S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  To Lou, it felt like he, the bandit, and the store manager were the only people in the store. Lou kept his gun pointed at the bandit for what seemed like a half hour. In reality, it was three, maybe four minutes. The gunman menacing the manager suddenly turned his head toward Lou.

  “What should I do?”

  “If I were you, I’d call 911 and talk to the police,” Lou said.

  To his astonished relief, the bandit lowered his shotgun, walked behind a service counter, and picked up the phone. He was patched through to a police commander in the parking lot.

  Minutes later, both gunmen dropped their weapons and walked out of the store with their hands in the air.

  Later that night, in the police station, Lou walked up to the bandit he’d almost shot. The man was sitting in a holding area, handcuffed.

  “Do you realize how close I came to killing you?” Lou said.

  “Who the hell are you? You’re too young to be a roller.”

  Lou brushed his coat aside and showed the badge and gun clipped to his belt.

  “Goddamn, you are a roller!” the man exclaimed.

  By the early eighties, Lou was working as a homicide detective, discovering that he liked jumping into investigations, gathering evidence, and figuring out ways to coax—or leverage—witnesses to talk. Lou took the sergeant’s exam when he was thirty. He aced it. Same with the exams for lieutenant and captain. In a span of three years, he rose from officer to captain.

  At thirty-three, he was young for a captain—and he figured he had maxed out. Tests determined promotions up to that rank; all promotions beyond it were political, approved by the mayor. Barry was known to favor certain high-ranking commanders, who in turn looked out for other white shirts in their clique. Lou never joined a faction and didn’t put any energy into departmental politics—he was all about being the po-lice, enforcing the law and keeping the peace. Being part of the clique meant telling his chief whatever he wanted to hear, and Lou wasn’t wired like that.

  Beyond that, Lou believed, the city’s political system for police appointments wasn’t helping matters on the street. People in dozens of neighborhoods overrun by drug dealing and violence pressured elected officials for relief. The pols leaned on the police brass. The white shirts responded with a series of highly publicized sweeps, arresting dozens of street dealers at a time. These operations got great play on the TV news shows, local residents felt grateful, and the Metropolitan Police Department bumped up its arrest statistics. MPD made some forty thousand arrests between 1986 and 1988, in Operation Clean Sweep, which focused on street dealers and buyers.

  But a day or two after police made arrests, the street dealers were either back out or replaced by other slingers. The buyers lined up again. The police department didn’t even bother to interview arrestees to try to compile intelligence on the serious players. The real dealers and enforcers weren’t on the street making retail sales, so the sweeps didn’t touch them. MPD was going after garden snakes and ignoring the cobras and pythons.

  Not only did the sweeps have no lasting impact, they were actually counterproductive, Lou thought. They made the police look like ineffectual amateurs.

  In the city’s most violent neighborhoods, detectives heard the same names over and over in the wake of a shooting. The fact that there were more than four hundred homicides in the city didn’t mean that there were four hundred killers. There were a relative handful of shooters—two, maybe three dozen—killing a lot of people, Lou believed. They tended to operate in specific neighborhoods, where everybody knew who they were. Most killings weren’t whodunits. The challenge was getting frightened witnesses to testify.

  Lou had given the problem a lot of thought. He’d developed a plan for how to go after the most violent players in the city.

  All he needed was a chance to put it into action.

  Six days after Barry flipped the bird, I began my first Saturday in town with some pickup hoops at the downtown YMCA. Then I settled down to watch a college football game. After a couple of beers, I upgraded to gin and tonics. Three drinks later, I was happily drunk.

  I was in no condition to drive. But in L.A. I’d gotten behind the wheel dozens of times while hammered and had never been pulled over. It was a warm, sunny September day. I wanted to explore my new neighborhood, my new city. What harm could come of that?

  My street was dominated by Victorian row houses. There was an old four-story apartment building at the far end of the block, directly across the street from a church. I drove a block past the apartment building and the church and turned right, toward downtown.

  I’d gone exactly three blocks when I saw her. She was standing on the corner of 13th and M Streets Northwest, near a liquor store. Her brown eyes followed each passing car. She was trying to make eye contact with motorists.

  The woman was petite, with curly, dark brown hair and fair, freckled skin. She wore a calf-length black skirt, a short-sleeve blouse, and flats. She held a small black handbag. I guessed her to be about my age, in her late twenties.

  She was working the street, trying to be subtle, and mostly pulling it off. The woman was pretty, but not TV-ingenue gorgeous, like Raven. She looked like someone I’d feel comfortable approaching at a party after one or three drinks.

  If I’d been sober, I might have kept driving, but the beer and gin had drowned my better judgment. There’d be no harm in talking to her, I figured. I pulled over to the curb, leaned over, and rolled down my passenger-side window.

  “Hi!” she chirped. “You want some company?”

  Her invitation unleashed a little jolt of adrenaline, the kind I’d felt whenever I’d pulled up to the curb on Raven’s street. The rush of getting high began with making the buy, and making the buy usually started with finding the girl to cop the rock.

  I glanced at the street in front of me and checked the rearview mirror. Traffic was light. There were no cops in sight. The thought just popped into my head: Why not?

  “Sure,” I replied as I reached over and opened the passenger door.

  The woman swiveled her head, taking a quick look down both ends of the street, then settled into my car.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Champagne.”

  Maybe it was her obvious street name. It could have been junkie intuition. Real estate certainly had something to do with it. Though we were only two blocks from the shiny office buildings and upscale hotels of downtown, we were in a neighborhood full of liquor stores and rundown apartment buildings, its streets populated by junkies, winos, and strawberries. I’d chosen my apartment because it was just five blocks from the main offices of the Post, but I think part of me was drawn to the inherent drama of the whole area.

  Whatever the reason, as soon as Champagne was in my car, I just knew. It had been eleven long days since my last hit, and in that moment, some internal switch was flipped.

  “So,” I said. “Do you party?”

  Champagne knew exactly what I meant. She opened her handbag and held it over the gearshift so I could see inside. The bag contained a nail file, a handful of condoms, a small mirror, a lighter, a six-inch strand of hanger wire, and a crack pipe.

  Aces. I checked the rearview again. All clear.

  “If I buy a rock for you, and one for me, would you do me while I’m hitting the pipe?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you holding?”

  “No, but I know where to go. It’s close by. I can get us two for thirty-five.”

  One more party wouldn’t hurt. “You navigate.”

  Champagne directed me two blocks north, to Logan Circle. She had me bear right, onto Rhode Island Avenue, toward the east. We passed people engaged in ordinary Saturday-afternoon activities: a group of kids playing basketball on the outdoor court of a middle school, a handful of old people passing the time in chairs outside their building, a woman carrying a bag of groceries. They hardly looked like the residents of a city under siege from crack violence.

  At
7th Street Northwest, Champagne had me turn left. Two blocks later, we hit the corner of 7th and S.

  “Turn right here and park,” she said.

  I pulled up directly in front of a squat concrete building with a small sign that read JOHN’S PLACE. A nightclub. I killed the engine and gaped.

  In front of us, a half-dozen or so sullen young men and teenagers in wifebeaters or tees and sagging shorts or blue jeans loitered in the shade of a tree in front of a row house. Across the street, an equal number of slingers leaned against a rusty railing in front of an abandoned bakery.

  The two-story brick building was huge. The front spanned about thirty yards, and it looked to be more than fifty yards deep. Two sets of front doors were padlocked, and the windows were covered with plywood. Near the top of the facade, plastic letters spelled WONDER BREAD and HOSTES CAKE, a space where the second S in HOSTESS had once been. I wondered whether some young gunslinger had knocked it off during target practice.

  The building seemed like some kind of giant, urban ghost ship.

  My eyes flickered to the right, to our side of the street. A brick row house stood next to John’s Place, then an alley, followed by four modest two-story houses.

  In the middle of the block stood a large brick Victorian with circular bay windows and a large turret on top. It looked like a small castle. The lush front yard was filled with boxwoods, a rosebush, and daisies, all shaded by a large sycamore. The yard was set off from the sidewalk by a short, black iron fence. A small sign near the front door read NEW COMMUNITY CHURCH. A church? Here? In the middle of a crack zone?

  To my right, just past John’s Place, a thin man flipped burgers on a grill in the small front yard of his home, seemingly unconcerned about the brazen drug dealers working the block. The aroma of barbecue wafted into the car.

  Within five seconds, the slingers on both sides of the street spotted Champagne and sprang to life. Their eyes lit up as they raced toward my car. Yeah, she was known on the block. I watched them close in with a combination of anticipation and horror. I imagined a team of plainclothes cops swooping in, guns drawn, as Champagne exchanged crack for cash from the passenger seat.

  “The money?” Champagne asked, calm as Sunday morning.

  “Not in the car,” I said, my voice tense. I knew that some cities could confiscate the vehicles of motorists busted for drug buys made from a car. I wasn’t sure if D.C. was one of them. “Do you mind getting out?”

  Champagne shrugged. “Fine.”

  I handed her the cash. The street dealers surged toward her. I checked the rearview once more.

  As soon as her feet hit the sidewalk, Champagne was surrounded by a dozen slingers. I figured she’d lead them into the nearby alley, on the side of John’s Place, out of plain sight. I figured wrong. Champagne stayed put as the dealers formed a tight circle around her. They reached into their pockets, then held out their palms, displaying their products. Calmly, as casually as if she were inspecting fruit at a farmers’ market, Champagne considered her options. I watched in anxious awe.

  In Los Angeles, the Latino-gangster slingers in MacArthur Park and in Raven’s neighborhood at least looked over their shoulders for cops during drug deals. Here we were, barely two miles from the White House, and neither Champagne nor the dealers were breaking a sweat.

  In fact, Champagne looked bored. After what felt like a small eternity, she nodded toward one slinger and made the buy. The crack dealers retreated to their territory like football players jogging to the sideline after being removed from the game. Champagne strolled back to my car. I checked the far end of the street. Still no cops.

  “How’d you do?” I said.

  “See for yourself.”

  She opened her palm, displaying two healthy-sized chunks of rock in separate plastic baggies. Goose bumps erupted on my arms and neck.

  “Nice job,” I said.

  I turned on the ignition, shifted into drive, and cruised past the guy barbecuing on his front lawn, the slingers, the bakery, and the church that looked like a castle.

  We reached the end of the block. As I hung a right to head back to my apartment, I joked, “I guess these guys haven’t heard about the war on drugs.”

  A quizzical expression crossed Champagne’s face. “Huh?”

  At my place, we sat on the edge of my bed and got right to it. Without a word, she cut her rock in half, loaded it into her pipe, lit up, and inhaled.

  “Shotgun?” I asked. Champagne nodded. We leaned toward each other and she exhaled a blast of crack smoke into my mouth. The hit made me light-headed. I motioned for the pipe and lighter. She handed them to me.

  “You’ll do me while I do my rock, right?” Champagne reached into her handbag, brought out a condom, and broke open the wrapper.

  “Ready when you are,” she said. The rock was good. Champagne was good. Together, the rock and Champagne were great.

  Before she left, Champagne grabbed a piece of scrap paper and a pen from my nightstand and scribbled her name and a series of digits.

  “That’s my pager number,” she said. “Call me whenever.”

  Remorse kicked in as soon as she walked out the door. I padded to the bathroom and stared at my guilty-looking face in the mirror. In less than forty-eight hours, I’d be starting my job as a crime reporter at the Washington Post. What the hell was I thinking?

  In disgust, I grabbed the paper with Champagne’s number, rolled it into a ball, and fired it into a wastebasket. I downed a frozen dinner with a beer, vowed to stay away from Champagne and S Street, and went to bed.

  The next morning, I stirred awake as slivers of sunlight angled through the blinds of my bedroom. My apartment was ten feet above street level. A rickety wooden porch ascended from the sidewalk to my door. I opened the door, stepped outside, and, for the first time, picked up the Sunday edition of the Post. The street was dead quiet. On the other side of the block, a middle-aged couple in their Sunday best walked toward the church at the far end of the street. Birds chirped.

  I dumped milk, a banana, and some peanut butter into a blender, then reconsidered the previous night.

  Champagne had been fun. She didn’t dress like a hooker, so she wouldn’t draw undue attention from my neighbors. She was willing to assume all the risk of copping. She held the money. She made the buy. She carried the rocks until we got to my place.

  If I happened to be on S Street when the cops swooped in—if they ever did—well, there was no law against giving someone a ride. The police would know why I was there, but they’d never be able to prove it. The cops might detain me for questioning, and I might suffer some embarrassment. But so long as I wasn’t charged with a crime, my bosses at the Post were unlikely to find out about my tawdry activities. There would be no harm, no foul. And thirty-five bucks for a rock and a blow job was a pretty sweet deal.

  I stepped into the bedroom and retrieved the balled-up sheet of paper with Champagne’s pager number. I carefully opened it, smoothed it out, and slipped it into my sock drawer.

  If the slingers were working that brazenly in the middle of the day, S Street must be an around-the-clock operation. It was a five-minute drive from my apartment. Champagne was clearly connected. I was about to get a nice pay bump courtesy of the Post.

  I couldn’t see a downside.

  Chapter 3

  “This Must Be Where God Needs Us”

  On a gray, frigid day, pastor Jim Dickerson and demolition man Claude Artis inspected a small wood-frame house on S Street Northwest. The structure stood a few feet from a four-story Victorian that Jim and his humble congregation, a dozen strong, hoped would become their spiritual home, the place they would gather for Sunday services.

  It was January 1984. Cops had shooed away the heroin junkies, squatters, hookers, and hustlers who’d made the big brick house at 614 S their own for years. The building would need to be thoroughly cleaned and renovated before it would be of any use as a church. But first, Jim and Claude had to deal with the smaller house, whi
ch was also part of the property—and looked as if it might fall over in the first decent breeze.

  Jim and Claude crunched their boots over the remnants of a recent snowfall as they circled the sad little building. The front door and windows were long gone. The framing was rotting. The roof looked like two big slabs of Swiss cheese. The whole sorry thing was leaning hard to one side.

  Fifteen or so drug dealers were working the other side of the street, near the not-yet-derelict Hostess bakery. Delivery trucks lurched out of the huge building every twenty minutes or so. The inviting smell of freshly baked bread, muffins, and cakes filled the winter air. A couple of the slingers wandered over to a fire burning inside a rusty metal trash can on an empty lot directly across the street from the old wooden house.

  The drug dealers eyeballed Jim, Claude, and the demolition man’s crew. Claude hired laborers off the street. Some of them were friends with some of the slingers. Some bought drugs from them.

  Claude studied the house. He was compact and muscular, with a thick neck and arms and shoulders that could have belonged to a middleweight boxer. Claude looked like someone who could handle himself in a brawl.

  “This bad boy’s done,” he said. “It can’t be saved. I best blow it up.”

  Jim nodded in agreement. “I’m afraid you’re right. This structure’s not worth saving. We’re better off knocking it down.”

  A tall and lean forty-year-old, Jim wore wire-rim glasses and a beard. He was bald on top, with a fringe of brown hair that ran from ear to ear. He looked like he’d be at home in a college lecture hall.

  The slingers who’d gathered near the fire leaned toward one another and exchanged whispers. They threw hard looks at Jim and Claude.

  Silently, independently, Jim and Claude came to the same unnerving conclusion: The dope boys were using this little house to hide their stashes of heroin, methamphetamine, and Dilaudid. Now here they were, fixing to blow it up.

  Jim rubbed the back of his neck. This was grief he didn’t need. The minister looked at Claude. The two men were good friends. Jim asked Claude what they should do. The demo man pivoted toward the dope boys and said, “Come with me, reverend.”