Takedown Twenty(56)

I cruised up and down a few side streets in the area, but I didn’t see anyone wearing purple, and I didn’t see Ants Brown. I returned to my parking place on the first block of Stark, and I called Lula.

“I’m on Stark Street, looking for Antwan Brown,” I told her. “I know he’s a Stone Deader, and I know they own the fifth block of Stark, but it’s like a ghost town here. No one’s out on the street. Do you have any idea where these Dead idiots live? They can’t all live on the fifth block.”

“They’re all over the place. Most of them live with their mamas. My friend Shirlene would know. She works a corner on the fourth block, and her little brother is one of those Deaders. At least he used to be. He got shot in the back and got paralyzed. The only thing he can move without help is his tongue. He’s in a county hospital somewhere.”

“How awful.”

“Yeah, it’s been hard on Shirlene. She’s a real nice person too.”

“Is she out working now?”

“We can go see. I’m bored anyways. I was supposed to have a date, but he got arrested. Where are you?”

“I’m parked on the first block of Stark. I’m in front of the used-appliance store.”

“I’ll be there in a couple minutes.”

I checked my phone for email messages. I called my sister to say hello. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw Lula parking behind me.

“Why did he get arrested?” I asked Lula as she settled herself into my passenger seat.

“Who?”

“Your date.”

“Don’t know. Don’t care. All I know is I got stood up. And then he had the nerve to ask me to bail him out.”

“Did you?”

“Hell no. I’m not throwing my money away on some loser who gets himself arrested. Been there, done that.”

I drove to Shirlene’s corner, but there was no Shirlene.

“She’s usually out here,” Lula said. “She might be doing business somewhere. We could ride around and come back in a couple minutes. It don’t usually take Shirlene long to do business. She gives people their money’s worth, but she don’t waste time.”

I motored up and down Stark, and on the third pass we saw Shirlene get out of a car. She tugged at a hot-pink spandex skirt that barely covered her ass, adjusted her boobs, and sashayed over to her corner. I pulled up to the curb, and Lula stuck her head out the window.

“Hey, girl,” Lula said. “How’s business?”

“Business sucks,” Shirlene said. “What’s going on?”

“We want to talk to you.”

“It’ll cost you if you want to talk now. This is premium time. Women go to Bible study on Sunday afternoon, and men find Jesus with Shirlene.”

“We don’t want to find Jesus,” Lula said, “but we’ll spot you a pizza.”

“Done deal,” Shirlene said. “What are we talking about?”

“Antwan Brown,” Lula said.

“That’s unhealthy talking,” Shirlene said. “That talking could get you set on fire.”

“Let’s talk in general then,” Lula said. “Do you happen to know where any nineteen-year-old baggy-pants homeless killers live?”

“That covers a lot of ground,” Shirlene said. “And if they’re homeless then they don’t got a home where you could find them.”

“What do these kids do all day?” I asked Shirlene.

“The usual kid stuff. Smoke dope, play videogames, watch SpongeBob and cage fighting on television. The ones who want to get somewhere push drugs. Or if they can read they make drugs. Making drugs is better ’cause you eliminate the middleman. Otherwise they sit around working themselves up over who’s dissin’ them. And they tweet. They do a lot of tweeting.”

“How would I hook up with them?”

“Same way you hook up with anyone,” Shirlene said. “Twitter. Or you could walk down the fifth block wearing red, and then they’d show up and shoot you.”

“Anything else?” Lula asked.

“I hear some of them play basketball on the city courts across from the projects.”

“Do you know when they play?” I asked.

“They don’t play in the morning.”

I gave Shirlene twenty dollars, and Lula and I drove to the basketball courts by the projects. There were kids playing basketball, and some of them looked like killers, but none of them looked like Antwan.

“I don’t know why Vinnie wrote a bond on this loser,” Lula said. “It’s no wonder we can’t find him. We don’t have any information. Who writes a bond on someone without an address or a single relative?”