Drama City

'Thank you, cuz,' said Green, passing the joint over to Butler, who took it and drew on it hard.

Green thinking, Ain't nothin' wrong with this kid, when you get down to it. The boy's just nice.

Rico Miller was under the wheel of his 330i, sitting low, as Melvin Lee, in the passenger bucket, scanned the radio for a song he liked. Miller had let Lee drive the car for most of the day, but now it was time for Miller to take back what was his.

Lee had this hoop, an old Camry, the kind of car a white man in the suburbs bought when he thought he'd made it. It was the car to go with the relaxed jeans and the goatee and the wife with the long T-shirts trying to cover her fat ass. Funny to see Melvin driving a car like that, much as he loved nice things, but that was part of his strategy for layin' low and staying free. Show no flash, hold a job up at the car wash, watch the weed intake, report steady to the correctional officer, pee in the cup when they asked you to, all that. Melvin carried no gun, either, 'cause a felon like him, he got caught with one, that was a mandatory ten-to-fifteen right there. What they called the Reno law. Melvin did not want to go back to prison.

So Rico Miller let him drive his whip. Not all the time, but some. Even let Melvin pretend it was his, like when he was talking mad shit to that dog man back at Dupont, saying, 'You leanin' against my car.' Dog man playin' Melvin off, not using his words but his eyes to let Melvin know that he didn't give a good fuck about Melvin or what he had to say. Anyway, if it made Melvin feel better about his circumstances to call the car his own, Miller had no problem with it. Melvin knew whose car it was.

Rico Miller hit the hydro he was smoking and smiled about nothing. The weed was starting to blow kisses to his head.

'I like this right here,' said Melvin Lee, his NY baseball cap sitting loose on his tiny head, taking his hand off the radio's scan.

'Alicia?'

'Joint is tight. She tight too.'

It was the one where the coffee shop waitress at '39th and Lenox' calls up a customer, this dude she's been noticing, and leaves him a message on his answering machine, right in the middle of the song. She tells him how she's been slipping milk and cream into his hot chocolate, even though the manager wouldn't like her doing it, because she, the waitress, finds him 'sweet.' Rico would never listen to this kind of bitch music on his own, but Melvin was an old head who was into that old-type thing. Rico didn't ask him to turn it off.

'I'd give that girl a whole bucket of cream,' said Miller, who felt he had to say something.

Lee swigged from a bottle of malt liquor he had in a paper bag and wiped his chin. 'They turnin' up there.'

'I got eyes.'

'They turnin', is all I'm sayin'.'

Miller and Lee had followed DeEric Green and the Butler boy in the black Escalade through Petworth and into Park View. It was early in the evening, not yet close to dark. The sun was low and throwing gold on the street. People were walking on Georgia, going in and out of markets, Laundromats, liquor stores, check-cashing operations, and bars, their shadows long on the sidewalks. The activity would pick up soon. On the side streets both east and west of Georgia, open-air drug sales would intensify as the night progressed.

The Escalade turned left onto Otis and went up its grade. It cut a right on 6th. Rico Miller kept his distance, going slowly up Otis and pulling over to the curb before the turn. He didn't want to get burned, and from where he'd parked, he could see just fine down 6th. Also, he was being mindful of the territory into which he'd crossed.

This was Nigel Johnson's turf, from Otis to Park Road. Deacon Taylor had the south section of the neighborhood, from Lamont through Kenyon, down to Irving. They shared Morton, and the Park Morton Section Eights. What got confusing sometimes, what caused trouble, was some of those corners in between.

Neither Nigel nor Deacon worked the area west of Georgia Avenue anymore. Way the Spanish were acting back in Columbia Heights, with their gangs, La Raza and especially that STC mob, just goin' wild back in there, there wasn't any upside to it anymore.

Miller cut the engine. He and Lee watched DeEric Green and Michael Butler get out of the Escalade. Green had a shoe box in his hand and Butler had a bag.

'What they doin'?' said Miller.

'That's where Nigel's mother stay at,' said Lee. 'Most likely, they be droppin' off the count.'

'Lotta cash to go to his moms.'

'She get some every day. She be bankin' it for Nigel.'

'Both of them carryin' money?'

'The bag the kid be carryin'? I expect he got some food in that motherfucker. 'Cause you know that fat-ass heifer do like to eat.'

Miller stared at the house. 'We gonna brace 'em when they come out?'

'Not in front of Nigel's mother's place,' said Lee. There were some things you did not do.

They sat there for a while, Rico Miller enjoying his high, fingering the knife in his pocket as violent images moved like swift dark clouds behind his eyes. Melvin Lee drank methodically, staring at the run-down stretch of 6th. His mind was on simpler things.

'I fucked a girl on that street,' said Lee, seeing her in his head.

'Which house?' said Miller.

'I'm tellin' you, I fucked her on the street. We was walkin' back from the Black Hole one night, and she couldn't wait. I bottomed her ass right there on the asphalt.'

'What her name was?'

'What difference does that make?'