A Firing Offense

by George Pelecanos

  She blew some smoke at her feet and spoke softly. “After you fought, Charlie Fiora called me at the motel to tip me off that you were on the way. They had just killed Eddie. There wasn’t time to do anything but take Jimmy and leave me behind, to slow you up.” She looked up at me with pleading eyes and began to cry, but I stopped it.

  “You can save the crocodile tears,” I said coldly. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way Eddie looked, tied up on that bed. His throat had been cut, left to right. You could tell by the entry wound on the left, and by the direction of the skin as it folded out from the slice. Assuming he was killed from behind, that would have to be done by a right-handed person.” I stepped away from the wall and unfolded my arms. “The other night, I faced the man I thought had killed Eddie Shultz. He proved to me that he didn’t have the stomach for that sort of thing. In fact, before his brains were blown out, he dropped his weapon. And he dropped it from his left hand.” I paused and stared at the cigarette in her right hand, then into her eyes. “You cooled Eddie Shultz.”

  The silence between us was heavy and long. Finally she spoke just above a whisper and with her eyes down. “They couldn’t do it,” she said. “They were tough, but even they couldn’t do that, not to a kid. They didn’t know Redman like I knew him. Him and his Nazi friends. They would have queered the whole deal, believe me. He had to die.”

  “Everybody has to,” I said. “But nobody has to like that. What were you going to do about me?”

  “Nothing,” she said, her voice rising. “Jerry just wanted me to keep you occupied until he could figure out what to do.”

  “Relax. I’m not going to turn you in. They’d only treat you and set you free. I’d only be doing you a favor.”

  “I know what I did was horribly wrong,” she said. “But this program here…. I’m going to clean up.”

  “There isn’t going to be any program. Not much longer. Your benefactor is going to be leaving town any day now. When the well dries up, you’re out. You’re a junkie, Kim. That’s your future.”

  “I’ll make it,” she said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  MY LANDLORD HAD WEDGED my mail in the screen door of my apartment. The cat nudged my calf as I carried in the letters and sorted them out.

  There was a phone bill, which I kept, and a credit card offer, which I tossed. The last item in the stack was from the D.C. government. My application for a private investigator’s licence had been accepted. The notice instructed me where and when to pick it up.

  I fed the cat, brewed some coffee, and took a mug of it and a pack of smokes out to the living room. I settled on the couch to read the Monday Post.

  Andre Malone’s two little paragraphs were buried in the back of Metro, under a group head called “Around the Region.” He was “an unidentified N.W. man.” He died of “gunshot wounds to the chest and lower abdomen.” Police believed the killing, the article said, to be “drug related.”

  ONE WEEK LATER, McGinnes phoned.

  “Nick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Johnny.”

  “Hey, Johnny. Where you at, man?”

  “The Sleep Senter,” he said.

  “That the place that spells Center with an S?”

  “The same.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “The way they explained it to me, it has a double meaning. The sleep sent-her, get it? Like this place really sends her, it’s some kind of out-of-body experience.”

  “Clever.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “This place is okay. They got a bunch of schmoes on the floor, but they’re an all right bunch of guys. And dig this—they put a fifty dollar pop on the reconditioned mattresses. Fifty big ones, man, for something that’s recession proof. Everybody’s gotta sleep, right, Jim? Anyway, mattresses, electronics, what the hell’s the difference? I could sell my mother if they’d tack a dollar bill on her.”

  “When did you make the move?”

  “Today’s my first day. The last day I saw you, I kinda fell into a black hole. When I crawled out the next day, I quit my job at Nathan’s. Good thing I did. I talked to Fisher—they had some serious shake-ups after I left.”

  “Such as?”

  “Rosen resigned on Wednesday, effective that day.”

  “Who’s running the show?”

  “They booted Ric Brandon up to general manager. You believe that shit?”

  “The cream always rises to the top,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He laughed briefly, then coughed into the phone. “Listen, Nick, I gotta go take an up. I don’t want these putzes to think I’m weak. Talk to you later, hear?”

  “All right, Johnny. Talk to you later.”

  THE NEXT MORNING I was folding my clothes from the laundromat when some shells and stones fell from the pockets of my swimtrunks. An hour later I was driving south on 95, headed for the Outer Banks and Ocracoke Island.

  The ferry was nearly empty that early November day, as was the island campground. I pitched my tent on a spot near the showers and, wearing a sweatshirt beneath my jean jacket, unfolded a chair on the beach.

  I spent the first day reading the rather seedy biography of a relentlessly hedonistic musician, a story I lost interest in long before the inevitable overdose. Later I wrote a long letter to Karen that took two hours to compose and only a few seconds to shred. In between those activities I walked on the beach and stopped occasionally to talk with fishermen who were wading in the surf. In the evening I cooked hot dogs and ate a can of beans, and then crawled into my sleeping bag as soon as it was dark, as there was little else to do.

  By the middle of the second day, I realized once again that being away from home clarifies nothing. Despite romantic notions, that’s been the case in every instance that I’ve left town to “think about things.”

  An approaching northeaster shook me out of my stupor late in the afternoon. I broke camp as the slate sky blew in, and was packed and in my car when the rain came down, suddenly and quite violently, from the clouds.

  I started my Dodge and drove through the storm to the gray house on pilings with the small gray sign. Running through the rain and up the wooden stairs, I entered Jacko’s Grille.

  The door slammed behind me when I entered and most of the heads in the place turned my way. There was a group of older locals in plaid flannel shirts and dirty baseball caps, all sitting at a couple of picnic tables that they had pushed together. Empty cans of beer dotted the tables. Full ones were in the men’s hands. Water dripped down through holes in the roof into more than a few spots in the room, though no one was taking much notice. The sound of the rain competed with the country music coming from the jukebox.

  I nodded to the men and pushed wet hair back off my forehead. A couple of them nodded back. One of them smiled and said, in a startling island accent more northern European than American South, “Wet enough for ya?” I said it was and stepped up to the bar, where I ordered a burger and a beer.

  I took the beer out to the screened-in deck and drank it while I watched the hard rain dimple the wetlands as it blew across the sound. The beer was cold but warmed me going down, and I ordered another when I picked up my burger.

  I ate the burger and drank the beer out on the deck. When I was finished, the first, beautiful verse of “Me and Bobby McGee” came from the juke, and the men inside began to sing. I listened as their drunken voices welled up on the achingly true chorus. When I went to the counter for another beer, one of them waved me over and I joined them.

  I bought what was the first of many rounds. The water was coming in now all around the bar, and someone had turned up the jukebox to its maximum volume. One of the men produced a fifth of whiskey and some glasses, and we started in on that.

  The corners of the room bled into the walls. There was laughter and it was warm and I was away from my world, and everything was cleaner and more clear.

  With time came darkness, and the rain continued to fall outside and into the barroom. M
y friends told jokes and sang, then joined me in a toast, to a Greek immigrant everyone had called Big Nick. For a moment I wondered what he would think, seeing me now, so twisted and so far from home; that moment burned away with my next taste of whiskey, stronger than reason, stronger than love.

  Reading Group Guide

  A

  FIRING

  OFFENSE

  A novel by

  GEORGE PELECANOS

  George Pelecanos responds to questions from his readers

  Have you always thought of yourself as either a writer or, before you began publishing your work, at least as a writer-in-training? Or did the idea of your being a writer really take root only once you were published? Also, do you find it in any way difficult to take the blunt, unvarnished subject matter—especially the rough dialogue—of your work and convert it into fiction? Similarly, do you find it easy or difficult to take your interest in movies and music and put it into your fiction?

  I always wanted to tell stories in some form. I thought I would be a filmmaker, but I got sidetracked by a professor in college who turned me on to books. It wasn’t until my first novel was published that I actually thought of myself as a writer. But your point about being a writer-in-training is well taken. I learned my craft while on the job, and I continue to do so.

  My subject matter, and the attendant language, is indeed unvarnished. With the world I’m trying to explore, it has to be or the novel fails; in effect, to back away from it would be akin to a lie. The aim is to make it reportorial without trying to be dark or “street.”

  Pop culture—music and movies—plays a large role in our everyday lives. You’re going to see it creep into the fiction of younger writers with more frequency because it’s a natural element of our generation’s psyche. Again, it has to be done organically or it doesn’t work.

  I’m curious about your writing habits. What is your writing process? Do you revise as you go along, write a rough draft and then edit, or do it some other way? How long does it take you to write a novel? Do you outline or wing it?

  My work habits are fairly rigid. When I’m writing a novel, I write seven days a week. I don’t feel that you can leave that world for days at a time and still remain engaged. I begin early in the morning and write into the afternoon, until I have to break for lunch (I put lunch off for as long as possible; once you’ve got food in your stomach, you’re done). In the evening I return to my desk and rewrite what I did in the morning so that I’m ready to move forward the following day. You can see where I’m headed with this: I write one draft, rewriting as I go along, and usually that is the draft that is sent up to my editor in New York. With that schedule, it usually takes me four to six months to write a clean novel.

  Having said that, I don’t mean to give the impression that it’s a cakewalk. I struggle with every book, especially in the first couple of months. Much of my working day, in fact, is spent pacing around the house, bouncing a rubber ball, listening to music, etc. Work means working it out. Since I don’t outline, it’s a matter of finding your characters and then your plot. Once I have gotten to that point, the work accelerates. I can go on writing jags for ten, twelve hours at a time. And that’s when this job gets really fun.

  What are your thoughts on the recent trend of crime/police dramas on television? Do you think this will have an impact on crime fiction?

  Television crime dramas. I don’t think that crime novelists will be influenced by what they see on TV. Rather, it’s the other way around. In my opinion, the best crime novels of the last ten years have influenced what we see on television today (as well as movies—there would be no Tarantino had there not been an Elmore Leonard). What do I like? On network, I’ve been a longtime fan of Law and Order, straight procedural without the window dressing. I only wish they’d bring back Carey Lowell. NYPD Blue was good at one time, but its shelf life expired long ago. At the bottom of the trash heap is The District, an insult to the cops and citizens of D.C. and anyone else unfortunate enough to watch it. On cable there’s The Shield, whose creators are shooting for something different and often achieve it. While we’re on the subject, Kent Anderson’s Night Dogs is hands-down the best cop novel ever written. Training Day was a great film about cops, too.

  I’m hoping you might discuss the influence of movies in your own writing. For instance, what are your favorite films and how do they filter into your own work? Or, in general, has the connection between cinema and novels changed much, in your belief, between 1950 and the 2000s?

  I was a movie freak originally and not much of a book person. That changed for me in college, but before that, I was deeply influenced by films. Going back to the ’60s, the movies that left the most lasting impression on me were The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape (both from John Sturges), The Dirty Dozen (Aldrich), the Sergio Leone Westerns, and Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. All describe a masculine world with codes of friendship, honor, and (bloody) redemption. Add to that my formative film-going years (the early to mid ’70s), where I got into the anarchic films of Don Siegel, Scorsese, and others (and the entire exploitation, blaxploitation, and kung fu canon), and you pretty much have the setup for what I would explore in my novels.

  With regards to all of this, I was pretty fortunate to have grown up when I did. If I were a teenager watching films today, there would be little to inspire me.

  As I said before, there’s nothing wrong with younger writers absorbing their pop culture influences and organically incorporating them into their books. But a novel should not read like a screenplay or be a blueprint for a film.

  The best example I know of the historic relationship of books to movies is the one between noir literature and film noir. I’ll generalize here for the sake of time. Pulp noir novels came first and were adapted to film. Film noir began to take shape as a cinematic expression of the novels, but also developed concurrently with elements of other arts (Expressionism, Ed Hopper paintings, the lighting design in German films, etc.). But a funny thing began to happen in the ’50s. Film noir began to influence noir literature. You can see “shots” and cinematic shadows begin to show up, quite consciously, in the books of Woolrich, David Goodis, and others. Finally, late-period noir films like Kiss Me Deadly and Touch of Evil are pulp adaptations that comment on film and literature, and the film noir genre itself. Those films were, in effect, brilliant parody, and they marked the end of noir (Aldrich literally explodes the genre by way of apocalypse at the end of Kiss Me Deadly, just as Peckinaph would do to the Western, fourteen years later, in The Wild Bunch). After this, noir became a dead end. Today’s film noirs are a parody of a parody, which is to say that they equal nothing.

  I’ve gone on too long. But I don’t see a dynamic modern relationship between films and novels. I’d like to see one. I guess I’m waiting for the revolution.

  How do you go about your street research? Are you upfront about what you are doing or more “incognito”? Is your research observational or participatory? Having lived in the D.C. area and having been on those “bad” sides of town, were any of your research expeditions dangerous or scary?

  I’ve lived here all my life. That gives me an edge. I know where to go and what streets to avoid, and when. But generally, I’m pretty comfortable out there. You need to know about body language, eye contact, and things of that nature. But the one thing you have to learn is how to give respect. In many case, self-respect is one of the last things some of these people have to hold on to. You violate that and you’re going to have a problem.

  I’m not much of a talker, either on the job or in my everyday life. I find that I learn a whole lot more just by listening. So my “research” often consists of walking into a bar, having a quiet beer, and keeping my ears open. If people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them. But I don’t volunteer the information. Some of the things I do might seem dangerous to the outsider, but they don’t feel that way to me. I spent some time in a crack house while researching Right as Rain, but never felt threaten
ed. People using drugs (with the exception of out-of-fashion drugs like angel dust—“boat,” to Washingtonians) are generally benign. It’s the sellers you need to look out for. There are turf issues as well.

  After midnight I do ride-alongs with D.C. cops. This has been very valuable (I go places I will not go alone) and also gives me some insight into the psyche of the police. In Hell to Pay there are several passages that are nearly reportorial and describe some situations I’ve gotten into while on these rides. I also work closely with a private investigator who handles the fed-prosecuted RICO cases in the District on behalf of the public defender’s office. Derek Strange’s clothing, the things he carries in the trunk of his car, all of this comes out of my time spent with this guy. Finally, I sit in on a lot of violent-crime trials. It is a citizen’s right to do so. You can learn everything you need to know about a drug/gang operation, and the current slang, from doing this. Still, the most valuable research I do comes from just hanging out in the neighborhoods and listening.

  Questions and topics for discussion

  Familial connections—or lack thereof—arise often throughout A Firing Offense, from Joe and Sarah Dane to Jimmy Broda and his grandfather to Eddie Shultz and his mother, and more. What role does family play in the lives of these characters? What is Nick’s take on these relationships, and what insight does that offer into his own family and his relationship with his parents?

  Discuss Joe Dane’s role in the drug operation. How much guilt or responsibility do you think he felt? Do you think Joe did the right thing in the end?

  Why does Kim Lazarus take things into her own hands with Eddie Shultz? Were you surprised by her goals or motives?