Politics Daily

Watchdogs: From Medicare Waste to Dirty Money, Helping Readers See the Connections

James Grady — 2010-03-01T08:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Wall Street, PD Investigations

The Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security . . .

Yes, there's still some of the world they don't cover.

. . . is scheduled Wednesday to open hearings on waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare's $49 billion-a-year prescription drug program. According to the subcommittee, the Department of Health and Human Services is "struggling" to come up with a figure for waste in the program. Issues like double-billing and phony prescriptions -- some "written" by dead doctors -- plague the system. While preparing for the hearings, Senate investigators also heard disturbing reports about abuse of prescription painkillers like OxyContin through Medicare.

Meanwhile, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is shifting its focus from suitcases of shrink-wrapped cash -- foreign corruption and how it impacts America, including how our lawyers, real estate brokers, lobbyists and money lenders operate -- to shining their investigatory flashlights into America's current financial crisis.

Is it possible that PSOI's sleuths will see connections between their two investigations?

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The Hamas Hit: Assassination Politics

James Grady — 2010-02-20T05:00:00 00:00

Filed under: PD Investigations

The growing diplomatic furor over the murder of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last month in Dubai, possibly by an Israeli hit team, cracks the cloudy glass partition all governments keep over assassination politics.

Dubai authorities say the assassins stalked Mabhouh and suffocated him with a pillow in his luxury hotel room. Working from dozens of airport, shopping mall, hotel lobby, and elevator security cameras, Dubai authorities pieced together video footage of the 10 men and one woman who they say used false passports, wigs, and other disguises to carry out the killing.

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Watchdogs: Terrorists, Telephones and Tolls

James Grady — 2010-02-17T15:57:00 00:00

Filed under: Terror, PD Investigations

A pack of government and private watchdogs have separately set their oversight eyes on America's telecommunications industries. They are concerned about everything from how terrorist cyber attacks might ravage the country and our post-9/11 failures to improve emergency communications to cell phone companies potentially charging excessive fees.

This week, the non-governmental Bipartisan Policy Center ran a "war game" in Washington, D.C., to consider how the federal government could react to a cyber attack.

In January, 2003, the "Slammer" computer worm crippled Bank of America ATMs, Continental Airlines, and Seattle's 911 network.

In August, 2008, Russia's "first strike" in its invasion of the neighboring country of Georgia launched massive cyber attacks on Georgia's government Web sites and Internet communications.

And last month, Chinese computer hackers stole data from Google and 30 other major international companies.

BPC's war game focused on revealing how our leaders could react to a successful cyber attack. Its role-playing participants included former high-profile executives from the White House, CIA, Homeland Security, Congress and the Justice Department. The cost of the war game run at a D.C. hotel was shared by BPC, private and academic donors.

Michael V. Hayden, former CIA director and the chief architect of the war game simulation, told The Washington Post: "We were trying to tee up specific issues that would be digestible so they would become the building blocks of a broader, more comprehensive cyber strategy."

All the analyses of BPC's war game have not yet been published, but what appears to have emerged from the simulation is a sense of confusion about not only what our leaders might do, but what they might legally be able to do as they respond to a cyber warfare emergency.

Problems in responding to terrorist attacks and other emergencies are not confined to White House policy, command and control levels. The chaos of 9/11 revealed our first responders -- police, firemen, and EMS personnel on the street -- struggle to communicate with each other.

Now, the Center for Public Integrity -- working with the Center for Investigative Reporting -- has found that though more than $4.3 billion federal dollars were spent between 2004 and 2008 to improve "interoperability" among first responders nationwide -- more than any other Department of Homeland Security program -- Motorola and other contractors may well have benefited more than our first responders, and much of the money has been poorly managed.

Even without any dubious purchases, the problem seems to be that most of the money has been spent on hardware, while planning and organization -- less tangible changes -- are lagging far behind.

Of more "private" concern to Americans, the House Energy and Commerce Committee this week sent letters to 24 telecommunication companies seeking information on allegations of "traffic pumping schemes." The Committee is investigating whether current cell phone rate structures might create incentives for companies to charge excessive rates for completing calls.

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Watchdogs: A Hard Look at Healthcare Middlemen

James Grady — 2010-02-16T05:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Senate, Democrats, Republicans, Economy, Investigations, Health Care, Obama Administration, PD Investigations

As part of the effort to revive the health care reform package, the U.S. Senate may soon step up attempts to end the longstanding antitrust protections afforded the insurance industry. Now, insurers aren't the only business whose antitrust privileges are coming under close scrutiny on Capitol Hill. A bipartisan band of senators is turning to an inquiry into the billions of dollars a year gained by inventory middlemen known as Group Purchasing Organizations that supply health care institutions and hospitals with medical devices and equipment.
GPOs purchase medical supplies for hospitals around the country, charging the hospitals lucrative administrative fees in return for their middlemen services. Like insurance companies, the purchasing conglomerates enjoy many legal exemptions from antitrust restrictions.

A number of senators, including Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) have asked their staffs to investigate why some of the country's smaller medical device companies complain about not being able to compete as suppliers to the GPO-dominated market. The senators also want to look at criticisms that the GPO system lacks transparency and, according to one Hill investigator, might be "rigged."

One current business regulation theory is that purchasing organizations save money for the health care system because their exemptions allow them to buy and then re-sell to hospitals at a cheaper cost than if the GPOs were subject to broad market of competition. Senate investigators are gathering documents and doing interviews. Expect an oversight hearing early this spring to focus on the antitrust exemptions afforded these middlemen purchasers.

Similar antitrust exemptions enjoyed by the insurance industry due to the McCarran-Ferguson Act have been fought over in Congress since the law was enacted in 1945. Those antitrust exemptions have become part of the Obama-generated debate on health care reform.

Currently, the giant insurance companies are regulated primarily at the state level by individual insurance commissions. While most states' insurance commissions have severely limited power over the insurance companies domiciled in their states, serving on the commissions is often a stepping stone to higher political office. For example, Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius went from being a state legislator to being the state insurance commissioner before becoming governor of Kansas.

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Watchdogs: The Badges and Suits Who Guard Us and Our Money

James Grady — 2010-02-03T05:00:00 00:00

Filed under: PD Investigations

Surviving our complex world often comes down to: Who's got your back?

With that in mind, PDI today introduces a regular new feature spotlighting America's watchdogs -- government and sometimes non-government groups that work to keep us safe, oversee how our democracy actually operates, and investigate wrongdoing.

Most watchdogs' work is obscure and out of sight until a crisis like tainted hamburger meat or toxic lead paint on children's toys or 9/11 explodes in headlines. Failures are easier to see than the day-to-day successes of just doing the watchdog job.

But sometimes, watchdogs become celebrities.

This year's best example of that is the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Prior to CBS's fictional hit TV series starring Mark Harmon, NCIS watchdogs were unknown to most Americans.

NCIS is real and is indeed the Navy's primary law enforcement group, headquartered at Washington, D.C.'s Navy Yard, with personnel "on the ground" in Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq - almost everywhere the Navy and Marines deploy. NCIS focuses on three main missions: counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and investigating crimes like sexual assaults and narcotics trafficking that impact the Navy and Marine Corps.

In 2009, NCIS worked about 9,500 investigations. About 8,000 were criminal, 1,000 were counterintelligence related, with about 250 related to counterterrorism. About 50 investigations can be classified as "cyber" related -- though these days, almost everything has a "cyber" component. Few of those real investigations receive TV or news coverage that comes close to the media exposure given the fictional NCIS watchdogs. One way to get a sense of what NCIS does is to check out their wanted fugitives.

When it comes to real watchdogs, the TV images most Americans flash on are not NCIS agents or other heroic badges. America's most famous TV watchdog moments come not from car chases but from high-ceiling, klieg light bright hearing rooms in the marbled halls of Congress.

From organized crime hearings led by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.) to Communist-hunting hearings led by Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wisc.), from Watergate to Iran-Contra, from White House gate crashers to Wall Street bank busters, for decades Americans have watched thousands of witnesses parade past investigating and oversight committees of Congress.

Congress is a schizophrenic watchdog for America because Congress both creates and oversees government programs. The party that controls Congress dominates the watchdogging done by its committees and subcommittees, though senators and congressmen from both parties have been known to create "investigations" or "oversights" without the full approval of whatever party claims a majority on Capitol Hill.

Tomorrow, Thursday Feb. 4, the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee On Investigations (PSOI), one of Congress' most legendary watchdogs, is scheduled to hold a hearing on keeping foreign corruption out of America. The scheduled witness list indicates the scope of the problem and the direction the subcommittee's investigation will take.

One irony of our politics is that for problems as huge as foreign corruption or organized crime or Wall Street shenanigans, the actual number of congressional watchdogs is small.

As with most congressional committees, we could take all PSOI's lawyers, investigators, professional staff members, staffers loaned out or detailed to the subcommittee from senators' personal office staffs, receptionists, recorders, administrative aides, and a few interns and still fit the whole crowd into a grade school classroom.

True, congressional committees often have subpoena power and can draw on the General Accounting Office for investigative help, but on the Hill, our watchdogs are small prides, not rumbling packs.

And all those staffers reflect the political makeup of Congress, which means PSOI's Chairman is Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) while its minority is led by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). The subcommittee exists under the full Senate Committee On Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) as the ranking minority member.

As for what PSOI's hearing will reveal about the impact of foreign corruption on America...that's another's day's story, one that's probably only a glimpse of the tip of a dangerous and nasty iceberg.

In recent years, PSOI watchdogs have looked at the impact of shell companies on America, unfair credit card practices, tax dodging and money laundering, and manipulation of oil and energy prices.

In coming months, PSOI watchdogs will probably take an investigative bite at America's financial crisis.

But today, some of the more important government eyes on our financial woes are not on Capitol Hill.

One of America's newest watchdogs is the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board - RATB - created less then a year ago in the financial recovery legislation to track waste, abuse and fraud in the government's $787 billion economic stimulus programs. When you wonder where the money went, RATB is a great place to look for answers. And if you think somebody is ripping off the stimulus and recovery system, its webpage tells how to share your suspicions via telephone, e-mail and the classic stamped letter handed to your friendly neighborhood postman.

RATB is lean machine, with some 40+ employees in a 7^th floor suite of rented offices about a block from the White House. The heart of RATB's watchdog activities is the ROC: the Recovery Operations Center, a team that deals with reported waste and abuses.

"Reported" is key: the ROC doesn't patrol our streets for bad guys or waste; they process reports from tipsters and refer the most solid leads to 29 offices of inspector generals in other federal departments. Currently, RATB is working with those IG's on 141 active investigations of possible abuse and misuse of our billions of dollars.

Watchdogs don't always live up to their duties; sometimes they get it wrong, and seldom on their own save the day. Their work can be unpopular because it brings discomforting news to all of us and perhaps legal or economic problems to some of us. Partisans of all persuasions are experts at twisting watchdogs' work to fit their own agendas. But when watchdogs get a chance to do their best, we're all safer for having them on the job, even if -- like the press, like us here at Politics Daily -- they are, after all, only human.

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Where We All Walk: Chapman, Hinckley, and Unintended Consequences

James Grady — 2010-01-30T21:10:00 00:00

Filed under: Crime, Culture, Ethics

J. D. Salinger's slide into that last good night sent my mind to assassins.

And suddenly, it's Dec. 8, 1980, night on a New York city sidewalk where a chunky Mark Chapman draws his Hawaiian-bought Charter Arms .38 and from spitting distance blasts four out of five hollow point bullets into ex-Beatle John Lennon's back. As Lennon bleeds out on the sidewalk and Yoko Ono screams and sirens wail closer, the assassin reaches into his pocket, pulls out and reads Salinger's most famous book, Catcher In The Rye.

FADE IN: Washington D.C. March 30, 1981, a cool spring day. Boyishly good looking but a failure as both a Nazi and a rock star, John Hinckley leaves his copy of Catcher In The Rye in his rented room to lurk outside the Hilton Hotel and fire a volley of shots with a Saturday night special .22 revolver that years later when the FBI let me hold it felt like a high school track team's harmless starter pistol. Hinkley's bullets hit four men, including his target President Ronald Reagan.

As best as we can know...

Chapman sensed some kind of prophetic power via Salinger's novel that the assassin believed would help him in his quest to be John Lennon, a quest that -- of course -- necessitated killing the real John Lennon.

Hinckley somehow thought Salinger's plot of a misunderstood teenager might be a map on his quest to win the love of actress Jodie Foster -- who'd starred as a runaway teenage prostitute "saved" by a crazy taxi driver in the cinematic art form that nurtured the man Hinckley shot, President Reagan.

Salinger had no way of predicting the existential reach of fiction he wrote. There's no record of what he thought when the news linked his most famous work to blood-spattered Chapman and Hinkley. But what Salinger had to wonder about in those windswept moments when we try to grasp the cosmic ways of cause and effect surpasses the what if's most of us face.

And those what-if's haunt all of us. We are all authors of a book of lives where what we do becomes what is written. We get up in the morning, make it through the day, fall back in bed to wonder if the work we did in our waking hours was worth it. And maybe, just maybe, sometimes we wonder what bizarre unpredictable thing might happen because of what we did. Philosophers and political scientists codify such concerns within The Law Of Unintended Consequences.

For novelist J.D. Salinger, for all of us, the sad truth of this nonfiction life is that The Law Of Unintended Consequences enforces itself in our world where we walk the streets with assassins.

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21 Songs of 21st Century Politics

James Grady — 2009-12-08T08:06:00 00:00

Filed under: Culture

Americans live with a soundtrack: the relentless chatter of media, the clash and clatter of daily life, collisions with history, voices in our hearts and heads, sounds we love and noises we can't escape. Out of that roar comes our culture and our politics.

These 21 songs pulled from the musical soundtrack of our 21st Century aren't necessarily the artistically best songs so far -- or even in the year they were written. They aren't songs we all know: our soundtrack comes at us through so many technologies with so many niches of "aural art" that we barely have a common songbook. As Politics Daily reporter David Wood informed me, even our soldiers carry their own individualized music instead of relying on some Good Morning, Vietnam broadcast.

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Thanksgiving at Alice's Restaurant: The Guthries' American Dream Lives On

James Grady — 2009-11-25T12:01:00 00:00

Filed under: Culture

A rock 'n' roll tradition marks "turkey day" for baby boomers and their "Not again!" suffering children, an annual cultural moment via the radio airwaves that educated generations of Americans beyond their textbooks.

And from today's perspective, this goofy 40-year-old boomer rite spotlights the evolution of a controversial American entertainment dynasty, reveals how politics evolves - while showing us the heart of Thanksgiving.

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Something's Happening There: The Politics Of Chinese Punk Rock

James Grady — 2009-11-15T07:52:00 00:00

Filed under: Foreign Policy

The sensational portraits of Beijing punk rockers in Matthew Niederhauser's SOUND KAPITAL - a new art gallery exhibition and book - call to mind the famous paraphrase of the father of politics, Plato: "When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake."

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The Boo! of Politics

James Grady — 2009-10-31T05:00:00 00:00

Halloween is our American celebration that best reveals politics.

Thanksgiving, with succulent turkey, pumpkin pie and kaleidoscopic family collisions, is our sensual political fete. Memorial Day is a red balloon more dependent on intellectual construction than emotional content. The Fourth of July lights political sentiments with children's sparklers and volunteer fire department starbursts in the summer night sky.

None of them beats Halloween for dramatizing the essence of politics. Halloween's slogan says it all: Trick or treat!

Halloween is Transaction City.

A knock on your door whether or not you're home.

Halloween proves that We Are Not Alone.

And dooms us to act accordingly.

Just picture who haunts America's streets come Halloween.

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Killer in a Hood, Part 9 of 'What's Going On': A Political Fiction

James Grady — 2009-09-29T18:18:00 00:00

Previously: Despite his wife Rhea's worries and a political threat by a city councilman, Dante forges a truce in a street war between two Liss Garden groups, but knows the rivalry over a girl named Shawn between West Sider Mondel and East Sider Caps will inevitably shatter this neighborhood peace and suck their crews back into war. Dante can't isolate and convert the two rivals without revealing them as the core problems to criminal kingpin Luther -- and his bullet solutions to peace for his heroin business.

Dante missed the bus depot of his youth, a swooping art deco D.C. building that he'd stood in front of when he headed back to his Army base for shipment to Vietnam.

That night in 1971, he'd stared at the neon glow of nearby Mafia-tainted burlesque houses that employed a stripper whose 1974 car crash affair with a Democratic congressman destroyed his political kingpin career - an eerie parallel to the 2009 adulterous road trip of a Republican governor that redefined the presidential campaign of 2012: Both women were from Argentina, home of the tango and los Desaparecidos.

Now here I am because of another war, trapped inside an artless blue & white-walled block-sized "terminal" for wandering souls, thought Dante.

Fading sunlight filtered through the glass front doors and portals to garage bays for buses adorned with racing dogs. The thick air smelled of sour dust and mop disinfectant.

Every noise echoed in this vast cavern. Cable channel news chattered from big-screen TVs mounted halfway to the high ceiling of pipes and girders. Loudspeaker announcements blended into electronic gunshots of zombie-killing video games placed near the bathrooms to kidnap quarters. Wheeled suitcases rumbled over the brown tiles.

Three children babbling Spanish ran past where Dante stood. Over there was a Buddhist monk in orange robes, there walked a man in African garb. A boy and a girl carefully not checking each other out slouched like college kids. An old man clutching his ticket sat on one of the black metal benches facing a lost world only he could see.

That could be me, thought Dante.

Cop: bulletproof vest bulging under his blue uniform shirt, SWAT baseball cap and boots as he marched past Dante to vanish 200 paces away out the far end bus bay. No one was inside the clear-walled corner cubicle labeled: SECURITY SEGURIDAD

Can anyone hear the thunder of my heart?

Looming outside the west front's glass doors.

A sunset-seared silhouette wearing a pulled-up hood.

Looking. Hunting.

For me.

The hooded figure pushed open the glass doors to the terminal.

Stalked toward Dante.

Sun burning my eyes, can't see 'face . . .

Stopping just out of grabbing range, the lone figure pulled off the black sweatshirt's hood with an empty right hand.

She said: "This ain't fair!"

"No, Shawn," he said. "It isn't."

"You show up ' my house, like, two hours ago, barely meet you, 'n you scare my folks to death, making me like a prisoner, shipping me off, no good byes, take my cell phone shut up and move get outta the car an' get inside here you' going to _______ Cleveland!"

Shawn ran out of breath and Dante truly saw her for the first time.

Wasn't that she was beautiful - maybe she was, maybe she wasn't. Call her tall, could use or lose a few pounds. Hair cascading around a look then look again face, classic cheekbones and common nose, the kind of mouth that makes young men sweat and old men sigh plus cannon-bore eyes. But lioness ferocity was what made her a killer who sent men's hearts to heaven or hell.

"All I want to do is live my life!" she said. "Those shootings aren't my fault! Nobody's doing nothing like that for me."

"Not because of you, but Mondel and Caps will gun the world for you."

"So I get shipped off because they're rain men?"

Dante blinked. "Rain men? Like . . . the movie?"

"My life is no movie." She shrugged.

Dante realized she carried only a backpack slightly more stuffed than the burdens teenagers cart to high school.

"Rain men," said Shawn: "Modnell's the kind of guy you chase after in the rain, and Caps is the kind of guy who'll stand in the rain for you.

"What was I supposed to do about that?" She shook her head. "I'm just - I was just trying to figure it out. Now you're ripping me out of my home, everybody 'n' everything I know. This is America, land of the free!"

Dante quoted: "And the better be brave. That's how you need to be."

"Brave? What does that mean when I can't even find Cleveland on a map? What am I supposed to do there?"

"Not be caught in the middle of a war.

"Look," continued Dante, "you're staying with the sister of a Coalition guy, nice house, they'll help you find a job, maybe go to school -"

"Yeah? And be who?"

"Who are you now?" said Dante.

"'Least I know where my mirror's hung."

"Don't be so sure about that."

Dante told her: "You're free to say no. Free to go or stay. But you gotta live with what happens next."

Her eyes told him she got it. Facing it like a lioness.

He nodded at her backpack. "Is that it?"

"I ain't got a suitcase. I'd rather show up with a backpack of not much than with all my not enough in black plastic trash bags."

Dante handed her the envelope with all the cash left over from buying the bus ticket that he, Max and 'Trey had pulled from their ATMs.

Rhea, she'll have to understand.

He told Shawn: "That's all we can give you."

"NOW BOARDING CLEVELAND, GATE A-11! CLEVELAND!"

He raised his hand - she flinched, but let him lead the way.

Said: "When can I come home?"

"What do you want me to say? Not for a long time."

"You couldn't figure nothing else?"

"Not without more people dying. Including Mondel and Caps."

"'Least now they got me leaving them in common."

And that gives everyone a new place to start.

"What'll I tell people? You know . . . wherever the bus goes."

"If you gotta tell them something, tell them you're a refugee."

Dante handed her ticket to the driver.

"Guess I'll find out what that means." Shawn turned on the bus step. Glared at him. "You're gonna watch until I'm disappeared, aren't you. Make sure I don't bolt."

Anger and tears turned her face ugly: "I hope I'm never like you!"

"Good," said Dante.

Like she said, he stayed until he knew she was long gone.

Walked out of the front doors as the setting sun shimmered on new glass and concrete buildings that blocked his view of the Capitol dome only a hard run away. Bus fumes vanished. The evening smelled cool and clean, night rolling into the city.

He cell-phoned that number. Said: "Can I come home now?"

Rhea told him: "You better."

Episode One: The Jagged Ride Home
Episode Two: Smoke
Episode Three: Yellow Tape
Episode Four: Sirens
Episode Five: War Zone
Episode Six: The Bat Cave
Episode Seven: Terrorist Weather
Episode Eight: Like a Cocked Gun

What's Going On is fiction. All characters and incidents, except for historic references, are purely fictitious. Copyright: James Grady
Related: 'What's Going On:' Facts Inside the Fiction

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Like a Cocked Gun, Part 8 of 'What's Going On': A Political Fiction

James Grady — 2009-09-28T05:00:00 00:00

Previously: A three-dead gun battle near Washington, D.C.'s blighted Liss Gardens pits gang truce negotiator Dante Jones against his wife Rhea who's worried he'll be killed, the West Side and East Side Liss Garden crews who's beefs exploded into violence, a city councilman who wants to dump his support of Dante's Coalition of Committed Citizens, and the Gardens' crime kingpin Luther.

Dante walked into the meeting with Liss Gardens West Side crew. The energy in that crowded yellow kitchen felt like a cocked gun.

This meet had a no weapons rule.

Trust starts by taking people at their word. Taking a chance.

Count seven West Siders, including Jerome.

Establish a zone of comfort.

Then: hug a thug.

Set aside good and evil, right and wrong, choice and circumstance.

Gangbangers have scant experience with intimacy.

People handle their lives. They know flesh on flesh, the ache of gone and not there, slaps, punches, pushes, kicks, violations. They do and are done to. All of them insist they know sex. They high-five, shoulder and fist bump. But few know the selfless equal intimacy of human touch that nurtures empathy.

So when Dante met a man who could be more than a killer, he shook his hand, gave him a hug: I care enough to risk you attacking me or thinking I'm a fool. Dante and 'Trey needed three minutes to hug a thug their way around the kitchen.

Figure half of these guys had had charges on them. A couple had real part-time jobs, a couple more picked up cash on the fringes of Luther's industry, none of them were strangers to crime. None of them had seen 25. No doubt at least one of them had fired some of the shots near the subway stop the night before that left three people murdered.

"OK guys," said Dante, "we gotta circle up."

Inertia stood the group in a circle around a white kitchen table, each one with his arms over the shoulders of the men beside him.

The West Side warriors knew this ritual from NFL games on TV. They didn't realize the Coalition political strategy: Expand the shape of the group to expand its consciousness.

Dante said: "Anybody gonna pray or say?"

Get them to articulate beyond anger and fear.

Silence. Silence is the worst!

Then 'Trey said: "'Just come to me that we all want to walk out of here to where it won't hurt any more than it does now."

Perfect! Now set the agenda. Dante said: "What's going on?"

A babble of voices shouted: They started it! Nobody gets to do us like that! They gotta pay!

This would be so much easier if they were a TV gang, thought Dante, picking up on how the young men checked the reactions of a stocky guy in a red shirt, deferring to him: He's the shot caller. Not a "boss" because this neighborhood street crew doesn't have a political science textbook structure. These guys grew up together, played together, now saw that together as the only way to live. So if one got mad...

Half an hour in, Dante spotted the mad one: Mondel, handsome, strobing too much electricity to be a shot caller -- or to be ignored. Twice, Dante heard Mondel insist: Nobody can be doin' what ain't his to do.

An hour in, Dante said: "I'm an old man so...."

He nodded to Red Shirt: "Can you show me the bathroom?"

When I'm out of the room, the dynamic will shift. 'Trey will be there representing. A second shift happens when I come back. From those shifts, maybe we can shift them 5 degrees off the killing line.

Upstairs beyond the babble of kitchen voices, Dante asked shot caller Red Shirt: "'Mondel got some personal beef in this?"

"He walked off some girl named Shawn. Now some East Side fool taking up with her. Guy called Caps."

"And you all back Mondel when some girl makes him do trash?"

Red Shirt stared at the old guy closing the bathroom door. Dante waited. Flushed the toilet, washed his hands, came out. Red Shirt still stood there: We've got a chance.

Back in the kitchen, push it: "What are you guys going to get out of this war?"

`Gonna get even!'

`Nobody gonna tells what to do, take what's -'

Dante said: "No."

Young men waiting to bury a dead friend fell silent.

Put faces on it. "You got one brother dead. So do they. Plus a girl, named Barbara. Barbara. Because of you guys on one side of this nowhere Gardens beefing with guys on the other side, she's dead, too. Nothing you can do will bring them back or make that right.

"You think you're gonna get even? How will you know when you get it? When will it be over? Nobody's going to tell you what to do? Every TV commercial tells you what to do. If you're going to war because of the East Siders, they're telling you what to do. You keep doing it and being a chump, 'most you can win is life in a cell or maybe somebody will toss your sneakers over a telephone wire before everybody forgets about you forever."

Mondel blurted: "There's things a man -"

Red Shirt interrupted: "Dante, we can't back down 'cause they won't. We gotta be who we are because that's who they are."

"You guys," said Dante, "the East Siders, too: you all sound like those suit & tie gangbangers across town in Congress. It's always the other guys' fault. Politicians figuring your angles, not gonna step up for some idea bigger than keeping you just who you are."

Silence filled the kitchen.

'Trey said: "Harsh."

Everybody laughed.

Took 30 more minutes, but the West Siders agreed to a "truce summit" if the East Siders agreed, too - with Dante there "to make sure fair's fair."

Mondel hid the fire in his eyes.

A cold hand cupped Dante's heart.

An hour later at a meeting with East Side crew in an alley across the Gardens -- a meeting greased by whoever in the East Side crew belonged more to Luther than to his neighborhood buddies -- during the rituals and the venting, blaming and denials, Dante watched Mondel's romantic rival Caps say a whole lot of nothing and mean every word.

Mondel radiated energy.

Caps absorbed energy.

And though like their neighbors across the Gardens, the East Siders agreed to a truce meting, Dante knew those two men doomed any peace.

Their tension would stay controlled long enough for the Coalition to work a truce agreement, have a ceremony, maybe even get another picture taken with Councilman Reggie. But in days, Mondel or Caps would snap. One squeeze of a trigger and an explosion of blood would kill one or both of them, suck all their brothers into a war.

Can't isolate Mondel and Caps to work on them.

Spotlight them as the triggers for war in the Gardens.

Then Luther will green light them.

Dante walked out of that afternoon alley gut-sick and haunted:

Are all my politics going to end up just being about who gets killed?

Episode One: The Jagged Ride Home
Episode Two: Smoke
Episode Three: Yellow Tape
Episode Four: Sirens
Episode Five: War Zone
Episode Six: The Bat Cave
Episode Seven: Terrorist Weather

NEXT -- Episode Nine: Killer In A Hood

What's Going On is fiction. All characters and incidents, except for historic references, are purely fictitious. Copyright: James Grady
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Terrorist Weather, Part 7 of 'What's Going On': A Political Fiction

James Grady — 2009-09-27T05:00:00 00:00

Previously: A three-dead gun battle near Washington, D.C.'s blighted Liss Gardens pits gang truce negotiator Dante Jones against his wife Rhea, who's worried he'll be killed, the West Side vs. East Side Liss Garden crews, who's beefs exploded into violence, a city councilman who wants to dump his support of Dante's Coalition of Committed Citizens in favor of developers' progress, and the Gardens' crime kingpin Luther.

Picture a September morning when cool blue sky cups the city but the sun's strong enough to warm your bare arms as you stand outside a red brick Washington, D.C. corner grocery store. The caustic whiff of food additives and cleaning supplies drifting through the screen door doesn't matter. This is terrorist weather, 9/11 perfect with its crisp images of brilliant colors, trees scattered along the cracked sidewalk, one crinkled leaf turned from vibrant green to empty brown as it falls lost forever to the indigo street.

Great day to be alive.

Dante Jones, standing on the corner.

Sauntering up to him: Luther.

Wearing that black silk sports jacket over his colostomy bag and legendarily a shoulder-slung Uzi Dante was betting Luther'd left at home - or at least stashed in his smoke windowed, four wheel drive war machine. Wearing what he wore when came to my house to lean on me.

Luther's goatee flashed white teeth. "'Your wife like the flowers?"

Two men circled each other on the street corner.

"You got my attention," answered Dante.

"I don't want your attention. I want your attention on Liss Gardens."

"So you thought a scare would make me work harder on what I want, too?"

"Motivation is key to success."

"Motivation can backfire."

"That's what I'm saying. I'm just channeling what's best."

"Really?" said Dante. "That's your `motivation'? What happened to protecting your business?"

"These are amazing times in my industry. There's more product stashed in Afghanistan caves than retails U.S. domestic in one year, plus more product in the pipeline and flowing from alternative production sources. 'Could depress wholesale to street price without a monopoly, but on the upside, we're getting new customers from Uncle Sam's A-Stan soldiers shooting up their blues and then coming home needing to find a friend - kinda like your Vietnam, right my brother?"

Mocking brother. Mocking my history.

Rock it back to him to keep you equal.

"Surprised to see you outside alone. Where are your big dogs?"

"Where I want 'em to be. Where's your man 'Trey?"

"Not in this like us."

"See how you got boxed there? You had to push him out of...any unpleasantness between us, but to do that, you had to show that you give a ____ about the guy - which puts more on the table for you to lose."

Dante walked to the wall of the corner store. Leaned his spine against those sun-warmed red bricks.

Luther stared at the old man leaning against the wall. Took a beat.

Walked over and leaned his back on the bricks right beside him.

Two men leaning against a brick wall stared out at the city.

Luther said: "Hey, I'm pragmatic. Life only hits you where it hurts."

"That doesn't leave you with much."

"What I want, I get."

"As long as you don't want something way down deep."

"Life doesn't get any deeper than the grave, Dante. You should let yourself get that smart."

"I used to be."

"Yeah. And look where you are now. You phoned me. All it takes to rock your world is some flowers."

Rattlesnake buzz in Dante's shirt - Luther flinches - a cell phone.

"You best get that," said Luther. "You're a busy man."

Text message from 'Trey:

jrome came thru txtd me

wst side crew meet us noon

see u bat cave now

"Good news?" said Luther.

"Every new day is good news," answered Dante.

"Come on, man: spare me the stand in the circle and pray ____ you Coalition guys do. I know you are supposed to work the junkie program 'bout `a higher power' and your Rhea -"

Dante tightened on the bricks.

"-she's a church going lady with you in tow. But you don't really believe all that, do you?"

"I believe you gotta believe," said Dante. "Have faith."

"What are you talking about: politics, business or religion?"

"Yeah."

"How's that working out for you?"

"A whole lot better than before."

"Still, you're leaning against the bricks beside me."

A family SUV cruised down the street past the corner store.

"Look at them," said Luther, nodding to their Indiana license plate. "Tourists. Driving past us like we're just a couple of corner boys. They got a sweet voice satellite GPS telling them where to go and they've got no idea where they are."

"And we do?" said Dante.

Luther shrugged. "As soon as I walk outta sight, you're going to get a phone call saying that the Gardens' East Side crew will take a meet."

They looked at each other.

Luther smiled. "I am a man of some influence."

Dante said: "Walk away - and I mean walk away - now. Start it moving."

But Luther stuck to the wall. "You got a mess to sort through, my brother. Two bullpens of guys with not much to lose."

"They just don't know they're wrong about that yet."

"Sell it to them, not me. I know what they cost. So if it comes down to just a couple guys standing in the way of a truce, they'll get done."

"No! Don't! You can't!"

Luther grinned inside his goatee as he flowed off the brick wall.

Said: "Oh ye of little faith."

Episode One: The Jagged Ride Home
Episode Two: Smoke
Episode Three: Yellow Tape
Episode Four: Sirens
Episode Five: War Zone
Episode Six: The Bat Cave

NEXT - Episode Eight: Like A Cocked Gun

What's Going On is fiction. All characters and incidents, except for historic references, are purely fictitious. Copyright: James Grady
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The Bat Cave, Part 6 of 'What's Going On': A Political Fiction

James Grady — 2009-09-26T05:00:00 00:00

Previously: A two-dead gun battle near Washington, D.C.'s blighted Liss Gardens forces community activist Dante Jones to defy his wife Rhea, go "back to the streets" to re-politic a gang truce. Dante negotiates his protégé 'Trey out of a jam with the Murder Police, and they convince community stalwart Mrs. Williams to ask her "wild boy" grandson Jerome and his Liss Gardens West Side posse to meet with them.

Dante woke as sunlight streamed over him on the floor of his office.

Rhea will kill me if she finds out I slept on the floor.

Actually, on cushions pulled off the donated chairs and under a sheet destined to be a drop cloth if the Coalition got enough money for paint.

As he lay there wearing a CCC T-shirt and his boxers, last night's shirt and pants draped on his desk chair, his socks airing beside his shoes, he imagined his wife grousing: "I bought you that cot for you and you gave it away to a Group Home."

Maybe I just won't tell her about the cot.

But he knew he would. Eventually.

Like he'd tell her about the ambush warning from Luther.

Dante checked his watch: 7:09 the morning after the killings.

Rhea'd be getting dressed for work at the clinic where she was Chief Administrative Nurse. Coulda been a doctor but I couldn't bear to pronounce one person dead. He'd called her cell phone at midnight when he got to the Coalition's building, but she'd out-foxed him, had it on, answered so he couldn't just leave a message. He ached from hearing worry in her voice. He thought about calling her now, but if he didn't, maybe she'd think he got to sleep in, wouldn't worry about his 60-year-old heart.

She'd be drinking coffee.

He clutched the white sheet around him while holding his shirt, pants and a razor. Scanned the empty main room where Angela did more than answer phones near the desk for Max, the Coalition's Chief Operating Officer. The other guys who'd created the Coalition were in Omaha on a training grant scrounged by a citizens' group there desperate to pull peace from street wars spun out of Nebraska's meth market. Dante was the only CCC exec in town who'd worked Liss Gardens.

'Least I got young 'Trey to help.

Dante shuffled down the hall to the bathroom with a working shower.

Dante's watch read 7:32 when he stepped out of the shower, dried off with the sheet, wore his shirt & pants to barefoot back down the hall.

Dante'd been angry when he first heard a young gangbanger call the Coalition's two story battered brick building: "the bat cave."

"We aren't some comic book movie!" he'd complained to Rhea.

"Yeah," she'd said, "be a shame if kids you're trying to reach thought your busted up headquarters was a kind of cool place for heroes and them."

Can't be coffee I smell, thought Dante as he shuffled down the hall.

But it was, Angela pouring a cup from the 1970's plastic brewer, handing it to him as he entered the main office: "Trey texted me."

The phone rang.

Dante answered: "Coalition of -"

"Reggie Parker!" barked the voice in the phone.

"Councilman, how are -"

"You said we had a Liss Gardens truce, but there's two more dead plus! I got cops crying for more patrol budget. I got party workers burning my ears. If this don't get fixed, it's on you guys, not me!"

"You liked being in the photo when the Mayor announced that truce."

"Don't think that won't come back to haunt me - us."

Reggie sighed. "Give me something to run with."

Buzzing, what -

Angela went into his office, came out holding his cell phone.

Dante told the Councilman: "Tell people you made sure we're on it."

Angela handed Dante his cell pone with a text on its screen:

rnng late baby girl sick at ER bout six hrs trey

Reggie said: "This couldn't have come at a worse time for you."

Dante blinked.

"You guys meet with the Housing Authority next Thursday, right?"

"Every month for seven years, we go in, document what `public use' we're doing that's benefiting the city, how we're maintaining this old tax lien-seized building, why Housing should let us stay here, no rent."

"I'm hearing that you could have a problem this time. Liss Gardens blasting apart a Coalition truce won't help."

"We always appreciate your support at the Housing Board, Reggie."

"I'm calling you now, aren't I?"

So you can claim credit, thought Dante, or dodge blame, but he said: "What are you talking about?"

"There's talk that your building, that corner lot, that there might be better use the city could get from it. Like revenue. Increase the tax base."

"Developers," said Dante. "Big money."

"Progress," said the City Councilman who depended on totally legal fundraisers to keep his job. "Everybody wants that."

"Progress is just a direction. What matters is where."

Into the office walked Max, the bald bear who'd served on Dante's bank jobs crew.

Dante told the Councilman: "You rip us out of here, Housing will stuff us in some rat hole that the people we help can't get to. Nine gang truces that still hold, classes here, counseling, that counts for nothing?"

"Last night Liss Gardens bloodied you," said the Councilman.

"As for what you've done," he added, "I certainly appreciate that - I'm on record there - but politics....

"Politics forgets about yesterday for promises about tomorrow."

Dante thumbed END on his cell phone.

Max told him: "'Didn't hear until this morning after I put Sis' on the plane back to Cleveland. Last night we went to the Lincoln Memorial, saw the Reflecting Pool full of the Washington Monument, then the Vietnam Memorial, so I wasn't around. You need me in the Gardens?"

"Need you here. Our good friend Councilman Reggie's looking to cut us loose. Maybe even knife us."

As Dante explained, the office phone rang.

Angela answered it.

Max said: "Maybe that ties in with the earmarks fight. Until Congress comes up with its budget for D.C. - that Congresswoman from Seattle is looking to shift bucks over to her District, some hospital - until Congress tells our City Council what they're gonna get, all us contractors 'n' grant groups are frozen. Maylene at the schools is pulling in groups to figure out how to pressure who. Don't worry, I'll work it."

"Watch out for Reggie," said Dante. "Get who we can in his District to call - no, have 'em write their Councilman, e-mail, how they appreciate his support of the Coalition in these rough times."

Angela hung up the phone. Walked toward Max and Dante.

Max said: "I'll call our guys out in Omaha. They can squeeze in some phone calls 'round helping those folks. Talked to 'em last night: there's bodies falling in the corn fields."

Angela opened her mouth -

Max asked Dante: "'You look at that bill in the California legislature to `regulate and certify' everybody who works gang truces?"

"I get what's behind that," said Dante. "But we're about who's willing to walk out into the bullets, who can talk to gang guys, which means mostly guys who been locked up. Guys like us struggle just to get Off Paper, won't clear more regulations, and if we get popped for violating them..."

Max said: "Still only a probably won't pass bill out in California. Not some national trend gonna run us over."

Angela said: "One of the wounded kids died. Now it's three killed."

Nobody said so far.

"A 16-year-old girl," said Angela. "Not from the Gardens. Got off the subway to go visit her aunt. Caught a stray bullet like that subway car."

Her name was Barbara.

Dante's cell phone buzzed.

Max squeezed his shoulder; like Angela, walked away to work.

The buzzing cell phone displayed Rhea's number.

Dante answered: "I was gonna -"

"Wait until your flowers softened me up?" said his wife. "We can't afford this bouquet. Sure, it's beautiful with red roses and white carnations, but its big enough for a wedding or a funeral! I should say thank you, but you never sent a card."

"What are you talking about?"

"The huge bouquet you had delivered to me 'soon as I got to work."

"I didn't."

He heard Rhea catch her breath.

Heard his own slamming heart.

"Dante," whispered his wife. "Who sent me flowers?"

Episode One: The Jagged Ride Home
Episode Two: Smoke
Episode Three: Yellow Tape
Episode Four: Sirens
Episode Five: War Zone

NEXT - Episode Seven: Terrorist Weather

What's Going On is fiction. All characters and incidents, except for historic references, are purely fictitious. Copyright: James Grady
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War Zone, Part 5 of 'What's Going On': A Political Fiction

James Grady — 2009-09-25T05:00:00 00:00

Previously: A two-dead gun battle near Washington, D.C.'s Liss Gardens forces community activist Dante Jones to defy his wife Rhea, go "back to the streets" to re-politic a gang truce. Dante negotiates his 22-year-old protégé 'Trey out of a nighttime crime scene jam with the Murder Police, and they convince community stalwart Mrs. Williams to ask her "wild boy" grandson Jerome and his West Side posse for a meeting.

One September night.

Cool, but not like when we were young.

Washington, D.C. A neighborhood called Liss Gardens.

Liss was some forgotten politician with enough glory or clout to buy himself into history or enough of an ego to be bought by getting Congress to OK the D.C. government's christening of a square block of the city that later became one of 28 FUDS (Formerly Used Defense Sites) in Washington, a piece of earth razed by the Corps of Engineers after the War To End All Wars, land that had been a chemical warfare facility and that based on the 1992 lawsuit-generated release of incomplete Army records plus testing by the Environmental Protection Agency contains less than officially toxic levels of arsenic, asbestos and atropine.

Real estate developers laugh when they called Liss Gardens "a triple A zone," sigh about how the subway station five blocks away could have better served - and enhanced - a more pragmatic neighborhood.

The Gardens is packed earth supporting a swing set, a merry-go-round, well-carved picnic tables, and burned down public toilets. Five of the six concrete basketball half-courts have hoops, three with nets of chain.

About half the apartment building complexes and townhouses surrounding the Gardens are among the 8,000 units managed by D.C. government's Housing Authority for citizens who are too broke or busted up with old age or ills to pay for their own shelter. Whoever owns the rest of the buildings matters only on the Darwinian money tree.

When the sun slants just right over the legally-dictated, shorter-than- the-Washington-Monument buildings surrounding the Gardens or when, like that night, pollution lets moonlight shine, the ground of the Gardens sparkles with diamonds of broken glass.

That moonlit September night, no one lingered on the front porches or at building entryways near Liss Gardens. Nobody laughed and lounged on cars parked around the curb. The chain basketball hoops hung silent. The merry-go-round didn't spin.

Two men walked alone around the Gardens.

"What time is it?" asked the gray haired man.

His younger companion checked his blue lit cell phone. "'Bout halfway through the Jon Stewart show. Laughing let's you get it, you know?"

"But I still don't know what time it is."

"Sorry, Dante. Like, 11:13."

"Did you get a wristwatch like I told you? With hands?"

"Why are you so old school?"

"'Trey, I carry a cell phone. Plus a watch."

They walked the cracked sidewalk in silence for a few steps.

'Trey said: "That's supposed to tell me something, isn't it."

"Knowing that shows how far you've come."

Dante's arms goose-bumped. He wished he'd been wearing a jacket when the call came into his car after dinner. Was glad all the eyes in the night could see that the only arms he carried were attached to his body.

"A digital clock makes it always right now 'cause that's all it shows you. A watch with hands let you understand time better because you can watch it happen."

"Shift change buzzers in prison," said 'Trey. "You can't wait for the next one to come and every one of them drives you crazy mad and sad."

Headlights probed in front of them before they heard the car, turned, saw the same police cruiser that had driven past them four times before in their walks around the Gardens, two cops who'd stopped and flashlight I.D.ed them, eventually accepted that they were with the Coalition of Committed Citizens. The cops drove past.

'Trey said: "That heat be here 'bout a week, two. Unless there's another shooting. Or they put a charge on some dudes."
"Or we get the truce back up and working."

"Working again. You 'n' the Coalition been walkin' a long time."

"Few years after I got out of prison, some of us guys had to think up the Coalition or just watch guys your age keep killing and dying."

Like the hands on his watch spun backwards from that autumn night and the scent of street garbage, Dante smelled the pine disinfectant of his mop bucket, the closeness of the classroom, chalk on the blackboard that spelled out a mystery.

"I'd been a janitor at U.D.C.," he told 'Trey. "This woman professor comes back for a book she forgot and I stopped her, apologized...trusted her enough to tell her I was an ex-junkie and I couldn't figure out the white chalk word on the blackboard.

"She took a chance. Said: `Let's look it up.' Pulled out a dictionary. We got to talking. She told me because I was on U.D.C. staff, I could take free classes. Spent days helping me get into the system, but six years later, I graduated from George Washington University."

"What was the word on the blackboard?"

"Hypothetical." Dante said: "I told her I knew all about hypo's."

'Trey took a few steps. "That word means...What could be - right?"

"You got it."

'Trey scanned locked-tight homes, crumbled sidewalk, over-flowing trashcans, the rubble filled park.

"Somebody sure hypo'd us up with some bad 'thetical out here."

Dante said: "You don't need to hold out your arm."

"True that," said 'Trey. "How long we gonna stay out here? Everybody's inside 'cause it's all cocked to jump off."

"Politics." Dante nodded to the invisible people of that night. "If they can't count on you being there, they won't count you in for whatever's going on and you won't be able to change a thing."

"I can find who the shooters were and -"

"No. We don't want to know in any way that makes us an accessory for the police or puts us working for the police so nobody trusts us."

"Or gets us killed."

They laughed.

'Trey shook his head. "Two dead by the subway, three in the hospital. How bad's it gonna get?"

"Back when we started, after the 1980's crack and heroin wars, that shoot first way of doing business spilled over into ordinary living - bullets for beefin', not even about money or drugs or power, just killing for killing.

Dante shook his head. "It's bad enough now, tonight, eleven weeks of truce shot to hell."

"If we get a meet with Jerome's West Side posse - "

"Not if," said Dante: "think when. And how."

"With them West Side boys, Jerome might be our how. Won't do no good 'less we get East Side, too, and we got nothing to bring them in."

"Yet," said Dante.

"You done it before," said 'Trey. "We meet with whoever, what do want me to do?"

"Don't focus on this incident, move them past that. Help me figure out who's a shot caller and who's just a loud mouth or hurtin' bad. Hear what's behind the who did what to who. Maybe one joke or flipped finger at the wrong time and place started a chain reaction. Might somebody working a money or dope beef. Might be all that plus, everything in a mix."

"If it's dope, we got Luther to look out for."

Dante said: "Luther wants this truce, too."

"Yeah, cops coming down here be hurting his business."

Don't tell 'Trey that Luther's leaning on you, thought Dante: The kid doesn't need to carry that weight.

"We might split guys off to talk to them," said Dante. "Build a core consensus. Might need to isolate some guy so he's got to go against his own if he wants to stay wild, work on him special later. If you try to persuade three people onto some common ground, they've got three different sets of reasons 'might get them there. You might never know which is the most powerful one, but you still need to find what works.

"We don't need to change everyone all around," said Dante. "We just need to work the Five Degrees. They don't have to turn 180 degrees straight back the other way, they just need to turn five degrees off of where they're headed now to not arrive at that killing there."

They'd reached one end of the rubbled Gardens.

"What's the difference between the west side and the east?" said Dante, more to himself and the night than to the young man beside him.

"Where you think owns you," said 'Trey. "Who you shoot."

A door slammed behind them.

Whirl! Look!

No one was there.

No one they saw.

'Trey said: "What are we going to do next?"

Episode One: The Jagged Ride Home
Episode Two: Smoke
Episode Three: Yellow Tape
Episode Four: Sirens
NEXT WEEK - Episode Six: The Bat Cave

What's Going On is fiction. All characters and incidents, except for historic references, are purely fictitious. Copyright: James Grady

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Sirens, Part 4 of 'What's Going On': A Political Fiction

James Grady — 2009-09-24T05:00:00 00:00

Previously: A gun battle in D.C.'s Liss Gardens neighborhood shatters a truce crafted by Dante Jones, then earns him the wrath of his wife Rhea as he leaves her to "politic" that truce AND the ire of colostomy-bagged, goateed Luther, the gangster whose hegemony over Liss Gardens requires the peace sought by Dante's Coalition Of Committed Citizens. Dante rescues his protégé, 22-year-old ex-armed robber 'Trey, from an altercation with the Murder Police inside the nighttime crime scene's yellow tape, only to have 'Trey say: "We lost Mrs. Williams."

The night ballooned against Dante and 'Trey as they stood on the front porch of a gray brick house three blocks from Liss Gardens. Black steel bars outside the porch windows and drawn shades on their inside kept the home's interior secret and blind.

Dante reached through the black bars over the front door.

Knocked. Again.

"'Tellin' you," said 'Trey. "She's so done with us, she might shotgun us right off her porch."

"Mrs. Williams!" said Dante to the closed door. "Please!"

Behind them in the street: a car rumbles.

"No worries," said 'Trey. "Just some old guy like you. "

Knock on the door.

Whispers of TV from up the block.

Echo of an out-of-sight woman laughing in the night.

Not as sweet as Rhea who didn't laugh when Dante called her cell phone, told her it was safe to go home and she said: "Just as long as you're not there, right?" then hung up before he could smooth some reply.

Dante told the closed door: "Your neighbors are going to wonder when we're still standing out here after sun up."

Muffled voice beyond the wood, Mrs. Williams: "Go away! I'm not going to listen to you again. I already heard police and ambulance sirens you said weren't going to come like that no more."

"We need to figure out what to do now. Or all we get is more sirens."

The door behind the black bars opened enough for Dante to see a grandmother inside her house say: "Your help didn't do nothing."

"It's been 11 weeks since somebody last got shot in a beef 'round here," said Dante. "Eleven weeks is more than nothing."

Her eyes flicked away from the two men on her porch.

"None of us can just walk away," said Dante.

Mrs. Williams let them in.

But didn't ask them to sit down in the spotless living room that smelled of lemon furniture polish. Wouldn't look at Dante and 'Trey.

Now that they were inside, they heard her turned-low TV and its perky blonde news star: "Some people are saying that the country is dangerously off course, but we want to know what you think, so text us at the number on your screen. Press Star 1 for YES and Star 2 for NO, and we'll report that poll back to you. We report, you know."

Mrs. Williams muttered: "Who are `some people saying'? Her boyfriends? She gets folks confused about what `dangerous' or `off-course' means so they pick a choice from 'some people.' Then she reports what she started as what's going on so we can know out here in real America."

Dante said: "What's going on is we're here. Now. For real."

"No," said Mrs. Williams, "you're just like her. Put on a show. Six months ago, you and your Coalition pals, knocking on doors, talking to the corner boys, people in the grocery, coming to my church. Saying you want to help stop the killings, stop our babies from shooting each other. So I did what you said. Talked up how we needed to help you make truce between wild boys like my grandson Jerome. You got me to call Jerome, get him to meet you -- and now there's bodies in the street."

"Jerome's OK, isn't he, Mrs. Williams?" said Dante.

She said nothing.

'Trey said: "I hit his cell, but he won't answer."

"He won't talk to you," she said. "And I won't ask him to!"

Dante said: "Even if that wasn't his West Side crew shooting and getting shot, you know him and his are going to get dragged into it."

"Jerome's a stand-up guy," said 'Trey. "If he's with you, he's there."

She said: "He ain't no thug! No dope slinger. No killer."

"We're not the police," said Dante. "We aren't about figuring who killed who. We don't want anybody to kill anybody. Your grandson Jerome. He's going to stand with somebody. Best chance he has is to stand with us and try to stop the madness."

"We talked to him before an' he helped us," said 'Trey. "Hooked us up with his friends, 'n' then Dante worked with Jerome's West Side posse and the East Side guys and a truce come together."

"We need to talk to Jerome again," said Dante. "He won't answer our call, but he'll take yours."

She turned her face to stone. "I won't help you."

"Why?" asked Dante.

Words tore out of her like wounds opening under torture.

"Because you say there's hope! Say we can stop this killing! Say we can give my Jerome a chance. But it won't ever stop. This is the way it is. We been killing each other always, good Lord help us. I can picture my Jerome bleeding on some sidewalk or locked up on killer's row until Judgment Day, that breaks my heart but I GET THAT! Know it's real.

"Then you, you come around saying there's hope! That life doesn't have to be all luck and the way it is and what's real America! I believed you once. Let myself do that, so help me Jesus, but your _____ didn't happen and now, now you're back here still saying there's hope!

"I can live with pain," she said. "I got a lifetime of practice. But I can't live in lying hope, 'cause that guts my soul and makes me your fool."

Got no other choice. Gotta tell her.

Heart pounding, Dante said: "Do you know who I am?"

"I don't care," said Mrs. Williams.

"My son got gunned down when he was 19," said Dante. "Dead in the street. Something over nothing, bang he's dead. Never made the news. His name was Malcolm. He was streetwise. Like me. Like Jerome."

The grandmother's eyes watched him.

"I was in prison then," said Dante.

"I was on heroin then," he said.

Ran out of words.

She said: "How do you get up every morning?"

"Because if I get up every morning, maybe I can help one person from becoming me. And that real helps me be more than the pain."

They heard the TV play a commercial for deodorant.

"Can you save my grandson?" whispered Mrs. Williams.

"No," said Dante. "But maybe we can help him save himself."

She nodded OK like she was knocking her head on a gravestone.

Episode One: The Jagged Ride Home
Episode Two: Smoke
Episode Three: Yellow Tape
TOMORROW -- Episode Five: War Zone

What's Going On is fiction. All characters and incidents, except for historic references, are purely fictitious. Copyright: James Grady

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'What's Going On': Facts Inside the Fiction

James Grady — 2009-09-23T05:00:00 00:00

While "What's Going On" and its "Coalition of Committed Citizens" are fictions, citizen groups organized to counter violence, crime and related social issues are a growing force across America. Many of these groups are powered by ex-offenders -- former criminals who've served prison sentences and now "take to the streets" to find solutions to "beefs" (rivalries and grudges) that often result in bullets flying through our cities.

One of the most prominent gang-intervention groups is Washington, D.C.'s Alliance of Concerned Men, joined on our capital's streets now by the more recently formed Peaceoholics.

Several American cities besides Washington have experience with anti-gang citizen groups, including Kansas City, Mo. and Los Angeles.

Most of these groups are non-profit organizations that rely on donations, foundation grants and contracts with government agencies to provide a variety of services that include GED training, life skills classes, mentoring programs for juvenile offenders and training seminars for gang-intervention workers. While many groups are independent, they usually ally with government and other community groups.

Gang-intervention groups are not without controversy and problems, but many such programs have been praised by police chiefs and corrections officials.

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Yellow Tape, Part 3 of 'What's Going On: A Political Fiction'

James Grady — 2009-09-23T05:00:00 00:00

Previously: Dante Jones and his wife Rhea lose their night out when a shooting in the Liss Gardens area of their Washington, D.C. hometown shatters a street war truce ex-con Dante helped forge between rival groups in the Gardens who live under the web of a criminal spider named Luther. Surprising Dante outside his home, Luther blames Dante for failing to create police-free peace.

You're alone.

Driving through the city night.

Car wheels rumble over potholes that weren't in somebody's budget.

You can do this.

Gotta!

This isn't about you.

Push the gas pedal harder.

How many dead?

'Trey: How bad is he jammed up?

Leave blocks of homes lit with happiness and hard work, random luck and regulated electricity. Merge onto the commuter strip lined by neon dreams that won government-backed small business loans.

A parked car.

Inside, she's smiling and turning in the passenger seat to meet the guy behind the steering wheel who's turning toward her and they lean in with closing eyes, parted lips.

Remember that kiss.

Traffic light flashes RED. Stop on the road's white line.

Pale twin eyes light your driver's side mirror.

A white car tattooed with red & blue scrawls pulls beside you.

Cops.

Driver. Shotgun rider.

Two machines chugging at a stoplight in the city night.

Shotgun Cop lets his face swing your way.

For a look! That's all! Not `the' look, `a' look, it's OK! You're straight now! Like Luther said, a stone citizen. Off Paper Outta The Life.

Show a whiff of nervousness like a regular American.

Don't stop me. Don't pull me over.

Phone in your shirt pocket buzzes: ANSWER ME! ANSWER ME!

Shotgun Cop licks you with his eyes. Our windows are down. What can he hear? Does he care as the cell phone vibrates ANSWER ME!

Can't! Gotta! 'Law says no cell phone while operating a motor vehicle. Can't take the bust, the hassle, the delay!

Shirt pocket over your heart stops vibrating.

Traffic light flashes GREEN.

Let the cops glide away first, going, gone.

Don't let anybody shoot them tonight.

Don't let them shoot anybody tonight.

Radio broadcasts: "Metro just announced delays on the Red Line. Investigation of an incident has trains running one track of alternating routes. Spokesmen expect no delays in tomorrow's morning commute."

Liss Gardens.

But what's important is tomorrow morning's commute.

News is what people want to know.

Dante's silver car flew like an arrow in the night toward the glistening ivory dome of Congress' lair, turned right to careen around a park named for a Secretary of War who barricaded himself in his office until the president who'd fired him was gelded by impeachment.

Go north like that mouse in the kids' story.

This ain't no story.

You ain't no kid.

We are not mice.

Invisible dollar signs on the passing townhouses shrank with each block the silver car sped north until it turned left on a road dotted by stores still boarded up from assassination riots Dante'd missed while stalking through Asian jungles in a war no one could tell him how to win.

Up ahead, by Metro's bridge of above-ground subway tracks: spinning red & blue lights.

A police cruiser blocks the road.

Park.

Got no jacket on - good.

Get out slowly. Keep your hands in plain sight.

Watchers huddled in shadows and doorways wait to whisper.

Walk past the first cop cruiser - it's empty. More cruisers block traffic beyond the bridge that supports an empty subway train whose windows glow like golden scales on a snake.
Smoke swirls from hissing flares.

A heart-high line cuts the night in front of you: yellow tape.

Yellow tape that cages somebody else's pain.

Yellow tape that defines the life you've chosen.

Uniformed cops work inside the yellow tape. Shimmers from flares, headlights and emergency flashers reveal a white chalk outline of somebody on the pavement. The sidewalk by the bridge displays another chalk artwork.

"Dante! Over here!"

'Trey's voice, he's --

"Who the ___ told you to talk?"

Rebuke from a skinny guy in a black suit: Murder Police. Ten steps further into the yellow taped turf, his bulldog partner looks up from taking notes to lock his eyes on Dante.

Leaned against an unmarked cop car: 22-year-old 'Trey, muscled like a linebacker, his face regaining concrete Dante'd started chiseling away eight months earlier.

'Trey's hands bent behind his back.

They've hooked him up!

Stand on the citizen side of the yellow tape.

Spread your hands out empty and wide like Jesus.

Yell: "Officer! Can I come over to help?"

Skinny Cop puts the eyes on Mister who the ___ : "Sure."

Duck under the yellow tape.

"Officer, my name is Dante Jones, I'm from the Coalition of Committed Citizens." Tell it and sell it. "Sorry you had to come out here for something terrible, but I'm glad to see you."

"Really." Skinny Cop's smile could slice steel.

"Yes sir." Give him respect. Even if the ____ 's cuffed 'Trey. "The community needs all the help we can get."

Now reel it back: "Has my man 'Trey there been able to help?"

Smells: Flare smoke. Singed air from hot lights. Sweaty clothes off the cops and 'Trey. And you. Ghosts of gunpowder. Something like meat.

"Your man?" says Skinny Cop, detective eyes, Murder Police soul. "Your man's On Paper."

"Absolutely. His Parole Officer hooked us up."

After we asked, but never mind the cause, now is about effect.

"'His P.O. know' he's on my crime scene interfering with a police officer and causing a public disturbance?"

"We're all disturbed. But I'm surprised: he's too street smart and re-directed to interfere with a police officer."

'Trey yells: "I came 'cause 'word was six people shot and I needed to know to chill it, Dante, tha's all!"

Give 'Trey the four magic words/shut the ___ up glare.

Give Skinny Cop silence to fill.

But his partner Bulldog calls out: "Hey, I know about these guys!"

"Me, too," says Skinny Cop. "I used to read the newspapers."

Meet him there: "They don't write it right about us, do they."

Let that bond settle.

Go for it: "I figure 'Trey over-stepped trying to get the truce working - if this ain't some domestic or stick-up."

"These are beef killings. I know that even if we got a night full of NSN's."

"Nobody Saw Nothing," said Bulldog Cop.

Flat out tell them: "We can't help you with that."

Skinny Cop says: "Then what good are you?"

"We want to work it so you won't have to come out like this again."

Bulldog Cop told his partner: "Come on. They ain't the bad guys. 'Least not on our case."

Self-interest is the sweetest appeal. "Do you really want to do all the paperwork for locking my man up?"

"Do?" said Skinny Cop. "I don't want to do death notifications, meet more ripped up Moms with two sons never comin' home 'n' three other kids racking up hospital bills. I don't want to do a day of reports spelling out not what I do know, but what some lawyer can't rip me up for. I do not want to knock on doors for more NSN's. I do not want to squeeze here, squeeze there until somebody who needs me to squeeze them out of a jam realizes how maybe we can do for each other."

Skinny Cop jerked his thumb toward the train parked on the bridge.

Subway car -- one brightly lit window centered by a starburst hole.

Skinny Cop said: "I got the subway police arguing with my bosses about statistics, who's got jurisdiction, whose budget is going to pay for backing the train up to where it got shot 'n' panicked a hundred riding-home voters even if none of them caught that stray bullet. I got bosses pushing me to close my numbers here so City Council won't make the Chief `re-organize' us Murder Police just to show they're doing something about crime, and I got your Mister On Parole For Armed Robbery 'Trey here doing his thing, getting in my face and him I can do!"

From the bridge came the clunk of steel as the train moved.

Validate him. "You're right."

Shine a light into his night. "You sent the train home. What good will it do to lock up 'Trey?"

Ten heartbeats later, 'Trey got un-cuffed.

Make 'Trey shake hand with both Murder Police.

Shake their hands, too.

Don't let it look like anything more than that to eyes watching from beyond the yellow tape.

Walking away with 'Trey, hear the Skinny Cop yell: "Now you do!"

'Trey says: "Sorry, man! I know I was supposed to stay away, but -"

"If you're sorry, use that." Dante strode toward his silver car.

Cops pull the yellow tape so POP! it burst in front of Dante and 'Trey to flood its caged time & place into this city night.

'Trey whispered: "Bad ____, Dante. We lost Mrs. Williams."

Episode One: The Jagged Ride Home

Episode Two: Smoke

Tomorrow - Episode Four: Sirens

What's Going On is fiction. All characters and incidents, except for historic references, are purely fictitious. Copyright: James Grad.

Related: 'What's Going On:' Facts Inside the Fiction

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Smoked Mirror Windows, Part 2 of 'What's Going On: A Political Fiction'

James Grady — 2009-09-22T05:00:00 00:00

Episode 2: Smoked Mirror Windows

Previously: A cell phone call ruins the after-dinner drive of Dante Jones and his wife Rhea with news of a shooting near Washington, D.C.'s Liss Gardens neighborhood where Dante, who is a community organizer, had negotiated a street truce in the shadow of a gangster named Luther. Dante spots a black SUV with tinted windows parked across from their house, so he makes sure Rhea is safely inside a neighbor's house before parking. Then he steps out of his car.

Dante stood in the night street in front of his home.

The cell phone in his shirt pocket buzzed like a rattlesnake.

September leaves rustled in the trees.

He smelled fresh pine mulch chips in his neighbors' garden.

Pollution-dimmed stars, the pale glow from a foot-printed moon, vaporous cones of low-bid city streetlights, the yellow twinkle of zone-approved porch fixtures, and rainbow flickers of Federal Communication Commission-reined TVs inside his neighbors' houses illuminated the parked black SUV but not who waited beyond its tinted windows.

Told Rhea that what I do is politics.

Said: Politics is who you choose to be. The rest is just the doing.

Doors stayed closed on the black SUV. Tinted windows stayed up.

You wait for the black car to find you or you go to the black car.

Like smoked mirrors, the black SUV's tinted windows captured Dante's image walking closer from across the street. Closer.

Six steps away from the black SUV and the smoked mirror windows.

Five.

Dante saw his reflection growing in the SUV's dark glass.

Knew this make of vehicle got created to win World War II.

He stopped two steps from the SUV.

The rear passenger's smoked mirror window slid down, swallowed Dante's image into a black steel slab to replace it with the grinning, goateed face of a man who'd notched about half the number of Dante's 60 years into life.

"My man, Dante Jones." White teeth glowed inside the goatee. "Walking over here like you're some kind of stone citizen."

"My house, my street, our country."

"That ain't what you want to say," said this goateed man in the backseat. Dante intell'ed the other three men in the Jeep: Don't know two. Seen the Fat Man before. Can't see their hands. The goateed man wore a black silk sports jacket that cost more than Dante and Rhea's two old cars. That jacket draped open over a blue shirt.

Over his colostomy bag.

Over what else?

"What you want to say," the goateed man told him, "is: Get off my turf, ______!"

"Your words, not mine, Mr. Kross."

"Mister? Now we back to being like that?"

"Respect."

"Word, right? `R-E-S-P-E-C-T.' That's big for you and all the other ex-cons - My bad: all you other ex-offenders -- down at your Coalition Of Committed Citizens. You guys shut down what, a dozen street wars?

Course, that's not counting Liss Gardens," added the goateed man.

Don't take the bait.

Dante said, "The Coalition helps the community negotiate truces."

"Taking on other people's beefs."

"No, stopping the killing for all of us."

"You ever drop a body?" The goateed man crawled his eyes over the old guy standing in the street. "I know you did large time for Dillinger work, but before, you was in the Vietnam. 'You waste your time over there, or did you put a couple down for Uncle Sam?"

The phone in Dante's pocket buzzed just as a cell phone rang in the front seat. Dante ignored his call. Fat Man in the Jeep's front passenger seat answered his: "Yeah?..."

Dante made silence for the goateed man to fill.

"You know why I come on your home street, Dante?"

Fat Man talking on the cell phone: "Yeah...Naw, we on it now."

His goateed boss said: "I'm here 'cause I want to be. Because I can be. Because this is America. Land of the free, home of the better be brave."

"Better be smart, too," added Dante.

"Good to know you know that." Goateed man smiled. "Call me Luther, like I told you to back before when you lied to my ______ face."

Breathe, take a breath.

Say: "No lies. Never happen."

Fat Man closed his phone.

Goateed Luther said: "Wasn't that you who promised if I ignored what's what there was gonna be no more crazy bullets making police cruise Liss Gardens like `the community' was giving away donuts?"

"I told you that we were working out a truce in the Gardens' war, guys living across from each other with a tangle of beefs that we were asking you to help us resolve by you standing back."

"You say tomato," said Luther, "I say squish."

Dante's cell phone buzzed.

"Ain't you gonna answer that?" said Luther.

Change the focus. Move him off balance - but not too much.

"What I wonder," said Dante, "is why you ride in the backseat."

"Nobody gets behind me." Lips curled inside Luther's goatee.

"What can I do for you tonight?" said Dante.

"Tonight, tomorrow, last month, next _______year, you can be smart enough to not do me like some punk. You told me how it was gonna be, and come to find out tonight, you were wrong. What am I supposed to do when I been done by you and life ain't right?"

"The only promise I - we - made you was to do our best."

"Well you best do a whole lot better, Mister Jones."

Luther mumbled something to the Jeep's driver that Dante could have heard back when he was a younger man. The Jeep growled to life.

The goateed man set his eyes hard on the old wolf. Said: "Life makes everybody stand and deliver. From where I stand, you ain't delivered."

"You get what you can."

"Naw," said Luther: "I get what I want."

The smoked glass window whirred up, closed.

The black Jeep pulled away.

Left the old man standing in his own street.

Invisible in the night sky above him, Dante heard a jetliner fly from the airport re-named for a movie actor who won a second act as President of the United States.

Somewhere a dog barked.

The cell phone buzzed in Dante's pocket.

Buzzed again.

Dante grabbed it, answered: "Yeah, 'Trey....What? You're where?"

Episode One: The Jagged Ride Home

Episode Three: Yellow Tape

What's Going On is fiction. All characters and incidents, except for historic references, are purely fictitious.

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What's Going On: A Political Fiction in Nine Episodes

James Grady — 2009-09-21T05:00:00 00:00

Episode One: The Jagged Ride Home

Dante drove up the Hill between two Senate Office buildings, past the Supreme Court, then left on East Capitol Street. His rear view mirror filled with Congress's dome, its pale ivory drenched pink by September's setting sun.

Rhea rode beside him in their dented silver import that had ravaged Detroit. The radio played D.C.'s murdered hometown star of their youth --Marvin Gaye singing `What's Going On.' Rhea's wedding ring hand lay on her crimson skirt. She wore that musky perfume that drove him crazy. She always knew how to drive him crazy. Earlier as they'd sat at the restaurant on their monthly date night, she'd pressed the blue pill of a controlled substance called Viagra into Dante's palm, a legal gift to her from her clinic's corporate drug dealer.

The cell phone vibrated in Dante's shirt pocket.

Like a fool, he answered it as they drove past the Folger Shakespeare Library, barely got out "Hello?" before 22-year-old 'Trey battered his ear with: "Dante, they're shooting people! It's on again! War!"

"What?"

"Liss Gardens! By the subway. Bodies in the street 'n' everybody saying it's all gonna blow!"

Dante's eyes darted from the windshield and what he couldn't see to where his wife rode beside him, her eyes as hard as the road humming beneath their wheels and that look that said more than she knew.

From the phone came: "Dante, what you gonna do? Should I -"

Dante gripped the steering wheel. "Call Liss folks we know. Ask them how they are, get them to chill."

"I'll go down there an'-"

"No, you're On Paper. You can't take street exposure. I'll call you."

Dante hung up.

Push-buttoned the radio from Marvin's poetry to local news.

Turned to look at his wife.

She said: "No."

"Baby, you don't - I don't even know what's what."

"I know you, Dante Jones. You promised your street time was history!"

The radio talked up a story about the big money baseball team that had gotten the Feds' anti-trust OK to move to D.C. three years earlier.

"Rhea'," he said, "I'm just gonna -"

"You are just gonna drive us home. Don't tell me your Coalition partners are all off helping Omaha. Now you just work the Life Skills classes. And help on GED prep, and -- "

Radio said: "We have reports of a shooting at the Metro stop near Liss Gardens, with three confirmed victims. Stay tuned for -"

Rhea push-buttoned the radio off.

"And don't you answer that phone!" she said.

"It's gonna ring whether I answer it or not."

"We're going home." Rhea shook her head like she did when she had to give bad news to patients at the clinic. "You're done with that."

"Still my city - our city. Our country. 'Still people like us."

"People like us don't shoot people." She stabbed her finger at him. "Don't tell me about you in Vietnam or the what-next: you did your time."

"Liss Gardens was my last gang truce. Maybe it's not over."

"It's never over." Her voice softened. "I'm live and breathe proud of you, but it's somebody else's turn to step up. You aren't some street-walking Henry Kissinger!"

"I know who I am," he said as the windshield filled with a sports stadium named for assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

"'You want to be Henry Kissinger," said Rhea, "go into politics."

"What I do is politics."

"Don't tell me about politics!" Rhea reached back in time for the voice she'd used to forbid her now-grown children to be stupid. "Politics is who gets what. Who gets to do what to who. You're not going to do this to me! To us!"

"Politics is who you choose to be. The rest is just the doing."

"Just the doing?" snapped Rhea as their silver car followed the road onto the bridge over the river. "Oh that's catchy. Slap that bumper sticker on your chest, it won't stop bullets."

She shook her head. "Bad enough you go out there looking for people who want to kill each other, wild young men with eyes so full of hot blood they can't see no tomorrow, you politic with them while stepping on the shadow of hyenas like Red Luther."

Their silver car left the bridge.

Dante said: "Don't say `Red.' Call him `Luther' or Mister-"

"Call him `Mister'? Him with a gut-shot colostomy bag on one side and an Uzi slung on the other? Whatever you call him, he doesn't care about your politics, he's a gangster."

"Every gangster is born in politics. That's where laws come from."

"Your Luther comes from the Devil. I never want to meet him. Never want you to breathe the same air as him again. Pastor Doss and you claim everyone can redeem themselves, but him...he's Luther like in Lucifer."

The cell phone buzzed in Dante's shirt pocket.

He turned left at the corner with the shopping mall bank rescued by ex-President George W. Bush's $700 billion bailout.

Rhea softened her tone. "Baby, all I want is you and the chance to grow old that we earned. You've come so far, so hard, you deserve that."

"Maybe so, but we're all stuck with what we get.''

Dante drove into their quiet tree-lined neighborhood that like the rest of the District sat on turf carved out of America to avoid diluting the Congressional power of other turfs called states. Blocks of middle class houses he'd seen a thousand times flowed past his windshield.

Seven blocks from home, he said: "Look, I'll just make some calls."

Six blocks away, he negotiated: "If I go in, it'll just be to pass this off."

Five blocks away, streetlights winked on.

Four blocks - What's that?

Parked down across the street from their home.

A black SUV. Tinted windows. No neighbor's car.

Three blocks. Remember.

Their silver car slowed. Parked at the curb.

Rhea said: "What are you doing?"

"Slide out and walk back around the corner to Ben and Margaret's. You got your phone, I'll call --"

"Dante! Look at me! What is this? What - Did you see...?"

"I love you, Rhea. Go now. Don't look back."

She whispered: "We're in this together!"

"Then trust me. Work with me. That's how it's going to be OK. Go now. Walk - walk -- to Margaret's. I'll call you in a few minutes. Don't call anybody until you need to call somebody."

"Don't you -"

He said. "We get later."

"Promise?"

He said nothing until they said they loved each other. Her door opened, she flowed out into the fading evening light, closed her door: going, gone. It took everything he had not to watch her walk away. To hold that so near black SUV in his eyes. Let it be whatever it was.

When he knew she'd had time to vanish, Dante steered their car from the curb, drove onto his block, pulled on his headlights and lit up the SUV. Shapes inside of those tinted windows: three - no, four people. He parked in front of the truest home he'd ever known, right behind their green Ford built in a Mexican factory that Rhea used for work.

The doors on the black SUV stayed closed.

Those tinted windows stayed up.

Dante shut off his silver machine. Rolled down the window.

Heard autumn leaves stirring in the night trees.

A neighbor's TV.

The thunder of his heart.

Who you choose to be.

Dante left the keys in the ignition.

Got out of his car.

Episode Two: Smoked Mirror Windows

Episode Three: Yellow Tape

What's Going On is fiction. All characters and incidents, except for historic references, are purely fictitious. Copyright: James Grady

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