Damaged Goods by Austin Camacho Page A

across Marquita’s bed. Now that she was finally resting, her features appeared delicate, frail, the way Hannibal imagined Snow White when he was a child.
    â€œShe’s been abused, buddy,” Hannibal whispered. “Physically. Emotionally. Sexually if I understand the story. The man responsible is the man I’ve got to find to help my client. Can you watch over her for the night?”
    â€œGod, she looks so helpless. Fragile, like a doll, you know?”
    As if she sensed that she was being talked about, Marquita’s eyes fluttered open for a moment. Hannibal watched Sarge’s rough face soften as he stared into Marquita’s fawn colored eyes. He seemed to make a connection there. Perhaps it was the empathy of a man, homeless not long ago, who could see this woman as downtrodden despite her apparent financial status. While theywatched, the ghost of a smile touched the edge of Marquita’s lips and she slipped back into sleep.
    â€œDon’t you worry,” Sarge said. “I’ll take care of her.”

-8-
FRIDAY
    Hannibal’s tee shirt was soaked by the time he was approaching the end of his morning run. He felt a little stitch in his left side, but nowhere near enough to slow him down. It was a good day. He had started on time, and would finish a little early. He took a perverse pride in his own anal retentive nature, suspecting that certain people he waved to five mornings every week used him to determine whether or not they were on time for work.
    It was getting harder to keep his breathing quiet, but he tried anyway, relishing the morning sounds and not wanting to blot them out of his own ears. Anacostia was one of the roughest of urban inner city areas, yet it still offered an early morning symphony for those awake to hear it. Even there, birds chirped and whistled and sang at the edge of dawn. However, the main theme there was carried by groaning garbage trucks, and the taxicab horn section. The overhead whine of jet engines replaced the woodwinds, and all the sounds melded together in a way neither nature nor an orchestra could imitate.
    As he reached his own block Hannibal slowed to a walk. The view to his home was a path of brick buildings, cracked sidewalks and broken bottles. This area of the nation’s capital was rundown and generally impoverished, yet it tried hard tocling to its dignity. Hannibal loved his neighborhood because it was a real neighborhood. He knew his neighbors, and his neighbors knew him.
    As rough as it was, it was a neighborhood in transition, within a city in transition. Ahead lay a few blocks of abandoned or condemned buildings, many still inhabited. But a few block to his left stood a series of new, high-priced town houses. If he ran in the other direction, crossed the Anacostia Bridge and went a few blocks up Potomac Avenue he would bump into the congressional office buildings that flank the Capitol, less than two miles away. In Washington, it was an easy walk from the halls of power to the abandoned halls of slum apartments.
    Having almost regained his breath, Hannibal leaned on the sandstone banister and mounted the steps up to the stoop at number 2313. Hannibal remembered the first time he walked up those steps. The building was a crack house then, and the owner had paid him to flush the squatters out. He looked down at the dark stain on the stoop left there by his own blood after his first attempt to do his job. He had returned with a small team of men gathered from the homeless shelter where he volunteered. Sarge and the others had helped him take the building back. Ray, a former client, had helped too. Afterward, he had decided to stay there, and the others did too. They had fought for the building and found a home.
    Closing the outer door behind him, Hannibal glanced to the right out of habit to read his own name on his office door. Then he walked left around the central stairway. He unlocked and opened the fourth of five doors down