Джордж Пелеканос: King Suckerman

Wilton Cooper reached for the speaker, counterclockwised the volume. It sounded to him, with all that static and shit, like the brothers were talking Chinese. Like he was watching some chop-socky thing, Five Fingers of Death or something like that. Anyway, Cooper didn’t need that tinny-ass box hanging on the window. He knew the dialogue by heart. He’d seen Black Caesar, what, five, six times already. Even had the original sound track on cassette tape. James Brown, doin’ it to death. “Down and Out in New York City.” “The Boss.” And all that.

It wasn’t Black Caesar that Cooper had come to see, anyhow. And it sure wasn’t that peckerwood biker picture — Angels the Hard Way — no, Angels Hard as They Come, that’s what it was — that had gone second on the triple bill. Cooper had come to check out that new one, The Master Gunfighter, with Tom Laughlin and Ron O’Neal. Billy Jack and Superfly, way out West. Yeah, that would be something to see. He’d been waiting on that one to open for a long time.

Wilton Cooper took a last swig of Near Beer, crushed the can, tossed it over his shoulder to the backseat. He placed the speaker back in its cradle, got out of his ride, walked past rows of cars to the darkened field behind the projection house. With all that liquid in him, he had a fierce need to drain his lizard, and he just couldn’t abide waiting in the men’s room line.

Cooper moaned a little as he let a long stream fly. He could see the screen, Fred Williamson walking out of Tiffany’s just before being gut-shot by that Irishman dressed as a cop. He always liked this part, and then the wild chase scene through Manhattan, people on the street looking right into the camera, the director not bothering to edit or reshoot, maybe because he had no budget for it, or he just plain didn’t give a shit. Cooper dug checking out the extras, trying not to look into the lens but not able to help themselves, doing it just the same. On a bigger-budget feature the producers never would have let that slide. Cooper thought it was cool, though, just the way it was.

He shook himself off, tucked his snake back in where it belonged.

He saw a white boy then, heading from the opposite end of the field in the direction of the projection bunker’s rear door.

The boy had one of those ratty, blown-out Afros, big as Dr. J’s. He wore lemon yellow bells, with a rayon print shirt tails out over the pants. The shirt was untucked because he had slipped a short-barreled rifle — or a sawed-off, Cooper couldn’t tell which — down inside the pant leg along his right hip.

Cooper knew. He had been with stickup kids who had done it the same way, walking into liquor stores and banks. Point of fact, this boy he knew, Delaroy was his name, he had worn his shotgun just that way when the two of them had done that Gas-and-Go outside of Monroe, Louisiana. That was the last armed robbery Cooper had ever done, the one that got him his five-year bit in Angola. He was into different shit now.

Anyway, that was Louisiana, and this here was Fayetteville, North Kakilaki. Now what the fuck was this white boy going to do with that big gun?

Cooper watched him walk — strut, really — toward the cinder block bunker. The kid’s left hand was cupped at his side, and he kind of swung it on the down-step. As the kid passed below the light of the floodlamp, Cooper could see the four-inch heels on the boy’s stacks. Those platforms, the Afro, and the kid’s street-nigger strut: a white-boy, wanna-be-a-black-boy cracker. He had the walk down, a little too much with the hand action for Cooper’s taste, but not bad. And the kid was cooler than a motherfucker, too, the way he went straight through the door without knocking, not even looking around before he did. Cooper wondered, What’s going to happen next?

It took about a hot minute for him to find out. Cooper heard the muffled report of a long gun come from the projection bunker just as the redheaded phony cop fired his pistol into Fred Williamson on screen. So the kid had timed whatever he had done to go with the gunshots in the film. Maybe he had seen Black Caesar enough times to plan the whole thing out. Or maybe he wasn’t into the movie and he just happened to work at the drive-in. Cooper was curious either way. He figured he’d hang back there in the dark a little bit. Wait until the white boy came out, ask him then.

When Bobby Roy Clagget walked into the projection bunker, the fat man didn’t even turn around. Couldn’t hear the door open and shut, what with the whir of the reels and the flutter of film running through the gate. Clagget stood there, watching the fat man’s back, his rounded shoulders, red fireman’s suspenders over a blue work shirt holding up a worn pair of jeans hanging flat on a no-ass frame.

Clagget pulled the sawed-off Remington up out of his pant leg by its stock. He racked the pump, pointed the.12-gauge at the fat man.

“You know what this is?” said Clagget. “You recognize that sound?”

The fat man turned around at Clagget’s voice.

“Bobby Roy,” said the fat man, a friendly smile right away, noticing the shotgun but not showing fear or surprise. Not showing Bobby Roy a bit of respect. “Who’s coverin’ the concessions?”

“I said, you recognize that sound?”

“What sound?”

Damn, he hadn’t even heard the pump. This wasn’t at all like the script he had written up in his head. Clagget went ahead with the dialogue anyway. There wasn’t much else he could do.

“That there,” said Clagget, “was the sound of your own death.”

“Say what?” The fat man looked Clagget up and down. “Shoot, son, what y’all doin’ with that hog’s leg? You fixin’ to take out some crows?”

Clagget looked over at the cot in the corner of the booth, where some sort of needlepoint the fat man had been working on lay on a pillow atop wrinkled sheets. Clagget had known nearly all projectionists to have their own funny hobbies — model-car making, Nam memorabilia, shit like that — and this one was no different than the rest.

Clagget’s eyes went along the dust-specked shaft of light, through the rectangular window to the screen. Fred Williamson was crossing Fifth Avenue with the Tiffany presents in his hand. The bogus uniformed cop had begun to close in.

“Go lay down on that cot,” said Clagget, “and put that pillow over your face.”

“Huh?” The fat man chuckled. Clagget couldn’t believe it. By God, he had actually laughed.

Black Caesar bumped into a man in a suit, a decoy for the cop. In another second or two would come the shot.

“Why you want me to lay down, Bobby Roy?”

“Never you mind that now,” said Clagget. He stepped forward, gripped the Remington tight.

“Bobby Roy?” said the fat man.

And Clagget squeezed the trigger.

The fat man flew back, hit the cinder blocks, took down a bulletin board hung there. Clagget pumped the shotgun — it felt good, doing that — and watched the fat man kind of flop around for a few seconds like a dry-docked perch. A jagged piece of bone jutted up from the center of the fat man’s shredded shoulders. Clagget wondered idly where the man’s head had gone.

He slipped the shotgun inside his pant leg. Walking to the door, he wiped what felt like a warm slug off his cheek, flung it to the side. He imagined Fred Williamson, shot now and staggering across the street. Bobby Roy Clagget began to sing the J. B. vocals that he knew were now filling the interior of every car on the lot: “Look at me, you know what you see?/See a baaaad mother...”