up.'
'Yeah, something like that,' Wayne said.
'Want another one?'
'Nah, I'm good with this one. Don't need to be setting a bad example for you young 'uns.'
'Sure.'
'What about you?' King raised a beer to Lott.
Lott bobbed his head to beats and rhymes only he heard, keeping his own counsel. He was a week past getting his hair tightened up and his large brown eyes drifted with the activity of the court. His FedEx uniform — a thick sweatshirt over blue slacks, his name badge, 'Lott Carey' with a picture featuring his grill-revealing smile, wrapped around his arm — girded him like a suit of armor. Lott put on his pimproll strut for all the eyes to see as he moved toward an open seat, a puffed-up exaggerated gait with a cool blank stare, his face locked into a grimace of put-on hostility purposefully designed to make old ladies clutch their purses and white suburbanites cross the street if they were in his path. A row of faux gold caps grilled his teeth. He was a wrong time/wrong place sort, always getting caught up in situations he didn't start but felt compelled to finish, with jail being the typical finish line. These days he kept his dreams simple: dreaming of holding a job and breathing free air, not like some of the other talkers on the block.
'You know I don't drink.'
'It's still polite to ask.'
'And where would we be without politeness?'
King nodded then popped open the beer. There were too few evenings with anything approaching peace, so he opted to enjoy the time he had.
It was a glass half full of Kool Aid evening.
A nest of fine braids lined Omarosa's head, not a hair out of place as if she had just stopped from the beauty salon. Hers was a cultivated beauty, but where would her kind be without beauty? With skin like heavily creamed coffee, almond eyes that missed nothing, and the high cheekbones with accompanying aquiline nose of a European aristocrat, her pointed ears were the only tell of her mixed fey heritage. The pair of handcuffs clicked in her hand as she spun one spindle through the rest of the cuff.
Invisible to all, she strolled along the court sidewalks. Only three kinds of people generally remained invisible: fiends, homeless, and pros. Such a station in life supplied invisibility because as fixtures in the neighborhood, most folks averted their eyes from them either in sympathizing shame or due to the desire to not be approached by them. Folks tended to assume she was a pro, though few dared ask her for sex. She allowed them to carry on in their assumptions, for her kind also valued the power of illusion. After all, few suspected the need to be on guard against the sawed-off 12-gauge that rarely left her side.
'The game begins again.' She didn't turn her head to address him nor otherwise betray any surprise at his presence. Few managed to sneak up on her, with her battle-hardened senses keen as the edge of the blade strapped to her thigh. However, Merle had a way of appearing when least expected. 'All the players are almost in place.'
'Indeed,' he said. 'They've woken the dragons.'
CHAPTER TWO
Juneteenth Walker wanted more. Trapped in the corner of the fevered nightmare of his life, he suffered from the epiphany of a fuck-up's resignation: he was never going to rise higher. Baylon kept him on the crew out of what passed for goodwill, but Dred was the main man and if Dred got word of his latest fuck-up, he was done.
The slow growth of keloided needle tracks trailed along his arm. Too many black moles dotted his skin. The spike rested in his vein though he'd already pushed the plunger. His head lolled back and the heroin rush took him to dark places. Images of a flesh-stripped baby sucking at the damp skin of the elongated tits of an emaciated old woman with too much paunch and lank hair danced in his mind's eye. The resounding closeness of the dark thundered in his ear.
The picture of this scene froze like a bootleg DVD in need of cleaning before resolving into his present or at least not-too-distant past. Half-formed shadows entwined in the night. The dirty mattress stank of liquor and blood, the close squalor of rusted pipes and cracked plaster walls around him. A woman with a large nose and a numb smile gazed up at him in the approximation of a come-hither stare that at one time might have been sexy. Her body remembered her poise and flirting coyness despite her now-sagging skin and dusty complexion. Her toothless mouth wrapped around his engorged member, still mewling from his lap for a taster package. A transaction of flesh for a free dose. As if electric wires stabbed into his thigh, he convulsed, her filthy fingernails digging into him as she bared her gaping mouth full of his seed. Far from pleasing, the entire concerto of writhing flesh played out with the pleasure of him crawling along a hill of razor blades. Anything to divert his attention. To numb him.
Junie tripped over a body in the debris-littered corridor. A series of doorless rooms lined the hallway. Alone with the ritual madness and his thoughts, a long drag from the cigarette helped him to ride down his high. It was almost time to get back on the clock and start grinding, if he still had a place on the crew. In a straight-up dope fiend move, after he screwed up the count, he blamed it on being jacked by a notorious street thief. He knew he had better keep hiding the truth because if Baylon knew, goodwill notwithstanding, they'd beat his ass before putting him out of his misery.
Back in his spot, he set down the controller for his PlayStation and spat out the last of his sunflower seeds when Parker Griffin hit him up on his cell for them to do a run. For appearance's sake, he wanted to appear busy or, if nothing else, at least not at the immediate beck and call of Baylon as, after all, he was no man's errand boy. He told Parker to be at 30th and MLK and he'd pick him up in a half-hour. Nearly an hour later, practically punctual in his world, he saw the skinny man with a boy's face, with his eager eyes and teeth too large for his mouth. It was his hair, a Mohawk with the hair on either side of it braided into corn rows. Five-O would always be picking him up if he worked a corner.
''Sup, Junie,' Parker said.
Junie hated the nickname, but it wasn't as if he were in love with his given name, either. ''Sup, big man. You still got that hair.'
'What took you so long?' Parker changed topics. The last thing he wanted was to become one of those nondescript fools. He envisioned himself like Samson in the Bible; his strength, his image, was in his hair and he'd be damned if he'd cut it for a woman, much less a dude.
'You interrupt a man while he's in mid-stroke, you should expect him to take a minute to get his rhythm back.'
'I heard that.' Parker reached out to give him a pound.
The easy acceptance of the lie pleased Junie. It meant that his rep was set. Truth be told, he already had five kids by five different baby mommas, none of whom he bothered to know. But he had rather informally taken Parker under his wing and enjoyed the way Parker clung to his words. Junie was overprotective of him to the point of being too quick to take knucklehead bullshit to the next level.
For his part, Parker, though young, was anxious to prove himself both to Junie and to Baylon. It was just like Parker to admire a no-heart pretty boy with too much flash and too much to prove like Junie. He rolled with Parker's older brother — 'Griff,' as the right of the firstborn included the claim to his own name — and Parker worshiped both of them. It had been three years since Griff was killed.
'Where we heading?' Junie asked.
'Over to Breton Street. Night's boys playing our corners a little too close.'
Junie held his fingers up like a gun and squeezed off a few rounds.
'Nah, nothing like that,' Parker said. 'Yet. He said we should just make our presence felt.'
'A'ight.'
Jonathan Jennings Public School 109 — named for an early governor of Indiana — was a no-tolerance zone for the drug trade, not that the fact stemmed things beyond creating a neutral zone of sorts between the two major crews, Dred and Night. Dred's lieutenant, Baylon, had been tasked by Dred with establishing a west side beachhead which started with control of the Breton Court condominiums. Night's crew, helmed by Green, Baylon's equivalent in
