George Pelecanos - Right as Rain

'Explain.'

'Keep the subject's image in your mind all the time, but indirectly. Watch where he's goin' in the reflection of the plate glass windows, in the car windows, in the metal of the cars themselves. Lose yourself in the crowd.'

'There he is.'

'Go on.'

Quinn got out of the car and loitered near the building. Kane emerged from the building's glass doors. Strange watched Quinn follow, staying back in the moderate, late-morning throng moving along the sidewalk. With his shades and the hair, Quinn looked more like a rocker with shoulders than he did a cop. Kane crossed the street and entered the Purple Cactus.

Strange phoned Quinn. 'Go on in. They'll be settin' up for lunch; just tell 'em you're thinking of bringing a date there or somethin' and you're checking the place out. Try and see what he's doin' in there.'

'Don't let Kane recognize me, right?'

'Funny.'

Quinn came out of the Purple Cactus five minutes later and crossed the street. He got into the Chevelle and phoned Strange.

'He was talking to a couple of the waiters and a bartender downstairs. Old home week, I guess. He's coming out now.'

When Kane pulled the Prelude out of the garage and onto 14th Street, Strange said, 'Let's roll.'

Kane parked four blocks north in another garage. Strange followed him on foot this time, making a bet to himself that he knew where Kane was headed.

Kane walked into Sea D.C., the fancy seafood dining room and bar at the corner of 14th and K. The restaurant was fronted in glass, so Strange didn't need to risk going inside. Kane was talking to a man behind the bar, which was elevated on a kind of platform above the rest of the dining room.

Back in the car, Strange said into the phone, 'He's making the rounds.'

'What is he, a food broker?'

'He sellin' something, that's a bet. Usually, you see a guy hangin' around with restaurant employees like that, it means he's making book.'

'Or taking orders for something else.'

'I heard that. Here he comes, man. Get ready to move.' Strange pushed the 'end' button on the cell phone. He didn't tell Quinn that Sea D.C. was the last place Sondra Wilson had worked before she disappeared.

Kane drove to a velvet-rope, exclusive club over at 18th and Jefferson, where people were often refused entry for having the wrong haircut or the wrong label on their trousers. He next hit a Eurodisco on 9th, across from the old 9:30, a notorious nightspot for beret wearers and Middle Eastern trust-fund kids with coke habits. He drove to U Street and parked in front of a buppie nightclub. The pattern was the same: five minutes, in and out.

Kane drove east on Florida Avenue. Quinn and Strange followed.

Cherokee Coleman took a gold pen off his desk and tapped it on the blotter before him. 'You lookin' large, Adonis.'

Adonis Delgado, seated in front of the desk, glanced down at his crossed arms, defined beneath the blue of his uniform. He flexed a little, and the folds and wrinkles in his sleeves disappeared. 'I been workin' on it.'

'Looks like you have been. Think he looks bigger, Angle?'

Big-Ass Angelo stood behind Coleman, who was in his leather chair. Angelo shrugged, his face impassive behind his designer shades.

'You ain't been using them steroids, have you?' asked Coleman with mock concern.

'You know I don't use that shit,' said Adonis. He had shot himself up that very morning, after a two-hour session at the gym.

"Cause you know those drugs fuck up your privates. Make you tiny as a Chinaman and shit.'

'My privates are fine,' said Adonis with a scary smile, his mouth a riot of widely spaced, crooked teeth.

Adonis Delgado was an ugly, light-skinned man. His forehead was high and very wide, and he had a stoved-in nose with nostrils that flared upward in a porcine manner. His eyes were dead black and Asian in shape. Big-Ass Angelo said that Delgado looked like one of those mongoloid retards, like the one on that television show he used to watch on Sunday nights when he wasn't much more than a kid. Angelo called Delgado 'Corky,' but never when he was in the room.

'So what do we owe this honor to today, Adonis?' said Coleman. 'Ain't many times you like to face-to-face it with us. Mostly you just drive around the perimeter, makin' the streets safe for our citizens. Me and Angie, we were gettin' the idea you didn't like associatin' with us types anymore.'

'I came in to make sure we're clear on that Boone thing. Time comes, I want to make the last run out there myself.'

'You and Bucky, you mean.'

'Sure.'

'He gonna be down with it?'

'He does what I tell him to do.'

'Okay.' Coleman cocked an eyebrow. 'You seem kind of tense. You're not mad at me, are you, Adonis? Wouldn't be because I let Earl Boone take away your girlfriend, is it?'

'Shit. You talkin' about that skeeze over in the Yard?'

'So you're not mad .'

Coleman and Delgado stared each other down for a moment.

Delgado sniffed and rubbed his nose. 'Like I said, she's just a fiend attached to a set of lips. I let her suck my dick once or twice is all it was. I'm through with Ray and Earl, I'll just go ahead and add her to the pile.'

'You want my advice, you're gonna kick it with her one last time, I'd wear two or three safes, man.'

'I always double up,' said Delgado. 'Four-X Magnums, too.'

'No doubt,' said Coleman.

The cell phone rang on Coleman's desk. Coleman answered it, said, 'Okay,' and killed the connection.

'What is it, Cherokee?' said Angelo.

'Our little Caucasian brother is on his way in.'

'I'll wait right here,' said Adonis, 'you don't mind.'

'You got personal business with him?'

'He owes me money.'

'Hittin' him up, too. Nice to see you expandin' your client base, Officer Delgado.'

'I did plenty for that white boy. And I don't do a got-damn thing for free.' Delgado pulled a cigar from his blue jacket hung on the back of his chair.

'Prefer you didn't smoke that in here,' said Coleman. 'Me and Angie, we can't take the smell.'

Quinn and Strange followed Kane to a side street just east of Florida and North Capitol. As Strange saw the drug setup and the boys on the street, he said into the phone, 'Hold up, Terry; I'm gonna take off and go up ahead. Tail me until I pull over and pick me up.'

'Right.'

Kane pulled up to an open garage door and drove through it into a bay. Strange watched him, then made a right turn. Quinn followed. Strange got back on Florida and went east to the Korean food market complex, parking his car in the lot. He grabbed his AE-1, jumped out of his car, and got into Quinn's Chevelle.

'Punch it,' said Strange.

Quinn drove quickly back to the street off Florida where all of the drug activity was in plain sight. He parked far away, three blocks back from the action, and let the engine idle. Up ahead, young men stood lazy as cats against brick walls, on corners, and around a decaying warehouselike structure encircled with broken yellow police tape. Along with Japanese and German sedans, and several SUVs, an MPD cruiser was curbed on the street in front of a short strip of row houses, many of their windows boarded.

'You see that Crown Vic?' said Quinn.

'I see it,' said Strange, his voice little more than a whisper.

'You need me to get closer?'

Strange leaned out his open window and snapped off several photographs. 'I'm all right. Five-hundred-millimeter lens, it's like having a nice set of binos.'

'There's our boy.'

They watched Ricky Kane come out of the garage and cross the street like he owned it. He met a couple of the young men on the corner of the strip of houses and was escorted into the row house nearest the cop car parked beside the curb.

'What the fuck we got goin' on here?' said Strange.