George Pelecanos - Hard Revolution

“No help today?” said Vaughn, reading the “Manager” patch on the man’s chest, seeing the sweat on his brow and temples.

“My mechanic’s off and my pump boy called in sick.”

“The young guy who’s always here?” Vaughn was picturing him, dark-haired, good-looking kid with the haunted eyes, in his head.

“Yeah, Dominic,” said the manager, handing Vaughn his change. “If I find out he ain’t sick, his ass is gone.”

“What’s his last name?”

“Christ, can’t you see I’m busy?”

Vaughn produced his badge case and flipped it open. “His last name.”

The manager used a dirty shop rag to wipe at his face. “Last name’s Martini. Like Dean Martin’s before he changed it.”

“Martini was in the military, right?”

“He served.”

“He friends with Stewart?”

“Yeah. They’re asshole buddies.”

Vaughn chewed on his lip as he tossed over the new information: Stewart, Hess, and Martini had all made themselves absent from work on the same day.

“What’s Martini drive?” said Vaughn.

“A black Nova,” said the manager, moving to the car on the other side of the pump, adding over his shoulder, “but he better not be drivin’ it today. If he’s doin’ anything other than lyin’ in a sickbed…”

His ass is gone, thought Vaughn, finishing the manager’s sentence in his mind as he got back under the wheel of his Polara.

Vaughn drove to the Sixth Precinct station, a half mile down the road, to dig up Martini’s address.

DEREK STRANGE WENT through the residential entrance beside the liquor store on H, took the steps two at a time, and reached the second-floor landing. He found the door of Willis’s apartment and began to pound on it with his fist. He stopped pounding when he heard heavy footsteps approaching from behind the door.

“Who is it?” said Willis, his voice muffled, angry, and filled with attitude.

Strange did not identify himself. He waited for the peephole to darken. When he was certain that Willis was there, his face up against the wood, Strange stepped back and kicked savagely at the area of the doorknob. The door splintered and gave in.

Strange stepped into the apartment and shut the door behind him. Willis was on his back, one hand holding his jaw. He rolled over, moaned, and got to his knees.

Willis spit on the floor.

“Get your ass up,” said Strange.

Willis got to his feet slowly and turned around.

“Fuck you want?” he said.

Strange stepped in quickly and grabbed ahold of Willis’s shirt with his left hand. He threw a short right into Willis’s mouth, turning his hip and body into the punch. Willis’s head snapped back. Strange felt a burn in his knuckles and, as Willis’s head sprang forward, punched him again. Willis’s eyes went funny and he lost his legs. Strange took his shirt in both hands and pushed him. Willis tripped backward and landed in a heap on the couch.

Strange drew his.38 from his clip-on. He went to Willis and put the muzzle of the gun to his temple and then moved it to his eye. He pulled back the hammer and locked it in place.

“Who murdered my brother?” said Strange.

Willis’s eyes were glassy and afraid. Close up, Strange could see the bruises and swelling alongside his jaw, and, with his mouth stretched back the way it was, a space and black blood where a tooth had been. New blood flowed from his upper lip, which Strange had split with the second right.

“Dennis?” said Willis, his voice quavering and high. “ I don’t know. Dennis was my boy…”

Strange believed him. But he pressed the revolver harder to the corner of Willis’s eye.

“Where’s Jones?” said Strange.

Under the pressure of the gun, Willis tried to shake his head. Some of his blood dripped onto Strange’s hand.

“Where?” said Strange, his teeth bared, his hand slick with sweat and tight on the grip of the.38. “I will kill you, motherfucker, I swear to God.”

“He stayin’ with our cousin Ronnie. Ronnie Moses.”

“Say where that is.”

Willis described the approximate location of Moses’s apartment. He claimed he didn’t know the exact address.

“You got his number?”

Willis pointed weakly to a phone on a stand. Beside the phone was a small book with a marbleized cover.

“You got something to write with?”

“Under them magazines,” said Willis, pointing with his chin.

Strange stepped back and holstered the.38. He looked for paper and a pen, found both under some stroke magazines topped with an ashtray. Strange swept the magazines and ashtray to the floor. He went to the address book, got the number on Moses, and wrote it on the paper. He went to the front door, then turned to speak to Willis. Willis was hunched over on the couch, looking at his shoes, too ashamed to look at Strange. Bright red blood colored the front of his white shirt.

“I wasn’t here,” said Strange.

Willis nodded. Strange went out the door.

AT THE PRECINCT house on Nicholson, Vaughn scored the information he needed: Dominic Martini lived on Longfellow, two blocks away. He got the tag numbers of the Nova, a black-on-black ’66, registered in Martini’s name, and wrote them in his spiral notebook. Martini’s sheet was relatively clean: a couple of minor FIs from his youth and no adult priors.

Vaughn traded his Polara for an unmarked Ford and asked a couple of uniforms smoking cigarettes back by the Harley garage to come along in a squad car. He told them to keep in radio contact.

Vaughn drove slowly past the house on Longfellow, saw curtains drawn in all the windows. Halfway down the block, going west toward Colorado, he turned the Ford into the alley break. The squad car was idling near a garage at the edge of the Martini yard. Parked beyond the cruiser, tight along the property line, sat a green Rambler shitbox and, behind it, a red Max Wedge Belvedere.

“Bernadette,” said Vaughn, his mouth spread in a canine grin.

He threw the tree up into park and got out of the Ford. He walked to the driver’s side of the squad car.

“What’s goin’ on, Detective?” said the fresh-faced blond kid behind the wheel. His name was Mark White.

“Stay here, White,” said Vaughn, studying the drop-down door on the garage, padlocked at the latch. “Anyone comes for that Rambler or the Plymouth, hold him.”

Vaughn walked through the backyard and around the side of the house to the porch, where he knocked on the front door. An old Italian woman in thick eyeglasses and a black dress answered his knock.

“Yes?”

“Frank Vaughn, ma’am,” he said, smiling, showing her his badge.

“Is my son all right?” said the woman, often a mother’s first question when a cop came calling at her door.

“Dominic?” said Vaughn. “Far as I know. Is he in?”

“No,” she said, looking away quickly.

“I’m looking to talk to his friends.”

“Buzz and Shorty,” she said, with a tinge of contempt. “I told him, stay away from those two.”

“They’re all together, right?”

Angela Martini nodded. “They went out.”

“You wouldn’t know where they went, would you?”

“No,” she said, blinking her eyes heavily. “Dominic said he’d be home for dinner.”

“I’m gonna need to get into your garage.”

That’s where I’ll find something, thought Vaughn. That’s where greasers like them make their plans.

“What for?”

“There might be something in that garage that will help me with a case I’m working on. It has to do with his friends.” Vaughn gave her the most sincere look a guy like him could manage. “Your son’s not in trouble yet. But Stewart and Hess might find him some.”