A Firing Offense

by George Pelecanos

  “That’s right,” he said. “Believe me, I’m not proud of how I got you into this. Playing on your sympathies, and so forth.”

  “So forth. You mean lying, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I’d do more than that, to protect my grandson. When you have children, you’ll understand.”

  “I’m not interested in understanding your motives.” I shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit it, then dropped his Zippo on the table. “Why did you come to me?”

  “After I found the empty recorder in Jimmy’s room and linked it with his rather erratic behavior and the company he was keeping, I didn’t know what to do. Going to the police seemed out of the question. After all, Jimmy was involved, in a criminal sense. I went to Mr. McGinnes for help—he was the only one in the organization I knew—and he suggested you. When he said your name, I recognized it. Jimmy had mentioned you to me, several times. It wasn’t all a lie, Mr. Stefanos.”

  “But why didn’t you come clean with me from the beginning?”

  “Obviously there’s more than one person at Nutty Nathan’s who’s dirty,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if I could trust you.”

  I raised my open hand without thought, then lowered it. My voice shook.

  “You stupid old bastard,” I said slowly. “You just don’t understand, do you?” He stared at me blankly. I butted the cigarette, walked to the door, and turned the knob.

  “I’d like to help,” he said weakly.

  “No.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Finish it.”

  * * *

  MCGINNES WATCHED ME ENTER Nathan’s on the Avenue, and kept watching, his arms folded as he leaned against a microwave oven display.

  Lee was behind the counter to my right. She was wearing a jade green shirt, buttoned to the top, and a jean skirt, out of which came her stout little wheels. First she smiled, then her brow wrinkled.

  “You look terrible,” she said.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Sorry about your job.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Lee. Listen, I’ve been awful busy.”

  “You don’t have to explain,” she said.

  I glanced back at McGinnes. “Lee, I don’t mean to cut you short, but I’ve got to talk to Johnny.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “We’ll talk later.”

  I head-motioned McGinnes. We walked the length of the store through the back to the radio room.

  “You want a beer?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, and pulled a malt liquor from his usual spot. He popped the tab and drank.

  “Where’s Andre and Louie?”

  “Andre’s off. Louie’s out making a deposit. What’s up?”

  “Can we talk for a few minutes?”

  “Yeah, the floor is dead. If this is about the Broda thing, I can tell you that I’ve been keeping an eye on the news, and that Shultz boy was never found.”

  “I know. But there’s more.”

  I told him everything that I was certain of, and some of my guesses. He whistled softly when I was finished and then stared at his feet. Some color had gone out of his face.

  “What do we do now?” he said.

  “I only wanted you to be aware of the situation, in case they think you’re involved. They haven’t made any kind of play on me yet. Maybe they think the Shultz murder scared us off.”

  “What happened to the girl?”

  “She’s gone,” I said. “Listen, Johnny, I need one more favor of you, man, then it’s over for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “I know you keep a few pieces that you collect, the unregistered kind. I’ll be needing to borrow one.”

  He looked at me as he finished his beer. He moved the can around in his hand and then crushed it.

  “You come in here,” he said, “and tell me all this shit, and I haven’t even got it all digested yet, and now you want a gun? You’re fuckin’ nuts, man. Why don’t you just ask me to put one to your head and pull the trigger?”

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m going on with this thing. I don’t have any options, Johnny. And I need something behind me if I’m going to get this kid.”

  “I don’t think so, Nick,” he said, and shook his head as he walked away. “I gotta get back out on the floor.”

  “Think about it,” I yelled to his back. But he was already out the door.

  LATE IN THE AFTERNOON I stopped in the Good Times Lunch and had a seat at the counter. Kim came over with a pad in his hand.

  “The special, Kim,” I said sheepishly, “and a coffee, black.”

  He nodded and returned shortly with a fried-fish platter. I shoveled it in and had a cigarette with my coffee. After that I paid the check that Kim laid in front of me.

  “Kim,” I said, and he turned back around. “I’m sorry about yesterday. I was out of control. It won’t happen again.”

  “No problem, Nick,” he said. “But you should get rest. You don’t look so good.”

  THE RED LIGHT ON my answering machine was blinking when I entered my apartment. I pushed down on the bar.

  The first message, from McGinnes, told me to meet him at the store tomorrow. He would have what I wanted. The second message was from Joe Dane. I called him at home, and he picked up on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Joe, it’s Nick, calling you back.”

  “Nick, we need to talk.”

  “I think it’s time. How about right now?”

  “No, not now. I’m busy tonight. Tomorrow morning in the park.”

  “Tomorrow’s fine, but not in the park. Someplace more public.” He hesitated. “So it’s like that.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Tomorrow morning at ten, in the bell tower at the Old Post Office downtown.”

  “Okay, Nick,” he said. “Ten o’clock.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TO GET INTO the tower of the Old Post Office at Twelfth and Penn, one has to take the tour. I stood amid a group of eight tourists on the ground level, around a brightly lit, U-shaped counter.

  A gangly Park Service employee was giving us a brief history of the Post Office. He mumbled into a microphone in a barely intelligible, nasal voice. The man next to me was taping him with a video camera.

  After his speech we were ushered into a glass elevator and began our ascent to the tower base. The checkerboard floor of the Pavilion fell away rapidly as we rose higher. A little girl near me said to her father, “Daddy, if we fell now, we’d be dead, right?” An older woman who already looked a little frightened touched her collar and laughed nervously.

  The doors opened and we walked out to a circle of white and red ropes that rang the Congress Bells. A rotund guide informed us that the bells, a gift from Great Britain, were rung on the opening and closing days of Congress, and on all national holidays. The only other instances when they were rung, she said, were in honor of the Challenger’s crew, and “when the Redskins won the Super Bowl.”

  Then the guide herded us into another elevator. She reached in and pushed the floor button from the outside. “You picked a great day for the tower,” she said, as the doors closed and her fat, bespectacled face disappeared.

  When the doors opened again, the group walked out into the openair tower and scattered. The clock mechanism was housed in a raised platform in the center. A Park Ranger sat on the platform and looked through binoculars.

  A circular walkway afforded a view of the city in all directions. Three of the sides were strung with narrowly spaced wire to discourage jumpers. The south side had a Plexiglas shield. Joe Dane was standing on the east side, looking out. I tapped his shoulder.

  He turned without surprise. Though his clothes were clean, he looked as disheveled as always. There was a dead look to his watery brown eyes.

  “I don’t really like this view,” he said, turning his head towards the expanse of Pennsylvania, Constitution, and the Capitol.

  “We can m
ove,” I said.

  We walked past the southern view of the Potomac and the Jefferson Memorial, and over to the west wall. Dane stared through the wires. The curving lines of the Federal Building below were like a horseshoe framing the Mall and the Lincoln Memorial.

  “All those tourists,” he said. “They waste their time standing in line to get up the Washington Monument, when the best view of D.C. is right here.” He smiled. “Remember when you and me and Sarah and Karen used to come down here on Sundays? Smoke a joint out in the car, then come up and take pictures with our heads through the wires and shit like that? After that spend a couple of hours munching our way through the eatery downstairs.”

  “Joe,” I said. “Let’s just get down to it, all right?”

  “All right, Nick,” he said softly. His smile faded, and he buried his hands in his pockets.

  “Give it to me straight up. Did they get Jimmy Broda?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Yes.”

  I smiled and slapped the wall. The ranger and a couple of tourists looked my way. I wanted to hug Dane but didn’t show it. I wasn’t finished with him.

  “Why are you here, Joe?”

  “Last shot at redemption, I guess.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you still with them?”

  “No. But they don’t know that.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He shrugged. “It’s not all that complicated. It’s a small operation, smaller than you think. Only a few people involved. And this was their first time at this sort of thing. At least it was for Rosen.”

  “Jerry Rosen in charge of it all?”

  “On the D.C. end.”

  “What about Nathan Plavin?”

  “No. It was easy to keep him out of it. Rosen had him insulated from the day-to-day aspects of the business, anyway.”

  “Who else at Nathan’s? Brandon?”

  “No.”

  “How did you get in, Joe?”

  “Rosen knew I was hard up for money,” he said. “He came to me with a proposal. Supervise the shipment, in and out, and keep an eye on it while it was in the barn. The payoff was pretty sweet. And I rationalized it with that old mentality you and I grew up with—drugs are innocent, done by innocent people.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  He looked down at his shoes. “When one of the warehouse guys tipped me that the Broda kid had stolen the VCR, I knew things were going to fall apart. Then you started to poke around. I wanted to tell you and get out then, but I had to make a choice…. I had to make a choice between warning you and looking out for Sarah.” He spread his hands out.

  “Keep talking,” I said.

  “I went to Rosen,” he said, still looking at his shoes. “He had Brandon fire you, then had his boys beat you up to warn you off. They followed the kids south. The Shultz boy was killed. Then they caught Broda and brought him back.”

  “Why didn’t they kill Broda too?”

  Some tourists walked by. Dane stopped talking until they passed. “They don’t know what to do with him,” he said. “Listen, Nick, I know you feel like a sucker. But the reason that kid is still alive is you. They know you’ve stuck with this thing, and that you’re not going to leave it alone. They can’t get rid of the kid while you’re still looking, and they can’t let him go. It’s a stalemate now.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Joe.” I eyed him suspiciously. “Let me get this straight. Jerry Rosen was a fair-haired boy when he worked for Ned’s World in South Carolina. When he moved to D.C. to work for Nathan, he saw the drug market up here and decided to get a piece of it. Those two guys who roughed me up—did he recruit them from the South Carolina warehouse?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who else?”

  “There’s the Jamaicans who work with me.”

  “I met them,” I said. “A tall albino and his shadow. So there’s them, Rosen, the two from Carolina, you—and the man who bankrolled the whole deal. Ned Plavin, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  I thought for a minute. “Are the drugs out of the warehouse yet?”

  “Not entirely,” he said. “It was a hundred sticks to start out with. They moved fifty in two consecutive nights last week, and another twenty-five on Tuesday. Tomorrow night they move the last twenty-four.”

  “How?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The setup. Where, who comes for it, how it’s done, the money, all of it.”

  “Shit, Nicky.” He studied my face. “The way it was done the other times, two buyers come. They bring a hundred-fifty grand in a suitcase. We meet in the back of the warehouse, where the VCRs are stacked. Our guys load them up, they leave the suitcase.”

  “Guns?”

  “Yeah, everyone.”

  “What time does it go down?”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “Are you going to be there?”

  “I’m gone, Nick. Sarah and I packed last night. I called in sick today. We’re leaving this afternoon, all of us.”

  “Just walk, then everything’s all right.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s never going to be all right. I was part of something that got a kid killed. Maybe someday I’ll put a gun in my mouth to help me forget. Probably not. But for the time being my job is to protect my family.”

  “You’d better get going then, Joe.”

  “One more thing,” he said, and grabbed my arm before I could pull it away. “These guys are just a bunch of dumbshit cowboys. You go up against them, man, you’re gonna die.”

  “You know where they’ve got the kid?”

  “No.” He took his hand off my arm. “I’m sorry, Nick. I really am.”

  “So long, Joe.”

  He turned and headed for the stairwell. When the door closed behind him, I wished him luck.

  * * *

  LOUIE WAS BEHIND THE front counter when I walked into the store. He gave me a nod with his chin, then stared at me over the tops of his reading glasses.

  “How’s it going, Louie?”

  “Oh, I’m makin’ it, Youngblood. How about you? Anything goin’ on?”

  “I’m weighing the possibilities.”

  “Well, you got all the time in the world now. To find out what’s important.”

  “Is Johnny in?”

  “In the back, takin’ his medicine.”

  I negotiated the maze of floor display and passed under the BB-riddled caricature of Nathan. I took the stairs down to the stockroom.

  McGinnes was sitting on a carton in the back. Malone was standing next to him, a live Newport between his long fingers. I walked through a stagnant cloud of tobacco and pot smoke to get to them. I shook Malone’s hand and shot a look at McGinnes.

  “Andre knows everything,” McGinnes said unapologetically.

  “He ran it all down to me,” Malone said quickly, “in the hopes that the two of us could talk you out of whatever it is you plannin’ to do.” He gave me the once-over, dragged on his cigarette, exhaled, and threw me a hundred dollar smile. “You really stepped in some shit this time, didn’t you, Country?”

  “It’s deeper than you think.”

  I told them just how deep it was. Malone’s brow was wrinkled the entire time I spoke. When I was finished, he ran a thumbnail between his front teeth, keeping his eyes on mine.

  “So,” McGinnes said. “They’ve got the boy.”

  “If you don’t mind, Johnny,” I said, “I’ll take what I came here for.”

  McGinnes went to the corner of the stockroom, moved some boxes, and returned with something in his arms. He unwrapped the oilcloth it was in and brought it out.

  “I wasn’t sure what you wanted,” he said. “So I brought a solid automatic. Nine-millimeter Browning Hi-Power. Push button magazine release.” With a quick jerk of his wrist the clip slid out into his palm. “Holds thirteen with one in the chamber. Right here is the safety—you can operate it with your th
umb while your hand’s still on the grip. If you’re not sure the safety’s on, try cocking the hammer.”

  “Thanks.” I held out my hand.

  “I brought an extra clip.” He pulled that out, placed it with the pistol, and put them both in my hand. “It’s your up, man.”

  I rewrapped everything in the oilcloth and put it in my knapsack, then hung it over my shoulder.

  “You guys coming upstairs?”

  “I am,” Andre said.

  “I think I’ll hang,” McGinnes said. “Catch a buzz.”

  Malone and I climbed the stairs. As we neared the landing, we heard McGinnes coughing below. Malone stayed with me all the way to the front door, where he stopped me with a grip on my arm.

  “Hey, Brother Lou,” he shouted at Louie, who was still behind the counter. “I’ll be takin’ a break.”

  “You already had a break,” Louie said tiredly.

  “Then I’ll be takin’ another.”

  “What’s up, Andre?” I asked.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” Malone said. “I got a proposition for you, Country.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  MALONE SAID, “Pull on over, man.”

  We were in the southbound lane of North Capitol, near the Florida Avenue intersection. I pulled over and cut the engine. Malone rolled the window down, leaned his arm on its edge, and put fire to a Newport.

  On the east side of the street was a casket company, a beauty parlor, and a sign that read, “FISH, UBS.” Hand-painted on the door, in dripping, wide red brushstrokes, was, “Closed for Good.” To our right stood a Plexiglas bus shelter on a triangle of dirt that the city called a park. A man in a brown plaid overcoat slept in front of the shelter’s bench, where another graybeard sat and drank from a bagged bottle. Further down the street, near P, a Moorish carryout and a “Hi-Tech” shoeshine parlor graced the block.

  The sidewalks were teeming with activity. Those not seated on stoops paced within the confines of their block. A woman in a two-piece, turquoise jogging suit stood with her hands on her hips and yelled gibberish at the unconcerned people walking past. Her flat buttocks sagged much like her sloping shoulders. Straight ahead, less than two miles down the strip, rose the Capitol dome.