'No. He's actin' real nice. Said he knew about the parole lady. I told him I had to, 'cause she was fixin' to violate you. He said that shit was unfortunate, but it had to be done. Said he understood.'
'What else?'
'Told us to stay right here till he figures out how to put us somewhere safe.' Miller licked his lips. ''You sit tight right where you at,' he said, like he knew where we was.'
'What're you sayin', Rico?'
'Deacon be talkin' out the side of his mouth, Melvin. He done with us. Maybe he know where we at or maybe he tryin' to find out. Either way, he gonna send someone over here eventually. And when that someone come, he ain't comin' as a friend.'
Lee put his cigarette to his lips and dragged on it hard. A rope of ash dropped to his lap. He made no move to brush it away.
'We need to move,' said Miller. 'Gotta lay up somewhere else.'
Lee exhaled smoke. His cigarette hand shook as he moved it down to rest on his thigh.
'You stay here and keep an eye on the front,' said Miller.
Miller walked back into the bedroom. Lee stared at the plaster wall before him, chipped and water stained, and the bedsheets covering the windows.
There ain't no place to run to, thought Melvin Lee. Lee felt the heat of his cigarette as it burned down toward his fingers, but he made no move to put it out.
Entering his bedroom, Miller kicked aside a PS2 controller and some magazines. He stepped on a game case and crushed it, not caring, has he crossed the room. None of his possessions had ever made him happy. They had no value now.
Miller went to the closet and parted the shirts and jackets that hung on its rod. He freed the false wall, a sheet of particleboard fitted behind the clothing, and dropped it behind him. He removed his cut-down Winchester pump- action shotgun from the rack. He retrieved his Glock, his S&W .38, several bricks of bullets, a box of low-recoil shotgun load, and his harness and holsters. He placed everything on his bed.
Miller went to a dresser he'd bought for twenty dollars at the Salvation Army store. On top of the dresser sat the shoe box containing the count taken from DeEric Green's Escalade. Beside the shoe box was Miller's knife. He'd cleaned it and secured it in its sheath. He looked at his nickname, burned from top to bottom into the leather.
His mother was the first one to call him that. That was, when she wasn't calling him a punk or worse. Berating him, slapping him in public at every drugstore or grocery they went to when he'd ask for an action figure or just a pack of gum. When he cried, she only slapped him harder.
'Gonna teach you not to cry,' she said. 'I ain't raisin' no sissies.'
There was one time at this department store, around Christmas, when Rico was six or seven. He saw these ornaments, silver balls with people's names painted on them, hung on this big old tree they had set up in the middle of the store. He was standing beside the tree, trying to find his name on one of the balls, when he saw one had Ricky on it, right in front of him. He knew it wasn't his name exactly, but if he could take the ball with him, he believed his mother could paint over the
'There go my name, Mama,' he said, pointing happily at the tree.
'That ain't your name.'
'Can I have it? We can make it my name when we get home.'
'Your name Creep,' she said, yanking on his hand. 'And I ain't got the time to be paintin' over shit. You don't need that thing no way.'
He reached for it and pulled it from the tree. The ball fell and shattered on the floor.
'Now you gonna get somethin',' she said, slapping him so hard the store and all the Christmas lights in it began to spin. 'You fuck up every goddamn thing you touch.'
He cried, and hated himself for crying, as she dragged him through the store. He couldn't even look at his weak self in the mirror for the next few days.
That was out in public. In private, in their apartment in a rodent-infested, drug-plagued government housing project that someone had the nerve to call the Gardens, down near the Navy Yard in Southeast, his mother was worse. When she was drinking or sucking on that glass pipe, she beat him with her fists. Sometimes she whipped him with a belt. She never did beat on his little sister. Miller couldn't step to his mother, but he found a way to wipe that grin off his sister's face.
'My sister don't scream when you fuck her,' he'd said to Melvin the day before this one, and Melvin had laughed.
Yes she do, thought Miller. She scream and sob, both at the same time.
He was on the street by the time he was twelve. Staying with a bunch of older boys in Southeast, working the corners, learning the game. In and out of schools, courtrooms, and juvenile facilities. The last was Oak Hill, out there in Laurel. Couple of tough ones had tried to step to him there, and he showed them who he was. He walked out of that motherfucker one day, just climbed the fence and went over it where some other kids had cut the razor wire down. Far as he knew, no one was looking for him. Since he'd left the Hill, he'd been in the wind.
Staring at his name burned into the sheath, he thought of his mother, and then that parole woman. How good it felt when he'd cut her across the face, plunged the blade into her chest, and stuck it through her hand when she'd raised it to protect herself. Thinking on it, his dick grew hard.
Miller slipped the knife into the shoe box alongside the money. He went to the bed and loaded the guns. As he worked, he ground his teeth. The sound was like a whisper in the room.
CHAPTER 26
Nigel Johnson lifted the trunk of his Lexus. A light inside the lid illuminated the two toolboxes he had placed there. He looked around the
