Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

He pulled his head up, gliding to the wall, expecting to see Henry telling him they were closing up, that he’d lost track of time again. Instead, as his hand reached the tiled wall, he pulled his goggles up and found, through the lens of water spilling down his face, that he was looking at Sly Hastings, one of the deadliest men in the city, a killer and a sociopath, and perhaps his best source in town.

“Aquaman,” Sly said, smiling down at him. “I hear you been busy.”

They were the only two in the locker room, the only two still in the entire place, save Henry up front somewhere. Their voices echoed and bounced. Sully stuck his head under the shower to get the chlorine out, then was back out, getting dressed, Sly leaning against the peeling baby-blue paint on the wall, one foot crossed over at the ankle, the sleeves of his tracksuit neatly pushed up to the elbow. He took off his glasses, the little round ones, and polished them on the hem of his shirt.

“This place, why you come here? It looks like you going to catch something.”

“Water’s got enough chlorine to kill cancer,” Sully said, pulling a shirt over his head.

“I don’t mean just the water. Lookit this floor.” It was a slab of concrete, stained in patches that looked red or brown or slightly orange. The metal lockers were dented and had chipped paint and looked like any good tug would pull them halfway out of the wall. The trash can was three-quarters full, one of the lights was out, and the faucet dripped.

“It’s got character,” Sully said.

Sly snorted, looking up at the ceiling, like a disease was going to fall on him. “’S what white people say when they slumming.”

“You can’t slum in your own neighborhood,” Sully said. “And what white people is this you been hanging out with, to know what they say about anything?”

“I know some shit.”

“Un-hunh.”

“About you people.”

“Un-hunh.”

“You going to finish getting dressed or what? Never seen a man take so long to put clothes on.”

“Watch men get dressed a lot?”

“You know, you can get on a motherfucker’s nerves.”

Sully, deadpanning it now: “The way white people talk, how men get dressed-I’m learning a lot about you, brother.”

As he bent to pull on his boots, he saw Sly move toward the door out of the corner of his eye. He was finished, but dragged it out, letting Sly leave and go outside, allowing him a minute to take a deep breath and think, because dealing with a warlord like Sly was not something to do offhand.

He’d first met him shortly after coming back from the war, in Benning Terrace, better known as Simple City. Sly was an enforcer for the crew that ran the place, and Sully, just coming out of rehab and laced on painkillers most of the time, did not give a particular fuck about anything.

Sly had dragged the body of a police informant, one Kermit S. Allen, nicknamed Froggie, into the main courtyard of the project at high noon. The man was already shot twice through the chest and dying. A crowd gathered.

Sly pulled Allen’s head up off the dirt, clutching him by his hair, Allen weakly trying to claw at the hand holding him. Sly bellowed two or three times-it depended on which witness you believed-that this was what happened to motherfuckers who talked to cops. Then he shot Froggie through the forehead, blowing his brains out into the dirt. When Froggie was flat on the ground again, Sly shot him twice more in the face. Then he looked up and asked the assembled if there were any motherfucking questions.

When police came, no one talked to them.

Sully went down there to write a story about witness intimidation at the height of the city’s crack wars. He was walking down a crappy hallway in one of the crappy buildings of the complex when Sly emerged from a door, shoved him into a wall, put a Glock to his temple, and asked him if he wanted to die.

Sully answered in Bosnian, sounding bored, looking straight ahead. Sly, who didn’t recognize the language, slowed down enough to tell him to speak the English.

“I said,” Sully told him, “that if you don’t get that piece of shit off my face, then a pair of Chetniks that I sponsored for immigration will slit you from gullet to crotch.”

Sly lessened his grip just enough for Sully to know that this was over and said, “What’s a Chetnik?”

Of such things friendship and respect were born.

He had not seen Sly in what, two months, maybe three, hardly at all since the series of killings last fall up on Princeton Place. It had included the murder of the daughter of the chief judge of U.S. District Court in D.C. and a gorgeous Howard University student and both had been nasty. It had also ended badly, leaving a bitter taste in Sully’s mouth and business with Sly he needed to avenge.

This was easier said than done. By Sully’s count, Sly was responsible for at least five murders and probably double that. He was manipulative and ruthless. He was also a product of a disastrous upbringing in the projects who wanted better out of life, had used his drug profits to buy a couple of small apartment complexes, and now read books on property management and stock-market investing. He was loyal to what was left of his family, not a bad guy to watch a football game with, and a terror at the New York Times crossword puzzle. A good source who had given Sully better street intel than the cops had, but would also play him for a pawn if it suited his larger purposes.

No way to pigeonhole, to typecast, to write off.

Sully sat up straight now, arched his back, and took a deep breath, letting it out, onetwothreefourfive, and then he was as good as he was going to get, standing up and grabbing his bag and flicking off the light to the locker room on his way out.

The pool area was dark and the lobby was dim, the sound of his footsteps coming back to him. At the glass-walled front entrance, Henry was at the door, waiting to let him out and close up.

“Night, Henry,” he said, nodding, but the man didn’t even look at him. His face was set in a grimace, looking stiffly out the window; Sully knew he had recognized Sly and knew him for who and what he was. Sly had that effect on people, like they’d just seen the dead arise, and not the dead ones you loved and missed, but the dead you feared and loathed.

The rain had stopped but it was still dripping off the leaves overhead. They were standing in the darkness by the side of the building, the street fifty feet ahead of them. Two of the three nearest streetlights were out. Sully could make out Sly’s car, the yellow-over-black Camaro at the curb, engine idling, and he knew that Lionel would be behind the wheel, keeping an eye on the boss. A match struck and flared to his left and Sully moved toward it, picking up Sly’s outline in the glow. He was leaning against the wall, under the slight overhang, cupping the match till it lit the cigarette. Then he shook it dead. The light from the roadway glinted from his glasses when he moved his head and spoke, his voice soft and deep, an unseen thing in the dark.

“The Hall brothers,” Sly began, blowing out a stream of smoke, “are a problem of mine.”

Sully’s mind lit up, connections flaring, instantly looking for where this was going. So… so Sly knew he’d been in the Bend-that could have come from the article he’d written about the body in the channel. It didn’t mean Sly had been tailing him. He kept it straight, looking up at the trees, the water dripping, rubbing a shoe on the slick asphalt.

“Yeah? How so?” he said. The strap from his gym bag was slung over his shoulder, the bag light, almost weightless.

“They been looking to expand out they turf, M Street, down there like that. But, see, the problem with things expanding? They got to expand into something else. You know chemistry? Like, ions? They reactive, they bounce into other little molecules, and well, they change that other thing. That’s the Hall brothers. They been expanding into me.”