Plus, I got this thing at Lord and Taylor’s, up in Chevy Chase? Givin’ out perfume samples, like that.”

“Always wondered where they found those pretty girls in places like that.”

“Thank you,” said Eve, lowering her eyes for a moment and then fixing them again on Strange.

“Sounds like you’re doin’ all right.”

“I’m makin’ it.”

“You just walked away from trickin’, huh?”

“Worldwide specializes in those young girls. It wasn’t like I went off to another pimp. That’s something he wouldn’t let happen, understand what I’m sayin’? What it was, he couldn’t use me no more. I got old, Strange. So I clean-breaked and came on over here.”

“You’re like, what, thirty? That ain’t old.”

Eve tapped ash off her smoke. “I’m twenty-nine. That’s old for World.”

“What about the one who gave Quinn your name? You know her?”

“Oh, yeah. Had to be this little white bitch, name of Stella.”

“She told him you steered girls over to Wilson.”

“I ain’t never done that. It’s what she does. Can’t sell her own ass; ain’t nobody even wants that pussy for free. Trick-ass bitch hustled your boy out of his money, bringin’ him my way. I knew straight off, he mentioned P Street, it was her. ’Cause that’s her corner, right? She gets next to those young white-girl runaways and puts them up with World. She was doin’ that shit when I was with him, and she still is, I guess. Thought she could make some quick change, givin’ up my name. That’s her, all the way.”

“Where’s Worldwide base his self?”

“Uh-uh.” Eve took a final drag off her cigarette and crushed it dead in the ashtray. “Look, I talked too much already. And I got to get myself back to work.”

“I need you, I can get up with you here, right?”

“Door’s open, long as you just wanna watch me dance. Far as this goes, though, we are done. You do come back, don’t be bringin’ your Caucasian friend with you, hear?”

“Boy’s got some anger management problems is what it is.”

“Needs to learn some manners, too.” Eve stood and straightened her outfit. “Listen, you do run into World—”

“I don’t know you no way. I never met you, and I don’t even know your name.”

Eve’s eyes softened. She looked younger then, and when she moved in and rested her hand on Strange’s shoulder, it felt good.

“Somethin’ else, too,” she said. “Don’t you even have a dream of fuckin’ with that man. This is not somethin’ you want to do.”

“I hear you, baby.”

Eve kissed him lightly on the cheek. “You smell kinda sweet for a man, y’know it?”

Strange said, “Take care of yourself, all right?”

She moved away and went through one of the doors behind the bar. Strange settled his tab and got his receipt. On his way out he stopped by the bouncer with the braided hair. He stood before him, looked him up and down, and smiled.

“Damn, boy,” said Strange, “you got some size on you, don’t you?”

“I go about two forty,” said the bouncer.

“Looks like most of it’s muscle, too. Can you move?”

“I’m quick for my size.”

“You a D.C. boy, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Played for who?”

“Came out of Ballou in ninety-two.”

“The Knights. No college?”

The bouncer spread his hands. “I ain’t had the grades.”

“Well, all that natural talent you got, you ought to be doin’ somethin’ ’stead of standing in this bar, breathing in all this smoke.”

“I heard that. But this here is what I got.”

“Listen,” said Strange, “thank you for handling that situation the way you did.”

“I don’t reach out for trouble. But I only give out one get-out-of-jail card per customer, see what I’m sayin’? You need to tell your boy, he comes back in here again, I will kick his motherfucking ass.”

Strange put a business card into the bouncer’s left hand, shook his right. “You ever need anything, the name’s Strange.”

Strange walked out, thinking on one of those golden rules his mother used to repeat, that one about the honey always gettin’ the flies. His mother, she was full of those corny old sayings. Him and his brother, when he was alive, used to joke about it with her all the time. She’d been gone awhile now, and more than anything, he missed hearing her voice. The longer he lived the more he realized, damn near everything she’d taught him, seemed like it was right.

QUINN showered at his apartment on Sligo Avenue, then walked up to town, passing the bookstore on Bonifant, stopping to check the lock on the front door before he went on his way. He drank two bottles of Bud at the Quarry House, seated next to a dwarfish regular who read paperback novels, spoke rarely, but was friendly when addressed. Quinn had gotten a taste at Rick’s and knew his evening would not be done without a couple more. These days, he almost always walked into bars by himself. He hadn’t had a girlfriend since things between him and Juana, a law student and waitress up at Rosita’s on Georgia Avenue, had fallen apart over a year ago. But he still frequented the local watering holes. He liked the atmosphere of bars, and he didn’t like to drink alone.

After his beers, Quinn walked up to Selim Avenue, trying but failing to not look in the window of Rosita’s, then crossed the pedestrian bridge spanning Georgia that led to the B&O train station alongside the Metro tracks. At this time of night the gate leading to the tunnel that ran beneath the tracks was locked, so he stayed on the east side. As he often did, he stood there on the platform, admiring the colored lights of the businesses and the pale yellow haloing the street lamps of downtown Silver Spring. A freight train approached, raising dust as it passed, and he closed his eyes to feel the stir of the wind. When the sound of the train faded he opened his eyes and went back in the direction of his place.

He came up here to the tracks nearly every night. The platform reminded him of a western set, and he liked the solitude, and the view. A construction crew had been working on the station, probably converting it into a museum or something, a thing to be looked at but not used, another change in the name of redevelopment and gentrification. Of course, he didn’t know for sure what they were doing to the station, but recent history convinced him that it was something he would not like. In the last year Quinn’s breakfast house, the Tastee Diner, had been moved to a location off Georgia, and he rarely ate there anymore as it was out of his foot range. Also, with its new faux-deco sign out front, it now looked liked the Disney version of a diner. He wondered when the small pleasure of his nightly walk would be taken from him, too.

BACK at his apartment, Quinn checked his messages and returned a call from Strange, who had phoned from Janine’s place. Strange told him what he had learned from Eve.

“Sounds like you ought to go back to that girl Stella,” said Strange.

“I will,” said Quinn. “Thanks.”

Quinn was a little jealous that Strange had been able to get what he could not, but he was cognizant of his own limitations, and grateful that Strange had made the extra effort on his behalf.

After hanging up with Strange, he sat on his couch, rubbing his hands together, looking around at the spartan decor of his apartment, which was no decor at all. He was high from the beers and a little reckless from the high, and he felt as if his night was not done. He dragged his knapsack over to the couch, found Stella’s phone number, and then saw Worldwide Wilson’s number on Jennifer Marshall’s sheet. He reached for his phone and dialed the number Jennifer had scribbled down.

It was a pager number, as he knew it would be. Quinn left his home phone number, waited for the tone that told him the number had been received, and cut the line.

He stared at the phone in his hand, looked around the room, stared at the phone some more, then dialed Stella’s cell. She answered on the third ring.

“Hellooo. Officer Quinn?”

“You psychic or something?”

“Caller ID, duh.”

“I ought to get one of those ‘number unknown’ things.”

“Bet you’re too cheap to pay for the service, Quinn.”

“It always comes back to money for you.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Why’d you do it, Stella?”

“You musta talked to Eve.”

“I had the pleasure.”

“She bugged on you, huh?”

“I guess I ought to ask you another way. Why’d you send me to her? You could’ve put me onto somebody who didn’t know anything at all.”

“That’s true. But I wanted you to come back to me. I wanted to see how bad you wanted Jennifer, baby doll. And I can see that you do. I mean, you didn’t come looking to kick my ass or nothin’ like that. You’re callin’ me like a gentleman and you don’t sound angry. Are you angry at me, Quinn?”

“No,” he said, but it was a lie. “Can you deliver Jennifer?”

“I’d deliver my mother for a price. Shit, I’d give you my mother for free, everything she done to me.”

“What’s the price?”

“Five hundred will get you your girl.”

“How you gonna do that, Stella?”

“I got somethin’ of hers. Somethin’ I know she wants.”

“You stole from her?”

“Oh, my bad.”

“You’re a piece of work.”

“Always good to have a little somethin’ someone wants, information or merchandise, you know what I’m sayin’? Like I told you, it’s rough out here.”

“What about Worldwide?”

Quinn heard the snap of a match and the burn of a cigarette.

“What about him?” said Stella.

“You’re working for him. I don’t think he’d take too kindly to you setting up one of his girls to get taken off the street.”

“Course not. Worldwide is a bad motherfucker, for real. But he ain’t never gonna know, green eyes, ’less you thinkin’ on tellin’ him. You don’t have to worry about me, ’cause I have done this before. Made some large money on it, too. Parents pay more than ex-cops, but I take whatever’s there.”

“Always playing the middle.”

“When I can.”

“I won’t worry about you, Stella. But I do want this girl. So I’ll get you the money, with one condition. That you’ll be right there with me when I make the snatch. Because I don’t trust you, understand? I won’t get burned by you again.”

“Fair enough.”

“When can we set it up?”

“Soon as you want, lover.”

“I need to get my hands on the money and a van. How’s tomorrow night sound?”

“Sounds good.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow, hear?”

Quinn hit “end.” He phoned Sue Tracy and got her on her cell.

“Sue, it’s Terry.” He cleared his throat. “Quinn.”

“Hey, Terry.” There was a rasp to her voice, and he heard a long exhale before she said, “What’s up?”

“Listen, I got a strong line on Jennifer Marshall. But I’m gonna need a half a yard to buy the last piece of the puzzle.”

“I can get it.”

“Good. I think I might be able to make a grab tomorrow night.”

“We can do that.”

“We?”

“Well, one person generally can’t do this right, Terry. I’ll bring the van.”

“Okay, then. Okay.”

“Hold on a second.”

Quinn heard a rustling sound and waited for Tracy to get back on the line.

“Tell me where and when,” she said.

“You all right?”

“I’m in bed, Terry.”

“Oh.”

“I had to find paper and pen. Go ahead.”

“I don’t know yet. What I mean is, I’ll let you know.”

“You been out tonight?”

“Well, yeah.”

“You sound like you been drinking a little.”

“Just a little.”

“I bet you drink alone.”

“I don’t like to,” said Quinn.

“Tell you what. We get this girl tomorrow, I’m gonna buy you a beer. You don’t mind sitting next to a woman when you drink, do you?”

Quinn swallowed. “No.”

“Good work, Quinn.”

Quinn sat there for a while thinking of the velvet sandpaper in Sue Tracy’s voice, the sound of her long exhale, the way his stomach had kind of flipped when she’d said “I’m in bed.” How “Good work, Quinn” had sounded like “Fuck me, Terry” to him. Well, he was just a man, as stupid as any other. He looked down, saw his hand resting on the crotch of his jeans, and had to grin. He was too tired to jerk off, so he went to bed.

STRANGE sat on the edge of the bed, Janine’s strong thighs over his. She moved slowly up and down on his manhood, gyrating on the upstroke, that thing she did that made him feel twenty-one all over again. One of his hands grasped her ass and the other was flat on the sheets, and he pushed off, burying himself all the way inside her.

“You going for my backbone, sugar?”

“A man can try.”

She gave him her hips. “Shit, yeah.”

“C’mon, baby.”

“I am on the way.”

She kissed him deep, her eyes wide and alive. She kept them open when they kissed. He liked that.

Strange licked and sucked at one of her dark nipples, and Janine laughed low. Quiet Storm was coming from the clock radio by the bed, playing Dorothy Moore. Strange had turned it up before undressing her, so that Lionel, in the next room over, could not hear them making love.

He shot off and kept himself in motion. She was almost soundless when she came, just a short gasp. Strange liked that, too.

Later, he stood in his briefs by the bedroom window, looking through the blinds down to the street. Greco had nosed his way through the door and was sleeping on a throw rug, his muzzle resting between his paws.

“Come to bed, Derek.”

He turned around and admired Janine, her form all woman beneath the blanket on the bed.

“I’m just wondering what’s goin’ on out there. All those kids, still walking around.”

“You’re done working for today. Come to bed.”

He slid under the sheets and rested his thigh against hers.

“You better go to sleep,” said Janine. “You know how you get cranky when you don’t get enough.”

“Oh, I got enough.”

“Stop it.”

“Look, it’s just, at the end of the day, all these things go racing through my mind.”

“Like?”

“Thinkin’ on you, you want the truth. How I don’t tell you enough what a good job you do. And what you mean to me.”

Janine ran her fingers through the short wiry hairs on Strange’s chest. “Thank you, Derek.”

“I mean it.”

“Go ahead.”

“What?”

“Usually, when you start going that way with me, it means you need to unload something off your mind. So what is it?”

“Ain’t nothin’ like that,” said Strange.

“Is it Terry?”

“Well, he’s still a little rough around the edges. But he’s all right.”

“Is it the job you’re doing for George Hastings?”

“Uh-uh. I’m nearly done with that.”

“I’m almost done on my end with it, too,” said Janine. “Got one more thing to check up on. You didn’t find anything, did you?”

“No,” said Strange, and reached over to the nightstand and turned off the lamp.

He wasn’t sure why he had lied to her. So Calhoun Tucker was a player, so what? But something about snitching on a guy about that to a woman didn’t sit right with most men. It was a kind of betrayal, in an odd way. One betrayal too many in the day for Strange.

QUINN was disoriented from sleep when the phone rang by his bed. He reached over and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“You called?” The voice was smooth and baritone. There was music playing in the background against the sound of a car’s engine.

“Who is this?”

“Who’s this? You called me. But you, uh, declined to leave your name.”

Quinn got up on one elbow. “I’m looking for a girl.”

“You done called the right number then, slick. How’d you get it, by the way?”

“I’m looking for one girl in particular,” said Quinn. “Girl named Jennifer, I think.”

“You think?”

“It’s Jennifer.”

“Asked you how you got my number.”

“Why is that important?”

“Let’s just say I like to know if my marketing dollars are well spent. You know, like, do I re-up with the Yellow Pages or do I go back heavy on those full-page ads in the Washington Post?”

The man on the other end of the line laughed then. It was a cut-you-in-the-alley kind of laugh, and the sound of it made Quinn’s blood tick. His hand tightened on the receiver. He looked down at some CDs stacked carelessly on the floor. An old Steve Earle was atop the stack.

“A friend of mine, guy named Steve, recommended I call you. Said you could hook me up.”

“Oh, I can hook you up, all right. Your name is?”

“Earle.”

“Okay, Earle. But I’m a little curious; it’s in my nature, if you don’t mind. White boy like you, usually when I get a request from one, it’s for some black pussy, understand what I’m sayin’? And Jennifer, it’s the same girl we both thinkin’ of, she’s white all the way.”

“That’s what I want. She’s young, too, isn’t she?”

“Oh, Jennifer’s young, all right. They call her Schoolgirl, matter of fact. She’ll be good to you, too. But I guess your boy Steve told you that.”

“He did.”

“Sure he did. Satisfied customer’s the very best form of advertising. Steve, he mention specifics?”

“Just that he had a good time. That she’ll do things.”

“Any goddamn thing you want. You can bring your friends and roll some videos, too. Have your own private record of the occasion. Fuck her mouth or her pussy. Ass-fuck her, you got a mind to. Course, you gonna pay for all that.”

“Look, I’m talkin’ about a private party. You deliver her and you name the price. I got money.”

“You’re gonna need it, Earle. ’Cause this is some fresh turnout here. And I can’t be givin’ pussy this new away.”

Quinn kicked off his top sheet, swung his legs over the bed, and sat up. He reached for the pencil and pad he kept on the nightstand. Maybe he could make this happen without Stella. He didn’t need her now that he had gotten through to Wilson.

“How do I hook it up?” said Quinn.

“Well, let’s see. Where’d your boy Steve have his party?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Oh, come on, Earle, you can tell me. See, I need to know, to satisfy that curiosity I was tellin’ you about. Steve must have bragged on it. Man don’t tell another man ass stories without goin’ into the details.”

“It was out on New York Avenue,” said Quinn, feeling the sweat break upon his forehead. “I think it was one of those motels they got out there on the way out of town.”

“You think?”

“It was.”

The man on the other end of the line laughed heartily. It ended with a chuckle, long and low.

“What’s so funny?” said Quinn.

“Just that, you know, you done gone and fucked up right there. You talked too much, see? ’Cause I don’t use those trick pads over on New York Avenue. Never have.”

“What difference does it make? I said I thought it was there—”

“You said it was. And I did like the way you said it, Earle. It was. So sure of yourself. So tough. So much like the rough and tough man you must be. Bet you got your little chest all puffed up, right about now. Got your fists balled up, too? So easy to be tough when you’re speaking on the phone. Isn’t it? Earle.”

His voice was singsong and mocking. Quinn unclenched his jaw and spoke through barely parted lips.

“My name’s Terry Quinn.”

“Oh, I got your phone number now, so it would have been easy to get your name right quick. But thanks for providin’ it for me; I’ll remember it for sure. What’re you, Vice, sumshit like that? You must be new, ’cause I got the patrol boys on my strip taken care of.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Don’t matter to me what you are, anyway. You don’t mean nothin’ more to me than some dog shit on my shoe. Look here, I better be goin’. I’d put your girl on the line, but she’s suckin’ a dick right now, makin’ me some money.”

“Wilson—”

“So long, white boy. Maybe we’ll meet someday.”

“We will,” said Quinn. But the line was already dead as the words came from his mouth.

So now Wilson had his name and number. It would be easy for him to get Quinn’s address. In his mind, Quinn shrugged. When he was a cop, the threat that he’d be tracked down to his place of residence had been made many times. He’d lost count of those threats long ago.

Quinn turned off the nightstand lamp. He stood and went to the bedroom window. His hands were shaking at his sides. It wasn’t fear.

Tomorrow night the girl would be his.

chapter 12

ON Wednesday morning, Garfield Potter had Carlton Little and Charles White drop him at the Union Station parking garage, where he spotted a car he liked, a police-package, white-over-blue ’89 Plymouth Grand Fury with a 318 engine and a four-barrel carb. Potter used a bar to break into the vehicle and a long-handled flat-head to pop out the ignition. He hot-wired the Plymouth and rolled down to the exit. Potter wore a skully and shades so that the booth camera could record very little of his face. As he didn’t have a ticket, he paid the full-penalty parking fee and drove out of the garage.

Potter followed Little and White out to Prince George’s County, pulling up behind them on a gravel shoulder running alongside a football field in Largo. He waited for his boys to wipe the prints out of the interior and off the exterior handles of the beige Caprice, as he had instructed them to do, and when they joined him inside the Fury he turned the car back toward D.C.

Potter and Little both had priors: possession, intent to distribute, and aggravated-assault beefs. Also, there had been one sodomy-rape charge on Potter, dropped when the victim would not testify. Eventually, they knew, some judge would have to give them time. Like many of his peers, Potter often bragged on the fact that violent death or a jail cell awaited him. But he didn’t want to go down on something as mundane as grand theft. A charge like that was a bitch charge, and it bought you no respect inside the walls. So he was always careful to cover his tracks when he got rid of one of his stolen cars.

Old police cars, or those outfitted for police specifications, were the vehicle of choice for many young men in and around D.C. Potter heard you could buy them cheap off lots in Virginia, in places like Manassas and Nokesville, wherever that was. But he didn’t like to cross over into Virginia for any reason, and anyway, lately he hadn’t been buying shit. You could steal a car easily in the District, and if you rotated it out, say, once a week, you’d never get caught. Well, he hadn’t been caught at it yet.

Potter looked at it like this: What you had to do was, you had to target a car owned by a young brother who lived in the city or near the PG County line. Some young brothers got their shit stole, they didn’t even report it to the police, on account of they knew damn near nothing would come of it anyway, and there was also this unwritten thing about not talking with the MPD. Many of them didn’t carry insurance either, so there wasn’t no money reason to report it. Sure, the ones got their cars took kept their ears open and their eyes out for the thief, looking to get some street justice if they could. But so far, Potter, Little, and White had escaped that as well.

Potter floored the gas as he got on the entrance ramp to the Beltway.

“Shit moves,” said Potter.

“Better than that hooptie we done had, D,” said Little.

“Gonna buy us a Lex soon, though. I’m fixin’ to own me a nice whip.”

“When?” said Little.

“Soon.”

Charles White sat in the backseat, letting the wind from the open window hit his face. He was listening to that song “Bounce with Me,” done by that singer they called Lil’ Bow Wow, who dressed like a gangster but wasn’t nothin’ much more than a kid. White was still up there from the hydro him and Carlton had smoked on the way out to Largo, and the song sounded good. He was into music; it was, like, his hobby. Sometimes he made tapes of himself over beats. Maybe someday he’d take some of the money they were making and go into a studio, lay somethin’ down for real. But he figured that was for other people to do, like Bow Wow, had someone showin’ him how to make it and all that. Someone to guide him, like.

In his true mind Charles White knew that he was stuck with what he had right here. The only family he had now, except for his grandmother, was the boys he’d come up with. Garfield and Carlton, before both of them turned cold and all the way hard, like they were now.

White’s hand instinctively dropped to his side, but there was nothing there. He still thought of Trooper all the time. He missed him. He wished Trooper were sitting warm beside him on the backseat.

Potter looked in the rearview at White, breathing through his mouth, looking out the window with the wind beatin’ on him, slumped in the backseat. Dumb-ass motherfucker, probably still stressin’ over that stupid dog. Potter thought of White as a dog, too, in a way, a thing that just kind of followed him and Carlton around.

He was stuck with White. White still acted and thought like a kid sometimes. He hadn’t changed much since the three of them had been tiny, growing up in the Waterfront Gardens, the Section Eight housing units down off M Street by the Southeast / Southwest line. Wasn’t no “waterfront” about it, though sometimes the seagulls did drop in from Buzzards Point and pick at the trash. Some government type actually did have the nerve to name that shit hole a Garden, too. One of those jokes you couldn’t even laugh at. Not that Potter was crying about it or nothin’ like that. If it wasn’t for what he didn’t have, and he never did have one good thing, he wouldn’t have the ambition and drive he had today.

He could have used a father, he supposed, someone to throw a football to or sumshit like that. His mother didn’t even have the strength to lift a ball, eighty-eight pounds of no-ass crackhead like she was, at the end.

He wasn’t gonna cry about that either. Family and all that bullshit, it meant nothing to him, and it didn’t get you anything when you counted the chips up at the end of the day. It was like them books his teachers was always tellin’ him to read before they gave up on his ass, back about the fifth grade. He couldn’t hardly read, and still he had a shoebox full of cash money in the closet at his place, clothes, cars, bitches, everything. So what was the point of books, or some piece of paper, said you went to school?

He had a good business going now. Him and Carlton, he guessed he had to call Charles a partner, too, they had some runners down on Georgia, below Harvard Street, and they sold the shit out of some dime bags of marijuana on that corner there. Marijuana, the good shit that was goin’ around, the stuff grown hydroponic, was the way to go. In D.C., didn’t matter whether you were in possession of a dime bag or ten pounds, it wasn’t nothin’ but a misdemeanor. You did go to court, most of the time it was no-papered, everyone in the life knew that. Black juries didn’t want to send a young black man into the deadly prison system for some innocent charge like holding a little marijuana. Innocent, shit, Potter had to laugh at that. Young brothers killed one another over chronic just as dead as they did over crack and heroin. The people in charge would change the laws, make them tougher again when they figured all this out, but until then, hydro was the game.

So Potter had this business and he liked to keep it small. He didn’t call him and his boys a “crew” or a “mob” or nothin’ like that. You got into turf beefs and eyeball beefs that way; shit just got too complex. Potter was basically into having fun: stealing cars, taking off dumb motherfuckers who could get took, robbing crap games, shit like that. But he never fucked with those he knew to be hooked into crews, or their kin. Never that he knew, anyway. Only fuck with the weak, those who had no strength in numbers, that was his plan. He figured he hadn’t made any big mistakes yet. He was still alive.

“Where we goin’?” said Little.

“Dime the rest of that key out and get it out to our troops,” said Potter. “Maybe tonight we’ll slide by Roosevelt, see if our boy Wilder is hangin’ with his nephew on that football field.”

“You still on that?”

“Told you I wouldn’t forget.”

They went back to their place, a row house they rented month-to-month on Warder Street in Park View, and dimed out the shit. They smoked a couple of Phillies while they worked. White went out for a bag of McDonald’s, and when he returned there were a couple of young local girls up in the crib who’d dropped by. The new Too Short was up loud, and everyone was on the get-high and drinking gin and grapefruit. This pretty young thing, Brianna, was with Little, and they were laughing and then just gone, up in Carlton’s room. Potter took the other one, couldn’t have been more than thirteen, away with him next, kind of pulling on the sleeve of her Tweety Bird shirt. To White she didn’t look like she wanted to go. A little while later White heard the bedsprings from back in Potter’s room against the crying of that girl. White turned up the stereo so he didn’t have to hear it, but he could still hear it deep in his head. So he went outside and sat on the stoop, where he rubbed at his temples and tried to remember if there had ever been a time in his life when he felt right.

POTTER and the rest drove down to Harvard Street and found his main boy, kid named Juwan, sitting on a trash can. Juwan was one of those, like Gary Coleman, had a man’s head on a boy’s body. They took Juwan back to where the fence ran along the McMillan Reservoir. Juwan, sitting next to White in the backseat, passed a large Ziplock bag full of money, which he had taken from his knapsack, up to Little. Little took the money out, separated some for Juwan, and filled the Ziplock with dimed-out bags of marijuana. Juwan slipped the package back into his knapsack.

“Everything all right, little man?” said Potter.

“It’s good, D. One thing, though. You know William, that boy got one leg shorter than the other? The po-lice took him in last night. William be like, thick and shit. I done told him, Don’t be carryin’ when you steerin’, you know what I’m sayin’? But he don’t listen. I know he’ll be out today, but—”

“Say what’s on your mind.”

“Was gonna ask you, I got this cousin, just moved up from Southeast? He was lookin’ to get put on, yo.”

“Put him on then, Jew. What I been tellin’ you, man? Someone don’t work out, go ahead and find someone else. Always gonna be kids out there wanna get in.”

They dropped Juwan back on Harvard and Georgia. Then Potter stopped at a market and bought a few forties of malt. They drove around some more, drinking the malt and getting smoked up. Little found a cassette tape, a Northeast Groovers PA mix that had been left in the glove box by the Plymouth’s owner, and he slipped it in the deck.

“Shits ain’t got no bass,” said White from the backseat.

Potter ignored White and turned up the volume. At a stoplight he stared down some young boy in a rice burner who he thought had been staring at him. The young boy looked away.

“Where we goin’?” said Little.

“Swing on up to Roosevelt,” said Potter.

“I don’t want to be drivin’ around all night lookin’ for some ghost.”

“You got somethin’ better to do?”

“Brianna,” said Little. “I might just meet her again tonight, she can get out her mother’s house. I tossed the shit out of that bitch today, boy.”

“She ain’t look too satisfied to me.”

“Bull shit.”

“That’s too much girl for you, man.”

“Shit, she was singin’, ‘Say my name, say my name’ this afternoon. You saw her smilin’ when she walked out the crib. Not like that girl you was fuckin’, had tears on her face when she left.”

“I gave her the anaconda, she couldn’t help but cry. Anyway, your girl Brianna wasn’t smilin’, she was laughin’.”

“At what?”

“At that itty-bitty thing you got between your legs.”

“Shit, I’m thick as a can of tuna fish down there, man.”

Potter side-glanced Little. “Long as one, too.”

They drove up to Roosevelt High and parked on Iowa. Potter walked down the driveway entrance to the lot, where several cars were parked, and went to the fence bordering the stadium. Kids in football uniforms were doing calisthenics on the field. Their call-and-response chant echoed up to the parking lot.

“How y’all feel?”

“Fired up!”

Potter didn’t see Lorenze Wilder in the group of parents and relatives sitting in the stands. A bunch of men, looked like coaches, stood around on the field. One of them he recognized as the older dude with the gray in his natural, had been bold enough to study him and Little that time before. Potter spit on the ground and walked back to the car. He got behind the wheel of the Plymouth, his face gone hard.

They went back to their place. They got their heads up and drank some more and watched UPN and something on the WB. Little tried to sweet-talk Brianna out again, but her mother got on the telephone line and told him she was in for the night. Potter suggested they go out again, and Little agreed. White didn’t want to, but he got up off the couch. Potter slipped his .357 into his waistband and put a Hilfiger shirt on, tails out, over his sleeveless T. He fitted his skully back on his head. White slipped on a bright orange Nautica pullover, his favorite, and followed Potter and Little out to the street.

They drove around, up and down Georgia. They checked on the troops. Potter drank another forty, and his face got more humorless and he drove from a lower position in the seat. It had been a long day of getting high and doing nothing, and it felt late to White. Anyway, it was full dark. Potter rolled the Plymouth into the Park Morton complex, driving real slow. Some kids were out, sitting like they always did on the entrance wall.

“Lorenze Wilder’s sister live here,” said Potter.

Little said nothing. Like White, he was tired, and right about now would rather have been in front of the television, or in bed. He didn’t like being out with Garfield when he’d been drinkin’, had all that liquid courage inside him. Truth was, Little was kinda drunk, too.

Potter slowed the car. A lanky young man was walking across the narrow street, onto a plot of dirt that passed for a playground. He wore khaki pants, a pressed white T-shirt, and wheat-colored Timberland boots.

“Ask him he knows her,” said Potter.

“Yo,” said Little out the window. They were alongside the young man now. He was still walking, and the Plymouth was keeping pace.

“What?” said the young man, who looked at them briefly, for just the right amount of respect time, but kept his step.

“You know a woman name of Wilder lives here?” said Little. “Got a little boy, kid plays football, sumshit like that. I got this friend owes her money, he asked me to swing by and tell her he’d be payin’ it back to ’er next week.”

The young man looked at them again, scanned the front and backseat, his sight staying on the odd-looking young man in the bright orange pullover for what he feared might be a moment too long, then cut his eyes. “I ain’t know no one around here, no lie. I just moved up in here, like, last week.”

“Aiight then.”

“Aiight,” said the young man, moving off into the playground, walking with his shoulders squared, his head up, turning a corner and disappearing into the night.

“Maybe I ought to talk to that boy my own self,” said Potter, the lids of his eyes heavy, half shut.

“He said he didn’t know, D,” said Little. “Let’s just let this shit rest for tonight.”

Potter kept the Plymouth cruising slow. He went around a kind of long bend that took him to the other side of the housing complex. They could see a group of people back in a stairwell lit pale yellow. Potter braked, steered the Plymouth up on the dirt, and cut the engine.

Potter said, “C’mon.”

They got out of the car and followed him across the dirt to the stairwell entrance. There were three men crouched down there and a pink-eyed woman leaning against a cinder-block wall. In one hand the woman held both a cigarette and a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. Smoke hung in the yellow light.

Older cats, all of ’em, thought Potter. Didn’t know nobody, didn’t have nobody gave a fuck about ’em.

The dice-playing men looked up briefly as Potter approached, Little and White behind him. The oldest of the players, vandyked, wearing a black shirt with thin white stripes and a black Kangol cap, eyed Potter up and down, then rolled dice against the wall. The dice came up sixes. There was some talk about the boxcar roll, and money changed hands. Money was spread out on the concrete.

“Y’all want in,” said the roller, staring down the lane to the wall, shaking the dice in his hand, “you’re gonna have to wait.”