Overman

The marketplace of drugs. The low-rises. The pit. “Got your yellow tops!” Thin drug addicts stumble their way to young black men, who take their wrinkled tens and twenties. A signal sent to the runners—boys waiting fifty feet away who run over, small vials in hand. The cops staked out atop a nearby building, hoping to get a photo of a kingpin on a random visit to the frontlines, are on break and not watching. Enter a man in a trenchcoat, carrying a sawed-off shotgun. Whistling “The Farmer in the Dell,” flanked by two accomplices, he approaches the stash house, an abandoned apartment where the large reserve of drugs is kept. The trio enters the house. He orders the five or six inside to get their hands up. He aims the shotgun at one. “Hey, yo, where it at?” he asks. The man refuses to say. He blasts him in the kneecap. The injured man’s screams convince one of the others to tell him where the stash is. The trenchcoat-wearing figure walks out, having robbed drugs dealers of their drugs. Behold Omar Little. The marketplace of ideas. The three thousand year old history of moral philosophy, the study of right and wrong. The warbling of disagreement, cackle of dialogue. “Good is what Gods says it is.” “Good is what the Law says it is.” “No, good is what realizes the ends of humanity.”