George Pelecanos - Hell To Pay

After a while they came up out of the park. Stella emerged from the shadows of a church at 23rd and P as they pulled the van along the curb.

“That her?”

“Yeah.”

“She looks fifteen.”

“Cobras live to be fifteen, too,” said Quinn.

“They do?”

“I’m making a point.”

“The back doors are open,” said Tracy. “Tell her to get in there.”

Quinn rolled down his window as Stella reached the van. She wore black leather pants and a white poplin shirt, with a black bag shaped like a football slung over her shoulder. Her eyeglasses sat crooked on her face.

“You like?” said Stella, looking down at her pants. Her eyes were magnified comically behind the lenses of her glasses. “I wore ’em for you, Officer Quinn. They’re pleather, but that’s okay. I get paid tonight, I’m gonna buy me a pair of leather ones on the for-real side.”

“You look nice,” said Quinn.

“What color should I get? The black or the brown?”

“The back door’s open. Let’s go.”

They drove east. Quinn introduced Stella to Sue Tracy. Stella was cool to her questions. She only became animated when responding to Quinn. Clearly she was eager for his attention. It was plain to Tracy that Stella had a crush on Quinn, or it was a daddy thing, but he was ignoring it. More likely, as with many men, the obvious had eluded him.

On 16th they saw some girls working the stroll, a stretch of sidewalk off the hotel strip south of Scott Circle.

“Around here?” said Tracy.

“Those aren’t World’s,” said Stella.

“Where, then?” said Quinn.

“Keep goin’,” said Stella. “He ain’t into that visiting-businessmen trade. They talk too much, take too much time. Worldwide’s girls walk between the circles. The Logan-and-Thomas action, y’know what I’m sayin’?”

Quinn knew. “That’s old-school turf. I remember that from when I was a teenager.”

Tracy shot him a look from across the seat.

“Strictly locals,” said Stella. “Husbands whose wives won’t blow ’em, birthday boys lookin’ to get their cherry broke, barracks boys, like that. World’s got some rooms nearby.”

“We’re gonna try and take her in Wilson’s trick-house?” said Quinn. “Why?”

“Because she don’t trust me,” said Stella. “She won’t meet me anywhere else.”

Tracy steered the van around Thomas Circle.

“North now,” said Stella, “and make a right off Fourteenth at the next block.”

The landscape changed from ghost town-downtown to living urban night as soon as they drove onto the north side of the circle. Small storefronts, occupying the first floors of structures built originally as residential row houses, low-rised the strip. The commercial picture was changing, new theater venues, cafés, and bars cropping up with regularity. In fact, it had been “changing” for many years. White gentrifiers tried to close down the family-run markets, utilizing obscure laws like the one forbidding beer and wine sales within a certain proximity to churches. The crusading gentrifiers cited the loiterers on the sidewalks, the kinds of unsavory clientele those types of businesses attracted. What they really wanted was for their underclass dark-skinned neighbors to go away. But they wouldn’t go away. The former Section Eights were up the street, and so were families who had lived here for generations. It was their neighborhood. It was a small detail that the gentrifiers never tried to understand.

There weren’t any hookers walking the 14th strip. But as they turned right and drove a block east, Quinn could see cars double-parked ahead wearing Maryland and Virginia plates, their flashers on, girls leaning into their driver’s-side windows.

“Pull over,” said Stella.

Tracy curbed the van and cut the engine. Quinn studied the street.

A half block up, a couple of working girls, one black and one white, were lighting smokes, standing on the sidewalk outside a row house. One of them, the young white girl with big hair, wearing white mid-thigh fishnets and garters below a tight white skirt, walked up the steps of the row house and through the front door. A portly black man in an ill-fitting suit got out of his car, a late-model Buick, and went into the same house shortly thereafter.

“These all Wilson’s?” said Quinn.

“Not all,” said Stella. “You got a few independents out here, out-of-pocket hos. Long as they don’t look him in the eye, disrespect him like that, then they gonna be all right. But those are World’s trick-pads over there. All his. He rents out the top two floors, got, like, six rooms.”

“What about the car action?”

“That’s okay for a quick suck. World gets money for the room, too, so he tells his ladies, Make sure you take ’em upstairs. Anyway, you don’t want to be fuckin’ a man in a car down here. Even the pocket cops, they see that, they got to take you in. This ain’t the Bronx.”

“That where you come from, Stella?” said Tracy.

“I’m from nowhere, lady.”

“We waitin’ on Jennifer?” said Quinn.

“You already saw her,” said Stella. “She was that white girl with the white stockings, went inside.”

“It didn’t look like her,” said Quinn.

“What, you think she’d still be wearing her yearbook clothes?” Stella laughed joylessly, an older woman’s laugh that chilled Quinn. “She ain’t no teenager now. She ain’t nothin’ but a ho.”

“We could have grabbed her off the street.”

“We got to do this my way. I told you I’d come along, but I don’t want nobody spottin’ me, hear?”

“Keep talking.”

“I called Jennifer up. Soon after I met her, I boosted her Walkman and a few CDs she had. She never went anywhere without her sounds. I told her when I called her, I found her shit in some other girl’s bag and I was lookin’ to get it back to her.”

“Where?”

“Told her I’d meet her at eleven-thirty, up in three-C. That’s the third-floor room nearest the back of the house. There’s a fire escape there, goes down to the alley. The window leads out to the fire escape, one of those big windows, goes up and down-”

“A sash,” said Quinn.

“Whatever. World always tells the girls, leave that window open, hear, case you need to get out quick.”

Quinn checked his watch: close to eleven by his time.

“Think I’ll drop in on her a little early,” said Quinn.

“I’m coming with you,” said Tracy.

“Who’s gonna drive the van?” said Quinn, head-motioning over his shoulder. “Her?”

Tracy looked out her window for a moment, then at Quinn. She reached back and pulled her leather briefcase from under the back bench. Her hand went into the briefcase and came out with a pair of Motorola FRS radios. She handed one to Quinn.

“Walkie-talkies?”

“That’s right.”

“These come with a decoder ring, too?”

“Quit fuckin’ around, Terry. You keep the power on, hear? There’s a call alert; you’ll hear it if I’m tryin’ to get through to you.”

“All right.” Quinn turned the power on so that Tracy could see he had done it. He slipped the radio into his jacket.

“How long you gonna need in there?” said Tracy.

“Jennifer’s where Stella says she is, I’d say ten minutes tops.”

“I’m gonna take the van back in the alley, but I’m gonna give you five minutes before I roll. I don’t like alleys. I’ve seen too much shit go wrong in alleys, Terry-”

“So have I.”

“I don’t want to get jammed up in there.”

“All right. I’ll bring the girl down the fire escape. See you in ten, right?”

“Ten minutes.”

Quinn got out of the van and crossed the street. Go-go music came loudly from the open windows of one of the double-parked cars. The girl outside the row house, black girl with red lipstick and a rouged face, her ass cheeks showing beneath her skirt, looked him over and smiled as he approached.