“Vera, this is just, well, heroic. It’s heroic. Thank you,” Stanley said. He was about to ask her a question when her beeper went off. She looked. It was one of her detectives. “Stanley, this is my guy. I gotta go.”

When she got to the 2700 block of Douglass Place Southeast, it was July 4 and Juneteenth come together. One in the morning, and children were hanging out on the eastern side of fabled St. Elizabeth’s, built expressly for the mentally ill, partly shut down, still standing like an abandoned plantation house. Over here two of the worst, Douglass Dwellings and Stanton Dwellings, maybe army barracks but maybe pride of one unknown Negro architect, once sat on this hill. It was the highest place in Southeast. Frederick Douglass’s homestead was near. Now the dwellings were down and something called Henson Ridge, built-fast townhouses, stuck up right and left. There were still too many empty lots.

“She up in there,” said a slack girl sitting on a wall with two sisters, banging heels on bricks.

Vera took the advice and walked toward the apartment building catty-corner to the townhouses. A skein of boys jerked around behind her. “What channel you wit?” sang out one. “You ain’t fornever coming back here,” another boy mock-warned.

When she called Stanley, one kid was pressing his face into the glass of her car window. “You tole her you love her,” said another boy. “Oh no, I ditent,” said the face pancake.

She read from her notebook. “At 1:15 a.m., officers raced to the 2700 block of Douglass Place SE and found a 19-year-old woman with a graze wound to her head. A group of gunmen attacked her and a man, authorities said. The couple ran into an apartment building seeking safety, but the barrage of gunfire pierced the outer walls, police said. Police found shell casings from two handguns and a shotgun in the apartment complex’s parking lot.”

“I’m trying to tie all this together,” Stanley said. “This isn’t normal. This—I don’t think we’ve had this since before Clinton.”

“But you can’t say that.”

“No,” he said glumly. “You know I would if I could.”

The boys were gone, and her detective was tapping on the windshield. “Stanley, I gotta go,” she said.

A half-hour later, she called him one last time, knowing it probably wouldn’t make the last edition. He was still there, though, waiting for her.

“Shortly after 2 a.m., a victim walked into Greater Southeast Community Hospital with a gunshot wound in the back. The victim told D.C. police that he had been attacked at the Southern Avenue Metro station, in Prince George’s County near the D.C. border.”

14.   GO VIEW THE LAND,
EVEN JERICHO