Bad Men

Berman looked as if he was about to upchuck his breakfast.

“Stop, don’t even say things like that.”

It struck him that Dupree was in surprisingly good humor this morning. Berman guessed that it might not be unco

“I think you’d make a nice couple,” said Dupree. “I can just see the two of you together. Well, I could see Nancy, anyway. You’d be kind of lost somewhere underneath…”

Berman unclipped his holster.

“Don’t make me shoot you,” he said.

“Save the last bullet for yourself,” said Dupree as he headed out. “It may be your only hope of escape.”

Far to the south, close to the town of Great Bridge, Virginia, a man named Braun walked back to his car carrying two cups of coffee on a cardboard tray, packets of sugar poking out of his breast pocket. He crossed the street, slipped into the passenger seat, and handed one of the coffee cups to his companion, whose name was Dexter. Dexter was black, and kind of ugly. Braun was redheaded, but handsome despite it. He had heard all the redhead jokes. In fact, he’d heard most of them from Dexter.

“Careful,” he said, “it’s hot.”

Dexter looked at the plain white cup in distaste.

“You couldn’t find a Starbucks?”

“They don’t have a Starbucks here.”

“You’re kidding me. There’s a Starbucks everywhere.”

“Not here.”

“Shit.”

Dexter sipped the coffee.

“It’s not bad, but it’s no Starbucks.”

“It’s better than Starbucks, you ask me. Least it tastes like coffee.”

“Yeah, but that’s the thing about Starbucks. It’s coffee, but it doesn’t taste like coffee. It’s not supposed to taste like coffee. It’s supposed to taste like Starbucks.”

“But not coffee?”

“No, not coffee. Coffee you can get anywhere. Starbucks you can get only in Starbucks.”

Braun’s cell phone buzzed. He picked it up and hit the green button.

“Yeah,” he said. He listened for a time, said, “Okay,” then hung up.

“We’re all set,” he told Dexter, but Dexter wasn’t paying attention to him.

“Look at that,” said Dexter, indicating with his chin.

Braun followed the direction of the other man’s gaze. On a corner, a small black kid who might have been in his early teens but looked younger had just exchanged a dime spot with an older kid.

“He looks young,” said Braun.

“You get up close to him, see his eyes, he won’t seem so young. Street’s already worn him down. It’s eating him up from the inside.”

Braun nodded, but said nothing.

“That could have been me,” said Dexter. “Maybe.”

“You sell that shit?”

“Something like it.”

“How’d you get out?”

Dexter shook his head, his eyes losing their glare just momentarily. He saw himself in his brand-new Levi’s-Levi’s then, not those saggy-ass, no-rep jeans that the younger kids wore now, all straps and white stitching-walking across the basketball court, glass crunching beneath the soles of his sneakers. Ex was sitting on a bench, alone, his feet on the seat, his back against the wire of the court, a newspaper in his hands.

“Hey, little man.”

Ex, short for Exorcist, because he loved that movie. Twenty-one, and so secure in himself that he could sit alone on a fall day, reading a newspaper as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

“What you want?”

He was smiling, pretending that he was Dexter’s best buddy, that he hadn’t crippled a twelve-year-old the week before for coming up short, the kid wailing and crying as Ex knelt on his chest and put the gun barrel against the kid’s ankle, that same smile on his face as he pulled the trigger.

The kid’s street name was Blade, on account of his father being called Gillette. It was a good name. Dexter liked it, liked Blade too. They used to look out for each other. Now there was nobody to look out for Dexter, but he would continue to look out for Blade, as best he could.

Ex’s smile was still in place, but any residual warmth it might once have contained had begun to die from the eyes down.

“I said, ‘Hey, little man.’ You got nothing to say back to me?”

Dexter, thirteen years old, looked up at Ex and removed his gloved hands from the pockets of his Lakers jacket. He was unused to the weight of the gun, and he needed both hands to raise it.

Ex stared down the stubby barrel of the Bryco. He opened his mouth to say something, but it was lost in the roar of the gun. Ex toppled backward, his head striking the wire fence of the court as he fell and landed in a heap on the ground, his legs splayed against the back of the bench. Dexter looked down at him. The bullet had hit Ex in the chest, and he was bleeding from the mouth.

“Hey,” he whispered. He looked hurt, as if the young boy had just called him a bad name. “Hey, little man.”

Dexter fired the final shot, then walked away.

“Dexter? You okay?”

Braun nudged Dexter’s arm with an elbow.

“Yeah, I’m here. I’m here, man.”

“We got to go.”

“Yeah, we got to go.”

He took one last look at the kid on the corner-Hey, little man-then started the car and pulled away.

By coincidence, some twenty miles to the north, two men with a similar racial profile were also drinking coffee, except they had found a Starbucks and were drinking grande Americanos from big Starbucks mugs. One of them was Shepherd, the gray-haired man of few vices. His companion was named Tell. He was small and wiry, and he wore his hair in cornrows, like the basketball player Allen Iverson used to wear his, and probably for the same reason: because it made white folks uneasy. Tell was reading a newspaper. Tell was very conscientious about reading the newspaper every day. Unfortunately, that day’s newspaper happened to be a supermarket tabloid, and in Shepherd’s opinion, Tell could have been reading the back of a cornflakes box and been better informed. The gossip sheets weren’t big on analysis, and Shepherd liked to think of himself as an analytical kind of guy.

Two seats down from them, in the otherwise deserted coffee shop, an Arab was talking loudly on his cell phone, tapping his finger on the table before him to emphasize his points. In fact, he was talking so loudly that Shepherd wasn’t even certain that his phone was turned on. The guy behaved like he was trying to shout his message all the way to the Middle East, and was holding the cell phone only out of habit. He’d been talking like this for the better part of ten minutes, and Shepherd could see that Tell was getting pissed. He’d watched him start the same story about some has-been pop star’s face-lift three times already, which was once more than Tell usually needed to take in what he was reading. Truth be told, Shepherd was kind of unhappy about it himself. He didn’t like cell phones. People were rude enough as it was without having another excuse to be bad-ma

Tell looked up. “Hey, man,” he said to the Arab. “Can you keep it down?”

The Arab ignored him. This led Shepherd to suspect that the Arab was either very arrogant or very dumb, because Tell didn’t look even remotely like the kind of person you ignored. Tell looked like the kind of person who would remove your spine if you ignored him.

Tell’s face wore a puzzled expression as he leaned in closer to the Arab.

“I said, can you talk a little quieter, please? I’m trying to read my newspaper.”

Shepherd thought Tell was being very polite. It made him nervous.

“Go fuck yourself,” said the Arab.

Tell blinked, then folded his newspaper. Shepherd reached an arm across, holding his friend back.

“Don’t,” he said. Over at the counter, a barista was watching them with interest.