George Pelecanos - Hell To Pay

Strange phoned Quinn and got him on the third ring.

“Terry, it’s Derek. You see the game?”

“I saw some of it.”

“Some of it. Your girlfriend over there, man?”

“Yes, Sue’s here.”

“Been there all day, huh? Y’all even get a look at the sunshine today, man?”

“Derek, what’s on your mind?”

“Wanted to make sure you were gonna be ready to go in the morning.”

“Told you I would be.”

“Meet me down at Buchanan at nine, then. We’ll roll out together in my car.”

“Right.”

“And Terry?”

“What?”

“Bring your gun.”

CARLTON Little swallowed the last of his Big Mac and used his sleeve to wipe secret sauce off his face, where it had gathered like glue on the side of his mouth. He had another Mac in the bag on the table in front of him and he wanted to kill it right now. The grease stain on the bottom of the bag, just lookin’ at it made him hungry.

He was hungry all the time. Not hungry for real like he had been when he was a kid, but hungry just the same. Loved to eat anything you could take out of somebody’s hand from a drive-through window. Taco Bell, Popeyes, and the king of it all, Mac- Donald’s. Little knew guys who had trouble with their movements, but not him. All the food he ate, the kind came in damp cartons and grease-stained bags? Damn if he didn’t take three or four shits a day.

He supposed his love for food had somethin’ to do with the fact that he didn’t have any when he was a boy. His aunt, who he stayed with, she sold their food stamps most of the time to pay for her crack habit. She had food in there from time to time, but the men she was hangin’ with, who were pipeheads, too, and always leaving a slug’s trail around the house, ate it or stole it themselves. There was cereal sometimes, but the milk went fast, and he couldn’t fuck with eatin’ no dry cereal. Before he grew some, when he weighed, like, sixty pounds, Carlton used to hide the milk outside his bedroom window, on this ledge that was there, so it wouldn’t get used up. In wintertime the milk froze and in summer it went sour, so you couldn’t do it all the time. But it was a good trick that worked half the year. This teacher taught him how to do that after he collapsed one time at school ’cause he was so weak. Weak from not eating. Not that he was cryin’ about it or nothin’ like that. He had money now, and he wasn’t weak anymore.

Man on the TV said that one third of the kids in D.C. lived below the poverty level, the same way he had. Well, fuck those kids. Nobody ever gave him nothin’, and he made out all right. They’d have to figure a road out their own selves. If they were to ask him, he’d say that there was one thing he knew for sure about this life out here. You acted the punk, you were through. You wanted to make it, you had to be hard.

Little laid himself down on the couch.

Potter sat low in one of those reclining rocking chairs he loved. Potter had bought two of them at Marlo’s, along with the couch Little lay on now, filled out the no-payment-till-whenever paperwork and had them delivered the next day. That was a year ago, and Potter had still not made a payment and never would. No Payments Till Forever, that’s the way the sign read to him. Potter had given the African or whatever he was a different billing address than the delivery address, and the dude hadn’t even noticed. Stupid-ass foreigners they hired out there, workin’ those sucker jobs.

“You gonna eat that?” said Potter, one hand pointed lazily at the paper bag holding the last Mac.

“I was thinkin’ on eatin’ it right now,” said Little.

“I wouldn’t even be feedin’ that shits to a dog.”

“It’s good.”

“You gonna throw it up out in the street, like you did the other day?”

“I ain’t ashamed. Made me sick to see what happened to that kid.”

“Well, he shouldn’t’ve been in that car.”

“Yeah, but those bullets you used done fucked him up for real.”

“Oh, it was just mines now.”

“It was those hollow points out of that three-five-seven you was holdin’, did all that damage.”

“Couldn’t handle lookin at it, huh?”

“Shit was just nasty is all.”

“Yeah, well, you keep eatin’ that Mac Donald’s, gonna make you worse than sick. Gonna kill you young.”

“I be dyin’ young anyway.”

“True.”

They had been in the living room all day. Charles White had gotten into his Toyota at lunchtime and brought them back a big carton of Popeyes and biscuits for the Redskins game, and they had gotten high and eaten the chicken, and then they had watched the four o’clock game and told White they were hungry and to go out again. White had returned with a bag of McDonald’s for Little and some Taco Supremes from the Bell for Potter, because Potter didn’t eat McDonald’s food.

Now the eight o’clock game was coming on ESPN, and the sound was off on the television because neither Potter nor Little could stand to hear Joe Theismann, the color man for the Sunday night games, speak. They put on music during the games, but the Wu-Tang Clan CD they had been listening to had ended. For the first time that day, it was quiet in the room.

Potter and Little had been keeping a very low profile since the murders. They sent White out for all their food and beer. He was scared, they could tell it from his face and the way his voice kinda shook these past few days. But they knew him to be weak, knew that he would do as they asked.

Juwan, their main boy down in the open-air market, had been delivering the daily take to their place on Warder. Their dealer in Columbia Heights had agreed to drop off the product, as needed, at the house. They had burned the Plymouth and abandoned it, and dropped the guns off the rail of the 11th Street bridge into the Anacostia River. Far as evidence went, Potter reasoned, their asses were covered good.

Since the shooting, Potter had gone out twice. Once to buy a couple of straps from this boy he knew who arranged straw purchases out of that gun store, where you could pay junkies and their kind to buy weapons real easy, over in Forestville. The other time he went out was to buy a car, a piece of garbage sitting up on that lot on Blair Road in Takoma, across from a gas station and next to a caterer. Place where all the cars had $461 scrawled in soap on the windshields, all the same price, looked like a kid had written it. Potter bought something, he didn’t even bother to look at it close, and paid cash. The salesman tellin’ him how to get plates, get insurance, get it inspected, all that, Potter not even listening because he knew he wouldn’t have the car long enough to worry about it anyway. Insurance, what the fuck was that? Shit.

So they were keeping low. Their pictures, drawings made to look like them, anyhow, were posted all around the neighborhood. Potter figured, who that could connect the pictures to their names was gonna rat them out? Wasn’t anyone that stupid, even if the reward money was printed right there on the drawings, because that person had to know that if they did this, if they snitched on them, they would die. It was a good idea to stay indoors for a while, but Potter wasn’t worried in a serious way, and if Little was worried he didn’t act it. It was Charles White who was the loose end.

“Where Charles at?” said Potter.

“Up in his room,” said Little. “Why?”

“You and me need to talk.”

“Well, talk.”

“Go put some music on the box. I don’t want him to hear us.”

“He can’t hear us. You know that boy’s up in his bed with his headphones on, listening to his beats.”

“I expect.”