“What is it?” said Constance, slick with sweat, lying on his bed.
Lucas stared at the phone, then placed it back on the stand. “Nothing I need to worry about tonight.”
EIGHT
The next day, Lucas phoned and texted Tavon Lynch and Edwin Davis but got no response.
There was nothing on his plate for the morning, so he got on his bike and hit Beach Drive north and took it out into Maryland all the way to Veirs Mill Park. The ride back was flat to a subtle downgrade. There was little road traffic and he found his zone, where it was just the motion, his feet tight in the toe clips, the chain quietly running over the teeth, a perfect, simple machine at work.
He carried his bike up the stairs when he returned and put it on the back porch. As he often did after a good ride, he wanted a woman. Instead he did several sets of push-ups, normal and wide stance, and then did chin-ups and pull-ups on a bar mounted inside the door frame of his bedroom.
Lucas took a shower and tried phoning Tavon and Edwin. Nothing.
Lucas learned of the murders that evening while reading the news on the Washington Post’s website. He felt an inner chest-bump at first, seeing Tavon’s and Edwin’s names as fatal victims of a shooting. That soon passed, and he had no lasting feeling of grief beyond the too-familiar feeling of lament for young lives that had been prematurely terminated. He had willed himself to be unemotional about such events. He had witnessed too much death, and if he got stuck on it he felt he would be frozen and done.
He phoned Tom Petersen at home to tell him that Anwan Hawkins’s two top associates had been murdered. He thought that it might have implications for Anwan’s trial and that Petersen should know. Certainly the prosecution would try to bring the murders into evidence, if only to tell the jury that Anwan Hawkins moved through a world of extreme violence connected, in some way, to his drug enterprise.
“You are working for Anwan,” said Petersen.
“He hired me to find something he lost.”
“Are these murders related to that job?”
“I don’t know for sure,” said Lucas. He suspected they were, but the qualifier took it out of the realm of lie.
“Okay,” said Petersen dubiously.
There was a silence that was a standoff.
Lucas said, “If you hear anything…”
“I’ll check in with my sources,” said Petersen. “If you come across anything that might impact my client…”
“Right,” said Lucas.
They ended the call.
Lucas got up early the next morning and read the newspaper’s print version of the Lynch and Davis murders, which held no further details. The story made it inside Metro and had a few more inches than the usual “roundup,” due to what was described as the “execution-style” method of the crime, a coded message telling readers that the victims had probably been in the game.
A notable decrease in violent crime in the District had made the murders of young black men and women more newsworthy than they had been in the past. Certain high-profile murders, like the recent shoot-into-the-crowd drive-by that had claimed several victims, and the killing of a DCPS principal in Montgomery County, might have left the impression that little had changed since the dark days of late-eighties Washington. The reality was that homicides were down to a forty-five-year low in the city. The implementation of community policing and more foot patrols under Chief Lanier, the closing and relocation of troubled public-housing units under former mayor Tony Williams, and a genuine shift in the culture caused in part by activist groups within the community had all contributed to the positive developments in the atmosphere and the stats. The Post continued to routinely bury the violent deaths of D.C.’s young black citizens inside the paper, telling its readership implicitly that black life was worth less than that of whites, and that policy, apparently, was never going to change. Had Tavon Lynch and Edwin Davis been raised in Bethesda or Cleveland Park, their demise would have been reported on A1. As it was, they made B2, which felt something like progress to Lucas.
When the subject came up at the Lucas family dinner table, as it surely would, Eleni Lucas would say, “Those young men deserve the same memorial in the newspaper that anyone does,” and Spero Lucas would respond, “You’re right, Ma.” He did agree with her, but he was not a crusader, leaving those kinds of conversations to his mother and others who were more conscientious than he was.
Lucas took a shower and dressed in Carhartt. He had work to do.
Lucas drove down to the holding facility, signed the logbook, and gave the DOC woman his driver’s license. He was still on an official visitors list per Petersen’s letter. The woman handed him a pass that would allow him entrance to the next step of security. Lucas looked her over in her uniform, a tall woman, broad shouldered and full in the back, like many females who worked security at the jail. They were union, and he assumed their income and benefits package had been well negotiated, but still, for the atmosphere they endured, for the risk, they had to be underpaid. The woman’s badge plate read Cecelia Edwards. She had buttery skin, large eyes, and a lot of muscle coupled with femininity. Lucas wondered.
“Have a good one,” he said, looking at her the way a man does.
“You have a blessed day,” she said, holding the look for the one extra moment that spoke many words. He would remember her name and write it down after he left the jail.
Lucas met Anwan Hawkins in the visiting room. The glass between them was filmy and smudged, their chairs low and hard. Hawkins wore an orange jumpsuit with slip-on sneaks. His braided hair was pulled back, exposing neck tats, Japanese characters in a vertical formation. His facial expression was serious, his posture all business.
“Talk about it,” said Hawkins, speaking into the phone, his voice gravelly and distant. Their connection was as weak as it had been the last time they’d met. “Tell me what happened.”
“It was straight murder,” said Lucas.
“By who?”
“I know what you know. Less than you, if you’re holding out on me.”
“Why would I?”
“It’s safe to say that their killing was related to your business. Maybe it was a power grab by someone beneath them.”
“Wasn’t anyone below ’em who knew shit.”
“Were you aware that they lost a third package?”
Hawkins did not speak right away. Lucas studied his reaction.
“When was that?” said Hawkins.
“I don’t know when, exactly. Tavon told me about it the night he and Edwin were murdered. But I’m guessing it was stolen the day before. I was surveilling the street of the second theft, and they left me to do some business.”
“Where was it stole at?”
“East of the Hill. Tavon didn’t give me the address. Maybe you can tell me.”
“I don’t know it. Those boys were on their own.”
“So I’ll just keep working the theft on Twelfth.”
“But I don’t want you workin it, Spero. What I want is for you to drop this.”
“Why?”
“This shit’s got to stop,” said Hawkins. “I don’t care about the cash no more. If I get off, then I walk out of here and start new. If I do more time, so be it. Either way, I’m done. I wanna be with my son again, like a regular father. I want to live a long life. ”
“That’s a lot of money to leave on the table.”
“It’s mine to leave.”
“We had a deal.”
“Not the kind you take to court.”
Lucas and Hawkins stared at each other without malice.
“You speak to the police?” said Hawkins.
“No,” said Lucas.
“You were in contact with the boys by phone, weren’t you?”
“I was.”
“If the police got hold of their cells, there’d be a record of that.”
“Which tells me their cells weren’t found,” said Lucas. “Otherwise the homicide detectives would have contacted me by now.”