Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

“Now, what we’re going to find?” John said. “We’ll run a trace, see if somebody has reported this thing stolen. But I’m guessing all the military officers around here, maybe right over there in Fort McNair? One of those vets had this thing. Somebody from the hood goes over the wall, breaks in someplace, pulls that gun back over here, sells it, somebody else resells it and it eventually gets used to clock the Halls. That’s my first thought. My second one is that it’s going to be some dumb fuck who had no idea-no idea -of the gun he was holding.”

They stepped over the yellow tape.

“So, you got somebody rousting the South Caps?”

“Right now, you damn straight,” Parker said. “Maybe we’ll get somebody to roll over on somebody else. But, you know, that’s a death sentence so, I’m saying, probably not.”

“Probably not,” Sully said, the scene from the other night in T-Money’s house blossoming anew in his mind.

“So when you writing something about this?”

“I got suspended, John, you remember? Not necessarily at all. I don’t know. The paper will do something on Tony and Carlos getting shot, yeah, but that won’t be me.”

“Fine. Whatever, whenever, you decide to write? You talk to me before. Because look. This is the Hall brothers. The Hall brothers . This is not your garden variety hit. This, this here, changes business.”

And then he walked off, a curt wave, his Crown Vic three or four cars down. Sully stood there on the sidewalk for a minute, watching Parker pull out, the muscles under his jaw cramping up. He rubbed it, gingerly, opened his mouth, worked his jaw around.

The minute Parker had described the murder weapon it had hit him who killed Billy Ellison, as bright and clear as a spotlight in the dark. He’d had to keep it off his face, keep his jaw steady and his eyebrows level the whole time, just standing there, nodding, acting like the world hadn’t just blown up.

YOU HAD TOsecure the beachhead first, make sure you had a safe base of operations, communications, resources. This was his mantra of working in war zones-keep your supply and communication lines open behind you, make sure whom you could trust before wading out into open conflict where all sorts of shit could happen, most of which you could not see coming and none of which you could control.

It really wasn’t any different now. The people he could trust, with Alexis gone back abroad, were zero. The base of operations was the hotel, where nobody could find him. And his source of power, of influence, was Billy Ellison’s golden fucking thesis. Well. The research for it, anyway. The kid never had the chance to write it.

He didn’t risk going by his house, not even in a taxi. He was willing to bet dollars to doughnuts it had already been ransacked by Stevens’s investigators and was almost certainly being watched.

It was a long goddamn walk, a mile or better, before he got back up to the National Mall and found a taxi, the driver on his way home, picking him up as a last fare, Sully promising him a $20 tip.

The first thing he’d thought he’d do, upon getting back to the room at the Four Seasons, was take a shower and fall into bed. But Billy’s research and notes were spread over everything; you could barely walk in the place. It looked like, when he opened the door to the suite, he had gone as mad as Billy. Stepping over one pile of documents and between another two, he found himself looking down at it all, then lying on the floor to read back over some of it, and when he blinked again daylight was streaming through the windows. His back hurt. When he rolled over to sit up, he got a whiff of his body, a stale, dank odor of sweat and meaty flesh.

A shower sounded better now, and that was his definite destination, right up until he lay back down-just for a second-and sleep overtook him. His last thought, before darkness fell, was of Alexis, the way her hair bounced on her shoulders, the way she called his name, the taste of her skin, beneath her shoulder blades, above her buttocks. Just to put his mouth there.

“Sly Hastings. Brother. Digame. ”

“Carter? That you?”

“You expecting Avon?”

Down the line, he could hear Sly moving, walking somewhere, had to be inside because there was a slight echo. Maybe his basement apartment over there in Park View.

“You got jokes, hunh?” Sly said. “That why you call me? Work on your material?”

“Where you at?”

“This duplex I got over in Southeast, the rentals. On Halley Terrace.”

“Your sister still working those for you?”

“Not so much anymore. I had to get more involved. These bathrooms, man, people will put any damn thing in the toilets.”

Sully was lying flat out on the bed in the Seasons, a place that probably went for as much a night as Sly could rent one of his junk boxes for a month. He had to call downstairs, ask them where they got these sheets. Thread counts were a real thing.

“I was wanting to ask you,” he said into his cell, “about what the fuck happened last night.”

“I really just don’t know what you talking about. I’m a businessman with apartment buildings to manage.”

“This was at a different apartment building. Two tenants.”

Silence down the line. Then, “We gots to talk.”

“You don’t say,” Sully said.

“That brother who can’t cook his greens? Meet me at his place.”

Sully smiled. “In forty-five.”

Kenny’s was in an old redbrick row house, three tables and takeout, the cook in the back behind the glass display cases, the cashier on the right. The house had been there probably eighty or ninety years, eight blocks from the Capitol, seven from the Supreme Court, and now it was a no-frills joint trying to bridge a couple of demographics, the neighborhood being what white people called “in transition.” Close to the Capitol, in the 300 of Massachusetts Avenue, you had institutions like Schneiders, the tiny liquor store, on a corner. A few doors down was La Loma, the Mexican place, in an old row house, dining rooms upstairs and down.

But, just a few hundred yards and five blocks back, it was another world. Here, you had Customer Base A, the older black folks who had been living on these streets for decades. Customer base B, the young palefaces who were moving in, fixing up the century-old places, turning them into well-heeled showplaces.

Gay, straight, Hill staffers, journalists, IT consultants. All these new residents, couples with young kids, turning up at Lincoln Park on Saturday mornings, walking their lapdogs. Thirty-one-year-old first-time home buyers who didn’t blink at dropping fifty thou on rehabbing the kitchen and bath.

Their row houses shared a brick wall with the older black couple next door who’d lived there forty years and kept plastic sheeting over the front-room furniture. Who went to one of the neighborhood churches every Sunday morning. Who bought their groceries at Murry’s on H Street, where the riots had gone crazy in 1968, before half of their new neighbors were out of short pants.

Sully had been sitting on what passed for the front patio of Kenny’s for twenty minutes, watching the comings and goings of the quick mart catty-corner across the intersection, the old dude panhandling out front. He was picking at a meat-and-three in one of the cast-iron chairs, which was chained to the cast-iron table, which was chained to the cast-iron fence.

Sly materialized from behind him, a Styrofoam container of his own, rattling another chair out from under the table to sit beside him.

“I was looking for the bike,” Sly said. “Lionel and me made the block three, four times before I saw you sitting here.”