D.C. Noir

by George Pelecanos

  The lobbyist stared at them. “You two make a helluva pair.”

  “Don’t you talk about us.” Lena hugged her arms across her chest.

  Frank Greene shrugged. “What do you got for me?”

  Joel handed him a photocopy. As the bulldog studied that piece of paper, Joel heard the clatter of wind and rain storming against his living room windows.

  “Our turn,” said Lena.

  “About that.” The bulldog tossed a thick envelope to Lena. “Tough luck.”

  “What do you mean?” said Joel.

  “Changing circumstances require compromises. Means that your appropriation is cut fifty percent to fifty thou.”

  “You can’t screw us,” said Lena.

  “Fifty K is way more than you’ve been paid for screwing before.” The lobbyist turned to the Senate aide. Shrugged in a fashion that an amateur might mistake for an apology. “This town. What can you do?”

  “I didn’t sign on for this,” said Joel.

  “You signed up for everything the moment you let her in your car.”

  “Stop it!” screamed Lena.

  The bulldog thrust his finger at her. “You don’t give orders.”

  Joel pushed the lobbyist’s arm away from Lena.

  “What are you going to do?” growled the bulldog. “You got what I gave you.”

  Joel replied: “And all you’ve got for sure is a piece of paper.”

  “Oh, you think so?” The bulldog snapped at Lena. “You think so, too?”

  “Shut up!” She shook the envelope in Greene’s face. “You think I did it for this?”

  Lena threw the envelope away. It landed on the couch by her bulky cloth purse.

  “Why you did whatever is your problem.”

  Joel said: “Leave her alone.”

  “Oh, come on.” said the bulldog. “Don’t you get it?”

  Joel said: “I get that we’ve only gotten half of what was promised.”

  “You sure you want the rest?”

  “Shut up!” Lena lunged toward the couch, her purse, the money envelope. “You can’t fuck us like this!”

  “Babe, getting fucked is your whole life.”

  “Not now!” Lena cradled the envelope and her clunky purse. “Not for us.”

  Whoa, stop the way the world’s been working, ’cause suddenly you decided you got yourself an us? Let’s see.”

  “No. Don’t!”

  Like a mad dog, the lobbyist whirled to Joel. “You want it all?”

  “Shut up.” said Lena. “Stop!”

  The bulldog surged toward her Joel, growled: “You want what you really got?”

  Out of her purse jerked Lena’s hand holding a snub-nosed revolver Bam

  Window panes flashed and vibrated with the gunshot.

  From outside, it seemed only like the storm.

  Joel knew he must have heard the bang, seen the gunshot flash, but he felt like he had fallen back into himself after being far away. Now, suddenly, he was right here, in his living room, Lena holding a pistol, Frank Greene clutching his left side.

  “You bitch!” yelled Frank. “Gonna kill you.”

  Frank staggered toward her.

  Bam! Bam

  Frank crumpled to the maroon rug. Window panes rattled.

  Lena whispered: “It shot him.”

  Joel crouched to touch the lobbyist’s motionless neck. Then Joel’s hand shook and wouldn’t stop. His whole body trembled.

  Lena pulled him up to her embrace. “I’ll call the police,” she said. “Tell them the truth.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “Even you can’t fix this.”

  “But it can be managed.”

  “Joel, no. What he did, said, what he was going to—”

  “What matters is what happens right now,” Joel told her.

  He filled her eyes as she told him: “I never thought it would go this way. I love you.”

  “Yeah. But now that’s not enough.”

  He pocketed the gun. Had her help him roll the dead man up in the maroon rug.

  Joel put on a hooded raincoat. Ran outside in the storm. Drove his car into the alley, parked by his trash cans. Lena let him in the back door. Helped him shoulder the rolled-up maroon rug, stagger through the rain, cram it into his car’s trunk.

  Inside his house, water dripped off them to tap on the bare wood floor.

  “Take the money.” He stuffed the envelope in her cloth purse. “Go home. You weren’t here. Barely know me. I’ll call when it’s safe.”

  He drove her to nearby Union Station. Stopped where the few people running past them had eyes only for their own escape from the storm.

  “Go,” he told her crying eyes. “I’ll call as soon as I can.”

  She hugged him so tight he almost died. Ran from his car toward the subway escalator. Turned to look back at him through gray sheets of driving rain. He memorized her standing there washed by all the tears in town.

  The escalator fed her to the underground.

  Go he told himself. No speeding tickets. No accidents. Off the Hill: Virginia? Maryland? A country road. A quarry filled by a dead lake. A ditch with rocks that could be rolled. Wipe the gun. Throw the wallet, cell phones—cell phones: what is it about—never mind Ditch evidence everywhere but on the Hill.

  Ring! His cell phone, not the disposable he’d need to dump.

  Can’t not

  Dick’s voice in his ear: “Joel, where the hell are you?”

  Sell the truth when you can: “In my car. On the Hill. Got places to go.”

  “Yeah,” said Dick, “like here to the boss’ house, pron-to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the rain, man. It’s like a hurricane.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, or our butts are in a sling. We got here just as it started spitting. Finding the white sack took awhile. Now we gotta get back to the Capitol in time for the interview in the TV press gallery. Looking rough for a good TV Q is cool, but looking like a drowned rat blows, so you need to swing by here and give us a ride.”

  “What about the Senator’s car?”

  “In the shop, and in this storm, no way can we get a taxi. If you don’t come get us, we’ll lose the chance to get the Sudan bill on TV and spin the PR we need to win.”

  Rain drummed the roof of Joel’s car. Flooded his wind-shield.

  “Yeah,” he said into the cell phone, “Ness’s got to take this ride.”

  Joel double-parked in front of the Senator’s town house.

  Two men hurried through the rain to his car. The Senator wore a trenchcoat, jumped in the front seat. Dick tumbled into the back.

  “Where’s your umbrella?” said Joel.

  “Somebody else always has one,” said the Senator.

  “Go!” said Dick. “We’re going to be late.”

  Joel stepped on the gas.

  Ca-lump.

  Dick said: “What was that?”

  The rearview mirror showed Dick turning to look toward the car’s trunk.

  “D.C. streets,” blurted Joel. “Roughest roads around.”

  Joel steered his car into a right-turn-on-red. Water wooshed under his tires. Potholes slammed the wheels. The wipers went whump whump.

  “Turn on the defrost,” ordered the Senator. “You can barely see.”

  The engine fan whirred an invisible wind up the fogged windshield.

  “Look out!” yelled Dick.

  A yellow smear slid past their surging car.

  “You almost hit that cop!” said Dick.

  A neon red starburst filled Joel’s windshield.

  “What the hell?” said Dick as Joel slammed on the brakes.

  Three Capitol Hill cops in yellow rain slickers blocked the road. One cop stabbed a popped flare into the wet mirror blacktop. Two others stalked toward the halted vehicle.

  Joel lowered his window. Spray from the storm wet his face.

  “Sir, shut off your vehicle!” yelled the
older cop, while the younger one kept his right hand thrust inside his yellow slicker. “Now!”

  A laser dot of red light refracted through the windshield to kiss Joel’s chest.

  Joel shifted to park and killed his engine. The red dot danced on Joel’s chest as two cops moved to his side of the

  “Sir!” yelled the lead cop. “The officer back there ordered you to halt.”

  “I didn’t see him. I’m driving Senator Ness.”

  The older cop snapped a flashlight beam on the Senator’s face.

  Gonna be all right, thought Joel. Gonna make it now

  “He’s him,” said the cop’s younger partner.

  “Sorry Senator,” said the ranking officer, “I didn’t see you, but…Doesn’t matter. Homeland Security just bumped us up to ORANGE Alert.”

  “Fuck Homeland Security!” yelled the Senator. “This is Capitol Hill, I’m a Senator, we’re in charge, let us pass.”

  “Sir…our scenarios include a Senator being snatched in a terrorist attack.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “So is four jetliners being hijacked into flying bombs. I’m sorry, but you entered our secured zone so now you all have to step out of the vehicle before you proceed.”

  Joel yelled: “In this damn storm?”

  “Come on,” said Dick. “We can still make it.”

  The black Senate staffer stepped out of the car, kept his hands in plain sight.

  “Fuck me.” The Senator stepped into the rain.

  Through the water-blurred windshield, Joel saw three more yellow-slickered cops march toward the car. One carried an umbrella. One carried a pole with a mirror for examining the underside of vehicles.

  The senior cop told the driver: “Everyone must exit the vehicle.”

  Joel Rudd stood on the road, arms out like Jesus, face turned up to the falling rain.

  Senator Carl Ness stood under an umbrella held by a yellow-slickered cop and, like his law-writing aide Dick Harvie, stared at the Capitol Hill wizard they worked with who suddenly seemed to have gone insane.

  “Sir, we need to pop the trunk. Check it. Then you can go.”

  “No,” said Joel. “I’m going nowhere. I’m already there.”

  The older cop said: “We’re just following the rules.”

  Joel turned his flooded face toward that guardian of law and order. “Rules. I know about them. In my trunk you’ll find a body.”

  What?” chorused the cop, the U.S. Senator, and the legislative director.

  “A lobbyist named Frank Greene. Shot dead.”

  Rain beat down on them. Flares sputtered. Police radios crackled routine reports.

  Until a cop opened Joel’s trunk, announced: “He’s right.”

  The younger cop slid his hand back inside his yellow slicker.

  An officer lifted his radio, but his sergeant ordered: “Keep this off the air.”

  Senator Ness yelled at Joel: “What have you done?”

  Joel stared at the man he knew so well, had served so long. A thousand calculations churned behind the Senator’s frantic expression. Through the raging storm, Joel saw the spirit inside that man as clearly as he saw the spirit in himself.

  Carl Ness reached inside his suit and pulled out a white sack.

  “Do you see what you’ve done?” said the politician. “Do you see what you’ve put at risk? Ten thousand lives and you stand there flushing them down the drain.”

  A cop exchanged his radio for a cell phone.

  The Senator shook the white sack. “Now it’ll take all I’ve got to make this happen.”

  Suddenly Joel saw it all through the pouring rain. Cell phone. Fingerprints. The cell phone in the cop’s hand as he reported in. The third cell phone on the Senator’s desk when there should have been only two. A sequence where a bulldog and a politician set up a “shaky” crusader with a desperate dream girl who they’d schooled. Joel positioned to structure the corrupt deal over the Senator’s “opposition” in front of witnesses Trudy and Dick. If anyone ever cried corruption, the guilty fingerprints would belong to fall guy Joel. The Senator’s “independent” campaign committee set up to reap a windfall from the contract winners. The payoff to Joel and Lena was chump change to distract him, keep him quiet, drive more nails into his frame.

  The white sack waited in the Senator’s fist for what Joel would say.

  The whole, unprovable, public truth wouldn’t save Joel. Would cut the balls off a Senator so that he kept his job but had no power. Would thus sentence 10,000 people to starvation. Destroy a woman desperate to be free.

  Capitol Hill’s bottom line: It’s what you can get done.

  Thunder boomed. Joel never saw the flash. His words tasted like smoke. “The creep got shot because he welched on paying me for fixing the warplane vote.”

  “Wait,” said the youngest cop. “Shouldn’t we read him his rights?”

  No one can prove me wrong, thought Joel. Or will want to.

  Clarity shimmered through the hissing red glow of the flares, the spinning blue-and-blood lights on arriving police cars, the storm-slick skull-white glow off the Capitol dome. Joel envisioned Lena grimly marching through a D.C. airport. He wondered where she’d go. The color of her hair.

  “My fall!” cried Joel.

  “What’d he say?” yelled the older cop.

  Whose partner yelled back: “He said it was his fault!”

  But Senator Ness’s face said he’d heard Joel’s offer. A look of pure understanding passed between them.

  Like the noble boss of a doomed sinner, the Senator told Joel: “I’ll do all I can.”

  Joel’s nod sealed their redemptive bargain.

  “Cuff him,” ordered the older cop.

  Bare steel clamped around Joel’s wrists.

  Dick Harvie lunged toward the prisoner who’d taught him how democracy works.

  “Murder,” said Dick, the word burning in his eyes. “I get that. But how could you, you of all people, how dare you sell out all the best dreams up here.”

  Joel said: “Everybody gets a hill.”

  STIFFED

  BY DAVID SLATER

  Thomas Circle, N.W.

  The restaurant had emptied after the Friday lunch shift, so Gibson shoved open the battered back door to get a quick taste of sunshine. He leaned against the chain-link fence, pulled his lunch tips out of his pocket, and slowly counted the crumpled bills. Seventeen lousy dollars.

  He plopped down on an overturned five-gallon pickle bucket and lit a Camel to mask the dumpster’s ripeness. He added some numbers in his head, trying to figure out how much he had earned that week. He needed at least another thousand by the end of the month or he was going to lose his apartment. But if he was going to continue living off his eight-dollar-an-hour salary while putting his tips toward the thousand-dollar goal, there was no way that seventeen bucks was going to cut it.

  He still had to man the grill until the next guy came on in a few hours, but he figured that there wouldn’t be many more tips coming his way that day. The afternoons had been slow lately as the stifling summer heat settled over D.C.

  The heavy door groaned opened and Karen, the day waitress, walked squinting into the sunshine. “There you are,” she said. “Want to make a few extra bucks?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m supposed to hang around till the next girl comes in at 5:00. But I was hoping to get over the Bay Bridge before it backs up. You want to hold down the fort?”

  “You think I can work the grill and wait on tables too?”

  “Come on, Gibson, look at how dead it’s been. You can handle it for a couple of hours.”

  Gibson shrugged his shoulders. What the hell. He had been counting on pocketing more than fifty bucks from the day’s lunch shift, and this might get him there.

  “Give me a couple minutes to finish this cigarette,” he said, “and I’ll be out.”

  The Shelbourne Grill was a dying breed for the neighborhood
just below Thomas Circle. Nothing fancy or modern: People came in for made-from-scratch onion rings and fat burgers, grilled behind the bar by the same guys who served the beer. The crane-strewn neighborhood was upgrading fast, but the Shelbourne hadn’t seen much change in its four decades. It was narrow and dark, with seating for around sixty at a worn bar, six uncomfortable wooden booths, and a row of two-tops. The prices were low and the place only accepted cash, even though ten times a day they had to send customers scurrying to the ATM machine at the corner bank across the street.

  Working as a combined grillman/bartender took some getting used to for Gibson. In the fourteen years since high school, he had bounced around a lot of restaurant kitchens, but this was the first place where he had worked behind the bar and around customers. When he first took the job, he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to put up with the patrons’ bullshit, but he had been doing it for more than a year now without any major hassles.

  Gibson only worked the lunch shift, and most of the customers he dealt with were generally all right: low-key folks from the neighborhood or from the offices on 15th Street, most of whom would rather read a book or paper than talk anyway. But according to Williamson, who had worked dinners at the Shelbourne for a nearly a decade, an increasing number of twenty-somethings had been stopping in at night for a cheap tune-up, in part because of City Paper ads placed by Barry, the young owner who had inherited the place from his father around eight months earlier.

  Gibson had dealt with some of these kids during his afternoon shifts. He found most of them impatient and a couple of them obnoxious, but so far he had managed to keep things in check. The tips, which cooks never saw at most restaurants, gave him a reason to watch his temper. And that motivation had intensified since he learned five months ago that his apartment building was turning into co-ops. Now, his only chance of holding onto his place, the place he had lived in ever since his mom passed away a decade ago, was if he came up with the down payment by the end of the month.

  He stood at the end of the bar and poured himself a cup of coffee.The tables were all empty and so was the bar, except for McManus, the college kid that Gibson had just carried all through the lunch shift. He was a preppy little snot who moved in slow motion behind the bar and didn’t even care enough to cut a sandwich on a bias. The word was that he had been hired because he was a family friend of the owner. That seemed logical, because Barry wasn’t much older than McManus and, in Gibson’s eyes, was just as worthless. Barry was probably locked in his upstairs office at that very moment, jerking off as usual to a copy of Golf Digest.