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“Let’s talk in general then,” Lula said. “Do you happen to know where any nineteen-year-old baggy-pants homeless killers live?”
“That covers a lot of ground,” Shirlene said. “And if they’re homeless then they don’t got a home where you could find them.”
“What do these kids do all day?” I asked Shirlene.
“The usual kid stuff. Smoke dope, play videogames, watch SpongeBob and cage fighting on television. The ones who want to get somewhere push drugs. Or if they can read they make drugs. Making drugs is better ’cause you eliminate the middleman. Otherwise they sit around working themselves up over who’s dissin’ them. And they tweet. They do a lot of tweeting.”
“How would I hook up with them?”
“Same way you hook up with anyone,” Shirlene said. “Twitter. Or you could walk down the fifth block wearing red, and then they’d show up and shoot you.”
“Anything else?” Lula asked.
“I hear some of them play basketball on the city courts across from the projects.”
“Do you know when they play?” I asked.
“They don’t play in the morning.”
I gave Shirlene twenty dollars, and Lula and I drove to the basketball courts by the projects. There were kids playing ba
sketball, and some of them looked like killers, but none of them looked like Antwan.
“I don’t know why Vinnie wrote a bond on this loser,” Lula said. “It’s no wonder we can’t find him. We don’t have any information. Who writes a bond on someone without an address or a single relative?”
“The bond was completely secured. Vinnie doesn’t care if we find him.”
“Then why are we looking?”
“I need to find him. I need the recovery money for a new car. Or at least a new muffler.”
“I don’t know why you’re going there. You’ll be rolling in dough when you capture Uncle Sunny.”
“I’m making zero progress with the Sunny capture. I broke my finger, I’ve been condemned to hell, dropped off a bridge, and shot at.”
“Yeah, but you can’t expect everything to go perfect all the time. You just had a few bumps in the road.”
“I need a new job.”
“I don’t think so. What about me if you get a new job? What am I going to do?”
“You’d be the office bounty hunter.”
“That sounds pretty good. That’s an important promotion. I like the way that sounds. Only wait a minute, then I’m gonna be the one getting dropped off the bridge. I’d hate that. It’d ruin my hair. And what happens to my Via Spigas when I go off the bridge?”
I drove through the projects, and then because we were close to Fifteenth I drove through Sunny’s neighborhood. We didn’t see Sunny. We didn’t see Kevin. We didn’t see Antwan. I drove back to the basketball court and the court was empty. I made one last pass down Stark Street and dropped Lula off at her car.
“This was a pretty good day,” Lula said. “We didn’t get shot at even once.”
I let myself into my apartment, slumped into my bedroom, flopped onto the bed, and pulled the pillow over my face. I wallowed in self-pity for a couple minutes, did a couple minutes of berating myself, but ultimately it wasn’t working for me. I got up, had a beer and a peanut butter sandwich, and felt pretty good. It’s hard to feel bad after drinking some beer and eating some worthless white bread and peanut butter.
I went to the computer and logged on to Antwan’s Twitter page. There was a lot of tweeting about music. Some chest beating about how tough he was. He had ham and cheese for lunch. Blah, blah, blah. He trash-talked about a girl he’d messed up. His brain-dead friends tweeted back supportive messages. More blah, blah, blah. He hung out with Big Al after basketball.
Eureka. This was exactly what I was looking for. He played basketball. He wasn’t there yesterday, but he was there sometimes. I kept reading, and there was another mention of his usual noontime basketball game. So maybe I knew where to find Antwan. Now I just had to figure out how to capture him. I wondered if Morelli was serious about the SWAT team.
At nine o’clock I followed Grandma’s instructions and signed on to play Bingo. I read the rules and used my credit card to deposit fifty dollars in my Bingo account. I was able to buy cards with this account, and winnings would be deposited in it. I could withdraw my money at any time so it seemed okay. I gave “Luvbaby” as my screen name, and I bought three Bingo cards. It took three minutes for me to lose. I bought three more cards. Lost. Bought more cards. Won a small jackpot.
Morelli called a little before ten o’clock, and I told him I couldn’t talk. I got back to the game and played until midnight, when I had to quit because I’d maxed out my credit card.
