George Pelecanos: Hell To Pay

The second book in the Derek Strange and Terry Quinn series, 2002

GARFIELD Potter sat low behind the wheel of an idling Caprice, his thumb stroking the rubber grip of the Colt revolver loosely fitted between his legs. On the bench beside him, leaning against the passenger window, sat Carlton Little. Little filled an empty White Owl wrapper with marijuana and tamped the herb with his thumb. Potter and Little were waiting on Charles White, who was in the backyard of his grandmother’s place, getting his dog out of a cage.

“It don’t look like much, does it?” said Potter, looking down at his own lap.

Little grinned lazily. “That’s what the girls must say when you pull that thing out.”

“Like Brianna, you mean? Your girl? She ain’t had no chance to look at it, ’cause I was waxin’ her from behind. She felt it, though. Made her forget all about you, too. I mean, when I was done hittin’ it she couldn’t even remember your name.”

“She couldn’t remember hers either, drunk as she had to be to fuck a sad motherfucker like you.” Little laughed some as he struck a match and held it to the end of the cigar.

“I’m talkin’ about this gun, fool.” Potter held up the Colt so Little, firing up the blunt, could see it.

“Yeah, okay. Where’d you get it at, man?”

“Traded it to this boy for half an OZ. Was one of those project guns, hadn’t even been fired but once or twice. Short barrel, only two inches long, you’d think it couldn’t do shit. But this here is a three fifty-seven. They call it a carry revolver, ’cause you can carry this shit without no one knowin’ you strapped. I don’t need no long barrel, anyway. I like to work close in.”

“I’ll stick with my nine. You don’t even know if that shits works.”

“It works. Yours jams, don’t be askin’ me for mines.”

Potter was tall, light skinned, flat of stomach and chest, with thin, ropy forearms and biceps. He kept his hair shaved close to the scalp, with a small slash mark by way of a part. His irises were dark brown and filled his eyes; his nose was a white boy’s nose, thin and aquiline. He was quick to smile. It was a smile that could be engaging when he wanted it to be, but more often than not it inspired fear.

Little was not so tall. He was bulked in the shoulders and arms, but twiggish in the legs. A set of weights had given him the show muscles upstairs, but his legs, which he never worked on, betrayed the skinny, malnourished boy he used to be. He wore his hair braided in cornrows and kept a careless, weedy thatch of hair on his chin.

Both wore carpenter jeans and button-down, short-sleeve plaid Nautica shirts over wife-beater Ts. Potter’s shoes were whatever was newest in the window of the Foot Locker up at City Place; he had a pair of blue-and-black Air Maxes on now. On Little’s feet were wheat-colored Timberland work boots, loosely laced and untied.

Little held a long draw in his lungs and looked ahead, exhaling a cloud of smoke that crashed at the windshield. “Here comes Coon. Lookit how he’s all chest out and shit. Proud about that dog.”

Charles White was walking his pit bull, Trooper, past a dying oak tree, its leaves nearly stripped bare. A tire hung on a chain from one of the branches. When he was a puppy, Trooper had swung on the tire for hours, holding it fast, strengthening his jaws.

“That ain’t no game dog,” said Potter. “Coon ain’t no dog man, neither.”

White had Trooper, brown with a white mask and golden-pink eyes, on a short leash attached to a heavy-ringed, wide leather collar. Trooper’s ears were game-cropped at the skull. White, of average size and dressed similarly to his friends, moved toward the car, opened the back door, and let the dog in before getting inside himself.

“S’up, fellas,” said White.

“Coon,” said Little, looking over the bench at his friend. Others thought White’s street name had something to do with his color, dark as he was. But Little knew where the name had come from. He’d been knowing Coon since they were both kids in the Section Eights, back in the early nineties, when White used to wear a coonskin hat, trying to look like that fool rapper from Digital Underground, that group that was popular then. There was the other thing, too: White had a nose on him, big and long like some cartoon animal. And he walked kind of pitched forward, with his bony fingers spread kind of like claws, the way a critter in the woods would do.

“Gimme some of that hydro, Dirty.”

Dirty was Little’s street name, so given because of his fondness for discussing women’s privates. Men’s, too. Also, he loved to eat all that greasy fast food. Little passed the blunt back to White. White hit it deep.

“Your champion ready?” said Potter.

“What?” said White.

It was hard to hear in the car. Potter had the music, the new DMX joint on PGC, turned up loud.

“I said, is that dumb animal gonna win us some money today?” said Potter, raising his voice.

White didn’t answer right away. He held the smoke down in his lungs and let it out slow.

“He gonna win us mad money, D,” said White. He reached over and massaged the dense muscles bunched around Trooper’s jaw. Trooper’s mouth opened in pleasure and his eyes shifted over to his master’s. “Right, boy?”

“Sure he’s strong enough?”

“Shoot, he was strong enough to drag a log down the block yesterday mornin’.”

“I ain’t ask you can he do circus tricks. Can he hold his shit in a fight?”

“He will.”

“Well, he ain’t showed me nothin’ yet.”

“What about that snatch we did with that boy’s dog over on Crittenden?”

Potter looked in the rearview at White. “That dog at Crittenden wasn’t nothin’ but a cur. Trooper a cur, too.”

“The hell he is. You’re gonna see today.”

“We better see. ’Cause I ain’t wastin’ my time or my green paper on no pussy-ass animal.” Potter slid the Colt under the waistband of his jeans.

“I said, you’re gonna see.”

“C’mon, D,” said Little. “Let’s get a roll on, man.”

Garfield Potter’s street name was Death. He didn’t care for it much since this girl he wanted to fuck told him it scared her some. Never did get that girl’s drawers down, either. So he felt the name was bad luck, worse still to go and change it. His friends now called him D.

Potter turned the key in the ignition. It made an awful grinding sound. Little clapped his hands together and doubled over with laughter.

“Ho, shit!” said Little, clapping his hands one more time. “Car’s already started, man, you don’t need to be startin’ it again ! Maybe if you turned that music down some you’d know.”

“Noisy as this whip is, too,” said White.

“Fuck you, Coon,” said Potter, “talkin’ mad shit about this car, when you’re cruisin’ around town in that piece-of-shit Toyota, lookin’ like a Spanish Cadillac and shit.”

“All this money we got,” said Little, “and we’re drivin’ around in a hooptie.”