George Pelecanos - Soul Circus

“I hear you can play.”

“You know I can.”

“We’re gonna start the camp in August. Now, all the boys who play for me, they need to show me their last report card from the school year. So I want you to finish up strong.”

“I’ll do all right. But how I’m gonna get over there to where y’all practice?”

“I’ll work that out,” said Strange, realizing that he hadn’t figured it out yet. But he would. “All right then, why don’t you get on home before it gets dark.”

“I will, in a little while.”

“Take care of yourself, young man.”

Gray wheeled off on his bike and joined his friends. Strange got back in his car.

Strange phoned Quinn from his cell as he drove across Anacostia. Quinn told him that he was outside the address given on Olivia Elliot, and he was getting ready to confirm. He asked Strange for the son’s name. Strange gave it to him and told Quinn that if he needed him he could reach him at Janine’s house, which he had not yet gotten used to calling home.

Strange was looking forward to holding his woman and talking to his stepson, sitting at the dinner table, just being with the ones he loved. Seeing the things he saw out here every day, he figured he deserved a couple of hours of that kind of peace.

He turned the radio on and moved the dial to PGC. The Super Funk Regulator was on the air, talking to a woman who had called in from her car.

“Where you at right now?” asked the DJ.

“I’m on Benning Road, headed home from work.”

“Who you goin’ to see?”

“My son Darius,” said the woman giggling, obviously hyped to be on the radio and live. “He’s ten years old.”

“You have a good one,” said the DJ. “Thanks for rollin’ with a brother.”

“Thanks for lettin’ a sister roll.”

Strange smiled. He did love D.C.

IT was Terry Quinn’s habit to keep a paperback western on the car seat beside him when he was on a job, since there were often long stretches during surveillance when he found himself with little to do. Today he had brought along They Came to Cordura, an out-of-print novel by Glendon Swarthout, from the used-book store where he worked in downtown Silver Spring. Sitting in his vintage hopped-up Chevelle, looking at the group of boys playing outside the building where Olivia Elliot had apparently settled, he didn’t think he’d have that extra reading time to kill.

He was on a street numbered in the high fifties, in the neighborhood of Lincoln Heights, a residential mix of single-family homes and apartments at the forty-five-degree angle of border close to the Maryland line. This portion of the city, on the east side of the Anacostia River, was called Far Northeast, just as Anacostia was known as Far Southeast by many who lived in that part of town.

Nearby was the W. Bruce Evans Middle School. Administrators there had recently sent a group of “problem students” to the D.C. Jail to be strip-searched in front of prisoners, one of whom had masturbated in plain sight as he watched the kids disrobe. Some District school official had apparently decided to reenact an unauthorized version of Scared Straight. Quinn wondered how that “strategy” would have settled with the parents of problem kids out in well-off Montgomery County or in D.C.’s mostly white, mostly rich Ward 3. But this controversy would fade, as this was a part of the city rarely seen by commuters and generally ignored by the press, out of sight and easily forgotten.

Lincoln Heights was not all that far from Anacostia, a couple of bus rides away. If Olivia Elliot was trying to put some distance between herself and Mario Durham, she had made only a half-hearted effort. But Quinn wasn’t surprised. Washingtonians were parochial like that; even those who were running from something didn’t like to run too far.

He grabbed a blank envelope from the glove box and neatly wrote “Olivia Elliot” across its face. He folded a sheet of blank notebook paper, slipped it inside the envelope, and sealed it. Then he got out of his car, locked it down, and crossed the street.

There were plenty of kids, girls as well as boys, out of doors, though the sun had dropped and dusk had arrived. School was nearly done for the year, and if there was any parental supervision to begin with, it was even more lax this time of year. As Quinn went down the sidewalk toward the kids he saw rows of buzzers in the foyers of the attached homes, indicating that these houses had been subdivided into apartments. An alley split the block halfway, leading to a larger alley that ran behind the row of houses. Not unusual, as nearly every residential street in town had an alley running behind it, another layout quirk unique to D.C.

Quinn stopped close to the address Strange had given him, where four boys had built a ramp from a piece of wood propped up on some bricks in the street. A kid on a silver Huffy with pegs coming out of the rear axle circled the group.

“Hey,” said Quinn. “Any of you guys know where I can find Mark Elliot?”

A couple of the boys snickered and looked Quinn’s way, but none of them replied. The kid on the bike pulled a wheelie and breezed by.

“He might be new in the neighborhood,” added Quinn.

They continued to ignore him, so he walked on. He saw some girls on the next corner, one of them sitting atop a mailbox, and he decided to see if he would fare better with them.

He heard, “Hey, you guys!” in a straight, white voice, and then, “He might be new in the neighborhood!” in the same kind of voice, and then he heard the boys’ laughter behind him. Quinn felt his blood rise immediately; it was hard for him to handle any kind of disrespect. He wondered, as he always did, if he would have been cracked on down here, like these kids were cracking on him now, if he were black.

“Mister,” said a voice behind him, and he turned. It was the kid on the bike, who had followed him down the street.

“Yeah.”

“You lookin’ for Mark?”

Quinn stopped walking. “Are you Mark?”

The kid pulled up alongside him and stopped the bike. He was young, lean, with an inquisitive face. “Your face is all pink. You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You mad , huh?”

“No, I’m all right.”

“Shoot, they’re only messin’ with you because you’re white.”

“Y’all think there’s something wrong with that?”

“I don’t know. It’s just, we don’t see too many white dudes around here, is all it is. And when we do see ’em, they act like they scared.”

“I’m not scared,” said Quinn. “Do I look scared to you?”

“Yeah, okay. But why you lookin’ to get up with me?”

“You’re Mark Elliot, then.”

“Yeah, I’m Mark.”

“I was looking for your mother.” Quinn held up the envelope. “I gotta give her this.”

“You a police?”

“No.”

“A bill collector, right? ’Cause, listen, she left out of here a while ago and I don’t know where she’s at.”

“She’s gonna be back soon?”

“I prob’ly won’t see her. I’m gonna be watchin’ the Lakers game tonight over at my uncle’s. He’s fixin’ to pick me up right about now.”

“Listen, Mark. I’m not looking to hurt her; I’m trying to give her something. She entered a contest. A raffle, you know what that is?”

“Like they do at church.”

Quinn nodded. “She won a prize.”

“What kind of prize?”

“I’m not allowed to say what it is to anyone but her. And I need to put this in her hand.”

“She’s out gettin’ a pack of cigarettes.”

“Thought you didn’t know where she was.”

“Just give it here,” said Mark, reaching out his hand. “I’ll make sure she gets it.”