As Mercer jinked onto the main road, Aggie pulled a pack of cigarettes and a gold lighter from a small purse. She glared at him, defying a comment about her smoking as she lit up, the flame like a harsh flare in the intimate glow of the dash.
He waited out her silence, wondering where this would lead and secretly happy she’d followed him.
“I hate him almost as much as I love him.” Mercer knew she was speaking about her father. “In so many ways he’s the kindest, most thoughtful man I think I’ll ever meet, but I can’t help opposing him. He’s a health nut, so I started sneaking cigarettes from the staff when I was fourteen, hoping to get caught, but he never noticed. He still doesn’t know I smoke. Because he made all of his money in the oil business, I decided, even before I knew what it meant, that I would become an environmentalist.”
The window slid down and Aggie tossed her spent cigarette into the darkness. “I sometimes wonder if he’s noticed anything I’ve done. Lord knows he never noticed my mother’s desperation until it was too late.”
Mercer knew that she just wanted to talk, so he remained quiet.
“She killed herself when I was getting my master’s. I found out from the chauffeur Dad sent to bring me home for the funeral. You’d think that she and I would have been close, but we really weren’t. I cried at the funeral and I still cry sometimes now, but it isn’t loss that causes it. It’s pity. She was a pitiable person, really.
“My only strong memories of her are when she was drunk and one time, just before her suicide, when I nearly caught her in bed with another man. I wanted to blame my father so badly, but I can’t. She had a self-destructiveness that forced her to stay, to give her a reason to keep abusing herself with booze and affairs. She would have killed herself even if she had left him. You talked about mankind’s fate earlier. Well, the fate of Barbara Johnston was to die by her own hand, and nothing was going to stop it.”
Mercer glanced at Aggie. Her hands were trembling as she lit another cigarette, but her voice had remained steady. It didn’t take a trained psychologist to understand the emotional conflicts that made up her personality and motivated her actions. Her anger at her father had driven her to champion causes that opposed him. And that anger didn’t stem from her mother’s death but her own inability to stop it. Everything warned him to stay away from her, but he found himself drawn by her contrast of toughness and vulnerability.
“Where do you live?” he asked as they approached the nation’s capital.
“Georgetown. I have a condo on the canal.”
They didn’t speak for the rest of the trip, but somehow the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. She directed him to her street with one-syllable prompts or simple nods of her head. Her condo building had once been a warehouse along the C amp;O Canal. Mercer knew that the units started at a quarter of a million dollars and rose dramatically from there.
Rain had started falling, pelting the windshield with dappled splashes as he pulled up to the building’s entrance. Aggie waited for the wind to die down, her purse held across her lap, her slim body enfolded by the wide bucket seat of the Jaguar. When she spoke, her voice was soft, almost timid.
“I didn’t want to fight you tonight. In fact, I think I wanted to seduce you.” She looked at him, waiting for a reaction that he refused to give. “When I first met you, I had this noble image of you. I thought you were different from the rest of them. I guess it was just a schoolgirl crush.”
She opened the door and unlimbered herself from the car. Before she vanished into her building, she ducked her head back into the Jag. “I’m glad I learned disappointment at a young age.”
The door closed softly and she was gone.
“The old Mercer charm strikes again,” he muttered, hurt by her statement.
Rather than giving himself time to digest what had just occurred, he decided to thrust it out of his mind until later. But as he dialed his car phone and listened to it ring three thousand miles away, he knew that Aggie’s outburst about being disappointed had been directed more at her father than at him. About her desire to seduce him, well, she wasn’t the first woman he’d blown it with and most certainly wouldn’t be the last.
The ringing stopped. “You have reached the home of Howard Small. I’m sorry I’m not here to take your call. Please leave a message after the tone.”
“Damn it.” Mercer cut the connection without leaving a message.
AT eighteen years old, Jamal Lincoln had lived a life that was all too common in Washington’s poorest neighborhoods. A gang member at thirteen, he saw his first action two weeks later when he was caught in the cross fire of a deal gone bad. He’d picked up the gun his cousin Rufus dropped when a nine-millimeter blew his teeth out the back of his head, and sprayed rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger. He didn’t hit anything, but the feeling it gave him was the beginning of a life that would have an inevitable outcome.
A week after that shoot-out, he’d pumped two slugs into the chest of a convenience-store clerk and used the thirty-seven dollars that that man’s life had been worth to buy his first vials of crack. He slowly worked his way up through the gang, promotions coming as his body count rose. He lost his virginity at fourteen when Nyeusi Radi, the gang leader who bragged that his name meant “Black Thunder” in Swahili, gave him a prostitute for his birthday. Jamal was still in school and spent his time roaming the hallways or lurking outside school grounds selling drugs and recruiting for his gang. On both counts he was too adept. By the time he was seventeen, he had survived enough firefights to become one of Radi’s chief lieutenants.
Radi was twenty-four, a millionaire with time running out. Everyone knew that his luck would end soon. The life he led would kill him eventually, and the longer he held on, the closer his death came. And Jamal, now eighteen, was next in line to take over the gang, make the real money, have the real power. That’s why he resented being sent on this mission outside his turf to nail some guy he’d never even heard of.
Earlier that night, Radi had invited Jamal into his crib, a series of large rooms carved out of a rundown apartment block in Anacostia. Radi had told him what to do and gave him a clean piece; all the while this creepy white dude watched them from a couch near Radi’s desk. Everything about the white guy screamed cop, but the dude didn’t even blink when Radi told Jamal to waste this other guy out in Arlington.
As Jamal was leaving the room, the white guy came up off the couch and grabbed him by his bare bicep. Jamal’s arms were big, roped with muscle held taut beneath glossy skin. The guy’s fingers were thin, pale, and bony, yet they sank so deeply into Jamal’s arm that he was staggered by the pain.
“Make it look like a mugging. Take his watch, wallet, whatever you want, but make sure he’s dead. If he isn’t, you will be.”
“Who da fuck you think you are, motherfucker?” Jamal shouted, trying to pull his arm away.
The hand around his bicep tightened, forcing Jamal to his knees. “Willis, tell your dog to stop yapping, or I’ll tear his arm off and beat him to death with it.”
“Jamal, do the guy, all right? Don’t ask no fucking questions.” Nobody ever called Radi by his given name, and nobody ever put an edge of fear to his voice, but he was frightened by the white man in the dark suit.
“I’ll do it, Radi.” Jamal looked toward his leader, surprised to see him heave a sigh of relief.
According to the recently stolen Rolex he wore, Jamal had been pacing the street for three hours. No cops had cruised by during the wait, and Jamal had seen only a few brothers, mostly zebras, blacks trying to pass themselves off as white. He felt fairly safe, a little exposed but anonymous enough. No matter how he felt, there was no way he was going to leave the neighborhood until he’d done the guy. He didn’t want to face that white dude ever again.