George Pelecanos - DC Noir

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.

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 to 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.”