Hell To Pay

by George Pelecanos

  “Do I think it’s right? I don’t know… Where are you, Derek? You don’t sound right.”

  “Never mind where I’m at.” Strange shifted his weight on the bench seat. “I love you, Janine.”

  “Us lovin’ each other is not the issue, Derek.”

  “Good bye, baby.”

  Strange cut the call. He stared up the street at the row house. If he was going to do this, then he had to do it now. He found his notepad beside him, and on the top sheet, the phone number of the house. He punched the numbers into his cell. As he did, he went over in his head what he had planned. It was all risk, a long play. He couldn’t waver or stumble now.

  The phone rang on the other end. A silhouette moved behind the curtains of the row house window.

  “Yeah.”

  “Garfield Potter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Lorenze Wilder. Joe Wilder. Those names mean anything to you?”

  “Who?”

  “Lorenze Wilder. Joe Wilder.”

  “How’d you get my number?”

  “Not too hard, once you find out where a person lives. I been followin’ you, Garfield.”

  “Man, who the fuck is this?”

  “Derek Strange.”

  “That supposed to mean somethin’ to me?”

  “If you saw me, you’d remember. I was coachin’ the football team that little boy played on. The boy you killed.”

  “I ain’t kill no boy.”

  “I’m the one you and your partners were crackin’ on, callin’ me Fred Sanford and shit while I was walking to my car. Y’all were smokin’ herb in a beige Caprice. You and a boy with cornrows, and another boy, had a long nose. Remember me now? ’Cause I sure do remember you.”

  “So?”

  Strange heard a crack in Potter’s voice.

  “I followed Lorenze and the boy the night you killed them. I was responsible for that boy, and I followed. Only, you weren’t riding in a beige Caprice that night. It was a white Plymouth with a police package. Isn’t that right, Garfield?”

  “White Plymouth? That shit was on the news, any motherfucker own a television set gonna know that. You got somethin’ serious you want to say, then say it, old-time.”

  “Maybe you want to say something, Garfield. You kill a boy-”

  “Told you I ain’t killed no kid.”

  “You kill a boy, Garfield, and you got to have somethin’ to say.”

  Save yourself. If you want to live, young man, then now’s the time.

  “What, some young nigger dies out here, I’m supposed to cry? I be dyin’ young, too, most likely; ain’t nobody gonna shed no tears for me.”

  Strange spoke softly as he closed his eyes. “I want to get paid.”

  “What? I just told you-”

  “I’m tellin’ you, I was a witness to the murders. I saw the event with my own eyes.”

  Strange listened to the hiss of dead air. Finally, Potter spoke. “You so sure of what you saw, why ain’t you gone to the police? Get your reward money and slither on back into that hole you came out of?”

  “Because I can get more from you.”

  “Why you think that?”

  “Drug dealer like you, all that cash you got? Told you, I been followin’ you, Potter.”

  “How much more?”

  “Double the ten they’re offering. Make it twenty.” Strange squinted. “Since you been insulting my intelligence, might as well go ahead and make it twenty-five.”

  “Ain’t even no murder gun no more. And I know you ain’t gonna try and play me the fool and claim you got photographs or sumshit like that.”

  “Not photographs. A videotape. I own an eight-millimeter camera with a three-sixty lens. I was parked a whole block back from that ice-cream shop on Rhode Island, but with that zoom the tape came out clear as day.”

  “Tape can be doctored. Bullshit like that gets thrown out of court every day. Truth is, you can’t prove a thing.”

  “I can try,” said Strange.

  More silence. “Aiight, then. Maybe we should hook up and talk.”

  “I don’t want to talk about nothin’. Just bring the money. I’ll give you the tape and we will be done.”

  “Where?”

  “I got a house I keep as a rental property; it’s unoccupied right now. Figure you’re not stupid enough to try somethin’ in a residential neighborhood. I got some business I got to take care of first, so it’s gonna take me about an hour, hour and a half to get out there.”

  “Where is it?”

  Strange gave Potter the directions. He repeated them slowly so that Potter could write them down.

  “You still drivin’ that black Cadillac that was parked outside Roosevelt?”

  “You do remember me, then.”

  “You still drivin’ it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I see any kind of police-lookin’ vehicles outside that house, I am gone. I don’t want to see nothin’ but that Caddy, hear?”

  “Bring the money, and come with your two partners. I want to keep my eye on all of you at once.”

  “Ain’t but two of us now,” said Potter.

  “Hour and a half,” said Strange. “I’ll see you then.”

  Strange ended the call, ignitioned the Chevy, and put it in gear. He drove quickly up to Buchanan, where he washed his face, changed his shirt, and fed Greco.

  Back on the street, Strange walked toward his Brougham. Quinn had parked his car behind the Cadillac earlier that morning. The Chevelle was gone.

  THE guns Garfield Potter had bought were a six-shot.38 Special and a.380 Walther, the PPK double action with the seven-shot capacity. The revolver, a blue Armscor with a rubber grip, was for Potter. He stayed away from automatics, fearing they would jam.

  Potter checked the load on the.38. He jerked his wrist and snapped the cylinder shut. He had been practicing this action in the mirror just this afternoon.

  “You ready, Dirty?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Little.

  He was sitting on the couch, thinkin’ on Brianna, how if she was here now how good it’d be to bust it out. He was flyin’ like the eagle behind some hydro he’d just smoked, and his eyelids were heavy. He was happy. Hungry, too. He didn’t really want to go out, but Garfield did. So there it was.

  Little looked down at the automatic he held loosely in his hand. The grip was checkered plastic and had the Walther logo on it, the word written inside a kind of flag, like, looked like it was blowin’ in a breeze. The safety was grooved, and there was this thing on the side, like a little sign, showed you when you had put one in the chamber, in case you forgot. Walther, they made a pretty gun.

  “Dirty? You with me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on, then,” said Potter, fitting his skully onto his head. He picked up two pairs of thin leather gloves off the table, one pair for him and one for Little. He knew Carlton would not think to bring a pair himself. “Let’s get this done.”

  Little got up off the couch and looked in a mirror they had over a table by the stairs. His cornrows were lookin’ raggedy and fucked. He wondered if maybe he ought to do those twisties in his hair, the short tips, like he’d seen the fellas around do. Little realized he had been staring at himself for a while and he chuckled. It sounded like a snort.

  “Let’s go, Dirty.”

  “Yeah, aiight.”

  Little got into his leather and holstered the Walther under his shirt. Potter put his leather on and dropped the.38 in its side pocket. He looked at Little and smiled.

  “Damn, boy, you just smoke too much of that shit, don’t you?”

  “It’s good to me, D. Wish you had a player in that hooptie you bought, though. We could listen to some beats on the way out the county.”

  “We’ll let Flexx roll on ninety-five point five. Anyway, I be havin’ a Lex next time, with the Bose system in it, too.”

  “You been talkin’ about that nice whip for, like, forever, man. When you gonna get it?”<
br />
  “Soon.”

  Little and Potter laughed.

  “Let’s go,” said Potter. “We need to take care of this tonight.”

  “Maybe we’ll peep Charles while we’re out.”

  “Coon’s just hidin’ somewhere, you know this.” Potter pulled his car keys from the pocket of his jeans. “We do find him, we gonna down him, too.”

  Little head-motioned to the TV set, a UPN show playing with the volume up. “Should I turn it off?”

  “Nah” said Potter. “We ain’t gonna be gone all that long.”

  They walked from the row house, the laugh track from the sitcom fading as they shut the door behind them.

  QUINN did push-ups in his apartment while “Jackson Cage” played loud from his speakers. He did five sets of fifty and stopped when he had broken a sweat and felt the burn in his pecs. When he came out of the shower he dropped a Steve Earle into his player and listened to “The Unrepentant” as he dressed. His blood was up sufficiently now. He could feel his sweat again, cool beneath his flannel shirt.

  Quinn slipped his cell into his jeans, put on his leather, and dropped a pair of cuffs into the side pocket. He locked the apartment down and walked out into the night air. A kid on the sidewalk nodded in his direction and Quinn said, “Hey,” and kept walking without a pause in his step.

  He got under the wheel of the Chevelle and fitted his key to the ignition. Quinn cooked it and headed downtown.

  chapter 29

  THE man at the used-car lot on Blair Road had told Garfield Potter that there might be some white smoke at first, coming out the exhaust pipes of the ’88 Ford Tempo he was about to sell him, but not to worry.

  “It just needs a good highway run,” said the man, some kind of Arab, or a Paki, maybe; Potter couldn’t tell one from the other. “Blow the cobwebs out, and it’s going be just like new.”

  Potter knew the man was lying, but the price was right, and anyway, he was lookin’ for something wouldn’t attract much attention. An ’88 Tempo? That was just about as no-attention-gettin’ a motherfucker as you could get.

  Looking in the rearview, going east on New York Avenue, he could see the white smoke trailing out behind the Ford. Carlton Little had made mention of it, as he always reminded Potter that what they were rolling in was a hoop, but he hadn’t said much after that.

  Little had turned the radio up loud. Flexx had a set going on PGC, the same list they played over and over every night, their most-requested jams. It had gone from Mystikal to R. Kelly to Erykah Badu since they’d left the house. Little had been kind of bobbing his head up and down, the same way no matter the beats, all the way. Potter didn’t bother talkin’ to him when he was chronicked out all the way, like he was now.

  As he drove down the road, Potter saw a woman outside one of those welfare motels they had on New York. Woman had a boy by the hand and a cigarette hanging out her mouth, and she was leading the kid across the lot. Potter could see the boy’s shirt, had one of those Pokémon characters on it, sumshit like that.

  Potter had had a shirt with E.T. on the front of it when he was a kid. He was too young to have seen the movie in a theater, but his mother had bought the video for him from the Safeway on Alabama Avenue, and he had just about wore that tape out. He really loved that part where the boy kind of flew up in the sky on his bicycle against that big old moon. For a long time Potter had thought that if he had a special bike like that boy did, he could fly away, too. Until this man who was always hangin’ around the apartment laughed at him one night when he talked about it, called him a dumb-ass little kid.

  “You ain’t flyin’ no goddamn where,” said the man, Potter still remembering his words. “You a project boy, and a project boy is all you will be.”

  His mother should’ve said something to that man. Told him to shut his mouth, that her boy could do anything he wanted to do. That he could fly against the moon, even, if he had a mind to. But she hadn’t said a thing. Maybe she knew the man was right.

  Potter got the Tempo on the Beltway and forced the car up to sixty-five. The new Destiny’s Child was on the radio. Little was bobbing his head, kind of staring out through the windshield, his mouth open, his eyes set.

  Potter’s mother, she had this smell about her, sweet, like strawberries, somethin’ like that. It was these oils she used to wear. He remembered when she used to hold his hand like that woman was holdin’ that kid’s hand back in that lot. He could close his eyes and recall the way it felt. She had calluses on her palms from work, but her fingers were cushioned, like, sorta like that quilt blanket she’d cover him with at night. Her hand was always warm, like bein’ under that blanket was warm, too. And sometimes when he couldn’t sleep she’d sit by his bed, smoke a cigarette, and talk to him till he got drowsy. Once in a while, even now, he’d smell cigarette smoke somewhere, maybe it was the same brand she’d smoked, he didn’t know, but it would remind him of her, sitting by his bed. When he was a kid and she was there for him, before she fell in love with that pipe. Forgetting she had a kid still needed her love, too.

  But fuck it, you know. He wasn’t no motherfuckin’ kid no more.

  “Dirty,” said Potter.

  “Huh?”

  “Read them directions to me, man, tell me where we at.”

  Little squinted as he picked up the paper in his lap and tried to read Potter’s handwriting, nearly illegible, in the dark of the car.

  “Take the next exit,” he said. “Take the one goes east.”

  They took the exit and the road off of it, brightly lit at first and then dark where the county had ended the lamps. They went along woods and athletic complexes and communities with gates.

  “You ever think of your moms, Dirty?”

  “My mother?” said Little. “I don’t know. I think of my aunt some, ’cause she owes me money.” He smiled as he heard the first few notes of a song coming from the radio. “This is that new Toni Braxton joint right here, ‘Just be a Man’? I’d be a man to her, she let me.”

  Potter didn’t know why he bothered talking to Carlton. But he figured he’d keep hangin’ with him anyhow. He didn’t have Dirty, he didn’t have no one at all.

  “Where we at?” said Potter.

  Little looked at the notepaper. “Turn ought to be comin’ up, past some church on the right-hand side.” Little pointed through the windshield. “There go the church, right up there.”

  A half mile past the church, Potter made a turn into an ungated, unmarked community of large houses with plenty of space in between them. Many of the houses were dark, but that didn’t mean anything. It was a Monday night, and it had gotten late.

  “Right turn up there,” said Little. “Then a left.”

  Potter made the first turn. Some light from a corner lamppost, made to look like one of those antique jobs, bled into the car and cast yellow on his face. Then his face was greenish from the light drifting off the dash.

  “You know what to do,” said Potter, “we get in there.”

  Potter made the second turn.

  Little pushed out his hips, withdrew his Walther from where he had fitted it, and racked the slide.

  “Kill Old-time,” he said, refitting the gun under his shirt.

  “Once we get the video,” said Potter, “we’ll down him quick. Put a couple in his head and get out.”

  Little put on his gloves. He held the wheel steady as Potter did the same. They were on a cul-de-sac now that had only three houses set on oversize lots. The first house was dark inside, with only a lamp on over the front door. They passed the second house, completely dark, with two black Mercedes sedans parked in its circular driveway.

  “There’s the Caddy,” said Little, chinning toward the black Brougham parked in the circular drive in front of the last house on the street.

  Potter parked the Ford along the curb and killed its engine.

  They walked over grass and asphalt, then grass again, as they neared the steps of the brick colonial. The first-floor interior
of the house was fully lit. An attached garage with a row of small rectangular windows across the top of its door was lit, too.

  Potter and Little stood beneath a portico marking the center of the house. At Potter’s gesture, Little rang the doorbell. Through leaded glass, Potter could see the refracted image of a man wearing black coming down a hall. The door opened. The football coach, the one who called himself Strange, stood in the frame.

  “Come on in,” said Strange.

  They stepped into a large foyer. Strange closed the door and stood before them.

  Potter licked his lips. “Somethin’ you want to say to me?”

  “Just wanted to have a look at you.”

  “You had it. Let’s get on about our business.”

  “You got the money?”

  “In my jacket, chief.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “When I see the tape.”

  Strange breathed out slow. “Okay, then. Let’s go.”

  “Hold up. Want to make sure you’re not strapped.”

  Strange spread his black leather jacket and held it open. Little stepped forward and frisked him like he’d seen it done on TV. He nodded to his partner, letting him know that Strange was unarmed.

  “Follow me back,” said Strange. “I’ve got a studio in the garage. The tape is back there.”

  They walked down one of the halls framing the center staircase, leading to a kitchen and then a living area housing an entertainment center and big cushiony furniture.

  “Thought you said this house was unoccupied,” said Potter.

  “I rent it furnished,” said Strange over his shoulder.

  And it’s all high money, too, thought Potter. And then he thought, Somethin’ about this setup ain’t right.

  “What you do to get this?” said Potter, elbowing Little, who was clumsily bumping along by his side, away.

  “I own a detective agency,” said Strange. “Ninth and Upshur.”

  “Yeah,” said Potter, “but what’s your game? I mean, you can’t be havin’ all this with a square’s job.”

  “I find people,” said Strange.

  They passed a door that was ajar and kept going, Strange stepping down into a kind of laundry room, then heading for another door and saying, “It’s right in here.”