'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.'

Quinn and Strange followed Kane to a side street just east of Florida and North Capitol. As Strange saw the drug setup and the boys on the street, he said into the phone, 'Hold up, Terry; I'm gonna take off and go up ahead. Tail me until I pull over and pick me up.'

'Right.'

Kane pulled up to an open garage door and drove through it into a bay. Strange watched him, then made a right turn. Quinn followed. Strange got back on Florida and went east to the Korean food market complex, parking his car in the lot. He grabbed his AE-1, jumped out of his car, and got into Quinn's Chevelle.

'Punch it,' said Strange.

Quinn drove quickly back to the street off Florida where all of the drug activity was in plain sight. He parked far away, three blocks back from the action, and let the engine idle. Up ahead, young men stood lazy as cats against brick walls, on corners, and around a decaying warehouselike structure encircled with broken yellow police tape. Along with Japanese and German sedans, and several SUVs, an MPD cruiser was curbed on the street in front of a short strip of row houses, many of their windows boarded.

'You see that Crown Vic?' said Quinn.

'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 Quinn.

'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 Quinn, side-glancing Strange. 'Why do so many light-skinned black guys claim they got Indian blood in 'em, Derek? I always wondered that.'

"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 gonna bust him, man? You see those boys out there on that street? All of 'em got a separate function. You got the steerers leading the customers to the pitchers, making the hand-to-hand transactions. And then there's the lookouts, and the moneymen who handle the cash. The ones just gettin' into the business, always the youngest, they're the ones who touch the heroin and the rock and the cocaine. And even they don't carry it on 'em. You look real close, you see they're always nearby a place where you can hide a crack vial or a dime in a magnetic key case or in a space cut in a wall. And they're always close to an escape route where they can get out quick on foot: an alley or a hole in a fence.

'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.'

Quinn nodded toward the warehouse, where addicts were walking slowly in and out of large holes hammered out of brick walls. A rat scurried over a hill of dirt, unafraid of the daylight or the humans shuffling by.

'There's where they go to slam it,' said Quinn.

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

Quinn said, 'What about Kane?'

'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 Quinn.

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 gonna burn us soon for sure, and that cop, wherever he is, he's gotta be getting back to his car.'

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

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

Quinn pushed the Hurst shifter into first gear, worked the clutch, and caught rubber coming off the curb. He slammed the shifter into second. A couple of the boys on the corner turned their heads, and one of them began to yell in the direction of the car. Strange got himself halfway out the window and sat on the lip, his elbows on the roof of the car. He took several photographs of the police cruiser, shooting over the roof, and got back into the car just as Quinn cut a sharp right at the next side street. In the rearview, Quinn saw one of the boys chasing them on foot.

'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.'