'I been meaning to go.'
'You need to get by the clinic and drop a urine.'
'I will. You know I'm gonna drop a negative too.'
'No doubt,' said Rachel. 'You still need to do it.'
'I will. But look, I did have a beer or two this week.'
'I don't have any problem with that. Your agreement talks about excessive alcohol use. Doesn't mean you can't live a life.'
You live one too, thought Lorenzo. I can smell that wine or liquor, or whatever you had last night, coming through your skin right now. In the summertime, when you sweat, it's real plain. Also, when we meet real early in the mornings, I see how your face is kinda puffy and your eyes be all red. So you're human; you got your problems like everyone else. Like they say at the meetings: Don't judge.
'How's everything else?' said Rachel, cutting her eyes away from his, reading his look. 'How's your daughter?'
Lorenzo nodded, seeing a little Chinese girl standing outside one of the markets, holding some kind of toy in her hand. 'I guess she's good.'
'Her name is—'
'Shay,' said Brown. 'I see her, but her mother doesn't let me talk to her.'
'Ever?'
'Shay don't even know who I am. I went in a few months before she was born.'
'You talked to the mother about it?'
'I tried. Sherelle ain't lookin' to bring me into my little girl's world. I been putting some money aside for Shay. Just a little bit, understand? But I been doin' it every month. It'll help with her college someday, she wants to go.'
'That's good, Lorenzo.'
'I'm gonna stay on it. I want her to know me. I don't expect her to love me or nothin' like that, but still.'
'Maybe in time.'
'Speakin' of which,' said Lorenzo, glancing at his watch. 'I got some calls.'
'Me too. You just keep doing what you're doing, hear?'
'I plan to.' Lorenzo shook her hand and opened the passenger door of the Honda. 'Have a good one, Miss Lopez.'
'You also.'
She watched him go to the Dumpster in the Subway lot, deposit his trash, then walk to his van.
Lorenzo was trying. He was not as pure as he made himself out to be in her presence, but he was one of the better ones. He had chosen a road now and he wanted to stay on it.
She had felt the day she'd met him that he would make the effort. The fact that he worked well with animals, that was a good sign. Most of the time she put little stock in reports and statistics, but studies did show that animal-friendly inmates had lower rates of recidivism. She believed that people who were good to animals had more human potential than those who were not. That was just common sense.
Rachel wasn't naive. Lorenzo had committed some crimes, most likely, that were not in his jacket. To go as far as he had in the game, he almost certainly was involved in acts of violence. Perhaps he'd even killed. At the very least he had done some bad things beyond the mechanics of dealing drugs. But she did not think that the Lorenzo Brown she knew in the present was a bad man.
She could tell this by looking in his eyes.
CHAPTER 5
Nigel Johnson's shop stood on the 6200 block of Georgia, between Sheridan and Rittenhouse streets in Northwest, with the neighborhoods of Brightwood to the west and Manor Park to the east. From the sidewalk, concrete steps went up to its second-floor entrance. There Nigel sold pagers, disposable cells, cigarette lighters, chargers, condoms, and everything else his young, mobile customers might need on the street. He even had a fax machine and a copier, a pay-per-use kind of thing. Sign said NJ Enterprises right there out front. 'NJ' was in script, like he'd used his hand to write it himself.
Nigel used the shop as a front for his real business, and as a place to run through some of his cash, put a few of the dollars on the books, so to speak. You had to show something to the IRS, and he sure wasn't looking to go down on tax evasion charges, like many had been known to do. There was no safe here, and, it went without saying, guns and drugs never passed through the front door. He ran the place as any retail-and-service merchant would, the difference being that he kept it open whenever he liked. Dealers all over the city did the same thing, with barbershops, beauty and nail parlors, variety stores, and such. White dealers, moving cocaine, mostly, did it too, at those antique shops in Adams Morgan and at boutiques on the western edge of the new Shaw.
Johnson liked the location. The neighborhood was cleaner and safer than down in Park View, where he did his dirt. The presence of the Fourth District police station, two blocks away, between Peabody and Quackenbos, kept the lowlifes in semicheck and the fiends off the sidewalks. His friend Lorenzo worked out of the Humane Society office up there around Fern and Geranium, north of Walter Reed, where all those tree-and-flower streets were at. He didn't see his boy much anymore, because of the circumstances, but it felt good knowing Lorenzo was close and breathing free air.
Most of the stores were legitimate on this particular strip. One of them, the Arrow dry cleaners, went back eighty years, still owned by the same family of Greeks. Nigel Johnson's spot, it used to be a Chinese laundry back in the sixties. There was a good story about that laundry too. Nigel had not yet been born when this story happened, but old-time residents had talked about it often, and he knew the tale by heart. Nigel liked to tell it, especially to the ones under him. Some of his people were grouped around him now.
''Round the time that black folks started moving into this neighborhood, I'm talking about before the riots, there was some armed robberies got pulled on this block. Right here on the avenue. The most famous was when the Theodore Nye jewelry store got knocked off. Like most of the nice stores, that place is gone now. There was another one, though, didn't get too much publicity: the Chinese laundry robbery, right on this spot.'
'Where we at now?' said DeEric Green.
'That's right, right where we sittin'. A Chinaman, his wife, and the Chinaman's mama san, old lady looked like a yellow prune with eyeholes, worked here, all together. The man's kids, a little boy and a girl, were always running around in here too. Whole family livin' together, then they'd go off and work together, together, all the time. You know how those Asians do.
'One day, couple of young brothers, full of fire and speed, came in and put a gun to the Chinaman, demanding all of his cash. Man naturally wasn't going to give up what he'd worked so hard to get, so one of the brothers, high as he was, got nervous and busted a cap in the Chinaman's face. Chinaman must have turned his head at the last second, because the bullet grazed his temple. Legend was, right after? You could see the smoke coming off the man's skin. And listen: Forever after, that square head of his had a burn mark on it too. You know, like the way a brand is, on a cow?'
'Chang got his self the mark of Zorro,' said DeEric Green.
'Okay,' said Johnson, keeping on, not wanting to lose his rhythm, though Green was doing his best to stop the flow. 'One of the brothers, let's say it was the gunman, 'cause it make the story better, jumped down off the stoop, coming out the shop, and landed on a wrought-iron fence they had out there at the time, came down right on his dick. Fence had those spikes on it. No, spires, that's what they called those things. That spire, it took a piece of that boy's manhood, just tore off a slice of his testicles. People still talk about the way he was runnin' down Georgia, all in pain, blood on his drawers, to a waiting car.'
'Story good,' said DeEric Green.
'Hold up,' said Nigel. 'I ain't finished. I ain't told y'all the best part.'
'The Chinaman, his wife, and the old lady continued to work that laundry for a bunch more years, even though that was just the start of the violent shit that would come to the block, and even though their store, in the summer, was hotter than the devil's own attic, 'specially in the back, where Mama San toiled. And because of all that hard work and sacrifice, those two kids of theirs, they did more than all right. The son became a three-star general in the army and shit, and the girl went on to become a doctor, one of those chemists over at NIH or a new-clear scientist, somethin' like that.'