“No doubt.”
“Me and Nigel, we ain’t never had no big problems. I been knowin’ him since we was Rough Riders.”
“Roosevelt,” said Lee, enjoying this part of the conversation, the history.
“I ain’t sayin’ either one of us wore the cap and gown.”
“Nigel’s main runnin’ boy, he was there round that time too, right?”
“Lorenzo Brown. Boy was fierce.”
“Yeah, well. He ain’t shit now.”
Deacon Taylor removed his shades, used his shirttail to clean the lenses, and replaced the glasses on his face. “I just can’t understand why Nigel would want to start some bullshit at this point in time.”
“Maybe his boy did it on his own. Green do tend to act bold like that.”
“That could be,” said Deacon Taylor. “Still, even if Nigel ignorant to the situation . . . I mean, a man needs to control his niggas, you feel me?”
“Damn sure do.”
“Sharin’ those corners is gettin’ old,” said Deacon. “That’s a situation I’m gonna have to fix.”
“What can I do?” said Lee.
“For now, we gonna need to send Nigel a message,” said Deacon. “I can put Griff on this, you don’t feel up to it.”
Griff was Marcus Griffin, twenty-one, Deacon’s enforcer, feared even by his own. The mention of his name made Lee answer quickly.
“I want it,” said Lee, knowing he had to step up to keep proving his self to Deacon.
“Can I help?”
It was the voice of Rico Miller, seventeen, coming from the backseat. In the rearview, Taylor saw a strange, gap-toothed smile spread on Miller’s thin, wolfish face.
Like many of Deacon’s younger people, but in a magnified way, Miller claimed to be indifferent to the prospect of an early death. He was also cunning and at times uncontrollable. Most saw Miller’s willingness to jump into any kind of fight as bravery, but Deacon saw it differently. There were those who did violent acts out of necessity, and a certain few, like Miller, who did them out of pleasure. Deacon knew that Miller had not yet acquired the maturity needed to take on a supervisory position, but he did not feel that he could hold him back. Miller had just appeared one day, seemingly out of nowhere. His promotion from lookout to tout to lieutenant had been swift. He was one of those Deacon wanted close.
“What you say, Melvin?” said Deacon. “You mind if Rico hang with you on this?”
“I don’t mind,” said Lee. “Rico a beast.”
Rico Miller clapped Melvin Lee on the shoulder.
“Sooner the better,” said Deacon. “I want Nigel to know that I’m on it.”
“We’ll do it tonight,” said Lee.
“You workin’ your paycheck job this afternoon?” said Deacon.
“I was s’posed to. But they changed up my schedule. I got to be in there tomorrow.”
“You still on paper, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So you definitely need to report to that job.”
“I always do,” said Lee.
Deacon exhaled slowly. “What you doin’ today?”
“Me and Rico, we was gonna check out a thing, east of the river.”
“What kind of thing?”
“Fat Tony say they got some dogfights in the woods.”
“Take care of this thing with Green tonight, then,” said Deacon. “Not too soft and not too hard.”
Lee said, “We will.” He tried to say it real strong. But inside him, already he was dreading what he had to do.
Rico Miller felt no such dread. Rather, he felt a familiar kind of warmth in his thighs at the thought of confronting Green. As he imagined stepping to him, he fingered the sheath in his deep pocket. In the sheath was a Ka-Bar knife with a six-inch stainless steel blade.
The sheath had the word Creep burned vertically into its leather. Rico Miller’s mother had given him the name.
SIX
LORENZO BROWN STOPPED BY the D.C. Animal Shelter on New York Avenue to take a pee. It was a large facility that over the course of a year warehoused more than 13,000 animals, mostly stray and unleashed dogs, or those who had bitten or attacked people. These animals would eventually be reclaimed, adopted, or euthanized.
Mark Christianson, the closest thing Lorenzo had to a partner on the job, had worked at the D.C. Animal Shelter early in his career but had moved on to the Humane Law Enforcement team when the opportunity had arisen. Lorenzo and Mark did not deal with strays, lost dogs, or cats stuck in trees. The animals in the kennel at the office on Georgia Avenue were either humane holds—animals impounded due to cruelty complaints— or surrenders, which were animals simply given up, voluntarily, by their owners. Lorenzo and his fellow officers were not empowered to make physical arrests, but they could paper offenders and serve search and arrest warrants. They also worked closely with the U.S. Attorney’s office to prosecute their cases.
Lorenzo didn’t feel superior, exactly, to those who worked animal control at the shelter on New York Avenue. They looked very much like his coworkers on Georgia, do-gooders with a touch of punk rock, D.C.-style, in their eating habits, ethics, and manner of dress. But he did feel that what he was doing as a Humane Law Enforcement officer was more productive, and exciting, than the work done by others in the animal protection field.
After using the bathroom, Lorenzo headed out through the kennel, passing barking dogs, dogs wagging their tails, and dogs with their faces pressed up against the links of their cages, desperate for love and the human touch. He stopped once, to let a pointer-terrier mix named Judy press her nose to his knuckles, then went on his way. He didn’t like to linger in the kennel too long.
Near the door, he was greeted by Lisa, a compact woman with short blond spiky hair, a young shelter employee he had seen from time to time at barbecues and picnics. Lisa had started as a Humane officer but now worked in animal control. She was well-intentioned but, it was said by some of her former coworkers, unprepared for the conflicts that often flared up on the street. City people tended to be resentful of uniformed folks in general, a resentment that graduated to outright hostility when those folks were attempting to impound their dogs. There were different productive ways of handling the conflicts, but showing fear was not one of them. Mark said that Lisa once left the scene of a necessary impound without the animal when a couple of women had begun to get into her physical space and address her as a “white-ass bitch.”
“Well,” Lorenzo had said to Mark, “her ass is white, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think they meant it as, you know, a physical description,” Mark said.
“You tell me,” said Lorenzo. “I mean, you done had it, right?”
Mark had blushed then. It was common knowledge around the shelter and the Humane office that Mark and Lisa had rocked a bed. But Mark, who had come out of the straight edge thing, felt it was wrong to discuss women in “that way,” even though, as Lorenzo had pointed out to him, he liked to do them every which way.
“C’mon, Lorenzo.”
“Okay, so they were testin’ her. The woman shoulda shook that shit off. You do. Shoot, sometimes I don’t even think you hear the insults they be throwin’ at you, man.”
“I hear them,” said Mark. “But it comes with the territory. Lisa just wasn’t suited to that kind of fieldwork, is all.”
“You mean she’s got a color problem.”
“I don’t think so. She was intimidated, is all it was.”
“By bein’ around black folks.”
“By the conflicts, more likely.”
“City’s black. You afraid of black people, you ain’t got no business working out in the streets. Those women? That’s what they were tryin’ to tell her.”
“Maybe.”
“So about that ass . . .”
“It is white,” said Mark, one side of his mouth up in a reluctant smirk.
“Looks like it’s nice and round too,” said Lorenzo.
Lorenzo spoke briefly wi
th Lisa, then got back in his van and put the air conditioning on high. Since he was in the area, he went through Ivy City, past horribly run-down row houses, some with plywood in their window frames. He drove on to Mount Olivet Road, the thoroughfare that bordered the Gallaudet University campus and led eventually to the Olivet Cemetery and beyond to the National Arboretum. There on the four-lane he parked along the curb and walked to a set of low-rise warehouse structures grouped across the street from a drive-through burger house and a Chinese sub shop, the ubiquitous Kenny’s. Lorenzo often wondered why so many Asians used that name. Wasn’t like it was the coolest one you could pick.
He went along the sidewalk of the warehouse that fronted the street. To the left side of the structure was a parking lot that had been converted into a holding area housing several high chain-link cages. There were no dogs in the cages today. He had warned the woman who lived in the warehouse about leaving the dogs out in the sun, especially at the height of the August heat.
Lorenzo went to the front door of the warehouse and knocked. He could hear the deep, insistent barks of large dogs coming from behind the door.
He waited, then knocked again. The woman was in there, he knew. She rarely ventured outside.
Lorenzo stood on the stoop for five minutes, sweating, waiting, and rapping his fist on wood. Eventually the woman, a stocky, milky-eyed Korean with wildly unkempt hair, opened the door. She recognized him immediately, as he had visited her the previous week. Through the open door, he smelled ammonia.
“I did!” she said, stamping her foot petulantly, like a child. She wore sneakers without backs.
“I’m just checking up on you to see you did,” said Lorenzo, careful to inject no animosity into his voice, but raising it some so she could hear him. The barking had intensified.
“No dogs outside,” she said. “All inside. I clean!”
“Where are they now?”
“Right there!” she said, pointing to a hallway. In the center of the hall, set in a cut-out of the drywall, Lorenzo could see a large interior window, glass streaked with saliva and clouded by breath. The barks were coming from behind the glass. The barking, teeth-bared heads of dogs appeared, disappeared, and appeared again.
“Can I come in?” said Lorenzo.
“I did!”
“Need to do my job and confirm that, ma’am.”
The woman shook her head and stepped aside.
“They all in that room?”
“All, yes.”
Lorenzo entered the hall. His eyes burned immediately from the ammonia. His lungs burned too. He went to the window and looked through it. Had to be twenty, twenty-five dogs in that room, running around, sniffing at one another, barking at him, wagging their tails at the woman who stood beside him. All were large long-haired shepherd mixes. All had similar brown-black coats. Some appeared to be inbred through generations.
There was some sort of portable kitchen hookup along one wall in there, a trashed, barely cushioned chair and a sofa, looked like it had lost a firefight. Set against another wall was a bed, its sheets rumpled and dirty with grime and hair. This, he guessed, was where the woman slept.
Lorenzo walked down the hall to the open warehouse. Stand-up industrial-sized fans were situated around the warehouse floor, drying the concrete, which had been hosed down. The last time Lorenzo had been here, the floor had been littered with feces. She had taken care of it, as he’d asked her to do.
“I clean shit,” said the woman.
“I see that,” said Lorenzo, taking a handkerchief from his pocket and wiping his eyes. He was sickened from the ammonia and could not stand to breathe it much longer. “You can’t have those dogs in here with this ammonia. It’s poison.”
“Ammonia for clean,” said the woman, who seemed entirely unaffected by the fumes.
“But it’s poison. Do you understand?”
“Yes, poison. That why dogs in room. When no smell, I let dogs out.” The woman looked at Lorenzo with a smile in her eyes. “Okay, police?”
“You need to keep this place free of clutter and feces,” said Lorenzo, ignoring her remark. “Let those dogs outside, but not too long in the middle of the day.”
“Too hot.”
“That’s right. And put water out in those cages when they’re out there too.”
“Okay.”
“I’m gonna leave now,” said Lorenzo. “But I’ll be back.”
“I clean,” said the woman tiredly, looking around the warehouse, making a limp sweeping gesture with her hand.
“Right,” said Lorenzo.
Out in the van, he dry-swallowed two ibuprofens. The ammonia fumes had hastened the return of his headache.
The Korean woman was one of several “hoarders” he had been introduced to on the job. Generally they were decent people who seemed to love their animals and want to do their best to give them good care. They often lived in filth and maintained little contact with other humans, preferring the company and security of animals. Like the Korean woman, they focused on one breed or mix of animals and sought them out. They considered themselves to be rescuers. Lorenzo was convinced that these people had some sort of mental illness. Mark said it was a form of agoraphobia, and when Lorenzo had asked him what that was, Mark said, “Fear of the marketplace. You know, from the Greek.”
“From the Greek?” said Lorenzo. “What Greek?”
“The Greek language,” said Mark. “The market, as in the agora.”
“So, like, these hoarders, they afraid of goin’ out to the Safeway, that’s what you’re saying?”
“In a way,” said Mark. “More like they’re afraid of seeing people at the Safeway.”
“But if they was to see a bunch of dogs, up on two legs, pushing those shopping carts around the supermarket, they’d be all right with that.”
“Precisely,” said Mark.
Precisely. Mark talked funny, all that extra schooling he’d had. But Mark was all right.
On the way back to the office, Lorenzo stopped at a residence on Kennedy Street, in Northwest, at 6th and Longfellow. The old woman there had been leaving messages on his machine about her cat.
He entered the house and had a seat on the living-room couch while the woman, nearly bald and wearing a housedress, explained the situation to Lorenzo. As she did, an equally old man, wearing a sweater despite the heat, sat beside her, intently watching bare-knuckled Tibetan fistfights on the cable channel that was playing on the Sony. The curtains had all been drawn, shutting out the afternoon light. A fan blew warm air and dust across the room.
“I figured it was time to do this,” said the woman. “Queen been slippin’ out in the alley and visiting her boyfriends again.”
“Past time,” said the man, his eyes focused on the fights.
“Now, John,” said the lady. “That little girl is just frisky.”
Lorenzo looked through the screen of the travel box at the green-eyed cat. “She’s a calico, right?”
“Through and through,” said the old lady. “I appreciate you pickin’ her up. I don’t have a car and if I did I couldn’t see to drive it.”
“I’ll take her to the spay clinic,” said Lorenzo. “It’s right next door to my office. They’ll do it tonight, and you can have her tomorrow morning.”
“Will you bring her back?”
“Someone will.”
“I want you to bring her back, young man.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m gonna need a twenty-five-dollar check for the procedure.”
“Shoulda done this a while back,” said the old man. “Way that cat likes to spread her love around.”
“John,” said the old lady, reaching into her purse for her checkbook.
Five minutes later, Lorenzo went out the door, crossed the concrete porch, and headed down the steps of the row house with the travel box in his hand. He heard two old men on an adjoining porch discussing his presence.
“Why Miss Roberts got police calling on her for? Her great-grandson done
somethin’ wrong again?”
“That boy already payin’ his debt. Anyway, that’s no police. That’s the dog man, come to take her cat.”
“Take it for what?”
“To fix its privates.”
“’Bout time.”
“You should have it done your own self.”
“You should too.”
“I’d be disappointin’ a lot of women.”
“Not as many as me.”
Lorenzo placed the box in the back of the van.
AFTER DROPPING THE CALICO off at the clinic, Lorenzo entered the lobby of the Humane Society office, greeting a couple of his coworkers, Jamie, attractive and gay, and Luanne, plain and straight. A tough white girl, Cindy, sat behind the dispatch desk, radioing a call to a field operative, an ever-present cup of Starbucks before her. Lorenzo rubbed the head of the latest house pet, a previously abused border collie mix named Tulip, who had gotten up out of her bed to greet him.
Down in the basement kennel, Lorenzo checked on the dogs he had brought in recently. All of them had been impounded, taken away from unacceptable living conditions. Most would make good house pets, with retraining and care. For various reasons, some could not live with children, and some could not live with cats or other dogs. A few were beyond rehabilitation. They could never coexist with humans or other animals and would have to be destroyed.
He feared this was the case with Lincoln, a pit he had brought in weeks ago. Lincoln had lived year-round in the paved backyard of a storefront church on 14th Street, between Quincy and Randolph. Lorenzo wondered how someone who preached the word of God could abuse an animal. But the live-in priest at the iglesia had done just that to this dog. Lincoln had been beaten and chained by his owner, and taunted and stoned by neighborhood kids his entire life. He was mercurial, aggressive, and unpredictable. He was a victim, and he could never be socialized.
Lorenzo whistled softly, made a fist, and put it up to the cage. Lincoln came forward, his jaws working furiously, and snapped at Lorenzo’s knuckles. Then he retreated to the back of the cage. He looked at Lorenzo shyly, almost apologetically. He seemed to remember Lorenzo as the one who’d taken him away from his hellish existence, but he could not keep himself from trying to bite his hand.