Right as Rain

'Looks like you have been. Think he looks bigger, Angle?'

Big-Ass Angelo stood behind Coleman, who was in his leather chair. Angelo shrugged, his face impassive behind his designer shades.

'You ain't been using them steroids, have you?' asked Coleman with mock concern.

'You know I don't use that shit,' said Adonis. He had shot himself up that very morning, after a two-hour session at the gym.

"Cause you know those drugs fuck up your privates. Make you tiny as a Chinaman and shit.'

'My privates are fine,' said Adonis with a scary smile, his mouth a riot of widely spaced, crooked teeth.

Adonis Delgado was an ugly, light-skinned man. His forehead was high and very wide, and he had a stoved-in nose with nostrils that flared upward in a porcine manner. His eyes were dead black and Asian in shape. Big-Ass Angelo said that Delgado looked like one of those mongoloid retards, like the one on that television show he used to watch on Sunday nights when he wasn't much more than a kid. Angelo called Delgado 'Corky,' but never when he was in the room.

'So what do we owe this honor to today, Adonis?' said Coleman. 'Ain't many times you like to face-to-face it with us. Mostly you just drive around the perimeter, makin' the streets safe for our citizens. Me and Angie, we were gettin' the idea you didn't like associatin' with us types anymore.'

'I came in to make sure we're clear on that Boone thing. Time comes, I want to make the last run out there myself.'

'You and Bucky, you mean.'

'Sure.'

'He gonna be down with it?'

'He does what I tell him to do.'

'Okay.' Coleman cocked an eyebrow. 'You seem kind of tense. You're not mad at me, are you, Adonis? Wouldn't be because I let Earl Boone take away your girlfriend, is it?'

'Shit. You talkin' about that skeeze over in the Yard?'

'So you're not mad.'

Coleman and Delgado stared each other down for a moment.

Delgado sniffed and rubbed his nose. 'Like I said, she's just a fiend attached to a set of lips. I let her suck my dick once or twice is all it was. I'm through with Ray and Earl, I'll just go ahead and add her to the pile.'

'You want my advice, you're gonna kick it with her one last time, I'd wear two or three safes, man.'

'I always double up,' said Delgado. 'Four-X Magnums, too.'

'No doubt,' said Coleman.

The cell phone rang on Coleman's desk. Coleman answered it, said, 'Okay,' and killed the connection.

'What is it, Cherokee?' said Angelo.

'Our little Caucasian brother is on his way in.'

'I'll wait right here,' said Adonis, 'you don't mind.'

'You got personal business with him?'

'He owes me money.'

'Hittin' him up, too. Nice to see you expandin' your client base, Officer Delgado.'

'I did plenty for that white boy. And I don't do a got-damn thing for free.' Delgado pulled a cigar from his blue jacket hung on the back of his chair.

'Prefer you didn't smoke that in here,' said Coleman. 'Me and Angie, we can't take the smell.'

Quinn and Strange followed Kane to a side street just east of Florida and North Capitol. As Strange saw the drug setup and the boys on the street, he said into the phone, 'Hold up, Terry; I'm gonna take off and go up ahead. Tail me until I pull over and pick me up.'

'Right.'

Kane pulled up to an open garage door and drove through it into a bay. Strange watched him, then made a right turn. Quinn followed. Strange got back on Florida and went east to the Korean food market complex, parking his car in the lot. He grabbed his AE-1, jumped out of his car, and got into Quinn's Chevelle.

'Punch it,' said Strange.

Quinn drove quickly back to the street off Florida where all of the drug activity was in plain sight. He parked far away, three blocks back from the action, and let the engine idle. Up ahead, young men stood lazy as cats against brick walls, on corners, and around a decaying warehouselike structure encircled with broken yellow police tape. Along with Japanese and German sedans, and several SUVs, an MPD cruiser was curbed on the street in front of a short strip of row houses, many of their windows boarded.

'You see that Crown Vic?' said Quinn.

'I see it,' said Strange, his voice little more than a whisper.

'You need me to get closer?'

Strange leaned out his open window and snapped off several photographs. 'I'm all right. Five-hundred-millimeter lens, it's like having a nice set of binos.'

'There's our boy.'

They watched Ricky Kane come out of the garage and cross the street like he owned it. He met a couple of the young men on the corner of the strip of houses and was escorted into the row house nearest the cop car parked beside the curb.

'What the fuck we got goin' on here?' said Strange.

'You tell me,' said Quinn.

'Ever hear of Cherokee Coleman?'

'Yeah, I've heard of him. Like every cop and most of the citizens in D.C. What do you know about him?'

'Coleman played guard for the Green Wave over at Spingarn. He came out in eighty-nine. He could go to the hole, but he didn't have the height and his game wasn't complete, so college wasn't in the picture. Rose up in the ranks down here real quick after committing a couple of brazen murders they couldn't manage to pin on him. So the high school that gave the world Elgin Baylor and Dave Bing also gave us one of the most murderous drug dealers this town's ever seen.'

'I read this interview the Post did with some of the kids over in LeDroit Park. They talk about Coleman like he's some kind of hero.'

'He employs more of their older brothers and cousins than McDonald's does in this city, man.'

'Cherokee,' said Quinn, side-glancing Strange. 'Why do so many light-skinned black guys claim they got Indian blood in 'em, Derek? I always wondered that.'

"Cause they don't want to admit they're carrying white blood, I expect.' Strange lowered the camera. 'Coleman works out of this area right here.'

'Everybody knows it, and it keeps goin' on.'

'Because he's smart. Drugs don't ever touch his hands, so how they gonna bust him, man? You see those boys out there on that street? All of 'em got a separate function. You got the steerers leading the customers to the pitchers, making the hand-to-hand transactions. And then there's the lookouts, and the moneymen who handle the cash. The ones just gettin' into the business, always the youngest, they're the ones who touch the heroin and the rock and the cocaine. And even they don't carry it on 'em. You look real close, you see they're always nearby a place where you can hide a crack vial or a dime in a magnetic key case or in a space cut in a wall. And they're always close to an escape route where they can get out quick on foot: an alley or a hole in a fence.

'Once in a while the MPD will come through here and run a big bust. And it doesn't do a goddamn thing. You can bust these kids, see, and you can bust the users, but so what? The kids serve no time on the first couple of arrests, especially if there's no quantity to speak of. The users get a night in jail, if that much, and do community service. And the kingpins go untouched.'

'You sayin' that Coleman'll never do hard time?'

'He'll do it. The Feds'll get him on tax evasion, the way they get most of 'em in the end. Or one of his own will turn him for an old murder beef on a plea. Either way, eventually he'll go down. But not until he's fucked up a whole lot of lives.'

Quinn nodded toward the warehouse, where addicts were walking slowly in and out of large holes hammered out of brick walls. A rat scurried over a hill of dirt, unafraid of the daylight or the humans shuffling by.

'There's where they go to slam it,' said Quinn.

'Uh-huh. I bet a whole lot of junkies be livin' in there, too.'

Quinn said, 'What about Kane?'