Right as Rain

'He owes me money.'

'Hittin' him up, too. Nice to see you expandin' your client base, Officer Delgado.'

'I did plenty for that white boy. And I don't do a got-damn thing for free.' Delgado pulled a cigar from his blue jacket hung on the back of his chair.

'Prefer you didn't smoke that in here,' said Coleman. 'Me and Angie, we can't take the smell.'

Qui

'Right.'

Kane pulled up to an open garage door and drove through it into a bay. Strange watched him, then made a right turn. Qui

'Punch it,' said Strange.

Qui

'You see that Crown Vic?' said Qui

'I see it,' said Strange, his voice little more than a whisper.

'You need me to get closer?'

Strange leaned out his open window and snapped off several photographs. 'I'm all right. Five-hundred-millimeter lens, it's like having a nice set of binos.'

'There's our boy.'

They watched Ricky Kane come out of the garage and cross the street like he owned it. He met a couple of the young men on the corner of the strip of houses and was escorted into the row house nearest the cop car parked beside the curb.

'What the fuck we got goin' on here?' said Strange.

'You tell me,' said Qui

'Ever hear of Cherokee Coleman?'

'Yeah, I've heard of him. Like every cop and most of the citizens in D.C. What do you know about him?'

'Coleman played guard for the Green Wave over at Spingarn. He came out in eighty-nine. He could go to the hole, but he didn't have the height and his game wasn't complete, so college wasn't in the picture. Rose up in the ranks down here real quick after committing a couple of brazen murders they couldn't manage to pin on him. So the high school that gave the world Elgin Baylor and Dave Bing also gave us one of the most murderous drug dealers this town's ever seen.'

'I read this interview the Post did with some of the kids over in LeDroit Park. They talk about Coleman like he's some kind of hero.'

'He employs more of their older brothers and cousins than McDonald's does in this city, man.'

'Cherokee,' said Qui

"Cause they don't want to admit they're carrying white blood, I expect.' Strange lowered the camera. 'Coleman works out of this area right here.'

'Everybody knows it, and it keeps goin' on.'

'Because he's smart. Drugs don't ever touch his hands, so how they go

'Once in a while the MPD will come through here and run a big bust. And it doesn't do a goddamn thing. You can bust these kids, see, and you can bust the users, but so what? The kids serve no time on the first couple of arrests, especially if there's no quantity to speak of. The users get a night in jail, if that much, and do community service. And the kingpins go untouched.'

'You sayin' that Coleman'll never do hard time?'

'He'll do it. The Feds'll get him on tax evasion, the way they get most of 'em in the end. Or one of his own will turn him for an old murder beef on a plea. Either way, eventually he'll go down. But not until he's fucked up a whole lot of lives.'

Qui

'There's where they go to slam it,' said Qui

'Uh-huh. I bet a whole lot of junkies be livin' in there, too.'

Qui

'Yeah, what about our boy Ricky Kane, huh? You ask me right now, I'd say he's makin' a pickup. I'd say he was takin' orders back there from the staffs of those restaurants and bars. What do you think?'

'I was thinkin' the same way.'

Kane came out of the row house. He crossed the street quickly and headed in the direction of the warehouse structure.

'Fuck's he doin' now?' said Strange, looking through the lens of the camera and snapping off two more shots.

'Derek,' said Qui

Kane ducked inside one of the large holes that had been opened in the warehouse walls.

'We can't be hangin' out here too long, Derek. We can't wait for Kane to come back out.'

'I know it. One of Coleman's boys is go

'Let's take off. We've got enough for today.'

'Get me to within a block of that cruiser, man, then book right.'

Qui

'God damn, Terry. I tell you to make all that noise? You must have left an inch of tread on the asphalt.'

'I'm not used to the car yet.'

'Yeah, well, we can't bring it down here again.'

'Why, we comin' back?'

'I am,' said Strange, sitting back in the seat and letting the cold wind blow against his face. 'There's more to learn, back there on that street.'