Hell To Pay

“My sympathies on the death of your uncle,” said Strange.

“Yeah,” said Oliver. “That was a real tragedy right there.”

Strange walked out of the house. He nodded to the boy raking leaves and received only a scowl. Phillip Wood and partner were leaning against their Mercedes in the circular drive. Strange passed them without a word, got into his Cadillac, and drove back into D.C.

chapter 24

THE Park Morton complex looked different during the day. There were children using the playground equipment, and mothers, aunts, and grandmothers watching over them. A group of girls was doing double Dutch by the entrance, and the ones sitting on the brick wall nearby were actually smiling. Strange knew that Sundays were quiet time, even in the worst neighborhoods, and the fact that the sun was full in a clear blue sky, its rays highlighting the turning leaves, added to the illusion of peace. Also, most all the men around town, even the bad ones, were indoors watching the Redskins game.

Strange had been listening to it on the radio, the pregame and then the play-by-play, Sonny, Sam, and Frank on WJFK. The Ravens were in the house at FedEx, and the contest had just gotten under way.

Strange got the list Lydell Blue had given him out of his trunk and locked down the Brougham. He walked across the brown grass of the courtyard to the stairwell leading to Sandra Wilder’s apartment. He noticed flyers with the likenesses of the shooters taped on the stairwell wall.

Strange knocked on the door of the Wilder residence. He waited patiently for a while and did not knock again. Then the door opened and Sandra Wilder stood in its frame. She gave Strange warm eyes.

“Sandra.”

“Derek.” She reached out and touched his arm. “Come on in.”

They settled in a kind of living room the size of a den, at the end of a hall broken by an open entrance to a galley-style kitchen. The couch Strange sat on was marked with food stains and its piping was torn away from the fabric. A television sat on a stand past the rectangular table set before the couch; it was on and showing the game at a very low volume. On the wall behind the set were photographs torn from magazines and newspapers, taped crookedly, of Keyshawn Johnson and Randy Moss, along with a close-up of Deion wearing a do-rag. Tellingly, a poster of Darrell Green at the ready was the largest and most prominently displayed. It would be like Joe to honor the tireless workhorse above the flash. Strange could see him sitting on this couch, eating a snack or a microwaved dinner prepared by his mom, watching the game on a Sunday afternoon. He guessed that that was how the stains had gotten on the couch.

Strange drank a glass of instant iced tea, quietly watching the ’Skins move the ball upfield. Sandra sat beside him, leaning forward and making marks on the list Strange had given her, which she had placed on the table. Her lips moved as she read the names.

Though Sandra Wilder was in her mid-twenties, she appeared at first glance to be ten years older. She was heavy in the hips and waist, and her movements were labored. She had big brown eyes, freckles, a full mouth, and straight teeth. She was pretty when she smiled. Strange guessed she had given birth to Joe when she was about sixteen.

Today Sandra wore a pair of jeans with an untucked T-shirt showing a computer-generated photograph of a grinning Joe. The words “We will not forget you” were printed beneath his image. Entrepreneurs offered T-shirts like this at the wakes and funerals of young people citywide, usually in the form of bulk sales to the grieving families. It had become a cottage industry in D.C.

“Here you go,” said Sandra, handing Strange the sheet of paper. “Why are those Social Security numbers next to the names?”

“My friend hooked me up. I’ll be using those numbers in my computer to get addresses, job histories, like that.”

“I circled the ones still come to mind.”

Strange studied the list. Sandra had highlighted three names: Walter Lee, Edward Diggs, and Sequan Hawkins.

“These your brother’s closest friends?”

“The ones I recall. The ones who used to be around our house most when we were coming up.”

“Were they still tight with Lorenze?”

“I have no idea. I didn’t have much contact with my brother these past few years. But you say these names came off the funeral home list, that book you sign when you pay your respects? So I figure, at least they’re still around. Far as where they live or how to get in touch with ’em, I don’t have a clue.”

“I can find them,” said Strange. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

“My mother would know. She had this address book, she used to keep all our friends’ names in it, ’cause me and Lorenze, when we were young? We were, like, always slipping out, and she had to have a way of finding us. ’Specially Lorenze; that boy was buck wild, you couldn’t keep him in the house at all.”

“Can I speak to your mother?”

“She’s dead.”

Strange turned on the couch so that he was facing her. “Where’d y’all come up, Sandra?”

“Manor Park, over there around North Dakota Avenue. South of Coolidge?”

“I know it,” said Strange, something catching his eye over Sandra’s shoulder. On an end table abutting the couch sat a framed photograph of Joe in his uniform, his face shiny with sweat, a football cradled against his chest.

“Anything else?” said Sandra.

“You say you were out of contact with your brother. Why was that, you don’t mind my askin’?”

“Lorenze was no-account. I loved him, but that’s what he was. He wanted some of that bling-bling, but he couldn’t even do that right, for real. He was always calling me, trying to get me to hook him up with Granville. Tellin’ me he wanted Granville to put him on. But when Joe got born, I didn’t want to have anything to do with Granville anymore. I didn’t want Joe to know about him at all. Lorenze wouldn’t leave it alone, so I broke things off with my own blood. You know I took a car from Granville, and I am not proud of that, but I swear to you, that’s all I had to do with that man.”

“You don’t need to apologize for anything.”

“But I do want you to know. I’ve been straight all the way. I been having the same job for years now and I’m never late on my bills . . . . It’s been hard, Derek, but I have been straight.”

“I know you have,” said Strange. “Did Lorenze have enemies you knew of?”

“It’s like I told the police. He didn’t go lookin’ for trouble. But it found him sure enough. It was his way. He just didn’t take anything serious. Couldn’t hold a job, and still, he always felt free to put out his hand. Never did take care of his debts. Never did. Laughed it off most of the time. He thought it was all a joke, but the ones he was laughin’ at, they didn’t see it that way. To them, Lorenze was tryin’ to take them for bad.”

“You think that’s why he was killed?”

“I expect.”

Strange folded the list and slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit coat. He took one of Sandra Wilder’s hands. It felt clammy and limp in his.

“Listen,” said Strange. “You did right by keeping your son away from Oliver, and away from your brother, too. And don’t you ever think that you could have prevented what happened. Because you did right, and you did good. That boy was as special as they come, Sandra. And it’s because of you.”

A smile broke upon her face. The smile was perfect, and her hair was beauty-shop done and in place, and her makeup was perfectly applied. Cosmetically, Sandra Wilder was completely intact. But Strange could see that her eyes were jittery and too bright, and her mouth twitched at the corners as he tried to hold the smile.

Strange put his arms around her and drew her toward him. She fell into his embrace without resistance, Strange catching the foulness of her breath. It was quiet in the room except for the faint voice of the announcer calling the game. After a while he felt Sandra’s shoulders shaking beneath him and her hot tears where she had buried her face in his neck. He held her like that until she was cried out, and he left her there when he knew that there was nothing left.

THE ’Skins / Ravens game was tied up three to three, a pair of field goals the only score, as Strange drove north. A pass interference call against Washington put the Ravens on the Redskins’ one yard line with ten seconds to go in the half. From the radio, Sonny Jurgensen and Sam Huff discussed the most likely call for the next play. It would certainly be a run, Jamal Lewis up the middle. If he was stopped, there would still be time on the clock for a field goal to put the Ravens ahead before the end of the first half.

Strange pulled his Cadillac to the curb and let the motor run. He clockwised the volume dial.

“Come on,” said Strange. “Hold ’em.”

Ravens quarterback Tony Banks did not hand the ball off to Lewis. He attempted a pass into the flat of the end zone to Shannon Sharpe, who was in the company of two burgundy jerseys. It was a bad play to call — if Banks were to throw it at all he should have thrown it away. Redskin linebacker Kevin Mitchell picked off the pass.

Strange’s holler was one of disbelief. The roar of FedEx and the laughter of Sonny and Sam were in the car as Strange pulled down on the tree and continued uptown.

“DEREK, come on in,” said George Hastings. “You see that last play?”

“I been listenin’ to it on the radio,” said Strange.

They walked through the hall of Hastings’s brick tudor in Shepherd Park. Hastings wore a Redskins cap, but he was otherwise cleanly dressed in an expensive sweater and slacks. His house was just as clean.

“You believe that call Billick made?” said Hastings, looking over his shoulder as he led Strange into his den. “You got Jamal Lewis, a tough young back, on the one yard line, and all you got to do is give it to him and let him run it up the gut, and you call a pass? ”

“Tony Banks ain’t exactly one of your top-tier NFL quarterbacks either.”

“Not yet, anyway.”

“Should have pitched it out of the end zone when he saw the coverage. That was his inexperience showing right there.”

Hastings pointed to one of two big loungers in the den. A large-screen Sony was set in a wall unit in the room; the second half was under way. “Sit down, Derek. Can I get you something? I might have a cold beer myself.”

“Nothin’ with alcohol in it for me, not today. A Co-Cola if you got it, George.”

Hastings returned with the drinks and had a seat. Both teams went scoreless in the third.

“Our defensive linemen got fire in their eyes today,” said Strange.

“Yeah, this is one of those classic defensive battles we got goin’ right here,” said Hastings.

“They’ve stopped Stephen Davis, and we got hardly any receivers left except Albert Connell. Fryar’s out.”

“Your boy Westbrook is gone for the season, too. Again.”

“And I thought it was gonna be his year, too,” said Strange sadly. “Next year, maybe.”

At the start of the fourth quarter, Stephen Davis left the field with a pinched nerve in his shoulder. Skip Hicks replaced him for three downs at tailback and then Davis came back in. On second and seven, the teams lined up on the Baltimore thirty-three, with the Ravens showing blitz. Davis took the handoff from Brad Johnson and hit a hole provided by tackle Chris Samuels and fullback Larry Centers. Davis was off with only safety Rod Woodson between him and the goal line. Davis stiff-armed Woodson, dropped him to the turf, and sailed into the end zone.

Strange and Hastings were on their feet with instant high fives.

“Just like Riggo,” said Strange.

“Thought you said they were stoppin’ Davis.”

“You can’t stop that boy for long.”

George looked at his friend. “Good to see you smiling, man.”

“Was I?” said Strange. “Damn. Guess it’s been a while since I have.”

They watched the rest of the game, knowing the contest was over with the Davis touchdown. The ’Skins had broken Baltimore’s back with that one play. When the whistle sounded, Hastings hit the mute button on the remote and sat back in his lounger.

“All right, man,” said Hastings. “Gimme the bad news.”

“Well, I don’t think you can call it bad,” said Strange. “Your future son-in-law is clean.”

“For real?”

“Don’t look so disappointed.”

“What about all that Calhoun Enterprises jive?”

Strange spread his hands. “Can’t fault a man just ’cause he picks a bad name for his business. Far as his work ethic goes, and his reputation, the man is golden. He comes from a solid family who gave him a good example, by all accounts. I got no reason to think he won’t be anything but a good provider for your daughter.”

“What else?”

“Huh?”

“I been knowin’ you too long, Derek, and you know I can read your face. There’s somethin’ else, so why don’t you say it?”

“Well, Calhoun Tucker likes the ladies.”

“Course he does. What, you think some faggot’s gonna be fallin’ in love with my girl?”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, he’s got an eye for ’em.”

“Say what you’re gettin’ at, man.”

Strange looked down at his hands. He had been rubbing them together and he made himself stop.

“I don’t know what I’m getting at exactly, George. I guess . . . I was wondering, not to get into your business, understand, but I was wondering how it was between you and Linda. The whole time you were married, I mean. Did you ever, you know, stumble? Did you ever find yourself steppin’ out on her or anything like that?”

“Never,” said Hastings. “You know me better than that, Derek.”

“But I remember how you were, back when the two of us were out there. When we were single and coming up, I mean. You had a lot of girlfriends, George. Wasn’t like you ever just stuck to one.”

“Until I met Linda.”

“Right. But you and her were together for like, two years before you put the ring on her finger. How was it for you and other women in that time?”

“Well, naturally, you know, I continued to see other girls while I was dating Linda. I never did consider that to be any kind of sin. But once I made a pledge to her and the Lord in the church, though, that was it. I looked hard at plenty of women, but as far as lyin’ down with someone other than my wife, after I was married? It was never an option for me again.”

“So you don’t see nothin’ wrong with cattin’ around up to the wedding day.”

“Young man’s only gonna be young once. You tellin’ me Calhoun Tucker’s a player?”

If he were to bring it up, now would be the time. But he had been leaning one way already, and this conversation with George had made up his mind. Strange shook his head.

“I guess I strayed off the topic some. To tell you the truth, I was askin’ about it because . . . because I been having some problems with Janine. I been stumblin’ like that with regards to her, George. Not just once or twice, understand, but as a matter of habit. It came to a head between us last night.”

“Sounds like you need to make some decisions. But you know, Derek, everybody’s got to make those kinds of choices their own selves.”

“I hear you.”

“Anything else about Tucker?”

“Just this: I talked to some people who know him, here in D.C. They told me, to a one, how much he goes on about Alisha all the time, how deep he loves her. Sounds like he’s sincere to me.”

“Who wouldn’t love that girl?”

“True. But I thought you might like to know. Far as what kind of husband he’s gonna be, only thing I can say is, neither one of us is gonna know that until time tells us. Right?”

“Yeah, you’re right. I guess I been wantin’ to find something wrong with that young man. It’s like you told me back in your office: Maybe the only thing wrong with him is that he’s getting ready to take away my little girl.”

“Maybe. Wouldn’t anybody blame you for feeling that way, though. The thing is, you just got to support her decision now and see what happens. Don’t you agree?”

Hastings reached over and shook Strange’s hand.

“Thank you, Derek.”

“I’ll have a written report for you next week.”

“Send a bill along with it.”

“You know I will.”

Hastings removed his Redskins cap and rubbed the top of his head. “Any progress on finding that boy’s killers?”

“It won’t be long,” said Strange. “One way or another, they’ll be got.”

STRANGE walked out the front door of the Hastings residence. Calhoun Tucker’s Audi was parked behind Strange’s Cadillac. Tucker, all Abercrombie & Fitch, leaned against the car. Alisha Hastings was with him, her eyes alight as she followed his every word, both of them beside the waxed Audi parked beneath the fiery colors of an oak. The tableau was like some advertisement for beauty and youth.

“Come here, Mr. Derek,” said Alisha. “I want you to meet someone.”

Strange crossed the lawn and went to the couple. He kept his eyes on Tucker’s as Alisha introduced them to each other. They shook hands.

“I bet you and my daddy were in there watching the game,” said Alisha. “I can’t understand how you two could stay inside and watch television on a beautiful day like this.”

“It’s always a beautiful day when the Redskins win,” said Strange.

“Y’all catching up on old times in there?” said Tucker.

“Just being a friend to my old buddy George.”

“Oh?”

“Been meaning to get by and congratulate him on the engagement of his lovely daughter here. Congratulations to the both of you as well.”

Tucker’s eyes softened. “Thank you, Mr. Strange.”

“Make it Derek.”

They shook again. Strange tightened his grip on Tucker’s hand.

“Good to meet you, young man.”

“You don’t have to worry,” said Tucker, moving in close to Strange’s face.

“See that I don’t,” said Strange, his voice very low. He released Tucker’s hand.

Strange kissed Alisha, hugged her and held her tightly. He kissed her again and walked toward his car.

“What was that about?” said Alisha. “I couldn’t hear what you two were saying, but it looked intense. You two don’t know each other, do you?”

“No. It was nothing. Just, you know, pissin’-contest stuff between men.”

“Stop it.”

“I’m kiddin’ you. He seems like a good guy. He coming to the wedding?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Looking forward to seeing him again is all.”

Tucker flexed his right hand to alleviate the pain. He watched Strange drive away, orange and red leaves rising from the street in the Caddy’s wake.

STRANGE stopped by the house to pick up Greco and a couple of CDs, then drove down to his place of business. In his office, he slipped The Sons of Katie Elder sound track into his CPU as he settled into his chair. The message light blinked beside his phone.

Lydell Blue had called to tell him that the beige Caprice had been found in an impound lot in Prince George’s County. The Chevy was determined to have been a stolen vehicle, wiped down of prints. Clothing fibers, orange threads of a fleece material, found in the Chevy matched those found in the Plymouth driven by the shooters.

Strange was certain now that the boys he had seen in the Caprice idling in Roosevelt’s parking lot were the killers of Lorenze and Joe Wilder. He had caught a look at the driver and especially the boy with the braids, and their faces loosely matched those of the artist’s renderings posted around town.

He knew this. But he didn’t phone Lydell Blue back to tell him what he knew.

Strange got into Westlaw and fed the names Walter Lee, Edward Diggs, and Sequan Hawkins, along with their Social Security numbers, into the program. It took a couple of hours to find what it would have taken Janine a half hour to find. Despite his rudimentary knowledge of the programs, Strange was still old world, and much better at his job when out on the street. He also tended to seek out distractions when he should have been working nonstop behind his desk. In those two hours he played with Greco, thought of Janine, and ate a PayDay bar she had left for him on his mouse pad. But finally he got the information he needed.

Using PeopleFinder and the reverse directory, he had secured the current addresses and phone numbers of the men. Also the names and addresses of their current neighbors. The Social Security numbers had given him their past and present employment data.

Strange phoned Quinn and got him on the third ring.

“Terry, it’s Derek. You see the game?”

“I saw some of it.”

“Some of it. Your girlfriend over there, man?”

“Yes, Sue’s here.”

“Been there all day, huh? Y’all even get a look at the sunshine today, man?”

“Derek, what’s on your mind?”

“Wanted to make sure you were gonna be ready to go in the morning.”

“Told you I would be.”

“Meet me down at Buchanan at nine, then. We’ll roll out together in my car.”

“Right.”

“And Terry?”

“What?”

“Bring your gun.”

chapter 25

CARLTON Little swallowed the last of his Big Mac and used his sleeve to wipe secret sauce off his face, where it had gathered like glue on the side of his mouth. He had another Mac in the bag on the table in front of him and he wanted to kill it right now. The grease stain on the bottom of the bag, just lookin’ at it made him hungry.

He was hungry all the time. Not hungry for real like he had been when he was a kid, but hungry just the same. Loved to eat anything you could take out of somebody’s hand from a drive-through window. Taco Bell, Popeyes, and the king of it all, Mac-Donald’s. Little knew guys who had trouble with their movements, but not him. All the food he ate, the kind came in damp cartons and grease-stained bags? Damn if he didn’t take three or four shits a day.

He supposed his love for food had somethin’ to do with the fact that he didn’t have any when he was a boy. His aunt, who he stayed with, she sold their food stamps most of the time to pay for her crack habit. She had food in there from time to time, but the men she was hangin’ with, who were pipeheads, too, and always leaving a slug’s trail around the house, ate it or stole it themselves. There was cereal sometimes, but the milk went fast, and he couldn’t fuck with eatin’ no dry cereal. Before he grew some, when he weighed, like, sixty pounds, Carlton used to hide the milk outside his bedroom window, on this ledge that was there, so it wouldn’t get used up. In wintertime the milk froze and in summer it went sour, so you couldn’t do it all the time. But it was a good trick that worked half the year. This teacher taught him how to do that after he collapsed one time at school ’cause he was so weak. Weak from not eating. Not that he was cryin’ about it or nothin’ like that. He had money now, and he wasn’t weak anymore.

Man on the TV said that one third of the kids in D.C. lived below the poverty level, the same way he had. Well, fuck those kids. Nobody ever gave him nothin’, and he made out all right. They’d have to figure a road out their own selves. If they were to ask him, he’d say that there was one thing he knew for sure about this life out here. You acted the punk, you were through. You wanted to make it, you had to be hard.

Little laid himself down on the couch.

Potter sat low in one of those reclining rocking chairs he loved. Potter had bought two of them at Marlo’s, along with the couch Little lay on now, filled out the no-payment-till-whenever paperwork and had them delivered the next day. That was a year ago, and Potter had still not made a payment and never would. No Payments Till Forever, that’s the way the sign read to him. Potter had given the African or whatever he was a different billing address than the delivery address, and the dude hadn’t even noticed. Stupid-ass foreigners they hired out there, workin’ those sucker jobs.

“You gonna eat that?” said Potter, one hand pointed lazily at the paper bag holding the last Mac.

“I was thinkin’ on eatin’ it right now,” said Little.

“I wouldn’t even be feedin’ that shits to a dog.”

“It’s good.”

“You gonna throw it up out in the street, like you did the other day?”

“I ain’t ashamed. Made me sick to see what happened to that kid.”

“Well, he shouldn’t’ve been in that car.”

“Yeah, but those bullets you used done fucked him up for real.”

“Oh, it was just mines now.”

“It was those hollow points out of that three-five-seven you was holdin’, did all that damage.”

“Couldn’t handle lookin at it, huh?”

“Shit was just nasty is all.”

“Yeah, well, you keep eatin’ that MacDonald’s, gonna make you worse than sick. Gonna kill you young.”

“I be dyin’ young anyway.”

“True.”

They had been in the living room all day. Charles White had gotten into his Toyota at lunchtime and brought them back a big carton of Popeyes and biscuits for the Redskins game, and they had gotten high and eaten the chicken, and then they had watched the four o’clock game and told White they were hungry and to go out again. White had returned with a bag of McDonald’s for Little and some Taco Supremes from the Bell for Potter, because Potter didn’t eat McDonald’s food.

Now the eight o’clock game was coming on ESPN, and the sound was off on the television because neither Potter nor Little could stand to hear Joe Theismann, the color man for the Sunday night games, speak. They put on music during the games, but the Wu-Tang Clan CD they had been listening to had ended. For the first time that day, it was quiet in the room.

Potter and Little had been keeping a very low profile since the murders. They sent White out for all their food and beer. He was scared, they could tell it from his face and the way his voice kinda shook these past few days. But they knew him to be weak, knew that he would do as they asked.

Juwan, their main boy down in the open-air market, had been delivering the daily take to their place on Warder. Their dealer in Columbia Heights had agreed to drop off the product, as needed, at the house. They had burned the Plymouth and abandoned it, and dropped the guns off the rail of the 11th Street bridge into the Anacostia River. Far as evidence went, Potter reasoned, their asses were covered good.

Since the shooting, Potter had gone out twice. Once to buy a couple of straps from this boy he knew who arranged straw purchases out of that gun store, where you could pay junkies and their kind to buy weapons real easy, over in Forestville. The other time he went out was to buy a car, a piece of garbage sitting up on that lot on Blair Road in Takoma, across from a gas station and next to a caterer. Place where all the cars had $461 scrawled in soap on the windshields, all the same price, looked like a kid had written it. Potter bought something, he didn’t even bother to look at it close, and paid cash. The salesman tellin’ him how to get plates, get insurance, get it inspected, all that, Potter not even listening because he knew he wouldn’t have the car long enough to worry about it anyway. Insurance, what the fuck was that? Shit.

So they were keeping low. Their pictures, drawings made to look like them, anyhow, were posted all around the neighborhood. Potter figured, who that could connect the pictures to their names was gonna rat them out? Wasn’t anyone that stupid, even if the reward money was printed right there on the drawings, because that person had to know that if they did this, if they snitched on them, they would die. It was a good idea to stay indoors for a while, but Potter wasn’t worried in a serious way, and if Little was worried he didn’t act it. It was Charles White who was the loose end.

“Where Charles at?” said Potter.

“Up in his room,” said Little. “Why?”

“You and me need to talk.”

“Well, talk.”

“Go put some music on the box. I don’t want him to hear us.”

“He can’t hear us. You know that boy’s up in his bed with his headphones on, listening to his beats.”

“I expect.”

Potter fired a Bic up in front of the Phillie in his hand and gave the cigar some draw. He held the draw in and passed the blunt over to Little.

Little hit the hydro and exhaled slowly. He blew a ring of gray smoke into the room. “So talk.”

Carlton Little knew what was about to come from Potter’s mouth. He expected it, and didn’t like it, but he would go along with it, because he knew Potter was right. Though Little fully expected to die on the street or in prison, it didn’t mean he was in any hurry. He wasn’t exactly afraid to die. He had convinced himself that he was not. But he did want to live as long as he could. His friend Charles White was fixin’ to cut his life short, one way or another. Charles had to go.

“We got a problem with Charles,” said Potter. “Boy gets picked up for somethin’, he is gonna roll on us. Or maybe his conscience is gonna send him to the po-lice before that. You know this, right?”

“I do.” Little sat up on the couch and rubbed at his face. “Shame, too. I mean, me and Coon, all of us, D, we go back.”

“I’ll take care of it, Dirty.”

“Wish you would.”

“You know, Charles is like that dog of his,” said Potter. “Good to hang around with, wags his tail when you be walkin’ into a room and shit. But like that dog, he’s a cur. And a cur needs to be put down.”

“When?” said Little.

“I was thinkin’, later tonight, after we watch this game, get our heads up some? We take Charles out for a ride.”

CHARLES White had been lying in bed, listening to a Roc-a-Fella compilation through the headphones of his Aiwa, when the cups on the phones started to hurt him some. His ears got sore when he kept the phones on too long, and he had been having them on his head most of the day. He took the headphones off and moved onto his side, staring out the window at the night out behind the house. Wasn’t nothin’ but dark and an alley back there. He looked at it a little while, then got off the bed and walked out to the bathroom in the hall.

White could hear them playing the first Wu-Tang, the one that mattered, down in the living room. It was that last track the Clan had, “Tearz,” before that spoken thing they did to close the set. This was the bomb, the kind of classic shit he wanted to record his own self when he got the chance. But of course, he knew deep down he would never get the chance.

White figured he better go downstairs and see what Dirty and Garfield was up to. See if they wanted him to run out for some burgers or malt or sumshit like that. But first he needed to get those dirt tracks off his face. He had been crying a little while ago, back in his room. Some of it had been over what they’d done to that kid, but most of it had been just cryin’ for himself.

He bent over the bathroom sink, washed his face, toweled off the water, and checked himself in the mirror. He must have lost weight or something, what with the way he’d been stressin’ since they’d killed that boy. His nose looked bigger than usual, his cheeks on either side of it nothin’ but some flabby skin hanging on to bone. But you couldn’t tell he’d been crying, now that he’d cleaned up. He looked all right.

White went along a hall, hearing their voices below and smelling the smoke of the cheeva they were hittin’ drifting up the stairs. It was strange for things to be so quiet in this house. He heard Dirty say, “So talk,” and then Garfield say, “We got a problem with Charles.”

White’s heart had kicked up and his fingers were shaking some as he went down the stairs halfway. There was a wall there that blocked a view from the living room, and carpet on the steps to muffle the sound of his descent.

He listened to their conversation. He heard his friend Carlton say “When?” and Garfield, quick and cold in his reply, answered, “Later tonight.” He said something else about watching the game and getting high, and then he said, “We take Charles out for a ride.”

You ain’t takin’ me a motherfuckin’ place, thought White as he backed himself slowly up the stairs.

CHARLES locked his bedroom door. They came up and asked why he’d locked himself in, he’d deal with it then.

He got into his Timbies and laced them tight. He found an old Adidas athletic bag, the size of a small duffel, in his closet. He stuffed it with underwear and a few pairs of jeans and some shirts, and one leather jacket, but he left most of the cold-weather stuff on the hangers because he had already decided that he was headed south. He had grabbed his toothbrush and shaving shit from the vanity over the sink on the way to his room, and he dropped it all in. There was still some room in the bag. He put his Aiwa in along with all the CDs, the newer joints, he could fit. He found some older stuff he still listened to, Amerikkka’s Most Wanted and Doggystyle, and jammed those in there, too.

White went to his bedroom mirror, where he had taped a photograph of his mother to the glass. In the original shot, some Jheri-curled sucker, all teeth and sweat, lookin’ like he walked off the Street Songs cover, had his arm around White’s mom. White had scissored the man off the picture so that now you could only see the hustler’s hand. His mother was smiling in the photo, had a low-cut dress on, red, you could see her titties half hangin’ out, but that was all right. At least she looked happy. Not like she looked when they’d cuffed her right at the apartment for robbery, the last of her offenses in a long line of them, and taken her off to that women’s prison in West Virginia. Last time White had seen her, ten years back, before he went to live with his grandmother. Granmoms had been okay to him, but she wasn’t his moms. He had no idea who his father was.

White carefully took the photograph down and slipped it into his wallet, along with eighteen hundred dollars in cash he found where he’d hidden it, under some T-shirts in the bottom of his dresser.

He opened the window by his bed and dropped the Adidas bag into the darkness. He heard it hit the alley and he closed the window tight.

White slipped himself into his bright orange Nautica pullover, swept the keys to his Toyota off his scarred dresser, and walked out of his room. He walked quickly, so he wouldn’t have much time to think on what he was about to do. Wasn’t like he could just drop himself out that bedroom window and ghost. He needed to talk to those two, act like everything was chilly. He needed to do this and be gone.

And now he was going down the stairs. And now he was down the stairs and into the living room, and he was twirling his car keys on his finger, wondering why he was doing that, tipping them off so soon that he was headed out the door.

“Where you off to, Coon?” said Little, lying on the couch. He said it casual, like he was still White’s friend. White could see in Carlton’s eyes that he was higher than a motherfucker, too.

“I’m hungry. You hungry, right?”

“I still got me a Mac.”

“I was gonna roll on up to the Wings n Things, man.” His voice shook some and he closed his eyes, then forced them open quick.

“Bring me some malt back,” said Potter.

“You got money?” said White.

He moved to the lounger where Potter sat.

Be hard, Charles. Give ’em somethin’ bold to remember you by. Let ’em know you all there.

White opened his hand in front of Potter’s face. Potter slapped the hand away. “Man, get that shit out my face! Bring me some Olde English back, hear? Two forties of that shits.”

“And some wings,” said Little.

Potter and Little laughed, and White laughed, too.

“Aiight, then,” said White. He headed for the door.

“Coon,” said Potter, and White turned.

“Yeah?”

“What I tell you about wearin’ that orange shirt out, man? You want people to be noticin’ you? Is that it?”

“Cold out, D. Shit keeps me warm.”

“Damn, boy, you about the thickest motherfucker . . . Look, you ain’t gonna be long, right?”

“Nah, I’ll be back in like, an hour, sumshit like that.”

“’Cause I thought we’d all roll out together for a while, later on.”

White nodded, went out the door, and closed it behind him. He walked down to the corner and when he was out of window-sight he ran around to the alley. He found his Adidas bag there and ran with it back to the street, where he walked to his Toyota parked along the curb. His heart was fluttering like a speed bag as he put his key to the driver’s-side door.

White tossed the Adidas bag in the backseat, got into the front, and turned the ignition. He put the stick into first and heard the tires squealing as he pushed on the gas and let off the clutch. First time this old shit box had ever caught rubber. White didn’t look in the rearview. As he neared Georgia Avenue he began to laugh.

WHITE stopped at a market on Georgia, one of those fake 7-Elevens, places those Ethiopians named Seven-One or Seven-Twelve, for a big cup of coffee to go. A 4-D cop was parked in the lot, but that meant nothing in this neighborhood, ’less you were out here committing some obvious mayhem. Shoot, someone was smoking cheeva in a nearby car, you could smell it in the lot, and the cop was just sitting there behind the wheel, smellin’ it too, most likely, sipping from a large cup. Why would that cop care to stress his self, make an arrest, when the courts would just kick that smoker right back out on the street?

White went into the store. He bought his coffee and a couple of Slim Jims, some potato chips, and a U.S. road map, folded up wrong like someone had been using it without paying, which was in a slot next to the gun magazines they sold in that joint. White went back out to the lot, the map in one hand, the other stuff in a brown paper bag.

There was this boy standing near his Toyota, and when White came out the boy kind of backed away. He was wearing a white T-shirt and khakis, and White had the real feeling he knew this boy or he’d seen him before.

White wasn’t a fighter and he wasn’t brave, but when it looked like someone was fuckin’ with your whip out here, ordinarily you had to say something. You couldn’t let it pass, because then you were weak. Just a comment like, “You got some business lurkin’ around my shit?” or somethin’ like that. But White didn’t need no drama tonight, what with the police right there, and he let it pass.

As he pulled out of the lot and back onto Georgia, he noticed that boy, standing on the corner, staring at him and his car. But White wasn’t gonna worry about it now. He was gone.

WHITE got over to 14th Street and headed south. He took the 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac River and into Virginia, where he followed 395 to 95 South. Soon he was out of anything that looked like the city and seeing signs for places like Lorton, which of course he had heard of, and Dale City, which he had not. Down around Fredericksburg, just an hour into his journey, he saw a Confederate flag sticker on the back window of a pickup truck and knew he was already very far away, maybe a whole world away, from D.C.

The coffee had done its job. He was wired and bright with thoughts of the future. He was sorry that the little boy had been killed, but he was convinced that he couldn’t have stopped it, and he knew for certain that he couldn’t change what had happened now.

This was his plan: He had a cousin in Louisiana, a nephew of his mother’s who had come up and stayed with his grandmother a couple of summers back. That summer, White and this boy, Damien Rollins, had got kind of tight. Damien worked in a big diner down there on the interstate, outside New Orleans, and told White that he would hook Charles up if he ever came down south. He said that the man who owned the diner paid cash, under the table. Charles had the idea that this would allow him to work there without incident, under an assumed name, in case anyone was still lookin’ for him up in D.C.

White had an address on his cousin, and he had held on to it. About halfway down, he’d give him a call and tell him he was on his way. He had money in his pocket, so he’d also tell cuz that he’d be stayin’ with him and help out with half the rent. He’d get that job at the diner and he’d hold it. He wouldn’t get into any kind of bad shit down there and he’d stay away from those who looked wrong.

Maybe he’d make manager someday at that job.

chapter 26

WALTER Lee worked for a big-box electronics retailer up by Westfield Shopping Center, the fancy new name for the mall that everyone in the area still called Wheaton Plaza, a few miles north of the Silver Spring business district. Lee wrote up answering machines, mini–tape recorders, cordless phones, and portable stereos at a computer station after the customers had basically picked the units out themselves. The human resources department gave him the title of sales counselor, but there were few professional salesmen left in the business, and Walter Lee was a clerk.

Strange and Quinn entered the store late in the morning. There was a sea of maroon shirts in the place and few customers at this hour. Most of the employees looked like African Americans, African immigrants, and Indians of some variety, with some Hispanics thrown into the mix to cater to the Spanish-speaking clientele. Strange found himself wondering if the manager of the store was white.

No one approached them or asked if they needed help. In fact, several of the sales counselors had scattered when the two of them had walked through the doors. Strange went up to a tall young African and asked him if he could point out Walter Lee. Strange already knew that Lee was on the schedule; he’d phoned the store on the ride out to Wheaton.

Walter Lee stood by the rack of boom boxes, fiddling with a radio dial, as Strange and Quinn approached. Lee looked up and saw a strong middle-aged man in a black leather jacket, a beeper and a Buck knife and a cell on his belt line, with a younger white dude, also in a leather, had a cocky walk, coming toward him. Lee saw two cops.

“How you doin’ today?” said Strange.

“Good. What can I get for you gentlemen?”

Quinn got too close to Lee, crowding him, like he used to do when he wore the uniform. Strange did the same to Lee on his opposite side and flipped open the leather case he drew from his jacket. He let Lee look at the badge and license and closed the case before he had looked at them too long.

“Investigators, D.C.,” said Strange. “This here’s my partner, Terry Quinn.”

“What y’all want?”

“’Bout a minute of your time,” said Strange. “A few questions about Lorenze Wilder.”

“I already talked to the police.” Lee looked around the sales floor. He was in his early thirties and carried too much weight for his age. He wore a fade haircut that looked fine on Patrick Ewing but on Lee just looked tired. “This ain’t too cool, you know.”

“We won’t be long,” said Strange. “You were at the wake for Lorenze, right?”

“Sure.”

“Y’all were tight?”

“I already told the police—”

“Tell us,” said Strange.

“Tell us again,” said Quinn, his tone softer than his partner’s.

Lee looked over Strange’s shoulder, then breathed out slow. “We hadn’t been tight for, like, ten, fifteen. We ran together in high school, that was about it.”

“Coolidge?”

“Yeah. I came out in eighty-six. Lorenze, I don’t think he finished up.”

“Lorenze have many enemies when you two were hangin’ together back then?”

“Back then? I guess he did. He had this way about him, right? But if you’re askin’ me, Did he have enemies lately, or, Do I know who killed him? The answer is, I don’t know.”

“Y’all didn’t swing in the same circles,” said Strange.

“Like I said: not for a long time.”

“You use drugs, Walter?”

Lee’s eyes, directly on Strange, narrowed, and he lowered his voice. “This ain’t right. You know this ain’t right. Comin’ up in here to a black man’s workplace and tryin’ to sweat him.”

“If you do drugs,” said Strange, plowing ahead, “and if you cop from the same people, then maybe you know who Lorenze owed. ’Cause it could’ve been a drug debt got him doomed.”

“Look. I haven’t been usin’ any kind of drugs for a long time. Back in the eighties, yeah, I had a little problem with powder. Lotta people did. But I found my way out of it, see—”

“Let’s get back to Lorenze.”

“No, you’re gonna let me finish. I found my way out of it. This isn’t the only job I have. I got a night job, too. I been holdin’ two jobs down now for the last ten years, and all the time doin’ it straight. Takin’ care of my little girl, raising her right.”

“All right,” said Strange. “You’re so far away from all that, why’d you go to Lorenze’s wake, then?”

“Because I’m a Christian. I went to say a prayer for my old friend. To pay my respects. Even you can understand that, right?”

“Did Lorenze still hang with some of the old crowd that you know?”

Lee relaxed his shoulders. It seemed he’d given up on reaching Strange’s human side and now he just wanted this done. “Most of them grew up and moved on. A couple of them passed.”

“Sequan Hawkins? Ed Diggs?”

“I haven’t seen Sequan, so I don’t know. Digger Dog? He’s still around.”

“That’s Diggs’s street name?”

Lee nodded. “I saw him at the funeral home. He’s still livin’ over there with his grandmother. He looks older, but the same, you know? He always was Lorenze’s main boy.”

“Thanks for your time,” said Quinn.

“That it?” said Lee, his eyes still locked on Strange.

“That’ll do it,” said Strange. “We need you, I expect we can find you here.”

Strange and Quinn walked toward the entrance to the store. They passed a white guy in a maroon shirt, small, with a belly and patches of hair framing a bald top, trying to calm an angry customer. The manager, thought Strange.

Out in the lot, Quinn glanced over at Strange on the way to the car. “You were kinda rough on him, weren’t you?”

Strange stared straight ahead. “We got no time to be nice.”

They drove out toward Potomac in Strange’s white Caprice. Strange made a cell call to see if Sequan Hawkins was at his job. Then he phoned the office and got Janine. Quinn sipped coffee from a go-cup and listened to their short, businesslike conversation. Strange made another call, left a message on the machine at Lamar Williams’s apartment, and left Lamar the number to his cell.

“What’s going on?” said Quinn.

“Lamar’s been trying to get up with me. Janine said he told her it was important.”

“Well?”

“He’s got his classes right now. I’ll get him later.”

“Any idea what he wants?”

“These boys rolled up on him a while back in Park Morton, lookin’ for Joe’s mother? Pretty sure it’s the same hard cases I saw up at Roosevelt one night at practice. They were huntin’ Lorenze, I’m certain of it now. Bet you they ain’t nothin’ but neighborhood boys, too. Maybe Lamar found out something more.”

“If they’re stupid enough to stay in the neighborhood, it won’t be long until someone turns them in.”

“You’re right. If it doesn’t happen today, it’ll happen tomorrow, if you know what I mean. The police are gonna get those boys soon enough.”

“What if we find them first?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet, Terry. To tell you the truth, right now I’m just goin’ on blind rage.”

Strange kept the needle above eighty on the Beltway. Quinn didn’t comment on the speed. He blew the steam off his coffee and took a long pull from the cup.

“You and Janine got some problems, huh?” said Quinn.

“Guess you heard that in my tone.”

“You two gonna make it?”

“Haven’t figured that one out yet, either,” said Strange. “Anyway, it’s not up to me.”

Strange parked the Caprice in the lot of Montgomery Mall, near an upscale retailer that anchored the shopping center. In contrast to Westfield, the parking lot here was clean, and the multiethnic people walking from their luxury cars and SUVs to the mall might as well have had dollar signs stamped right on their foreheads.

Strange and Quinn went up to the second floor of the department store. The sound of piano met them as they reached the top of the stairs. A man in a tuxedo played the keys of a Steinway set near the escalators adjacent to a menswear section and a large layout of men’s shoes. Middle-aged white men wearing pressed jeans and sweaters strolled the aisles. Strange wondered what they were doing here on a Monday, why they weren’t at work. Living off the interest, he reckoned.

They walked along the display tables of shoes. Several well-dressed salesmen eyed them as they passed.

“You need any kicks?” said Strange.

“I got a wide foot,” said Quinn, “and it’s hard to fit. There’s this salesman, though, at Mean Feets, down in Georgetown? Says he can fit me. Dude named Antoine.”

“Skinny cat, right? Always standin’ outside in the doorway there, hittin’ a cigarette.”

“That’s him.”

“I know him. They call him Spiderman.”

“You know everyone in town?”

“Not yet,” said Strange. “But it’s a long life.”

To the side of the shoe department was a shoe-shine stand, where a kneeling man in suspenders was buffing the cap-toes of a suited white man sitting in a chair above him, up on a kind of elevated platform.

Strange and Quinn waited in an alcove-type area beside the stand. They could hear the white man talking to the shoe-shine man about the Redskins/Ravens game, praising only the black players. They could hear the white man ending his sentences with “man” and they could hear him dropping his g’s, talking in a way that he thought would endear him to the black man kneeling at his feet. Talking in a way he would never talk at work and in a way he would forbid his children from talking at the dinner table at home. Strange looked over at Quinn, and Quinn looked away.

Soon the white man left, and they went out to the stand, where the shoe shiner was straightening the tools of his trade.

“Sequan Hawkins?” said Strange, getting a short nod in return. “I’m Derek Strange, and this is Terry Quinn, my partner. We phoned you a little while ago.”

Hawkins rubbed his hands clean with a rag that smelled of nail polish remover. He was a handsome, well-built man with a light sheen to his close-cropped hair and a careful hint of a mustache.

“Come on around here,” said Hawkins, indicating with his chin the alcove where they had stood.

They went back to the alcove and Strange said, “This is about Lorenze Wilder, like I explained.”

“Let me see some identification, you don’t mind,” said Hawkins.

Strange flipped open his leather case and produced his badge and license. Hawkins’s mouth turned up on the right, a lopsided grin.

“You two are, like, cops.”

“Investigators, D.C.,” said Strange. “We knew the young man who was murdered alongside Lorenze.”

“My sympathies,” said Hawkins, the grin disappearing at the mention of the boy. “I got two of my own.”

“You went to the funeral home for Lorenze’s wake,” said Quinn.

“That’s right.”

“You were friends with him?”

“A long time ago.”

“What made y’all stop being friends?” said Strange.

“Geography,” said Hawkins. “Ambition.”

“Geography?”

“I haven’t lived anywhere near the old neighborhood for the past ten years.”

“Don’t get back there much, huh?”

“Oh, I do. I drive over to the house I grew up in, like, once a month. Park outside of it at night sometimes and look through the windows. They got a new family in there now.”

“Why would you do that?”

“To look at the ghosts.”

Strange didn’t feel the need to comment. He often went by his mother’s house at night, parked on the street, and did the same thing. He didn’t consider Hawkins’s actions to be odd at all.

“You ever run into Lorenze Wilder on those trips?” said Quinn.

“Sure, I saw him now and again. He was still living in his mother’s house; I guess it was paid for with life insurance after her death. He never did get a steady job I knew of. He was one of those . . . I don’t like to speak ill of the dead. But it was plain Lorenze was never gonna make it.”

“How about Ed Diggs?” said Strange.

“I saw him around the way, too. He was living with his grandmother last time I ran into him. Ed was the same way.”

“Any other reason why you might have gone back?”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re looking for someone who might have wanted to hunt down Lorenze,” said Strange. “Maybe for a drug debt or somethin’ like that.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“So, you’d go back to the neighborhood once a month for what, exactly?” said Quinn. “Couldn’t be to just park outside your house.”

“I went back to remember, Mr. . . .”

“Quinn.”

“I’d see some of those guys still in the neighborhood, the ones who were already at that dead end, who weren’t even lookin’ to get through it anymore, and it just served to remind me.”

“Of what?”

“Of why I’m down on my knees here every day. See, I don’t just work here. I own this concession. I got four of these around the Beltway and a couple downtown.”

“You must be doin’ all right,” said Strange.

“Got a house on a couple acres out in Damascus, a wife I love, and a couple of beautiful kids. There’s a Harley in my garage and a Porsche Boxster, too. It’s not the Carrera, but I’m workin’ on that. So yeah, I’ve done all right.”

“You read about the murders,” said Strange, “and you knew Lorenze. Any ideas?”

“I think you’re talkin’ to the wrong man. You want to know if Lorenze died because of a street beef, you need to be talking to Ed. They were still as tight as any two men could be, way I understand it. But Ed’s not the type to talk to the police, or even to someone got a toy badge, tryin’ to look like they’re police.”

“Okay,” said Strange.

“Couldn’t resist,” said Hawkins. “You need to be flashing that license quick, so no one can look at it too close.”

“Normally I do. Get back to Diggs.”

“All I’m saying is, if there’s any information to be got, Ed’s the one to talk to. But you’re gonna have to be creative.” Hawkins looked them both over. “Y’all got a couple of pairs of shoulders on you. Use ’em.”

“You say he still stays with his grandmother?”

“Far as I know.”

Strange shook Hawkins’s hand. “Thanks for your time.”

Crossing the lot to the Caprice, Quinn said, “Just goes to show you, you can’t judge a man by his appearance.”

“You tellin’ me that?”

“Oh, so now you’re gonna tell me you didn’t look at that guy and think, Shoe-shine Boy.”

“Didn’t see the word ‘boy’ flashin’ through my head at any time, if that’s what you mean.”

“You know what I’m sayin’. Man shines shoes for a living and he’s got a Porsche in his garage.”

“It’s not a Carrera, though.”

“He’s workin’ on that,” said Quinn.

Strange removed his keys from his pocket and tossed them to Quinn. “You drive. I need to make some calls.”

“Right.”

Quinn hit the Beltway and headed back toward the city. Strange phoned Lamar, got no answer, and left another message. He found the number for Ed Diggs on his list and phoned the house. Quinn heard him talking to a woman on the other end of the line; he could tell it was an older woman from the patient tone of Strange’s voice.

“Any luck?” said Quinn, as Strange hit “end.”

“His grandmother says he’s on his way out the door. I figure he’s still home, still wearin’ his pajamas, and now she’s gonna tell him to get his shit together and get himself out the house.” Strange looked at the needle on the speedometer. “You can get there quicker, we might still catch him in.”

“I’m already doin’ seventy-five. Wouldn’t want us to get pulled over. You might go showing that toy badge of yours to a real police officer, get us into a world of hurt.”

“Funny. C’mon, Terry, speed it up. Car’s got a three-fifty square block under the hood, and you’re drivin’ it like a Geo and shit.”

“You want me to drive it like a race car, I will.”

“Pin it,” said Strange.

LUCILLE Carter lived on a number street off North Dakota Avenue in Manor Park, in a detached bungalow fronted by a series of small roller-coaster hills that stopped at a stone retaining wall before they reached the sidewalk. There were plenty of cars parked along the curb on this workday. This, along with the condition of the raked lawns and the updated paint on the modest houses, indicated to Strange that the residents were mainly retirees holding on to their properties and sheltering their extended families.

Strange and Quinn went up the concrete steps to the porch of Lucille Carter’s house. Strange knocked on the front door, and it soon opened. Carter, short, bespectacled, narrow in the hips, and not yet completely gray, stood in the frame. She knew who they were. Her eyes were unsmiling and her body language told them that she wasn’t about to let them in. As agreed, Quinn stepped back and let Strange take the lead.

“Derek Strange. This is my partner Terry Quinn.” Strange opened his badge case and closed it just as quickly. “Like I explained to you on the phone, we’re investigating the Lorenze Wilder homicide. We need to speak with your grandson Edward.”

“He already talked to the police.”

“I told you we needed to speak with him again.”

“And I told you, Mr. Strange, that he was on his way out. As I am about to be, shortly.”

“Any idea where we can catch up with him?”

“He went out to his job—”

“He doesn’t have a job, Miss Carter.”

“He went out to his job search. If you had let me finish—”

“All due respect, I don’t have the time or the inclination to let you finish. You told Edward that we were on our way over here, and now he’s gone. So let me make this easy for you and tell you how it’s gonna be. Me and my partner here are gonna be back in an hour with a subpoena. Edward’s not in, we’ll come back the hour after that. Same thing the hour after that. We have to, we’ll be here on the hour around the clock. Now, what do you suppose your good neighbors gonna think of that?”

“This is harassment.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Would you like me to call your supervisors?”

“I can’t stop you.” Strange looked at his watch. “We’ll see you in about sixty minutes, then. Thank you for your time.”

They heard the door close behind them as they were walking down the steps.

“That was nice,” said Quinn. “The Gray Panthers are gonna give you their humanitarian award for that one.”

“You want to find a man in this city, shake down his grandmother,” said Strange. “Black man like Diggs always gonna respect the matriarch who treated him right. Plus, she’s stronger than he is, and the last thing he’s gonna want is to incur her wrath.”

“That cop knowledge?”

Strange shook his head. “My mother always said it. ‘Kick the bush and the quail comes flyin’ out.’”

“So Diggs flies out of the bush. Then what? I mean, the cops have already talked to this guy.”

“They didn’t know how close he was to Lorenze. And they didn’t talk to him the way I’m gonna talk to him.”

“Okay, what now?”

“Let’s get my car out of view so we can regroup.”

Strange pulled the Caprice around the corner and parked it a block south of the Carter residence and out of its sight lines. He phoned Lamar’s apartment and this time he got him on the line. Strange made a writing sign in the air and snapped his fingers. Quinn handed him a pen. Strange wrote down a series of numbers, asked Lamar some questions, nodded as he listened to the answers, and said, “Good work, son,” before ending the call.

“What?” said Quinn.

“Lamar saw one of those boys last night, one of the three who rolled up on him at Park Morton.” Strange was punching numbers into the grid of his cell as he talked. “Said this boy was wearing the same bright shirt he had on when he saw him the first time.”

“Lotta bright shirts out here.”

“His face was hard to forget, had a nose like an anteater.”

“And?”

“Boy had a duffel bag in his backseat and a road map in his hand when Lamar saw him coming out the market, over there near the Black Hole. Looked to Lamar like he was runnin’.”

“What else?”

“Lamar got the license number off this boy’s Toyota, too.” Strange gave him the hold-up sign with his hand as his call connected. “Janine. Derek here. I need you to run a plate for me quick. You get an address on the owner of the car, I’m gonna need a phone number from the reverse directory, too.” Strange gave her the information and nodded as if Janine were in the room. “I’ll be waiting. Right.”

Strange hit “end.” “Janine will get it quick. She sends a Christmas card every year to this guy she’s been knowin’, over at the DMV? One of those little things she does, small gestures of kindness. Gets results.”

“She is good.”

“The best.” Strange pointed his chin up the block. “You want the alley or the front of the house?”

“The alley.”

“Where’s your gun at, case I need it?”

“Right here, under the seat.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Yeah.”

“You got your cell?”

“In my pocket.”

“Keep it live.” Strange kept the pen Quinn had given him and slipped a notepad into his jacket. “The old lady will be going out, I expect. Either he’s in there or she’s gonna find him and tell him to get back to the house and take his medicine. But I don’t trust him to do what she says. If you get sight of him, you call me.”

“What if you see him first?”

“I’ll do the same.”

STRANGE positioned himself a half block east of the Carter home, his 10×50 binos around his neck.

Quinn walked down the alley, found the Carter bungalow, and quickly opened the link gate at the end of the weedy concrete path to the back porch of the house. Then he walked back and stood three houses away on the stones of the alley. A pit bull in a cage barked at him from a neighboring yard. No one came out to see what the barking was about, and no curtains moved from the back windows of the houses.

Quinn paced the alley for an hour. Then his phone chirped. He flipped it open.

“Yeah.”

“The old lady just left. She’s drivin’ off in her Ford right now.”

“Okay,” said Quinn.

Another thirty minutes passed. Then a sad sack of a man in oversize jeans and a T-shirt came out from the back of the Carter house. He stepped down off the peeling wood porch and reached into his jeans for a pack of cigarettes. He shook one out from a hole cut in the bottom of the pack and lit it with a match he tore from a book.

Quinn stepped back behind a tall lilac bush that still had leaves. He phoned Strange and kept his voice low.

“Derek, he’s out in the yard. How do you want to play it?”

“Hard,” said Strange. “Strong-arm him into the house and keep that back door unlocked. How much time you figure before he goes back inside?”

“However long it takes to smoke a cigarette.”

“Right,” said Strange.

Strange ran to the Caprice. He dropped his binoculars to the floor. He found Quinn’s automatic, a black Colt .45 with a checkered grip and a five-inch barrel, underneath the seat. He released the magazine and checked the load: a full seven shots. It had been a long time since Strange had had the weight of a gun in his hand. He felt that he needed one today.

EDWARD Diggs took a last drag of his Kool, then a real last drag that burned his throat, and crushed the butt under his shoe. He picked up the butt and tossed it over the fence, into the yard of a neighbor who was also a smoker. Diggs’s grandmother wouldn’t let him smoke in the house, and she didn’t like to see any evidence of it in her backyard. Mad as she had been this morning, he wasn’t gonna do anything to get her back up more than it already was.

But fuck that shit if she thought he was gonna talk any more to the police. Let them deliver that subpoena. He had told them he didn’t know shit about what had happened to Lorenze and that kid, and he didn’t have to go on repeating it if he didn’t want to. Far as telling them the truth, he had decided from the get-go to keep his mouth shut. Lorenze was his main boy, he loved him like a brother and all that, but all the talking in the world wasn’t gonna bring Lorenze back. Diggs felt that the police wouldn’t waste their time protecting a guy like him. All he wanted now was to live.

He turned and went back up the walkway, cracked and overgrown with clover and weeds. He thought he heard something behind him, but it couldn’t be, it was just his own footsteps and that cur, wouldn’t stop barking across the way.

His right hand was grabbed from behind and then bent at the wrist. A bolt of electric pain shot up to his neck, and the shock of it nearly dropped him to his knees. But the man behind him held him up.

“Let’s go, Ed.” A white man’s voice, the one saying the words pushing him along the walkway to the back porch. “Inside.”

“Fuck is this shit? You’re hurtin’ me!”

“Investigator, D.C. Move it.”

“I’m ’onna get your badge number, man.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“This is assault right here!”

“Not yet,” said Quinn. “Open that door, let’s go.”

Diggs did it and Quinn released him as they stepped inside. They were in a clean kitchen that held a small table and chairs. On the table was a coffee cup and the sports page of the Washington Post. A set of knives sat on the Formica counter, sheathed in a rubber stand. Diggs stood by the table, trying to give Quinn a hard glare. Quinn looked Diggs over carefully, thinking of the knives, deciding that Diggs would never make a play.

“Sit down,” said Quinn, pointing to one of the chairs. Diggs pulled one away from the table and sat in it. He mumbled to himself as he stared at the linoleum floor.

Quinn moved to the rear window and looked through it. Strange was coming through the open gate and moving quickly up the walkway. His shirttails were out over his jeans. Then Strange was opening the door and he was in the kitchen and closing the door behind him. He walked toward Ed Diggs. Diggs stood from his chair.

“Meet Ed Diggs,” said Quinn.

“Ed,” said Strange, and as Strange reached him he threw a deep right into Diggs’s mouth and knocked him back over the chair. Diggs slid on the linoleum and stopped sliding when the back of his head hit the kitchen cabinet beneath the sink. Strange yanked him up by his T-shirt, kept his left hand bunched on the T, and hit him with a short, sharp right to the same spot. Diggs’s neck snapped back and his eyes fluttered. His eyes came back, and he stared up at Strange as blood flowed over his lower lip and dripped onto his shirt. Strange released him and Diggs dropped to the floor. Diggs staggered back up to his feet.

“We tell you to stand?” Quinn righted the chair. “Sit your ass down.”

Strange pulled a chair over so it faced the one Diggs had been sitting on. He and Quinn listened to Diggs mumble and moan, and they waited for him to slouch across the room. Strange had split Diggs’s lip wide, and blood came freely now from the cut.

Diggs sat down dead eyed, his shoulders slouched. Strange reached under his shirt and pulled the .45.

“Nah,” said Diggs in the voice of a boy. “Uh-uh, man, nah, uh-uh.”

“Who killed Lorenze?” said Strange.

“I don’t know who did that.” His diction was sloppy and wet.

“Somebody was huntin’ him. Was it a drug debt?”

“I don’t know.”

Strange racked the receiver on the Colt.

“Why you want to do that, brother? I told you I don’t know.”

Strange got up out of his chair and with his free hand flat-palmed Diggs’s chest. Diggs and the chair toppled back to the floor. Diggs grunted, and Strange crouched over him and forced the barrel of the .45 into his mouth.

“You know,” said Strange. He withdrew the barrel, touched it gently to the corner of Diggs’s right eye, and then pressed it there with force.

“They’ll kill me,” said Diggs.

“Look at me, Ed. I’m gonna kill you right now, I swear to God.”

“Derek,” said Quinn. It wasn’t part of the act. Strange’s eyes had long since veered from the script.

“Look at me, Ed.”

Diggs did look. His lip quivered and he closed his eyes. When he opened them again a tear sprung loose and ran fast down his cheek.

“Lorenze,” said Diggs, “he owed money to this boy for some hydro he copped. I was there when Lorenze bought it. He was gonna pay this boy in his own time . . . . Wasn’t nothin’ but a hunrid dollars. Boy stepped to me at a dogfight back by Ogelthorpe; I could tell he was serious. I mean, that boy had nothin’ in his eyes.”

“What’d this boy look like?”

“Tall and slim, light skinned, had this crazy smile.”

“He had partners, right?”

“The ones he came with to the fight. Boy with cornrows and show muscles. ’Nother kid, one with the dog, boy had this funny-lookin’ nose and shit.”

“The main one, he say his name?”

“Garfield Potter.”

“You know where he stays at?”

“He said he was up on Warder Street, near Roosevelt.”

“What else you know?”

“Nothin’ else.” Diggs blinked hard. “You just doomed me, man. Don’t you care nothin’ about that?”

Strange slipped the Colt back under his shirt as he stood.

“Don’t speak of this,” said Strange. “Tell your grandmother you got jumped out on the street. Tell her you fell down and bounced a few times or anything you want. But don’t tell her it was us came back. It’s over for you, hear? You’ll be fine.”

They left him lying on the kitchen floor and walked out the back door of the house and to the alley.

Strange handed Quinn his gun. Quinn slipped it into his waistband and side-glanced Strange.

“You got some anger management issues you need to work on, Derek. You know it?”

“My anger’s been working pretty good for me today so far.”

“Thought you were gonna use the forty-five for a second back there.”

“Couldn’t have used it if I wanted to. I emptied the magazine before I came to the house.”

“That gun felt too good in your hand, didn’t it?”

“Scared me how good it felt,” said Strange. “Your bullets are in the ashtray, back in the car.”

ON the way to the Caprice, Strange answered his cell. He continued his conversation with Janine as he got under the wheel of the car. Quinn slipped the .45 back under the seat. As Strange listened to his call, writing in his notebook, Quinn’s cell chirped. He answered, got out of the Chevy, and leaned against the rear quarter panel as he took the call.

Strange waited for Quinn to get back inside. He noticed that some of the color had drained from Quinn’s face.

“Janine got me a name and address on that boy Lamar saw,” said Strange. “Charles White. And guess what? His credit record shows his last address is up on Warder Street. I bet you he was the only one of the three qualified to sign for the utilities. She got me the phone number there, too.”

“Guess you got enough to call Lydell,” said Quinn, his eyes showing he was somewhere else. “Time to send in the troops.”

“I’m not ready to do that yet,” said Strange, watching Quinn’s stare go out the window. “Terry, you all right?”

“I just got a call from the MPD. They got a girl down in the ER at Washington Hospital Center, she’s all fucked up. Beaten close to death. It’s an informant of mine, helped me on that snatch I did. She gave my name as the first contact. Girl named Stella.”

“You want to go there, then go. I can drop you at the hospital and pick this up my own self from here.”

“All right,” said Quinn. “Let’s go.”

Quinn phoned Sue Tracy as Strange turned off Georgia Avenue and headed east on Irving Street. Strange entered the complex of hospital buildings five minutes later and stopped the Caprice near the heliport adjacent to the ER entrance. Quinn opened his door and put one foot to the asphalt. He turned and shook Strange’s hand.

“Don’t do anything without me, Derek.”

“I won’t,” said Strange.

Even as he said this, Strange was weighing a plan. It went against most everything he believed in. Still, he couldn’t shake it from his mind.

chapter 27

QUINN went directly past the check-in desk, through the waiting area, and into the treatment facility. A security guard stopped him and walked him over to a plainclothes MPD cop who wore a black mustache. He held a go-cup of coffee in his thin, veined hand.

“You got a minute to talk?” said the cop.

“After I see the girl,” said Quinn. “How is she?”

“According to the people here, she got beat up pretty bad. The man did it used his fists, but he didn’t hold back. He punched right through her. Broke a few ribs, and she’s bleeding inside. They’re trying to stop that, and the doc thinks they will. Also, whoever this prince was, he carved up her face with a knife.”

“She gonna live?”

The cop shrugged. He sipped from a hole torn in the lid of the cup and looked Quinn over. “You know, I recognized your name on the sheet, and then when you walked in, from the pictures they used to run in the papers. You’re the same Terry Quinn used to be on the force, right?” The cop’s eyes said curiosity rather than aggression.

“Yeah. Can I go?”

“Why’d she have you as contact number one?”

“I don’t know why.”

“No fixed address, no mention of parents. And she wants to talk to you?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay. She claims she got blindsided and never saw a thing. You got any idea who did this to her?”

“None.”

“Here’s my card.”

Quinn took it and slipped it into his coat.

“Excuse me,” said Quinn.

Stella was on a gurney behind a portable curtain, at the end of a row of makeshift stalls. Her forehead and cheeks were nearly covered in surgical tape, damp and brownish red in spots. Her thin right arm, lying outside the blanket, was bruised black with large defensive marks and also in several places where a nurse had tried to find a vein for the IV. Tubes ran from somewhere under the sheets and into her nostrils. The fluid in the tubes was dirty, and brown particles ran through it as Stella inhaled, her breath labored and ragged.

Quinn found a hard chair and placed it beside the gurney, where he took a seat and held her hand. A nurse came by and told him that they were preparing to move Stella to the ICU and he couldn’t stay much longer. Ten minutes later, Stella opened her eyes, bloodied in the corners and ringed in black. Her head remained in place as her eyes moved to his, and she squeezed his hand.

“Hey, Stella.”

“Green eyes.”

Her voice was barely audible, and Quinn bent forward and moved his ear close to her mouth. “Say it again?”

“You came.”

“Course I did,” said Quinn. “We’re friends.”

Stella’s lips began to move, but nothing came out. She tried again and said, “Ice.”

A cup of ice chips sat beside Stella’s eyeglasses on a stand next to the gurney. Quinn put the cup to her blistered lips and tilted it so that a few chips slid into her mouth. When he returned the cup to the table he saw a bag at the foot of the gurney containing Stella’s clothing and shoes. A white plastic purse rested atop her possessions.

Quinn stroked her hand. “Wilson do this to you, Stella?”

She nodded, her eyes straining as she looked up at Quinn. Quinn took her glasses off the stand and carefully fitted them on her face.

“Better?”

Stella nodded.

“You tell anyone else that he did this?”

Stella shook her head.

“I don’t want you to tell anyone else, not yet. Do you understand?”

Stella nodded.

“Why did he do this, Stella? Did Jennifer Marshall tell him you’d set up the snatch?”

“She called him,” said Stella. “She’s out again . . . mad at her parents . . . and she called World.”

“All right,” said Quinn. “That’s enough.” The tubes running into her nose were dense now with brown particles, and her hand felt hot beneath his.

“Terry . . .”

“Don’t talk. Sue Tracy, remember her? She’s on her way down. I want you to talk to her when she comes. You need to tell her how to get in touch with your people. Your parents, I mean.”

“Home,” said Stella.

“Sue’s gonna take care of that.”

The nurse returned and told Quinn he had to go. Quinn kissed Stella on her bandaged forehead, told her he’d be back to see her later, and walked out from behind the curtain. The cop was waiting for him by the swinging exit doors.

“She say anything?” said the cop.

“Not a word,” said Quinn, hitting a wall button and going through a space in the opening doors. He yanked his cell off his belt clip and dialed Strange as he walked. He had Strange’s location by the time he left the building and hit fresh air.

Quinn looked ahead. Sue Tracy was coming down the sidewalk toward him, a cigarette in her hand. She hit the smoke and pitched the butt onto the street as they met.

“What happened?” said Tracy.

“Wilson got to her. He worked on her with his hands and a knife.”

“Why?”

“From what I can make out? Jennifer Marshall ran away from home again. She called Wilson and hipped him to Stella.” Quinn looked around, distracted, nervous as a cat. “Listen, I gotta go.”

“Wait a minute.” Tracy grabbed his elbow. “I think you need to take a deep breath here.”

“Go take a look at her yourself, Sue. See how peaceful it makes you feel.”

“All right, it’s rough. We’ve both seen plenty.”

“Stay in neutral if that’s what works for you.”

“You got a history, Terry. Don’t make this an excuse to settle some score just because some lowlife looked at you wrong and called you a girl.”

“Right. Here’s the part where you say, ‘We live in two different worlds. Yours is too violent. I don’t want to live in your world anymore.’ Go ahead and say it, Sue, because I’ve heard it from women before.”

“Bullshit. I’m not giving up, and I’m not looking to walk away. Don’t put me down just because I’m worried about you.”

Quinn pulled his arm free of her grasp. “Like I said, I gotta bounce.”

“Where are you off to?”

“To hook up with Derek. We’re working on something important and I can’t leave him twisting out there.”

“You sure that’s where you’re going?”

“Look: Stella wants to go home. You need to find her parents. She’ll cooperate.”

“I know what to do. You don’t have to tell me, because I’ve been doing this for a long time. I hired you, remember?”

“There’s a plainclothes in the ER; he’ll be looking to talk to you. I didn’t give him anything, understand?”

“You don’t want me to talk to the police.”

“Not yet. You’ll know when the time’s right.”

“Why don’t you want me to talk to them now?”

“Take care of Stella,” said Quinn.

He put his arms around Tracy and kissed her on her lips. He took in the clean smell of her hair. They broke their embrace, and Tracy stepped back and pointed her finger at Quinn.

“Keep your cell on, Terry. I want to know where you are.”

She watched him jog down the sidewalk toward a line of cabs idling near the main entrance of the hospital. She turned and walked into the ER.

Quinn got into the backseat of a purple Ford. The driver was talking on a cell phone and did not turn his head.

“Warder Street in Park View, off Georgia.”

The African looked at Quinn in his rearview but kept talking on his cell. He did not touch the transmission arm coming off the steering column.

Quinn flipped open his badge case, reached over the front seat, and held the case in front of the cabby’s face.

“Haul ass,” said Quinn.

The cabby pulled down on the tree and fed the Ford gas.

“LYDELL, it’s Derek.”

“Derek, where you at?”

“Down near my office. Can you hear me?”

“Sure.”

Strange sat behind the wheel of his Caprice, parked along the curb on Warder Street, facing east. He was a half block down from the row house where Charles White and, he expected, Garfield Potter and the boy with the cornrows lived. Strange’s binoculars hung around his neck.

“Lydell, I wanted to get up with you. I don’t think me and Terry are gonna make it to practice tonight.”

“Why not?”

“We got a big surveillance thing we’re working on. Can’t break it; you know how that goes.”

“That’s a lot of boys for me and Dennis to handle.”

“Call Lionel, and Lamar Williams; those two know the drills and the plays as good as we do. If you don’t have their phone numbers, call Janine.”

“Yeah, okay. But what’s up with this surveillance thing? Thought you’d be out talking to Lorenze Wilder’s associates today.”

“We been doing that, too,” said Strange, looking at the empty row house porch. “But nothin’ yet.”

“Well, we might have something.”

“Yeah?”

“Woman called in, trying to get some of that reward money. Said she was out late one night, a few nights before the killings. Some male friends of hers was in a crap game got robbed by three young men, over there in Park Morton. One of the young men pulled a gun on one of her friends, man named Ray Boyer. Used it like a hammer and broke Boyer’s nose. Woman says the one with the gun matched the description of the artist’s drawing on the posters we put up in the neighborhood. And get this: She says the gun was a short-barreled revolver. You know that we’ve identified one of the murder weapons as a snub-nosed three fifty-seven.”

“Could’ve been a thirty-eight that boy pulled on that crap game. Could’ve been anything.”

“Could’ve been. But this is too much of a coincidence to leave alone.”

“I don’t suppose the gunslinger left his name.”

“Matter of fact, this knucklehead did say his name. But she can’t remember it. Admits she was too intoxicated and up on weed, and scared in the bargain. We’re out looking for Ray Boyer right now. He didn’t show up to his job today, so we’re visiting the bars he likes to go to. Hoping that he’ll remember this boy’s name. Man’s a Vietnam veteran, so I’m thinking he’ll be able to identify the caliber of the gun as well.”

“Sounds promising.”

“Just a feeling, Derek, but it looks to me like we’re gonna make an arrest on this today.”

“Keep me posted on it, you don’t mind. You got my cell number, right?”

“I got it.”

“All right, then. Thanks, Lydell.”

Strange slipped his cell into its holster on his side. In his rearview, he saw Quinn walking up Warder, two cups of coffee in his hands.

Strange reached over and opened the passenger door. Quinn dropped onto the seat and handed Strange one of the cups.

“Thank you, buddy,” said Strange.

“I know you like to sip water on a surveillance.”

“Coffee makes me pee.”

“But you’re gonna need the caffeine to make up for all the food we haven’t eaten today.”

“I forgot all about it. Not like me to forget being hungry.”

Quinn chin-nodded up the street. “Which one is it?”

“Third one down from the corner there. Only one has a porch got nothin’ on it. There, see?”

“They show themselves yet?”

“No. But I expect, they got any brains at all, they’re staying inside.”

“What about the one Lamar saw?”

“Charles White. His Toyota’s not out here. Maybe Lamar’s right about that boy leaving town.” Strange sipped his coffee. “How’s that girl, man?”

“Bad,” said Quinn.

Quinn described what he had seen, and how he had kept what he knew from the police. Strange told Quinn that he had spoken to Lydell Blue, and that he had kept everything from his friend as well. He told Quinn that the police seemed very close to finding the killers. He told Quinn what he had in mind.

“So you’re just giving up on those boys,” said Quinn. “No possible hope, ever, is that what you’re sayin’?”

“For them? That’s right.”

“You can call the MPD in now if you want to. End it right here.”

“You think that would end it?”

“There’s no death penalty in the District, if that’s what you mean. But they’d do long time. They’d get twenty-five, thirty years. Maybe on a good day they’d get life.”

“And what would that do? Give those boys a bed and three squares a day, when Joe Wilder’s lying cold in the ground? Joe’s gonna be dead forever, man—”

“Derek, I know.”

“Then you’re gonna read in the paper how the police solved the murder. The big lie. Can’t no murder ever be solved. Not unless the victim gonna get out of his grave and walk, breathe in the air. Hug his mother and play ball and grow up to be a man and lie down with a woman . . . live a life, Terry, the way God intended him to. So how you gonna solve it so Joe can do that?” Strange shook his head. “I’m not lookin’ to solve this one. I’m looking to resolve it.”

“You telling me, Derek? Or are you trying to convince yourself?”

“A little bit of both, I guess.”

“You do this,” said Quinn, “you lose everything. You believe in God, Derek, I know you do. How you gonna reconcile this with your faith?”

“Haven’t figured that one out yet. But I will.”

Quinn nodded slowly. “Well, you’re on your own.”

“You don’t want any part of it, huh?”

“It’s your decision,” said Quinn. “Anyway, I’ve got something I’ve got to do tonight myself.”

Strange looked Quinn over carefully. “You’re goin’ after that pimp.”

“I have to.”

“It’s not just what he did to the girl, is it? That pimp tried to punk you out.”

“Like you said: It’s a little bit of both.”

“Sure it is.” Strange smiled sadly. “Shit’s older than time, man. Garfield Potter killed Joe Wilder ’cause he thought Joe’s uncle disrespected him on a hundred-dollar debt. Now I’m gonna do what I think I have to, my idea of making it right. And all of it started ’cause this boy Potter thought he got took for bad.”

Quinn finished his coffee and dropped the cup on the floor. “I gotta go.”

“Go ahead, then. But don’t forget your gun. It’s under the seat there.”

“I won’t need it.”

“Neither will I.”

“I better leave it. Can’t be carrying it around town now, can I?”

“Plus, you wouldn’t feel right, would you, to have any kind of drop on that pimp?”

“That’s not it.”

“Okay. You need a ride?”

“I’ll catch a Metrobus up Georgia. I can get off at Buchanan and pick up my car.”

“You gonna hang out at the bus stop, in this neighborhood? At night?”

“I’ll be all right.”

Strange reached over and shook Quinn’s hand. “I’m gonna pray that you will be.”

“Keep your cell on,” said Quinn, “and I’ll do the same with mine. Let’s talk later on, all right?”

Strange nodded. “See you on the other side.”

Quinn got out of the car and shut the door. Strange eyed him in the rearview, walking down Warder in that cocky way of his, hands in his leather, shoulders squared, going by groups of young men moving about on the sidewalks and gathered on the corners.

Quinn went under a street lamp and passed through its light. Then he was indistinguishable from the others, just another shadow moving through the darkness that had fallen on the streets.

chapter 28

STRANGE made a call on his cell. He spoke to the man on the other end of the line for a long while. When their conversation was done, Strange said, “See you then.” He hit “end,” punched Janine’s number into the grid, pressed “talk,” and waited to connect. He got Janine on the third ring.

“Baker residence.”

“Derek here.”

“Where are you?”

“Workin’ this Joe Wilder thing. Sittin’ in my car.”

“Where?”

“Out here on the street.”

“You’re not drinking coffee, are you?”

“I did.”

“You know how it runs through you.”

Strange found himself smiling at the sound of her voice. “Just wanted to call and make sure Lionel got to practice.”

“Lydell came by and got him. Told me to tell you, if we spoke, that they found this guy, Ray something, and picked him up.”

“Ray Boyer. He say if Boyer gave him anything?”

“Not yet. Lydell said that Boyer wanted to lawyer up first. Something to do with making sure the paperwork’s right so he gets the reward money.”

Strange knew now that he didn’t have much time.

“Why don’t you knock off for the day?” said Janine. “Sounds like the police have this in hand.”

“I think I’ll stay out some, see what happens.”

“Must be getting chilly in that car. And I know you’re not lettin’ the heat run. You, who’s always telling Ron Lattimer that a running car kills a surveillance, what with the exhaust smoke coming out the pipes—”

“You know me too well.”

“That I do.”

“You asking me to come over and warm myself up?”

“Are you ready to do some serious talking?”

“Not yet,” said Strange. “Soon. But I didn’t just call about Lionel and practice.”

“Well?”

“Wanted to ask you something. My mother used to tell me, You can’t trade a bad life for a good. Do you think that’s right, Janine?”

“Do I think it’s right? I don’t know . . . . Where are you, Derek? You don’t sound right.”

“Never mind where I’m at.” Strange shifted his weight on the bench seat. “I love you, Janine.”

“Us lovin’ each other is not the issue, Derek.”

“Good bye, baby.”

Strange cut the call. He stared up the street at the row house. If he was going to do this, then he had to do it now. He found his notepad beside him, and on the top sheet, the phone number of the house. He punched the numbers into his cell. As he did, he went over in his head what he had planned. It was all risk, a long play. He couldn’t waver or stumble now.

The phone rang on the other end. A silhouette moved behind the curtains of the row house window.

“Yeah.”

“Garfield Potter?”

“That’s right.”

“Lorenze Wilder. Joe Wilder. Those names mean anything to you?”

“Who?”

“Lorenze Wilder. Joe Wilder.”

“How’d you get my number?”

“Not too hard, once you find out where a person lives. I been followin’ you, Garfield.”

“Man, who the fuck is this?”

“Derek Strange.”

“That supposed to mean somethin’ to me?”

“If you saw me, you’d remember. I was coachin’ the football team that little boy played on. The boy you killed.”

“I ain’t kill no boy.”

“I’m the one you and your partners were crackin’ on, callin’ me Fred Sanford and shit while I was walking to my car. Y’all were smokin’ herb in a beige Caprice. You and a boy with cornrows, and another boy, had a long nose. Remember me now? ’Cause I sure do remember you.”

“So?”

Strange heard a crack in Potter’s voice.

“I followed Lorenze and the boy the night you killed them. I was responsible for that boy, and I followed. Only, you weren’t riding in a beige Caprice that night. It was a white Plymouth with a police package. Isn’t that right, Garfield?”

“White Plymouth? That shit was on the news, any motherfucker own a television set gonna know that. You got somethin’ serious you want to say, then say it, old-time.”

“Maybe you want to say something, Garfield. You kill a boy—”

“Told you I ain’t killed no kid.”

“You kill a boy, Garfield, and you got to have somethin’ to say.”

Save yourself. If you want to live, young man, then now’s the time.

“What, some young nigger dies out here, I’m supposed to cry? I be dyin’ young, too, most likely; ain’t nobody gonna shed no tears for me.”

Strange spoke softly as he closed his eyes. “I want to get paid.”

“What? I just told you—”

“I’m tellin’ you, I was a witness to the murders. I saw the event with my own eyes.”

Strange listened to the hiss of dead air. Finally, Potter spoke. “You so sure of what you saw, why ain’t you gone to the police? Get your reward money and slither on back into that hole you came out of?”

“Because I can get more from you.”

“Why you think that?”

“Drug dealer like you, all that cash you got? Told you, I been followin’ you, Potter.”

“How much more?”

“Double the ten they’re offering. Make it twenty.” Strange squinted. “Since you been insulting my intelligence, might as well go ahead and make it twenty-five.”

“Ain’t even no murder gun no more. And I know you ain’t gonna try and play me the fool and claim you got photographs or sumshit like that.”

“Not photographs. A videotape. I own an eight-millimeter camera with a three-sixty lens. I was parked a whole block back from that ice-cream shop on Rhode Island, but with that zoom the tape came out clear as day.”

“Tape can be doctored. Bullshit like that gets thrown out of court every day. Truth is, you can’t prove a thing.”

“I can try,” said Strange.

More silence. “Aiight, then. Maybe we should hook up and talk.”

“I don’t want to talk about nothin’. Just bring the money. I’ll give you the tape and we will be done.”

“Where?”

“I got a house I keep as a rental property; it’s unoccupied right now. Figure you’re not stupid enough to try somethin’ in a residential neighborhood. I got some business I got to take care of first, so it’s gonna take me about an hour, hour and a half to get out there.”

“Where is it?”

Strange gave Potter the directions. He repeated them slowly so that Potter could write them down.

“You still drivin’ that black Cadillac that was parked outside Roosevelt?”

“You do remember me, then.”

“You still drivin’ it?”

“Yeah.”

“I see any kind of police-lookin’ vehicles outside that house, I am gone. I don’t want to see nothin’ but that Caddy, hear?”

“Bring the money, and come with your two partners. I want to keep my eye on all of you at once.”

“Ain’t but two of us now,” said Potter.

“Hour and a half,” said Strange. “I’ll see you then.”

Strange ended the call, ignitioned the Chevy, and put it in gear. He drove quickly up to Buchanan, where he washed his face, changed his shirt, and fed Greco.

Back on the street, Strange walked toward his Brougham. Quinn had parked his car behind the Cadillac earlier that morning. The Chevelle was gone.

THE guns Garfield Potter had bought were a six-shot .38 Special and a .380 Walther, the PPK double action with the seven-shot capacity. The revolver, a blue Armscor with a rubber grip, was for Potter. He stayed away from automatics, fearing they would jam.

Potter checked the load on the .38. He jerked his wrist and snapped the cylinder shut. He had been practicing this action in the mirror just this afternoon.

“You ready, Dirty?”

“Uh-huh,” said Little.

He was sitting on the couch, thinkin’ on Brianna, how if she was here now how good it’d be to bust it out. He was flyin’ like the eagle behind some hydro he’d just smoked, and his eyelids were heavy. He was happy. Hungry, too. He didn’t really want to go out, but Garfield did. So there it was.

Little looked down at the automatic he held loosely in his hand. The grip was checkered plastic and had the Walther logo on it, the word written inside a kind of flag, like, looked like it was blowin’ in a breeze. The safety was grooved, and there was this thing on the side, like a little sign, showed you when you had put one in the chamber, in case you forgot. Walther, they made a pretty gun.

“Dirty? You with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on, then,” said Potter, fitting his skully onto his head. He picked up two pairs of thin leather gloves off the table, one pair for him and one for Little. He knew Carlton would not think to bring a pair himself. “Let’s get this done.”

Little got up off the couch and looked in a mirror they had over a table by the stairs. His cornrows were lookin’ raggedy and fucked. He wondered if maybe he ought to do those twisties in his hair, the short tips, like he’d seen the fellas around do. Little realized he had been staring at himself for a while and he chuckled. It sounded like a snort.

“Let’s go, Dirty.”

“Yeah, aiight.”

Little got into his leather and holstered the Walther under his shirt. Potter put his leather on and dropped the .38 in its side pocket. He looked at Little and smiled.

“Damn, boy, you just smoke too much of that shit, don’t you?”

“It’s good to me, D. Wish you had a player in that hooptie you bought, though. We could listen to some beats on the way out the county.”

“We’ll let Flexx roll on ninety-five point five. Anyway, I be havin’ a Lex next time, with the Bose system in it, too.”

“You been talkin’ about that nice whip for, like, forever, man. When you gonna get it?”

“Soon.”

Little and Potter laughed.

“Let’s go,” said Potter. “We need to take care of this tonight.”

“Maybe we’ll peep Charles while we’re out.”

“Coon’s just hidin’ somewhere, you know this.” Potter pulled his car keys from the pocket of his jeans. “We do find him, we gonna down him, too.”

Little head-motioned to the TV set, a UPN show playing with the volume up. “Should I turn it off?”

“Nah” said Potter. “We ain’t gonna be gone all that long.”

They walked from the row house, the laugh track from the sitcom fading as they shut the door behind them.

QUINN did push-ups in his apartment while “Jackson Cage” played loud from his speakers. He did five sets of fifty and stopped when he had broken a sweat and felt the burn in his pecs. When he came out of the shower he dropped a Steve Earle into his player and listened to “The Unrepentant” as he dressed. His blood was up sufficiently now. He could feel his sweat again, cool beneath his flannel shirt.

Quinn slipped his cell into his jeans, put on his leather, and dropped a pair of cuffs into the side pocket. He locked the apartment down and walked out into the night air. A kid on the sidewalk nodded in his direction and Quinn said, “Hey,” and kept walking without a pause in his step.

He got under the wheel of the Chevelle and fitted his key to the ignition. Quinn cooked it and headed downtown.

chapter 29

THE man at the used-car lot on Blair Road had told Garfield Potter that there might be some white smoke at first, coming out the exhaust pipes of the ’88 Ford Tempo he was about to sell him, but not to worry.

“It just needs a good highway run,” said the man, some kind of Arab, or a Paki, maybe; Potter couldn’t tell one from the other. “Blow the cobwebs out, and it’s going be just like new.”

Potter knew the man was lying, but the price was right, and anyway, he was lookin’ for something wouldn’t attract much attention. An ’88 Tempo? That was just about as no-attention-gettin’ a motherfucker as you could get.

Looking in the rearview, going east on New York Avenue, he could see the white smoke trailing out behind the Ford. Carlton Little had made mention of it, as he always reminded Potter that what they were rolling in was a hoop, but he hadn’t said much after that.

Little had turned the radio up loud. Flexx had a set going on PGC, the same list they played over and over every night, their most-requested jams. It had gone from Mystikal to R. Kelly to Erykah Badu since they’d left the house. Little had been kind of bobbing his head up and down, the same way no matter the beats, all the way. Potter didn’t bother talkin’ to him when he was chronicked out all the way, like he was now.

As he drove down the road, Potter saw a woman outside one of those welfare motels they had on New York. Woman had a boy by the hand and a cigarette hanging out her mouth, and she was leading the kid across the lot. Potter could see the boy’s shirt, had one of those Pokémon characters on it, sumshit like that.

Potter had had a shirt with E.T. on the front of it when he was a kid. He was too young to have seen the movie in a theater, but his mother had bought the video for him from the Safeway on Alabama Avenue, and he had just about wore that tape out. He really loved that part where the boy kind of flew up in the sky on his bicycle against that big old moon. For a long time Potter had thought that if he had a special bike like that boy did, he could fly away, too. Until this man who was always hangin’ around the apartment laughed at him one night when he talked about it, called him a dumb-ass little kid.

“You ain’t flyin’ no goddamn where,” said the man, Potter still remembering his words. “You a project boy, and a project boy is all you will be.”

His mother should’ve said something to that man. Told him to shut his mouth, that her boy could do anything he wanted to do. That he could fly against the moon, even, if he had a mind to. But she hadn’t said a thing. Maybe she knew the man was right.

Potter got the Tempo on the Beltway and forced the car up to sixty-five. The new Destiny’s Child was on the radio. Little was bobbing his head, kind of staring out through the windshield, his mouth open, his eyes set.

Potter’s mother, she had this smell about her, sweet, like strawberries, somethin’ like that. It was these oils she used to wear. He remembered when she used to hold his hand like that woman was holdin’ that kid’s hand back in that lot. He could close his eyes and recall the way it felt. She had calluses on her palms from work, but her fingers were cushioned, like, sorta like that quilt blanket she’d cover him with at night. Her hand was always warm, like bein’ under that blanket was warm, too. And sometimes when he couldn’t sleep she’d sit by his bed, smoke a cigarette, and talk to him till he got drowsy. Once in a while, even now, he’d smell cigarette smoke somewhere, maybe it was the same brand she’d smoked, he didn’t know, but it would remind him of her, sitting by his bed. When he was a kid and she was there for him, before she fell in love with that pipe. Forgetting she had a kid still needed her love, too.

But fuck it, you know. He wasn’t no motherfuckin’ kid no more.

“Dirty,” said Potter.

“Huh?”

“Read them directions to me, man, tell me where we at.”

Little squinted as he picked up the paper in his lap and tried to read Potter’s handwriting, nearly illegible, in the dark of the car.

“Take the next exit,” he said. “Take the one goes east.”

They took the exit and the road off of it, brightly lit at first and then dark where the county had ended the lamps. They went along woods and athletic complexes and communities with gates.

“You ever think of your moms, Dirty?”

“My mother?” said Little. “I don’t know. I think of my aunt some, ’cause she owes me money.” He smiled as he heard the first few notes of a song coming from the radio. “This is that new Toni Braxton joint right here, ‘Just be a Man’? I’d be a man to her, she let me.”

Potter didn’t know why he bothered talking to Carlton. But he figured he’d keep hangin’ with him anyhow. He didn’t have Dirty, he didn’t have no one at all.

“Where we at?” said Potter.

Little looked at the notepaper. “Turn ought to be comin’ up, past some church on the right-hand side.” Little pointed through the windshield. “There go the church, right up there.”

A half mile past the church, Potter made a turn into an ungated, unmarked community of large houses with plenty of space in between them. Many of the houses were dark, but that didn’t mean anything. It was a Monday night, and it had gotten late.

“Right turn up there,” said Little. “Then a left.”

Potter made the first turn. Some light from a corner lamppost, made to look like one of those antique jobs, bled into the car and cast yellow on his face. Then his face was greenish from the light drifting off the dash.

“You know what to do,” said Potter, “we get in there.”

Potter made the second turn.

Little pushed out his hips, withdrew his Walther from where he had fitted it, and racked the slide.

“Kill Old-time,” he said, refitting the gun under his shirt.

“Once we get the video,” said Potter, “we’ll down him quick. Put a couple in his head and get out.”

Little put on his gloves. He held the wheel steady as Potter did the same. They were on a cul-de-sac now that had only three houses set on oversize lots. The first house was dark inside, with only a lamp on over the front door. They passed the second house, completely dark, with two black Mercedes sedans parked in its circular driveway.

“There’s the Caddy,” said Little, chinning toward the black Brougham parked in the circular drive in front of the last house on the street.

Potter parked the Ford along the curb and killed its engine.

They walked over grass and asphalt, then grass again, as they neared the steps of the brick colonial. The first-floor interior of the house was fully lit. An attached garage with a row of small rectangular windows across the top of its door was lit, too.

Potter and Little stood beneath a portico marking the center of the house. At Potter’s gesture, Little rang the doorbell. Through leaded glass, Potter could see the refracted image of a man wearing black coming down a hall. The door opened. The football coach, the one who called himself Strange, stood in the frame.

“Come on in,” said Strange.

They stepped into a large foyer. Strange closed the door and stood before them.

Potter licked his lips. “Somethin’ you want to say to me?”

“Just wanted to have a look at you.”

“You had it. Let’s get on about our business.”

“You got the money?”

“In my jacket, chief.”

“Let me see it.”

“When I see the tape.”

Strange breathed out slow. “Okay, then. Let’s go.”

“Hold up. Want to make sure you’re not strapped.”

Strange spread his black leather jacket and held it open. Little stepped forward and frisked him like he’d seen it done on TV. He nodded to his partner, letting him know that Strange was unarmed.

“Follow me back,” said Strange. “I’ve got a studio in the garage. The tape is back there.”

They walked down one of the halls framing the center staircase, leading to a kitchen and then a living area housing an entertainment center and big cushiony furniture.

“Thought you said this house was unoccupied,” said Potter.

“I rent it furnished,” said Strange over his shoulder.

And it’s all high money, too, thought Potter. And then he thought, Somethin’ about this setup ain’t right.

“What you do to get this?” said Potter, elbowing Little, who was clumsily bumping along by his side, away.

“I own a detective agency,” said Strange. “Ninth and Upshur.”

“Yeah,” said Potter, “but what’s your game? I mean, you can’t be havin’ all this with a square’s job.”

“I find people,” said Strange.

They passed a door that was ajar and kept going, Strange stepping down into a kind of laundry room, then heading for another door and saying, “It’s right in here.”

“You can’t be all that good at findin’ people,” said Potter, “to have all this.”

“I found you,” said Strange, and he opened the door.

Beyond the door was just darkness. Potter stared at the darkness, remembering the garage door and its little windows, remembering the light behind the windows as they’d walked toward the house.

“Dirty,” said Potter, and as he reached into his leather for his .38 he heard steps behind him and then felt the press of a gun’s muzzle against the soft spot under his ear.

Little was pushed up against a wall, his face smashed into it by a man holding a gun to the back of his head. The man found Little’s gun and took it.

Potter didn’t move. He felt a hand in his jacket pocket and then the loss of weight there as his revolver was slid out.

“Inside,” said the voice behind him, and he was shoved forward.

Strange flicked on a light switch and moved aside as the four of them stepped down into the garage.

Potter saw a big man in a jogging suit with golden-colored eyes, standing with his hands folded in front of him. A young man in a dress suit stood beside him, an automatic in his hand. On the other side of the big man was a boy, no older than twelve, wearing an oversize shirt, tails out. Other than the people inside of it, the garage was empty. A plastic tarp had been spread on its concrete floor.

Potter recognized the big man as Granville Oliver. Everyone in town knew who he was.

Oliver looked over at Strange, still standing in the open doorway.

“All right, then,” said Oliver.

Strange was staring at the young boy in the oversize shirt. He hesitated for a moment. Then he stepped back and closed the door.

A row of fluorescent lights, set in a drop ceiling, made a soft buzzing sound overhead.

“You Granville Oliver, right?” said Potter.

Oliver stepped forward with the others. The two who had braced Potter and Little had joined the group. Potter and Little retreated and stopped when their backs touched the cinderblock wall of the garage. One of the men reached out and tore Potter’s skully off his head. He threw it to the side.

“What is this?” said Potter, hoping his voice did not sound weak. But he knew that it did. Little’s hand touched his for a moment, and it felt electric.

Oliver said nothing.

“Look, you and me ain’t got no kinda beef,” said Potter. “I been careful to stay out the way of people like you.”

The fluorescent lights buzzed steadily.

Potter spread his hands. “Have I been steppin’ on your turf down there off Georgia? I mean, you tryin’ to build somethin’ up there I don’t know about? ’Cause we will pack up our shit and move on, that’s what you want us to do.”

Oliver didn’t reply.

Potter smiled. “We can work for you, you want us to.” He felt his mouth twitching uncontrollably as he tried to keep the smile.

Oliver’s eyes stayed on his. “You want to work for me?”

“Sure,” said Potter. “Can you put us on?”

“Gimme my gun,” said Oliver, and the young boy beside him reached under the tail of his shirt and withdrew an automatic. Oliver took the gun from the boy and jacked a round into the chamber. He raised the automatic and pointed it at Potter’s face. Potter saw Oliver’s finger slide inside the trigger guard of the gun.

Potter closed his eyes. He heard his friend beside him, sobbing, stuttering, begging. He heard Carlton drop to his knees. He wasn’t gonna go out like Dirty. Like some bitch, pleadin’ for his life.

Potter peed himself. It felt warm on his thighs. He heard the ones who was about to kill him laughing. He tried to open his eyes, but his eyes were frozen. He thought of his mother. He tried to think of what she looked like. He couldn’t bring her up in his mind. He wondered, did it hurt to die.

STRANGE walked through the kitchen toward the stairway hall. He slowed his step and leaned up against an island holding an indoor grill.

Even from here, even with that door to the garage closed, he could hear one of those young men crying. Sounded like he was begging, too. The one with the cornrows, if he had to guess. Strange didn’t even know that young man’s name.

It wasn’t that one, though, or Potter, who had given him pause. It was the young boy standing next to Oliver. The one he’d seen raking leaves the previous day, the one he’d never seen smile. Like he was already dead inside at eleven, twelve years old. Quinn would say that you should never give up on these kids, that it was never too late to try. Well, Strange wasn’t sure about Potter and his kind. But he knew it wasn’t too late for that boy who’d lost his smile.

Strange walked back the way he’d come. He opened the door leading to the garage without a knock. He stepped down onto the plastic tarp and entered the cold room. All heads turned his way.

Granville Oliver was holding an automatic to the face of Garfield Potter. Saliva threads hung from Potter’s open mouth, and his jeans were dark with urine. The smell of his release was strong in the garage. The one with the cornrows was on his knees, tears veining his face. His eyes were red rimmed and blown out wide.

“You ain’t got no business back in here,” said Oliver.

“Can’t let you do this.”

Oliver kept his gun on Potter. “You delivered our boys here. Now you’re done.”

“I thought I was, too,” said Strange. “Can I get a minute?”

“You got to be playin’.”

Strange shook his head. “Look at me, man. Do I look like I’m playin’ to you? Gimme one minute. Hear me out.”

Oliver stared hard at Strange, and Strange stared back.

“Please,” said Strange.

Oliver’s shoulders loosened and he lowered the gun. He turned to the man in the suit, Phillip Wood, standing beside him.

“Hold these two right here,” said Oliver. To Strange he said, “In my office.”

Strange said, “Right.”

A phone chirped as Strange sat in the chair before Granville Oliver’s desk. Oliver reached into his jacket for his cell.

“That’s me,” said Strange, slipping his cell from its holster. “Yeah.”

“Derek, it’s Lydell. We got his statement.”

“Whose?”

“Ray Boyer, the craps player. Said the boy who broke his nose did it with a three fifty-seven snub-nose.”

“He remember the boy’s name?”

“Garfield Potter. They’re runnin’ the name right now, should have a last-known on him any minute.”

“Potter’s the one.”

“What?”

“I can give you his address,” said Strange, looking over Oliver’s shoulder through the office window to the street, where Potter had parked. Potter’s car was gone. “But he ain’t there just yet.”

“What’re you talkin’ about, man?”

“Here it is,” said Strange, and he gave Blue the Warder Street address. “It’s a row house, got nothin’ on the porch. They ought to be there in about a half hour. Both Potter and his partner, the one with the cornrows. Potter’s driving a Ford Tempo, blue, late eighties. The third boy, I can’t tell you where he is. I believe he’s gone.”

“How you know all this, Derek?”

“I’ll explain it to you later.”

“Trust me. You will.”

“Get all your available units over there, Ly. Ain’t that how they say it on those police shows?”

“Derek—”

“How’d practice go?”

“Say what?”

“Practice. The kids all right?”

“Uh, yeah. The boys all got home safe. Don’t be trying to change the subject, man—”

“Good. That’s good.”

“I’m gonna call you later, Derek.”

“I’ll be waiting,” said Strange.

Strange hit “end,” made a one-finger one-moment gesture to Oliver, and punched in Quinn’s number. Quinn had turned his cell off. Strange left a message and stared at the dead phone for a moment before sliding it back in place.

“You done?” said Oliver.

“Yeah.”

“You know, what you did tonight ain’t gonna change a thing in the end. Those two are gonna die. I’ll make sure of that.”

“But not tonight. Not by my setup. Not in front of that little boy you got workin’ for you.”

“Yeah, okay. We been all over that already.”

“I just want that boy to have some kind of chance.”

“So you said. But what would you have done if I had said no?”

“I was counting on reaching your human side. You proved to me that you have one. Thank you for hearin’ me out.”

Oliver nodded. “Boy’s name is Robert Gray. You think I been ruinin’ him, huh?”

“Let’s just say that I don’t see him hookin’ up with your enterprise as an opportunity. You and me, we got a difference of opinion on that.”

“Strange, you ought to see what kind of conditions he was livin’ in when I pulled him out, down there in Stanton Terrace. Wasn’t nobody doin’ a goddamn thing for him then.”

Strange leaned back and scratched his temple. “This Robert, he play football?”

“What’s that?”

“Can he play?”

“Boy can jook. He can hit, too.” Oliver grinned, looking Strange over. “You’re somethin’, man. What, you tryin’ to save the whole world all at once?”

“Not the whole world, no.”

“You know, wasn’t just my human side convinced me to let those boys walk out of here.”

“What was it, then?”

“I’m gonna need you someday, Strange. I had one of those, what do you call that, premonitions. Usually, when I get those kinds of feelings, I’m right.” Oliver pointed a finger at Strange. “You owe me for what I did for you tonight.”

I owe you for more than that, thought Strange.

But he just said, “I do.”

Strange drove back to the city in silence. Coming up Georgia Avenue, he tried to reach Quinn again on his cell but got a recording. He passed Buchanan Street and kept driving north, turning right on Quintana and parking the Cadillac in front of Janine’s. She let him into her house and told him to have a seat on the living room couch. She joined him a few minutes later with a cold Heineken and a couple of glasses. The two of them talked into the night.

chapter 30

QUINN had been parked along the curb for half an hour when Worldwide Wilson’s 400SE came rolling down the street. Quinn watched the Mercedes glide up in his rearview and he tucked his chin in and turned his head a little as it passed. The Mercedes double-parked, flashers on, as the driver’s-side window came down. A woman Quinn recognized, the black whore who’d asked him for a date the night of the snatch, leaned into the frame. A minute or so went by, and Wilson stepped out of the car.

He wore his full-length rust-colored leather over a suit. He wore his matching brimmed hat and his alligator shoes. He walked toward his row house, and the black whore got under the wheel of his Mercedes and drove off to find a legal parking spot for her man’s car. Worldwide Wilson moved like a big cat onto the sidewalk. He went up his steps and entered his house.

Quinn ignitioned the Chevelle and drove down the street, hooking a left at the next corner, and then another quick left into the alley. He parked the car in the alley along a brick wall. His headlights illuminated several sets of eyes beneath the Dumpsters. He cut the lights and in their dying moment saw rats moving low across the stones of the alley. He killed the engine and listened to the tick of it under the hood. He counted units and found the row house, lit by a single flood suspended from the roof. He saw a light go on in the sleeper porch on the second floor.

Quinn stepped out of the car and walked fast toward the fire escape. Dim bulbs lit the third-floor hall. He could see the third-floor window, but his long sight was gone, and he could not determine if the window was ajar.

He turned off his cell, got on the fire escape, and began his ascent. He could hear music from behind the wood walls of the sleeper porch as he climbed the iron mesh steps. The music grew louder, and he was grateful for that as he went low along the porch’s curtained windows and kept going up. As he neared the third floor he could see the hall window clearly and he could see now that the window was open a crack.

He raised the sash and climbed into the hall. He could feel his sweat, and his blood pumping in his chest. The hall smelled of marijuana, tobacco, and Lysol. Behind one of the doors he heard thrusts and bedsprings, and the sounds of a man reaching his climax, and Quinn went on.

He moved down the hall, his hand sliding along the banister, and at the end of it he looked down the stairs to the second floor. The music, mostly bass, synthesizer, and scratchy guitar, was emanating from below. The music was loud and it echoed in the house. He started down the stairs. The music grew louder with each step he took.

WORLDWIDE Wilson sat on a couch covered in purple velvet, swirling ice in a glass of straight vodka, listening to “Cebu,” that bad instrumental jam ending side two of that old Commodores LP, Movin’ On. Wilson had owned the vinyl, on the Motown label, for over twenty-five years. He still had all his wax, racked up here in this finished porch, where he liked to kick it when he wasn’t at home. At his crib he listened to CDs, but here he kept his records and turntable, and Bang & Olufsen speakers, and his old tube amplifier, made by Marantz. Box had a lotta clean watts to it, the perfect vehicle for his vinyl. You just couldn’t beat the bottom sound of those records.

Wilson tapped some ash off his cigarette. He drank down some of the vodka, now that it had chilled some, and let it cool-burn the back of his throat.

Wilson loved his potato vodka. He bought that brand in the frosty white bottle, with the drawing of the bare tree on it, up there at the store on the District line. He was different from all those other brothers, felt they had to drink Courvoisier and Hennessy just because everyone else did, because the white man told you to. Shit was just poison. There was a word for it, even: carcino-somethin’. Gave you cancer, is what the word meant. And the Man pushed that bad shit into the ghetto, through billboards and bus ads and ads in Ebony and Jet, the same way they pushed death through cigarettes. Well, Wilson did like his tobacco, but the point was, he wasn’t buyin’ into all that, ’cause he was his own man all the way. His brother, who read a lot, had explained this all to him once after they’d smoked some Hawaiian at his mother’s house on Christmas Day. So he wasn’t into no con-yak. But he did love his expensive vodka. He’d gotten a taste for it overseas.

This room was nice. He’d insulated the room and put radiator heat in it for the wintertime. He had it carpeted with a remnant, hung some Africa-style prints he’d picked up at a flea market on the wall, and bought those thick curtains for the windows. The curtains gave him privacy and made him feel as if he was in his own private club. He’d brought in the furniture and even had a chandelier, had a couple of bulbs missing but it looked good, up in this motherfucker. You could bring a young country-type bitch up here, straight off the bus, and impress her in this room. Girl got a look at all this, you could turn her out quick.

Wilson put his feet up on the table and dragged on his cigarette. He looked at the windows and thought he saw some kind of shadow pass out there beyond the curtains. He had another sip of vodka, moved his head some to the sounds coming from the stereo, and finished his cigarette.

Wilson got off the couch, went to the windows, and spread the curtains. He looked out, down the fire escape, and then up to the third floor. Wasn’t nothin’ out there he could see. But he thought he’d go out to the hall for a minute, have a look out there. Never did hurt to double-check.

QUINN had reached the bottom of the stairs and was standing on the landing when the door to the sleeper porch swung open at the end of the hall. Worldwide Wilson stood there, a drink in his hand, wearing a light green suit over a forest green shirt and tie. A look of perplexity creased his face. Then a smile of recognition broke upon it. His chuckle was long and low.

“Damn if it ain’t Theresa Bickle,” said Wilson. “You come to knock me for another woman? That why you came back? ’Cause I am fresh out of young white girls, Theresa.”

Quinn moved quickly down the hall.

“Guess you ran into your friend Stella. Shame what that bitch made me do to her, huh?”

Quinn broke into a run.

“Now what?” said Wilson. “You gonna rush me now, little man?”

Quinn’s stride reached a sprint, and he put his head down as Wilson dropped the glass and tried to reach into his jacket pocket. Quinn hit him low, wrapping his arms around Wilson and locking his fingers behind his back, and both of them went through the open door and into the room.

Quinn ran Wilson through the room and slammed him against the window. The window shattered behind the curtains, and shards of glass fell as Quinn whipped Wilson around, still holding on. Wilson was laughing. Quinn ran him into a stand holding a turntable, and as they toppled over the stand, Quinn’s hands separating, there was the rip of needle over vinyl and the music that was pounding in their heads suddenly came to an end.

Quinn and Wilson stood up, six feet apart. Quinn saw blood on his hands. The glass from the window had opened up one of them or both of them. He didn’t know which.

“You fucked up my box,” said Wilson, incredulous.

“Let’s go,” said Quinn with a hand gesture, seeing the slice along his thumb now, seeing that it was bleeding freely and that the slice was deep.

Wilson stepped in. Quinn put his weight on his back foot, tucked his elbows into his gut, and covered his face with his fists. He took Wilson’s first blows like that, and the punches moved him back and the pain of them surprised him. He took one in the side and grunted, losing his wind, and Wilson laughed and hit him in the same spot again. Quinn dropped his guard. Wilson hit him in the jaw, and the blow knocked Quinn off his feet. He rolled and came up standing. He moved his jaw, and the pain was a needle through his head. Wilson smiled, and his gold tooth caught the glow off the chandelier.

Quinn charged in. Wilson jabbed at his face as he advanced, but Quinn swatted it off and threw a right. The right glanced off Wilson’s cheek, and as Wilson moved a hand up to fend off another blow, Quinn put one in his gut and buried it there. Wilson jacked forward, then squared himself straight. They traded body blows. Quinn threw a vicious uppercut in the space between Wilson’s hands and connected square to Wilson’s chin. Wilson’s eyes rolled up, and Quinn hit him there again. Wilson staggered back. He shook the cobwebs out and kicked the table violently away from the couch. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

There was a large space, cleared now, in the middle of the room. They circled the space and met in its center.

Wilson stepped on Quinn’s foot and punched through his guard. Quinn’s neck snapped back as he took the short right. He tasted the blood flowing over his upper lip, and Wilson threw the same jab. Quinn blocked it with his palm, quickly wrapped his arms around Wilson, and locked his hands behind him once again. Wilson ran him straight into a wall. Quinn felt a picture frame splinter behind his back. He reared back and butted his forehead into Wilson’s nose. Wilson’s blood mingled with his, and Quinn heard an animal sound that was his own and he butted Wilson again. Tears welled in Wilson’s eyes, and Quinn released him. They both stepped back and tried to breathe.

Below his nose, blood covered Wilson’s face. His blood was brown on his green suit. Quinn’s shirt was slick with blood.

“Enough,” said Wilson, reaching into his suit pocket. His hand emerged with a pearl-handled knife, and its blade flicked opened as Wilson walked toward Quinn. The scream of a woman now pierced the room.

Wilson’s arm whipped forward. The blade winked in the light, and Quinn tried to move out of its arc, but as he felt the impact, like a punch, he knew that he had failed. Fresh blood warmed his face.

Wilson turned the handle in his hand so that the blade revolved and he tried to make a backswing, but Quinn caught his forearm and held it. Wilson’s legs were spread wide, and Quinn kicked him in the balls, aiming for three feet behind them and following through. Wilson coughed. Quinn felt the tension go out of Wilson’s forearm, twisted the arm behind him, and kicked Wilson’s right leg out from under him at the shin. Wilson went down on one knee, and Quinn got his wrist and bent it forward until Wilson released the knife. The knife dropped to the carpet. Quinn put everything he had into it and kicked Wilson in the face. There was a wet cracking sound. Wilson’s body jerked up, and blood arced up with it. Wilson fell on his side and then onto his back, where he remained. His face was featureless and ruined.

Quinn picked up the knife. He folded the blade into its handle and pocketed it. He dragged Wilson to the radiator and cuffed him to one of its tubes.

A woman was screaming obscenities at Quinn. She was standing in the doorway, ass-out in a short skirt and fishnets, but not attempting to enter the room.

Quinn reached into his jeans for his cell. He sat on the purple couch, squinting at the keyboard of the cell, and with a shaky hand punched in 911. He asked for squad cars and an ambulance and gave the dispatcher his general address. He ended the call and tried to think of Strange’s number. He tried to think of Sue’s. He couldn’t bring either of their numbers to mind.

He breathed slowly. He knew that he was still bleeding because he could feel it going down his neck. He could feel the wetness of it on his upper chest and behind his collar. He wanted to bring his heart rate down to slow the flow of blood. The air was full on his wounds now, and the pain had ratcheted. He stared at the ripped curtains and the broken glass, and after a while he heard sirens and an odd sound coming from his lips.

Wilson said something from across the room. It was hard to hear him because the woman was still alternately sobbing and berating Quinn.

“What?” said Quinn.

“Somethin’ funny?” said Wilson.

“Why?”

“You laughin’.”

“Was I?” said Quinn.

It didn’t surprise him. It didn’t scare him or make him feel any way at all. Quinn let his head drop back to the couch. He closed his eyes.

chapter 31

ON the stoops of the row houses of Buchanan Street, the jack-o’-lanterns of Halloween had begun to wilt. Time and the weather had mutated the faces carved into the pumpkins, and hungry squirrels had mutilated their features. Gloves and scarves had come out of the closets, and lawn mowers had been drained of gas and put away in basements and sheds. Colors had exploded brilliantly upon leaves, then the leaves had dried and gone toward brown. One holiday was done and another was approaching. Thanksgiving was just a week away.

Strange drove his Cadillac up his block, waving to an old woman named Katherine who was out in a heavy sweater, slowly raking her small square of yard. Katherine had been an elementary school teacher in D.C. for her entire career, put two sons and a daughter through college, and had recently lost a grandson to the streets. Strange had been knowing that woman for almost thirty years.

Strange hooked a right on Georgia Avenue. He looked in his shoebox of tapes and slipped an old Stylistics mix into the deck. Bell and Creed’s “People Make the World Go Round” began with a wintry prologue, Russell Thompkins Jr.’s incomparable vocal filling the car. As Strange drove south on Georgia he softly sang along. At a stoplight near Iowa, he noticed a flyer with the likenesses of Garfield Potter, Carlton Little, and Charles White still stapled to a telephone pole. By now, most of those flyers had been torn down.

Potter and Little had been arrested at their house on Warder Street without incident. They had been arraigned and were now incarcerated in the D.C. Jail, awaiting trial. The trial would not come for another six months. The whereabouts of the missing suspect, Charles White, would continue to be a source of speculation for the local media from time to time. A year and a half later, White’s identity would surface in connection with another murder charge outside of New Orleans. White would eventually be shanked to death, a triangle of Plexiglas to the neck, in the showers of Angola prison. The story would only warrant a paragraph in the Washington Post, as would the violent fates of Potter and Little. As for Joe Wilder, the memorial T-shirts bearing his face had been discarded or used for rags by then. For most metropolitan-area residents, Wilder’s name had been forgotten. “Another statistic.” That’s what hardened Washingtonians called kids like him. One name in thousands on a list.

Strange parked on 9th and locked the Brougham down. He walked by the barber shop, where the cutter named Rodel stood in the doorway, pulling on a Newport.

“How’s it goin’, big man?”

“It’s all good.”

“Looks like you could use a touch-up.”

“I’ll be by.”

He went down the sidewalk and looked up at the logo on the sign hung over his place: Strange Investigations. There were a few dirt streaks on the light box, going across the magnifying glass. He’d have to get Lamar on that today.

Strange was buzzed into his storefront business. Janine was on her computer, her eyes locked on the screen. Ron Lattimer sat behind his desk, a porkpie hat angled cockily on his head. The color of the hat picked up the brown horizontals of his hand-painted tie. Strange stopped by his desk and listened to Lattimer’s musical selection for the day, a familiar-sounding horn against a slamming rhythm section.

“Boss.”

“Ron. This here is Miles, right?”

Lattimer looked up and nodded. “Doo-Bop.”

“See, I’m not all that out of touch.” Strange looked at the paperwork on Lattimer’s desk. “You finishin’ up on that Thirty-five Hundred Crew thing?”

“I’ll be delivering the whole package to the attorneys next week. Major receivables on this one, boss.”

“Nice work.”

“By the way, Sears phoned in. They said your suit’s been altered and you can pick it up any time.”

“Funny.”

“Serious business. The cleaner down the street called, said your suit and shirts are done.”

“Thank you. I got a wedding to go to this weekend. You remember George Hastings, don’t you? His little girl’s.”

“The dress I’m wearing is down there, too, Derek,” said Janine, not taking her eyes off the screen. “Could you pick it up for me?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t mind my saying so,” said Lattimer, “you goin’ to a wedding, you ought to do something about your natural.”

“Yeah,” said Strange, patting his head. “I do need to get correct.”

Strange passed Quinn’s desk, littered with old papers and gum wrappers, and stopped at Janine’s.

“Any messages?”

“No. You’ve got an appointment down at the jail, though.”

“I’m on my way. Just stopped in to check up on y’all.”

“We’re doing fine.”

“You comin’ to the game this afternoon? It’s a playoff game, y’know. Second round.”

Janine’s eyes broke from her screen, and she leaned back in her seat. “I’ll be there if you want me to.”

“I do.”

“I was thinking I’d bring Lionel.”

“Perfect.”

Janine reached into her desk drawer and removed a PayDay bar. She handed it to Strange.

“In case you’re too busy for lunch today.”

Strange looked at the wrapper and the little red heart Janine had drawn above the logo. He glanced over at Ron, busy with his work, and back to Janine. He lowered his voice and said, “Thank you, baby.”

Janine’s eyes smiled. Strange went back to his office and closed the door.

Lamar Williams was behind Strange’s desk, reaching for the wastebasket as Strange walked in. Strange came around and took a seat as Lamar stepped aside. Lamar stood behind the chair, looking over Strange’s shoulder as he logged on to his computer.

“You getting into that People Finder thing?” said Lamar.

“Was just gonna check my e-mails before I go off to an appointment. Why, you want to know how to use the program?”

“I already know a little. Janine and Ron been showin’ me some.”

“You want to know more, I’ll sit with you sometime. You and me’ll get deep into it, you want.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

Strange swiveled his chair so that he faced Lamar. “You know, Lamar, Ron’s not gonna be here forever. I know this. I mean, good people don’t stay on in a small business like this one, and a fair boss wouldn’t expect them to. I’m gonna need some young man to replace him someday.”

“Ron’s a pro.”

“Yeah, but when he first came here, he was green.”

“He had a college degree, though,” said Lamar. “I’m strugglin’ to get my high school paper.”

“You’ll get it,” said Strange. “And we get you goin’ in night school, you’ll get the other, too. But I’m not gonna lie to you; it’s gonna take a lot of hard work. Years of it, you understand what I’m tellin’ you?”

“Yes.”

“Anyway, I’m here for you, you want to talk about it some more.”

“Thank you.”

“Ain’t no thing. You coming to the game?”

“I’ll be there.”

Lamar walked toward the door, the wastebasket in his hand.

“Lamar.”

“Yeah,” he said, turning.

“The sign out front.”

“I know. I was fixin’ to get the ladder soon as I emptied this here.”

“All right, then.”

“Aiight.”

Strange watched him go. He picked up the PayDay bar he had placed on his desk. He stared at it for a while, and then he shut down his computer and walked out of his office. He stopped in front of Janine’s desk.

“I was wondering,” said Strange, “if Lionel couldn’t just take your car home after the game. I thought, if you wanted to, you and me could go for a little ride.”

“That would be good,” said Janine.

“I’ll see you up at the field,” said Strange.

STRANGE drove down to the D.C. Jail at 1901 D Street in Southeast. He parked on the street and read over the notes he had taken from the news stories he had researched on the Net.

Granville Oliver had recently been arrested and charged in one of the most highly publicized local criminal cases in recent history. He had fallen when Phillip Wood, his top lieutenant, was arrested for murder on an anonymous tip. The murder gun had been found, and Wood was charged accordingly. He had pleaded out and agreed to testify against Oliver on related charges. It was exactly what Oliver had predicted Wood would do when he and Strange had first met.

Oliver had been hit with several federal charges, including the running of a large-scale drug operation and racketeering-related murder. At a recent press conference, broadcast on all the local stations, the attorney general and the U.S. attorney had jointly announced that they would aggressively seek the death penalty in the case. Though the citizens of D.C. had gone to the voting booths and overwhelmingly opposed capital punishment, the Feds were looking to make an example of Granville Oliver and send him to the federal death chamber in Indiana.

Strange closed his notebook and walked to the facility.

He checked in and spent a long half hour in the waiting room. He was then led to the interview room, subdivided by Plexiglas partitions into several semiprivate spaces. There were two other meetings being conducted in the room between lawyers and their clients. Strange had a seat at a legal table across from Granville Oliver.

Oliver wore the standard-issue orange jumpsuit of the jail. His hands were cuffed and his feet were manacled. Behind a window, a guard sat in a darkened booth, watching the room.

Oliver nodded at Strange. “Thanks for comin’ in.”

“No problem. Can we talk here?”

“’Bout the only place we can talk.”

“They treating you all right?”

“All right?” Oliver snorted. “They let me out of my cell one hour for every forty-eight. I’m down in Special Management, what they call the Hole. Place they put the high-profile offenders. You’re gonna like this, Strange: Guess who else they got down there with me.”

“Who?”

“Garfield Potter and Carlton Little. Oh, I don’t see ’em or nothin’ like that. They’re in deep lockup, just like me. But we’re down there together, just the same.”

“You’ve got more to worry about right now than them.”

“True.” Oliver leaned forward. “Reason I’m telling you is, I got contacts all over. Last couple of years I made friends with some El Ryukens. You know about them, right? They claim to be descended from the Moors. Now, I don’t know about all that. What I do know is, these are about the baddest motherfuckers walkin’ the face of this earth. They fear nothing and take shit from no man. They got people everywhere, and like I say, me and them are friends. Wherever Potter and Little go, whatever prison they get sent to? They will be got.”

“You don’t need to tell me about it, Granville.”

“Just thought you’d like to know.”

Strange shifted his position in his chair. “Say why you called me here.”

“I want to hire you, Strange.”

“To do what?”

“To work with my lawyers. I got two of the best black attorneys in this city.”

“Ives and Colby. I read the papers.”

“They’re going to need a private detective to help build my case against the government’s. It’s routine, but this case is anything but.”

“I know how it works. I do this sort of thing regularly.”

“I’m sure you do. But this here ain’t the usual kind of drama. It’s life and death. And I’ll only have a black man working on my case. You do good work, so there it is. What those lawyers are gonna need is some conflicting testimony to the testimony the government is gonna get out of Phillip Wood.”

“In a general sense, what’s he saying?”

“I’ll tell you specifically. He’s gonna get up on the stand and say that I ordered the hit on my uncle. That I gave Phil the order directly, and he carried it out.”

“Did you?”

Oliver shrugged. “What difference does it make?”

“None, I guess.”

Oliver turned his head and stared at one of the room’s blank white walls as if it were a window to the outside world. “They got Phil next door, you know that? In the Correctional Treatment Facility. He’s in one of those low-number cells, like CB-four, CB-five, sumshit like that. The special cells they got reserved for the snitches. Phil got punked out the first stretch he did. Got ass-raped like a motherfucker, and he can’t do no more prison. That’s what all this is about. Course, he could be got the way Potter and Little gonna be got. But that would take some time, and time is something I do not have.”

“Told you I don’t need to know about that.”

“Fine. But will you help me?”

Strange didn’t answer.

“You wouldn’t want to sit back and watch someone kill me, would you, Strange?”

“No.”

“Course not. But they got me on these RICO charges, and that’s what they aim to do. You remember that photo I showed you, that promo shot I did for my new record, with me holding the guns? The prosecution’s gonna use that in court against me. You know why? Do you know why they picked me to execute, the only death penalty case in the District in years, instead of all the other killers they got in D.C.? Well, that picture says it all. They got a picture of a strong, proud, I-don’t-give-a-good-fuck-about-nothin’ black man holding a gun. America’s worst nightmare, Strange. They can sell my execution to the public, and ain’t nobody gonna lose a wink of sleep over it. ’Cause it’s just a nigger who’s been out here killin’ other niggers. To America, it is no loss.”

Strange said nothing. He held Oliver’s stare.

“And now,” said Oliver, “the attorney general wants to help me right into that chamber where they’re gonna give me that lethal injection. She and the government gonna help me now. Wasn’t no government lookin’ to help me when I was a project kid. Wasn’t no government lookin’ to help me when I walked through my fucked-up neighborhood on the way to my fucked-up schools. Where were they then? Now they’re gonna come into my life and help me. Little bit late for that, don’t you think?”

“You had it rough,” said Strange, “like a whole lot of kids. I’m not gonna deny you that. But you made your own bed, too.”

“I did. Can’t say I’m ashamed of it, either.” Oliver closed his eyes slowly, then opened them again. “Will you work for me?”

“Have your lawyers call my office,” said Strange.

Strange signaled the guard. He left Oliver sitting at the table in chains.

“HOW y’all feel?”

“Fired up!”

“How y’all feel?”

“Fired up!”

“Breakdown.”

“Whoo!”

“Breakdown.”

“Whoo!”

“Breakdown.”

“Whoo!”

The Petworth Panthers had formed a circle beside the Roosevelt field. Prince and Dante Morris were in the center of the circle, leading the Pee Wees in calisthenics. Strange and Blue and Dennis Arrington stood together in conference nearby, going over the roster and positions. Lamar and Lionel tossed a football to each other on the sky blue track.

In the stands, Janine sat with the usual small but vocal group of parents and guardians. Among them were the parents and guardians rooting for the opposing team, the Anacostia Royals.

Arrington noticed a white man and white woman walking slowly across the field, the woman’s arm through the man’s, where two refs stood conferring at the fifty-yard line. Arrington nudged Strange, who looked across the field and smiled.

“Terry,” said Strange, shaking Quinn’s hand as he arrived. “Sue.”

“Hey, Derek,” said Sue Tracy, pulling an errant strand of blond away from her face.

“Runnin’ a little late, aren’t you?” said Strange.

“Had a meeting with my attorney,” said Quinn. His cheek was bandaged. His jaw line was streaked yellow, the bruise there nearly faded away.

“They’re not gonna drop the charge?” said Strange.

“Assault with intent,” said Quinn, nodding. “They got to charge me with something, right?”

“Well,” said Strange, a light in his eyes, “wasn’t like Wilson came to your apartment and kicked your ass.”

“Right,” said Quinn. “But with Stella’s testimony, he’s gonna do some time.”

“Soon as they take those straws out his nose and rewire his jaw.”

“It’ll keep him off the stroll for a while, anyway. As for me, my lawyer says, I get sentenced at all, it’ll be suspended.”

“The authorities don’t want no one mistaking you for a hero.”

“I’m no hero,” said Quinn. “I got a temper on me, is all.”

“You think so?” said Strange. He nodded to Quinn’s cheek. “Still need that bandage, huh?”

“All these scars, I look like Frankenstein.” Quinn grinned, looking ten years older than Strange had ever seen him look before. “I don’t want to scare the kids.”

“Bring it in!” said Blue, and the teams ended their six-inches drill and jogged over to their coaches, where they took a knee.

“Glad you could make it,” said Arrington, looking Quinn over as they met the boys.

“I’m like you,” said Quinn. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

“Just doing God’s work,” said Arrington, and he shook Quinn’s hand.

Quinn and Blue went over positions and told the boys what they expected of them. Arrington led them in a prayer, and Strange stepped in to give them a short talk as Dante, Prince, and Rico, the designated captains, went out to the center of the field.

“Protect your brother,” said Strange. “Protect your brother.”

The game began, and from the start the contest was fierce. Many times when one of the black teams from D.C. played a primarily white suburban team, the contest was over before the first whistle. White boys taught by their parents, indirectly or directly, to fear black boys sometimes gave up and lay down the moment they saw black players running onto the field. That fear of the unknown was the seed of racism itself.

But this was not the case here. Today there were two teams from the inner city, a Northwest-Southeast thing, kids battling not for trophies but for neighborhood pride. You could see it in the charging style of play, in the hard eyes of the defenders, the way it took three kids to bring one kid down. And you could hear it in the ramlike clash of the pads, echoing in the bowl of Roosevelt’s field. By halftime, Strange knew that the game would be decided not by one big play, but by one fatal mistake. With the score tied in the fourth quarter, with the Petworth Panthers controlling the ball and threatening on their own twenty, that was exactly how it went down.

On one, Prince snapped the ball to Dante Morris, who handed off to Rico, a simple Thirty-two play, a halfback run to the two-hole. The Petworth linemen made their blocks and cleared an opening. But Rico positioned his hands wrong for the handoff and bobbled the ball as he tried to hit the hole. He ran past the ball, leaving it in the air, and the fumble was recovered by Anacostia. The play broke the Panthers’ spirit. It took only six running plays for Anacostia to score a touchdown and win the game.

At the whistle, the boys formed a line at center field and congratulated their opponents. To their counterparts, the coaches did the same.

“Take a knee!” said Lydell Blue.

The boys formed a tight group, the parents and guardians, along with Lamar, Lionel, Janine, and Sue Tracy, standing nearby. Blue looked at Arrington, and at Quinn, visibly upset. Quinn chinned in the direction of Strange. Strange stepped up to address the boys.

He looked down into their faces. Turf was embedded in their cages, and some of their helmets were streaked with blue, the color of Anacostia’s helmets. Dante was staring at the ground, Prince on one knee beside him. Rico was crying freely, looking away.

“All right,” said Strange. “We lost. We lost this one game. But we didn’t lose, not really. You don’t have to be ashamed about anything, understand? Not a thing. Look at me, Rico. Son, look at me.”

Rico’s eyes met Strange’s.

“You can hold your head up, young man. You made an error, and you think it cost us the game. But if it wasn’t for your running out there, the courage and the skill you showed, we wouldn’t have even been in this game. That goes for all a y’all.”

Strange looked down at the boys, trying to look at each and every one of them, holding his gaze on them individually, before moving on.

“We had a tough season. In more ways than one, it was so tough. You lost one of your fellow warriors, a true brother. And still you went on. What I’m trying to tell you is, every so often, every day, you are going to lose. Nobody is going to give you anything out here, and you will be knocked down. But you got to stand back up again and keep moving forward. That’s what life is. Picking yourself up and living to fight, and win, another day. And you have done that. You’ve shown me what kind of strong character you have, time and time again.”

Strange looked over at Lionel. “You know, I never did have a son of my own. But I know what it is to love one like he was mine.”

Strange’s eyes caught Janine’s as he returned his attention to the team kneeling before him.

“You are like my own.”

Rico ran the back of his hand over his face. Dante held his chin up, and Prince managed a smile.

“I am so proud of you boys,” said Strange.

STRANGE left Prince, Lamar, and Janine sitting in his Cadillac, said good-bye to Blue and Arrington, and walked toward Quinn, who was beside Sue Tracy, leaning on his Chevelle. Leaves blew across Roosevelt’s parking lot, pushed by a cool late-afternoon wind that had come in out of the north.

Strange greeted Tracy and kissed her on the cheek. “Sorry I didn’t get to talk to you much today.”

“You had your hands full,” said Tracy.

“So,” said Strange. “You gonna throw us any more work?”

“I had the impression,” said Tracy, “you didn’t want to get involved with this prostitution thing.”

Strange looked at Quinn, back at Tracy. “Yeah, well, I had some personal issues I had to take care of with regards to that subject. I believe I’ve got it worked out.”

“There’s always work,” said Tracy. “We did get Stella back to her home in Pittsburgh. We’ll see how long that lasts.”

“What about the one you snatched away from Wilson?” said Strange.

“Jennifer Marshall. She left home again, and she’s missing. So far, she hasn’t turned up.”

“Gotta make you wonder sometimes, why you keep trying,” said Strange.

“Like you told the kids,” said Tracy. “Live to fight another day.”

“We’re getting a beer, Derek,” said Quinn. “You and Janine want to join us?”

“Thank you,” said Strange. “But I need to get up with her alone on something, you don’t mind.”

“Some other time.”

Strange shook Quinn’s hand. “It was a good season, Terry. Thanks for all your help.”

“We did the best we could.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow. Looks like I’m picking up a big case, and I might need your help. You gonna be at the bookstore?”

“I’ll be there,” said Quinn.

They watched Strange cross the lot and climb into his Brougham.

“I told Karen, the first time we met him,” said Tracy, “that he was gonna work out fine.”

Quinn put his arms around Tracy, drew her in, and kissed her on the mouth. He held the kiss, then pulled back and touched her cheek.

“What was that for?” said Tracy.

“For being here,” said Quinn. “For sticking around.”

AFTER dropping Prince and Lamar, Strange stopped by Buchanan, going into his house to pick up Greco while Janine waited in the car. They drove up to Missouri Avenue, turned left, and continued on to Military Road. Strange parked in a small lot on the eastern edge of Rock Creek Park.

Strange leashed Greco and the three of them walked onto the Valley Trail, up a rise along the creek. Strange held Janine’s arm and told her about his meeting with Granville Oliver while Greco ran the woods through bars of light. They returned to the car as the weak November sun dropped behind the trees. Greco got onto his red pillow in the backseat and fell asleep.

Strange kept the power on in the car so they could listen to music. He played some seventies soul, and kept it low.

“You going to take the Oliver case?” said Janine.

“I am,” said Strange.

“He represents most everything you’re against.”

“I know he does. But I owe him.”

“For what he did with Potter and them?”

“Not just that. The way I see it, most all the problems we got out here, it’s got to do with a few simple things. There’s straight-up racism, ain’t no gettin’ around it, it goes back hundreds of years. And the straight line connected to that is poverty. Whatever you want to say about that, these are elements that have been out of our hands. But the last thing, taking responsibility for your own, this is something we have the power to do something about. I see it every day and I’m convinced. Kids living with these disadvantages already, they need parents, two parents, to guide them. Granville Oliver was a kid once, too.”

Strange stared through the windshield at the darkening landscape. “What I’m saying is, Oliver, he came out of the gate three steps behind. His mother was a junkie. He never did know his father. And I had something to do with that, Janine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I knew the man,” said Strange. “I killed his father, thirty-two years ago.”

Strange told Janine about his life in the 1960s. He told her about his mother and father, and brother. He recounted his year as a uniformed cop on the streets of D.C., and the fires of April 1968. When he was done, gray had settled on the park.

Strange pushed a cassette tape into the deck. The first quiet notes of Al Green’s “Simply Beautiful” came forward.

“Terry gave me this record,” said Strange. “This here has got to be the prettiest song Al ever recorded.”

“It’s nice,” said Janine, slipping her hand into Strange’s.

“So anyway, that’s my story.”

“That’s why you brought me here?”

“Well, there’s this, too.” Strange pulled a small green jewelry box from his leather and handed it to Janine. “Go on, take a look at it. It’s for you.”

Janine opened the box. A thin gold ring sat inside, a diamond in its center. At Strange’s gesture, she removed the ring and tried it on.

“It was my mother’s,” said Strange. “Gonna be a little big for you, but we can fix that.”

“You planning to ask me something, Derek?”

Strange turned to face her. “Please marry me, Janine. Lionel needs a father. And I need you.”

Janine squeezed his hand, answering with her eyes. They kissed.

Strange kept her hand in his. They sat there quietly in the Cadillac, listening to the song. Strange thought of Janine and of her heart. He thought of Joe Wilder, who had fallen, and of all the kids who were still standing. Outside the windows of the car, the last leaves of autumn drifted down in the dusk.

Deep fall had come to the city. It was Strange’s favorite time of year in D.C.

Also by George P. Pelecanos

Right As Rain

The Sweet Forever

Shame the Devil

King Suckerman

The Big Blowdown

Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go

Shoedog

Nick’s Trip

A Firing Offense

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