“You and me go back. I need to know the people I deal with.”
“I ain’t the only person you know from high school.”
“True. But when I ran into you at the shoe store, I remembered how you and me was always straight. And I started to think, that shopping mall you work in is an untapped market. You and your boy must know a rack of heads out there, don’t you?”
“Sure,” said Cody with a careless shrug.
“I got no one out in that area,” said Dominique. “This here is an opportunity for me but also for you. I mean, what’s the next step you take after salesman at that shop? Assistant manager? I’m not tryin to be funny about it, either. I’m askin you.”
“That’s right,” said Deon.
“There it is,” said Dominique.
“What’s a pound gonna cost us?” said Cody.
“This shit I got now is fifteen hundred wholesale,” said Dominique. “But I’m gonna front it to you. This time only, because I want to help you get started. The first fifteen comes in, you pay me back. The rest you sell for profit or keep for your personal use. It makes no difference to me.”
“Sell it for what amount?” said Deon.
“What the market bears. You get two hundred an ounce for it, you gonna double your money. Time to time, I’m gonna bring in some high-intensity hydro that’s more expensive. Two thousand, twenty-five hundred a pound. When that happens, you got to get three, four hundred an ounce to make your usual thing. ’N other words, you adjust.”
“What do you pay for it?” said Cody.
“What’s that?”
“I’m just interested.”
“That ain’t none of your business,” said Dominique, smiling in a friendly way.
Cody looked at the young man in the Ben Sherman shirt with the little roses on it, his slender fingers and thin wrists, his shiny, manicured nails. Cody didn’t like what he saw, but he nodded his head.
“Look, dawg,” said Dominique. “The way this works, the way this got to be is, keep it simple. I’m gonna deliver what you need whenever you need it, and then it’s on you to move it. But I’m just a middleman. I don’t get involved in what you do, and you don’t need to know the details of what I do. Understand?”
“Yeah, okay,” said Cody.
“My advice? Don’t get sloppy. That’s what you got to keep in mind. Far as who you sell to, I’m sayin take care. Some kid who got no loyalty to you gets put in the box for possession, he might offer up your name. And then you gonna be under the hot lights yourselves, and you might say mine.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Cody.
“No doubt,” said Dominique. “We just talking here. But you should know, anyone gives me up, the people I deal with gonna be nervous.”
“I get you,” said Cody.
“You remember my brother, don’t you, Deon?”
“Sure,” said Deon. He didn’t know Calvin Dixon but knew of his rep. “Where he at now?”
“Oh, he’s out there. Still out there, you know.”
Deon drummed his fingers on the tabletop. He glanced around the lunch place. He looked at Cody, then back at Dominique.
“So,” said Dominique, relaxing in his chair. “Y’all ready to make some money?”
Dominique had contacted Deon and Cody at the right time. They were bored, unsatisfied with their income levels, and saw no way up or out. It would be fun, a game played outside the law, something that would blow up their self-esteem. Neither of them felt that what they were about to do was wrong. Marijuana was a part of their everyday lives, as it was for their peers. Smoking weed didn’t hurt anyone. It wasn’t heroin or cocaine, and they weren’t corner boys. Of them, only Cody aspired to the life he had heard about in rap songs and seen on television, sung and acted by people who for the most part had never experienced that life themselves. Deon, prone to depression and treading water since high school, saw it as a positive move. He liked the idea of extra money in his pocket and free weed to smoke. Beyond that, he looked no further than the day he walked through.
“We’ll do that one pound,” said Deon. “See how it goes.”
It went well at first. It was easy finding customers, and the ones they dealt with were friends they’d made at the mall or people those friends could vouch for. If a kid got pulled over in his car and got busted for a bag of weed in his glove box, the event ended there. The no-snitch culture had bled out from the city to the inner suburbs. The police were not respected as worthy adversaries. Uniforms were the enemy. It was unspoken and understood that no one would roll on Cody and Deon.
In the course of a year, change came rapidly. The lunch place up past Georgia and Alaska closed its doors. Another neon letter on the Morris Miller sign went dark. Cody rented an apartment and furnished it. Charles Baker came into Deon’s mother’s life and inched his way into theirs. Cody quit the job at the shoe store. He bought a gun, the second transaction started by a straw purchase from a firearms store on Richmond Highway in Virginia. They doubled their orders from Dominique.
Deon didn’t care for the changes. At times, when he was off his Paxil, too high on weed, paranoid and confused, he thought of running away, perhaps moving to another city. But he knew no one outside D.C., and he didn’t want to leave his mother. The bus he had caught was an express.
“Here come that boy now,” said Charles Baker.
They were parked on Madison, facing west, the dark grounds of the park on their right, residences on their left. A stock Chrysler 300 drove slowly down the block, then executed a three-point turn and backed up so that its trunk was close to their hood. Dominique Dixon got out of the car and lifted the trunk lid as Cody opened the trunk to the Honda using his keypad remote. Dominique quickly retrieved two large black plastic trash bags, each holding a pound of marijuana. He closed the lid with his elbow, went around back of the Honda, and dropped the bags into its trunk and shut it.
“Kid dresses nice,” said Baker, as Dominique, sporting a leather jacket over a striped designer shirt worn out over expensive jeans, came to the driver’s window, now rolled down.
“Fellas,” said Dominique, his eyes losing their light as he got a look at Baker, sitting in the passenger seat.
Cody handed him an envelope containing three thousand dollars cash. Dominique slipped it into the inner pocket of his jacket.
“Why don’t you come on in and sit, boy,” said Baker.
“I gotta roll,” said Dominique.
“Don’t wanna be social, huh?”
“I ain’t trying to get jailed,” said Dominique, attempting to keep a jovial tone to his voice. He looked into the backseat. “We good, Deon?”
Deon made a very small shake of his head. The movement told Dominique to leave them. Deon’s eyes were saying “Just go away.” Baker caught the signal and it made his blood tick.
“Yeah,” said Deon. “I’ll get up with you later.”
“We could go somewhere and talk,” said Baker pleasantly. “I wouldn’t mind gettin to know you better.”
“I can’t tonight,” said Dominique.
“Maybe we could go over to where you stay at. Have a drink, somethin like that.”
“I got plans.”
“With a woman, I hope,” said Baker, and Cody chuckled. “C’mon, bro, we just wanna visit.”
“I don’t take my clients to my crib.”
“Do I stink or somethin?”
“Look, man -”
“It’s Mr. Charles to you.”
Dominique exhaled slowly. He didn’t make the correction. He looked at Deon pointedly and said, “I’m out.”
He didn’t acknowledge Baker or Cody before returning to his Chrysler. The headlights of the 300 swept across them as Dominique Dixon pulled away.
