S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. by Ruben Castaneda Read Free Book Online Page A

inhaled.
    “Shotgun?” I asked. Champagne nodded. We leaned toward each other and she exhaled a blast of crack smoke into my mouth. The hit made me light-headed. I motioned for the pipe and lighter. She handed them to me.
    “You’ll do me while I do my rock, right?” Champagne reached into her handbag, brought out a condom, and broke open the wrapper.
    “Ready when you are,” she said. The rock was good. Champagne was good. Together, the rock and Champagne were great.
    Before she left, Champagne grabbed a piece of scrap paper and a pen from my nightstand and scribbled her name and a series of digits.
    “That’s my pager number,” she said. “Call me whenever.”
    Remorse kicked in as soon as she walked out the door. I padded to the bathroom and stared at my guilty-looking face in the mirror. In less than forty-eight hours, I’d be starting my job as a crime reporter at the Washington Post . What the hell was I thinking?
    In disgust, I grabbed the paper with Champagne’s number, rolled it into a ball, and fired it into a wastebasket. I downed a frozen dinner with a beer, vowed to stay away from Champagne and S Street, and went to bed.
     
    The next morning, I stirred awake as slivers of sunlight angled through the blinds of my bedroom. My apartment was ten feet above street level. A rickety wooden porch ascended from the sidewalk to my door. I opened the door, stepped outside, and, for the first time, picked up the Sunday edition of the Post . The street was dead quiet. On the other side of the block, a middle-aged couple in their Sunday best walked toward the church at the far end of the street. Birds chirped.
    I dumped milk, a banana, and some peanut butter into a blender, then reconsidered the previous night.
    Champagne had been fun. She didn’t dress like a hooker, so she wouldn’t draw undue attention from my neighbors. She was willing to assume all the risk of copping. She held the money. She made the buy. She carried the rocks until we got to my place.
    If I happened to be on S Street when the cops swooped in—if they ever did—well, there was no law against giving someone a ride. The police would know why I was there, but they’d never be able to prove it. The cops might detain me for questioning, and I might suffer some embarrassment. But so long as I wasn’t charged with a crime, my bosses at the Post were unlikely to find out about my tawdry activities. There would be no harm, no foul. And thirty-five bucks for a rock and a blow job was a pretty sweet deal.
    I stepped into the bedroom and retrieved the balled-up sheet of paper with Champagne’s pager number. I carefully opened it, smoothed it out, and slipped it into my sock drawer.
    If the slingers were working that brazenly in the middle of the day, S Street must be an around-the-clock operation. It was a five-minute drive from my apartment. Champagne was clearly connected. I was about to get a nice pay bump courtesy of the Post .
    I couldn’t see a downside.

Chapter 3
    “This Must Be Where God Needs Us”
    On a gray, frigid day, pastor Jim Dickerson and demolition man Claude Artis inspected a small wood-frame house on S Street Northwest. The structure stood a few feet from a four-story Victorian that Jim and his humble congregation, a dozen strong, hoped would become their spiritual home, the place they would gather for Sunday services.
    It was January 1984. Cops had shooed away the heroin junkies, squatters, hookers, and hustlers who’d made the big brick house at 614 S their own for years. The building would need to be thoroughly cleaned and renovated before it would be of any use as a church. But first, Jim and Claude had to deal with the smaller house, which was also part of the property—and looked as if it might fall over in the first decent breeze.
    Jim and Claude crunched their boots over the remnants of a recent snowfall as they circled the sad little building. The front door and windows were long gone. The framing was rotting.