Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

This was her apartment, raised her children here, the boy in Rudyard, two boys, Ordell thinks, and some bitch, a silly pipehead selling what she can out on the street. In the pen, the boys come to Jesus and busted out, quit B S D. So Ordell's set moved in here. The old woman was tough. 'You-all go on, shoot and kill me, do whatever you-all like, I ain movin out, this here's my house, I ain givin my house to no bunch of silly-ass hoodlums.'

T-Roc, one of B S D's two heads, Vice-Lord he called – T-Roc told Hardcore straight up, 'Do just like she say, man, fade her.' Hardcore, he put in work for his, done whatever for BSD, be a bar-none Saint and all, but he don't fall to cappin no old lady. He decided leave her stay.

'And I ain gone have no dope-peddlin or whorin or any other gangbanger whatnot in here neither,' she'd said to Ordell.

'We ain doin nothin,' he told her.

'Hmm,' she said.

Now she sleeps. Just then, 6:15 like they been sayin, he sees the ride, some shitbox Chevy a hundred years old, bend the corner on the street far below. Now, Ordell thinks, now we gone tear some shit up. He has field glasses but he can see well enough. Bug, just folding the flip-phone back into her jacket, approaches the car. Then she retreats a distance, as she's supposed to do. The cell phone in his pocket makes a throaty sound.

'Yo,' he answers. "‘I's up, cuz?'

'Ten-two,' Lovinia says. They use radio code, mix it up, make them Tic-Tacs crazy. 'Ten-two' means trouble. Need help. 'You hear?' she adds. That Lovinia. Don't never have no respect.

'Stall out, bitch, I hear. And I don't see no damn ten-two.' On the broad avenue, on Grace Street, there is nothing, cars, white folks driving by fast. Not even foot trade. ‘I ain't seed nothin. You standin still, bitch, and you best be hittin the wall, man.'

'Ain to see, not from where you is, and I ain talkin on this punk-ass telephone neither. Ten. Two.' She's gone with that.

Setup, he thinks, as he often thinks. Bug – as Lovinia is known – damn Bug be settin him up. Kan-el, T-Roc, one them, maybe them Goobers – as the Saints call the Gangster Outlaws – one them switched her somehow. He ponders Kan-el and T-Roc, Commandant and Vice-Lord of B S D. They on top, man, but they all the time trippin and shit, worryin is Hardcore on this power thang, man, he gone bust his whole set right out the gang or what? And him running eight zones into the jail every week, so BSD down for theirs, catch his black booty he be gone for-ever. Set him up. 'Mmm.' He grunts aloud at the thought of it.

But he's on his way. He has a 9-millimeter pistol stored behind the iron grating of the air return and he tucks it in his belt and lets his black silk shirt hang out of his trousers. In the elevator he continues rumbling with his angry thoughts, speaking to himself and wondering if he should have shouted out for Honcho, some of them. Scared, he thinks, scared is what he is and old enough to know it. All them youngsters always puttin down that shit, 'Cain't no nigger fade me,' shit like that, make him laugh. You always scared. Get used to it is all. Gotta be is gotta be.

He has three sons. Dormane – Hardball he called – got two kids of his own, he inside, doing fifteen no-parole on some fool buy-bust, and Rakleed is on these streets, too, and the little one. Del, still too young to know too much of nothing. They mommas, each of them, behind Ordell's back, told those boys the same. 'Don't you be no dope peddler now, don't you be slangin and hangin and bangin, I'll be whompin you backside, you ain never gone be too big for me do you like that.' That's what they sayin. In his own time, Ordell gave each of these boys his answer: 'You got to be somebody. They's bad shit here. With them bad coppers – bad motherfuckers everywhere here. But, man,' he said, 'man, this here what you-all's – you with the people here, you giving them what these poor niggers need, some nickel's worth of happiness white folks and all don't want them havin.'

Walking from the IV Tower, the first stirrings of the day, music and voices, from some windows, wondering is he really gone get himself gauged, Hardcore thinks, as he often does, about his sons. He walks past one of the newer buildings, where the concrete corner has parted, revealing a cheap core of pink foam. In a nearby play area, only one seesaw remains, and on that both seats were long ago shattered by some teen in a random outbreak of destructive will. A milky-eyed drunk is teetering down the block, slept it off somewhere and now looking for home. He has a tatty overcoat and his hat askew, a face of white whiskers, and when he sees Hardcore, he wants to move, get out the way, man, and his legs can't let him. Funny. Hardcore calls him 'Man' as he passes by.

They got they needs, he thinks, wishing he'd told his boys that, too. 'Everybody on these streets, man, these motherfuckers out here is just completely crazy with what they need. This gal she need her check, and this momma be needin to hold her baby, and that old cat need his fix.' Needing. He sometimes thinks he doesn't walk on pavement – he is just moving on top of what everybody needs.

He crosses the boulevard, Grace Street, and starts down Lawrence, a block of ruined three-story apartment buildings, stout as battlements, with flat tarred roofs and limestone blocks placed decoratively amid the dark bricks and as a border above the doorways and at the cornices. The windows are gone in some, boarded up. A raised garden area of railroad ties sits under the windows of 338, the dirt desert dry, even the weeds struggling to survive.

'Yo,' Lovinia calls, emerging like a cat from one of her hiding places. This Lovinia, he thinks. God, look-it here at this scrawny bitch, motherfucker are you gone believe it? With this fuzzball stocking cap dragged down over her whole damn head and this grey coat and twill pants. Don't want nobody comin up on her to know she a bitch is what it is, figure they'll shoot her ass or molest her ass or somethin. They better not try neither, she ain't strapped – armed – she know better than that for when Tic-Tac come by, but you bet she got it near here, under the mailbox, or in a hole in one them trees, you mess with her, she gone smoke you ass. Word up. T-Roc, he think Hardcore stone crazy using Bug, but she sharp. She strut up to the cars, she change her whole routine now, she sort of swingin it a lot. 'What you like, man?' Make them say. Anybody she take for Tic-Tac, narco, when they say 'Dope,' she just go, 'Oh, man, I ain sellin dope, man, I got somethin sweeter 'n that, man,’ like she thinkin they was here to bone.

Now she points to the white Nova at the curb, a hundred feet away. ‘I done told her, "Lady, you in the wrong place." ' 'Lady? What kind of motherfuckin lady?'

Tol' you now, ten-two. He ain come. She come. She be lookin for Or Dell.' Bug smiles then, toward the walk. Lovinia, just a kid and all – fifteen – she love to play.

'Lady,' Hardcore repeats a few more times. Damn. He advances on the car. 'Lady, this the wrong place for you.' Leaning into the darkness of the car, he catches some of her soapy smell and the humid sour scent of his own overheated breath. 'You best get out here fast.'

'Mr Trent? I'm June Eddgar.' She extends her hand, and then laboriously leaves the car to stand in the bluish morning light. Old. She be fat, too, big and fat. Some kind of hippie or farmer or some such, and her thighs all mashed together in her jeans. She have a plain face and some long lightish brown kinda hair going to grey, kind of lopsided and knit together like it ain't really combed. 'I thought we could talk a minute.'

'Lady, they ain nothin for you and me to talk about.'

'Well, I thought – I'm Nile's mother.'

'Told him get hisself here. Didn't tell him send nobody's momma.'