Wesley looked over at James. James was short and skinny, with a mouthful of buck teeth. The other kids at school were always crackin’ on him over those teeth, calling him Hee-Haw Willets and shit. James was too small and scared to be useful in a bind, but Wesley had named him his lieutenant anyway. Gave James confidence. One thing you could count on with James, he hung with it, not like their friend Mooty Wallace, who would run home the first time one of Tyrell Cleveland’s boys gave them any kind of hard look. Truth was, Mooty was faster on his feet than the two of them combined.
Shoot, they were just out here having fun, basically, gettin’ a little bit but not too much, not cutting into Tyrell’s turf at all. Tyrell’s boys, they could see that Chief and P-Square weren’t much more than a couple of kids. Came down to it, they wouldn’t waste their time.
Wesley and James came to the head of the alley and heard a screech of tires on the street. They looked up to see a black Z heading straight toward them.
“Buck!” said Wesley Meadows.
They turned and ran.
Short Man Monroe curbed the Z. He pulled his keys from the ignition, came out of the car with the Glock in his hand and pointed up in the air. He ran into the alley.
He could see that green hat even in the dark. The head of some other young boy, too, waggin’ back and forth as he ran next to the one who called himself Chief.
“Yo, man, hold up!” screamed Monroe. He jumped over a tire, landed clean, kept going without breaking his stride.
Wesley said, “P-Square!”
“Chief!”
Their voices sounded funny to them, mixed with their hard breath, running all out like they were.
“Go right, man,” said Wesley. “I’ll meet you on our street!”
“Okay!”
James Willets turned abruptly, ran straight for someone’s backyard fence. He had the action figure out of his pocket, clutched tightly in his fist. He knew he’d have to leap that fence clean...
“Peter Parker,” said James. “Fly!”
And he was over the fence with barely a touch, heading into the darkness of the side yard and out the front, adrenaline pushing him on, his feet hardly lighting on the dead grass and then the asphalt of the street.
“You!” shouted Monroe. He had let the skinny one go, was concentrating on the one called Chief. He was gaining on him now.
Wesley Meadows cut hard coming out of the alley and booked west on S. A woman was walking down the sidewalk; Meadows danced around her, kept right on.
Monroe came around the corner, almost ran right into some fool woman carrying grocery bags. She looked into Monroe’s eyes, looked at the automatic in his hand. Her own eyes widened. She hurried past with her head down, staring at the sidewalk and her feet.
Monroe ran a few more steps, slowed down and stopped. He bent forward to catch his breath.
“Damn,” he said.
He stood up straight. That woman would remember him. Stupid to finish this tonight. Kid was plain lucky she came on them like she did. He slipped the Glock in the waistband of his jeans.
Monroe looked down S. Around 12th, under a streetlamp, he saw the kid in the green cap stop and look back, jump up and down cheerleader style, wave his arms. What, did this little mothafucker think Monroe was playin’? And what was that he was holding up in his hand? Looked like... goddamn, it was, some kind of gun.
“You done sealed your doom, Chief,” said Monroe, narrowing his eyes, watching the kid, watching the smoke of his own breath. “Now you’re gonna die for sure.”
Dimitri Karras leaned forward from his seat on the couch. He used his single-edge blade to lengthen the long line on the mirror. He moved the snow back and forth, making it longer with each stroke. He loved to play with the stuff; sometimes he thought the ritual was the best part of doing coke.
Donna Morgan stood in the center of the room, moving to No Free Lunch, the Green on Red EP that Karras had thrown on the turntable. While Donna danced, she stared at the Miami Vice episode playing silently on the television. Karras thought it funny — ironic, he would have said in his teaching days — that a nation of coke-using young people watched this show every Friday night, religiously following the exploits of these stylish undercover cops. Karras would have said something to Donna about it, but she wouldn’t have heard him. The music was up too loud.
They had come back to Karras’s apartment at 1841 R Street, nicknamed the Trauma Arms by its earlier residents, after Karras had stopped for a twelve-pack of Heinekens. Karras wasn’t a power drinker normally, but when he did coke he had a bottomless thirst. Lately he’d been drinking quite a bit. There were five dead soldiers on the table in front of him.
“Here, baby,” said Karras when he’d caught Donna’s eye.
He watched her walk to the couch. She had taken off her sweater and now had just a white T-shirt tucked into her skirt. Like everyone else these days, partiers and health nuts alike, she had a tight body. Karras could remember the freckles on her chest, the dark nipples hung like plums on her smallish, hard white breasts. He tried not to think of them or the rest of her. He wanted to party some more, not rush the night.
Donna used a twenty, tightly rolled and taped, to hoover the line. There was a cigarette burning in the ashtray and one still smoking where she had butted it out.
“All right,” Donna said, dipping her fingers in the glass of water on the table, putting the wet fingers in her nose. She took a bottle of beer off the table.
Karras sang along to the record: “ ‘Time ain’t nothin’ when you’re young at heart, and your soul still burns...’ ”
“Yeah!” said Donna.
Karras did half his line into one nostril, half into the other. He dumped some more coke from Donna’s snow-seal onto the mirror.
As the music ended, Donna said, “You got any U2?”
“Uh-uh.”
“What?”
“I saw them at the Ontario on the Boy tour, and then at Ritchie in College Park to make sure I wasn’t missing something. The audience was in black leather, all of them pumping their fists in the air at once. It looked like Berlin in thirty-eight.”
“You’d know, ’cause you were, like, hanging out in Nazi Germany in thirty-eight.”
“Look, I just don’t get it.”
“Whaddya wanna hear, then?”
“Keep on goin’ with that Paisley Underground thing. Put on some Dream Syndicate.”
“Which one?”
“Medicine Show,” said Karras. “A Sandy Pearlman production.”
“Huh?”
“Guy who produced that record produced early BOC. Also did that Clash record, Give Em Enough Rope.”
It was all speed now, Karras knew. His mouth was overloading his asshole. He was spouting useless shit just to hear his own voice.
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“Go ahead and put on that Dream Syndicate, Donna.”
A couple of beers and several lines later, Karras was in the center of the room air-guitaring the “Merrittville” solo. He caught his reflection in the window, a gray-haired guy running his fingers down an imaginary fret.
“What’s so funny?” said Donna.
“Funny? I feel good, that’s all.”
“I feel good, too.”
She’d reached her peak, a kind of desperate and deluded happiness in her eyes. Her smile was glued open. She looked blown out.
Karras wanted more. The time between jolts was getting shorter, and more was all he could think of now.