Tavon drove a couple of blocks farther and hung a right onto Hayes Street. They went up a rise, crossing 42nd, and there the street ended dark in a court bordered by what looked like a stand of trees and dirt through which ran a narrow creek.
“You sure?” said Edwin.
“This is where he said to come.”
Tavon cruised slowly around the semicircle of the court and curbed the Impala, its nose pointed back to the west. He killed the engine. Edwin looked around, at the wooded area on their right, at the little bit of light that reflected off the creek, past the trees to the houses and apartments they had back up there on Hunt Place. It was quiet.
“Man, I know what this place is,” said Edwin. “One of my uncles used to live over by the Mayfair units, and he would talk about it. This is part of Watts Branch.”
“So?”
“They be murderin motherfuckers back in here.”
“Not anymore. Your uncle’s name must be Fred Sanford, ’cause that was an old man talking about things that happened a long time ago. Neighborhood people cleaned things up back here, Edwin. Got all kinds of government money to do it.”
“For real?”
“I read on it, man.”
An MPD squad car came slowly up the street. Thirty yards below them, on the rise, it swung to the curb. The driver cut his lights but kept the engine running.
“Here we go,” said Edwin.
Another car, a black Chevy Tahoe with factory rims, came up the rise. It swung around the court and stopped behind the Impala. The driver of the Tahoe cut the engine and killed the lights. The driver of the squad car lit his headlamps and turned around in the street.
“He supposed to stay,” said Edwin. “Right?”
Tavon squinted, looking hard at the patrol car. His eyes went to the cell phone in his hand. He pondered the situation for a moment. He went to messages, found the recipient he was looking for, and typed in four numbers. He sent a text and slipped the phone into the pocket of his jeans.
Tavon checked the side-view mirror and watched the driver of the Tahoe get out of the SUV. Then in the rearview he saw another man step out of the passenger side. This man held a shoe box close to his side. The two of them walked toward the SS.
Lucas and Constance were making it with great enthusiasm, Gregory Isaacs’s Soon Forward playing loudly in the bedroom, when Lucas’s iPhone began to buzz on his nightstand. Neither of them heard a thing.
Tavon and Edwin sat in the front seat of the Impala, waiting for the men. Tavon’s eyes were moving between the two mirrors.
“That our man?” said Edwin.
“Yeah,” said Tavon. “He brought that white dude with him, too.”
“Why?”
“You holdin that kind of money, guess you need an extra man to guard it.”
“What you gonna do with yours, man?”
“Buy things,” said Tavon, as the men neared their car.
Buy things. Tavon had been driven to do just that for as long as he could remember. From his first pair of baby Nikes on, his mother had sacrificed and run up her credit cards to see that he had the right labels, especially when he went off to school. Couldn’t have those other kids and their parents seeing him in knockoff Timbs. Never mind that his mom was ass broke; working the after care program at the local elementary for next to nothing, she still took care of him, made sure he had things. Bought him the videos for the VCR, his earliest being Aladdin and his favorite The Lion King. The Spanish people in the apartment next door had the same movie, but theirs said El Rey Leon on the box, and he cried about that, and damn if his mom didn’t find one of those for him, too. And then Space Jam, with that song his mom used to sing to him at night to make him feel positive, that R. Kelly thing, “I Believe I Can Fly.”
Tavon took his mother’s buying habits to heart, and when he was old enough to pick out his own stuff it had to be the best. Or at least it had to look like it. His Gucci belt buckle was fake, and so were his Dior shades and Rolex with cut glass around the face, but the We R One stuff was real, as was his Helly Hansen parka and collection of Lacoste shirts and sneaks, which he wore with the tags still on. He even had a Zegna suit. Man said it was Zegna, anyway, even though the name had been tore out the jacket.
Why spend two, three thousand on a suit when you could buy one just as good for a couple hundred in the back of someone’s shop? Why go to community college, with no guarantee of a job after you had put in all that work, when you could make money now? Same thing with Anwan, putting them on, teaching them. Okay, they had been impatient. But why wait for it to come to you in a big way? Why not walk to it? It was why he and Edwin had done their dirt.
But even with what was about to come their way, Tavon, at that moment, felt empty. He was thinking on his mother, the way she looked at him with disappointment, the hurt on her face when she found the scale and dime bags in his room. “Didn’t I give you everything?” she’d said. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, thinking, You did.
Tavon was sitting behind the wheel of a dark car on a dead-end street, and in his mind he was seeing his mother, his vision of her as a younger woman, singing to him softly, sitting beside his bed, telling him that he could touch the sky. All that money that was about to come his way. He should have been elated, but he was not.
The two men opened the rear doors of the Impala and slid into the backseat.
The man holding the shoe box was thirty-five, wiry and flat faced and cat eyed. He wore a large wooden crucifix on a beaded chain hung out over his shirt. His name was Earl Nance. The man who had slipped in behind Tavon was also in his thirties, large, stack shouldered, wearing an unfashionable fade, one gold hoop earring, and a jacket too heavy for the weather. His name was Bernard White.
Tavon swiveled his body some and turned his head to look into the backseat. “Y’all got it?”
“It’s right here,” said Nance, untopping the shoe box and reaching inside.
Nance pulled a. 357 S amp;W Combat Magnum and pointed it at Tavon’s face. Tavon said, “Mom,” and the interior of the car exploded in sound. The muzzle flash strobed Tavon’s death mask as the hollow-point round entered his cheek and exited big as a peach, blowing head stew across the dash and windshield.
Bernard White had drawn the. 380 Taurus holstered inside his jacket. In futility, Edwin Davis raised one hand to cover his face. Wilson shot him through his palm, and as Edwin screamed and turned his head, Wilson shot him in the temple. Edwin’s last breath was a long exhale. His head came to rest against the passenger window. Blood dripped into his open mouth.
The air was heavy with smoke and the smell of gun smoke and shit. White used the barrel of the Taurus to break the dome light on the headliner.
“Get their cells,” said White.
Nance rat-fucked through their pockets, coughing against the stench of Tavon’s voided bowels, and found their phones. White retrieved the two shell casings that had been ejected from the. 380. They used their shirttails to wipe the inner and outer handles of the Impala and everything else they thought they’d touched.
Ten minutes later, as White drove west in the far right lane of the Benning Bridge, Nance leaned out the passenger-side window and heaved the two guns over the rail, where they dropped into the Anacostia River, sinking to the bottom to come to rest with countless other murder weapons that would never be found.
“You didn’t need to use a cannon in that small space,” said White. “Wasn’t no need for that big gun. Seems to me you were compensating again for your lack of size.”
“You mean over compensating,” said Nance.
“So you do admit it.”
They drove for a while in silence.
“That was easy,” said Nance.
Bernard White said, “They fucked with men.”
Lucas, standing naked on the hardwood floor, picked up his iPhone off the nightstand. He looked at the text message from Tavon Lynch. It read, “4044.”