Soul Circus (16 page)

“Want me to pick up some KY or somethin’ on the way?”

“We won’t need no jelly. I’ll get it all tuned up for you; you don’t have to worry none about that. Hurry home, Ulee.”

“Baby, I’m already there.”

Foreman figured an hour and a half was plenty. He could knock Ashley’s boots into the next time zone and have the gun like new by the time Nutjob and his shadow came by.

Foreman pulled down on the tree, swung his Caddy around, and headed for the Maryland line.

BRIGHT and sunny days did nothing to change the atmosphere of the house on Atlantic Street. The plywood in the window frames kept out most of the light. The air was stale with the smoke of cigarettes and blunts, and there was a sour smell coming from the necks of the overturned beer and malt liquor bottles scattered about the rooms.

Dewayne Durham and Bernard Walker sat at a card table with Jerome Long and Allante Jones. The four of them had been discussing the shooting by the school and what needed to be done next.

“Those cousins just came up on us, Dewayne,” said Long. “James Coates was poppin’ off rounds and smilin’ while he was doing it. Wasn’t like we provoked ’em or nothin’ like that.”

“That’s how it was,” said Jones.

“The cousins,” said Long, his lip curling, “they sittin’ on the back steps of the house on Yuma, across the alleyway, right now.”

Long and Jones had been watching them from the kitchen window moments ago. They were over there, getting high with others from the Yuma, on the porch steps. James would look over toward the house on Atlantic now and again, and do that smile of his. Long hated that the Coates cousins were so bold, knew that in part he was hating on himself for his cowardice the night before. It was eating at him hard inside.

“Why you ain’t fire back last night?” said Walker. “I
gave
you my gun. You just want to look like a gunslinger or you want to be one?”

“I ain’t had no time, Zu,” said Long. “They came up on us so quick. I was about to reach for it when Lil’ J tackled me to the ground.”

“That’s how it was,” repeated Jones.

“We could make it happen right now,” said Long, “you want us to.”

“I ain’t lookin’ for no full-scale war in broad daylight,” said Durham. “This here is between you two and the cousins. You representin’ Six Hundred, don’t get me wrong. But it’s up to y’all to make it right.”

Dewayne Durham stared across the table at the two young men. He knew them better, maybe, than they knew themselves. Allante Jones was loyal to his bosses and his friend, fearless, and on the dumb side. Jerome Long was handsome, a player, and, considering his lack of education, smart. What he was missing was courage. He had always avoided going with his hands and he had never killed. This here was a test and an opportunity, to see if these boys were ready to go to the next level, and to reduce the numbers of the Yuma Mob by two, thereby weakening them and Horace McKinley. So it would also be good for business.

“You tell us what to do, D,” said Long, “and it’s done.”

“You need to roll up on those cousins out on the street,” said Durham.

“We gonna need a gun,” said Long. “I gave the Glock back up to Zulu.”

“Are you gonna use it?” said Durham.

“I’m ready to put work in,” said Long. He was assuring Durham that he was willing to make his first kill.

Durham phoned Ulysses Foreman from his cell. He got Foreman’s woman, the big white girl, on the line. He told her what he needed and what he wanted to pay for it, and they all sat around and talked some more about the business and cars and girls. A short while later, Ashley Swann phoned him back with instructions. He thanked her and cut the call.

“Give him about an hour and a half,” said Durham, “then tip on over to his house.”

“I won’t let you down,” said Long.

“It’s all over to y’all,” said Durham. “I’m gonna be out today, so I’m countin’ on you two to get it done.”

“Where you gonna be at?”

“I’m taking my son to King’s Dominion.”

“Thought we was goin’ to Six Flags,” said Walker.

“Whateva,” said Durham, who saw his son, Laron, a beef baby he had fathered four years ago, once or twice a year. “Point is, I might not be back in town till late.”

“We’re gonna take care of it,” said Long, Jones nodding his head in agreement.

“Go on about your business,” said Durham, officially ordering the hit. He flipped some cash off his bankroll for the gun purchase and handed it to Long. He and Walker watched them walk from the room and listened for the door to shut at the front of the house.

“Think he can do it?” said Walker.

“I don’t know. What do
you
think?”

“Boy’s a studio gangster, you want my opinion.”

“One way or the other,” said Durham, “we gonna find out now.”

TERRY Quinn was seated behind the glass case of the used-book-and-record store where he worked, reading a Loren Estleman western called
Billy Gashade
, when Strange phoned him from his cell. He was headed down into Southeast and was looking for company, wondering if Quinn would like to ride along. Strange said that they could hook up at his house. Quinn said he would ask Lewis if he could cover for him, and Strange said, “Ask him how to get the dirt stains out of my drawers while you’re at it. I bet he’s an expert at that.” Quinn told Strange he’d meet him at his row house on Buchanan and hung up the phone.

Lewis was back in the sci-fi room, rearranging stock. His thick glasses were down low on his nose, and surgical tape held them together at the bridge. His hair was unwashed and his skin was pale. He wore a white shirt with yellow rings under the arms. Strange called it his trademark, the Lewis Signature, the look that made all the “womenfolk” fall into Lewis’s arms.

“That record came in you were looking for,” said Lewis.

It was
Round 2
, by the Stylistics. Quinn had ordered it from his contact at Roadhouse Oldies, the revered vinyl house specializing in seventies funk and soul, over on Thayer Avenue.

“Don’t sell it,” said Quinn. “I got it for Derek but he doesn’t know about it. He’s got a birthday coming up.”

Lewis nodded. “I’ll put it in the back.”

“I’m going out for the day,” said Quinn. “All right?”

Lewis had recently bought half the shop from the original owner, Syreeta Janes, and he was more than happy to cut Quinn’s hours whenever possible.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Out on Bonifant Street, Quinn went up toward the Ethiopian coffee shop beside one of his neighborhood bars, the Quarry House, to grab a go-cup for his drive down Georgia. He walked by a group of young men who were headed into the gun store, a popular spot for sportsmen and home-protection enthusiasts. It was also a hot destination for those D.C. residents who wanted to touch the guns they had seen in magazines and heard about in conversation. Though it was illegal for them to purchase guns in this shop, they could buy or trade for these same models later on the black market or rent them very easily on the street. The store was conveniently located just a half mile over the District line in downtown Silver Spring.

SITTING at his desk in his house, listening to a new CD, Strange stared at the tremendous amount of paper spread before him. He had been on the Oliver case for some time, and it had been easy to forget, busy as he’d been, just how much work he had done.

He had started with the original indictment and set up dossiers on all the codefendants and the government witnesses who were scheduled to testify against Oliver. He had studied the discovery, which was everything the government had seized on the case: autopsy files, bullet trajectories, and coroner’s reports among the data. He’d read the 302, the form the FBI used to describe the debriefing of its cooperating witnesses. The names of those witnesses had been blacked out; it was Strange’s job to identify them through careful reconstruction. He’d used the PACER database to turn up previous charges on the witnesses. By law, these charges did not have to be mentioned in the reports provided by the government prosecutors.

All of this was office work, the first phase of the process. The second phase was done out on the street.

Here Strange took his research and went out to the civilian population, looking for character witnesses and witnesses for the defense: those who had direct knowledge of the actual “events” referred to in the indictment. In court jackets he looked for assault cases, complainants in domestic disputes, and codefendants who might have a beef against his client. He was looking for any kind of background that could be used during cross-examination. Most of the people he spoke to would never make it to the stand.

Strange looked at it all as a stage play with a large cast of characters. In the beginning, he had written Oliver’s name on a large sheet of paper and connected lines, like tentacles, from it to the names of those who had known him or had been affected by his alleged deeds. These included the current drug dealers who had stepped into Oliver’s abandoned territory. All of this was an awful lot of work, but by doing it, he found that the various relationships and their possible ramifications sometimes became more graphic, and evident, to him.

Many of the leads he’d gotten were false leads, and though he suspected them to be from the get-go, he still went after anything he could. He had even traveled down to Leavenworth, on the nickel of Ives, to interview a former member of Oliver’s gang, Kevin Willis, who had later gone to work for the Corey Graves Mob in another part of Far Southeast. Willis had talked on tape about everything he knew: who was “hot” on the street and who would or would not most likely flip. He had talked freely about charges still pending against him. Strange had the tapes in his office off Georgia and duplicates here in his house. But, as with many of the interviews he’d done, the tapes had given him nothing.

But Strange had a feeling about Devra Stokes. He sensed that Stokes, one of Phillip Wood’s former girlfriends, had more to tell him. He had phoned the hair and nail salon and been told she was working today. He had gotten Janine to start the process to obtain a Federal Order of Subpoena, in the event that he would need her to testify.

Greco’s sharp bark came from the foyer down on the first floor. When Strange went out to the landing and saw Greco’s nose at the bottom of the door, his tail twitching, he knew that this was Quinn.

Quinn, a folder under his arm, came up to the office and waited as Strange gathered up the papers he needed for the day.

“What the hell is this?” said Quinn, chuckling, holding up a CD he had picked up off the desk. “
My Rifle, My Pony and Me
?”

Strange looked down at his shoes. “Meant to put that away before you came by. Knew you’d give me some shit about it if you saw it.”

“It’s a song from
Rio Bravo
, right?”

Strange nodded. “Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing it in that scene in the jail.”

“
What
scene in the jail? Christ, half the movie’s set in the jail.”

“I know it. But look, they got another twenty-five tracks just like that one on there, too. Title tunes with vocals from old westerns.”

“Okay. You haven’t actually seen all these, have you?”

“Most of ’em, you want the truth. But I got a twenty-year jump on you.”

“Seen
The Hanging Tree
lately?” said Quinn, reading off the CD.

“No, but I saw a damn good one the other night on TNT. I forgot the name of it already, but I been meaning to tell you about it. Italian, by that same guy did
A Bullet for the General
.”

“I liked that one.”

“Anyhow, in this movie, they’re gettin’ ready for the big gunfight at the end. The hero gets off his horse and faces a whole bunch of gunmen standing in this big circle of stones, like an arena they got set up.”

“That’s been done before.”

“Well, they do that Roman Coliseum thing for the climax of these spaghetti westerns all the time. They’re Italians, remember?”

“I’m hip.”

“So they’re all starin’ at each other for a while, like they do. Squintin’ their eyes and shiftin’ them around. Then this hero says to these four bad-asses, before he draws his gun, ‘What are the rules to this game? I like to know the rules before I play.’ And the main bad-ass, got a scar on his face, he smiles real slow and says, ‘It’s simple. Last man standing wins.’ ”

Quinn grinned. “I guess that put a battery up your ass, didn’t it?”

“I did like that line, man.”

“You need to get out more, Derek.”

“I’m out plenty.” Strange stood, slipping the papers he needed into a manila folder. He undid his belt, looped it though the sheath of his Buck knife, moved the sheath so that it rested firmly beside his cell holster on his hip, and refastened the belt buckle. “You ready?”

Quinn nodded at the knife. “
You
are.”

“Comes in handy sometimes.”

“You had a gun, you wouldn’t need to carry a knife.”

“I’m through with guns,” said Strange. “Let’s go.”

Down the stairs, Strange put a bowl of water out by the door and dropped a rawhide bone to the floor at Greco’s feet.

“He gonna be all right here all day?” said Quinn.

“Too hot to have him in the car,” said Strange. “He’ll be fine.”

DRIVING down Georgia in the Caprice Classic, Strange had the Stylistics’ debut playing in the cassette deck; “Betcha By Golly, Wow” was up, symphonic and filling the car. Strange was softly singing along, closing his eyes occasionally as he tried to hit the high notes on the vocals.

“Careful, man,” said Quinn. “You keep shutting your eyes when you’re gettin’ all soulful like that, you’re gonna get us killed.”

“I don’t need my eyes. I’m driving by memory.”

“And you’re gonna bust a stitch in your jeans, the way you’re trying to reach those notes.”

“Tell me this isn’t beautiful, though.”

“It’s dramatic, I’ll say that much for it. Kinda like, I don’t know, an
opera
or something.”

“Exactly. What I was trying to tell you yesterday.”