chapter 12
ON Wednesday morning, Garfield Potter had Carlton Little and Charles White drop him at the Union Station parking garage, where he spotted a car he liked, a police-package, white-over-blue ’89 Plymouth Grand Fury with a 318 engine and a four-barrel carb. Potter used a bar to break into the vehicle and a long-handled flat-head to pop out the ignition. He hot-wired the Plymouth and rolled down to the exit. Potter wore a skully and shades so that the booth camera could record very little of his face. As he didn’t have a ticket, he paid the full-penalty parking fee and drove out of the garage.
Potter followed Little and White out to Prince George’s County, pulling up behind them on a gravel shoulder running alongside a football field in Largo. He waited for his boys to wipe the prints out of the interior and off the exterior handles of the beige Caprice, as he had instructed them to do, and when they joined him inside the Fury he turned the car back toward D.C.
Potter and Little both had priors: possession, intent to distribute, and aggravated-assault beefs. Also, there had been one sodomy-rape charge on Potter, dropped when the victim would not testify. Eventually, they knew, some judge would have to give them time. Like many of his peers, Potter often bragged on the fact that violent death or a jail cell awaited him. But he didn’t want to go down on something as mundane as grand theft. A charge like that was a bitch charge, and it bought you no respect inside the walls. So he was always careful to cover his tracks when he got rid of one of his stolen cars.
Old police cars, or those outfitted for police specifications, were the vehicle of choice for many young men in and around D.C. Potter heard you could buy them cheap off lots in Virginia, in places like Manassas and Nokesville, wherever that was. But he didn’t like to cross over into Virginia for any reason, and anyway, lately he hadn’t been buying shit. You could steal a car easily in the District, and if you rotated it out, say, once a week, you’d never get caught. Well, he hadn’t been caught at it yet.
Potter looked at it like this: What you had to do was, you had to target a car owned by a young brother who lived in the city or near the PG County line. Some young brothers got their shit stole, they didn’t even report it to the police, on account of they knew damn near nothing would come of it anyway, and there was also this unwritten thing about not talking with the MPD. Many of them didn’t carry insurance either, so there wasn’t no money reason to report it. Sure, the ones got their cars took kept their ears open and their eyes out for the thief, looking to get some street justice if they could. But so far, Potter, Little, and White had escaped that as well.
Potter floored the gas as he got on the entrance ramp to the Beltway.
“Shit moves,” said Potter.
“Better than that hooptie we done had, D,” said Little.
“Gonna buy us a Lex soon, though. I’m fixin’ to own me a nice whip.”
“When?” said Little.
“Soon.”
Charles White sat in the backseat, letting the wind from the open window hit his face. He was listening to that song “Bounce with Me,” done by that singer they called Lil’ Bow Wow, who dressed like a gangster but wasn’t nothin’ much more than a kid. White was still up there from the hydro him and Carlton had smoked on the way out to Largo, and the song sounded good. He was into music; it was, like, his hobby. Sometimes he made tapes of himself over beats. Maybe someday he’d take some of the money they were making and go into a studio, lay somethin’ down for real. But he figured that was for other people to do, like Bow Wow, had someone showin’ him how to make it and all that. Someone to guide him, like.
In his true mind Charles White knew that he was stuck with what he had right here. The only family he had now, except for his grandmother, was the boys he’d come up with. Garfield and Carlton, before both of them turned cold and all the way hard, like they were now.
White’s hand instinctively dropped to his side, but there was nothing there. He still thought of Trooper all the time. He missed him. He wished Trooper were sitting warm beside him on the backseat.
Potter looked in the rearview at White, breathing through his mouth, looking out the window with the wind beatin’ on him, slumped in the backseat. Dumb-ass motherfucker, probably still stressin’ over that stupid dog. Potter thought of White as a dog, too, in a way, a thing that just kind of followed him and Carlton around.
He was stuck with White. White still acted and thought like a kid sometimes. He hadn’t changed much since the three of them had been tiny, growing up in the Waterfront Gardens, the Section Eight housing units down off M Street by the Southeast / Southwest line. Wasn’t no “waterfront” about it, though sometimes the seagulls did drop in from Buzzards Point and pick at the trash. Some government type actually did have the nerve to name that shit hole a Garden, too. One of those jokes you couldn’t even laugh at. Not that Potter was crying about it or nothin’ like that. If it wasn’t for what he didn’t have, and he never did have one good thing, he wouldn’t have the ambition and drive he had today.
He could have used a father, he supposed, someone to throw a football to or sumshit like that. His mother didn’t even have the strength to lift a ball, eighty-eight pounds of no-ass crackhead like she was, at the end.
He wasn’t gonna cry about that either. Family and all that bullshit, it meant nothing to him, and it didn’t get you anything when you counted the chips up at the end of the day. It was like them books his teachers was always tellin’ him to read before they gave up on his ass, back about the fifth grade. He couldn’t hardly read, and still he had a shoebox full of cash money in the closet at his place, clothes, cars, bitches, everything. So what was the point of books, or some piece of paper, said you went to school?
He had a good business going now. Him and Carlton, he guessed he had to call Charles a partner, too, they had some runners down on Georgia, below Harvard Street, and they sold the shit out of some dime bags of marijuana on that corner there. Marijuana, the good shit that was goin’ around, the stuff grown hydroponic, was the way to go. In D.C., didn’t matter whether you were in possession of a dime bag or ten pounds, it wasn’t nothin’ but a misdemeanor. You did go to court, most of the time it was no-papered, everyone in the life knew that. Black juries didn’t want to send a young black man into the deadly prison system for some innocent charge like holding a little marijuana. Innocent, shit, Potter had to laugh at that. Young brothers killed one another over chronic just as dead as they did over crack and heroin. The people in charge would change the laws, make them tougher again when they figured all this out, but until then, hydro was the game.
So Potter had this business and he liked to keep it small. He didn’t call him and his boys a “crew” or a “mob” or nothin’ like that. You got into turf beefs and eyeball beefs that way; shit just got too complex. Potter was basically into having fun: stealing cars, taking off dumb motherfuckers who could get took, robbing crap games, shit like that. But he never fucked with those he knew to be hooked into crews, or their kin. Never that he knew, anyway. Only fuck with the weak, those who had no strength in numbers, that was his plan. He figured he hadn’t made any big mistakes yet. He was still alive.
“Where we goin’?” said Little.
“Dime the rest of that key out and get it out to our troops,” said Potter. “Maybe tonight we’ll slide by Roosevelt, see if our boy Wilder is hangin’ with his nephew on that football field.”
“You still on that?”
“Told you I wouldn’t forget.”
They went back to their place, a row house they rented month-to-month on Warder Street in Park View, and dimed out the shit. They smoked a couple of Phillies while they worked. White went out for a bag of McDonald’s, and when he returned there were a couple of young local girls up in the crib who’d dropped by. The new Too Short was up loud, and everyone was on the get-high and drinking gin and grapefruit. This pretty young thing, Brianna, was with Little, and they were laughing and then just gone, up in Carlton’s room. Potter took the other one, couldn’t have been more than thirteen, away with him next, kind of pulling on the sleeve of her Tweety Bird shirt. To White she didn’t look like she wanted to go. A little while later White heard the bedsprings from back in Potter’s room against the crying of that girl. White turned up the stereo so he didn’t have to hear it, but he could still hear it deep in his head. So he went outside and sat on the stoop, where he rubbed at his temples and tried to remember if there had ever been a time in his life when he felt right.