A morning drizzle washes away a night’s residue of terror. Now it’s just a black Accord with Maryland tags parked on the northbound side of the 900 block of 5th Street NE. Or so we think. The police Explorer is pulled up alongside Papito’s VW and we assume they’re writing him a ticket. No pink-slip folded under his wipers and I notice the rear left flat on the Accord. I guess it’s been jacked. We head inside, father and son, drinking coffee and chatting Celtics. He takes calls in the office and I take to the porch. A forensics officer arrives and begins photographing the car in a navy slicker. She puts on purple surgical gloves and tries breaking in. She uses a mallet to drive in a small white wedge. The front passenger-side window doesn’t give but the rear one does. She slides in a long hook sheathed in a neon green tube through the crack and pulls open the front door. The car’s alarm sounds. She can’t turn it off. So she pops the hood and takes pliers to the battery, disconnecting it. She starts swabbing the inside of the car with the same tools the TSA uses to test my suitcase for bombs. A neighbor comes out. Young blond woman with an pre-school daughter. Two cops step out of the Explorer. She’d called it in. She’d seen the bullet hole in the passenger side. The forensics officer finds blood on the rear seat. They chat with her in the rain as her daughter sits in the second row of their Mazda SUV, evidently graduated from the kiddy seat. Then the two officers case the blocks for Ring cameras. Officer White, a middle-aged black man with a grey beard and two white AirPods in at all times, introduces himself to me and asks if I’d noticed the car. I hadn’t. He says it was a carjacking and shooting. His partner, a young black woman with baby hair-style edges and a Pride-edition Metro Police nameplate Velcro-ed to her back, stands off the edge of the stoop.
The other day two cops in a Charger asked me if I’d seen the boys who like to hang on the rocks along I, “they think y’all sweet with it. Next time you see ‘em, call in a drug complaint. They relocated from the electric box on 8th.” I wave them off. We’ve all heard gunshots. My friend was assaulted by the Girl Robbers. At a game night in a Levi’s penthouse above Pennsylvania Ave months back, a Peace Corps friend abandons an effort to construe the Girl Robbers as radical feminism after we point out our assaulted friend was a woman too. I leave early and step into the immediate aftermath of a carjacking. The cops are there and I overhear their story in flashes of red and blue. A gun. A white Mercedes SUV. Shock. I bike home.
My bike was stolen off the front porch seven months back, a ‘90s Cannondale my father used to ride. It was the World Cup and the US was playing the Orange in the round of 16. Cam and I were at Dirty Water and it was before noon but there was a beer deal so we were both a bit tight. We step out on to H and there’s my bike. Not locked to anything but itself. Cam asks what I’m going to do. I say take it home. As we’re standing there, discussing the best approach, a man runs out of the packie and tells us to get the fuck away from his bike. I explain its my bike. He says that’s bullshit, he bought it the other day. I say it was stolen the other day. A crowd gathers. Cam, a former Ranger (“you sit in a shed in Georgia for 8 hours more than you jump out of planes”), sparks out of a beer haze. There’s always a crowd on 8th and H. It’s a key artery where the X2 meets the 90 and the 92, north-south-east-west. And the Electric Box Boys hang there too. A man steps to the front and appoints himself foreman of the street jury. He instructs me to state my case. I explain when my bike got stolen and where. It’s unclear who is the plaintiff, and who the defendant, that swings with the crowds move. Then its the other mans turn. He wears orange tinted shades and a patterned cravat of mustard yellow. He says he bought it at the pawn shop just there, spent $50 on it. I offer all the cash in my wallet. The foreman deems it fair. The Jury concurs. The man agrees. I hand him $12. He unlocks the rear wheel from the frame and we set off.
Back to the present.
I’m never in danger. But someone was last night. Someone driving that Accord. Someone stealing that Accord. Someone shooting into or out of that Accord. Everyone involved was in the grips of terror. It’s a terror that’s hard to ignore here in DC. And its senseless. To pooh-pooh it would be blind. To call it a hell hole would be disingenuous. But this morning there it is. A black Accord with a flat and a bullet hole parked across from my house. Cleaned by a drizzle. A recovery crew backs up down the block and the Jerr-Dan deploys its ramp. The chain grows taught and the Accord is drawn onto the back of the flatbed. The flat is crimped. The tinted back window of the Jerr-Dan’s cab is adorned with a looping white cursive, “Always Able to help!!!!"
The car is gone and the cruiser is too. All that’s left is a bag of 7/11 brand kettle chips under the dry negative of the Accord’s body.