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the silver cap that did the other ones?”
     
    “ I sold it to them both, half an hour before. One of them went right here, died in the house, other one out in the alley.”
     
    “ You get rid of them?”
     
    “ What you think?”
     
    “ So what you want me to do about this shit?”
     
    “ Maybe it’s the bug spray.”
     
    “ Everybody uses bug spray for bonding.”
     
    “ Not this industrial shit we been getting. They use Black Flag or something. We oughta go back to it, maybe it’s this stuff that’s been—”
     
    “ Shut up. It’s not us, pendajo . Okay? This bug spray I got makes the stuff go farther, people like it, they come back for more, that’s bueno .”
     
    “ Reporters was hanging around the ‘hood, s’afternoon. Nobody told ‘em shit. And The Man be coming around. Asking shit.”
     
    “ They connect it to us?”
     
    “ Not yet.”
     
    “ Then fuck ‘em. It’s not us anyway.” Samson made a dismissive motion, a hummingbird blur of his hand, and started toward the front steps that led up to the old two bedroom stucco place that was the neighborhood rockhouse.
     
    Dwayne started to go after Samson. Froze when he saw Raiders glare at him. They’d already had a run-in. Come back when you got the green , Raiders had said, we not hiring. You come around with money or we hammer your whole fucking body .
     
    Samson was going into the house. Opportunity walking away. Dwayne rubbed his Bic-thumb callouses with a forefinger, could almost feel a dove there, between his fingers. Could picture putting the dove in a pipe, firing up. Could almost taste it.
     
    Once Samson was in his “office” there’d be no getting to see him. Not from where Dwayne was at in the pecking order.
     
    Dwayne smelled base, someone smoking somewhere. Turned and saw Joleen in the front seat of a beat-up van, her head bobbing over some guy’s lap. The guy firing a blast in a broken-off stem, the glow pulsing, lighting up a little blue skull tattoo on the guy’s cheek, and showing his face. He was a big, dirty yellow-haired white guy, a biker type, with an overgrown beard and matted hair; a biker who’d had to sell his bike for crack.
     
    Dwayne smelled the burning base. Watched the flare of pipe. Heard the biker grunt as the blast rocked him.
     
    Fuck it. Dwayne couldn’t stand it. He started up the stairs, after Samson. “Yo, Samson—!” he called after him. “Yo, my bro, wait up—”
     
    But then Jim White Guy stepped out of the bushes with a gun. A .45 automatic. He was grinning. Motherfucker was real proud of himself.
     
     
     
     
     
    10:15 P.M.
     
     
     
    “ You fucking with me, right?” Samson said.
     
    Raiders shook his head. “While I was out. Ramon told me. Three more dead, just all in the last half hour, right here in this fucking house.”
     
    Samson and Raiders were in the pipe room, which had once been someone’s living room. Now it was a big box, just a place to sit and smoke crack with a couple of burn-pocked mattresses on the floor and a smell like a shitty diaper from the plugged-up toilet in the bathroom off to one side. Naked bulb, windows double boarded over, linoleum curling up off the sagging wooden floor. Intricately calligraphed posse graffiti on the walls next to the mattresses. One broken stem in a corner.
     
    Samson swore in Spanish. “What you do with them?”
     
    “ Some of the posse taking them to the dumpster behind the Pioneer Chicken place. I fucking don’t know. I ain’t smoking none of that silver cap.”
     
    “ You don’t be smoking at all around here. I go off on you, I catch you. Don’t smoke at work.” But he was thinking about something else.
     
    “ We use up this batch, then maybe we switch to Black Flag for the bonding agent in the stuff—who’s making it up?”
     
    “ The base? Ramon.”
     
    “ He get sick?”
     
    “ Hard to tell with Ramon.”
     
    “ Okay, we get rid of the Bug Deth now, but we use up this batch of the