Tall Tales in the Hood

There were four cops, three police detectives and a couple of crime scene techs present but not one of them wanted to sit in the dead man’s seat.

Don’t get me wrong, I understood how they felt. After all these, guys had died messy. According to the forensics boys somebody had come up on the passenger side with a tech 9 and put three bullets in each of them, the passenger and the driver. Two in the chest and one in the head. Then the shooter had dragged them out of the car and shoved them under it, head first, with their legs sticking out. The crime scene techs were done with the inside of the car but they wanted to draw their traditional chalk lines. The car had to be moved.

So there we all stood, on a narrow side street in Southeast DC where the two passengers must have been talking in the car. I got called because the police chief knew I’d been hired to help a client deal with the gangsters trying to squeeze him for protection money. The two victims were leaders of smaller gangs that might have been involved in the protection racket. He figured a private eye like me might have some valuable intel to share, but instead of exchanging information we were standing around looking at the expensive Chux sticking out from under a black Mercedes.

“What a bunch of pussies,” I snarled, yanking the door open. They had thrown a sheet over the Benz’s blood spattered seat and the blood was dry from last night anyway. I plopped down, started her up with the key left in the ignition, pulled the seat forward so I could reach the pedals comfortably, lowered the window to let the stench of death out, and cranked the wheel hard right.

“Give me a ground guide, Sergeant Burke,” I hollered out the window. Burke was a thick guy with real dark skin, one of those dudes who wears a trench coat when he doesn’t need it. Maybe he wanted to be Columbo.

I put the car into reverse and backed slowly until he closed his fist, meaning I was about to roll over somebody’s skull. I wound the wheel all the way the other way and inched forward.

“So what were these two chatting about?” Burke asked, waving me forward with his fat fingers.

“How am I going to know until I see their faces? Did you crawl under the car and make an I.D.?”

Burke clenched his fist to stop me before I rolled over their legs. I turned the wheel again and started back, letting Burke guide me in straightening so the car’s wheels would be straddling the bodies.

“One of the uniforms did,” Burke said. “He says they both got crazy street names. The brother they call G-raffe and the one who calls himself Tego Suave.”

I kept backing up until I saw their faces emerge from under the front bumper. Yeah, that was G-raffe, so named because he was probably six foot five and a hell of a baller. He ran with the 12th Street Mob. Tego Suave was a little guy with huge arms, a powerful Latin banger, representing the Brown Union.

When I was completely clear of the bodies I shut off the car and got out. The sun was just climbing over the nearby buildings, illuminating the two faces, both twisted more in anger than pain. Two young men, leaders by nature, lying there in wife beaters and jeans. A couple of blocks away we could hear the traffic as the city got down to its business without them. Burke hustled over to me.

“Was either of these guys involved in the protection scam you’re working on?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “That’s a Jamaican thing.”

Burke nodded, poking at his teeth with a toothpick. “So maybe they were getting together to take over this new racket. Do these street gangs form unions?”

“Naw. What happens when they feel threatened is that one gang takes another over. They might have been talking about that. If that’s the case, the shooter would be a member of the gang that was about to be swallowed up who didn’t agree with the takeover.”

“Great!” Burke rolled his eyes. “So our suspect pool is every member of two rival street gangs. I ain’t got the manpower to question them all.”

I shook my head and walked over to stare down at the two corpses. “Not really, chief. I can cut your suspect pool in half just by looking at these guys. See, the guy who’s taking over is going to be driven around by the other dude, not the other way around.”

Burke stood beside me, as if he might catch a clue if he got close enough. “I don’t get it,” he finally said. “How the hell do you know which one was driving?”

I looked at him. “You’re kidding, right?” He kept staring at me. I figured I better put him out of his misery.

“Chief, didn’t you just see me pull the seat forward when I got in the car? If Tego had been driving, I’d have had to push it back. G-raffe’s a freakin’ giant.”

Burke nodded. “So you’re saying G-raffe was driving Tego around. Somebody didn’t want Tego taking over the 12th Street Mob so they blew him away, and then had to take out G-raffe too.”

“Right,” I said. “You find the boy who’s trying to move up into the top spot in the 12th Street Mob and I’m betting you’ve found your shooter. And now that I’ve done your driving, and your detecting, I’ve got my own case to get back to.”