Buy things. Tavon had been driven to do just that for as long as he could remember. From his first pair of baby Nikes on, his mother had sacrificed and run up her credit cards to see that he had the right labels, especially when he went off to school. Couldn’t have those other kids and their parents seeing him in knockoff Timbs. Never mind that his mom was ass broke; working the after care program at the local elementary for next to nothing, she still took care of him, made sure he had things. Bought him the videos for the VCR, his earliest being Aladdin and his favorite The Lion King. The Spanish people in the apartment next door had the same movie, but theirs said El Rey Leon on the box, and he cried about that, and damn if his mom didn’t find one of those for him, too. And then Space Jam, with that song his mom used to sing to him at night to make him feel positive, that R. Kelly thing, “I Believe I Can Fly.”
Tavon took his mother’s buying habits to heart, and when he was old enough to pick out his own stuff it had to be the best. Or at least it had to look like it. His Gucci belt buckle was fake, and so were his Dior shades and Rolex with cut glass around the face, but the We R One stuff was real, as was his Helly Hansen parka and collection of Lacoste shirts and sneaks, which he wore with the tags still on. He even had a Zegna suit. Man said it was Zegna, anyway, even though the name had been tore out the jacket.
Why spend two, three thousand on a suit when you could buy one just as good for a couple hundred in the back of someone’s shop? Why go to community college, with no guarantee of a job after you had put in all that work, when you could make money now? Same thing with Anwan, putting them on, teaching them. Okay, they had been impatient. But why wait for it to come to you in a big way? Why not walk to it? It was why he and Edwin had done their dirt.
But even with what was about to come their way, Tavon, at that moment, felt empty. He was thinking on his mother, the way she looked at him with disappointment, the hurt on her face when she found the scale and dime bags in his room. “Didn’t I give you everything?” she’d said. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, thinking, You did.
Tavon was sitting behind the wheel of a dark car on a dead-end street, and in his mind he was seeing his mother, his vision of her as a younger woman, singing to him softly, sitting beside his bed, telling him that he could touch the sky. All that money that was about to come his way. He should have been elated, but he was not.
The two men opened the rear doors of the Impala and slid into the backseat.
The man holding the shoe box was thirty-five, wiry and flat faced and cat eyed. He wore a large wooden crucifix on a beaded chain hung out over his shirt. His name was Earl Nance. The man who had slipped in behind Tavon was also in his thirties, large, stack shouldered, wearing an unfashionable fade, one gold hoop earring, and a jacket too heavy for the weather. His name was Bernard White.
Tavon swiveled his body some and turned his head to look into the backseat. “Y’all got it?”
“It’s right here,” said Nance, untopping the shoe box and reaching inside.
Nance pulled a. 357 S amp;W Combat Magnum and pointed it at Tavon’s face. Tavon said, “Mom,” and the interior of the car exploded in sound. The muzzle flash strobed Tavon’s death mask as the hollow-point round entered his cheek and exited big as a peach, blowing head stew across the dash and windshield.
Bernard White had drawn the. 380 Taurus holstered inside his jacket. In futility, Edwin Davis raised one hand to cover his face. Wilson shot him through his palm, and as Edwin screamed and turned his head, Wilson shot him in the temple. Edwin’s last breath was a long exhale. His head came to rest against the passenger window. Blood dripped into his open mouth.
The air was heavy with smoke and the smell of gun smoke and shit. White used the barrel of the Taurus to break the dome light on the headliner.
“Get their cells,” said White.
Nance rat-fucked through their pockets, coughing against the stench of Tavon’s voided bowels, and found their phones. White retrieved the two shell casings that had been ejected from the. 380. They used their shirttails to wipe the inner and outer handles of the Impala and everything else they thought they’d touched.
Ten minutes later, as White drove west in the far right lane of the Benning Bridge, Nance leaned out the passenger-side window and heaved the two guns over the rail, where they dropped into the Anacostia River, sinking to the bottom to come to rest with countless other murder weapons that would never be found.
“You didn’t need to use a cannon in that small space,” said White. “Wasn’t no need for that big gun. Seems to me you were compensating again for your lack of size.”
“You mean over compensating,” said Nance.
“So you do admit it.”
They drove for a while in silence.
“That was easy,” said Nance.
Bernard White said, “They fucked with men.”
Lucas, standing naked on the hardwood floor, picked up his iPhone off the nightstand. He looked at the text message from Tavon Lynch. It read, “4044.”
“What is it?” said Constance, slick with sweat, lying on his bed.
Lucas stared at the phone, then placed it back on the stand. “Nothing I need to worry about tonight.”
EIGHT
The next day, Lucas phoned and texted Tavon Lynch and Edwin Davis but got no response.
There was nothing on his plate for the morning, so he got on his bike and hit Beach Drive north and took it out into Maryland all the way to Veirs Mill Park. The ride back was flat to a subtle downgrade. There was little road traffic and he found his zone, where it was just the motion, his feet tight in the toe clips, the chain quietly running over the teeth, a perfect, simple machine at work.
He carried his bike up the stairs when he returned and put it on the back porch. As he often did after a good ride, he wanted a woman. Instead he did several sets of push-ups, normal and wide stance, and then did chin-ups and pull-ups on a bar mounted inside the door frame of his bedroom.
Lucas took a shower and tried phoning Tavon and Edwin. Nothing.
Lucas learned of the murders that evening while reading the news on the Washington Post’s website. He felt an inner chest-bump at first, seeing Tavon’s and Edwin’s names as fatal victims of a shooting. That soon passed, and he had no lasting feeling of grief beyond the too-familiar feeling of lament for young lives that had been prematurely terminated. He had willed himself to be unemotional about such events. He had witnessed too much death, and if he got stuck on it he felt he would be frozen and done.
He phoned Tom Petersen at home to tell him that Anwan Hawkins’s two top associates had been murdered. He thought that it might have implications for Anwan’s trial and that Petersen should know. Certainly the prosecution would try to bring the murders into evidence, if only to tell the jury that Anwan Hawkins moved through a world of extreme violence connected, in some way, to his drug enterprise.
“You are working for Anwan,” said Petersen.
“He hired me to find something he lost.”
“Are these murders related to that job?”
“I don’t know for sure,” said Lucas. He suspected they were, but the qualifier took it out of the realm of lie.
“Okay,” said Petersen dubiously.
There was a silence that was a standoff.
Lucas said, “If you hear anything…”
“I’ll check in with my sources,” said Petersen. “If you come across anything that might impact my client…”
“Right,” said Lucas.
They ended the call.
Lucas got up early the next morning and read the newspaper’s print version of the Lynch and Davis murders, which held no further details. The story made it inside Metro and had a few more inches than the usual “roundup,” due to what was described as the “execution-style” method of the crime, a coded message telling readers that the victims had probably been in the game.
A notable decrease in violent crime in the District had made the murders of young black men and women
