Free The Speed Chronicles by Joseph Mattson Page B

walk in the park. White people were easier to manage than crackheads. Give ’em a smile. Make a joke they understand and you turn into their main boy in a flash. It’s even easier when you know how to get ’em what they want. They assigned me to someone named Guy Medscar. He was an assistant to somebody’s assistant. But his cousin was a big deal over at the Capitol, a senator I think.
    Medscar was one of those dudes who got married out of high school to a girl who didn’t fuck him anymore. He had the four kids, the twin Beamers, the vacation house, all of that. But I could tell that it was more like a life sentence than a week in the Bahamas. My first lesson on the job was that the life everybody wants in the ’hood is a pain in the ass to somebody in the ’burbs.
    Then he asked me one day, in a whisper, “You know where I can get some”—his fingers coming to together like they were holding an imaginary pipe—“meth?”
    While I had a PhD in crack cocaine, meth wasn’t big in my part of town. The way he asked was so funny to me that I thought he was making it up. Meth was for trailer park hillbillies and the fags in Dupont Circle. I might not have known much about it, but I knew where to get it. I knew where to get anything that wasn’t nuclear or came with propellers.
    â€œHow much you want?” I asked him. His eyes lit up like the Washington Monument after six.
    â€œHow much can I get?” he asked.
    It seemed simple enough. I went to see the guy sitting on Rico’s stash out by Iverson Mall. I brought him a dub that Friday and he gave me a hundred dollars, five times what it was worth. That next Monday he asked me for an eighth. Every three days he’d page me after hours. The code after the number would say how much he wanted.
    I hadn’t been there two months before I was buying ounces to cover Medscar’s orders. Then his boys got in on it. It got to the point where people in the building showed up at his office like it was mine. Since I didn’t use (I didn’t even drink), the money was all profit.
    It really did seem like a foolproof situation. Then the fools got involved.
    â€œSo what we supposed to do once we get there?”
    â€œWe supposed to holler at this dude named Jeremiah,” I explained. “That’s all I know.”
    â€œYou think they gonna have any food up in this jawnt? I ain’t had shit since dem wings and fries I had for lunch.”
    Jeremiah was a prophet. He believed in God so much that he went wherever the Lord told him to go. Sometimes it was places he didn’t want to be. Other times it was places he didn’t understand. I didn’t want to be in Osito on a Friday night.
    I had a chocolate star named Deidre sending me pics with her legs open, panties off. She was free for the night. But business was business. This was a run we had to make.
    Now, as you might have imagined, it didn’t take long for the other pages to see that I was getting special treatment from the boss. I took hour lunches that were supposed to be thirty minutes. I never buttoned the top button on my dress shirt, even though it was policy. And every once in a while, one of my girls would come through.
    I made sure my broads knew the deal way before they came over to Capitol Hill. First and foremost, the invitations only went to the right ladies. I couldn’t have anybody up in the office who didn’t have the sense not to show up in sweatpants with her hair a mess.
    Kina was probably my favorite girl. She didn’t have much of an ass on her but her hips were lovely, the perfect handles to hold onto while I hit it from the back. She grew up on the block but she had worked at a bank. So she knew how to dress. She came in there one day in a pin-striped skirt and blazer, heels, and a real nice blouse. The blazer was one layer too many in the summer heat, but when she came in the office she was lookin’