George Pelecanos - Shame the Devil

Wilson sipped his beer, fumbled it as he placed it back on the table.

“You seem a little uptight,” said Farrow, catching Otis’s eye.

“I’m tired is all it is,” said Wilson. “Took me over an hour to get down here from D.C.”

Farrow slowly paced the room. “How is it up in town? Any heat that you can make out?”

“None.”

“Good. Me and Roman were thinking you could set us up again with some kind of thing. Something cleaner than the last time. Less risk.”

“I’m working on it. Been out in the bars at night, listenin’ to people talk. Trying to find out where the after-hours action is these days. I’m thinkin’ a bag rip-off, or a high-stakes game. Somethin’ y’all could take off quiet.”

“I like the way you’re thinking.”

“Get you in and out of town real quick.”

“That’s our intent. We need a substantial payday this time. Roman and Gus here have run into a financial setback. Your cut will be the usual – ten percent. That okay with you, T. W.?”

Wilson nodded.

“Tomorrow we’ll see Manuel and Jaime. You’ve called them, right?”

“Yes.”

“What’d they have to say?”

They said you killed a minister in cold blood down on the Eastern Shore.

“They said to come on by,” said Wilson. “They’ll have a car for you on Monday.”

“I need something with a little muscle. I’ve been driving this piece-of-shit truck -”

“They’re on it,” said Wilson.

“Damn, boy!” shouted Kendricks, jumping up from his chair and shutting off the set. “Can’t nobody in this league fuck with the Bulls?”

“Hey, Booker,” said Otis. “Keep your voice down, man.”

Kendricks dismissed them all with a wave of his hand. “Y’all are just way too serious for a Saturday night. I’m gonna take a walk, catch some air.”

Kendricks slipped the pistol into the pocket of his baggy slacks and put on a jacket. “See ya later, Tall Tree,” he said, smiling at Lavonicus before leaving the house.

Lavonicus blinked his eyes hard, but he did not raise his head.

When the door closed, Otis said, “Hard to believe that man shares a drop of my blood.”

Farrow said, “Where’s he goin’, anyway, in this cold?”

“I don’t know,” said Otis. “But if I owned one of these farms around here, right about now I’d be putting a lock on the barn door.”

“Likes those kickin’ mules, huh?” said Farrow.

“I don’t even think they have to kick to get his fancy. All he needs is the right texture to get him started. You want to know the truth, I wouldn’t even trust my cousin around a rare steak.”

Wilson cleared his throat. “That about it? ’Cause I got to make the drive back into town.”

“Wait a minute,” said Farrow, turning to Lavonicus. “Gus, give us a couple of minutes alone here, will you?”

“Sure.” Lavonicus stood and ducked an arched frame as he entered the hall to the back bedrooms.

“Gus don’t know much about the details of our history,” said Otis. “He don’t need to know, is what I’m sayin’.”

Farrow stopped pacing and looked down at Wilson. “You find out where that cop lives?”

“No,” said Wilson. “Not yet.”

“What about his sons?”

“His sons live with him. That much I got from the papers.”

“Find his address,” said Farrow. “I owe him a visit.”

Wilson nodded and said, “That it?”

“One more thing,” said Farrow. “Want to get this out on the table once and for all, and then bury it.”

“Go ahead.”

“Your pizza chef friend. I want to make sure you’re not carrying a grudge over what happened.”

“I’m not. I told you as much on the phone.”

“Look at me, T. W., not at the floor.”

Wilson locked eyes with Farrow.

“What happened in that pizza parlor was a necessity,” said Farrow. “In a situation like that, when you pull the trigger one time you have to keep pulling it until nobody’s left alive. Charles might have been the most stand-up guy who ever walked down the block, but the cops would’ve broken him, and he would’ve fingered us all to make a deal. Anybody would have. What we did to him was just business and self-preservation. Ours and yours. So I want you to tell me now that you don’t have a problem with what went down.”

Wilson’s mouth twitched.

“Do you have a problem, T. W.?”

I’d kill you now if I was man enough. But I am not man enough. God help me, I’m as weak as they come.

“No,” said Wilson. “I don’t have a problem.”

“Good,” said Farrow. “I’ll see you Monday at the garage.”

“Right.”

Wilson killed his beer. He stood from the couch and walked from the house.

“Man’s still got that tired Arsenio fade,” said Otis, pushing his own hair back behind his ears. “Needs to get himself to a shop where they’re doin’ that new thing.”

Farrow listened to Wilson’s Dodge pull away. “What do you think of him?”

“The man is troubled, that much is plain. But troubled don’t mean dangerous.”

“No, it doesn’t. Wilson’s weak and afraid. He always was someone you could push around.”

“So we got nothin’ to worry about, right?”

“He’s paralyzed,” said Farrow. “He’ll never make a play.”

Thomas Wilson gripped the steering wheel tightly to stop the shake in his hands. Anger was making his hands shake, but there was something else, too: fear. The fear was stronger than the anger. And the knowledge of this made him ashamed.

Wilson turned left off the two-lane and drove north on 301.

How had he come to be with these kinds of men? Looking back on it, it was an obvious path that had brought him to where he was now.

His life had turned with his coke addiction. He understood completely what Dimitri Karras was riffing on at those meetings, though of course he could never admit to Dimitri or the rest of them that he was a member of that same NA club. By way of explaining the hole in his personal time line, he had only told them that he had gone away for a few years to find his calling. Gone away, hell. Put away was more like it.

It had started as a casual thing for Wilson, back in the late seventies. That’s the way it always started with this shit; cocaine was the drug that always drove the car and never gave up the keys. By the time you knew it, it was too late.

Wilson had started dealing to support his habit. He was arrested and charged twice, but the judges were right, the jails were full, and he did no time.

After a while Wilson figured, if you’re gonna be into it, why not step it up, make some bigger money, get into it for real? So he hooked up with a dealer who controlled the action down around the dwellings at 7th and M in Northwest, and he became this dealer’s mule. Wilson began to make the regular Amtrak run from Union Station to Penn Station and back again. It was safer than being out on the corner, and it seemed to be risk free.

But Wilson had misjudged the stealth of his dealer’s rivals, who’d gotten the time of his run from a nose-fiend on the street. The cops pulled Wilson and his black leather suitcase off the Metroliner at the 30th Street station in Philly, busted his dumb ass right there on the platform. With Wilson’s priors and the quantity confiscated, he took the big fall. They sent him up to Lewisburg, the federal joint in PA.

In prison, Wilson got free of his coke jones but collected fateful relationships with many men: Frank Farrow, Roman Otis, Lee Toomey, Manuel Ruiz, and Jaime Gutierrez among them. On the last day of his bit, he promised Farrow and Otis he’d stay in touch.

When Wilson got out, he vowed to stay straight. But from his muling days he remembered how it felt to have money, real money, in his pocket all the time. His mother had died when he was in Lewisburg, and his uncle Lindo was good enough to hook him up with the hauling job. Lindo was all right to talk to during the day, but Lindo was old-time, and Lindo wasn’t his boy. That distinction would always go to his lifelong friend, Charles Greene.