Jack & Jill

soup kitchen at St. Anthony’s. His name was Loy McCoy, and he was a low-level crack runner now. He had helped me once or twice in the past.
    Loy had stopped coming by for free food once he had started moving nickel and dime bags of crack and speed around the neighborhood. It’s hard to blame kids like Loy, as much as I would like to some days. Their lives are unbelievably brutal and hopeless. Then one day someone conies along and offers them fifteen or twenty bucks an hour to do what’s going to happen anyway. The more powerful emotional hook is that their dope bosses believe in them, and in many cases nobody has believed in any of these lost kids before.
    I called Loy over, away from the posse of fools he was hanging with on L Street They all wore black, machine-knit wool caps pulled low over their eyes and ears. Gold toothcaps, hoop earrings, baggy trousers, the works. His gang was talking about the movie based on the old Flintstones cartoon, or maybe about the actual cartoons.
Yabba dabbas
was one of the catchphrases used to describe police patrolmen and detectives in the ‘hood.
Here comes the yabba dabba. Or, he’s a yabba dabba doo motherfucker.
I had recently read a sad statistic that seventy percent of Americans got nearly one hundred percent of their information from television and the movies.
    Loy smirked as he slow-shuffled up at me at the street corner. He was maybe six one, but about only a hundred and forty pounds. He had on baggy, layered winter clothes, artfully torn, and he was “grittin” me today, trying to stare me down, put me down.
    “Yo, you say c’mon over, I got to come?” Loy asked in a defiant tone that I found both irritating and monumentally sad. “Whyzat? I pay my
taxes,”
he rapped on. “I ain’t holdin’. Ain’t none of us holdin’.”
    “None of your bullshit attitude works on me,” I told him. “You better lose it right now.” I knew that his mother was a heroin addict and that he had three little sisters. All of them lived at the Greater Southeast Community Hospital shelter, which was like having the tunnels under Union Station as your home address.
    “Say your business, an’ I get back to my business,” Loy said, remaining defiant. “My time’s money, unnerstand? Axt me what you got to axt.”
    “Just one question for you, Loy. Then you can go back to your big money business dealings.”
    He kept “grittin” me, which can get you shot in this neighborhood. “Why I have to answer any questions? What’s in it for me? What you have to deal?”
    I finally smiled at Loy and he cracked a half-smile himself, showing off his shiny gold caps. “You give me something, maybe I’ll remember. Then maybe I’ll owe you one sometime,” I said.
    “Yo,” he came right back at me. “Wanna know a big fat secret,
Detective?
I don’t
need
your markers. And I don’t much care about these murdered kids’ homocides you lookin’ into.” He shrugged as if it were no big deal on the street. I already knew that.
    I waited for him to finish his little speech, and also to process my offer. The sad thing was that he was bright. Crazy smart. That was why the crack boss had hired him. Loy was smart enough, and he probably even had a decent work ethic.
    “I can’t talk to you! Don’t have to, neither!” He finally did a little exasperated spin and threw up both his skinny arms. “You think I owe you ‘cause once upon a time you fed us Manhandler soup-slop at the po’boy kitchen? Think I owe you? I don’t owe you shit!”
    Loy started to strut away. Then he looked back at me, as if he had just one more irritating wisecrack to hurl my way. His dark eyes narrowed, caught mine, and held on for a second.
Contact. Liftoff.
    “Somebody saw an old man where that little girl got kilt,” Loy blurted out. It was the biggest news we had so far on the Truth School case. It was the
only
news, and it was what I had been looking for all these days working the street.
    He had no idea how fast I was, or how strong. I reached out and pulled him close to me. I pulled Loy McCoy
very
close. So close I could smell the sweet peppermint on his breath, the scent of pomade in his hair, the mustiness of his badly wrinkled winter clothes.
    I held him to my chest as if he were a son of mine, a prodigal son, a young fool who needed to understand that I wasn’t going to allow him to be this way with me. I held him real tight and I wanted to save him somehow. I wanted to save all of them, but I