George Pelecanos - Hell To Pay

“He said he didn’t know, D,” said Little. “Let’s just let this shit rest for tonight.”

Potter kept the Plymouth cruising slow. He went around a kind of long bend that took him to the other side of the housing complex. They could see a group of people back in a stairwell lit pale yellow. Potter braked, steered the Plymouth up on the dirt, and cut the engine.

Potter said, “C’mon.”

They got out of the car and followed him across the dirt to the stairwell entrance. There were three men crouched down there and a pink-eyed woman leaning against a cinder-block wall. In one hand the woman held both a cigarette and a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. Smoke hung in the yellow light.

Older cats, all of ’em, thought Potter. Didn’t know nobody, didn’t have nobody gave a fuck about ’em.

The dice-playing men looked up briefly as Potter approached, Little and White behind him. The oldest of the players, vandyked, wearing a black shirt with thin white stripes and a black Kangol cap, eyed Potter up and down, then rolled dice against the wall. The dice came up sixes. There was some talk about the boxcar roll, and money changed hands. Money was spread out on the concrete.

“Y’all want in,” said the roller, staring down the lane to the wall, shaking the dice in his hand, “you’re gonna have to wait.”

Potter didn’t like that the man didn’t look him in the eye when he spoke.

“That your woman?” said Potter, staring at the lady leaning on the wall. She took his stare, even as Potter smiled and licked his lips.

The dice man didn’t answer. He made his roll.

“Asked you if that was your woman.”

“And I told you to wait,” said the man.

The other men laughed. One of them reached into his breast pocket and extracted a cigarette. None of them looked at Potter.

“Get up,” said Potter. “Stand your tired ass up and face me.”

The dice man sighed some, then stood up. He grunted and rubbed at one knee as he did. He was old. But he was bigger than Potter expected, both in the shoulders and in height. He had a half foot on Potter if he had an inch. Now his eyes were twinkling.

“You got somethin’ you want to say to me?”

Potter reached under his shirttail and drew the Colt. He held it at his hip, the muzzle on the midsection of the man. The man’s eyes were calm; they didn’t even flare.

“Give it up,” said Potter. “All the cash.”

“Shit,” said the man, drawing it out slow, and he smiled.

“I’m gonna take your money,” said Potter. “You want, I’ll dead you to your woman, too.”

“Son?” said the man. “I done had guns pointed at me, by real men, while I was layin’ in rice paddies and mud, for two solid years. And here I am standin’ before you. Do I look like I’m worried about that snub-nose you got in your hand?”

“This here?” Potter looked at the gun as if it had just showed up in his hand. “Old-time, I wasn’t gonna shoot you with it.”

Potter swung the barrel so quickly that it lost its shape in the light. He slashed it across the brow of the man, the blow knocking the cap off his head. The man’s hand went to his face, blood seeping through his fingers immediately, and he stumbled back against the wall. Potter flipped the gun in the air and caught it on the half turn, so that he held it now by the barrel. He moved forward, ignoring the other men who had stood suddenly and backed away, and smashed the butt into the man’s cheekbone. He hit him in the nose the same way, blood dotting the cinder blocks as the man’s head whipped to the side. Potter laughed against the woman’s screams. He reared back to beat the man again and felt someone grab his arm. Looking over his shoulder with wild eyes, he saw that it was Charles White who held him there.

“Man, get your got-damn hands off me, man!” yelled Potter.

“Let’s just take the money,” said Little, moving into the light. “You about to kill a motherfucker, boy.”

“Get the money, then,” said Potter. He smiled and spit on the man lying bloodied before him. “You ain’t standin’ now, are you, Old-time?” Potter barked a laugh and raised his voice in elation. “Can’t nobody in this city fuck with Garfield Potter?”

Little and White gathered the cash up off the concrete. They backed up into the grassy area, turned, and walked quickly to the car. No one followed them or shouted for help.

Little counted the cash as they drove out of the complex. White looked in the rearview. A grin had broken, and was frozen, on Garfield Potter’s face.

LAMAR Williams said good night to his mother, a thirty-two-year-old woman with the face and body of a forty-year-old, who was leaning against the stove in their galley-sized kitchen, smoking a cigarette.

“Where you been at, Mar?”

“Practice with Mr. Derek. I was watchin’ wrestlin’ with that kid Joe Wilder after that, over at his mother’s.”

“I’m gonna need you in tomorrow night. I got plans.”

“Aiight.”

Lamar went down a hall and pushed open the door to his baby sister’s room. She was lying atop her bed, stretched out in those pj’s of hers, the ones had little roses printed on them. On her feet were those furry gold slippers she wouldn’t take off, with Winnie the Pooh’s head on the front. What was she now, almost four? Lamar covered her with a sheet.

He went back to his room, turned on his radio, sat on the edge of his bed, and listened to DJ Flexx talkin’ to some young girl who’d called in with some shout-outs for her friends. Then Flexx played that new Wyclef Jean joint that Lamar liked, the one with Mary J., where they was talkin’ about “Someone please call 911.” That one was tight. It made him feel better, to hear that pretty song.

Lamar lay back on the bed. He could still feel his heart beating hard beneath his white T-shirt. He’d done right, not giving up anything to those boys who’d tried to sweat him from the open windows of that car, because whatever they wanted with Joe Wilder’s mother, it was no good. But it was hard to keep doing right. Hard to have to walk a certain way, talk a certain way, keep up that shell all the time out here, when sometimes all you wanted to do was be young and have fun. Relax.

Lamar was tired. He rested the palm of his hand over his eyes and tried to make himself breathe slow.

STRANGE spent Wednesday morning clearing off his desk, his noontime testifying for a Fifth Streeter down in District Court, and his afternoon finishing his background check on Calhoun Tucker. He hit a couple of bars on U Street and then drove over to a club on 12th, near the FBI building, where George Hastings had said that Tucker had done some promotions.

All he spoke to that day told him that Tucker was an upstanding young businessman, tough when he had to be but fair and with a good reputation. At the 12th Street club, the bartender, a pretty, dark-skinned woman setting up her station, said that Tucker was “a good guy,” adding that he did have “a problem with the ladies, though.”

“What kind of problem?” said Strange.

“Being a man, you probably won’t think of it as one.”

“Try me out.”

“Calhoun, he can’t just be satisfied with one woman. He’s a player, serial style. It’s cool for a young man to be that way, but he’s the type, he’s gonna be a player his whole life, you understand what I’m sayin’? After a while you gotta check yourself with that, ’cause you are bound to hurt people in the end.”

“Did he hurt you?”

The bartender stopped slicing limes, pointing her short knife at Strange. “It’s my business if he did.”

Strange placed his card on the bar. “You think of anything else you want to tell me about him, you let me know.”