Maybe his mother would actually take him in for the night. She’d do it for sure if he offered her the fifteen dollars, or even ten, but a mother should stand her boy to a bed for free. Plus, he hated Murray, Jamaican motherfucker always talking about the value of hard work. Home was almost as bad as the missions, especially if Antone, the four-year-old, was still peeing the bed.
Dub’s flop, though. That would work. Cold, but free. Lloyd would buy a sub and a Mountain Dew.
He stopped at Lucy’s and ended up getting a chicken box, which he wolfed down on the steps of an abandoned house a block away. He had meant to take it to Dub’s, share a little, but it smelled so good and warm, and it was heat that Lloyd craved as much as anything. He was down to the bones of the chicken, the Styrofoam box balanced on his knees, when he felt a vicious clap across the side of his head that knocked him to the street, the remains of his meal scattering.
“What the fu-”
The two boys who had jumped him worked silently and quickly, turning out his pockets and taking his change. They must have followed him from Lucy’s. It was business to them. They had seen him with cash and they wanted it, so they took it. Lloyd had no allegiances, no real backup. He was a free agent, and a free agent was prey. It made him angry, but it was like a mouse getting angry at a cat. Way of the world, outside his control.
Luckily, he had stashed the unicorn box in an inside pocket, deep inside the folds of his jacket where they couldn’t feel it. And at least he had finished his meal before they jumped him.
Knees and ego bruised, he collected himself with as much dignity as possible and limped toward Dub’s house of the month. It was boarded up, like most of the houses in the block, but Lloyd knew how to swing open the plywood on the door and crawl over the threshold. Cold, but not as cold as outside, and Dub had collected a good pile of blankets from the Martin Luther King Day giveaway at one of the soup kitchens.
“Hey,” Dub greeted him. He was reading a book by flashlight. Boy was a fool for schoolwork. “There’s a spot over there.”
“You wanna work tomorrow? I’m bust.”
“I could do it after school, if you wanna.”
“Midday’s better. More places. We gonna have to go work some strange territory, we wait until after school.”
“Got a test. And you know I can’t cut, or they gonna send a note home and find out I got no home to send it to.”
“Don’t know why you’re still fuckin’ with that school shit.”
Dub shrugged, pretending he didn’t know either. But Dub was smart. The teachers were always marveling at his brain, and they didn’t know the half of it. No one over at the school knew that his mother was in the wind, or that he hunkered down in vacant rowhouses with his brother and sister, Terrell and Tourmaline. If Dub stopped coming, the whole Lake Clifton faculty would probably take to the streets searching for him. And if he ever got busted for one of their “enterprises,” as Lloyd liked to think of the cons they pulled, those teachers would go to court, ask the judge to forgive and forget. Dub, not Lloyd. No one at the lake remembered who Lloyd was.
But Dub never got caught at anything. That’s how smart he was.
Lloyd picked his way among the others that Dub took in, preferring a spot by the wall, just one less person next to him. Once situated on his blanket, he took out the unicorn box, but he didn’t open it or propose smoking what he had brought. Dub was like a churchwoman when it came to drugs, didn’t want them anywhere near his brother and sister. Was it truly less than twenty-four hours ago that Lloyd had first seen this box, slipped it into his pocket, his head full of plans? He was going to sell the laptop and the camera, buy his mother some flowers or a pair of gold earrings, show up all flush, say he had a job.
But there would have been questions, he admitted to himself now, too many questions, and Murray would have broken him down, accused him of lying, which Lloyd would have denied with outraged innocence, because by then he would totally believe his own bullshit. It wouldn’t have been at all like he imagined.
Seemed like nothing ever was. The thing he had done last fall-but he hadn’t known. It was just a favor. He’d bet Le’andro didn’t know what it was all about either.
It was almost ten o’clock, and even the cleaning crew had cleared out of the U.S. attorney’s offices, but Gabe Dalesio was still at his desk, looking at office reports. Page after page after page of the most mundane stuff. The target discussed women and television shows, the Ravens, the relative merits of local sub shops. But he never alluded to drugs or crime, not unless he was using some elaborate code that they had failed to discern. Perhaps the sandwich orders could be translated into drug transactions. For example, “with hots” might be-But no, it just wouldn’t hang together. There was no doubt the guy was a dealer, given that it had gotten to a Title III. But he was cautious and disciplined-although not so disciplined that he eschewed landlines.
It hadn’t been Gabe’s bright idea to go after this particular dealer. But he had inherited the case, so he had to make it work. Some previous AUSA had been shrewd, shedding this loser. Who had initiated it? Gabe flipped back through the file. Gregory Youssef. Of course. No wonder the guy had lobbied to get into the antiterrorism unit, with these kinds of dog cases dragging him down. No one was going to make a name for himself with this shit.
Gabe’s thoughts returned, as they had almost obsessively over the last twenty-four hours, to yesterday’s conversation with Collins, out on the smoking pad. Do you spend a lot of time imagining what it’s like to get your dick sucked by another guy? A day later, Gabe still wasn’t sure what the snappy comeback should have been. He almost felt obligated to get one of those fat secretaries to lie down on his desk, timing it so Collins would be passing by his just-ajar door, know that he was verifiably straight.
He walked over to his window, which afforded a slice of a view, if you could call it that-office buildings, an old Holiday Inn with a revolving restaurant on top, that strange Bromo-Seltzer Tower glowing blue. He should have held out for a real city, Boston or Chicago. The guy who hired him had done a total sell job, claiming that Baltimore was the best office for those who were aiming up, up, up. Close to D.C., easy to stand out, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, and that guy was now hiding out in some high-priced law firm, trying to sock away enough money to retire in style.
Traffic was light-nothing happened in Baltimore at night-but there was a steady stream of brake lights in the street below. He thought again about the lines at the tollbooths. No one would wait in those fucking lines who didn’t have to, regardless of the circumstances. It would be automatic to head toward the flashing yellow light, to glide through as you had dozens of times before. Youssef had used his E-ZPass coming into the city, up I-95. Why would he have been so patient going out?