Between Rock and a Hard Place

"It was pretty quiet after that," remembers Mary. "Then about two weeks after they took him away, Mr. Shithead came back, and the whole block revved up again."

The charges against Ayers hadn't stuck. It turned out that most of the supposed crack he had on him when he was arrested was fake stuff, or "woo," made of soap and dried breadcrumbs.

Now shorn of his ponytail, Ayers was a near-daily presence throughout most of August at his usual post behind the beauty-parlor window.

"We're watching him," Neighborhood Inspection Services police liaison John Cohen said in late August. "We know he is back in that building and some other buildings and is dealing out of there and the other buildings on that block, and we're taking steps to solve that problem."

The department was "negotiating a solution" with Ayers's grandmother. "We're going to get the grandmother to give us permission to declare the building vacant," Cohen added. "That way, we can board it up and legally post it as vacant, and if we find that guy in there again, we can have him arrested for violating the vacant-and-derelict properties ordinance."

In the mid-1990s, Mayor Wellington Webb began pushing Denver City Council to pass a nuisance-abatement ordinance that would allow the city to seize a crackhouse and shutter it for up to three years, with or without the owner's permission. In 1998, that ordinance finally passed.

After dealing with the beauty-parlor crackhouse, Cohen said, his department planned to focus on "two or three other problems" on the western side of 2700 Downing, including the yellow Victorian.

"You have to document a series of violations before you can move toward a nuisance-abatement order," he explained. "We're moving on it. There's an investigation under way."

Just before Labor Day weekend, police officers hammered a nuisance-abatement order to the front door of the beauty parlor, announcing that the property had been confiscated by the city.

In the weeks since his arrest, Ayers had done his best to make a nuisance of himself to those he suspected of bringing down the heat. Shortly after he was released from jail in early July, Ayers rode in the passenger seat of a maroon station wagon that cruised ominously in front of Mary's house.

When she came outside, Ayers spat out: "Whore!"

"Same to you, bitch!" she fired back. The station wagon sped away.

"Mary's a sassy lady, and I respect her for that," says Sergeant Fall. "But I tell her she needs to be careful and not get too sassy, because you never know how desperate these people are or how they're going to react."

The owner of the only legal business on Mary's block is Julian Leevee, who has operated a nameless laundromat on the western side of the street since 1982. Asked to comment for this article, Leevee says only this: "It can get pretty rough down here. They'll burn you down. They don't give a damn about anything. So as far I'm concerned, there's nothing going on down here. I don't see anyone selling anything. The cops are doing a good job. Let's just drop the whole story."

Denver software engineer Michael Schreiber is more forthcoming. Schreiber owns a two-story apartment building on the eastern side of the block. It's up for sale. He can't seem to find a buyer.

"People come to look at it, and they're afraid to get out of their cars," he says. "I had one woman who had an appointment for me to show her the property, and as soon as she got out of her car, she was approached by a drug dealer asking her if she needed anything. She said, 'I'm not even going to go inside,' and left.

"I can't even keep tenants in there, because the drug dealers scare them off," he continues. "They're just so brazen about it. It's wrong to let it go on like that, but it seems like the people who live on that block, they're either involved in the drugs themselves, or their attitude is 'We leave them alone, they leave us alone.'"

Mary is the exception. She's a pissed-off lady with a garden hose.

All day long -- and she works long days -- Mary cleans other people's houses. When she returns to her own in the evening, she likes to unwind in her back yard by tending her garden. One night in late June, she was doing just that when her peace was disturbed by a bunch of crackheads smoking out in the alley behind her fence. They were giggling and shouting and turning the air over Mary's garden sickly sweet with the exhaust fumes of burning cocaine paste.

Mary turned the pressure up on the water coursing through her hose, calibrated angle and distance, and then unleashed a high arc of water over the fence, raking her fire back and forth like a helicopter gunner strafing a tree line.

"Get the fuck out of here, you zombies," she shouted.

She has only sprayed a drug dealer once -- the tattooed dope man in the silver car -- and she says she probably won't do it again.