George Pelecanos: Drama City

“Damn sure do.”

“Sharin’ those corners is gettin’ old,” said Deacon. “That’s a situation I’m gonna have to fix.”

“What can I do?” said Lee.

“For now, we gonna need to send Nigel a message,” said Deacon. “I can put Griff on this, you don’t feel up to it.”

Griff was Marcus Griffin, twenty-one, Deacon’s enforcer, feared even by his own. The mention of his name made Lee answer quickly.

“ I want it,” said Lee, knowing he had to step up to keep proving his self to Deacon.

“Can I help?”

It was the voice of Rico Miller, seventeen, coming from the backseat. In the rearview, Taylor saw a strange, gap-toothed smile spread on Miller’s thin, wolfish face.

Like many of Deacon’s younger people, but in a magnified way, Miller claimed to be indifferent to the prospect of an early death. He was also cunning and at times uncontrollable. Most saw Miller’s willingness to jump into any kind of fight as bravery, but Deacon saw it differently. There were those who did violent acts out of necessity, and a certain few, like Miller, who did them out of pleasure. Deacon knew that Miller had not yet acquired the maturity needed to take on a supervisory position, but he did not feel that he could hold him back. Miller had just appeared one day, seemingly out of nowhere. His promotion from lookout to tout to lieutenant had been swift. He was one of those Deacon wanted close.

“What you say, Melvin?” said Deacon. “You mind if Rico hang with you on this?”

“I don’t mind,” said Lee. “Rico a beast.”

Rico Miller clapped Melvin Lee on the shoulder.

“Sooner the better,” said Deacon. “I want Nigel to know that I’m on it.”

“We’ll do it tonight,” said Lee.

“You workin’ your paycheck job this afternoon?” said Deacon.

“I was s’posed to. But they changed up my schedule. I got to be in there tomorrow.”

“You still on paper, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So you definitely need to report to that job.”

“I always do,” said Lee.

Deacon exhaled slowly. “What you doin’ today?”

“Me and Rico, we was gonna check out a thing, east of the river.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Fat Tony say they got some dogfights in the woods.”

“Take care of this thing with Green tonight, then,” said Deacon. “Not too soft and not too hard.”

Lee said, “We will.” He tried to say it real strong. But inside him, already he was dreading what he had to do.

Rico Miller felt no such dread. Rather, he felt a familiar kind of warmth in his thighs at the thought of confronting Green. As he imagined stepping to him, he fingered the sheath in his deep pocket. In the sheath was a Ka-Bar knife with a six-inch stainless steel blade.

The sheath had the word Creep burned vertically into its leather. Rico Miller’s mother had given him the name.

Lorenzo Brown stopped by the D.C. Animal Shelter on New York Avenue to take a pee. It was a large facility that over the course of a year warehoused more than 13,000 animals, mostly stray and unleashed dogs, or those who had bitten or attacked people. These animals would eventually be reclaimed, adopted, or euthanized.

Mark Christianson, the closest thing Lorenzo had to a partner on the job, had worked at the D.C. Animal Shelter early in his career but had moved on to the Humane Law Enforcement team when the opportunity had arisen. Lorenzo and Mark did not deal with strays, lost dogs, or cats stuck in trees. The animals in the kennel at the office on Georgia Avenue were either humane holds-animals impounded due to cruelty complaints- or surrenders, which were animals simply given up, voluntarily, by their owners. Lorenzo and his fellow officers were not empowered to make physical arrests, but they could paper offenders and serve search and arrest warrants. They also worked closely with the U.S. Attorney’s office to prosecute their cases.

Lorenzo didn’t feel superior, exactly, to those who worked animal control at the shelter on New York Avenue. They looked very much like his coworkers on Georgia, do-gooders with a touch of punk rock, D.C.-style, in their eating habits, ethics, and manner of dress. But he did feel that what he was doing as a Humane Law Enforcement officer was more productive, and exciting, than the work done by others in the animal protection field.

After using the bathroom, Lorenzo headed out through the kennel, passing barking dogs, dogs wagging their tails, and dogs with their faces pressed up against the links of their cages, desperate for love and the human touch. He stopped once, to let a pointer-terrier mix named Judy press her nose to his knuckles, then went on his way. He didn’t like to linger in the kennel too long.

Near the door, he was greeted by Lisa, a compact woman with short blond spiky hair, a young shelter employee he had seen from time to time at barbecues and picnics. Lisa had started as a Humane officer but now worked in animal control. She was well-intentioned but, it was said by some of her former coworkers, unprepared for the conflicts that often flared up on the street. City people tended to be resentful of uniformed folks in general, a resentment that graduated to outright hostility when those folks were attempting to impound their dogs. There were different productive ways of handling the conflicts, but showing fear was not one of them. Mark said that Lisa once left the scene of a necessary impound without the animal when a couple of women had begun to get into her physical space and address her as a “white-ass bitch.”

“Well,” Lorenzo had said to Mark, “her ass is white, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think they meant it as, you know, a physical description,” Mark said.

“You tell me,” said Lorenzo. “I mean, you done had it, right?”

Mark had blushed then. It was common knowledge around the shelter and the Humane office that Mark and Lisa had rocked a bed. But Mark, who had come out of the straight edge thing, felt it was wrong to discuss women in “that way,” even though, as Lorenzo had pointed out to him, he liked to do them every which way.

“C’mon, Lorenzo.”

“Okay, so they were testin’ her. The woman shoulda shook that shit off. You do. Shoot, sometimes I don’t even think you hear the insults they be throwin’ at you, man.”

“I hear them,” said Mark. “But it comes with the territory. Lisa just wasn’t suited to that kind of fieldwork, is all.”

“You mean she’s got a color problem.”

“I don’t think so. She was intimidated, is all it was.”

“By bein’ around black folks.”

“By the conflicts, more likely.”

“City’s black. You afraid of black people, you ain’t got no business working out in the streets. Those women? That’s what they were tryin’ to tell her.”

“Maybe.”

“So about that ass…”

“It is white,” said Mark, one side of his mouth up in a reluctant smirk.

“Looks like it’s nice and round too,” said Lorenzo.

Lorenzo spoke briefly with Lisa, then got back in his van and put the air conditioning on high. Since he was in the area, he went through Ivy City, past horribly run-down row houses, some with plywood in their window frames. He drove on to Mount Olivet Road, the thoroughfare that bordered the Gallaudet University campus and led eventually to the Olivet Cemetery and beyond to the National Arboretum. There on the four-lane he parked along the curb and walked to a set of low-rise warehouse structures grouped across the street from a drive-through burger house and a Chinese sub shop, the ubiquitous Kenny’s. Lorenzo often wondered why so many Asians used that name. Wasn’t like it was the coolest one you could pick.

He went along the sidewalk of the warehouse that fronted the street. To the left side of the structure was a parking lot that had been converted into a holding area housing several high chain-link cages. There were no dogs in the cages today. He had warned the woman who lived in the warehouse about leaving the dogs out in the sun, especially at the height of the August heat.