by Neely Tucker
Curious leaned out of the window, tilting his head back up the street. “Come on up here,” he said, that rasp, “and leave my sister the fuck out of it.”
• • •
They parked on Seventh SE, a dark, narrow little street of row houses, about halfway between Sully’s place and the James Creek projects, which is to say, about three-quarters of a mile from either. Curious had killed the engine, sitting there behind the wheel, blowing a spliff with the window rolled down. Sully was sitting on the passenger’s side, window rolled up, cycle helmet at his feet. He waved a hand in front of him, clearing the cloud, and told Curious one more time that if he wanted his information about what the police knew about the Hall brothers shooting, then he was going to cough up some intel, too.
“You wanted to know what happened, you shoulda gone down there and asked them,” Sully said. “That’s work I did. So, hey, you want me to talk to you, you talk to me.”
“That what you do with Sly?” Curious rasped. The man’s eyes were red, bleary, his mind floating off somewhere, high as a kite.
“Go ask Sly, you wanna know his business,” Sully said. “You want to know what John Parker and MPD know, what he told me he knows, anyway? We trade. Capiche?”
“Whatever.” A wave of the hand.
“What I got for you,” Sully said, “the first part, is that they got the murder weapon on the Hall brothers killing.”
Curious looked down, remembering his joint, sucking in another toke, blowing it back out, slow and easy, the sodium-vapor streetlight up the block casting an orange glow into the car. It caught him about the shoulder, leaving his face in the gloom.
“Yeah?” he finally grunted. “Well, good. Good. T-Money and them, rolling up on Tony and Carlos. That shit’s wrong. Two and two, even MPD can see that’s four.”
“That right?” Sully said. “T-Money shot Tony and Carlos?”
George nodded, rasped, “Straight up.”
Sully didn’t hesitate, because this was it right here, right now. He rolled down his window to let the smoke clear.
“Bullshit,” he said, waving an arm again, clearing smoke, “and you know it. T-Money don’t have a thing to do with this.”
Curious looked over at him. “That right?” That low rasp, sandpaper over steel, mocking him.
“Yeah,” Sully said. “It is. It totally is. I’m interested in, like, actual facts. So I want you to tell me, you know, about something you do know about. I want you to tell me about the night Billy Ellison came down to the Bend and shot himself. Right in the head. You were there. You watched him do it.”
There was a long pause in the car, the air heavy with tension and ganja. Curious, playing it straight, not giving him anything, looking out his window, away from him.
“What make you say that?”
“Because, Curious, he shot himself with the same gun, the very same damn gun, that was used to kill the Hall brothers. That’s weird, don’t you think? One gun, three shootings, same place? Plus, that piece is something like sixty years old. Didn’t you notice, when you picked it up after Billy shot himself, that it was an antique? It was his granddad’s gun from the military. I mean, I don’t know that I would have thought about it, right up until I saw you you pick up Antoine’s gun after you shot him. You did the same when Billy shot himself. Picked up the dead man’s gun.”
Another long, dry, dark silence. The night spun out, slow, dark, eternal, threatening.
“Dude didn’t say shit till the end,” Curious began, the buzz taking him over, scrunching down farther in the seat, talking for three minutes, now five, the sound of his voice low and steady in the silence of the car, him looking up and out the windshield, like there was something up there in the overhanging trees, going on and on in an endless monotone.
“And he was a skinny little motherfucker, you know that? Not big. Not that big at all. He just come down there that night, looking around. Went down to the water, came back up, went back. The Bend, people do weird shit, crack fiends, man, but this . . . it was like”—he took another toke, pressing his mind for some sort of reference—“like a dog, you know what I’m saying? Looking for something he buried? Like that.”
“And he wasn’t saying nothing?”
“Not shit. That’s what I’m talking about. Like he didn’t even see nobody.”
“How long had he been coming down there?”
“Never seen him before in life. Me or Antoine either one.”
“He hadn’t been scoring down there at all? Wasn’t buying quantity?”
“You can’t hear? What did I just say?”
“Family tells me that he was moving coke, weed.”
“Not from the Bend he wasn’t.”
“Okay, so.”
“Okay, so, Antoine?” Curious licked his lips, worked his tongue up against his teeth, like he had something stuck on the top side and was trying to push it out. “He was pissed about the boy coming down there to start with, you hear? Like he could just show up? Like he owned the place? We walked up on him when he was way down at the water. The way we did you, that time you showed up. Brother man don’t even turn around. Antoine, he says, Hey motherfucker, I’m talking to you. Shoves him, knocks him two steps, nearly in the water. Then boyfriend turns around and he was crying, just—”
“Billy cried because Antoine shoved him?”
“—crying and—what? No, see, nah. He’s already snotty nosed. Boy was touched, you ask me. So, Antoine, this just pisses him off, the boy acting like a little bitch. He shucks out the Glock and says, Get your ass up and outta here before I clock you, you know? And brother man says, he says, I got my own goddamn gun! And then pulls it out and blam, right in the head. For fucking real. Shot hisself about three seconds before Ant woulda done it for him.”
Sully was steadily looking at him, assessing this. Curious was still slouched back in the seat, the blunt almost gone, the death of Billy Ellison recounted—sad, desolate, forlorn, possibly the only time anyone would ever hear it. Sully did not doubt a word of it.
“Then y’all threw him in the water,” Sully said.
“Ant kicked him two three times, ’cause he was pissed off, but yeah. Tossed him. Nobody wants five-oh walking around up in the Bend, poking their snouts where they don’t got no business.”
“And that left his gun right there.”
Curious flicked a glance out the window, yawning, tired of this. “Where else would it go?”
“And you picked it up.”
Curious cut off his yawn, looking over at him, his eyes bleary in the gloom but a glint underneath the haze.
“Somebody picked it up,” Sully said, “and used it to shoot the Hall brothers. And since Billy’s gone? And since you shot Ant in the head the other day? That leaves you, Curious. Who else could have plausibly picked it up?”
That did it, the glint in the eyes sparking into malice, his face tightening, Curious sitting up in the seat, the shadows in the car moving, shifting, his face hard to make out.
“The fuck you say.”
“The fuck I don’t. You wanted me to tell you what the police knew. I did.”
“You said they found the piece. You ain’t said—”
“They found the piece just like you wanted. You flipped it over there in the rocks, dropped it there, somewhere it looked like somebody tried to get rid of it. That was good. That was smart. You wanted them to go chasing a gun that couldn’t be traced, some crazy-ass old gun that looks like it belongs in a museum.”
“I done—”
“You’re taking over the Bend, Curious,” Sully whispered. “It’s you.”
Silence. Curious eye-fucking him hard, the ganja haze burned away now.
“You been doing it for a solid month,” Sully said. “Dee Dee shot his mouth off about being Sly Hastings’s boy. About being Sly’s muscle for moving in on t
he Bend. Ha. Dumbass. You saw that opportunity for yourself. It was just sitting there, once he’d pissed on the South Caps and they’d shot up his car. You had free license, man. Everybody was going to think it was them. So you popped Dee and you went to Sly and said, Hey, I’m your man. Moved right on up.”
Curious just looked at him, glaring,
“First time I saw you and Sly, that’s what Sly says, you’re his man. Then you capped Ant, right in front of me, so you can tell Sly you were getting me through the park all safe and sound. That was a nice little play there. Two down. And then the big kill, the Hall brothers. You get them to come outside, who knows what for, and bam bam. Who else would they have trusted enough to come outside on the spur of the moment, and let walk behind them?”
“You—”
“You’re Michael fucking Corleone, laying waste to the five families. You run the Bend now. Does Sly know? ’Cause I’m thinking he’ll cancel you out just for popping Dee without—”
“You think you know this.” That rasp coming at him in the half dark. “And you ain’t—”
“I didn’t know it until John Parker told me about the pistol they found. He thinks it’s a big-time clue, bless his heart. I like the man. But it’s just going to throw the cops off, because it’s never going to be traced. They want to trace it so bad, peg it to one of you lowlifes down there in the Bend. But they can’t. Never will. You’re going to walk, Curious.”
“You talking out your neck.”
Sully took a breath and let it out. It was all so clear now.
“That gun Billy used, that fossil? It belonged to his grandfather, in World War Two. It was some sort of collectible. Maybe Granddad got it issued to him on the luck of the draw, or maybe he was a collector and bought it. But when he died? Billy’s dad inherited it. It was a big deal, a family heirloom. Billy’s dad, he couldn’t get over it. I read all about it in the family papers. Told Billy all about it, like this was his birthright. Supposed to be a, a, what, a man-to-man thing. Kept it in a velvet-lined box on the top shelf of his walk-in closet.
“Then Daddy died, in a car wreck, and Billy’s mom, she kept it right up there on the same shelf. Told Billy all about it. Like it was magic. A birthright. Which is where Billy plucked it from, two nights before he came down here and shot himself. He was going loco at the end. He’d stopped taking his meds. He liked the mind-fuck historical aspect of his own suicide—putting an end to his family’s bloodline with a family heirloom.”
“You—you—there ain’t no way you know—”
“Sure I do,” Sully said, opening the car door, getting his cycle helmet off the floor. “I’ve got the case the gun was in. It’s a little wooden box. Billy wrote the whole thing down—the gun, taking it from his mother’s house, all that. He just didn’t know I was going to be the one to wind up with it. He thought it would be Elliot.”
He got out then, closed the door behind him, felt his knee twinge on him and bent it, and just that fast the passenger door swung open behind him. Curious had slid across the seat, pulled out a gun, and had it up and pointed, his jawline set.
“That gun, what you saying, the family’s going to ID as soon as they hear about it,” he said, “and you saying that’s gonna lead them right back—”
“No no no, you not listening,” Sully said. “That’s your break. The family has known it’s been gone since the night Billy shot himself. They’ve known it was suicide, the gun he used, the whole time. They found out Granddad’s gun was missing? Then they set him up, you hear? All that ‘Our Billy was a drug dealer’ routine? It was bullshit, to protect the family’s history. They sold him out. So trust me on this. They don’t want anybody to know anything different. They ain’t never, ever going to ID that gun.”
He took two steps, then turned back.
“And, hey, motherfucker? You point a gun at me one more time? Ima tell Sly you capped Dee Dee. Your sister, George? You know what Sly’ll do to your sister?”
THIRTY-NINE
IT TOOK SOME convincing with Sly to backstop him on the move he had set up. It took another mention of Noel Pittman and what he knew about it. But after a few days of no-bullshit hardball, and a few more days of scouting, Sly Hastings and Lionel reluctantly drove Sully out to Shellie Stevens’s house in Great Falls, the Virginia suburb of the posh and posher, late on a Sunday afternoon, neither of them wanting to be there.
They were all riding in a black Lincoln Town Car with stolen plates. Sly had borrowed the car for the afternoon from a guy who owed him, then jacked the plates. They’d picked up Sully a few minutes later. Sly started to explain the whole situation and Sully said he didn’t even want to know.
“You got to admit, it’s a pretty good cover,” Sly said. “We roll up on the man’s house, looking like we just got out of a private jet at Dulles.”
“The last thing anybody in Great Falls is going to look at,” Sully said, “is a white man getting out of a chauffeured Town Car.”
Sly, riding shotgun, turned to look at him in the backseat. “I didn’t even know you had a suit. You got your piece in there?”
Sully tapped the coat’s outer left pocket. “I’m not gonna need it.”
“What about his wife? Kids?”
“Wife goes to the Kennedy Center every Sunday afternoon, this classical concert series. She’s an official patron. Kids grown and gone.”
Shellie Stevens’s house was a monstrous stucco thing on a leafy street full of them. It was set back from the road on several acres. It was three stories, set among towering oaks with evergreens lining the drive. Lionel pulled up in the circular driveway, right around the fountain, and parked. Wearing a black suit and a chauffeur’s cap, he walked to the front door and, using what appeared to be a suction cup and a glass-cutting knife, sliced a quick circle in the glass, pulled it back with the suction cup, reached in, and turned the dead bolt. He poked his head in the door, called out, heard nothing, and then walked back to the car. He opened the rear passenger door. Sully, wearing a black two-button Versace suit and carrying a leather briefcase, got out and walked smartly into the house like he was ten minutes late.
Sly and Lionel pulled out of the drive. They would tool around the neighborhood until Sully paged them. Then they’d circle back through and he had better be there when they did.
The house was lovely. He liked it. He really did. Stevens—or more likely his wife, or even more likely her decorator—had good taste, you had to give that up. The piedmont red in the dining room gave him ideas for his own place. The hallways were wide, the wooden floors polished to a scream.
Sully went to the kitchen—big as a tennis court—found the crystal, got a glass, and used the ice maker in the fridge for four, then five cubes.
The liquor took a minute to find but it was in a built-in cabinet between the kitchen and dining room. Stevens, pretentious little prick that he was, apparently drank mostly Scotch. But there was a bottle of Maker’s Mark, its red wax seal peeking out from behind the Scotch and in front of the mixers. Not Basil’s, but it would do.
He poured two fingers over the ice, picked up the briefcase, and went to the living room, setting the ice-filled glass on the coffee table—he was guessing teak here—so that it would be sure to leave a water mark. Then he opened the briefcase and sat back to wait.
A little before five, the garage door opened. He walked to the windows and saw a black Jaguar pull in. He settled back on the loveseat. A few minutes later, Stevens came in through a side door from the garage, wearing ridiculous golf pants and a light green knit shirt, visor still on his head. He had taken his golf spikes off and was holding them in his hand, padding across the floor in his socks.
He went to the kitchen and poured something from the refrigerator and was about to walk up the stairs when he rounded the corner, looked up, and saw Sully. The glass dropped from his hand, liquid and ice sloshing out, glass shattering on the fl
oor.
“Counselor,” Sully said, with a slight nod.
“How did—how did—”
“The same way your assholes got into my place,” he said. “But I didn’t fuck up your car, like you did my bike, and God knows I didn’t waste your whiskey like you did mine. I just had one. Well, two. Since you took so long.” He held up his glass, nodding. “You should really drink better shit. Not that there’s—”
Stevens, ashen, moved across the room. “The police will take care of this. Of you. I can’t—”
“Which ‘this’ are we talking about? You want to tell them about ‘this’?”
He took the wooden box that had held the Singer .45 from his briefcase and set it on the coffee table in front of him. He lifted the lid. It was, of course, empty.
Stevens stopped short, his eyes going from searching for the phone to the pistol case.
“You been looking for this so hard,” Sully said, “since the night Billy argued with you and Delores and ran out of the house with it.”
“You—”
“Billy took the pistol out of this case,” Sully said, “and shot himself in the head with it. You knew that from the beginning. His last little fuck-you to the both of you. Going to the Bend so you’d be sure not to miss the point. Like you could possibly.”
Stevens’s eyes had gone to the case, not seeing anything else.
“So, you want to call the police, partner,” Sully continued, “you go right the fuck ahead. You call John Parker, head of D.C. Homicide. You tell him you found evidence that Billy Ellison was a suicide, not a homicide. Then you tell him the same weapon was used to execute the Hall brothers in the Bend a few days ago. Closing out three homicides—brother, I can’t tell you how happy he’s going to be to hear that.”
Stevens stared, his lower jaw starting to tremble.
“Come on, Shellie. You repeat the end of everything I say. That would be ‘Hear that.’ Or do you want to sit down and let me explain the end of your professional life to you?”