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

The roof looked like two big slabs of Swiss cheese. The whole sorry thing was leaning hard to one side.
    Fifteen or so drug dealers were working the other side of the street, near the not-yet-derelict Hostess bakery. Delivery trucks lurched out of the huge building every twenty minutes or so. The inviting smell of freshly baked bread, muffins, and cakes filled the winter air. A couple of the slingers wandered over to a fire burning inside a rusty metal trash can on an empty lot directly across the street from the old wooden house.
    The drug dealers eyeballed Jim, Claude, and the demolition man’s crew. Claude hired laborers off the street. Some of them were friends with some of the slingers. Some bought drugs from them.
    Claude studied the house. He was compact and muscular, with a thick neck and arms and shoulders that could have belonged to a middleweight boxer. Claude looked like someone who could handle himself in a brawl.
    “This bad boy’s done,” he said. “It can’t be saved. I best blow it up.”
    Jim nodded in agreement. “I’m afraid you’re right. This structure’s not worth saving. We’re better off knocking it down.”
    A tall and lean forty-year-old, Jim wore wire-rim glasses and a beard. He was bald on top, with a fringe of brown hair that ran from ear to ear. He looked like he’d be at home in a college lecture hall.
    The slingers who’d gathered near the fire leaned toward one another and exchanged whispers. They threw hard looks at Jim and Claude.
    Silently, independently, Jim and Claude came to the same unnerving conclusion: The dope boys were using this little house to hide their stashes of heroin, methamphetamine, and Dilaudid. Now here they were, fixing to blow it up.
    Jim rubbed the back of his neck. This was grief he didn’t need. The minister looked at Claude. The two men were good friends. Jim asked Claude what they should do. The demo man pivoted toward the dope boys and said, “Come with me, reverend.”
    They were halfway across the street when Claude, in his deep, booming voice, called out, “Listen up, fellas, the reverend wants to talk with you!”
    Claude had caught Jim by surprise. Jim could usually yap about anything until the seasons changed, and he’d planned on reaching out to the street dealers soon. But not this soon. Jim felt his pulse quicken as they approached the slingers.
    Jim and Claude stopped on one side of the trash can. The dealers gathered on the other side, about five feet away, and stared hard at Jim, murder in their eyes.
    The pastor shifted toward Claude until they were standing shoulder to shoulder. Jim blew out a white breath. He was scared, shaking, which he hoped the dope boys would mistake for shivering from the cold. Help me, God , Jim prayed to himself as he scanned his audience.
    In the next moment, the words came to him.
    “Listen, fellas. We’re gonna have to blow up that little house across the street,” Jim said calmly. “So those of you who have your stash there, now’s the time to get it out.”
    The dealers looked at the house, then back at Jim.
    Jim felt his neck muscles tense. He wondered: What would he do—what could he do—if the drug dealers bucked? What could he do if they declared war on him and his church?
    A slinger named Chief stepped up to Jim. Chief was an American Indian, with a bronzed complexion and a ponytail that hung to his waist. He never smiled.
    Could really use your help again here, God , Jim prayed to himself.
    Chief extended his hand.
    “Well, thank you, Reverend. Thank you so much,” Chief said.
    The drug dealer and the minister shook hands. Jim exhaled as a sense of relief and gratitude washed over him.
    Chief and the other slingers made a beeline for the doomed house.
     
    Jim grew up a thousand miles from S Street, in a small cracker-box house in the working-class, racially segregated town of Conway, Arkansas. He was born in Fort Smith, hard by the Oklahoma state line, about two hundred miles from