The Cut (Spero Lucas) (10 page)

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.”

T
HE 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 more newsworthy than they had been in the past. Certain high-profile murders, like the recent shoot-into-the-crowd drive-by that had claimed several victims, and the killing of a DCPS principal in Montgomery County, might have left the impression that little had changed since the dark days of late-eighties Washington. The reality was that homicides were down to a forty-five-year low in the city. The implementation of community policing and more foot patrols under Chief Lanier, the closing and relocation of troubled public-housing units under former mayor Tony Williams, and a genuine shift in the culture caused in part by activist groups within the community had all contributed to the positive developments in the atmosphere and the stats. The
Post
continued to routinely bury the violent deaths of D.C.’s young black citizens inside the paper, telling its readership implicitly that black life was worth less than that of whites, and that policy, apparently, was never going to change. Had Tavon Lynch and Edwin Davis been raised in Bethesda or Cleveland Park, their demise would have been reported on A1. As it was, they made B2, which felt something like progress to Lucas.

When the subject came up at the Lucas family dinner
table, as it surely would, Eleni Lucas would say, “Those young men deserve the same memorial in the newspaper that anyone does,” and Spero Lucas would respond, “You’re right, Ma.” He did agree with her, but he was not a crusader, leaving those kinds of conversations to his mother and others who were more conscientious than he was.

Lucas took a shower and dressed in Carhartt. He had work to do.

LUCAS DROVE
down to the holding facility, signed the logbook, and gave the DOC woman his driver’s license. He was still on an official visitors list per Petersen’s letter. The woman handed him a pass that would allow him entrance to the next step of security. Lucas looked her over in her uniform, a tall woman, broad shouldered and full in the back, like many females who worked security at the jail. They were union, and he assumed their income and benefits package had been well negotiated, but still, for the atmosphere they endured, for the risk, they had to be underpaid. The woman’s badge plate read Cecelia Edwards. She had buttery skin, large eyes, and a lot of muscle coupled with femininity. Lucas wondered.

“Have a good one,” he said, looking at her the way a man does.

“You have a blessed day,” she said, holding the look for the one extra moment that spoke many words. He would remember her name and write it down after he left the jail.

Lucas met Anwan Hawkins in the visiting room. The glass between them was filmy and smudged, their chairs low and hard. Hawkins wore an orange jumpsuit with slip-on sneaks. His braided hair was pulled back, exposing neck tats,
Japanese characters in a vertical formation. His facial expression was serious, his posture all business.

“Talk about it,” said Hawkins, speaking into the phone, his voice gravelly and distant. Their connection was as weak as it had been the last time they’d met. “Tell me what happened.”

“It was straight murder,” said Lucas.

“By who?”

“I know what you know. Less than you, if you’re holding out on me.”

“Why would I?”

“It’s safe to say that their killing was related to your business. Maybe it was a power grab by someone beneath them.”

“Wasn’t anyone below ’em who knew shit.”

“Were you aware that they lost a third package?”

Hawkins did not speak right away. Lucas studied his reaction.

“When was that?” said Hawkins.

“I don’t know when, exactly. Tavon told me about it the night he and Edwin were murdered. But I’m guessing it was stolen the day before. I was surveilling the street of the second theft, and they left me to do some business.”

“Where was it stole at?”

“East of the Hill. Tavon didn’t give me the address. Maybe you can tell
me
.”

“I don’t know it. Those boys were on their own.”

“So I’ll just keep working the theft on Twelfth.”

“But I don’t
want
you workin it, Spero. What I want is for you to drop this.”

“Why?”

“This shit’s got to stop,” said Hawkins. “I don’t care about the cash no more. If I get off, then I walk out of here and start new. If I do more time, so be it. Either way, I’m done. I wanna be with my son again, like a regular father. I want to live a long life. ”

“That’s a lot of money to leave on the table.”

“It’s mine to leave.”

“We had a deal.”

“Not the kind you take to court.”

Lucas and Hawkins stared at each other without malice.

“You speak to the police?” said Hawkins.

“No,” said Lucas.

“You were in contact with the boys by phone, weren’t you?”

“I was.”

“If the police got hold of their cells, there’d be a record of that.”

“Which tells me their cells weren’t found,” said Lucas. “Otherwise the homicide detectives would have contacted me by now.”

“Did the boys, you know, leave you any kind of clue as to what was about to go down?”

Lucas thought of the last text message he received from Tavon Lynch. “No.”

“What do
you
think happened?”

“No idea. The police are conducting an investigation. If an arrest is made, I’ll hear about it, same as you.”

“What about their funerals?”

“They haven’t been announced. There’ve been no obits yet in the
Post
.”

“You gonna pay your respects?”

“No. The police will be there. Could be they’ll be shooting video footage from vans, taking still shots like they do. I’m not trying to put myself in the mix. Anyway, I barely knew those guys.”

“You don’t seem too interested.”

“And you don’t seem all that shook.”

“I’m sorry for what happened to them.”

“So am I,” said Lucas. “But I’m not getting involved in those murders. You hired me to retrieve your property or your cash. That’s it.”

“You’re not even curious?” said Hawkins.

“Homicide police close murder cases. Private investigators never do. I took this on to make money. With this third theft, the pot just grew. I still intend to honor our agreement.”

“I guess I can’t stop you.”

“What do I do if I’m successful?”

“Take your cut,” said Hawkins. “What’s left, get it to my son’s mother.”

“Right.”

“Watch yourself out there,” said Hawkins, looking hard into Lucas’s eyes.

“I will.” Lucas cradled the phone.

LUCAS WAS
not far from Capitol Hill and Lincoln Park. He left the jail and drove west on Massachusetts Avenue, turning to explore the neighborhoods and the streets, doing the same past Lincoln Park proper, the dividing line of sorts
that brought him into the eastern portion of the Hill, where the homes were noticeably nicer and the income levels rose. He was looking for a 4044 address. He assumed the text from Tavon was meant to indicate the number on the house where the second drop had been made and lost. He found nothing to match the number, and if he had, he wouldn’t have known what to do. He felt lost.

Continuing west, toward his home, he suddenly said, “Yeah,” and pulled over to the side of the road, near the St. James Episcopal Church. Something had come to him. He remembered from the newspaper accounts that Tavon and Edwin had been found shot to death in their car, parked on Hayes Street, Northeast. More accurately, upper central Northeast, where the cross-numbered streets were in the forties. Tavon must have been trying to give him the location of the house. That’s where the drop was: the 4000 block of Hayes.

He drove in that direction, crossing the Anacostia, and ten minutes later was on Hayes. But the address did not appear to be a good one for the scheme that Tavon and Edwin had cooked up. There was a house there, but it was not the kind of place that you would ship a package to and expect it to go unnoticed. There were folks around, standing by their vehicles, going in and out of their homes, sitting on their porches. It did not look like they were typically away or at work during the day. Tavon wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t have chosen this spot to drop the weed.

Lucas continued up the block to the dead-end court that stopped at a thin tributary of creek and woods that was a part of Watts Branch. The Impala was gone. Except for a
piece of yellow tape lying in the street there was no sign that a crime of extreme violence had occurred here. The mobile crime technicians had completed their investigation of the scene, and the next task was in the hands of the chief medical examiner’s office, where the autopsies of the young men would be performed.