George Pelecanos - Shoedog

So if the old man came out of the house, what would he do? Would the father recognize the son after seventeen years? He would, Constantine decided. He would look at the long hair, the twisted, drunken face, the muddy clothes, and simply turn around and walk slowly back into the house. There was no reason to think, after all, that anything between them had changed. But standing there, Constantine felt himself hoping, against his cynicism, that his father would leave his chair just then, descend the pine staircase, pass through the small, dim kitchen, and walk out the back door, into the yard, to see and wrap his arms around his son.

The old man did not walk from the house, and after a while the light went out down the alley and the dog no longer barked.

Constantine ground his cigarette down into the concrete and walked out of the alley to Broad Branch Road, following that all the way to Military. He crossed to the other side of the street and put his thumb out at the first group of cars. At the tail end of the group an old Lincoln came to a stop near Oregon Avenue. Constantine went to the passenger door, opened it, and got inside.

Randolph sat low in the driver’s seat of the T-Bird, sideglanced Constantine. He looked at the man, slumped down, his eyes covered by dark shades, his long, uncombed hair blowing in the wind of the open passenger window. Randolph issued a low chuckle as he drove toward Virginia, over the 14th Street bridge.

“You look like some dog shit today, boy,” he said.

“But I feel like a million bucks,” Constantine said, stretching left and pushing in the dash lighter. “How’d the rest of your night turn out?”

“Nice lady,” Randolph said.

“A little old,” Constantine said, “even for you.”

“Old ladies,” Randolph said. “They love you right.”

Constantine touched the hot end of the dash lighter to a Marlboro. He pulled on it, felt the heat in his lungs, watched his exhale shimmer and disappear in the flash of the morning sun.

“This guy we’re going to see-”

“Rego,” Randolph said.

“You know him?”

“I’ve used him.”

“He all right?”

“Grease monkey. Talks nickel-dime bullshit all day long.” Randolph looked over the rail at the brown water of the Potomac River, back at Constantine. “But he’s down.”

They took the GW Parkway into Alexandria, drove through a poor residential district and then over railroad tracks into an industrial part of town marked by low cinderblock structures and two-story warehouses. Constantine did not recognize any of it. As a boy growing up in D.C., anything over the river had been irrelevant.

Randolph cut into the last group of warehouses in the complex, stopped in front of an open garage where coveralled mechanics lethargically circled foreign and domestic hood-raised cars parked in the bay. Randolph got out of the T-Bird, made a head motion to Constantine, and Constantine followed.

They walked around the side of the warehouse to the asphalt alley in the rear. Randolph pushed on a buzzer set next to an entrance to the left of a pull-down garage door. Constantine urinated in the alley while Randolph conversed with a voice coming through the speaker mounted below the buzzer. The door swung out as Constantine pulled up on the zipper of his fly.

A small man with a thick head of curly blond hair stood in the doorway. He appraised Constantine, smiled at Randolph as he ran his hands clean over the chest of his gray coveralls.

“Rego,” Randolph said.

“Randolph,” Rego said, shaking Randolph’s hand. “Come on in.”

Randolph and Constantine walked through the door, stepped into an immaculate, fluorescently lit bay that held four cars: a Ford, a Chevy, and two Chryslers. All had been painted flat black, stripped of their feathers-no stripes, no monster scoops, no spoilers, no oversized tires or mag wheels-but Constantine could see straight on, knew from the make and model years, that these cars had been manufactured for speed, and for the street.

“You two want some coffee?” Rego said, out the side of his mouth.

“I gotta get to work,” Randolph said, looking at the cars. “What do we got?”

Rego drew a cigarette and matches. Constantine watched with amusement as Rego, in the windless bay, cupped his greasy-nailed hand around the match, a gearhead affectation. Rego exhaled slowly, dramatically. The guy was handsome, almost a Redford type, with blue eyes and deep laugh lines ending at the cut of a square jaw. But the blue eyes were a bit wide-set, the jaw a little slack.

“You got your Ford Torino here,” Rego said, pointing his cigarette at the farthest car on the left “Cobra model, four twenty-nine Ram Air, with a four-barrel-”

“Skip the Ford,” Randolph said, looking past Rego. “That the way you look at it, Constantine?”

Constantine nodded.

Rego said, “What about the Chevy?”

“Fuck a Chevy,” Constantine said. His head hurt awfully bad.

“I guess you two know what you want,” Rego said.

“We’re lookin’ for somethin’ serious,” Randolph said.

“I got these Chryslers,” Rego said. “They’re serious as a heart attack.”

Randolph said, “Talk about it.”

Rego nodded in a scholarly manner as he dragged on his cigarette. He walked over to a long, clean-lined Plymouth parked third in the row, and touched his hand gingerly to the hood, as if the hood were hot.

“This Fury should do it,” Rego said. “Nineteen-seventy. Four-forty V-8, automatic, completely hopped up on the rebuild.”

“Six barrel?”

Rego closed his eyes with reverence, nodded slowly. “Three two-barrel Holly carbs.”

Randolph walked to the driver’s side, opened the door, climbed in. He sat behind the wheel, ran his hand along it, gripped it and ungripped it as he studied the dash.

“What about that one?” Constantine said, pointing his chin down the line at a black sedan that looked benign as a taxicab. “Fast?”

“Faster than shit through a goose,” Rego said. “Road Runner, four-forty. Six-pack, same year as the Fury. Four-speed Hurst.”

“It moves, huh?”

“It really screams,” Rego said, widening his eyes broadly, as if a stranger had just grabbed his dick. “I’m serious as cancer.”

Constantine got in the bucket of the Plymouth, looked at the tach mounted on the steering column, put his hand on the shifter, depressed the clutch, moved through the gears. He pushed on the car horn, heard the “beep-beep” of the Road Runner cartoon character, shook his head, and chuckled. He glanced through the passenger window, caught the eye of Randolph, still sitting in the driver’s seat of the Fury. Both of them got out of their cars and went to Rego, who was crushing his cigarette under the toe of his work boot.

“About that horn,” Constantine said.

“Purists,” Rego said, shrugging his shoulders. “If it don’t have the horn, it ain’t a Runner.”

“Keep it,” Constantine said, considering it for only a second. “It’s all right with me.”

“The two Chrysler products, then.”

Randolph said, “Right.”

“You pick ’em up tomorrow,” Rego said, handing Randolph a folded slip of paper from the pocket of his coveralls. “Here. The drop location is the same.”

“Plates?” Randolph said, putting the paper in his pocket.

Rego winked. “Fresh in the A.M., right out of satellite parking at National. They won’t even make the hot sheet by the time you roll. Guaranteed.”

“All right, man,” Randolph said. “You all straight?”

“Weiner fixed me,” Rego said.

“Then that’ll do it,” Randolph said, shaking Rego’s hand. Randolph exited and Constantine followed. The door closed behind them as they hit the alley.