Lorenzo shrugged. “Kitten got out. I suspect my mother put it out. Dog in the alley got hold of it, killed it dead. My first lesson in the laws of nature. I wasn’t angry at that dog or nothin’. Dog was just doin’ its job.”
Seemed like Rachel Lopez stared at him a long while then. Finally she said, “Well, I hope you get that position.”
“I aim to get it,” he said.
He did. But he didn’t last more than a few months on Oglethorpe Street. They were just warehousing animals there, doing nothing active about helping the ones in peril on the street, and he was no more than a paper pusher. After all that time in a cell, he didn’t want to be walled in, sitting behind some desk. From a coworker at the Rescue League, Brown heard about an opening at the Humane Society, where officers were honest-to-God investigators, empowered through a charter of Congress to seek out violations and violators of animal health and rights.
Irena Tovar, the woman who ran the Humane Society office on Georgia Avenue, gave him an extensive interview. First thing off, she asked him about the specific nature of his criminal charges. Brown figured she wanted to know if he had a rape or domestic abuse or something like it on his record. He told her of his drug offenses, leaving out the violent acts of his past and anything else for which he had never been arrested or charged. She said she had no problem with the fact that he had done time or that he was under supervision. She said that she believed in redemption and she hoped that he believed in it too.
Miss Tovar had hired him, and he had been at it since. He had found it odd, at first, to be wearing a uniform and a badge, especially while he was still on paper, just strange to be on “the other side.” Strange too that he took to it so quick. From his first day out there, it was like he had slipped his hand into a broke-in glove.
“Lorenzo,” said Rachel Lopez, pulling him back into the present. He stared out across the parking lot at the Capital City Market, where all those Asians and other ethnics had their wholesale food businesses.
“Yes?”
“You been by the clinic lately?”
“I been meaning to go.”
“You need to get by the clinic and drop a urine.”
“I will. You know I’m gonna drop a negative too.”
“No doubt,” said Rachel. “You still need to do it.”
“I will. But look, I did have a beer or two this week.”
“I don’t have any problem with that. Your agreement talks about excessive alcohol use. Doesn’t mean you can’t live a life.”
You live one too, thought Lorenzo. I can smell that wine or liquor, or whatever you had last night, coming through your skin right now. In the summertime, when you sweat, it’s real plain. Also, when we meet real early in the mornings, I see how your face is kinda puffy and your eyes be all red. So you’re human; you got your problems like everyone else. Like they say at the meetings: Don’t judge.
“How’s everything else?” said Rachel, cutting her eyes away from his, reading his look. “How’s your daughter?”
Lorenzo nodded, seeing a little Chinese girl standing outside one of the markets, holding some kind of toy in her hand. “I guess she’s good.”
“Her name is —”
“Shay,” said Brown. “I see her, but her mother doesn’t let me talk to her.”
“Ever?”
“Shay don’t even know who I am. I went in a few months before she was born.”
“You talked to the mother about it?”
“I tried. Sherelle ain’t lookin’ to bring me into my little girl’s world. I been putting some money aside for Shay. Just a little bit, understand? But I been doin’ it every month. It’ll help with her college someday, she wants to go.”
“That’s good, Lorenzo.”
“I’m gonna stay on it. I want her to know me. I don’t expect her to love me or nothin’ like that, but still.”
“Maybe in time.”
“Speakin’ of which,” said Lorenzo, glancing at his watch. “I got some calls.”
“Me too. You just keep doing what you’re doing, hear?”
“I plan to.” Lorenzo shook her hand and opened the passenger door of the Honda. “Have a good one, Miss Lopez.”
“You also.”
She watched him go to the Dumpster in the Subway lot, deposit his trash, then walk to his van.
Lorenzo was trying. He was not as pure as he made himself out to be in her presence, but he was one of the better ones. He had chosen a road now and he wanted to stay on it.
She had felt the day she’d met him that he would make the effort. The fact that he worked well with animals, that was a good sign. Most of the time she put little stock in reports and statistics, but studies did show that animal-friendly inmates had lower rates of recidivism. She believed that people who were good to animals had more human potential than those who were not. That was just common sense.
Rachel wasn’t naive. Lorenzo had committed some crimes, most likely, that were not in his jacket. To go as far as he had in the game, he almost certainly was involved in acts of violence. Perhaps he’d even killed. At the very least he had done some bad things beyond the mechanics of dealing drugs. But she did not think that the Lorenzo Brown she knew in the present was a bad man.
She could tell this by looking in his eyes.
FIVE
NIGEL JOHNSON’S SHOP stood on the 6200 block of Georgia, between Sheridan and Rittenhouse streets in Northwest, with the neighborhoods of Brightwood to the west and Manor Park to the east. From the sidewalk, concrete steps went up to its second-floor entrance. There Nigel sold pagers, disposable cells, cigarette lighters, chargers, condoms, and everything else his young, mobile customers might need on the street. He even had a fax machine and a copier, a pay-per-use kind of thing. Sign said NJ Enterprises right there out front. “NJ” was in script, like he’d used his hand to write it himself.
Nigel used the shop as a front for his real business, and as a place to run through some of his cash, put a few of the dollars on the books, so to speak. You had to show something to the IRS, and he sure wasn’t looking to go down on tax evasion charges, like many had been known to do. There was no safe here, and, it went without saying, guns and drugs never passed through the front door. He ran the place as any retail-and-service merchant would, the difference being that he kept it open whenever he liked. Dealers all over the city did the same thing, with barbershops, beauty and nail parlors, variety stores, and such. White dealers, moving cocaine, mostly, did it too, at those antique shops in Adams Morgan and at boutiques on the western edge of the new Shaw.
Johnson liked the location. The neighborhood was cleaner and safer than down in Park View, where he did his dirt. The presence of the Fourth District police station, two blocks away, between Peabody and Quackenbos, kept the lowlifes in semicheck and the fiends off the sidewalks. His friend Lorenzo worked out of the Humane Society office up there around Fern and Geranium, north of Walter Reed, where all those tree-and-flower streets were at. He didn’t see his boy much anymore, because of the circumstances, but it felt good knowing Lorenzo was close and breathing free air.
Most of the stores were legitimate on this particular strip. One of them, the Arrow dry cleaners, went back eighty years, still owned by the same family of Greeks. Nigel Johnson’s spot, it used to be a Chinese laundry back in the sixties. There was a good story about that laundry too. Nigel had not yet been born when this story happened, but old-time residents had talked about it often, and he knew the tale by heart. Nigel liked to tell it, especially to the ones under him. Some of his people were grouped around him now.
“’Round the time that black folks started moving into this neighborhood, I’m talking about before the riots, there was some armed robberies got pulled on this block. Right here on the avenue. The most famous was when the Theodore Nye jewelry store got knocked off. Like most of the nice stores, that place is gone now. There was another one, though, didn’t get too much publicity: the Chinese laundry robbery, right on this spot.”
<
br /> “Where we at now?” said DeEric Green.
“That’s right, right where we sittin’. A Chinaman, his wife, and the Chinaman’s mama san, old lady looked like a yellow prune with eyeholes, worked here, all together. The man’s kids, a little boy and a girl, were always running around in here too. Whole family livin’ together, then they’d go off and work together, together, all the time. You know how those Asians do.
“One day, couple of young brothers, full of fire and speed, came in and put a gun to the Chinaman, demanding all of his cash. Man naturally wasn’t going to give up what he’d worked so hard to get, so one of the brothers, high as he was, got nervous and busted a cap in the Chinaman’s face. Chinaman must have turned his head at the last second, because the bullet grazed his temple. Legend was, right after? You could see the smoke coming off the man’s skin. And listen: Forever after, that square head of his had a burn mark on it too. You know, like the way a brand is, on a cow?”
“Chang got his self the mark of Zorro,” said DeEric Green.
“Okay,” said Johnson, keeping on, not wanting to lose his rhythm, though Green was doing his best to stop the flow. “One of the brothers, let’s say it was the gunman, ’cause it make the story better, jumped down off the stoop, coming out the shop, and landed on a wrought-iron fence they had out there at the time, came down right on his dick. Fence had those spikes on it. No, spires, that’s what they called those things. That spire, it took a piece of that boy’s manhood, just tore off a slice of his testicles. People still talk about the way he was runnin’ down Georgia, all in pain, blood on his drawers, to a waiting car.”
“Story good,” said DeEric Green.
“Hold up,” said Nigel. “I ain’t finished. I ain’t told y’all the best part.
“The Chinaman, his wife, and the old lady continued to work that laundry for a bunch more years, even though that was just the start of the violent shit that would come to the block, and even though their store, in the summer, was hotter than the devil’s own attic, ’specially in the back, where Mama San toiled. And because of all that hard work and sacrifice, those two kids of theirs, they did more than all right. The son became a three-star general in the army and shit, and the girl went on to become a doctor, one of those chemists over at NIH or a new-clear scientist, somethin’ like that.”
“What kind of car she drive?” said Green.
“I don’t know the woman personal. What difference does that make, anyway?”
“Bet it’s an Avalon or somethin’ like it. Bet she went with a spoiler on it too. Chinese do love their Japanese cars.”
“Point is, you keep working hard, despite adversity, you gonna come out all right. Not just you, but the people around you as well.”
“I know what you trying to say,” said DeEric Green, pursing his lips, nodding his head rapidly.
“You do?” said Nigel.
Lawrence Graham, Nigel’s enforcer, chuckled low.
“Sure,” said Green. “You talkin’ about, like, that Boy Scout thing. Be prepared to fuck a motherfucker up. If Chang had been strapped his own self, that shit never would have ended up how it did.”
“It ended all right,” said Nigel. “Ended real good for the kids.”
“But the Chinaman musta carried that scar forever. Might as well had a sign on him said ‘I got my ass punked.’ How you gonna face your people after, when you got that shit tattooed right on your grille?”
Nigel Johnson, seated at his desk behind the customer counter, tented his hands and felt himself tighten beneath his Sean John sweats. Green, one of his seconds, was just dim like that. He never could see past the obvious.
“Story wasn’t about the robbery,” said Nigel. “Story was about how the man hung in, kept on doing his j-o-b. Passed on the legacy of hard work to the ones around him.”
“I feel you,” said Green. “I’m sayin, though, for me? I’ll just go ahead and murder a motherfucker, he finds the need to put a gun in my face.”
Nigel breathed out slow. He looked past Green, slouched with his elbow on the counter, his Raiders cap cocked on his head, wearing his look-at-me hookup of a thick platinum chain worn out over a bright FUBU shirt, to Michael Butler, standing by the window fronting the shop. Butler just nodded at Nigel, talked with those smart brown eyes of his, telling him he understood, that there wasn’t any need to make further comment.
The boy was mature for his age. At seventeen, he had more sense than DeEric Green and most of these other knuckleheads on the payroll. Respectful, hardworking, and he thought before he spoke. Focused. Butler reminded Nigel of his own self when he was coming up, though Butler was nowhere near as tough. He had a little Lorenzo in him too, with the way he stayed quiet unless something needed to be said. Butler was good.
“Nigel?” said Green.
“What.”
“I had a little thing I had to take care of this morning.”
“Talk about it.”
“Saw this boy they call Jujubee, one of Deacon’s kids, toutin’ his shit on our real estate. Had to pull over and show him what I had in my waistband, you understand what I’m sayin’? Him and his boys, they walked off slow. I don’t see no problem, like reoccurin’ and shit, but I thought you might want to know.”
“Where was he standin’?” said Nigel. “Exactly.”
Green described the exact corner on Morton. When he was done, he smiled proudly.
“Well, then,” said Nigel, “you fucked up.”
“Huh?”
“That ain’t our corner.”
“Huh?”
“I’m sayin’, that’s Deacon Taylor’s corner.”
“It’s close to ours.”
“But it ain’t ours, DeEric. It’s Deacon’s. I got an arrangement with the man.”
Green lowered his eyes.
“Look,” said Nigel. “I appreciate you takin’ some initiative, but you need to get me on the Nextel, or Lawrence here, if you not sure what’s ours and what ain’t. You gonna start a war out here, and that is something I don’t need.”
“Right.”
“Yeah, okay. Right.” Nigel was tired of talking to Green, tired of trying to impress things upon him that he would never understand. Boy had the chrome, the outfits, the chains, the Escalade with the spinners . . . all the things. But there wasn’t no reasoning behind it, no plan. Boy wasn’t going to last.
“Anyway,” said Green, “’bout time I went and picked up the count.”
“Take Michael with you, hear?”
“Nigel,” said Green, protest in his tone.
It’s Nigel, thought Johnson, not correcting Green, seeing no advantage in correcting him. Man had been working for him for two years now and he still couldn’t get the name right. Said he had a problem with it ’cause his cousin, boy name of Nigel Lewis, pronounced it “the English way.”
“Take Michael,” said Nigel, repeating the order. “Boy needs to learn.”
“Let’s go, youngun,” said Green without looking at the boy, resentment plain on his face.
“Your mom need anything?” said Michael Butler to Nigel.
“She good,” said Nigel, nodding at Butler, thanking him for asking after his mother without thanking him by word. He watched Green and Butler leave the shop.
“DeEric call you Nigel,” said Lawrence Graham, seated near him behind the counter. Like many of the deadlier young men in the city, those with the fiercest reputations, he was short and slight.
“I know it,” said Nigel. “He got a cousin or somethin’ who say it the wrong way.”
“DeEric stupid.”
“You think?”
“He right about one thing, though,” said Graham.
“What’s that?”
“If that slope had had him a shotgun, a cut-down or something like that, hid in that laundry basket of his? He’d a lit that boy up.”
You stupid too, thought Nigel. But he didn’t say it. Graham followed orders to the letter. It was hard to find people like that. Ni
gel liked having him on his side.
THROUGH THE WINDSHIELD of a Mercedes S430 parked in a space on the east side of Georgia, Deacon Taylor watched DeEric Green and Michael Butler walk down the sidewalk toward a black Escalade. Beside Deacon sat one of his lieutenants, Melvin Lee, spidery and small, an NY baseball cap worn sideways on his head. Slumped in the backseat was a young man named Rico Miller.
“That him?” said Deacon, thirty-three, handsome, wide-shouldered, and immaculately groomed.
“Way Jujubee described him,” said Lee. “Said he had on that orange FUBU when he told Jew to move on. Said he came out that ’Lade, with the spinners and shit.”
“DeEric Green, right?”
“Yeah. I ran with his brother, James, long time ago. The Greens stayed over there on Lamont when I was livin’ on Kenyon. Me and James, both of us went to the same middle school.”
“Tubman?”
“Yeah. I remember DeEric when he used to tag along at the basketball courts. He wasn’t no more than seventy pounds, but he talked like he was full grown.”
“His brother still out here?”
“Nah, James been dead.”
“What happened?”
“James couldn’t control his self around females. Made the mistake of gettin’ his grind on with some girl even though he got warned that this girl had a George.”
“Man didn’t take kindly to it, huh?”
“I’d say he took it to heart.”
Deacon nodded. One thing about Melvin, he made it a point to know a little something about everyone who was gaming on their side of Park View. Boy just had a talent for learning about the players, their histories, their alliances, and how they’d fucked up. Eventually everyone made that one big mistake. No one knew this better than Melvin Lee, who’d recently come uptown off a three-year sentence.
“Who that slim boy with DeEric?”
“New kid, name of Butler.”
“What you know about him?”
“Nothin’ yet. Nigel groomin’ him. But to me he don’t look like much.”
“Must be one of Nigel’s projects. You know how he gets all hopeful about them young ones.” Deacon tapped a manicured finger on the steering wheel. “Nigel got his corners, I got mine. That corner, the one his boy told Jujubee to step off of? That was mine. Nigel know this.”
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