George Pelecanos: Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go

The Spot cooked during the lunch rush that day. Darnell’s special, a thick slice of meat loaf with mashed potatoes and gravy, moved quickly, and he was sliding them onto the reach-through with fluid grace. Ramon bused the tables and kept just enough dishes and silverware washed to handle the turns. Our new lunch waitress, Anna Wang, a tough little Chinese-American college student, worked the small dining room adjacent to the bar.

Anna stepped up to the service bar, called, “Ordering!” She pulled a check from her apron, blew a strand of straight black hair out of her eyes while she made some hash marks on the check. I free-poured vodka into a rocks glass and cranberry-juiced it for color. Then I poured a draft and carried the mug and the glass down to Anna, a lit Camel in my mouth. I placed the drinks on her cocktail tray just as she speared a swizzle stick into the vodka.

Anna said, “How about some of that, Nick?”

I took the cigarette out of my mouth and put it between her lips. She drew on it once, let smoke pour from her nostrils, and hit it again as I plucked it out. She nodded and carried off the tray. I watched Ramon go out of his way to brush her leg with his as he passed with a bus tray of dirty dishes. Anna ignored him and kept moving.

“Another martini for me, Nick,” said Melvin, the house crooner, whose stool was by the service bar. I poured some rail gin into an up glass and let a drop or two of dry vermouth fall into the glass. I served it neatly on a bev nap, watching Melvin’s lips move to the Shirley Horn vocals coming from the Spot’s deck, and then I heard Darnell’s voice boom from the kitchen over the rattle of china and the gospel music of his own radio: “Food up!”

I snatched it off the reach-through and walked down the bar toward Happy, our resident angry alki, seated alone, always alone. On my trip, I stopped to empty the ashtray of a gray beard named Dave, who was quietly reading a pulp novel and drinking coffee at the bar, his spectacles low-riding his nose, doing his solitary, on-the-wagon thing. Some ashes floated down into Happy’s plate, and I blew them off before I placed the plate down in front of him. Happy looked down mournfully at the slab of meat garnished with the anemic sprig of wilted parsley and the gravy pooled in the gluey mashed potatoes. His hand almost but not quite fell away from the glass in his grip.

“This looks like dog shit,” he muttered.

“You want another drink, Happy?”

“Yeah,” he said with a one o’clock slur. “And this time, put a little liquor in it.”

I prepared his manhattan (an ounce of rail bourbon with a cherry dropped in it, no vermouth) and placed it on a moldy coaster advertising some sort of black Sambuca we did not stock. Then I heard Anna’s tired voice from down the bar: “Ordering!” I moved to the rail and fixed her drinks.

That’s the way it went for the rest of the afternoon. Buddy and Bubba, two GS-9 rednecks, came in at the downslope of the rush and split a couple of pitchers. They argued over sports trivia the entire time with a pompadoured dude named Richard, though none of them had picked up a ball of any kind since high school. Before they left, they poked their heads in the kitchen and congratulated Darnell on the “presentation” of the meat loaf. Darnell went about his work, and Buddy sneered in my direction as he and Bubba headed out the door.

After lunch, I put some PJ Harvey in the deck for Anna while she cleaned and reset her station. Phil Saylor had instructed me to keep blues and jazz playing on the stereo during the rush, but Happy, dashing in his dandruff-specked, plum-colored sport jacket, was now the only customer in the bar. Sitting there in a stagnant cloud of his own cigarette smoke, he didn’t ever seem to respond to the musical selection either way.

Anna split for the day after bumming a smoke, and Ramon retreated to the kitchen, where he practiced some bullshit karate moves on an amused Darnell while I began to cut limes for Mai’s evening shift. I had just finished filling the fruit tray when Dan Boyle walked through the front door.

Boyle parked his wide ass on the stool directly in front of me and ran fingers like pale cigars through his wiry, dirty blond hair.

“Nick.”

“Boyle.”

His lazy, bleached-out eyes traveled up to the call rack, then settled back down on the bar. I turned and pulled the black-labeled bottle of Jack Daniel’s off the call shelf. I poured some sour mash into a shot glass and slid it in front of him.

“A beer with that?”

“Not just yet.”

He put the glass to his lips and tilted his head back for a slow taste. The action opened his jacket a bit, Boyacket a the grip of his Python edging out.

On any given night, the Spot could be heavy with guns, as the place had become a favorite watering hole for D.C.’s plainclothes cops and detectives, the connection going back to Saylor. Guns or no, Boyle had earned a different kind of rep, topped by his much-publicized role in the Gallatin Street shoot-out. I had been there with him, right next to him, in fact, but my participation had remained anonymous. I was reminded of it, though, every time I passed a mirror: a two-inch-long scar, running down my cheek.

“Goddamn it, that’s good,” Boyle said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ll take that beer now.”

I tapped him one and set the mug next to the shot. Boyle pulled a Marlboro hard pack from his jacket, drew a cigarette, and tamped it on the pack. He put it to his lips and I gave him a light.

“Thanks.” Boyle spit smoke and reached for the mug. I bent over the soak sink and ran a glass over the brush.

“Good day out there?” I said, looking into the dirty gray suds.

“Not bad today, if you really want to know. Picked up the shooter that fired off that Glock on school grounds over at Duval two weeks ago.”

“The one where the bullet hit the wrong kid?”

“The wrong kid? If you say so. The kid that got shot, he had a roll of twenties in his pocket, and a gold chain around his neck thicker than my wrist. So maybe he didn’t hit the kid he was going for, but he damn sure hit a kid that was in the life. Shit, Nick, you throw a fuckin’ rock in the hall of that high school, you’re gonna hit someone guilty of something.”

“You’re a real optimist, Boyle. You know it?”

“Like now I need a lecture. Anyway, you want to talk about sociology and shit from behind that bar, go ahead. In the meantime, I’m out there-”

“In that concrete jungle?”

“What?”

“ ‘Concrete Jungle,’ ” I said. “The Specials.”

“Gimme another drink,” Boyle mumbled, and finished off what was in his glass. He chased it with a swig of beer and wiped his chin dry with the back of his hand.

Happy said something, either to himself or to me, from the other end of the bar. I ignored him, poured Boyle another shot. I leaned one elbow on the mahogany and put my foot up on the ice chest.

“So, Boyle. How about that kid, the one that got it two nights ago-”

“The one they found in the river?”

“Yeah. I guess that was a drug thing, too.”

“Bet it,” Boyle said. “But it’s not my district. So that’s one I don’t have to worry about.”

“Let me ask you something. You know what the weapons of choice are on the street this month, right? I mean, it changes all the time, but you’re pretty much on top of it. Right?”

“So?”

“These enforcers. They in the habit of using silencers these days?”

Boyle thought for a moment, then shook his head. He watched me out the corner of his eye as he butted his cigarette. Happy called again and I went down his way and fixed him a drink. When I came back, Boyle was firing down the remainder of his Jack and draining off the rest of his beer. He left some money on the bar, stashed his cigarettes in his jacket, and slid clumsily off his stool.