The Triangle by Kevin Deutsch

Author:Kevin Deutsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2014-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Basic Training

I’m part of this thing now. Whether I want to be or not.

—Devon

Back in the Triangle, a pair of detectives stands over the body of Doc Reed, pondering the piece of scalp missing from his head. It lay beside a storm drain, ten feet from his corpse. “What do you think did that—a .45?”

“Nah, .357.”

“No way.”

“Twenty bucks says I’m right,” one detective says, both of them clearly desensitized by now to the horrors of life in a war zone.

“Make it fifty.”

“Doc, if I lose this bet, I’m blaming you,” the detective says, addressing the corpse.

After narrowly surviving the nine-millimeter slug Dice Beckles had shot through his stomach in January, Doc’s luck has finally run out. Dice had spotted him waiting in line at a nearby McDonald’s drive-through in Freeport earlier that afternoon and had followed him back to a Bloods cookhouse a few blocks south of the Mercedes service center. Dice blew half his head off as Doc walked up to the door, bag full of quarter-pounders still in hand.

“If he hadn’t stopped for them burgers, he’d still be alive,” Dice says.

Their months-long feud, for all the bloodshed it has caused, originated with nothing more than a funny look.

“I didn’t like the way he stared at me when he rolled past one night,” says Dice. “So the next day, I shot him. But he ain’t die. Then he tried to shoot me. But he killed Little James instead. So I had to do his ass when I saw him at the drive-through.”

Doc’s killing stuns the Bloods, who are still reeling from the murder of Big Mac, the shootings of Steed and Spider Rick, and the attack on Ice’s sister. Doc’s death also creates an immediate opening for a corner supervisor, which Ice orders Tony to fill as quickly as possible. After considering a handful of candidates, they settle on Devon LaFleur.

“D-Bo,” as he’s known to his friends, is seventeen, six-foot-one, and muscular, a good student who recently began selling weed for the Bloods on weekends in order to make more money to spend on his girlfriend, Shonda. He’d initially tried his hand at two legitimate after-school jobs—first, as a clerk at CVS, and later, at Dunkin’ Donuts. But the pay of $8 to $9 an hour amounted to so little after taxes, Devon could barely afford a nice dinner date once a week.

“I’m tired of being broke,” he told Shonda one afternoon as they walked through Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City, an upscale shopping center a short drive from the Triangle. Garden City is Hempstead’s wealthier, almost exclusively white neighborhood to the north, a place close on the map yet worlds apart in every other way.

“If you so broke, do something about it,” Shonda said. “Show me what you’re all about.”

Devon upped his earnings by taking the weekend dealing gig with the Bloods but could barely keep up with Shonda’s requests for food and gifts. Unhappy with his progress, she broke up with him. A short time

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