Chapter 4: Honore Street

Dr. Pashek put me at the intake desk on Monday morning, where the Crack dead came in.

Four had come in since midnight, each with a yellow Directive tag wired to a toe.

I logged their names, their addresses and the hour of their Cracks, and I stamped each form for the courier.

I could have read every one of them.

It would have cost me four more hours in my head, and the camera over the desk had a red light on.

So I did what I had done for two years, which was nothing, and I kept their four names in my notebook.

At five Deloris drove me to Englewood in her Buick.

The club was meeting in a church basement on Honore Street, and it wanted the doctor.

The basement smelled of coffee and floor wax.

Along one wall hung the rota boards, a hundred porch cards in sandwich bags.

Each card listed the shooters in that house and the hours they were on watch.

Along the other wall hung the flyers.

There were sixty-one of them, photocopies gone soft at the corners, each with a face and the word MISSING over it.

I found him near the end: thirty-one, smiling, in a Sox cap, gone since March 14.

"Englewood has lost more people to the Cracks than to the folds," Deloris said.

"They don't die. They stop answering their phones," she said. "Nobody counts that one."

Forty people sat on folding chairs, and I counted a dozen rifles racked by the door.

The Honore Street Block Club had been meeting in this room since 1971.

Now it met with a seat at the front draped in a church quilt where Terrence Bayne had sat for twelve years.

Two strangers had come to stand at the back, each with a different set's colors on a jacket.

"The Racine set and the Halsted set," Deloris murmured. "Terrence's friends."

I had grown up on the Southwest Side and still half believed the sets were only gangs.

On Honore Street I learned the rule they kept.

When the hum starts there are no sets and no colors, because a Crack is nobody's turf.

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