only four for all that weight.
“Naw,” Tate told him, “that’s stainless right there.”
“Shit no. Do it look stainless?”
“Yeah, it do. Dirty from the pile where I found it is all.”
“Bulk weight,” the man said wearily, and Tate snatched the last singles, feeling punked, especially in front of the boy. He walked away calling the metal man everything but a child of God.
“Thirty-six. Ain’t bad for the first run of the day.”
The sound of the boy’s voice took the anger from Tate. He stopped and pulled the cash from his pocket, counting out eighteen and handing it to Daymo, who looked at the bills, then back at Tate.
“You need twenty to get out of the gate, right?” the boy said.
Tate said nothing and grabbed the empty cart, rattling away from the scales with the boy trailing.
“Ain’t you need one-and-one to start?”
Tate shook his head. Dope alone would get him right; he could wait on the coke until the next run. “Fair is fair,” he told the boy.
“You can have the twenty, man. I make due with the rest.”
Tate looked at Daymo, suddenly proud of the moment.
“We partners, ain’t we?”
The boy nodded, still wheezing, coming abreast on the other side of the cart. The sun was high now and they rattled down Monument Street feeling the summer day.
“Even split. Always.”
Corelli had no patience for this anymore. He had to admit that much. When he was younger, he could wait the wait, sitting in whatever shithole where he was needed, staying awake with black coffee and AM radio. Once, when he worked narcotics, he stayed put in the Amtrak garage for thirty hours, watching a rental car until a mule returned from a New York run.
He fucking
“I’m spelling you,” Hickham had said. “You can still catch last call.”
“Fuck it. I’m good.”
Corelli tossed the line away like it was nothing to sit in a fucking car for a day and a night and more. He could still see the look on Hickham’s face, that fat fuck.
“You wanna sit some more?”
“I said I’m good.”
Corelli thought he’d made a point until he got back to the squad office the following afternoon to learn Hickham had pronounced him an idiot. The fuck kind of braindead goof won’t take relief after twenty hours in a parking garage?
“Proud to know you, kid,” Hickham had said, the sarcasm thick. And the rest of those guys just laughed. Never mind that it was him who eyeballed the mule. Never mind that the case went forward because of it. The joke was on him.
His radio crackled and he recognized the voice.
“Seventy-four ten to KGA. Lateral with seventy-four twenty-one.”
“Seventy-four twenty-one?” the dispatcher repeated.
Corelli reached for the radio, keyed the mike, and answered: “Seventy-four twenty-one. I’m on.”
“Seventy-four twenty-one, go to three for a lateral.”
He flipped channels to hear his sergeant asking what the hell he was doing all afternoon. He answered dryly that he was busy with police work, that he was out in the streets of Baltimore defending persons and property from all threats foreign and domestic. His sergeant, equally dry, remarked on the weakness of the lie.
“Couldn’t you just tell me you’re drinking at some bar?” Cabazes mused, indifferent to whoever was listening on channel three. “Then I’d know you respect me enough to lie properly and respectfully.”
“I’m at Kavanagh’s on my sixth Jameson. Feel better?”
“No, actually. Now, because of that admission, I have to believe you are standing in your soiled underwear in a North Philadelphia cathouse.”
Corelli laughed, as much at the word
Lawyer, maybe. Or something like a lawyer.
“What do you need, Ray?” he asked his sergeant, releasing the mike.
As he wrote the Beemer’s tag, he listened to Cabazes tell him that Lehmann’s squad was short a man for the midnight shift, that he could work a double and clock overtime if he wanted.
“I’m good with it. No problem.”
The Beemer rolled past him on the way out of the lot. Glimpsed through a windshield, Lawyer Boy looked younger than he expected. Baby-faced even.
“Seriously, Tony, what’re you doing out there all the damn day?”
“Police work.”
In the pause that followed, he could hear wheels turning in his sergeant’s head. “All right,” Cabazes said finally, “I’ll see you when I see you.”
Tate stayed off Division Street, even though the crew on the Gold Street corners was said to have the best coke. He copped instead at Baker and Stricker from some young boys selling black-top vials.
There was no sense going on the other side of the avenue. Or so he told himself until he was halfway down the gulley on Riggs, moving fast, hungry to get the shit home and fire up.
“Where you been at, nigger?”
Tate startled at the voice. Not here on Riggs. Not again.
“I said, where the fuck you been at?”
Tate tried to cross and join the street parade around Riggs and Calhoun, where the Black Diamond crew was working double-seal bags. But Lorenzo followed him, cutting the angle, grabbing him by the throat and forcing him into the wall of the cut-rate. A tout, watching from the other corner, laughed.
“I’m up on Division Street waitin’, and where the fuck is you?” Lorenzo was in his pockets now, rooting around, finding nothing. “The fuck’s it at? Huh? Where the fuck it be?”
Lorenzo pulled out Tate’s shirt, grabbed his dip, then reached down for his socks. Tate tried to run, but Lorenzo snatched him by the hair and threw a hard right, bouncing Tate off the wall. The blood felt warm and metallic in his mouth, and when he finally found some balance, Tate realized that Lorenzo had the dope and coke both: two small zip bags of Mass Destruction and a red-top of good coke; all of it had been curled in the top of Tate’s left sock.
“This some low shit,” he managed.
But Lorenzo was already walking away, laughing. The whole corner-touts, runners, fiends-was tripping on the spectacle. At Mount Street, Lorenzo turned back before crossing and shouted, “Catch ya later.”
Tate gathered himself, wiping blood on his sleeve. Four times in two weeks, and there was no sign Lorenzo was getting tired of the game. Four times he had his shit taken. On Monday alone, it was eight black-tops-a bulk- buy to celebrate the money from the copper rainspouts from that warehouse roof.
“Why you his bitch like that?”
It was the tout, all of fifteen years old, signifying, trying to have more fun with it. Tate turned, started back across the street, and then saw the boy at the mouth of the alley, staring. Tate looked away, then started down Riggs. The boy followed, catching him at Fulton.
“’Sup.”
“Ain’t much,” said Tate. Maybe he didn’t see. Maybe he got there after.
“Yeah?”
“Banged up my face a bit.”
“I seen.”
