Yocke hung up the telephone without looking and kept right on tapping on the computer keyboard. The authorities were fully satisfied that the late Walter P. Harrington had been using Second Potomac to launder money for the crack trade. Local crack money or from somewhere else? No one was saying, not even off the record.
And someone had used a high-powered rifle to blow his head off while he drove the left lane of the Beltway at fifty-five miles per hour — his widow fervently insisted that he always drove fifty-five.
It certainly had not been a motorist enraged over Harrington’s highway manners. Not using a rifle.
Money, money, money. Hadn’t the other man killed the evening Harrington died also had something to do with money? Didn’t he own some kind of check-cashing business?
The phone rang.
Still tapping the Second Potomac story, Yocke cradled the receiver against his shoulder and cheek. “Yocke.”
“Jack, there’s been a shooting at the day-care center in the Shiloh Baptist Church, next door to the Jefferson projects. About thirty minutes or so ago. Would you run over there? I’m also sending a photographer.”
“Yo.”
Yocke looked over his story, pushed RECORD, and then left the terminal to turn itself off.
The Jefferson projects was not the worst public housing project in the city, nor was it the best. It was simply average. Ninety-eight percent black and Hispanic, the tenants existed in a netherworld of poverty and squalor where the crack trade boomed twenty-four hours a day and men sneaked in and out to avoid jeopardizing their girlfriends’ welfare eligibility.
All the legitimate merchants in a five-block radius of the projects had long ago gone out of business, except for one sixty-year-old Armenian grocer who had been robbed forty-two times in the last sixty months, a record even for Washington. Yocke had done a story on him six months or so ago. He had been robbed four times since then.
“One of these crackheads is going to kill you some night,” Yocke had told the grocer.
“Where am I gonna go? Answer me that. I grew up in the house across the street. I’ve never lived anywhere else. The grocery business is the only trade I know. And they never steal over a day’s receipts.”
“Some strung-out kid is going to smear your brains all over the back counter.”
“It’s sorta like a tax, y’know? That’s the way I look at it. The scumbags take my money at gunpoint and buy crack. The city takes my money legally and pays the mayor a salary he doesn’t earn and he uses it to buy crack. The feds take my money legally and pay welfare to that crowd in the projects and they let their kids starve while they spend the money on crack. What the hell’s the difference?”
Still pondering the crack tax, Yocke slowed the pool car as he went by the Armenian’s corner grocery and looked in. The old man was bagging groceries for an elderly black lady.
He parked the car two blocks from the project and walked. As he rounded a corner, there they were, long three-story gray buildings, four to a block, decaying without grace under a cold gray sky.
Something about the scene jarred him. Oh yeah, the place was deserted. The teenage boys who manned the sidewalks and sold crack to the white people who drove in from the suburbs were gone. The cops were here.
Yocke veered onto a sidewalk between the buildings and strode along purposefully, his steps echoing on the cinderblock walls and the gray, vacant windows.
White man, white man, the echoes said, over and over. White man, white man …
The church was across the street from the projects, on the western edge. Police cars in front, lights flashing. An ambulance. One cop keeping an eye on the vehicles.
Yocke showed the cop his ID. “Understand there’s been a shooting?”
The cop was a black man in his fifties with a pot gut. The strap that held his pistol in its holster was unlatched. The gun could be drawn in a clean, crisp motion. The cop jerked his thumb over his shoulder and grunted.
“Can I go in?”
“After they bring the body out. Be another ten minutes or so.”
Yocke got out his notebook and pencil. “Who is it?”
“Was.”
“Yeah.”
“The woman who ran the day care. I don’t know her name.”
“What happened?”
“Well, near as I can figure, from what I’ve heard, a couple squad cars stopped over on Grant.” Grant was the street bordering the west side of the projects. “The dealers ran through the projects. A cop chased one guy. He went charging into the church, through the day-care center toward the playground door, and when the victim didn’t get out of his way fast enough, he drilled her. One shot. Right through the heart.”
The radio transceiver on the cop’s belt holster crackled into life. He held it to his ear with his left hand. His right remained near his gun butt.
Other cops were searching the abandoned buildings and tenements to the west of the church. The cryptic transmissions floated from the radios of the parked cruisers.
When the radio fell momentarily silent, Yocke asked the patrolman, “Where were the kids when the shooting occurred?”
“Where the hell do you think? Right there. They saw the whole thing.”
“When?”
“About two-forty or so.”
“You haven’t got the killer yet?”
The cop spit on the sidewalk. “Not yet.”
“Description?”
“Black male, about eighteen or so, five feet ten to six feet, maybe a hundred fifty or sixty. Medium-length hair. Was wearing a red ball-cap, black leather coat, white running shoes. That’s the description from the cop chasing him. All the kids say is that he had a big gun.”
Big gun, Yocke scribbled. Yeah, any pistol vomiting bullets into real people, with real blood flying, it’s a big gun when you remember it. Big as your nightmares, big as evil personified, big as sudden death.
“How old are the kids?”
“Youngest’s a few weeks. Oldest is almost six.”
“Name of the cop chasing the shooter?”
“Ask the lieutenant.”
“Why was the cop chasing the shooter?”
“Ask the lieutenant.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“Your newspaper sucks.”
Yocke put the notebook in his pocket and rolled his collar upright. The wind was picking up. Dirt and trash swirled around the cars and funneled between the barracks of the projects. A chilly wind.
“May rain,” the cop said when he saw Yocke looking at the gray sky.
“Might.”
“Been a dry fall. We need the rain.”
“How many years you been on the force?”
“Too fucking many.”
The minutes passed. Yocke fought the chill wind as the police radio told its story of futility. The man who had done the shooting was nowhere to be found.
The Post photographer showed up. He burned film as Yorke shivered.
Finally, after twenty minutes, the ambulance crew brought the body out on a wheeled stretcher covered with a white sheet, which was strapped down to keep it from blowing away. It went into the vehicle and the crew followed. One man got in the driver’s seat, turned off the flashing overhead lights, and drove away.
“You can go in now,” the cop beside Yocke told him.
The church foyer was dirty and dark and needed paint. The sounds of children sobbing were plainly audible.
On the wall a small announcement board gave the title of this Sunday’s sermon: “The Christian’s Choice in Today’s World.” Beneath the sermon board was a faded poster with a girl’s picture: “Missing since 4/21/88. Black female, 13, five feet two.” Her name was there, what she had been wearing that evening nineteen months ago, a phone number to call.
A stairway led up to the left. To the sanctuary, probably. Yocke continued along the hallway, toward the sobbing. At the end of the hall the door stood open.