“Mine, too, I can’t lie about it. But I’m running a business, and I got employees like you to support, not to mention a new family. It was quick money and I took it.”

“It stunk, just the same.”

“We can talk about that over a beer later on, you feel like it.”

“All right. In the meantime, maybe I’ll go over to that grocery store and pass some of these out while you talk to Stokes.”

Strange reached for the handle on the door. “I’ll meet you back at the car.”

“THAT was Inez, over at the shop,” said Horace McKinley, flipping his cell closed. “That police, or whoever he is, came by to see Devra.”

“Same one we tailed yesterday?”

“He’s drivin’ the same car. He showed Inez some kind of badge, told her he was an investigator for D.C., some bullshit like that.”

“He leave his name?”

“Said it was Strange.” McKinley, in fact, had known Strange’s name for some time now.

“The girl ain’t there, though, right?” said Michael Montgomery.

“Nah, Inez sent her home for a couple of hours when that man called, said he was rollin’ on down.”

“Guess he shouldn’t have called ahead.”

“Yeah, we one step ahead of the motherfucker, for now. He gets her to testify against Phil Wood, we got us a serious problem we got to fix. I’m talkin’ about the girl.”

Montgomery nodded without conviction. He wasn’t into the way McKinley roughed up the women. Gettin’ violent on women didn’t sit well with him; he’d seen a whole lot of men – if you could call them men – beat on his mother through the years when he was a kid. One of them finally beat his mother half to death. Years later, that man had got his brains blown out across an alley by a gun in Montgomery’s hand. Montgomery’s mother and his younger brother were staying with some relatives now in a suburb of Richmond. He hadn’t seen his mom or the little man for some time.

They stood in the house on Yuma, McKinley’s great girth filling out the fabric of his warm-up suit. “Monkey Mike” Montgomery’s arms hung loosely at his sides, his hands reaching his knees.

“What you want to do, for now?” said Montgomery.

“Grab the Coates cousins off the back stoop,” said McKinley. “Tell them to get over to the apartment where Devra Stokes stays at. Strange told Inez he knew where she stayed, so that’s where he’s off to next. Tell ’em to make sure this Strange knows they’re around.”

“They took a few shots at the Six Hundred boys last night. You knew about it, right?”

McKinley nodded. He had heard them bragging on it out back, and he was down with what they had done. Once in a while you had to let the rivals know you were out here and still alive. Except for Dewayne and Zulu Walker, the 600 Crew was light. The one they had shot at, called himself Nutjob, like the name would mean somethin’ just by saying it, he wasn’t nothin’ but a punk.

“I musta knew somethin’ when I took those cousins on.” McKinley smiled, showing the three silver “fronts” on his upper teeth. “Those boys are ready.”

“You want them to talk to Stokes, too?”

“Nah,” said McKinley. “Those two are like a couple of horses, man. I don’t want to be ridin’ them too hard. You and me, we’ll visit the bitch when she gets back to work. In the meantime, let’s roll over to that barbecue place on Benning Road and get us some lunch.”

Montgomery left the house to give the Coateses their orders for the day. McKinley walked toward the front door, where he’d be far enough away from the others. He dialed a number, got a receptionist, gave her a name that was a code, and was transferred to the man he had asked to speak to.

“Strange is still on it,” said McKinley. “But you don’t have to worry about nothin’, hear?”

McKinley ended his call and mopped some sweat off his forehead with a bandanna he kept in his pocket. All this weight he was carrying, it was starting to get to him. He’d been meaning to lose some, ’cause lately he’d been feeling tired and slow all the time.

McKinley could think about that later, though. Right now, all he could get his head around was lunch.

AN elderly man wearing a straw boater sat on a folding chair in the shade outside the hair and nail salon, smoking a cigarette. Strange passed by him, nodded by way of a greeting, and received a slow nod in return.

Strange entered the salon and saw that Devra Stokes was not in, or at least was not in the front of the shop. He went over to the older woman who had been giving him the cold looks the day before, and who seemed to be in charge. Strange guessed her height at four-foot-ten or four-eleven, straddling the line between short and dwarf. Her face was unforgiving, without laugh lines or any other evidence that she knew how to smile.

“Devra in?” said Strange.

“She is not.”

Strange flipped open his badge case and showed it to her for a hot second. His private detective’s license read “Metropolitan Police Department” across the top. It was the one thing that most people remembered, especially if it was shown and put away in a very short period of time.

“Investigator, D.C.”

This was his standard introduction. Officially, the description was correct, intended to give the impression that he was with the police. Anyway, it wasn’t a lie.

“That supposed to mean somethin’ to me?”

“My name is Strange. I spoke to you on the phone a little while earlier. You said Devra would be in today.”

“I sent her home early.”

“But you knew I was comin’ by.”

“So?”

“You’re interfering with an investigation.”

“So?”

Strange stepped in close to the woman. He had more than a foot of height on her, and he looked down with intimidation into her stone-cold face. She didn’t back up. Her expression didn’t change.

“Yesterday,” said Strange, “when I came by here, I got followed on my way out. You know anything about that?”

“Why would I? And if I did know, why would I care? And why would I care to tell you?”

“You got a name?”

“I got one. But I got no reason to give it to you.”

“I know where Devra lives,” said Strange, realizing it was childish the moment the words left his mouth. “I’ll just go over there now.”

“You mean you ain’t gone yet?”

Strange left the shop, muttering something about a tough-ass bitch under his breath.

He heard the old man in the chair chuckle as he headed toward the parking lot. Strange stopped walking, stared at the old man for a second, then relaxed as he saw the friendly amusement in the old man’s eyes.

“Little old girl stonewalled you, right?”

“That’s a fact,” said Strange.

“You a bill collector? ’Cause if you are, you ain’t gonna get nary a penny out of Inez Brown.”

“I can see that. She the owner of that shop?”

The old man dragged the last life out of his cigarette and dropped it to the concrete. He ground the butt out with the sole of his black leather shoe as he shook his head.

“Drug dealer owns that shop,” said the old man.

“You know his name?”

The old man continued to shake his head, smoke clouding around his weathered face. “Big boy, wears jewelry. Got this ring that covers his whole hand. Has silver teeth, too. It ain’t unusual for his kind to put money into these places. Those young boys like to hang out where the young ladies do.”

Strange nodded slowly. “Can’t blame them for that.”

“No. You can blame ’em for a lot, but not for that.”

“You have a good one,” said Strange.

“Gonna be hot today,” said the old man. “Hot.”

Back in the Caprice, Strange eyeballed Quinn, who was outside the grocery store, his face close to the face of a young man, both of their mouths working furiously. Even from the distance, Strange could see that vein bulging on the left side of Quinn’s forehead, the one that emerged when he got hot.