George Pelecanos - Right as Rain

'You tell me,' said Quinn.

'Ever hear of Cherokee Coleman?'

'Yeah, I've heard of him. Like every cop and most of the citizens in D.C. What do you know about him?'

'Coleman played guard for the Green Wave over at Spingarn. He came out in eighty-nine. He could go to the hole, but he didn't have the height and his game wasn't complete, so college wasn't in the picture. Rose up in the ranks down here real quick after committing a couple of brazen murders they couldn't manage to pin on him. So the high school that gave the world Elgin Baylor and Dave Bing also gave us one of the most murderous drug dealers this town's ever seen.'

'I read this interview the Post did with some of the kids over in LeDroit Park. They talk about Coleman like he's some kind of hero.'

'He employs more of their older brothers and cousins than McDonald's does in this city, man.'

'Cherokee,' said Quinn, side-glancing Strange. 'Why do so many light-skinned black guys claim they got Indian blood in 'em, Derek? I always wondered that.'

"Cause they don't want to admit they're carrying white blood, I expect.' Strange lowered the camera. 'Coleman works out of this area right here.'

'Everybody knows it, and it keeps goin' on.'

'Because he's smart. Drugs don't ever touch his hands, so how they gonna bust him, man? You see those boys out there on that street? All of 'em got a separate function. You got the steerers leading the customers to the pitchers, making the hand-to-hand transactions. And then there's the lookouts, and the moneymen who handle the cash. The ones just gettin' into the business, always the youngest, they're the ones who touch the heroin and the rock and the cocaine. And even they don't carry it on 'em. You look real close, you see they're always nearby a place where you can hide a crack vial or a dime in a magnetic key case or in a space cut in a wall. And they're always close to an escape route where they can get out quick on foot: an alley or a hole in a fence.

'Once in a while the MPD will come through here and run a big bust. And it doesn't do a goddamn thing. You can bust these kids, see, and you can bust the users, but so what? The kids serve no time on the first couple of arrests, especially if there's no quantity to speak of. The users get a night in jail, if that much, and do community service. And the kingpins go untouched.'

'You sayin' that Coleman'll never do hard time?'

'He'll do it. The Feds'll get him on tax evasion, the way they get most of 'em in the end. Or one of his own will turn him for an old murder beef on a plea. Either way, eventually he'll go down. But not until he's fucked up a whole lot of lives.'

Quinn nodded toward the warehouse, where addicts were walking slowly in and out of large holes hammered out of brick walls. A rat scurried over a hill of dirt, unafraid of the daylight or the humans shuffling by.

'There's where they go to slam it,' said Quinn.

'Uh-huh. I bet a whole lot of junkies be livin' in there, too.'

Quinn said, 'What about Kane?'

'Yeah, what about our boy Ricky Kane, huh? You ask me right now, I'd say he's makin' a pickup. I'd say he was takin' orders back there from the staffs of those restaurants and bars. What do you think?'

'I was thinkin' the same way.'

Kane came out of the row house. He crossed the street quickly and headed in the direction of the warehouse structure.

'Fuck's he doin' now?' said Strange, looking through the lens of the camera and snapping off two more shots.

'Derek,' said Quinn.

Kane ducked inside one of the large holes that had been opened in the warehouse walls.

'We can't be hangin' out here too long, Derek. We can't wait for Kane to come back out.'

'I know it. One of Coleman's boys is gonna burn us soon for sure, and that cop, wherever he is, he's gotta be getting back to his car.'

'Let's take off. We've got enough for today.'

'Get me to within a block of that cruiser, man, then book right.'

Quinn pushed the Hurst shifter into first gear, worked the clutch, and caught rubber coming off the curb. He slammed the shifter into second. A couple of the boys on the corner turned their heads, and one of them began to yell in the direction of the car. Strange got himself halfway out the window and sat on the lip, his elbows on the roof of the car. He took several photographs of the police cruiser, shooting over the roof, and got back into the car just as Quinn cut a sharp right at the next side street. In the rearview, Quinn saw one of the boys chasing them on foot.

'God damn, Terry. I tell you to make all that noise? You must have left an inch of tread on the asphalt.'

'I'm not used to the car yet.'

'Yeah, well, we can't bring it down here again.'

'Why, we comin' back?'

'I am,' said Strange, sitting back in the seat and letting the cold wind blow against his face. 'There's more to learn, back there on that street.'

Quinn woke up on Tuesday morning in the bedroom of his apartment and sat up on the edge of his mattress, which lay directly on the floor. There was a footlocker in his room and a nightstand he had bought at a consignment shop, with a lamp and an alarm clock on the nightstand and four or five paperback westerns stacked beside the clock. There were no pictures or posters of any kind on the bedroom walls.

Quinn rubbed his temples. He had downed a couple of beers at the Quarry House the night before, then walked by Rosita's, but Juana was not on shift. He went down to his apartment on Sligo Avenue, phoned her and left a message on her machine, and waited a while for her to call him back. But she did not call him back, and he left the apartment and walked down the street to the Tradesmen's Tavern, where he shot a game of pool and drank two more bottles of Budweiser, then returned to his place. Juana had not phoned.

Quinn made coffee and toast in his narrow kitchen, then changed into sweats and went down to the basement of the apartment building, where he had set up a weight bench and a mirror and mats, and had hung a jump rope on a nail driven into the cinder-block wall. The resident manager had allowed him this space if he agreed to share the exercise equipment with the other tenants. A handful of black kids and a Spanish or two from nearby apartment buildings found out about the basement and occasionally worked out with Quinn. He often helped them, if they were not the kind of boys with smart mouths and attitudes, and sometimes he even learned their names. Mostly, though, he worked out down here alone.

After his shower, Quinn went to the bottom drawer of his dresser and retrieved the nine-millimeter Glock he had purchased several months earlier after a conversation with a man at the bar of a local tavern off Georgia. He took the gun apart and used his Alsa kit to clean it, then reassembled the weapon. He had no logical reason to own the Glock, he knew. But he had felt naked and incomplete since he'd turned in his service weapon when he left the force. Cops got used to having guns, and he felt good knowing there was one within reach now. He replaced the Glock in its case, which sat alongside a gun belt he had purchased at a supply house in Springfield, over the river.

He watched a little television but quickly turned it off. Quinn phoned Strange at the office and got Janine.

'He's out, Terry.'

'Can you beep him?'

'Sure, I'll try. But he might be into something, you know, where he can't get back to me right away.'

Quinn heard something false and a bit of regret in Janine's voice.

'Let him know I'm looking for him, Janine. Thanks a lot.'

Quinn got off the phone. Juana had been avoiding him since Saturday night. Now it seemed like Strange was ducking him, too.

Strange stood before Janine's desk.