A Firing Offense

by George Pelecanos

  Wrightsville Beach was just across the bridge over Bank’s Channel. Driving onto its main strip, I saw the large hotels and general congestion of concrete that I associated with the Delmarva Peninsula and the Jersey Shore. We checked into a clean and expensive motel near the fishing pier.

  McGinnes was sleeping when I came out of the shower. I dressed quietly, slipped out the door, and walked up to the pier. At its entrance was a snackbar that overlooked the beach. I sat on a red stool and ordered a tuna sandwich with fries and a coke.

  The teenage girl behind the counter had black hair and thick eyebrows and wore a Byzantine cross. I asked if she was Greek and she said yes. Her parents owned the concession stand and the adjoining restaurant. I asked her if she knew a place called the Wall.

  “It’s a surf-rat place,” she said. “In the summer they rage, but now in the off-season only the hardcores hang out there. If you’re not a local and you’re not in that crowd, it’s not too cool.” She told me where to find it, up near the Strand. I thanked her and left eight on four.

  Traffic was light. I found the Wall on the soundside corner of the intersection the girl had mentioned.

  The place appeared to be a converted service station. It stood alone on a shell and gravel lot. I was the only one parked in the lot. I sat in my car for half an hour and listened to top forty radio and beach commercials. Then a modified, black VW with two shortboards racked on the top pulled in. The doors opened and two guys got out.

  They walked across the lot. The taller one of the two was in oversized baggy shorts and a tie-dyed T-shirt and wore a red duckbilled cap, out of which came white blond hair. He was tall and in swimmer’s shape. The smaller one was dressed similarly but had a weak frame and the overly cocky strut of the insecure.

  I got out of my car quickly and ran to the door of the bar, just as the tall one was turning the key. I startled him as he turned and for a moment he looked vulnerable, but only for a moment. He had thin eyes and a cruel, thin mouth.

  “Hey,” I said, “how’s it going?” He didn’t answer but gave me the once-over. “Is Charlie Fiora around?”

  “That’s me,” he said in a monotone. “What do you want?”

  “I’m a friend of Kim Lazarus,” I said. His eyes flashed for a second, an emotion that he quickly shut down. “I heard she was in town. Heard you might know where she’s staying.”

  “You heard wrong, ace. I don’t know any Kim Hazardous,” he said, and his little friend giggled. “Now I gotta get my place opened up. So later.”

  The two of them walked in and shut the door behind them. I heard the lock turn. I stood staring at the door and the painted cinderblocks around it. Then I turned and walked back to my car. I sat there for a while. Nothing happened and I did nothing to make it happen. Finally I turned the ignition key and drove back to the motel.

  MCGINNES WAS CLEANED UP and waiting when I returned to the room. We walked to the restaurant above the arcade and concession stand and had a seat at the bar, which afforded us a view of the pier below. The ocean shimmered orange and gray at dusk. I told McGinnes of my experience at the Wall. Afterwards, he put down his Pilsner glass and looked at me dourly.

  “I didn’t want to bring this up,” he said, “but I’ve got to be at work tomorrow morning. If I don’t post, I lose my job.”

  “I know.”

  I settled the bill after finishing only half my meal. We walked down the stairs and out onto the pier. I turned my collar up against the wind as we neared the end, where some kids were spinning a cast-iron telescope on its base.

  “What are you going to do?” McGinnes asked. His hair was blowing back to expose his scalp.

  “They’re here in Wrightsville,” I said with certainty. “I didn’t go through everything and come all the way down here to drive back to D.C. now with my fucking tail between my legs.”

  “You want company?”

  “No, not this time. But get everything together at the room. I’ll be back in an hour to pick you up.”

  He nodded sadly and looked away. I left him there at the end of the pier and walked back, passing a small group gathered around a sand shark that was floundering and dying on the wooden planks.

  I found my car in the motel lot, pulled out onto the highway, and headed for the Wall.

  TWENTY-TWO

  WHEN I PUSHED open the heavy door to the Wall, they were blasting Led Zeppelin IV through the speaker system.

  The place was one big unfinished room, with a couple of pool tables, pinball and video machines, scattered chairs, and a bar. Some of the people that night looked to be underage. It was difficult to pick out the patrons from the employees.

  Charlie Fiora was standing outside the service bar area and recognized me as I entered. He said something to his sidekick, who then looked at me and grinned. I walked across the concrete floor to the bar, where I took a seat with my back to the wall on a stool in the corner.

  When the bartender was finished ignoring me, he dragged himself down to my end. He was tall with long brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, which gave the probably false impression of intelligence. I ordered a bottle of Bud and gave him three on two. He didn’t thank me but accepted the tip.

  I drank the beer and looked around. There were no windows. The area that had once housed the service station’s bay doors had been bricked up. The decorations were sparse but effective. Tiny white Christmas lights laced the walls and bar mirrors. Posters, replicating album covers of groups like Siouxsie & the Banshees and the Meat Puppets, hung on the cinderblocks. Styrofoam Flintstone Building Blocks were spraypainted and glued to the ceiling to better the acoustics and insulate the noise. Tie-dyed bedsheets hung like inverted parachutes, and held in their pockets still more Christmas lights. Fiora was nothing if not resourceful.

  The crowd here was the dark side of the myth of healthy, bronzed surfers out for clean fun and the perfect wave. The young people who lived in beachtowns like this, long after their peers had returned to school for the fall semester, were strangely joyless hedonists, bitter poseurs who were capable of unrepentant violence.

  Fiora was staring at me and I could feel it. I got up and walked across the room, past the pool tables and pinball machines, and into the men’s room.

  There was one sink, two urinals, and a stall. I stood at one of the urinals and peed. Above me on the wall were two lines of graffiti: “Michael Stipe sucks my pipe” and “Any friend of Ted Bundy’s is a friend of mine.”

  I washed up and returned to my barstool. There was a pretty young blonde in a powder blue sundress standing next to Fiora now. Fiora whispered something in her ear. She looked at me and smiled, then kept her eyes on me as she kissed him on the cheek. They both laughed.

  I ordered another beer. They were now well into the second side of the Zeppelin tape. A loaded kid sitting next to me said to his friend on the right, “I’m tellin’ you, dude, the way to get a babe to like you is to make her drink.”

  I began to read the cassette titles that were racked behind the bar. There were hundreds of them, arranged alphabetically. When I was finished doing that, I looked at my watch.

  Bonham’s drum intro to “When the Levee Breaks” kicked in, followed by harmonica. I finished my beer, got up from my stool, and walked back into the men’s room.

  I rewashed my hands. I was drying them with a towel and looking in the mirror when Charlie Fiora and his buddy walked in behind me. I threw the paper in the trash and turned to face them.

  Fiora had removed his cap, making him appear less boyish. In the blinking Christmas lights his tan skin was drawn tight. Veins popped on his biceps below the rolled-up sleeves of his T-shirt. His right fist was balled.

  “All right, ace,” he said. “What do you want?”

  I glanced quickly at his skinny little partner, who was struggling to look tough, then back at Fiora, whom I addressed.

  “Tell your girlfriend to beat it,” I said. “Then we talk.”

  The kid took half a step towards
me out of pride but stopped short. I thought I saw the beginnings of a grin at the edges of Fiora’s mouth.

  “Go on, Robo,” Fiora said.

  Robo left after giving me one more hard stare. Fiora and I studied each other for a minute or so. The music was thin and distorted, coming through a cheap speaker hung above the mirror.

  “I told you earlier what I wanted. Kim Lazarus is in town with two guys and I want to talk to one of them.”

  “You some kind of cop?”

  “Private,” I said. Fiora relaxed.

  “Then why don’t you just get the fuck out of here?” he said.

  “I could make trouble for you, Charlie. I know Kim sold you some shake, and I know you’re dealing it out of this bar.” I shifted my weight to my back foot.

  “You want some more?” he said, and pointed his hand very close to my bruised face. I was tired of him and all of it. Most of all, I wouldn’t be touched like that again.

  I grabbed his outstretched wrist and twisted down, and at the same time yanked him towards me. Then I kicked him with my back foot, pivoting the heel of my front foot in his direction and aiming two feet behind him, as I connected at the bottom of his rib cage.

  The sound of it was like that of a hammer through a carton. He veed forward, coughed once, and opened his eyes in pain and surprise. I stepped behind him, one hand still around his wrist, and with the other pushed down violently on his elbow.

  His face hit the floor before the rest of him. A sickening sound, like stone against stone, echoed in the bathroom. When a puddle of blood spread between his face and the floor, I knew he had broken his teeth on the concrete.

  “Where are they?” I growled. I had pressure on his arm and held it pointed at the ceiling.

  “Beachmark Hotel,” he said, and coughed convulsively, adding more blood and phlegm to the floor.

  “Where in the hotel?”

  “I don’t know the number,” he said, and I believed him. But I pressed harder on his arm. “Last room on the right. Oceanfront.”

  “Floor?”

  “Second floor.” He made a gurgling sound.

  “Repeat it,” I said, and his answer was the same. I let go of him and stepped away without looking back. I pushed the door open and walked quickly across the main room.

  Fiora’s friend was shocked to see me emerge first. He moved back from my path and stopped against the wall. I felt numb, and a foot taller at the same time. Robert Plant was shouting the blues.

  I walked over to the blonde in the blue sundress, took the bottle of beer out of her hand, and drank deeply. I put my other hand behind her neck and pulled her mouth into mine. When she began to kiss me back, I pushed away.

  Then I was out of the bar, out in the cool and wet air. I got into my car and watched my hands shake before I tightened them around the wheel, then laughed for no reason. I pulled out of the lot and screamed down the strip, to pick up McGinnes, and, from there, to get Jimmy Broda.

  “WHAT’S GOING ON, MAN?” McGinnes said, and looked at me strangely as I entered our room.

  “You turn in the room key yet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s get going, then.”

  We were out on the street quickly. I unintentionally caught rubber pulling out of the lot. I felt McGinnes’ stare.

  “I guess you got your information,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “There’s blood on your shirt,” he said.

  “I know,” I said, pressing down on the accelerator. “It isn’t mine.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE BEACHMARK WAS a tan, three-story hotel on the ocean near the Wrightsville Holiday Inn. It was highlighted with green awnings and a diagonal green sign with white lettering announcing its name. I parked and looked over at McGinnes.

  “You coming?” I said.

  “You want me to?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “There isn’t one. Let’s just go in and get him.”

  There were few cars in the parking lot, and the area around the hotel was still and quiet. The pool’s green light tinted our clothing as we walked around it and on past a Coke machine and ice dispenser.

  We ascended a metal stairwell, then went through a concrete hall and onto a walkway around the second floor. We walked along the northside wall and turned right at the oceanfront, where the temperature immediately dropped, the air became damper, and the sound of the surf more pronounced.

  I found the last door on the right and tried the knob. It was locked. To the left of the door was a small rectangular window and, through it, darkness. My first thought was that I had been had by Fiora. But McGinnes whistled and directed me to the next door in the row.

  The door of that room was ajar. Out of it fell a bar of light and the sound of a radio playing AOR at a very low volume.

  I knocked on the door and shouted “Hello.” No response. My knock opened the door halfway. I finished it with a push and stepped onto the green carpet of the living room. McGinnes followed me in.

  We walked slowly past the standard bamboo and plastic beach furnishings and the seaside prints that hung on the wall. There appeared to be two bedrooms. I pointed to one, and McGinnes walked in. I walked into the other.

  At first I did not recognize the figure lying on the bed. He did not look much like the defiant kid in the photograph his mother had shown me. In the photograph, Eddie Shultz had been alive.

  They had gagged him and tied his hands and feet together behind his back, laying him on his side on a dropcloth. Then they had cut his throat down to the windpipe, from left to right. His shirt and jeans were soaked halfway up in blood. Rope burns marked his wrists and his eyes were open. He looked something like a frog.

  I fell back against the door, tasted the bile of my dinner, and swallowed my own puke. I felt the blood drain from my face and I thought I heard Maureen Shultz’s voice on my answering machine. I stumbled into the other bedroom.

  McGinnes was on the bed, cradling a woman in his arms. Her eyes were barely open and her lips were moving but there was no sound. He pushed some hair out of her face.

  “She was unconscious when I walked in,” he said. “I’ve almost got her around.” He turned his head to look at me and dropped open his mouth. “What the fuck…?”

  “Eddie Shultz is dead, man. Murdered in the other room.”

  “Hold her,” he said, and I absently put my arms around the woman as he rushed out. I heard him say, “Jesus Christ,” then walk around the apartment until he came back, pasty-faced, into the bedroom.

  “Is Jimmy Broda…?”

  “Nobody else in the apartment,” he said.

  “We’ve got to…. ”

  “We don’t have to do shit,” he said, his voice shaking. He reached out and grabbed a handful of the front of my shirt. “Now listen. Did you touch anything besides the front door?”

  “I don’t know. I mean I don’t remember. Probably.”

  “You walk downstairs, now, and bring the car around to the stairwell we came up. I’m going to wipe this place down and get her walking. I’ll be down in a few minutes. Understand?”

  “Yes,” I nodded.

  “Do it,” he said, and released my shirt.

  I let the woman down gently on the bed, forcing her hand off my back. I walked out of the apartment, around to the north side of the hotel and down the stairwell.

  I moved the car past the pool and into the spot nearest the stairwell. I kept the windows rolled up, listened to the tick of my watch, and wiped sweat off my forehead.

  McGinnes came down the stairs ten minutes later with the woman. She was walking, supported by his arm. In his other hand was a suitcase. He put her in the back seat, where she immediately lay down. He stowed the suitcase in the trunk and got into the passenger side.

  “I think I got everything,” he said to himself, then looked at me. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  I found the bridge over Bank�
��s Channel, left Wrightsville Beach, and drove into Wilmington. At a convenience store I parked far away from the entrance.

  I bought three large coffees and a pack of Camel filters. I returned to the car, handed McGinnes two of the coffees, and tore a hole in the lid of mine. Then I opened the deck of Camels, shoved one in my mouth, and lit it. I had not smoked in more than three years. The raunch hit my lungs and burned. I kept it there, finally exhaling a stream out the window.

  “She know where Broda is?” I said, jerking my head in the direction of the backseat, where she slept.

  “No,” McGinnes said. “Drive.”

  He directed me to 421 heading northwest. It was past midnight and there were few cars on the highway. I kicked on my hi-beams with a tap on the floorboard.

  “We blew it,” I said, after a long period of silence.

  “Bullshit,” he said angrily. “Everything that’s happened has had nothing to do with you. And everything that’s going to happen, whether they catch up with the kid or not, you can’t change that either. The boy got his hands on some shake that wasn’t his, and the guys he took it from, man, they are not to be fucked with. You’re way out of your league, Nicky. Forget about it.”

  “What about the woman?”

  “She’ll be all right. I don’t think she was hurt bad. I’ve got to figure that half of her condition right now is from all the drugs they were doing. Take her back to D.C., drop her off, and wash your hands. Then pray we don’t get implicated in all this.”

  We drove for a couple of hours on 421. When we neared the signs for 95, McGinnes had me pull over.

  “I’m going to switch with her and try to get some sleep,” he said. “It’ll do her good to open her eyes for a while.”

  We urinated on the shoulder of the road. McGinnes rousted the woman and walked with her down the highway for a block, then back to the car. She slid in next to me on the passenger side. McGinnes lay down on the backseat.