“But it was going to be my turn.”

Now Stone was pouting.

“You had your turn and you blew it,” Carver said. “Now it goes to me. So why don’t you go back out there and get to work. You still owe me status reports on towers eighty through eighty-five. I want them by the end of the day.”

“Whatever.”

“Go. And cheer up, Freddy. We’ll be on the hunt again before the end of the week.”

Stone stood up and turned toward the door. Carver watched him go, wondering how long it would be before he had to get rid of him. Permanently. Working with a partner was always preferable. But eventually all partners got too close and assumed too much. They started calling you by a name no one has ever used. They started thinking it was an equal partnership with equal voting rights. That was unacceptable and dangerous. One person called the shots. Himself.

“Close the door, please,” Carver said.

Stone did as instructed. Carver went back to the cameras. He quickly pulled up the camera over the reception area and saw Yolanda sitting behind the counter. Geneva was gone. Jumping from camera to camera he started searching for her.

By the time Sonny Lester and I left the apartment where Wanda Sessums lived, the projects were alive and busy. School was out and the drug dealers and their customers were up. The parking lots, playgrounds and burned-out lawns between the apartment buildings were becoming crowded with children and adults. The drug business here was a drive-through operation with an elaborate setup involving lookouts and handlers of all ages who would direct buyers through the maze of streets in the projects to a buy location that was continuously changed throughout the day. The government planners who designed and built the place had no idea they were creating a perfect environment for the cancer that would in one way or another destroy most of its inhabitants.

I knew all of this because I had ridden with South Bureau narcotics teams on more than one occasion while writing my semiannual updates on the local drug war.

As we crossed a lawn and approached Lester’s company car we moved with a heads-down-minding-our-own-business purpose. We just wanted to get out of Dodge. It wasn’t until we were almost right to the car that I saw the young man leaning against the driver’s door. He was wearing untied work boots, blue jeans dropped halfway down his blue-patterned boxer shorts and a spotless white T-shirt that almost glowed in the afternoon sun. It was the uniform of the Crips set, which ruled the projects. They were known as the BH set, which alternately meant Bounty Hunters or Blood Hunters, depending on who was spraying the paint.

“How y’all doin’?” he said.

“We’re fine,” Lester said. “Just going back to work.”

“You the po-po now?”

Lester laughed like that was the biggest joke he’d heard in a week.

“Nah, man, we’re with the paper.”

Lester nonchalantly put his camera bag in the trunk and then came around to the door where the young man was leaning. He didn’t move.

“Gotta go, bro. Can I get by you there?”

I was on the other side of the car by my door. I felt my insides tighten. If there was going to be a problem, it was going to happen right now. I could see others in the same gang uniform standing back on the shaded side of the parking lot, ready to be called in if needed. I had no doubt that they all had weapons either on their person or hidden nearby.

The young man leaning on our car didn’t move. He folded his arms and looked at Lester.

“What you talking to moms about up there, bro?”

“Alonzo Winslow,” I said from my side. “We don’t think he killed anybody and we’re looking into it.”

The young man pushed off the car so he could turn and look at me.

“That right?”

I nodded.

“We’re working on it. We just started and that’s why we came to talk to Mrs. Sessums.”

“Then she tell you about the tax.”

“What tax?”

“Yeah, she pay a tax. Anybody in business ’round here payin’ a tax.”

“Really?”

“The street tax, man. See, any newspaper people that come ’round here to talk about Zo Slow has to pay the street tax. I can take it for you now.”

I nodded.

“How much?”

“It be fitty dollah t’day.”

I’d expense it and see if Dorothy Fowler raised hell. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my money. I had fifty-three dollars and quickly extracted two twenties and a ten.

“Here,” I said.

I moved to the back of the car and the young man moved away from the driver’s door. As I paid him Lester got in and started the car.

“We have to go,” I said as I handed over the money.

“Yeah, you do. You come back and the tax is double, Paperboy.”

“Fine.”

I should have let it go at that but I couldn’t leave without asking the obvious question.

“Doesn’t it matter to you that I’m working on getting Zo out?”

The young man raised his hand and rubbed his jaw as though giving the question some serious thought. I saw the letters F-U-C-K tattooed across his knuckles. My eyes went to his other hand, hanging limp at his side. I saw D-A-5-0 tattooed across the other ridge of knuckles and I got my answer. Fuck the police. With sentiment like that on his hands, it was no wonder he would extort those trying to help a fellow member of the crew. It was everybody for himself down here.

The kid laughed and turned away without answering. He’d wanted me to see his hands.

I got into the car and Lester backed out of the space. I turned around and saw the young man who had just extorted fifty dollars from us doing the Crip walk. He bent down and used the bills I had just given him to pantomime a quick polish of his shoes, then straightened up and did the heel-toe-heel-toe shuffle the Crips called their own. His fellow bangers over in the shade whooped it up as he approached.

I didn’t feel the tension in my neck start to dissolve until we got back to the 110 and headed north. Then I put the fifty bucks out of my mind and started to feel good as I reviewed what had been accomplished during the trip. Wanda Sessums had agreed to cooperate fully in the investigation of the Denise Babbit-Alonzo Winslow case. Using my cell phone, she had called Winslow’s public defender, Jacob Meyer, and told him that, as the defendant’s guardian, she was authorizing my total access to all documents and evidence relating to the case. Meyer reluctantly agreed to meet with me the next morning between hearings in the downtown juvenile hall. He didn’t really have a choice. I had told Wanda that if Meyer didn’t cooperate, there were plenty of private attorneys who would handle the case for free once they knew there were headlines coming. Meyer’s choice was either to work with me and get some media attention for himself or give the case up.

Wanda Sessums had also agreed to get me into Sylmar Juvenile Hall so that I could interview her grandson. My plan was to use the public defender’s case file to become familiar with the case before I sat down to talk to Winslow. It would be the key interview of the piece I would write. I wanted to know all there was to know before I talked to him.

All in all, it had been a good trip-the fifty-dollar tariff notwithstanding-and I was thinking about how I was going to present my plan to Prendergast. Then Lester interrupted my thoughts.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said.

“What am I doing?” I said.

“That washerwoman might be too dumb and the lawyer too worried about headlines to see it but I’m not.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re comin’ on like you’re the white knight that’s gonna prove the kid innocent and set him free. But you’re going to do the exact opposite of that, man. You’re going to use them to get inside the case to get all the juicy details, then you’re going to write a story about how a sixteen-year-old kid becomes a stone-cold killer. Hell, getting an innocent man free is a damn newspaper cliché nowadays. But gettin’ inside the mind of a young killer like that? Tellin’ how society lets that kind of thing happen? That’s Pulitzer territory, bro.”