The Cut

by George Pelecanos

  “No college?”

  “I had a couple of semesters. It wasn’t my thing.” Lucas leaned forward. “There’s a lot of men and women out here like me, Constance. We’ve been through this war and we just look at things differently than other people our age. I mean, there are certain bars I don’t hang in. The people, the conversations, they’re too frivolous. I’m not gonna sit around and have drinks with people who are, you know, ironic. Being in a classroom, listening to some teacher theorizing, I can’t do it. I also wasn’t about to take a job in an office and deal with the politics. I woke up one day and knew that I was never gonna have a college degree or wear a tie to work. I was coming up on thirty years old and I realized, I’ve fallen through the cracks. But I’m luckier than some people I know. I’ve found something I like to do. My eyes open in the morning and I have purpose.”

  Constance pushed her plate, now holding only bones, to the side. “You’re either the most complicated guy I ever met or the simplest.”

  “I’m the simplest.”

  “You’re smart. You read a bunch. You should try school again.”

  “Not gonna happen,” said Lucas. “Does that bother you?”

  “No.”

  “But it will.”

  “Maybe.” She reached across the table, put her hand over his, and squeezed it. “It doesn’t bother me tonight.”

  Lucas signaled the waitress.

  TAVON LYNCH and Edwin Davis drove east over the Benning Bridge in Tavon’s SS, passing streetlamps haloed in mist. The Anacostia River flowed darkly beneath them. They were headed toward central Northeast, a part of the city that was largely unfamiliar to them. A Backyard CD, a live at the Tradewinds thing with Big G on vocals, was playing low in the car. As Tavon accelerated, the young men felt the buzz and rumble of the Impala’s twin pipes.

  “Why’d you have to tell him ’bout the package?” said Edwin.

  “We’re gonna have to tell Anwan,” said Tavon. “And then he’s gonna put Spero on this one, too. Might as well be up front about it from now.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “Lucas.”

  “He don’t seem like the type to give up.” Edwin rubbed at the whiskers on his chin. “You tell them about him?”

  “No need to jam him up. He ain’t gonna find anything anyway.”

  “Had the feeling he was gonna sit out there on Twelfth Street all day.”

  “Man keeps hard at it,” said Tavon. “Got to give him that.”

  Tavon admired Lucas’s work ethic. He believed that he, Tavon, was of the same stripe. He and his boy Edwin were young, but they had been on it for a while.

  Tavon had grown up in Chillum, the youngest of a large family, now scattered. He was closest with his eldest brother, Samuel, who had done time in his youth but was now living straight. Edwin was from a smaller family that lived in an apartment in West Hyattsville. Edwin saw his father occasionally and of late had begun to reestablish a relationship with him; Tavon had no relationship with his father at all. Both of them had graduated from Northwestern High School, where Len Bias had played, on Adelphi Road.

  They were into watching sports on TV and playing video games, but mostly they loved nightlife. Tavon caught reggae at the Crossroads and dancehall at TNT and Mirage Hall, and hung out with Edwin at the go-go and hip-hop clubs in the city and in Prince George’s County. The Ibex had been shuttered long ago, and so had the Black Hole, but shows were live in places like Legend on Naylor Road, Icon in Waldorf, the Scene, D.C. Star off Bladensburg, and 24. Tavon and Edwin beat their feet to Reaction, TOB, Backyard, Junk Yard, old bands like EU with Sugar Bear at Haydee’s, and up-and-comers like ABM. They tipped the doormen, the bouncers, and the men guarding the parking lots, and soon they were in the VIP rooms for free and never had to be on the lower floors with those who stood in line. They met a promoter named Princess Lady who got them started on her street team, passing out flyers for a flat fee of thirty dollars a night, then they graduated into real promotion money, creating a guest list for the door that brought in three to five dollars a head. They made up stage names, Young Tay and E-Rolla. They always looked fresh.

  In the VIP loft of one of the big clubs off New York Avenue they met Anwan Hawkins, who most everyone knew by sight. He was approachable, an older man who didn’t have to front or act hard because he wasn’t trying to get somewhere; he was there. After several nights partying with Anwan, they began to do a little work for him on the side, keeping their promotion enterprise going all the while. Anwan moved them up quick and kept them busy, and the weed work overtook the promotion stuff and made it seem less important. Soon they were Anwan’s seconds and they let their show business aspirations die.

  Thing of it was, they weren’t making all that much money. Only Anwan was bringing it in big. But the life was exciting, for a while.

  The two of them still lived with their mothers. Edwin tended to lead a secret life and never did talk to his mom much; Tavon was close to his. She was excited for him when he first began to bring in dollars, and encouraged his entrepreneurial spirit. Then she found a scale in his room and tiny plastic bags, a ledger book with figures and names. He continued to tell his mother he was working on his music, but she could read the lie in his eyes.

  “Why they pick this part of town?” said Edwin, as they turned left onto Minnesota Avenue, passing fast-food chains, Chinese grease pits, pawnshops, high-priced convenience markets, and high-fee check-cashing establishments, the kind of places that kept folks unhealthy, broke, and low.

  “Said they was gonna be over here tonight on other business,” said Tavon. “They didn’t feel like crossing back and uptown just to pay up. Said if we wanted our piece we’d have to go where they decided to meet.”

  “I don’t like being off our turf,” said Edwin.

  “I don’t either,” said Tavon. “But I like the way money feel in my hands.”

  Tavon drove a couple of blocks farther and hung a right onto Hayes Street. They went up a rise, crossing 42nd, and there the street ended dark in a court bordered by what looked like a stand of trees and dirt through which ran a narrow creek.

  “You sure?” said Edwin.

  “This is where he said to come.”

  Tavon cruised slowly around the semicircle of the court and curbed the Impala, its nose pointed back to the west. He killed the engine. Edwin looked around, at the wooded area on their right, at the little bit of light that reflected off the creek, past the trees to the houses and apartments they had back up there on Hunt Place. It was quiet.

  “Man, I know what this place is,” said Edwin. “One of my uncles used to live over by the Mayfair units, and he would talk about it. This is part of Watts Branch.”

  “So?”

  “They be murderin motherfuckers back in here.”

  “Not anymore. Your uncle’s name must be Fred Sanford, ’cause that was an old man talking about things that happened a long time ago. Neighborhood people cleaned things up back here, Edwin. Got all kinds of government money to do it.”

  “For real?”

  “I read on it, man.”

  An MPD squad car came slowly up the street. Thirty yards below them, on the rise, it swung to the curb. The driver cut his lights but kept the engine running.

  “Here we go,” said Edwin.

  Another car, a black Chevy Tahoe with factory rims, came up the rise. It swung around the court and stopped behind the Impala. The driver of the Tahoe cut the engine and killed the lights. The driver of the squad car lit his headlamps and turned around in the street.

  “He supposed to stay,” said Edwin. “Right?”

  Tavon squinted, looking hard at the patrol car. His eyes went to the cell phone in his hand. He pondered the situation for a moment. He went to messages, found the recipient he was looking for, and typed in four numbers. He sent a text and slipped the phone into the pocket of his jeans.

  Tavon checked the side-view mirror and watched the driver of the Tahoe get out of the
SUV. Then in the rearview he saw another man step out of the passenger side. This man held a shoe box close to his side. The two of them walked toward the SS.

  LUCAS AND Constance were making it with great enthusiasm, Gregory Isaacs’s Soon Forward playing loudly in the bedroom, when Lucas’s iPhone began to buzz on his nightstand. Neither of them heard a thing.

  TAVON AND Edwin sat in the front seat of the Impala, waiting for the men. Tavon’s eyes were moving between the two mirrors.

  “That our man?” said Edwin.

  “Yeah,” said Tavon. “He brought that white dude with him, too.”

  “Why?”

  “You holdin that kind of money, guess you need an extra man to guard it.”

  “What you gonna do with yours, man?”

  “Buy things,” said Tavon, as the men neared their car.

  Buy things. Tavon had been driven to do just that for as long as he could remember. From his first pair of baby Nikes on, his mother had sacrificed and run up her credit cards to see that he had the right labels, especially when he went off to school. Couldn’t have those other kids and their parents seeing him in knockoff Timbs. Never mind that his mom was ass broke; working the after care program at the local elementary for next to nothing, she still took care of him, made sure he had things. Bought him the videos for the VCR, his earliest being Aladdin and his favorite The Lion King. The Spanish people in the apartment next door had the same movie, but theirs said El Rey León on the box, and he cried about that, and damn if his mom didn’t find one of those for him, too. And then Space Jam, with that song his mom used to sing to him at night to make him feel positive, that R. Kelly thing, “I Believe I Can Fly.”

  Tavon took his mother’s buying habits to heart, and when he was old enough to pick out his own stuff it had to be the best. Or at least it had to look like it. His Gucci belt buckle was fake, and so were his Dior shades and Rolex with cut glass around the face, but the We R One stuff was real, as was his Helly Hansen parka and collection of Lacoste shirts and sneaks, which he wore with the tags still on. He even had a Zegna suit. Man said it was Zegna, anyway, even though the name had been tore out the jacket.

  Why spend two, three thousand on a suit when you could buy one just as good for a couple hundred in the back of someone’s shop? Why go to community college, with no guarantee of a job after you had put in all that work, when you could make money now? Same thing with Anwan, putting them on, teaching them. Okay, they had been impatient. But why wait for it to come to you in a big way? Why not walk to it? It was why he and Edwin had done their dirt.

  But even with what was about to come their way, Tavon, at that moment, felt empty. He was thinking on his mother, the way she looked at him with disappointment, the hurt on her face when she found the scale and dime bags in his room. “Didn’t I give you everything?” she’d said. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, thinking, You did.

  Tavon was sitting behind the wheel of a dark car on a dead-end street, and in his mind he was seeing his mother, his vision of her as a younger woman, singing to him softly, sitting beside his bed, telling him that he could touch the sky. All that money that was about to come his way. He should have been elated, but he was not.

  The two men opened the rear doors of the Impala and slid into the backseat.

  The man holding the shoe box was thirty-five, wiry and flat faced and cat eyed. He wore a large wooden crucifix on a beaded chain hung out over his shirt. His name was Earl Nance. The man who had slipped in behind Tavon was also in his thirties, large, stack shouldered, wearing an unfashionable fade, one gold hoop earring, and a jacket too heavy for the weather. His name was Bernard White.

  Tavon swiveled his body some and turned his head to look into the backseat. “Y’all got it?”

  “It’s right here,” said Nance, untopping the shoe box and reaching inside.

  Nance pulled a .357 S&W Combat Magnum and pointed it at Tavon’s face. Tavon said, “Mom,” and the interior of the car exploded in sound. The muzzle flash strobed Tavon’s death mask as the hollow-point round entered his cheek and exited big as a peach, blowing head stew across the dash and windshield.

  Bernard White had drawn the .380 Taurus holstered inside his jacket. In futility, Edwin Davis raised one hand to cover his face. Wilson shot him through his palm, and as Edwin screamed and turned his head, Wilson shot him in the temple. Edwin’s last breath was a long exhale. His head came to rest against the passenger window. Blood dripped into his open mouth.

  The air was heavy with smoke and the smell of gun smoke and shit. White used the barrel of the Taurus to break the dome light on the headliner.

  “Get their cells,” said White.

  Nance rat-fucked through their pockets, coughing against the stench of Tavon’s voided bowels, and found their phones. White retrieved the two shell casings that had been ejected from the .380. They used their shirttails to wipe the inner and outer handles of the Impala and everything else they thought they’d touched.

  Ten minutes later, as White drove west in the far right lane of the Benning Bridge, Nance leaned out the passenger-side window and heaved the two guns over the rail, where they dropped into the Anacostia River, sinking to the bottom to come to rest with countless other murder weapons that would never be found.

  “You didn’t need to use a cannon in that small space,” said White. “Wasn’t no need for that big gun. Seems to me you were compensating again for your lack of size.”

  “You mean overcompensating,” said Nance.

  “So you do admit it.”

  They drove for a while in silence.

  “That was easy,” said Nance.

  Bernard White said, “They fucked with men.”

  LUCAS, STANDING naked on the hardwood floor, picked up his iPhone off the nightstand. He looked at the text message from Tavon Lynch. It read, “4044.”

  “What is it?” said Constance, slick with sweat, lying on his bed.

  Lucas stared at the phone, then placed it back on the stand. “Nothing I need to worry about tonight.”

  EIGHT

  THE NEXT day, Lucas phoned and texted Tavon Lynch and Edwin Davis but got no response.

  There was nothing on his plate for the morning, so he got on his bike and hit Beach Drive north and took it out into Maryland all the way to Veirs Mill Park. The ride back was flat to a subtle downgrade. There was little road traffic and he found his zone, where it was just the motion, his feet tight in the toe clips, the chain quietly running over the teeth, a perfect, simple machine at work.

  He carried his bike up the stairs when he returned and put it on the back porch. As he often did after a good ride, he wanted a woman. Instead he did several sets of push-ups, normal and wide stance, and then did chin-ups and pull-ups on a bar mounted inside the door frame of his bedroom.

  Lucas took a shower and tried phoning Tavon and Edwin. Nothing.

  LUCAS LEARNED of the murders that evening while reading the news on the Washington Post’s website. He felt an inner chest-bump at first, seeing Tavon’s and Edwin’s names as fatal victims of a shooting. That soon passed, and he had no lasting feeling of grief beyond the too-familiar feeling of lament for young lives that had been prematurely terminated. He had willed himself to be unemotional about such events. He had witnessed too much death, and if he got stuck on it he felt he would be frozen and done.

  He phoned Tom Petersen at home to tell him that Anwan Hawkins’s two top associates had been murdered. He thought that it might have implications for Anwan’s trial and that Petersen should know. Certainly the prosecution would try to bring the murders into evidence, if only to tell the jury that Anwan Hawkins moved through a world of extreme violence connected, in some way, to his drug enterprise.

  “You are working for Anwan,” said Petersen.

  “He hired me to find something he lost.”

  “Are these murders related to that job?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” said Lucas. He suspected they were, but the qualifier took it o
ut of the realm of lie.

  “Okay,” said Petersen dubiously.

  There was a silence that was a standoff.

  Lucas said, “If you hear anything…”

  “I’ll check in with my sources,” said Petersen. “If you come across anything that might impact my client…”

  “Right,” said Lucas.

  They ended the call.

  LUCAS GOT up early the next morning and read the newspaper’s print version of the Lynch and Davis murders, which held no further details. The story made it inside Metro and had a few more inches than the usual “roundup,” due to what was described as the “execution-style” method of the crime, a coded message telling readers that the victims had probably been in the game.

  A notable decrease in violent crime in the District had made the murders of young black men and women more newsworthy than they had been in the past. Certain high-profile murders, like the recent shoot-into-the-crowd drive-by that had claimed several victims, and the killing of a DCPS principal in Montgomery County, might have left the impression that little had changed since the dark days of late-eighties Washington. The reality was that homicides were down to a forty-five-year low in the city. The implementation of community policing and more foot patrols under Chief Lanier, the closing and relocation of troubled public-housing units under former mayor Tony Williams, and a genuine shift in the culture caused in part by activist groups within the community had all contributed to the positive developments in the atmosphere and the stats. The Post continued to routinely bury the violent deaths of D.C.’s young black citizens inside the paper, telling its readership implicitly that black life was worth less than that of whites, and that policy, apparently, was never going to change. Had Tavon Lynch and Edwin Davis been raised in Bethesda or Cleveland Park, their demise would have been reported on A1. As it was, they made B2, which felt something like progress to Lucas.

  When the subject came up at the Lucas family dinner table, as it surely would, Eleni Lucas would say, “Those young men deserve the same memorial in the newspaper that anyone does,” and Spero Lucas would respond, “You’re right, Ma.” He did agree with her, but he was not a crusader, leaving those kinds of conversations to his mother and others who were more conscientious than he was.