Shoedog

by George Pelecanos

  The clerk took the ring and glanced once at Weiner before she disappeared into the back room. Weiner took the roll from his trousers and unwound the rubber band, counting out the bills. He took what he needed for the ring and put it in his right pocket and rebanded what remained and put that in his left pocket. He looked into the mirror behind the counter.

  He wasn’t so old. At least he didn’t look his age, not fifty-five. No way did he look fifty-five. He had put on a few pounds, but on him it looked good, and the goatee he had worn for thirty years had come back in style. He had seen it on the young people, first the African-Americans and later the whites, over the last few years. He looked good anyway, and now the goatee, it made him look younger. He figured he looked good because he had never married, since married cats always looked older, on account of all that stress. Some people said it was clean living, but clean living, in his case, had nothing to do with it. Anyway, he didn’t know what kept him young, but he knew he wasn’t too old for Nita.

  That day in the coffee shop he had asked her to go to the Sonny Rollins show at One Step Down, the jazz joint in the West End. He had met her buying music at Olsson’s at Dupont Circle, where she worked as a clerk when she wasn’t studying for her undergrad degree at GW. He had been looking to pick up an old disc, “Mulligan Meets Monk,” that had been reissued on CD. Olsson’s didn’t stock the CD, but she knew of it, and he had been impressed. Her looks—dark hair, black clothes, heavy on the eyeliner, heavy in the hips—had impressed him as well. She reminded him of the zaftig beat chicks he had known in the old days, at Coffee and Confusion. The memory saddened him, but at the same time it made Weiner realize that all he wanted was to get next to it—to touch it—just once.

  But Nita had hedged on the date, telling him to swing by Friday afternoon, her next shift, where they’d discuss it. He figured she needed to think it over—the age difference, and like that—and that was natural. But the ring might help things along. The ring might close the deal.

  Three C notes seemed steep and a bit of a gamble, but that day Weiner felt lucky. He had cased both liquor stores in the morning, diagraming them and taking notes just after his visits. As usual, his memory had been dead on, his stay brief and uneventful. Afterward he had driven out to Laurel for the one o’clock post, settled in his spot in the grandstand, and quickly surveyed the form. For the first race he laid a win bet at the five-dollar window on the four horse, Arturo. Arturo was to be ridden by Prado, the hot and hotheaded Peruvian. Weiner gave equal weight to the jockeys as he did to the horses, and Prado had been his man since Desormeaux had hightailed it for Del Mar. Arturo went off at eight to two and won the six-furlong contest; Prado had pushed him to a roll at the rail.

  In the second race Weiner played the seven-two combination and hit the exacta for six hundred twenty-six dollars and twenty cents, his biggest payday in months. He would have stuck around for another race—his friend Kligman pleaded with Weiner to “parlay it,” the favorite strategy of track losers—but he had to make the two-thirty meeting. He felt relieved, really, driving to the jewelry store at Laurel Mall, that the money he had won still rested, for a change, in his pocket. He’d pick up the ring, drive out to Grimes’s house, and lay out the whole deal.

  As for the twenty grand that Grimes would give him to strategize the job, that would pay off old debts. And of course there was his debt to Grimes, for keeping the shylock’s muscle from crippling him that one time, two years back. He owed Grimes for that one still, and he supposed he would always owe him. Everyone owed Grimes something.

  The thought of it made him feel hollow, but only for a minute, when the clerk returned from the back room with the ring and placed it, beautifully wrapped, in his hand. He gave her the three hundred and asked for a receipt. Walking out the door, Weiner could only imagine the look on Nita’s face when she would unwrap the paper, and open the box. Maybe then she’d let him get next to it. Maybe then, he decided, she’d let him touch it.

  VALDEZ stared out the window of his room, stroking the long whiskers of his black mustache. His room was small, with a perpetually unmade bed and an unvarnished nightstand and bureau, and a color television on an unvarnished stand set in the corner. His .45 sat on the nightstand, under a naked-bulb lamp, next to the bed.

  Valdez didn’t mind the room. After a while he really didn’t notice the size of it or the furnishings. When he used the room, it was only to watch television or to sleep. It had been generous of Mr. Grimes to let him live there, in the back of the house, though at night he could often hear Gorman coughing into his shitty handkerchief in the next room, forcing up and then hocking phlegm. That would annoy him, the way a bug might annoy him, but Valdez would just turn up the sound on the television, and that would be that.

  Anyway, the room in this house in the country seemed a million miles from where he had been. First Mexico, then Los Angeles as a kid, then back down to Mexico, the border towns where everything—reefer, coke, pills, and women—could be bought, and everything of value needed protection. Valdez used muscle and a major set of balls there to earn his rep—he killed his first man at eighteen, one bullet to the head—until he became as valuable as that which he had been hired to protect. In Miami, in the early eighties, it had spun out of control; the ones he went up against had crazy, speed-stoked eyes. The retribution kills piled up and got bloodier—near the end, Valdez macheted a man in a dirt-floored warehouse, hacked at his shoulders and neck while the man cried out for his “mamacita”—until finally he gave up on it and drifted north, where an old contact put him on to Mr. Grimes. His decision to move on had nothing to do with fear. Valdez didn’t know fear, not like most men know fear. But he figured that the odds would catch up with him soon. And Valdez had no particular wish to die.

  Compared to his days as an enforcer, working for Mr. Grimes had been a blessing, a fat slice of angel food cake. Every year or so there would be a job, something to keep Mr. Grimes interested, though from where Valdez sat Mr. Grimes didn’t need the risk, what with all the pretty things he already owned, the horses and the blonde and the cars. But everyone had a kick, and the kick for Mr. Grimes was moving the men around the playing field, and the reasons for that did not interest Valdez. Unlike the others who had to stay, the ones who owed Mr. Grimes, Valdez stayed because he liked the life. In that way, he supposed, he owed Mr. Grimes too.

  Today, at two-thirty, Valdez would put on his black jacket and go to the meeting, and he would listen and not ask too many questions, because in the end you just shut your mouth and did the job and got out. The new one, the one with the long black hair, he bothered Valdez a little, maybe because he couldn’t read what was in the man’s eyes. And the old man—Valdez watched him now through the window, limping along the edge of the woods, smoking a cigarette—he would have to be dealt with this time. But what bothered him most today was the timing of the meeting—it would run over and cut into his show, “A Lifetime of Love.” He’d missed it yesterday, and now he was going to miss it again today. And he’d been waiting all month for Taurus, the international spy, to nail the brunette.

  Valdez sighed, stroked his mustache. He didn’t know why he got so worked up over it. Christ, the way they worked it on that show, Taurus and the brunette, they’d be in bed together for the whole goddamn month.

  POLK dragged hard on his cigarette, felt the burn as the paper touched the cork of the filter. He dropped the butt and crushed it in the grass beneath his right shoe. He exhaled the last of it, then spit into the woods. He looked at his left foot as he limped along the tree line, and cursed softly. This time of year die air was always cool and damp, and with the dampness came the pain.

  He had been a gimp for forty years, since Korea, so he had been this way for most of his adult life. He no longer thought about it, except on days like this, when the dull ache traveled up his leg, reminded him with the nagging insistence of a cold touch on his shoulder. Of course, it could have ended there, on a frozen reservoir in Korea. It could have en
ded, if not for Grimes.

  But that had been two young men, and now the men had grown old and into something else. He didn’t owe Grimes a thing, not after what Grimes had done. Not after Grimes had done the very worst thing that a man could do.

  Polk thought of Delia—she had become a truly fine-looking woman—and of Constantine, and of the look that had passed between them in the office of Grimes. Standing under the branches of a pine, thinking of Constantine, Polk had a brief but cutting rush of guilt. It wasn’t that Polk had a particular fondness for him. In the end, Constantine was no better or worse than any man, and in his drives and desires he was certainly as predictable. But he supposed that it came down to priorities. And he believed that it was still possible, perhaps for the last time, to fix what he had done, and not done, so many years ago. So he would keep pushing Constantine, and he would not think about the bad things that could happen to the young man with the long black hair.

  Polk pulled some needles from the branch that hung over his head. He rubbed the needles on his fingers, then put the fingers under his nose. He smelled the bite of green pine against the blackness of nicotine. He turned, and limped back toward the house.

  THE way Gorman saw it, the time of day didn’t matter much when a man wanted to get high. The meeting would be coming up soon, and he’d go to it, and he’d listen. A standard knockover, that’s what it was, you go in with a hard look and a drawn gun, maybe rap the barrel to someone’s head, let them feel the weight, and then you book. He’d done it enough to know the routine, and there wasn’t one good reason why he couldn’t listen to Weiner run it down without a little buzz in his head. No good reason at all. Gorman sat on the edge of his unmade bed and squeezed a line of clear glue out of the orange-and-white tube, moving the tube around in a circular motion to spread the glue into the opening of the brown paper bag. He quickly put the bag, bunched at the opening, to his face, letting the bag seal his mouth and nose. He closed his eyes and took long, deep breaths.

  When Gorman felt the rush in his head, a pleasurable pounding that seemed to levitate his skull, he took the bag away from his face and let himself drift back, until his head rested on the bed’s pillows. He opened his eyes, watched the room glide, closed his eyes again, and dropped the paper bag to the floor.

  He smiled. A poor man, living like a rich man in a country estate. A long way from the west side of Viers Mill Road in Wheaton, where he had grown up in a cramped GI-bill house, in a neighborhood of tradesmen. The old man, gaunt and chronically unemployed, had tried to raise him and his two brothers, but soon after the old lady died the boys went wild, and the old man gave up, crawling into a bottle of St. George’s scotch until his death. His older brother died too, soon after that. He had been fucking off on a construction site after dark, cooked on Schlitz and paint fumes, and trying to impress some heifer. He got his head tore off by a crane.

  Gorman joined a gang in the early sixties, a loosely knit group of greasers brought together by their distrust of foreigners and spades. They played only Motown at their parties, low-lit basement affairs where the girls wore sleeveless Banlons and heavy black eyeliner. Gorman and his boys wore baggy work pants called “Macs” from Montgomery Ward, Banlon pullovers, black high-top Chucks, and three-button black leathers. They hung out at the Cue Club in Glenmont—it was in that pool hall’s bathroom where Gorman first huffed glue—and the bowling alley at Wheaton Triangle, where they shook down junior high school kids for spare change. They always hung together.

  Gorman wondered, what happened to those boys? Some of them, he heard, bought it in Vietnam. Others became tradesmen like their fathers, mechanics mostly in the gas stations that ran along Georgia Avenue from Rockville down into the District. A couple of them did time, first for theft and later for dealing grass and dust. Suckers, all of them.

  Gorman had dropped out of Wheaton High his junior year, headed south to Daytona, where he heard about the parties and the girls and cars on the beach. He spent the next ten years dodging the draft and working a succession of odd jobs, warehousing and clerking auto and appliance parts. On the side he dealt reefer and dust and crystal meth, the cocaine of bikers and the working class. Gorman dug crank himself, but not in the same way that he dug the glue.

  In the late seventies he killed a man for money in the alley behind a bar, pushed a switchblade knife between the man’s shoulder blades as the man climbed into the saddle of his bike. It had been easy, and he did it a couple of times after that, always for money, and always from behind. Gorman had always been skinny, never a fighter, though he was good with a gun and a knife.

  Some years later Gorman met Valdez as Valdez headed north, passing through Daytona, shacking up with mutual friends. Valdez told him about a man named Mr. Grimes, just outside of D.C., who was looking for hired help. Gorman left with Valdez, as now he felt tired and too old for the Florida scene. He had stayed and worked for Grimes ever since, and it had been just fine.

  There in that room in the back of the house, Gorman had everything he needed. At forty-seven, he had lost interest in most things, including women. Women had never dug him in the first place, he knew that, and anyway it was easier to think about a broad and jerk his dick over the toilet bowl than it was to talk to one. Life was just that simple.

  All he needed, Gorman figured, as these thoughts spun dreamily inside his head, was a place to sleep, a little spending money, and the glue. The glue would get him through all of it, the hassles and the orders and the jobs. The glue would take him away. The glue was good.

  JACKSON pulled the car over to the curb on Wisconsin Avenue and cut the engine. He looked through the windshield, took in the block: upper Northwest, a row of specialty, white-interest retailers—camping gear, Persian rugs, gourmet baked goods, women’s books—and ethnic restaurants, pizza parlors, and beer halls servicing the students of American U. In the middle of it, all glass and fluorescent banners, stood a liquor store a quarter length of the block. The double glass doors swung in and out with regularity, even on this weekday, alkies and society folk and students alike cradling their brown paper bags like babies as they carried the goods to their cars.

  Jackson pushed his shades up on the bridge of his nose, straightened the Hoyas cap on his head, and glanced once more at the sign over the doors: Uptown Liquors. So this was the motherfucker he was going to hit on Friday.

  He pocketed the ignition key and got out of the car, walked across the sidewalk to the doors, pushed on the doors, and stepped inside. The first thing he thought, the way the aisles lined up, the big selection, the bright tags, die cashier stand with the conveyer belt to move the juice along: this was a supermarket for booze.

  Jackson stepped around the maze of wine displays in the center of the store, barrels filled with bottles capped by neon tags. The liquor racks ran behind the wine displays, and past the liquor a wall of glass-fronted coolers stocked with beer. He headed for the brown liquors in the center aisle, passed bourbon and scotch, and settled in on the brandies. He pretended to study the brandy bottles, looking over the top of his shades to the sales counter against the wall.

  Three men stood behind the counter, speaking loudly to the customers and each other, ringing sales on two old-fashioned registers. Shelved behind them: miniatures and pints, expensive champagnes, cordials, and liquor in seasonal, decorative decanters. An old women in a red sweater stood at the front cashier station, ready to ring, but the store action centered on the counter.

  The way it worked, the customers came in, stepped up to the counter, ordered from one of the loud men, and the men—Jews, Jackson guessed, two old and one young—would bullshit about the quality or the price, maybe suggest something else, and then the men would scream the order toward the entrance to the back room, at the end of the counter. After that a black man would carry the order out to the counter, dolly it out if it was more than one case of beer, and when the customer had paid the tab the black man would take it out to the customer’s car. The customers came to Uptown Li
quors for that ritual. Jackson could see that they came here for the show.

  The two older men, with their double-knit pants pulled high over their soft bellies, they would be no problem. The younger one, with his Rolex and diamond pinky ring, he had nothing, a cocky strut and a big mouth, but nothing underneath. The brother, the one the others called Isaac—“A case of long-neck Buds up front, Isaac, we need it now, the gentleman’s in a hurry!”—he’d be the one to watch.

  Jackson studied Isaac—the steady eyes, the solid walk—and decided he’d seen enough. Jackson did not step up to the register, where the lenses of two wall-mounted video cameras remained focused. He turned away from the brandies and walked down the aisle, negotiated the wine displays, and exited the store.

  Jackson fed the meter and sat in his car for the next half hour. Sometime around one o’clock Isaac walked out the front door of Uptown Liquors and into the small garage. A minute later Isaac drove his Monte Carlo out of the garage and headed downtown. Jackson pulled away from the curb and followed.

  Jackson sat low and relaxed in the driver’s seat, stayed two cars back. This liquor store thing, it looked easier now than he had first imagined. If this boy Isaac fell in line, then the whole deal would be down. Maybe nobody, except of course the old man, would get hurt. Jackson would be a hero, might even get off the hook with Grimes, even things out after Grimes had bailed him out on his card game debt. Not to mention the thirty grand. The thirty grand was nothin’ but sweet.

  Jackson tailed Isaac east, across town to 13th Street, south on 13th to Fairmont. Isaac drove to the middle of the residential block and parked. Jackson stopped at the top of the street and pulled over. Fairmont Street consisted of row houses sectioned off into apartments, glass and litter, young men wearing beepers, and children playing ball on the blacktop. It was exactly the kind of dead-end bullshit Jackson had come back to after Vietnam, before he got hip to the B & E and then the fencing business. Those had been the best days, the seventies, when it had all been business—before the cocaine and the cards.