George Pelecanos - Shame the Devil

“Dimitri.”

“When I saw him in the morgue, Nick, lying there… his body was black all over from the bleeding he’d done inside, and his arms and legs were bent crazy and broken in pieces beneath the skin… His face was so swollen, man. I knew then that there was no God. I’d known it all along, I guess, in my heart. I shouldn’t have lied to my son.”

“Dimitri, man. Don’t.”

Karras’s mouth twitched up into a frightening smile. “He was wearing a rabbit’s foot that day, Nick. I had given it to him, and I told him to clip it to his shorts. I told him it would bring him luck. Told him it would be lucky if he wore that rabbit’s foot on his shorts…”

Stefanos smoked the rest of his cigarette while Karras cried. Karras cried freely for a while, and then he wiped his face and got off the bar stool. He tripped on the way to the bathroom and grabbed a chair for support.

Stefanos made a pot of coffee. He heard Karras vomiting back in the bathroom. He waited for some time and went back to the bathroom and found Karras washing his face over the sink. There was puke on the collar of his shirt, and his face was the color of putty.

“How do you take your coffee?” said Stefanos.

“I take it black.”

The coffee was steaming in a mug when Karras returned. He drank it down and had another while Stefanos restocked the beer cooler and replaced the green netting along the lip of the bar.

Stefanos dimmed the conicals. The neon Schlitz logo burned over the center of the bar and bathed the room in blue.

“You about ready?” said Stefanos.

“Yeah,” said Karras, who had gotten the color back in his face. “Let’s go.”

They walked to Stefanos’s Dodge. Stefanos stumbled as he stepped off the curb. He reached into his pocket and handed his keys to Karras.

“Here you go, Dimitri. I’m too gassed.”

Karras got behind the wheel, fastened his seat belt, and ignitioned the Coronet. He engaged the transmission and drove down 8th toward Pennsylvania. They had been in the bar for hours. The streets were empty and dark.

“You can’t stop me,” said Karras. “I want you to know that.”

“I do know it,” said Stefanos. “But I had to try.”

Manuel Ruiz was replacing the headliner inside a ’64 Falcon on Thursday morning when he heard the phone ringing back in the office. He wiped his hands off on a shop rag and walked back to the office and picked up the phone. It was Farrow on the other end of the line. Manuel had been expecting the call.

Farrow’s voice grew increasingly agitated as he related the story of the cop and the chase through the G. W. campus. Manuel denied that the Mustang’s plates were dirty.

“Perhaps it was just that you and Roman look suspicious,” suggested Manuel.

“Perhaps,” said Farrow with annoyance. “But if it happens again -”

“It will not happen again,” said Manuel. “Those plates are clean.”

“Okay. But here’s another thing. You gave me a car with bum brakes.”

“The brakes, they do not work properly?” Manuel winced at the insincerity in his own voice.

“They’re working better since we dumped fluid into them.”

“My apologies, Frank. This was our mistake.”

Jaime Gutierrez entered the office, looking for cigarettes. Manuel pointed at the phone and silently mouthed the word “Frank.” Jaime nodded.

“Never mind,” said Farrow. “You have my new car ready for me? The one I’m driving’s getting red hot.”

“Yes. It is very fast.”

“I’m going to pick it up early Saturday morning. I would say two A.M.”

“We will wait.”

“Good. See you then.”

Manuel cradled the receiver. Jaime found his cigarettes in the desk drawer and struck a match.

“He is coming to get his new car after midnight tomorrow night,” said Manuel.

“You haf a car?”

“No. T. W. says we will not need it.”

“What if T. W. is wrong?”

“Then God help us.”

Jaime dragged deeply on his cigarette. “What else?”

“He made mention of a problem with his plates.”

“But it was not enough of a problem.”

“No,” said Manuel.

“What about the brakes?”

“They put fluid in. So I suppose the brakes will not stop them either.”

“The fluid, it will leak out again,” said Jaime. “The brakes will fail.”

Jaime tried to say this in a casual way. But he muttered a prayer under his breath, crossing himself quickly as he walked back out to the shop.

Roman Otis stood behind the house at the edge of the woods in Nanjemoy, practicing his draw. He had his. 45 holstered on the left side of his belt line so he could draw with his right hand. He found that his “Back to Oakland” ID bracelet occasionally caught on his belt as he drew the gun. Of course, he could just leave the bracelet or his belt behind for this particular job. But the bracelet was his lucky charm. And he felt it was important for a man to look like something when he left the house for work.

Frank Farrow came out the back door of the house and walked down a set of wooden stairs to where Otis stood.

“Hey, Frank,” said Otis. “Tell me what you think of this here.”

Otis raised his arms above his head and rotated his hands at the wrist. Gravity and the action made the ID bracelet slip down beneath the cuff of his shirt. Otis’s right hand flashed down to the grip of the. 45. He drew it and dry-fired into the woods.

“Why all that?” said Farrow.

“When I raise my hands and shake ’em,” said Otis, “it’ll be like my signal for you to let go.”

“Okay, Roman,” said Farrow, who had given up on trying to figure out the peculiarities of his partner. “Whatever you say.”

They heard the cackle of Booker Kendricks coming from the front yard, and underneath it the booming monotone of Lavonicus.

“Booker just won’t let up on Gus,” said Otis.

“Your cousin’s an amateur,” said Farrow.

“He’s fuckin’ with the wrong man,” said Otis.

“Well, after tomorrow night we’ll never see him again.”

“We all set?”

Farrow nodded. “The card game’s at midnight at an industrial park in a place called Upper Marlboro. T. W. says it’s all young brothers flush with drug money, playing pinstripe gangster like they seen in the videos. Gonna be a whole lot of dirty greenbacks there, Roman.”

“And guns, I expect.”

“There could be, yes. We’ll just have to go in hard and fast. And this time we’ll have an advantage.”

“How’s that?”

“T. W. got the key to the place. We’re gonna go in a couple of hours early, before the players arrive, and check everything out. The layout, the exit route… everything. Make sure there’s no surprises.”

“How’d T. W. get the key?”

“Paid off a man who works in that space during the day.”

“Another inside thing. Don’t that boy ever learn?”

“He’s scared. He just wants us out of town. It’ll be all right.”

“We will be leavin’ town after the job. Right, Frank?”

“I figure we’ll pick up the car from Manny, slide on over to Detective Jonas’s house in the middle of the night, do a little mayhem there. Then we’ll leave town.” Farrow looked closely at Otis. “You don’t have a problem with that, do you, Roman?”

“I’m with you,” said Otis carefully. “You know that.”

“What I wanted to hear.”

“There is something else I wanted to talk to you about, though.”

“Go ahead.”

“Gus. He don’t belong with us, man. The man’s plain lovesick over my sister. I brought him with me from Cali ’cause I wanted company on the ride. He wouldn’t do us no good -”