“You tell us what to do, D,” said Long, “and it’s done.”

“You need to roll up on those cousins out on the street,” said Durham.

“We gonna need a gun,” said Long. “I gave the Glock back up to Zulu.”

“Are you gonna use it?” said Durham.

“I’m ready to put work in,” said Long. He was assuring Durham that he was willing to make his first kill.

Durham phoned Ulysses Foreman from his cell. He got Foreman’s woman, the big white girl, on the line. He told her what he needed and what he wanted to pay for it, and they all sat around and talked some more about the business and cars and girls. A short while later, Ashley Swann phoned him back with instructions. He thanked her and cut the call.

“Give him about an hour and a half,” said Durham, “then tip on over to his house.”

“I won’t let you down,” said Long.

“It’s all over to y’all,” said Durham. “I’m gonna be out today, so I’m countin’ on you two to get it done.”

“Where you gonna be at?”

“I’m taking my son to King’s Dominion.”

“Thought we was goin’ to Six Flags,” said Walker.

“Whateva,” said Durham, who saw his son, Laron, a beef baby he had fathered four years ago, once or twice a year. “Point is, I might not be back in town till late.”

“We’re gonna take care of it,” said Long, Jones nodding his head in agreement.

“Go on about your business,” said Durham, officially ordering the hit. He flipped some cash off his bankroll for the gun purchase and handed it to Long. He and Walker watched them walk from the room and listened for the door to shut at the front of the house.

“Think he can do it?” said Walker.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Boy’s a studio gangster, you want my opinion.”

“One way or the other,” said Durham, “we gonna find out now.”

TERRY Quinn was seated behind the glass case of the used-book-and-record store where he worked, reading a Loren Estleman western called Billy Gashade, when Strange phoned him from his cell. He was headed down into Southeast and was looking for company, wondering if Quinn would like to ride along. Strange said that they could hook up at his house. Quinn said he would ask Lewis if he could cover for him, and Strange said, “Ask him how to get the dirt stains out of my drawers while you’re at it. I bet he’s an expert at that.” Quinn told Strange he’d meet him at his row house on Buchanan and hung up the phone.

Lewis was back in the sci-fi room, rearranging stock. His thick glasses were down low on his nose, and surgical tape held them together at the bridge. His hair was unwashed and his skin was pale. He wore a white shirt with yellow rings under the arms. Strange called it his trademark, the Lewis Signature, the look that made all the “womenfolk” fall into Lewis’s arms.

“That record came in you were looking for,” said Lewis.

It was Round 2, by the Stylistics. Quinn had ordered it from his contact at Roadhouse Oldies, the revered vinyl house specializing in seventies funk and soul, over on Thayer Avenue.

“Don’t sell it,” said Quinn. “I got it for Derek but he doesn’t know about it. He’s got a birthday coming up.”

Lewis nodded. “I’ll put it in the back.”

“I’m going out for the day,” said Quinn. “All right?”

Lewis had recently bought half the shop from the original owner, Syreeta Janes, and he was more than happy to cut Quinn’s hours whenever possible.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Out on Bonifant Street, Quinn went up toward the Ethiopian coffee shop beside one of his neighborhood bars, the Quarry House, to grab a go-cup for his drive down Georgia. He walked by a group of young men who were headed into the gun store, a popular spot for sportsmen and home-protection enthusiasts. It was also a hot destination for those D.C. residents who wanted to touch the guns they had seen in magazines and heard about in conversation. Though it was illegal for them to purchase guns in this shop, they could buy or trade for these same models later on the black market or rent them very easily on the street. The store was conveniently located just a half mile over the District line in downtown Silver Spring.

SITTING at his desk in his house, listening to a new CD, Strange stared at the tremendous amount of paper spread before him. He had been on the Oliver case for some time, and it had been easy to forget, busy as he’d been, just how much work he had done.

He had started with the original indictment and set up dossiers on all the codefendants and the government witnesses who were scheduled to testify against Oliver. He had studied the discovery, which was everything the government had seized on the case: autopsy files, bullet trajectories, and coroner’s reports among the data. He’d read the 302, the form the FBI used to describe the debriefing of its cooperating witnesses. The names of those witnesses had been blacked out; it was Strange’s job to identify them through careful reconstruction. He’d used the PACER database to turn up previous charges on the witnesses. By law, these charges did not have to be mentioned in the reports provided by the government prosecutors.

All of this was office work, the first phase of the process. The second phase was done out on the street.

Here Strange took his research and went out to the civilian population, looking for character witnesses and witnesses for the defense: those who had direct knowledge of the actual “events” referred to in the indictment. In court jackets he looked for assault cases, complainants in domestic disputes, and codefendants who might have a beef against his client. He was looking for any kind of background that could be used during cross-examination. Most of the people he spoke to would never make it to the stand.

Strange looked at it all as a stage play with a large cast of characters. In the beginning, he had written Oliver’s name on a large sheet of paper and connected lines, like tentacles, from it to the names of those who had known him or had been affected by his alleged deeds. These included the current drug dealers who had stepped into Oliver’s abandoned territory. All of this was an awful lot of work, but by doing it, he found that the various relationships and their possible ramifications sometimes became more graphic, and evident, to him.

Many of the leads he’d gotten were false leads, and though he suspected them to be from the get-go, he still went after anything he could. He had even traveled down to Leavenworth, on the nickel of Ives, to interview a former member of Oliver’s gang, Kevin Willis, who had later gone to work for the Corey Graves Mob in another part of Far Southeast. Willis had talked on tape about everything he knew: who was “hot” on the street and who would or would not most likely flip. He had talked freely about charges still pending against him. Strange had the tapes in his office off Georgia and duplicates here in his house. But, as with many of the interviews he’d done, the tapes had given him nothing.

But Strange had a feeling about Devra Stokes. He sensed that Stokes, one of Phillip Wood’s former girlfriends, had more to tell him. He had phoned the hair and nail salon and been told she was working today. He had gotten Janine to start the process to obtain a Federal Order of Subpoena, in the event that he would need her to testify.

Greco’s sharp bark came from the foyer down on the first floor. When Strange went out to the landing and saw Greco’s nose at the bottom of the door, his tail twitching, he knew that this was Quinn.

Quinn, a folder under his arm, came up to the office and waited as Strange gathered up the papers he needed for the day.

“What the hell is this?” said Quinn, chuckling, holding up a CD he had picked up off the desk. “My Rifle, My Pony and Me?”

Strange looked down at his shoes. “Meant to put that away before you came by. Knew you’d give me some shit about it if you saw it.”