Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets by David Simon

Author:David Simon [Simon, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22

Clayvon Jones lies face down in the courtyard of the housing project, his torso covering the loaded 9mm Colt he never had a chance to use. The gun is cocked, with a live round in the chamber. Someone was looking for Clayvon and Clayvon was looking for someone, and Clayvon got rained on first.

Dave Brown rolls the body and Clayvon stares up at him, white foam at the edges of his mouth.

“Damn,” says Dave Brown. “That’s a nice gun.”

“Hey, that is pretty,” says Eddie Brown. “What is that? A forty-five?”

“No, I think it’s one of those Colt replicas. They’re making nine-millimeters with that classic forty-five mold.”

“That’s a nine-millimeter?”

“Either that or a three-eighty. I saw an ad for one of these bad boys in the FBI magazine.”

“Uh-huh,” says Eddie Brown, giving the gun a last look. “She does look nice.”

It is daylight now, a little before six on a day that promises to be hot. In addition to having been the proud owner of a 9mm Colt replica, the dead man is a twenty-two-year-old east-sider with a thin, athletic frame. The corpse has already got a decent rigor to it, with the lone gunshot wound visible at the top of the head.

“Like he was duckin’ down and didn’t get low enough,” says Eddie Brown, a little bored.

A crowd has already gathered at both ends of the courtyard, and though a canvass of the neighboring rowhouses will produce not a single witness, half the neighborhood seems to be out bright and early for a glimpse of the body. Within hours there will be four anonymous calls-“I want to remain monogamous,” one caller will insist-as well as a report from one of Harry Edgerton’s paid informants on the east side. Together they will provide a full chronicle of the death of Clayvon Jones. Classify it as scenario number 34 in the catalogue of life-and-death ghetto drama: an argument between two dopers over a girl; a fistfight in the street; threats back and forth; young kid paid in cocaine to go shoot Clayvon in the head.

To Dave Brown’s amusement, three of the callers will insist that the shooter placed a white flower on Clayvon’s mouth after the murder. The flower, Brown will realize, was nothing more than the foam at the corners of the dead man’s mouth, which was undoubtedly visible to the crowd that greeted the detectives on their arrival at the scene.

At this moment, however, all of that is still to come. At this moment, Clayvon Jones is simply a dead yo with a quality weapon he never got to use. No witnesses, no motive, no suspects-the standard whodunit mantra.

“Hey, guy.”

Dave Brown turns around to see a familiar face on one of the Eastern uniforms. Martini, isn’t that it? Yeah, the kid who took a bullet for the company in a drug raid at the Perkins Homes last year. Good man, Martini.

“Hey, how you doing, bunk?”

“Okay,” says Martini, pointing to another uniform. “My buddy here needs a sequence number for his report.

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