The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace Read Online Free PDF Page A

going away. Jackie had been through it all a few times before and each attempt had ended with her back home.
    And now Rob was about to turn five. She was thinking about elementary school, determined to send her son to a private school. That cost money—not much, but “not much” was relative. She knew that the security required to afford tuition would be a stretch to maintain anywhere else except on Chapman Street.
    Skeet tried to make the extraction easier for her by renting an apartment on Chestnut Street, a few blocks from the house on Pierson. His plan was to conduct his business from the apartment and leave the house free and safe for his family. Jackie remained reluctant. She knew that in the deeply layered world of drugs, the nexus of commerce was the person, not the place. Too, in the very possible event that Skeet was arrested and sentenced to a few months or years in jail, she had no interest in being knotted to any property bearing his name.
    â€œLook at me,” he told her. “I’m thirty-eight years old. Nothing’s ever happened to me, and nothing’s ever going to. I’m cool.” And Skeet was cool about his involvement with the drug trade, as far as she could see.
    Jackie didn’t like to talk about or even reference obliquely the drugs that Skeet sold. She had never gravitated toward the dealers in high school or the years after, the way many women around her had, enticed by the gifts of coats and jewelry, the bravado and relentless charm, the respect these men commanded from their peers. However, Skeet wasn’t like the other dealers. He never flaunted the money he made—which didn’t seem like all that much, just enough to even out the math between work paying x and life costing y. He drove a boxy Volvo that had constant problems. He had jobs during the day—nothing permanent, but there was always something; the man wasn’t lazy. His friends were for the most part people from childhood, decent-seeming men who’d stayed around and paid attention to their mothers if not always their children. He coached a youth basketball team. He was always casual, never anxious. Most important to him in terms of safety, he didn’t try to run with or compete against the younger generation of hustlers, with their codes and protocols always evolving toward brutality. “I got too much respect for human life to mess with all them young ’uns,” he assured her. “I stay the hell out of their way.” Skeet was loud and sometimes arrogant about his own intelligence and prospects, but he was quiet and conservative about drugs.
    What made Jackie wary was the huge extent to which Rob’s father was known. To her, it seemed as though everyone living in the three square miles of East Orange—all fifty thousand people—knew Skeet Douglas. Wherever they went out, she heard the constant hoots and waves and incantations of “You call me now!” He told her that this was just the kind of person he was—friendly, with a lot of friends. Jackie knew that friends and friendliness weren’t always directly related. Skeet had a huge smile, a beautiful smile, and he bent the truth very well from behind it.
    She didn’t have to make a final decision on his offer, because the house on Pierson Street burned down. She never found out why. Skeet hadn’t called her for a week—rare even for him. She needed to figure out the day-care pickup situation for the month to come, and so she went to the Pierson Street house after work, ready for a fight. The smell of combusted carbon still hung in the air a week after the fire. Skeet was sitting on the front step, hunched over, talking to an elderly acquaintance from the block, his expression one she’d rarely seen on him before: resigned, tired, damned. The house was completely gutted, just an assortment of heavy beams scarred black and ashy objects that had once been furniture. He muttered