D.C. Noir

by George Pelecanos

  Butchie went on to inform you that D lived alone and had even given him a key to the house. But he didn’t want to pick up the loot himself just in case the cops were there waiting for him. Plus, he wasn’t the kind of “go-hard nigga” that you were. As a matter of fact, he’d brought D into the equation because he wasn’t from the street, because he needed somebody to have his back in an always competitive and treacherous marketplace. Thus, he was willing to give you almost a third of the cash sum if you’d just go in and get it for him.

  Once again you were listening less to the plan and more to your own imagination. What would ten G’s feel like in your hand? What couldn’t you buy with that kind of dough? The possibilities were endless, and you, even with sixty-two bucks in-pocket, enough for the tickets and a little dinner, were now game on snatching this new ball of wax. Citing a prior commitment, he gave you his pager number before he headed toward the ’93 Pathfinder on the asphalt. The deal would expire at the end of the day.

  2.

  “I don’t know about this shit,” Sean had grumbled as he passed you the remains of the blunt. Babatunde and Dante were on the other couch and Fat Rodney was upstairs cooking Steak-ums in the kitchen. If you were going to do this, you weren’t doing it alone. So you got the crew together and sat them down in your mother’s basement. These were the only dudes you trusted in the whole world.

  “Me neither,” Dante added. “This shit sounds way too easy for what he’s payin’ us.”

  “But then again, this nigga sounds weak,” Baba fired back. “You know, like the kinda dude ain’t never thrown a punch in his life. If the money’s in there, we’d have it before him. Shit, if we wanted we could take it all and say ‘fuck him.’”

  “That’s what I was thinkin’,” Fat Rodney said with half a sandwich in his mouth. He was that kind of fat where his whole torso bounced with every other step. Five-foot-nine and 300 pounds at sixteen. Somebody needed to put his ass on a treadmill.

  “We got five niggas,” Rodney continued. “We go in there, get the money, and we’re out. If he come around askin’ questions, we let that nigga know who he’s dealin’ with.”

  Sean argued back that it was easier said than done, that as far as you all knew the house might not even belong to the alleged “D”. Butchie coulda been a snitch for the cops or somebody’s cousin you jumped a few weeks back at some party you can’t even remember.

  You rebutted that the cops didn’t have a reason to be after y’all. Shit, you’d never been caught, never even been arrested, never even had to talk to a cop outside of the Officer Friendlys that blew through your elementary schools all those years ago. You’d dealt with a whole lot worse for a whole lot less. So why not give it a shot?

  Dante looked nervous. Baba looked like he was already through D’s door. Sean looked like you were all about to make the biggest mistake of your young lives. And Rodney, having finished his sandwich, actually looked full. Nobody wanted to put an answer on the table. So you did it for them. You were gonna tell Butchie that you were in, but stake the place out for a few hours before you made a move.

  You paged Butchie that afternoon and he gave you a green light. It was around 3:00 when you the made the call so you all decided to waiting until after 10:00 when the block would be night and settled in. While you were waiting, Sean took the wheel of your Accord hatchback and headed over to the local arsenal, where he happened to have a running tab. He came out five minutes after he went in with a Glock 9, two snub .38s, and a .380, enough for all of you except Rodney, who “didn’t do heat.”

  As it turned out, D’s crib was the last house on the right at the bottom of Adrian, a little bungalow with a front and back yard. No basement and no alarm system, which appeared to mean that there were no problems. Texas Avenue was at the corner and Dupont Park was a block east.

  Still, you decided to go with caution. Everybody took turns for three hours. The neighbors filed in car by car. By midnight all the lights in their cribs had gone dark.

  Nobody went in or out of D’s place either. It seemed deserted, just like Butchie said it’d be. All you had to do was go in and get rich.

  Dante decided to stay in the car. Sean told him to honk the horn twice if somebody was comin’. Baba went around the back to make sure nobody was gonna sneak in from the rear. Sean was gonna stay at the front gate. You and Rodney were gonna go up the steps, turn the key, and stuff the Jansport you used for your books with more cash than you’d held in your seventeen years on the planet.

  Each step brought you closer to the prize. You were thinking of Catalina and Claiborne, of having her lips wrapped around you in the privacy of your own bedroom. You slipped Butchie’s key into the lock and it turned, putting a bigger smile on your face than Isaac from The Love Boat You turned to Rodney for some sign of approval. You looked just in time to see the buckshot take half his head off.

  It was only God that kept you from going out with him. The blast was deafening. You tripped over the porch railing and did a double-back into the bushes underneath. From what you could tell, Sean returned fire, trading blasts with your fat homeboy’s killer. Babatunde picked you up and dragged you toward the car. Next thing you knew, Dante had parked at the river. The night sky didn’t have a star in it, but you had a full clip and one in the chamber, one you wanted to use on yourself.

  Sean didn’t have a problem reminding you that he’d told you so. Dante’s hands were trembling. Baba wanted blood. You wanted a time-traveling DeLorean so you could go back and stop your boy from a closed-casket funeral. But once the shock wore off, you wanted answers.

  Who the fuck were the niggas in there and why’d they open up on you so quick? If you’d been set up, what was the reason? If it was your bad luck, then why’d Rodney have to go out? The magnitude of it made your head hurt. But you couldn’t go home. You didn’t even want to make a phone call until the source of the problem was six feet deep.

  Baba and Dante seconded the motion. Dante knew he should have covered the front with you. He was sitting in the car with a gun that could’ve saved his boy’s life. Sean felt the same way too. He just wanted you all to be careful. This was a bigger game than any of you had ever played. So you had to be smart, or you’d be as dead as Rodney.

  After debating until dawn, you all decided the only move was to reach out to Butchie, to act like shit had gone as planned and then see what move he might make. Sure there were better ways to play it, but not with a bunch of young niggas working on fear, regret, and not a minute’s worth of sleep. You paged your betrayer just after 9:00 from a pay phone on Benning Road.

  He called right back and you told him you had everything. You even mocked Scarface by saying you had “the money and the yayo.” He laughed and told you to meet him at his crib, the white house at the corner of Chaplin and Ridge. He even gave you the street number. You gave people street numbers.

  Still, you pulled up to the given spot at the designated time, your lips greasy from the bag of sausage biscuits and hash browns you’d recently devoured. Why did you have to be so fucking greedy? Now you were leading a crew of five down to four, running on nothing but revenge.

  You literally saw red when he opened the door in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and some boxer shorts. He said that you were early. You said that he was a dead motherfucker. Baba and Sean came in through an open window at the rear and you all let him have it.

  Babo and Sean took the crib. They broke the glass-framed pictures and knocked over the credenza with all of his mom’s good dishes. Then they went to work on him, while you asked the questions.

  It turned out that Butchie had been doing a little double-dealing. Just to make sure he got paid, he pitched the same offer to some dude named Rico who lived over by the fish place on Burns Street. Apparently they’d gotten there long before you did. Maybe they’d come through the back or on the side you couldn’t see so good. So they were on their way out with the goods as y’all were headed in.

  However, Butchie hadn’t heard from
them, which told you maybe they’d gotten caught by the cops, probably with the money and the weight in hand after the shoot-out. Did Rodney’s mom even know yet? Was there enough of his face left for a positive ID?

  The bloody boy was talking so fast that he could’ve been speaking in tongues. He gave you Rico’s first and last name and told you where the place was. Sean and Baba found about $1,000, a half a brick, and a pump-action sawed-off with a bunch of shells. Had you actually been thinking, you would’ve pressed him for all the money he had, cake you knew had to be stashed somewhere. But now all you wanted was Rico. Rico would close the circle so y’all could get the shirts and suits ready.

  3.

  This was no longer about what you wanted. It was about what had to be done. That’s what you told yourself in the mirror as you changed into that hot-ass hoodie, that this was the way things worked in the streets, that it was an eye for an eye and all that other shit.

  But then, for a moment, you thought about your mama, about the two jobs she worked to keep a roof over your head, about all the efforts she made to get you out of that fucked-up neighborhood school and into that pre-engineering program. You thought about all those dreams you had of getting out of Southeast someday, of being a better dad than the one you never knew. You thought about all of those things and then shook them off when you closed the door behind you.

  Dante brought his car so you could work in teams. Baba bought the walkie-talkies from the corner store on his block. You were in business. All you had to do was go to the designated crib and designate Rico’s ass—that is, if he happened to be home. Still, you hesitated when you turned your key in the ignition. It was as if you knew you’d made the wrong choice.

  Ten minute’s later Dante crackles across the radio line, asking if you’re ready. Sean’s right next to you, down to see this thing through even if he was against it from day one. You can see people moving inside of the house from the street. There will never be a moment more perfect.

  “Yeah,” you say into the plastic device. “Let’s do it.”

  You and Sean storm out of the car and rush the front, assuming your boys are doing the same at the rear. Your weapons are locked and loaded and the enemy will be caught unaware. Then you hear the fucking sirens, followed by the flood of gold and blue cruisers on both sides of the street. They’re in the alley at the back too. The whole world is one big roar of karma’s siren.

  This was going to be your first kill, your first foray into the kind of streetlife that made gangsta rap sell millions. One pull of the trigger and you and your boys would’ve moved into a whole new area code. Instead you’re in the back of a cruiser knowing that bloody Butchie crawled to the phone and made the call. Maybe he felt guilty. Or even worse, maybe he was smarter than you.

  They won’t get you for murder. Truth be told, if you rat Butchie out you might only get a year at Oak Hill. You’re only seventeen with no priors. Make it through twelve months in that place and you can still have a future, so will the others. But Rodney won’t. He’s the first casualty of a war that never got started.

  You’ll think about him for the rest of your life, never understanding how that blast didn’t take you with him. If you live long enough, you’ll try to understand how this era even existed, how so many lives were snatched away over shit as equally silly. You’ll pour out a little brew every time you have a drink and never eat a Steak-Um again. You’re lucky to be alive, player. This is the first day of the rest of your life.

  CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

  BY JIM PATTON

  Chinatown, N.W.

  Two in the morning, a steamy Saturday night in July, Sherman Brown was standing by the jukebox in the notorious Sunbeam Lounge, wondering what the hell he was doing here. With a wife, a little girl, twins coming, and no way to live anywhere near the District on a cop’s pay, the idea was to earn some nice money, short-term, for a down payment on a house in peaceful Howard County, Maryland. But still, a D.C. cop—a good cop, who liked to think of himself as a good—moonlighting as a bouncer in a dive like this? He wasn’t the first, wouldn’t be the last, but—

  A gunshot. Marvin Gaye was wailing from the jukebox, a dozen or so brothers were whooping as the girl onstage humped the pole, but Sherman knew he’d heard a shot. A Metro cop heard plenty of them. Anyone who grew up in a project like Barry Farms had heard plenty. This one came from in back, the other side of the plain brown door Sherman had never passed through.

  Tyrone, behind the bar, heard it. So did Antwain, the whale, who’d been up near the stage ogling the girl and stood there now with his mouth hanging open. Some of the brothers had heard it—they were getting up from their tables and streaming out. The girl stopped humping the pole.

  LaPhonso, the boss, wasn’t around. He’d been in and out as always—keeping an eye on things, going in back with one of the girls for a while, stepping outside to get high or do some kind of business.

  Sherman crossed to Tyrone at the bar—Antwain right beside him, all 300 pounds. “Where’s LaPhonso?”

  “Ain’t seen him in a while,” Tyrone said.

  “You got a key so I can check it out? Or you want to check it?”

  Antwain butted in—“Naw, man. You the law. You gettin paid. Go on.”

  Sherman eyeballed him. He never liked mouth from a punk, 300 pounds or not.

  “Go on. The Man ain’t here,” Antwain said, “and when he ain’t here, I’m The Man.” He told Tyrone, “Give him the key, dawg.”

  Tyrone handed it over.

  “Go, boy,” Antwain said.

  Sherman wanted to hurt him—this whale, this punk, calling Sherman Brown boy. But not now. He turned and headed toward the anonymous door. He heard Antwain right behind him, the labored breathing.

  The door opened to a dim hallway. Approaching the first door on the left, Sherman reached for the Glock 17 holstered under his shirt at the small of his back. In the room he found crackhead Donita, one of the strippers, blowing a cornrowed brother called Junebug. They hadn’t heard anything, or didn’t care.

  In the next room a short, stocky guy called Cannonball was humping the new girl called Golden. No sign of any shooting here. Sherman pulled the door shut and went back the other way, Antwain close behind him, wheezing.

  In the first room at the other end, a girl he’d never seen was on the bed clutching the sheet up under her chin, scared, as if she’d seen or at least heard something—a white girl, dark hair, foreign-looking. Sherman had heard about foreign girls back here who never appeared out front.

  “You all right?”

  “Ho-kay. Ho-kay,” she said, nodding furiously. Foreign, definitely. Sherman wasn’t sure she understood him.

  Approaching the last door, he heard someone rattling the knob from inside, then working a key in the lock. Had to be LaPhonso.

  “Yo, LaPhonz!”

  Quiet, then. The key no longer working the lock.

  “Boss!” (What LaPhonso liked to be called, though Sherman could rarely bring himself to say it.)

  Nothing.

  “Whoever you are! I got my piece and I’m coming in!”

  He turned his key in the lock and opened the door a crack. There was someone there. A girl—a pale shoulder, an arm, part of a slip or negligee.

  She backed up, whoever she was. “Sorry!” She too had some kind of accent, and sounded shaken.

  The cordite smell told Sherman the shot had been fired in here. He raised his Glock and eased the door open with his left foot. “What’s going on? You got a gun in here?”

  The girl stared at him, wide-eyed. Behind her was a king bed and a pile of clothes on the floor—sandals, denim shorts, purple polka-dot boxers, and a wad that looked like the wife-beater T-shirt LaPhonso had been wearing tonight.

  The girl pointed off to her right. Sherman, unable to see over there from the hallway, eased into the room.

  There was a gun on the floor, probably a .38, near a closed door. Sherman picked it up, jammed it in his waist-band and turned t
o the girl. “What happened?”

  She stared with the wide eyes, didn’t say anything.

  “Who’s in there?” Sherman said.

  “Who where, man?”—Antwain, out in the hall.

  Sherman went to the closed door and pushed it open. It was a little bathroom, nothing but an old toilet and sink—and The Man, LaPhonso Peete, sprawled on the floor, dead as a flat rat. Brain matter all over the wall behind the toilet, blood pooling under his head.

  “What the fuck?”—Antwain right behind Sherman now. “Bitch!”

  “Chill, man,” Sherman said.

  “Who you tellin chill, boy? Bitch kilt my nigga! You dead bitch. Gimme that,” he told Sherman, meaning the Glock.

  Sherman wasn’t about to.

  Antwain glared. “You gonna take her out, then.”

  Out of his mind.

  “You hear me, nigga? You been gettin fat here. You wanna keep that cabbage rollin in? You take this bitch out, I get ridda this here”—jerking a thumb toward LaPhonso’s corpse, an inconvenience—“and we back to normal tomorra, nobody know nothin.”

  Sherman shook his head. It couldn’t work. Besides, he was a police officer and this was a murder, even if LaPhonso had been nothing but a piece of garbage.

  Yeah, you gonna do her,” Antwain said. “Then she ain’t tell nothin bout our business. Do her or we gonna do yo ass.”

  Sherman looked over at the girl in her slip—pale and thin, but with a pretty face and something in her eyes.

  “All right, then,” he told Antwain, and told the girl, “Come on. Get some clothes on.”

  A few minutes later he had her out in his old Cutlass. Now what? Antwain wouldn’t believe he’d blown her away unless there was proof. He’d want to see the body.