“Good, huh?”
“Yeah, it’s tight.” Joe smiled. His tongue showed a mixture of white and brown.
“Listen, Joe . . . you need to get up with your moms about your father and all that.”
“What about him?”
“Well, he ain’t exactly gone, like gone gone, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Not really.”
“You really ought to meet your father, son. I mean, every boy should be in contact with his pops.”
Joe Wilder bit off the crest of the mound of ice cream sitting atop the cone.
“When you do meet him,” said Lorenze, “what I want you to do for me is, I want you to tell him how nice I been to you. Like what we did right here tonight.”
“But my moms says he’s gone.”
“Listen to me, boy,” said Lorenze. “When you do talk to him, wheneva you do, I want you to tell him that Uncle Lo wants to be put on. Hear?”
Joe Wilder shrugged and smiled. “Okay.”
Lorenze looked up at a tire sound and saw a white police-looking car pull very quickly into the lot. The car stopped in front of his Olds. Well, it wasn’t no police. The car was too old, a fucked-up Plymouth, and anyway, it looked like a bunch of young boys just driving around. Dumb ones, too, if they thought he was gonna let them block his way when there were plenty of other spaces in the lot.
Both passenger-side doors opened on the car, and two of the young men jumped out, one coming around the hood and the other around the tail of the Plymouth. Lorenze’s eyes widened as he recognized Garfield Potter at the same time that Potter and a boy with cornrows showed their guns and raised them, stepping with purpose toward the Olds.
“Hey,” said Joe Wilder, “Uncle Lo.”
Lorenze Wilder heard popping sounds and saw fire spit from the muzzles of the guns. He dropped his ice cream and threw his body across the bench to try to cover his nephew just as the windshield spidered and then imploded. He felt the awful stings and was twisted and thrown back violently and thought of God and his sister and Please don’t take the boy, God in that last long moment before his brain matter, blood, and life blew out across the interior of the car.
chapter 19
FRIENDS, relatives, police, and print and broadcast media heavily attended Joe Wilder’s showing at a funeral parlor near the old Posin’s Deli on Georgia Avenue. At one point, traffic had been rerouted on the strip to accommodate the influx of cars. Except for a few acquaintances and a couple of black plainclothes homicide men assigned to the case, few came to pay their respects to Lorenze Wilder on the other side of town.
The boy and his uncle were buried the next day in Glenwood Cemetery in Northeast, not far from where they had been murdered.
Because of the numbing consistency of the murder rate, and because lower-class black life held little value in the media’s eyes, the violent deaths of young black men and women in the District of Columbia had not been deemed particularly newsworthy for the past fifteen years. Murders of young blacks rarely made the leadoff in the TV news and were routinely buried inside the Metro section of the Washington Post, the details consisting of a paragraph or two at best, the victims often unidentified, the follow-up nil.
Suburban liberals plastered Free Tibet stickers on the bumpers of their cars, seemingly unconcerned that just a few short miles from the White House, American children were enslaved in nightmare neighborhoods, living amid gunfire and drugs and attending dilapidated public schools. The nation was outraged at high school shootings in white neighborhoods, but young black men and women were murdered without fanfare in the nation’s capital every single day.
The shooting death of Joe Wilder, though, was different. Like a few high-profile cases over the years, it involved the death of an innocent child. For a few days after the homicide, the Wilder murder was the lead story on the local television news and made top-of-the-fold Metro as well. Even national politicians jumped into the fray, denouncing the culture of violence in the inner cities. As the witness at the ice-cream shop had mentioned the loud rap music coming from the open windows of the shooters’ car, these same politicians had gone on to condemn those twin chestnuts, hip-hop and Hollywood. At no time did these bought-and-sold politicians mention the conditions that created that culture, or the handguns, as easily available as a carton of milk, that had killed the boy.
Strange was thinking of these things as he pulled his Brougham into Glenwood Cemetery, coming to a stop behind a long row of cars that stretched far back from Joe Wilder’s grave site. Lydell Blue was beside him on the bench. Lamar Williams and Lionel Baker sat quietly in the back of the Cadillac.
Strange looked in his rearview. Dennis Arrington was pulling up behind him in his Infiniti. He had brought along Quinn and three of the boys from the team: Prince, Rico, and Dante Morris. Some of Joe’s other teammates had attended the church service, a ceremony complete with tears-to-the-eyes gospel singing, in the Baptist church where Joe and his mother had attended services.
Strange looked out at the automobiles, and the people getting out of them and crossing the lawn. Joe Wilder’s mother, Sandra Wilder, was stooped in the middle of a group of mourners who were helping her along to the grave site. She had just gotten out of an expensive German car. Lorenze’s casket and Joe’s, half the size of his uncle’s, were up on platforms under a three-sided green tent beside two open graves.
Most of the cars parked along the curb and up on the grass had been waxed and detailed out of respect. There was a van in the mix that Strange knew to be a police van, its occupants taking photographs of the funeral’s attendees. This was fairly routine in killings believed to be of the serial variety, as serial killers often showed up at the wakes and funerals of their victims.
Strange knew, and the police knew, that the killers would not show up here today. He was fairly certain what this had been about. This wasn’t a serial killing. It was a gang killing, or turf beef, or eyeball beef, or a death collect on a drug debt. The target was Lorenze Wilder; his nephew Joe just happened to have been in the car. A simple, everyday thing.
Again, Strange studied the cars. Many of them were not just clean. Many of them were drug cars. High-priced imports tricked out in expensive customized options. The men getting out of them were very young and flashily dressed. Strange didn’t even have to turn it over in his mind. It wasn’t black-on-black racism. He had lived in the city his whole life. It was real.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” said Blue.
“All kinds of young drug boys here,” said Strange. “Question is, why?”
“No idea.”
“Joe wasn’t even close to being in the life. I know his mother, and she’s straight.”
“You see that car she got out of?”
Strange had seen it. It was a three-series BMW, late model, the middle of the line.
“I saw it.”
“She’s got, what, a thirty-five-thousand-dollar car and she’s living in government-assisted housing?”
“Could be a friend’s car,” said Strange.
“Could be.”
“Something to think about. But this ain’t the time or the place.”
They got out of the car. Lamar and Lionel joined Quinn, Arrington, and the boys from the team. They walked as a group to the gravesite. Strange and Blue walked behind.
“You okay?” said Blue.
“Yeah,” said Strange. But to Blue’s eyes his friend looked blown apart, both depleted and seething inside.
“I’m on midnights tonight,” said Blue. “Was gonna take a car out. Was wonderin’ if you wanted to do a ride-along.”
“I do,” said Strange.
“Just thought I’d see what’s out there.”