Rain had started falling, pelting the windshield with dappled splashes as he pulled up to the building’s entrance. Aggie waited for the wind to die down, her purse held across her lap, her slim body enfolded by the wide bucket seat of the Jaguar. When she spoke, her voice was soft, almost timid.
“I didn’t want to fight you tonight. In fact, I think I wanted to seduce you.” She looked at him, waiting for a reaction that he refused to give. “When I first met you, I had this noble image of you. I thought you were different from the rest of them. I guess it was just a schoolgirl crush.”
She opened the door and unlimbered herself from the car. Before she vanished into her building, she ducked her head back into the Jag. “I’m glad I learned disappointment at a young age.”
The door closed softly and she was gone.
“The old Mercer charm strikes again,” he muttered, hurt by her statement.
Rather than giving himself time to digest what had just occurred, he decided to thrust it out of his mind until later. But as he dialed his car phone and listened to it ring three thousand miles away, he knew that Aggie’s outburst about being disappointed had been directed more at her father than at him. About her desire to seduce him, well, she wasn’t the first woman he’d blown it with and most certainly wouldn’t be the last.
The ringing stopped. “You have reached the home of Howard Small. I’m sorry I’m not here to take your call. Please leave a message after the tone.”
“Damn it.” Mercer cut the connection without leaving a message.
AT eighteen years old, Jamal Lincoln had lived a life that was all too common in Washington’s poorest neighborhoods. A gang member at thirteen, he saw his first action two weeks later when he was caught in the cross fire of a deal gone bad. He’d picked up the gun his cousin Rufus dropped when a nine-millimeter blew his teeth out the back of his head, and sprayed rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger. He didn’t hit anything, but the feeling it gave him was the beginning of a life that would have an inevitable outcome.
A week after that shoot-out, he’d pumped two slugs into the chest of a convenience-store clerk and used the thirty-seven dollars that that man’s life had been worth to buy his first vials of crack. He slowly worked his way up through the gang, promotions coming as his body count rose. He lost his virginity at fourteen when Nyeusi Radi, the gang leader who bragged that his name meant “Black Thunder” in Swahili, gave him a prostitute for his birthday. Jamal was still in school and spent his time roaming the hallways or lurking outside school grounds selling drugs and recruiting for his gang. On both counts he was too adept. By the time he was seventeen, he had survived enough firefights to become one of Radi’s chief lieutenants.
Radi was twenty-four, a millionaire with time running out. Everyone knew that his luck would end soon. The life he led would kill him eventually, and the longer he held on, the closer his death came. And Jamal, now eighteen, was next in line to take over the gang, make the real money, have the real power. That’s why he resented being sent on this mission outside his turf to nail some guy he’d never even heard of.
Earlier that night, Radi had invited Jamal into his crib, a series of large rooms carved out of a rundown apartment block in Anacostia. Radi had told him what to do and gave him a clean piece; all the while this creepy white dude watched them from a couch near Radi’s desk. Everything about the white guy screamed cop, but the dude didn’t even blink when Radi told Jamal to waste this other guy out in Arlington.
As Jamal was leaving the room, the white guy came up off the couch and grabbed him by his bare bicep. Jamal’s arms were big, roped with muscle held taut beneath glossy skin. The guy’s fingers were thin, pale, and bony, yet they sank so deeply into Jamal’s arm that he was staggered by the pain.
“Make it look like a mugging. Take his watch, wallet, whatever you want, but make sure he’s dead. If he isn’t, you will be.”
“Who da fuck you think you are, motherfucker?” Jamal shouted, trying to pull his arm away.
The hand around his bicep tightened, forcing Jamal to his knees. “Willis, tell your dog to stop yapping, or I’ll tear his arm off and beat him to death with it.”
“Jamal, do the guy, all right? Don’t ask no fucking questions.” Nobody ever called Radi by his given name, and nobody ever put an edge of fear to his voice, but he was frightened by the white man in the dark suit.
“I’ll do it, Radi.” Jamal looked toward his leader, surprised to see him heave a sigh of relief.
According to the recently stolen Rolex he wore, Jamal had been pacing the street for three hours. No cops had cruised by during the wait, and Jamal had seen only a few brothers, mostly zebras, blacks trying to pass themselves off as white. He felt fairly safe, a little exposed but anonymous enough. No matter how he felt, there was no way he was going to leave the neighborhood until he’d done the guy. He didn’t want to face that white dude ever again.
He’d thought about ducking into the bar up the street, especially since the rain started. His fake ID was good enough, but he didn’t want anyone getting a good look at him. Once the guy was dead, all a witness would be able to say was that the attacker was a young black male in a dark leather coat. Christ, that’s half the fucking city.
Jamal saw the sweep of light across the dark buildings and knew that a car had turned onto the street. He spun and saw the headlights of a vehicle about six blocks up, just past that bar. The big Glock 17 in his pocket suddenly seemed lighter. It was eleven-fifteen and all the other houses had been quiet for hours. This had to be his man coming.
A beat-up Chevy Cavalier pulled out from the parking spot directly in front of Tiny’s just as Mercer turned onto his street. Not one to avoid providence, he pulled his Jag into the spot without so much as a second thought and headed into the bar. It was a quarter past eleven on a Saturday night, and there was no way he was going home without a nightcap or two.
“The anointed has returned,” Harry White growled over the stereo as Mercer walked in. “What happened? They close the open bar or did they just close it to you?”
Mercer took his customary seat next to Harry and sipped the gimlet that Tiny had poured as soon as he’d entered. Tiny fingered the material of Mercer’s tux, nodding his approval.
Mercer shook his head sadly. “No one appreciates the old lamp shade on the head gag anymore.”
Tiny’s was exactly what Mercer needed to forget about Aggie Johnston and her problems. He and Harry bantered with a biting sarcasm that would wither most people, but neither would have it any other way. An hour and a half went by, Mercer’s couple of nightcaps turning into an entire milliner’s shop as he and Harry as well as a few of the other regulars drank their wallets empty. Tiny closed the place at one, making sure to call cabs for those patrons too drunk to drive and assigning moderately sober drivers for the rest. Harry left with Mercer, each of them with two bottles of beer in hand for their walk home. Harry lived five blocks away in the opposite direction from Mercer. He began swaying up the street after a few parting jibes about Mercer’s tuxedo.
Mercer left his car and turned down the street, taking swallows from one bottle as he went, though each footfall made him dribble a little beer. He knew he was really drunk when his feet crossed each other and he nearly sprawled on the sidewalk. He glanced around, his blurred eyes trying to penetrate the darkness to see if anyone had noticed, but the street appeared quiet.
He continued, draining the first beer as he crossed onto the block just before his. Rather than fighting open the other, a task he knew would be impossible in his state, he simply carried it with him, each dangling by its neck in his hands. He tripped again stepping to the curb on his block and laughed at himself. He’d heard from enough people that alcohol was a depressant, but right now he had that perfect buzz that made everything funnier than hell, even the shadowy figure that stepped from behind a van parked a few paces from him.
Mercer saw the blow coming and willed his body to tense, but his alcohol-deadened nerves wouldn’t respond. He was completely limp, and that saved his life. The pistol butt laid into his face, snapping his head so hard that he corkscrewed to the sidewalk. A vicious kick to the ribs turned him over twice, and he went with it, rolling away from his assailant, giving himself enough distance to get to his feet.
He staggered up, blood slicking the right side of his face and dripping into his mouth with a metallic salty taste. The Glock came down, its nine-millimeter muzzle leveled at Mercer’s chest.
The suddenness and ferocity of the attack would have frozen a normal man, but Mercer’s reactions were quick — if dulled by the gimlets. The alcohol coursing through his body filled him with a reckless courage. He leaped forward, ignoring the Glock, his evening shoes sliding across the rain-soaked cement. The gun never went off.
Jamal Lincoln was thrown off guard by Mercer’s assault and hadn’t squeezed hard enough on the integrated trigger safety of the unfamiliar weapon. He shifted the big semiautomatic in his hand, feeling the safety disengage an instant before Mercer crashed into him. The gun was aimed at his intended victim’s chest and at this range
