DC By the Book

Excerpt: Lucas rented the top floor of a house on Emerson and Piney Branch Road, in Northwest, a four-square backed to a bucolic stretch of alley in 16th Street Heights. His landlord, an elderly, fourth-generation Washingtonian named Miss Lee, lived on the first floor. His rent was reasonable and there was ample space for his bikes and kayak, which he hung from hooks on the back porch. When Miss Lee asked, he performed routine maintenance on the house and sometimes he did so unprompted. The setup, a country spot in the city, was perfect for him, though he suspected that his peace would soon be disrupted. A huge Mormon church had been erected across the alley in the past year, and was due to open its doors.

Excerpt: Lucas swung onto his saddle, put his feet in the clips, and took the bike lane on 14th all the way downtown, then cut over into Northeast, riding through the always-damp K Street tunnel, and over to the 400 block of H, where he locked his bike to a post and entered Boundary Road, a restaurant on the edge of the thriving Atlas District. Unlike the riot corridors of U and 7th Streets, which had benefitted more quickly from the construction of the Metro and its subway stations, H Street had taken 40 years to be reborn after the '68 fires.... Boundary Road was an airy, two-story space, brick walls, a distinctive chandelier, low-key atmosphere. Lucas has a seat at the bar. The night manager, Dan, frequently played reggae and dub through the house system, an added attraction for Lucas.... He ordered a Stella from the bartender, a friend named Amanda Brand, who had called and asked to see him. He had silent-bounced for Amanda in other establishments, so they had a history. She also knew of his side work and what he could do.

Excerpt: Grace Kinkaid lived on the 2300 block of Champlain Street, in Adams Morgan, in a newish condo building set on the slope between Columbia Road and Florida Avenue. Her place was orderly, gender neutral at first glance, and minimally furnished. The walls were painted in pale shades of green and fold. Lucas and Grace sat on her balcony in fold-out chairs, a small black table between them. Below them, a father and son kicked a soccer ball back and forth in the street.... From inside her living room, music played through her open, sliding glass doors. Her stereo dial was set to 89.3, WPFW, the jazz station broadcasting from a building on Champlain, a half block north of where they sat.

Excerpt: Lucas drove over to the Walter Reed Medical center, now located on the Navy Hospital grounds in Bethesda, Maryland. The longtime Washington hospital and attendant facilities, close to his apartment, had been recently shuttered, its wooded acreage between Georgia Avenue and 16th Street, just a handful of miles from the White House, too valuable to sit on any longer.

Excerpt: Lucas noticed that his favorite mural in the city, on the side of a funeral home at Randolph Place and North Capitol NW, had been replaced. The old mural depicted Jesus reaching out to man who was on the ground, with the word, "Don't look down on a man...unless you gonna pick him up." To Lucas the painting had always represented what was good about D.C. The new mural showed a vaguely spiritual figure carrying a depleted man in his arms on a beach as waves roll violently toward the shore. It looked like an ad for suntan oil.... Lucas has asked a friend, a Bloomingdale resident, about the change. She said, "The man who owns the funeral home got pressured from the neighbors and a local non-profit to get rid of the old mural. The paint was peeling. But them imposing their will and all, it didn't smell right to me. Some folks want this whole city to look like Georgetown. What you end up with is a clean town with no character or soul.

Excerpt: ...Lucas went over to Fish in the Neighborhood, on the 3600 block of Georgia, in Park View, and got some takeout sandwiches. Formerly known as Fish in the Hood, the owner had recently altered the name to reflect the changing demographics of his customer base. But the product was the same. Lucas ordered fried catfish for Marquis, trout for himself, with tartar and extra hot sauce, and a side of their signature mac and cheese.

Excerpt: At lunchtime, Lucas walked into the Hitching Post, a soul food eat-house on 2nd and Upshur, near the Old Soldier's Home. Owned and operated by Alvin and Adrienne Carter since 1967, it was one of D.C.'s hidden treasures that, like many other down-home, Chocolate City legends, could not last. The decor was eclectic, with almost fifty years worth of accumulation and whatever the liquor distributors had given the Carters. There was a full bar, several large booths covered in Naugahyde, and a patron-mix of races, classes, and generations. Folks came for the unusual ambience, the soul and funk jukebox, and the signature fried chicken.

Excerpt: He found Lumley's small, unmarked storefront on the ground floor of a stone townhouse on 22nd, west of Connecticut Avenue, between R and S. The neighborhood north of the Circle was clean, pricey, with primarily white residents. in style and layout its streetscape was reminiscent of norther or northwestern Europe. Lucas looked through curved plate glass. A man, turning the corner on 40, was inside the shop, seated behind a desk, working or trolling on an open Mac laptop. A couple of paintings, landscapes and portraits, were set up on easels, and a few were mounted on the white walls, but otherwise the store appeared to be low on salable merchandise.

Excerpt: Lucas checked into a room holding rows of chairs and screens in the shuttered hospital's grounds, near RFK Stadium and close to the D.C. Jail. In the jail, which held prisoners awaiting trail, convicted detainees transitions to Federal prisons, or those serving less than one-year sentences, men sat in common rooms in front of similar screens and spoke to loved ones, relatives, priests, nuns, or attorneys. Face to face visits had recently been stopped, a money-saving measure which eliminated the humiliating, time-consuming search-and-frisk procedure that all visitors to the facility had once endured. The shift in policy and procedure had also taken away the needed human contact that came from two people sitting across from one another and looking into each other's eyes.

Excerpt: He was seated at a two-top across from Lucas, in a new Ethiopian-owned coffee shop on Georgia Avenue, in Petworth, located on the second floor of a house.... The morning rush was over, but there were still several patrons seated at tables and on couches, killing time, working on their laptops, using the free wi-fi. Others stood by the go-counter, picking up stirring sticks and napkins, glancing at their phones before hurriedly leaving the shop. "Suckers," said King, pointing his chin in the direction of two young go-getters who were heading out the door. "Where they going that's so important?"

Excerpt: First time they'd met, they'd been in that meat house on Connecticut Avenue, the one with the notoriously ugly dancers.... King had struck up a conversation with Bacalov and found his chimp-like face, his one eyebrow, and his mangling of the English language amusing. Also, he sensed that Bacalov had fire.

Excerpt: Lucas parked his Jeep outside a boutique hotel on the 200 block of 16th Street, four blocks north of the White House.... He'd heard about this hotel and its refurbishment in 2009. His brother Leo brought women to the bar here, it they and the occasion were special. Leo had said the place was first class. Lucas walked on a checkerboard marble floor through a lobby lit by lamps and dusk filtered through skylights. He passed a pedestalled bust of Thomas Jefferson and a library whose shelves held leather bound books, and he walked on into the bar, clean and subtly lit, and saw her sitting at the stick.

Excerpt: He parked above Florida Avenue, where the neighborhoods of Bloomingdale, Eckington, and Le Droit Park were in the midst of a turnaround that was unlikely and nearly unbelievable to longtime observers of the District's renaissance. People with vision and money had been buying up row houses here in the past ten, fifteen years, putting down roots alongside longtime residents, and on North Capitol entrepreneurs both home-grown and immigrant had been opening up businesses and retail establishments that were not liquor stores, Chinese Plexiglas palaces, or cash-checking fleece operations.

Excerpt: Dodson took the Anacostia Freeway and made his way to MLK Avenue, the entranceway to Anacostia, and jumped off and went over to Firth Sterling Avenue, which took them along the Barry Farms dwellings, two-story, public housing structures set on weedy grounds.... "What you suppose your man in doing in this part of town?" -- "I don't know. Guy leaves his nice neat little neighborhood to come down here? I reckon he's doing some kind of dirt." They made a turnaround and parked up the hill. They could see young men, mothers, and girls, some who were also mothers, out around the dwellings. A group of men were throwing dice. It was late afternoon and this time of year folks stayed outside.... "The Farms," said Marquis. "This place was infamous when I was a youngster coming up in PG."

Excerpt: Over Marquis' mild protests, Lucas drove him to the VA Hospital on Irving Street in D.C. Lucas sat in the waiting room with veterans of Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, and various Middle East wars while Marquis got attended to. A WWII veteran in his late eighties, assisted by an oxygen tank and caregiver, sat waiting, too. Some of the patients had no visible ailments, some of them were amputees with prosthetics or no limb replacements at all, others were wheelchair bound, and one bore the unmistakable neurological damage of Agent Orange. Now middle ages and elderly, they'd been treated in hospitals such as this one since they were young men and women. They'd continue to be under VA care for the rest of their lives. No one would ever film a Budweiser commercial here.

Excerpt: ...soon he was in the upscale, upper Northwest neighborhood of Friendship Heights, parked near a stately, forest green colonial on the corner of 28th and Kanawha.... The first floor of the house, her house, was lit up.... Lucas wondered what his father would think if he could see him now, drunk, creeping around outside of the home of a married woman.... Along the porch was a series of windows, and through them Lucas could see a modern kitchen with a built-in refrigerator, wall oven, and island. Charlotte and her husband were standing next to the island.... Charlotte's husband stepped forward and touched her forearm, and both of them smiled. Don't do that, thought Lucas. She's mine.

Excerpt: Around noon, Billy King walked down Minnesota Avenue in Northeast. He had parked his car, locked the glove box, and made sure to lock the Chevy's doors, taking note of the many blacks, the Korean and Chinese merchants, and the varieties of brown that were on the street. From what he could see, he was the sole white in the area, but he was not concerned. King had never lacked confidence. He found the man he was looking for in a Laundromat, seated in a plastic chair.... He looked like a custodian or liquor store clerk. He didn't look like someone who would do violence for cash.

Excerpt: He parked on Princeton, the nose of his truck pointed east. Lucas knew that at the top of the grade was Warder Place and Park View Recreation Center, and one block beyond, the grounds of the U.S. Armed Forces Retirement Home complex, which most folks called the Old Soldier's Home. Just five years earlier, Lucas would have stood out, parked on this street. Since the 60's, and for many years after the riots, the neighborhood had been almost entirely black. Park View also was home to the once-infamous Park-Morton complex and the "Black Hole" go-go club on Georgia, a trouble spot for police in 4D. But Park View's demographics and amenities, like those citywide, were changing. There were whites, blacks, and Hispanics now on the streets, and new coffee shops, bars, restaurants, and condos opening on the Avenue. Lucas couldn't decide in the changes were positive, Maybe it was just a cultural and economic evolution. Neither good nor bad, just different.

Excerpt: Lucas took his daypack off and from it removed his lead-filled sap, wrapped in black electrician's tape.... he got back on his saddle and pedaled to Otis where he cut right and went down to 6th. There he made another right into the short stretch of alley.... Percy Malone would now be walking south on the alley that ran behind Princeton. Lucas heard the deep bark of a large dog coming from a yard. He proceeded to ride. He took the short stretch and turned left at Princeton's alley. Percy was halfway down the alley, walking. He turned his head at the sound of Lucas's bike, turned his head back, and stepped slightly to the right to let the white-boy biker pass, and as the bike came alongside him its rider swing the sap violently.

Excerpt: Lucas walked south toward Florida Ave. He checked the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates the Grant Summers email address had supplied.... He passed a church and a used furniture operation that put chairs, sofas and tables out on the street to attract customers. On a strip that was both commercial and residential, he came upon two properties that were unoccupied, one with paper taped inside its windows. Both properties displayed a real estate sign showing the same broker's name and phone number.... The IP address lookup wasn't on the nose, but it usually yielded fairly accurate results. The broker was a man named Abraham Woldu. Lucas recognized the surname as Ethipian or Eritrean..... Lucas met Abraham Woldu, a well-dressed middle-aged man with curly black hair and an open smile, in front of his properties on North Capitol the next morning.... Woldu looked toward one of the two properties, a ground level portion of a turreted row home fronted by a plate glass window. "I had a Jamaican in there for awhile. He sold CDs, incense, juices and the like. Before that, there was a coffee shop run by a lady from my country. Neither of them made it. You want those types of businesses to do well in the neighborhood. It's good for property values, good for all of us eventually,. But sometimes they just don't work."

Excerpt: Lucas changed into shorts and rode his bike down to Hains Point. He did the loop a couple of times, going along the Washington Channel and the Potomac River, passing fishermen at the rails, lovers on benches and blankets, golfers playing the public course, and fellow bikers on the road.

Excerpt: Lucas locked his bike outside Jenny's on nearby Water Street, and had a hearty, late afternoon Chinese lunch at a table in the bar area which gave to a view of the channel and marina. He glanced around at the couples around him, sitting at two-tops, conversing, laughing. It occurred to him that most of his meals these days were eaten alone.

Excerpt: They soon tired of their surroundings, and moved together across the street to the bar of Russia House, a restaurant and lounge. Bacalov said he'd be more comfortable around his people. But the place was filled with Americans, and Bacalov didn't talk to any women there, either. Mainly, he boasted about his criminal past and what he was capable of.... King thought that most of it was bullshit and alcohol talk. But not all. He saw potential.