Rising Phoenix (31 page)

He had been living in this place since John Hobart assigned him to D.C. at their meeting in his hunting lodge. The house was in a “disputed” area. To the north, the neighborhood was one hundred percent black. To the near south it was Hispanic. Farther south, it was an “up and coming” neighborhood, where Caucasian yuppies were buying relatively inexpensive homes and renovating them with window bars and high-tech security systems.

His first month had been slow. Neither the blacks nor the Hispanics were prepared to accept a fifty-year-old white man with a slight Southern accent into their respective folds. He’d worked his way in slowly—differentiating himself with top-notch product at below-market
prices. He was always fair and always had merchandise to sell. Eventually many of the small-time local dealers grudgingly came around. Economic concerns, it seemed, transcended racial bigotry.

There had been problems, of course. Mainly with the dealers that he had usurped. The most vocal of these, and ostensibly the most violent, had met with an unfortunate accident at the wrong end of Karns’s twelve gauge. That had quieted down the market resistance temporarily, as his competitors moved in on the dead man’s turf. They were better off with Karns than their unpredictable friend. They seemed to realize this, and an uneasy truce was born.

He hadn’t heard a word out of Hobart for weeks and he was getting impatient. Right now he was just another drug dealer, adding to the problem that he had hired on to eradicate.

He sat down on the floor and opened a can of Hormel, dumping it into the dirty pan sitting next to the hot plate. He cut a healthy chunk of Velveeta with his pocket knife and tossed it in with the chili. Stirring occasionally when the sides began to bubble, he polished off his beer and reached into the refrigerator for a new one.

A loud buzzing startled him as he peered into the pan to see if the cheese had completely melted. It was the doorbell that he had installed when he moved in. It was loud enough to be heard anywhere in the house.

Karns pulled his 9mm out of its holster and chambered a bullet before replacing the gun in the holster under his arm. He walked quietly to the front door and peeked through a peephole drilled in the wall. There was a much more obvious hole in the door, but it was
just there as a decoy. Looking through it was a good way to get a bullet in the eye.

It took him a moment to recognize the young black boy fidgeting on the porch. Reeling through the file of local dealers in his head, he finally placed him. His street name was Tek, and he was pretty far from home, by drug dealer standards. Karns glanced out the window and spotted another fidgety youth keeping lookout on the sidewalk. He had heard that his counterpart in Tek’s territory had been picked up a few nights ago, and that Tek had been having a hard time finding a new supplier. He also heard that there were some other “businessmen” interested in Tek’s territory.

Karns opened the door slightly and moved away from it, being careful to stay out of sight of the young man on the sidewalk. Tek took the open door as an invitation and stepped in.

“Close the door behind you. Pretty far from home, aren’t you, Tek?”

The young man looked around him, trying to see into the kitchen. He looked nervous. Yeah.”

“I hear you’re having a hard time finding product—that some people are moving in on you.”

Tek’s attention turned from the kitchen to Karns. A sneer passed his lips.

Karns calmly registered the anger on Tek’s face. His experience with the local dealers was that they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn at ten paces with a howitzer. He was confident that with his 9 mil and a few extra clips he could walk down the middle of the street and kill every dealer in Southeast without getting a scratch. Hell, they’d probably end up popping
each other in crossfires. If this little nigger wanted to pull down, he’d have a bullet in his head before his hand hit his pistol grip.

“Thought you might have something to sell.”

Karns nodded thoughtfully. His calm demeanor belied a racing mind. “I might. What do you need?”

“Some rock, man.”

Karns nodded again, recognizing the street name for crack cocaine.

“I don’t want to get pulled into this shit between you and DJ. Anybody know you’re here—other than your backup?”

Tek shook his head, and Karns believed him. If he found a new supplier, he sure as hell wouldn’t want his competitors finding out who it was. Besides, Tek and his friend—Twan was the name, if he remembered correctly—were both heavy users. The opportunity was just too good, Hobart or no Hobart.

“How much you need?”

“I got a grand.”

“Let’s see it.”

Tek’s hand moved slowly to his pocket. Karns tensed imperceptibly, though he knew that the jacket pocket was too small to house a Tec-9—the only weapon the young man was reputed to use. A moment later Tek produced a healthy-looking wad of bills.

Karns smiled approvingly. “Have a seat.” He pointed to an old vinyl chair sitting in the corner of the room. “I’ll be right back.”

He rushed through the kitchen, stopping for a moment to turn off the chili that was beginning to boil over. At the back of the kitchen was a new,
sturdy-looking metal door leading to a windowless basement. A perfect place to store merchandise, and a nearly impregnable fortress to retreat to, if things ever came to that.

The basement room was mostly in shadow, lighted only by a desk lamp on a small table. Along one wall, mired in gloom, stood a shelf fastened to the brick with long rusty nails. On it were at least twenty shoe boxes. Karns crouched down, his knees cracking loudly.

Pulling out three of the boxes in front, he reached back through barely perceptible cobwebs until his fingers hit crumbling brick. Moving his hand right, it fell on another box. This one was almost indistinguishable from the others, except that the masking tape label on top was printed in red, instead of the uniform blue on all the others.

Taking the top off, Karns began piling small vials into the dusty gym bag lying at his feet. He picked up the bag, weighing it, and tossed in a few more vials. He zipped it up as he walked back up the stairs.

“Here you go,” he said, handing the bag to Tek, who’d just jumped up from his seat, startled by Karns’s abrupt reappearance. Tek unzipped it and looked inside. His suspicious expression changed to one of approval.

Tek handed him the wad of bills and zipped up the bag. Karns decided to hedge a bit. It seemed safe to assume that Tek would rush off to his customers, supply them, and then retreat to his house to sample the product. There was no way to be sure, though. “I gave you a deal, cause I haven’t tried that stuff yet. I’m working with a new supplier.”

Tek looked up from the bag.

“It should be at least as good as what I had before—you let me know what you think.”

Tek hefted the bag to his shoulder, but made no move for the door. Karns faced him silently. Tek looked like he was about to say something.

Karns knew exactly what was going on. Washington, D.C., hadn’t been hit with poisoned narcotics as hard as some might have expected—or indeed, many apparently had hoped. Death was still there, though. It flooded their living rooms twenty-four hours a day, in full color and stereo sound.

He would have never pegged the blacks in the neighborhood’s reaction to the poisoning. The popular theory on the street, and in the minds of the more conspiracy-minded black leaders, was that this whole thing was the white government’s doing. That it was a plot to wipe out black Americans. The rational reaction, then, would have been to stop using, and to foil the government’s plot. Just the opposite had happened. The false bravado that had so often been the undoing of young urban blacks had twisted their logic. They thought that to stop using coke was to admit fear and defeat to the white hierarchy that they had grown to hate. As far as he could tell, the use of cocaine hadn’t slowed in Southeast D.C.’s black community. In fact, he knew of at least one gang that had made a group of its inductees smoke crack that they alleged was poisoned. It hadn’t been, as it turned out, but they hadn’t known for sure.

“What—you worried that it might be mickey?” Karns said, using the slang term that had become popular for poisoned product. Tek’s reaction was predictable.

“Hey, fuck you. I ain’t afraid of none of that shit.” He reached for the door and backed out, keeping his eyes on Karns, who stood motionless, arms crossed.

He watched as Tek joined his friend and half walked, half jogged up the street. They swatted and slapped at each other playfully, oblivious to the driving wind. Karns marveled at how alive they looked. An image of their corpses lying facedown on a dirty carpet next to a smoking crack pipe superimposed itself in his mind, and made him smile.

“You sure were in there long enough,” Twan said haltingly. All this running was getting him out of breath. “You sucking on his dick?” A devious smile.

“Fuck you,” Tek replied with mock severity, barely missing his friend’s head with a vicious open-handed slap.

As they ran, the bag bounced along under Tek’s shoulder. The vials within made a seductive rattling sound.

“Let’s stop off at my place and do a little smoke,” Twan suggested. He had run through his supply two days earlier, and the embargo by Tek’s competitors was wearing him down.

“No way—business first.” They slowed to a walk. Twan was holding his side uncomfortably.

Their first stop was a three-story brick apartment complex, sitting like a large brick box amidst the curving architecture of the rest of the neighborhood. In the mid-seventies, the brightly painted building had been a flagship of urban renewal. The mayor himself had stood barefoot in the grass and cut a wide ceremonial ribbon. He had spoken briefly of a new day for the city’s underprivileged, before rushing off to more pressing matters.

The colors had faded over the years, falling victim to pollution and neglect. Hope had faded with them. In the early eighties, a young girl had managed to work her way through the metal guard rails protecting the building’s open-air hallways. Her life, like her body, had been abruptly halted by the asphalt below.

Following that incident, the city had covered the entire front of the building with chain-link fencing. People had joked that the cops weren’t satisfied with putting the residents in jail, they wanted to imprison the building, too. In the end it had just added to the despair that quietly engulfed the neighborhood.

The two young men walked quickly through the asphalt-covered playground spread out in front of the building.

Two heavy wood doors protected the main entrance to the apartment building. One had a weblike crack emanating from its top hinge, keeping it from closing all the way. Tek pulled it open.

The air inside wasn’t much different from the outside because of the broken door. As they climbed the stairwell, though, the atmosphere grew heavier. The sounds of civilization replaced the whistle of wind through the buildings. A baby’s cry, a shout, a television turned up loud enough for an old lady to hear.

The numbers had long since been torn from the doors of the individual apartments—an obvious target for budding vandals. Tek knew the building well enough to make his rounds in the dark. It was a prerequisite for his job—lightbulbs were an easy target, too.

He rapped authoritatively at his first customer’s
door. Twan was a few feet behind him, looking back down the gloomy stairwell. His right hand rested casually under his sweatshirt.

Mark Beamon leaned back and listened for the cigarette lighter to pop. The street outside his window seemed unusually silent and dark by inner-city standards. He scanned the gray-and-black landscape as if it were an old photograph. The only movement was his faded reflection in the windshield.

Goddam Tom Sherman,
he thought, tapping the cigarette lighter as though it would speed the heating process. Right now he should have been half-sauced, sitting in front of the TV at his borrowed Capitol Hill town house. Instead, he was here. In the middle of D.C.’s no-man’s land, hiding in his car.

A comforting popping sound came from the dashboard, promising a quick nicotine fix. As he raised the lighter to his mouth, the red glow lit his face slightly, momentarily stealing his anonymity. The smoke was barely visible as it twisted through the confines of the car, obliterating its new smell. He concentrated on it anyway, blocking out the dim scene outside of his steel-and-glass cocoon and feeling the nicotine flow through him.

Reports of a serious poisoning incident, the epicenter of which was only a few miles from the J. Edgar Hoover Building, had come flooding into the switchboard less than an hour ago. Sherman had stormed into SIOC only a few moments later.

Beamon had argued vehemently. He had insisted
that he was buried with paperwork and subtly implied that there were important leads that he needed to follow up on. In the end it had all been a waste of time. Sherman had listened sympathetically, as he always did. Then he had told Beamon in no uncertain terms to get his ass to the housing project that had been hit. It wouldn’t look good for no one from the Bureau to show up when this kind of thing happened in their backyard.

The cigarette had burned down almost to his fingers. Beamon took one last hard drag and tossed the butt out a narrow crack in the driver’s side window. A quick turn of the key brought the car to life. He swung it out onto the narrow road.

Turning the corner was like jumping off a cliff. The quiet monotony of the side street gave way to a kaleidoscope of lights and activity. As he drew slowly closer, he could see that yellow-and-black striped barriers blocked the streets leading to an ugly box of a building. Crowds of people milled around the perimeter, many wearing robes pulled hastily over pajamas. The flashing blue and red of the police cars and fire trucks was drowned out by large spotlights—the kind used to advertise circuses and auto dealership sales. They had been set up on an asphalt playground in front of the apartments. They were aimed at the top of the building, and the glare lit the area sufficiently for rescue workers to rush from victim to victim, without the risk of tripping.