“Dark ball field be a good place to rob his ass,” said Cody.
“What I want can’t fit in a wallet,” said Baker. “His debt is bigger than that.”
The man cut left on Livingston and disappeared.
“Here you go,” said Baker, handing Cody a security-tinted envelope. The name Peter Whitten was printed on its face.
Cody got out of the car, jogged down the block, and placed the envelope in the mailbox beside the door of the colonial. He returned to the Honda, excited, pink of face, and short of breath.
“Go, boy,” said Baker.
Cody turned the ignition and pulled out of the space. They drove east, headed back to their side of town.
Vicki had gone to bed early, as she tended to do since Gus was killed. She could not bear to watch the serial-killer and autopsy shows that dominated the television schedule late in the evening, and she had never been a reader. Alex spent most nights in his chair in the living room, alone, with a trade paperback and a glass of red wine. He still read novels but alternated them with biographies, battlefield memoirs written by soldiers, and nonfiction books about the politics of war.
The house ticked and settled. Johnny was out with his friends, and Vicki by now was asleep. Alex dog-eared the page and poured out the rest of his wine in the kitchen sink. He left a light on for Johnny and went upstairs.
He entered Gus’s bedroom. They had kept it as it was. Neither he nor Vicki had been able to box up his football trophies, give away his clothing, or take down the posters Gus had tacked to his walls. Alex had talked about relocating, selling the house and moving on, but both of them decided that leaving the house would mean leaving Gus behind.
Alex wasn’t mentally unsound. A year ago, he had been close enough to madness to know how it felt to be scrambled. After that day, after the men in uniform came to the front door, after they’d buried what was left of Gus, Alex went half crazy with bitterness and rage. He took to hard liquor for the first time in his life. He thought of burning his house down. He had violent thoughts about the president. He talked to God aloud and asked him why he had not taken him first. One black night he asked God why he had not taken Johnny instead of Gus, and cried out for forgiveness until Vicki came to him and took him in her arms.
The woman the army sent explained the stages of grief. He said, “Fuck your stages of grief,” and repeated it to her back as she walked quickly from his house.
It got better. Time passed and it hurt less. He stopped drinking scotch. He grew tired of being angry. He wrote a letter to the army shrink and apologized. He had a business to run, a wife to take care of. He wanted to see Johnny settled. He wanted a grandson.
Alex looked at Gus’s bookshelf, which held few books but many trophies, mostly from his days in Pop Warner, the good years for Gus that were Alex’s best years, too. Driving the boys to the games, hearing their conversations, boasts, and predictions as their favorite hip-hop tunes played in the car. After the game, Gus on one knee, sometimes happy, sometimes tearful, listening intently to his coach, steam rising off his head, sweat beaded and streaked on his face, sod clumped in the cage of the helmet he cradled against his chest. Gus slept with a football then. His goal was to play for the Hurricanes. He wanted his father to move them to Florida so he could train year-round.
He was not much of a student. He was goal oriented only in athletics and at work, where he spent summers with his father down at the coffee shop, delivering food. His high school football career was a disappointment due to the limited talent and lackluster efforts of his teammates, and his grades were substandard. By his senior year, it was clear that he was not headed for college. A recruitment officer who hung around the strip mall near his high school began to talk to him. Gus was the perfect candidate: fit and strong, not particularly book smart, eager to test himself and tie his manhood to training and the battlefield. He watched commercials that made soldiering seem like a cross between a knight’s quest, an Outward Bound adventure, and a video game, and they filled him with emotion. Gus wanted to scale the mountain, pull the sword from the stone, and face the dragon. He enlisted at the age of eighteen.
“Don’t worry, Dad. When I come back, we’ll grow the business together.”
“That’s what the sign says,” said Alex, bringing his son roughly into his arms and hugging him tightly. “I’m keeping it for you, boy.”
Shortly after his nineteenth birthday, Gus was killed by a makeshift bomb detonated beneath his Humvee, west of Baghdad.
Alex held a trophy in his hand and read its plate: Gus Pappas, MVP, 1998. At the Boys Club banquet, Gus had swaggered to the podium to receive the award, stopping to replicate the Heisman pose to the laughter of his teammates.
“Son,” said Alex softly, replacing the trophy on the dusty shelf. And, as he often did on nights like this one, he thought, Why?
Eleven
Dominique Dixon had called Deon Brown on his disposable, given him the meet and time. It would be on Madison Place, near Kansas Avenue, along Fort Slocum Park.
Typically, Dixon would drive by the location first, and if he felt that it was hot he would warn Deon off and change the plan. There was rarely a problem and there had been no surprises.
Dixon had been in the marijuana business for a couple of years. He now supplied about a half-dozen dealers in the northern portion of the 20011 zip of Manor Park. Though he was not hard or a fighter, he did have a talent for reading people. Once he decided to enter into a business arrangement with someone, he treated them fairly. He reasoned that if he did them right, there would be no cause for them to betray him. Up until now, his reasoning had been sound.
Dixon grew up in a stable home in Takoma, D.C. His father and mother were good providers, attentive, and had mostly made the correct parenting moves. Nevertheless, Dominique had become a supplier. The blame fell not on the parents, but on his older brother, Calvin.
Calvin was handsome, reckless, a risk taker, thoughtless, charming, and short-tempered. He had a friend named Markos, the son of an Ethiopian father and an Italian mother, a successful Adams Morgan couple who had done well in Shaw and Mount Pleasant real estate. Calvin and Markos had met in the VIP room in a club off New York Avenue and discovered a mutual interest in highpotency marijuana, expensive champagne, mixed-race women, and Ducati bikes. Through a club acquaintance, Markos obtained a meeting with a Newark connect, who liked his sense of style. Neither Markos nor Calvin cared to work for a living, so they tapped Calvin’s smart younger brother to run the business. Dominique idolized his older brother and saw a chance to grow his stature in Calvin’s eyes. Markos’s seed money paid for the initial order. It had been a successful venture from the start.
Dominique had run into Deon Brown, with whom he had gone to high school, up at a shoe store in the Westfield Mall. He remembered Deon as a quiet, intelligent kid, an underachiever, maybe, but straight, someone he could trust. He recalled, too, that Deon liked to cocktail his antidepressants with heavy amounts of marijuana. Deon fitted Dominique into a pair of Vans and offered them to him at his employee discount. Out in the parking lot, Deon handed him the shoes, and Dominique pressed a very small baggie of marijuana into Deon’s palm.
“Trust this, ” said Dominique.
“What is it?”
“Some nice hydro. If you like it, ring me up.”
“You still stayin with your parents in Takoma?”
“I got my own spot now. But you need to reach me, just hit me on my cell.” Dominique gave him the number. “Don’t be givin that out to nobody else, hear?”
That night, Deon and his friend Cody smoked the hydroponic weed and got stupid behind it.