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but not unfriendly, showing she was both used to this kind of approach by the police and always in control, in style if not in fact.
    Sol picked up his flashlight and shined it into the shadows of the car that his rooftop lights couldn’t reach, directly into the faces of the two young men sitting in the front. Both of us watched how their pupils reacted, how their expressions changed. They mimicked their more assertive companion, with less success, but boldly enough that we could tell they were clean—the cigarettes were just that, and those were only sodas balanced on the dash.
    “Mike. Pete. How you doin’?” Stennis asked.
    The one at the wheel was Mike Beaupré, the older brother by a year. “We’re doin’. ”
    “What’re you up to way out here?”
    “Staying out of trouble,” Sally answered from the back.
    Sol nodded and killed all his lights, acknowledging that he was taking them at their word. “Any trouble in particular?”
    I saw her smile in the glow of her cigarette. “You should know.”
    “We don’t do too bad.”
    Mike chuckled. Cadaverously thin, with his baseball cap perched back on his head and a sharply protruding Adam’s apple, he looked like an animated scarecrow. “Only when you catch us.”
    “I haven’t had to come after you in a long time.”
    “You just haven’t caught him at nothin’,” Peter called out from beyond his brother. He was the low man on the totem pole. The three had been inseparable friends since childhood and, despite their youth and unremarkable appearance, were tough in ways I’d never been at their age. While they all had records, none of their crimes had been more than petty in nature. But their experience had given them stature among their peers, and they were worthy of our grudging respect. Which was why Stennis was allowing the conversation to follow the etiquette of the street.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” he now said, following up on Peter’s quip. “You might’ve settled down a little in the past year.”
    Mike mulled that over, gently bobbing his head. “Gettin’ older.”
    It was a comment an uninformed adult would have smiled at, but we knew the backgrounds of these kids—the neighborhoods and families that had shaped them. None of it compared to the ghetto of a big city, of course, but their lives had still been marked by neglect and violence and poverty.
    Stennis returned to the point, now that the social amenities had been observed. “You’re a long way from downtown tonight.”
    “Think you’d be happy ’bout that,” Sally said guardedly.
    “I’m not complaining. A little curious, maybe.”
    “We needed a break, man,” Pete spoke up. Mike nodded silently.
    “The burned car?” I asked quietly. Sally turned her head and stared at me. I didn’t have the rapport Sol had with them, but they knew me as a straight player.
    After a long pause, she said, “Yeah.”
    “Who was the driver?”
    “Benny Travers.”
    Sol let out a low whistle. “No shit.”
    “What happened?” I asked.
    Her face was hard to read in the gloom. Travers and she had been more rivals than friends, both street-level wielders of influence, but with significantly different management styles. While Sally was more of a consensus builder, albeit with a hard right hook, Travers had been a typical bully. Older by ten years and more traveled than Sally, he’d done hard time, had a rough reputation, and being originally from out of state, hadn’t had the local ties that we tried to work to our advantage.
    “He got whacked,” she finally answered.
    “By who?”
    “Don’t you know shit?”
    “We know you were at the scene before we were.”
    The implication hung in the air for a long, still moment.
    “I got a call,” Sally finally said.
    “Who from?”
    She looked around restlessly, as if suddenly constricted by the small car. “I don’t know.”
    “We think Sonny did it,” Mike said.
    Stennis was incredulous. “Sonny Williams? You’re shitting