“D,” said Walker, “I’m gonna need some help to drag Hoss out there to the alley.”
But Durham did not answer. He was staring at his shaking hands.
chapter 35
STRANGE parked the Caprice on Quintana, killed the engine, and looked at the house he shared with his wife and stepson. Janine and Lionel were standing on the front lawn with Devra Stokes, in the light of a spot lamp Strange had hung above the door himself. Strange smiled, seeing the puff Lionel put in his chest as he talked to the girl. Juwan was playing with Greco, throwing him that red spiked rubber ball the tan boxer loved, then chasing him around the yard. Greco allowed the boy to catch up, letting him put his hand in his mouth, trying but failing to get the ball free.
Strange got out of the car. Greco’s nub of a tail twitched furiously as he heard the familiar slam of the Caprice’s door, but he stayed with the boy. Strange crossed the sidewalk and met the group in the light of the yard.
“What’s goin’ on, family?” said Strange. He hugged Lionel, then Janine. He kissed her and kept his arm around her shoulder after breaking their embrace.
“We’re just getting acquainted,” said Janine, smiling at Devra.
“Everyone’s nice,” said Devra.
“Yeah, they’re all right,” said Strange.
“Where you been, Pop? Keeping the streets safe for democracy?”
“While the city sleeps,” said Strange.
“Hungry?” said Janine.
“You know I am.”
“I saved you some meat loaf.”
“Knew there was a reason my car turned down this street on its own.”
“You could have stopped at any old restaurant,” said Janine.
“It wouldn’t be home,” said Strange. He kissed her again, and this time did not break away. “Ain’t nothin’ better than this.”
QUINN went home to a quiet, empty apartment. He hadn’t heard from Sue Tracy all day and hadn’t expected to. She and her partner, Karen, were close to finding a girl they’d been looking for for the past month or so. They’d planned to snatch her off the street that night.
The message light on his machine was blinking and Quinn hit the bar. It was Sue, asking him to call her on her cell.
He took off his shirt, washed his neck and face over the bathroom sink, and washed under his arms. He changed into a clean white T-shirt, went to the kitchen, found a Salisbury steak dinner in the freezer, and put it in his microwave oven. He set the power and time and touched the start button, then moved out to the living room and phoned Sue.
“Sue Tracy.”
“Terry Quinn.”
“Stop it.”
“Where are you?”
“Out at Seven Locks with Karen. We got our girl. We’re processing the paperwork with the police, and her mother is on the way.”
“Can you come over?”
“It’s gonna be a couple of hours.”
Quinn looked at his watch. “Christ, it’s late.”
“Too late?”
“No, no. I want to see you.”
“Good. Did you have a productive day?”
“A lot happened,” said Quinn. “I don’t know about productive.”
“What about Linda Welles? Anything?”
“Yeah, plenty,” said Quinn, too quickly. “I’ll give it to you when you get here.”
“You might be sleeping.”
“Wake me up.”
“I’m going to, believe me. Listen, Terry, they’re calling us in. Love you.”
“I love you,” said Quinn.
The line went dead. Quinn stared at the phone.
I’ll give it to you when you get here.
He had a couple of hours to kill before Sue would be by. Enough time to go down there, get it, and have it for her when she arrived.
It wasn’t about finding Linda Welles. It was about doing something, and in the process, getting back a piece of his pride. He knew this, but he pushed the knowledge to the back of his mind.
Quinn went to the kitchen. He had a few bites of the Salisbury steak and some of the accompanying potatoes and mixed vegetables. Just enough to make his hunger headache fade but not enough to make him heavy and slow. He threw the rest of the dinner in the trash. He drank a large glass of water and walked to his bedroom.
Quinn retrieved his Colt, a black .45 with checkered grips, a five-inch barrel, and a seven-shot load, from his chest of drawers. He released the magazine, examined it, and slapped it back into the butt. He racked the slide. Quinn had bought the piece, a model O, after a conversation in a local bar.
It never would have happened, I had my gun.
Quinn holstered the Colt behind the waistband of his jeans and put on his black leather jacket.
Okay, so he’d been punked. He could fix that now.
He thought of Strange. He hadn’t lied to him. He’d gone home like he’d promised.
Quinn grabbed some tapes, a pen, and the Linda Welles file on his way out the door. He walked out into the night air, letting the mist cool his face. He ignitioned the Caprice and put Copperhead Road into the deck and turned it up. As he was going south on Georgia, the traffic lights flashed yellow. Quinn’s long sight was gone and the lights were a blur. He downshifted coming out of the tunnel under the pedestrian bridge leading to the railroad tracks. A freight train neared the station as he passed. Going up the hill, Quinn punched the gas.
IN Far Southeast, Quinn stopped the Chevelle on Southern Avenue near Naylor Road. He withdrew his Colt and flicked its safety off, then refitted it under his jacket. He turned off Southern and drove up Naylor. He passed the well-tended Naylor Gardens complex, the buildings deteriorating in appearance as he moved on. Up past Naylor Plaza he saw the group of young men sitting on the front steps of their unit at the top of a rise of weeds and dirt. He swung the Chevelle around in the street and parked behind a red Toyota Solara with gold-accented alloy wheels and gold trim.
Do your job.
Quinn was out of the car quickly, walking up the hill. The young men had heard his pipes and were watching his approach. He walked through the mist and the hang of smoke in the halogen light. His blood jumped as he walked, watching the faces of the heavyset young man with the blown-out Afro and the skinny kid with the napkin bandanna and the others who had been there earlier in the day. He reached behind him. His hand went up under his jacket. Finding the grip of the gun, he was not afraid. He pulled the Colt, going directly to the heavyset young man. He grabbed the young man’s shirt and bunched it in his left fist, touching the barrel of the Colt under his chin.
“Put your hands flat beside you,” said Quinn. “Your friends don’t want to fuck with me. Believe it.”
The young man did it. No one made a comment or laughed. No one moved.
“I ain’t strapped,” said the young man.
“I don’t care,” said Quinn. “Linda Welles.”
“Who?”
“The girl on the flyer I showed you. You know where she is, who she’s with. Gimme a name.”
The barrel of the gun dented the young man’s skin as Quinn pressed it to his jaw.
“She stayin’ with this boy Jimmy Davis, up on Buena Vista Terrace. Up there off Twenty-eighth.”
“Where on Buena Vista?”
“He’s in this place, got a red door.”
“Say it again.”
The young man repeated the name and address. Quinn released his shirt and stepped back. He held the gun loosely at his side. He looked around at the faces of the boys on the steps. They stared at him with nothing in their eyes. One of the young men raised a brown paper bag and tipped its bottle to his lips.
Quinn backed up a few steps. He holstered the gun. He turned and walked down the rise to his Chevelle. He got under the wheel, started the car, and pulled off the curb.
At the next corner, Quinn stopped and wrote down the name and location the young man had given him on the back of one of the flyers. He ejected the Steve Earle tape and slipped Darkne
ss on the Edge of Town into the deck. “Adam Raised a Cain” came forward, and he turned it up. Quinn rolled down his window and began to laugh. It was easy. Fire with fire. All it took was a gun.
He drove down Naylor and onto 25th, and looked around at the unfamiliar sights. He didn’t know this stretch of road, and anyway, his night vision was for shit. Street lamps and headlights were haloed and blurry. He wasn’t lost. He’d come out on Alabama somewhere and from there he could hit MLK. He wasn’t in a hurry. He was enjoying his Springsteen, his victory, the night.
He pulled up behind a car at a stoplight. Cars were parked along the curb at his right. In his rearview he saw a red import, tricked out in gold. He looked to his left. A white car with tinted windows rolled up had pulled alongside him. He couldn’t see the occupants of the car. He heard Strange’s voice in his head: A classic trap. Gangs hunt in packs.
Quinn’s eyes went back to his rearview. The driver of the red car was heavy and wore his hair in a blown-out natural.
Quinn reached behind him and fumbled under his jacket. He found purchase on the grip of the Colt and began to draw it out. As he did this, he looked out the open window, feeling the presence of someone there.
He saw a skinny boy with a napkin bandanna on his head and a stainless automatic in his hand. The boy’s finger went inside the trigger guard just as Quinn freed his gun and cleared it from his waist, seeing the stainless piece swing up, knowing he was far too late.
Quinn thinking, He ain’t nothin’ but a kid, as the world flashed white.
AUGUST
chapter 36
GRANVILLE Oliver’s biceps pushed against the fabric of his orange jumpsuit. His manacles and chains scraped the table before him as he lowered his hands.
“Thanks for coming by,” said Oliver.
“Ain’t no thing,” said Strange.
“Sentencing’s today.”
“Ives told me.”
“Whichever way it goes, I figure we won’t be seeing each other again. So I thought we should, you know, say good-bye, eye to eye.”
Strange nodded. The room was quiet except for the muffled voices of attorneys and their clients seated in other cubicles behind Plexiglas dividers. A guard with heavy-lidded eyes sat in a darkened booth, watching the room.
“You did everything you could,” said Oliver.
“I tried.”
“Yeah, you and that white boy was working with you, y’all did a good job.”
Strange leaned forward. “Say his name.”
“Quinn.”
“That’s right.”
“You two did all right, bringing that girl in like you did. For a while, seemed like her testimony was really gonna help my case. Sayin’ that Phil was talkin’ to her about plannin’ to kill my uncle and all that. Course, when they crossed her, the prosecutors tried to make her look like a common ho, what with her havin’ that boy out of wedlock, and the lifestyle she was into when she was kickin’ it with Phil. But she kept her composure up there. She was good.”
“She was.”
“Where’s she at now?”
Devra Stokes was living in Northwest, working in a salon, going to Strayer and taking secretarial classes around her hours in the shop. She and Juwan were renting an apartment, found by Ives, in a fringe but not deadly neighborhood. She and the boy were doing fine. But there was no reason for Strange to give Oliver, or anyone else connected with the trial, her whereabouts.
“I don’t know,” said Strange.
“Anyway, I guess it’s all over now. Relieved to have it behind me, you want the truth.”
After the defense had rested its case and closing arguments had been presented, jury deliberation lasted less than two weeks, an unusually short time for a case with this kind of life-and-death ramification. Once the verdict was read, a kind of minihearing had commenced in which Raymond Ives and his team argued mitigating circumstances in hopes of avoiding the death penalty. That phase, too, had concluded, leaving only Judge Potterfield’s sentencing to complete the trial.
“Too bad it didn’t work out for you,” said Strange.
“Aw, shit, I knew how it was gonna end from day one. That jury they handpicked, they decided what they were gonna do the first time they got a look at me. I mean, you get down to it, they didn’t even need to go through the trouble of havin’ that trial.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Ain’t no maybe about it. It wasn’t no kind of shock to me when they found me guilty. Question now is, will I live or die?”
Strange sat impassively, looking into Granville Oliver’s golden eyes.
“You know, it’s funny,” said Granville. “There was that day, when the Stokes girl was testifyin’, that I actually thought that there was a chance I might walk. She had planted that, what do you call it, seed of doubt up in that whole courtroom. And I remember thinkin’, Wouldn’t that be some shit, if it was what she was sayin’ that was gonna get me off?”
“Why would that be funny?” said Strange.
“Phil Wood told that girl he was gonna kill my uncle Bennett? Shoot, Phil was just talkin’, pumpin’ his own self up for the benefit of that pretty young ass. Phil had killed before to get his stripes, but he wouldn’t never pull the trigger on my own kin, not unless I ordered him to do it. And I never did.”
“What are you telling me?”
“I killed my uncle, Strange. Walked right up to the open window of his new Jag and shot that snitch motherfucker to death. Man was about to flip on me, and it was down to that. Him or me, and I wasn’t gonna do no long time, not for blood or anyone else.” Oliver looked Strange over. “You surprised?”
“Not really. In my heart, I guess I knew all along.”
“Didn’t make no difference to you, huh?”
“No. I suppose it didn’t.”
“You knew I was who they said I was and still you kept on it. Why?”
Because I took your father out, thirty-some years ago. Because it was me who put you behind the eight ball, like all these other kids out here, got no fathers to teach them, by example, right from wrong. How to be tough without being violent, how to walk with your head up and your shoulders square, how to love one woman and be there for your children and make it work. Because it was me who put you on the road that took you where you are today.
“I was just doing my job,” said Strange.
“Well, you stood tall,” said Oliver.
“I did my best.”
“And I appreciate it. Wanted you to know.”
Their hands met in the middle of the table. Strange broke Oliver’s grip and stood.
“How’s the little man doin’?” said Oliver, looking up, managing a smile.
“Robert’s fine. He’s with that family affiliated with the church. I’m going to see him at practice this evening.”
“Boy can play, can’t he?”
“Yes, he can,” said Strange.
“Holler at you later, hear?”
“I’ll pray for you, Granville.”
And for myself, thought Strange, as he turned and walked from the D.C. Jail, leaving Granville Oliver in chains.
STRANGE had no live cases on the week’s schedule. He was restless and had time to kill before evening practice, so he went about filling up his day. He visited a technical school in Northwest that Lamar Williams had mentioned to him as a place that offered computer training on a noncollegiate level. Strange had promised Lamar that he would contribute half to the cost of classes if he thought the school was okay. He picked up a brochure and got their rates from one of the admission staff, and had a look at the facilities. Then he called Janine on his cell. He asked her if she’d like to meet him at the old Crisfield’s, up on Georgia, for a late lunch.
After raw oysters, soft-shell crab sandwiches, and a couple of beers at the U-shaped bar, Strange and Janine went back to the house on Quintana and made slow love in their bedroom as Greco slept at the foot of the bed. The house was quiet, with only the sounds of their
coupling and the low hum of the window air conditioners running on the first and second floors. Lionel was in College Park, having started his freshman orientation.
Strange and Janine held each other for a while, kissing but saying little, after both of them had come. She looked up into his eyes and wiped some sweat off his brow.
“You’re troubled.”
“Even with all this,” said Strange. “I mean, with all I have, with you and Lionel. It’s crazy, I know.”
“You can’t hide it. Especially not in our bed.”
“I just feel like doin’ something. Making some kind of a difference. ’Cause damn if it don’t seem like I been chasing my tail these past months.” Strange put his weight on one elbow. “You know, the night Terry got shot—”
“Derek.”
“The night he got shot, Janine, he told me that all he wanted was to feel like he accomplished something.”
“Derek, don’t.”
“That’s what I want to feel now, too.”
“Maybe you haven’t felt that way lately. But you will.”
“I never should have let him go home alone like he did. I should have brought him back here that night to hang with all of us.”
“But that’s not what happened.”
“I know it.”
“Lie down,” said Janine. “Hold me and let’s go to sleep. Can’t remember the last time we had an afternoon to ourselves like this, just to do nothing but rest.”
“Okay,” said Strange. “I need to rest. That sounds good.”
But when he awoke, late in the afternoon, his feelings had not changed.
STRANGE drove down to 9th and Upshur. He had not yet read the paper, so he picked up that day’s Post at Hawk’s barbershop and told one of the cutters he would return it.
Going into his shop, he went through the reception area and into his office, where he had a seat behind his desk. The vinyl version of Round 2, the Stylistics’ follow-up to their debut, was leaning up against the wall, facing out, directly behind his chair. Lewis, from the used-book store in downtown Silver Spring, had mailed it to Strange, and Strange had not yet taken it home. Like the gum wrappers still in the top drawer of Quinn’s desk, it was something he had not wanted to deal with just yet.
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