George Pelecanos - Drama City

Nigel returned, gun in hand.

“Let’s go,” said Lorenzo.

Nigel pointed the gun at Lorenzo’s chest. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son.”

Lorenzo stood motionless. Back in the closed bedroom, Jasmine began to bark.

“Dog knows,” said Graham. “Funny how that is.”

“Dogs don’t like me nohow,” said Nigel.

“Don’t play,” said Lorenzo.

“I’m not,” said Nigel. “I’d rather see you dead than see you go back to where you were.”

“That’s a lie. You couldn’t use that on me if you wanted to, Nigel.”

“No,” said Nigel, making a head motion to Lawrence Graham. “But he could.”

Graham pushed away from the wall, stepped across the room, and took the gun from Nigel’s hand.

“He tries to follow me,” said Nigel to Graham, “you pull that trigger, hear?”

Graham nodded.

“Pull it seven times, you got to.”

Graham nodded again. His eyes smiled.

Nigel closed both toolboxes and made certain they were secure. He picked them up and headed for the door. Graham, holding the gun on Lorenzo and not taking his eyes from him, backed up and opened the door for Nigel.

“Ni gel, ” said Lorenzo.

Nigel stopped walking but did not turn his head. “What?”

“You can’t, not without me. You my boy.”

“I never was,” said Nigel. “But I’m gonna do you right this one time.”

He walked out of the apartment. Graham closed the door with his foot and pointed his chin at the sofa.

“Have a seat,” said Graham.

Lorenzo sat down on the sofa as Graham settled into the worn armchair beside it. He held the gun loosely, its barrel pointed at the hardwood floor.

“And don’t try and act like you gonna rush me, either,” said Graham.

They stared at each other and spoke no further. They listened to Jasmine barking in the other room.

Rico Miller had downloaded an electronic version of “In da Club” to his cell phone, so that the song played when someone called. Someone was calling him now. He picked the phone up off the folding table in the living-room area of his bungalow and answered. It was Deacon Taylor.

Miller listened to Deacon as he watched Melvin Lee. Lee, slouched on a sofa Miller had spotted by a Dumpster one day, held a live cigarette between his fingers. The ash was long and about to drop. Smoke hung heavy in the air, turning slowly under the light of a naked bulb.

Lee’s eyes, bugged in their sockets, had no life. His arms were thin and knotty, coming out of his shirt like twigs. Miller did not remember Melvin being so small.

Deacon talked on, smooth and precise. Miller’s eyes narrowed as he listened to his voice. When Deacon was done, Miller said, “Yeah, all right,” and hit “End” on his phone. He closed the phone’s lid and placed it back on the table.

“Deacon,” said Miller.

Lee stared straight ahead.

“He said he couldn’t get you on your cell…”

“I been had it off.”

“… so he tried mines.”

“He angry, right?”

“No. He’s actin’ real nice. Said he knew about the parole lady. I told him I had to, ’cause she was fixin’ to violate you. He said that shit was unfortunate, but it had to be done. Said he understood.”

“What else?”

“Told us to stay right here till he figures out how to put us somewhere safe.” Miller licked his lips. “‘You sit tight right where you at,’ he said, like he knew where we was.”

“What’re you sayin’, Rico?”

“Deacon be talkin’ out the side of his mouth, Melvin. He done with us. Maybe he know where we at or maybe he tryin’ to find out. Either way, he gonna send someone over here eventually. And when that someone come, he ain’t comin’ as a friend.”

Lee put his cigarette to his lips and dragged on it hard. A rope of ash dropped to his lap. He made no move to brush it away.

“We need to move,” said Miller. “Gotta lay up somewhere else.”

Lee exhaled smoke. His cigarette hand shook as he moved it down to rest on his thigh.

“You stay here and keep an eye on the front,” said Miller.

Miller walked back into the bedroom. Lee stared at the plaster wall before him, chipped and water stained, and the bedsheets covering the windows.

There ain’t no place to run to, thought Melvin Lee. Lee felt the heat of his cigarette as it burned down toward his fingers, but he made no move to put it out.

Entering his bedroom, Miller kicked aside a PS2 controller and some magazines. He stepped on a game case and crushed it, not caring, as he crossed the room. None of his possessions had ever made him happy. They had no value now.

Miller went to the closet and parted the shirts and jackets that hung on its rod. He freed the false wall, a sheet of particleboard fitted behind the clothing, and dropped it behind him. He removed his cut-down Winchester pump-action shotgun from the rack. He retrieved his Glock, his S amp;W. 38, several bricks of bullets, a box of low-recoil shotgun load, and his harness and holsters. He placed everything on his bed.

Miller went to a dresser he’d bought for twenty dollars at the Salvation Army store. On top of the dresser sat the shoe box containing the count taken from DeEric Green’s Escalade. Beside the shoe box was Miller’s knife. He’d cleaned it and secured it in its sheath. He looked at his nickname, burned from top to bottom into the leather.

Creep.

His mother was the first one to call him that. That was, when she wasn’t calling him a punk or worse. Berating him, slapping him in public at every drugstore or grocery they went to when he’d ask for an action figure or just a pack of gum. When he cried, she only slapped him harder.

“Gonna teach you not to cry,” she said. “I ain’t raisin’ no sissies.”

There was one time at this department store, around Christmas, when Rico was six or seven. He saw these ornaments, silver balls with people’s names painted on them, hung on this big old tree they had set up in the middle of the store. He was standing beside the tree, trying to find his name on one of the balls, when he saw one had Ricky on it, right in front of him. He knew it wasn’t his name exactly, but if he could take the ball with him, he believed his mother could paint over the k and the y, make them into an o somehow. Make it so it said Rico.

“There go my name, Mama,” he said, pointing happily at the tree.

“That ain’t your name.”

“Can I have it? We can make it my name when we get home.”

“Your name Creep,” she said, yanking on his hand. “And I ain’t got the time to be paintin’ over shit. You don’t need that thing no way.”

He reached for it and pulled it from the tree. The ball fell and shattered on the floor.

“Now you gonna get somethin’,” she said, slapping him so hard the store and all the Christmas lights in it began to spin. “You fuck up every goddamn thing you touch.”

He cried, and hated himself for crying, as she dragged him through the store. He couldn’t even look at his weak self in the mirror for the next few days.

That was out in public. In private, in their apartment in a rodent-infested, drug-plagued government housing project that someone had the nerve to call the Gardens, down near the Navy Yard in Southeast, his mother was worse. When she was drinking or sucking on that glass pipe, she beat him with her fists. Sometimes she whipped him with a belt. She never did beat on his little sister. Miller couldn’t step to his mother, but he found a way to wipe that grin off his sister’s face.

“My sister don’t scream when you fuck her,” he’d said to Melvin the day before this one, and Melvin had laughed.

Yes she do, thought Miller. She scream and sob, both at the same time.