DC By the Book

Excerpt: "Get down to Sheridan Road and Martin Luther King Avenue," Kisco said. "The kid's alone down there with an unidentified body.".... "This guy was face up in the street when I got here. And his face, man, his face was blown clean the fuck off.".... Reporters and neighborhood bystanders pressed in on the uniformed cops who stood guard around the body, trying with all their might to appear casual. A pair of teenage boys walked by along the road and stopped to mock the scene. The body was that of a well-built young man with a haircut that shaved both sides of his head. Bullets had shattered half his face and skull.... Scott, Mo, and Devon spent the morning canvassing the neighborhood. Nobody had seen or heard anything.

Excerpt: ...Big Mo parked his battered department car directly beside a No Parking sign on a street in Chinatown, which would not be called Chinatown in any other large city. The Go-Lo Restaurant was right across the street. Cotton was smoking a joint.... All the dope she'd done up was getting to her now: her eyes were so glazed and she was grinning from ear to ear because she was so happy with having embarrassed Big Mo in a restaurant half full of white yuppies sucking on their hot and sour soup. First Big Mo opened his eyes, then he brought back his hand. Then, as if he was going for a house fly, his hand flashed across Cotton's face and snapped the joint from between her lips. Cotton let our a yell, and a couple sitting across from them turned quickly in their direction to see what was the matter. But like most white people who feel uneasy around strange blacks, they did immediate excuse-me smiles and turned away, because they weren't about to do a goddamned thing about Big Mo or Cotton.

Excerpt: Running through a light sunrise drizzle, the jogger slipped, listed to his left, righted himself, then jumped a small, treacherous, mud-filled pool, and entered Malcolm X Park just below Beekman Place.... Quickly, more quickly than he'd hoped, he found the rolled carpet. Stepping into the cleaning, he caught sight of a pair of red tennis shoes on thin brown legs protruding from the roll. He took a deep breath, swallowed, and was instantly sick.

Excerpt: Big Mo ran up 17th Street, then ducked into an alleyway that led back to Mount Pleasant. On either side of the alley were wood frame houses, homes of decent working-class people whose neighborhood had gone bad. These people were now forced to zigzag between drug dealers and kids with Uzis and Mac 10s. At the far end of the alley, the two boys who'd gone in earlier sat in the dirt erasing a bit of their minds with glue sniffed from a paper bag.