Hawk smiled widely. “Just so,” he said. Again the slow scan of tight black faces. “Any questions?”
“Yeah.”
The speaker was the size of a tall welterweight. Which gave Hawk and me maybe sixty pounds on him. He had thick hair and light skin. He wore his Raiders cap bill forward, the old-fashioned way. He had on Adidas high cuts, and stone-washed jeans, and a satin Chicago Bulls warm-up jacket. He had very sharp features and a long face and he looked to be maybe twenty.
Hawk said, “What’s your name?”
“Major.”
“What’s your question, Major?” Hawk showed no sign that the shotgun might be heavy to hold with one hand.
“You a white man’s nigger?” Major said.
If the question annoyed Hawk he didn’t show it. Which meant nothing. He never showed anything, anyway.
“I suppose you could say I’m nobody’s nigger,” Hawk said. “How about you?”
“How come you brought him with you?” Major said.
“Company,” Hawk said. “You run this outfit?” I knew he did. So did Hawk. There was something in the way he held himself. And he wasn’t scared. Not being scared of Hawk is a rare commodity and is generally a bad mistake. But the kid was real. He wasn’t scared.
“We all together here, man. You got some problem with that?”
Hawk shook his head. He smiled. Uncle Hawk. In a minute he’d be telling them Br’er Rabbit stories.
“Not yet,” he said.
Major grinned back at Hawk.
“Not sure John Porter believe that entirely,” he said and jerked his head at the guy that had been sitting on Hawk’s trunk.
“He’s not dead,” Hawk said. Major nodded.
“Okay, he be bruising your ride, now he ain’t. What you want here?”
“We the new Department of Public Safety,” Hawk said.
“Which means what?”
“Which means that starting right now, you obey the 11th commandment or we bust your ass.”
“You Iron?” Major said.
“We the Iron here,” Hawk said.
“What’s the 11th commandment?”
“Leave everybody else the fuck alone,” Hawk said.
“You and Irish?” Major said.
“Un huh.”
“Two guys?”
“Un huh.”
Major laughed and turned to the kid next to him and put out his hand for a low five, which he got, and returned vigorously.
“Good luck to you, motherfuckers,” he said, and laughed again and jerked his head at the other kids. They dispersed into the project, and the sound of their laughter trailed back out of the darkness.
“Scared hell out of him, didn’t we?” I said.
“Call it a draw,” Hawk said.
CHAPTER 5
“She was hit seven times,” Belson said. He was sitting at his desk in the homicide squad room, looking at the detectives’ report from the Devona Jefferson homicide. “They fired more than that. We found ten shell casings, and the crime-scene techs found a slug in the Double Deuce courtyard. Casings were Remington-nine-millimeter Luger, center-fires, 115-grain metal case.”
“Browning?” I said. Belson shrugged.
“Most nines fire the same load,” he said. “Whoever shot her probably emptied the piece. Most nines carry thirteen to eighteen in the magazine, and some of the casings probably ejected into the vehicle. Some of the slugs went where we couldn’t find them. Happens all the time.”
Belson was clean-shaven, but at midday there was already a five o’clock shadow darkening his thin face. He was chewing on a small ugly cold cigar.
“Baby took three, through the mother’s body. They were both dead before they hit the ground.”
“Suspects?” I said.
I was drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Belson had some in the same kind of cup, because I’d brought some for both of us from the Dunkin Donut shop on Boylston Street near the Public Library. I had cream and sugar. Belson drank his black.
“Probably she was shot from a van that drove by slowly with the back door open.”
“Gang?”
“Probably.”
“Hobarts?”
“Probably.”
“Got any evidence?”
“None.”
“Any theories?”
“Gang people figure it’s a punishment shooting,” Belson said. “Maybe she had a boyfriend that did something wrong. Probably drug related. Almost always is.”
“They got any suspects?”
“Specific ones? No.”
“But they think it’s the Hobarts.”
“Yeah,” Belson said. “Double Deuce is their turf. Anything goes down there it’s usually them.”
“Investigation ongoing?” I said.
“Sure,” Belson said. “City unleashes everything on a shine killing in the ghetto. Treat it just like a couple of white kids got killed in the Back Bay. Pull out all the stops.”
“Homicide got anybody on it?” I said.
“Full time?” Belson smiled without meaning it, and shook his head. “District boys are keeping the file open, though.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“Yeah,” Belson said. “Now that you’re on it, I imagine they’ll relax.”
“I hope so,” I said. “I wouldn’t want one of them to start an actual investigation and confuse everything.”
Belson grinned.
“You come across anything, Quirk and I would be pleased to hear about it,” he said.
“You’re on the A list,” I said.
CHAPTER 6
I was in a cubicle at the Department of Youth Services, talking to a DYS caseworker named Arlene Rodriguez. She was a thin woman with a large chest and straight black hair pulled back tight into a braid in back. Her cheekbones were high and her eyes were black. She wore bright red lipstick. Her blouse was black. Her slacks were gray and tight and tucked into black boots. She wore no jewelry except a wide gold wedding band.
“Major is his real name,” she said. She had a big manila folder open on her desk. “It sounds like a street handle but it’s not. His given name is Major Johnson. In his first eighteen years he was arrested thirty-eight times. In the twenty-seven months preceding his eighteenth birthday he was arrested twenty times.”
“When he turned eighteen he went off the list?” I said.
“He’s no longer a juvenile,” she said. “After that you’ll have to see his probation officer or the youth gang unit at BPD.”
“What were the offenses?” I said.
“All thirty-eight of them?”
“Just give me a sense of it,” I said.
“Drugs, intent to sell… assault… assault… possession of burglary tools… possession of a machine gun… assault… suspicion of rape… suspicion armed robbery… ” She shrugged. “You get the idea.”
“How much time inside?” I said.
She glanced down at the folder on her desk. “Six months,” she said. “Juvenile Facility in Lakeville.”
“Period?”
“Period,” she said. “Probably the crimes were committed within the, ah, black community.”
“Ah what a shame,” I said. “Your work has made you cynical.”
“Of course it has. Hasn’t yours?”
“Certainly,” I said. “You got any background on him family, education, favorite food?”
“His mother’s name was Celia Johnson. She bore him in August of 1971 when she was fifteen years and two months old. She was also addicted to PCP.”
“Which meant he was, at birth,” I said.
“Un huh. She dumped him with her mother, his grandmother, who was herself, at the time, thirty-two years old. Celia had three more babies before she was nineteen, all of them PCP addicted, all of them handed over to Grandma. One of them died by drowning. There was evidence of child abuse, including sodomy. Grandma was sent away for six months on a child-endangerment conviction.”
“Six months?” I said.
“And three years’ probation,” Arlene Rodriguez said.
“Teach her,” I said.
“His mother hanged herself about two months later, doesn’t say why, though I seem to remember it had something to do with a boyfriend.”