Free The Speed Chronicles by Joseph Mattson Page A

a completely different matter. At least he wasn’t smokin’ meth.
    â€œThis is where the money is,” I said.
    Gary’s country-fried English made me self-conscious about the way I pronounced my syllables so clearly, a lesson from my father about living in the “other” world, the one where people wore shirts and ties and worried about their balance sheets and annual reviews. All I wanted was a cubicle with my name on it. All I wanted was a quiet place to do my job. Too bad I wasn’t any good at it.
    â€œWhat the fuck does that shit even do?” Gary asked, the blunt already at half.
    We’d boosted the car from the Dunn Loring station lot, a white Beamer wagon with factory rims. An ’01 or ’02 most likely. But I couldn’t be sure in the dark. We were headed to someplace called Osito, about an hour outside of Baltimore. Rico told us it would be like palming a Snickers from a checkout.
    My name is Nsilo. Don’t ask me where it comes from. I got it from my pops. Any explanation is as gone as he is. He took a .38 slug to the chest on a dance floor six months home from the first Gulf War. All he was trying to do was break up a fight. But when the line on the screen went flat, it was my mama who ended up broken.
    Rico had a cousin in Osito, the only child of the only black family in the whole town. This cousin had a father who was on the road most days driving eighteen-wheelers. The mother was the secretary at the all-white Pentecostal church. I could smell the sellout all over them.
    â€œI mean, why in the fuck would you wanna be up and runnin’ around all the time?” The roach that remained of the blunt was practically burning his fingers. But he kept pulling from it, even though he was at the wheel a long way from home.
    Gary had memorized the directions after a thirty-second read back at the house. A heavy-hitter with a photographic memory is a beautiful thing. As long as you can control him, that is. I’m middle management, which means that I’m the one who takes the dog for his nightly walks.
    Much like rap, the crack business ain’t what it was twenty years ago. Back in the day, you couldn’t walk down a street in the neighborhood without somebody trying to hire you to work one of their corners. But Rockefeller and the Patriot Act and rap changed all of that. That’s why Rico got into meth. There’s still plenty of money to be made in that game.
    So Rico’s family of sellouts sold him the location to the biggest meth lab in the county, five trailers in a park of twelve cooking crank like a twenty-four-hour convenience store. We were being sent to make a pickup, one we weren’t paying for. There was a bit of other business too. But I was supposed to handle that personally.
    When the summer had started I was 100 percent certain that I was headed for the straight and narrow. Meechie had gotten shot outside The Crab House on Georgia Avenue over some broad with more stretch marks than a bag of rubber bands. Our fathers were brothers. My pops had at least made it back from the war. Meechie’s had stepped on a land mine. And that was that.
    Meechie was the only dude in the world who always had my back. I mean, even when I used to hoop back in high school, he’d be in the bleachers right above the bench, ready to pounce on anybody stupid enough to start a fight with me in it. I was good. But he was better. The game wasn’t going to be the same without him.
    I had done all right in school. And there was a lady at my church who worked on Capitol Hill. They were short on minorities in the Congressional Page Program. It didn’t pay much but she said it was a way into working for the government. I was so fucked up over Meechie being gone that I actually thought it might be for me.
    I was used to taking orders and making deliveries. I’d done it all my life. So taking the blue line to Capitol South for the same seemed like a