Neely Tucker - Murder, D.C.

“That right?” Sully said. “T-Money shot Tony and Carlos?”

George nodded, rasped, “Straight up.”

Sully didn’t hesitate, because this was it right here, right now. He rolled down his window to let the smoke clear.

“Bullshit,” he said, waving an arm again, clearing smoke, “and you know it. T-Money don’t have a thing to do with this.”

Curious looked over at him. “That right?” That low rasp, sandpaper over steel, mocking him.

“Yeah,” Sully said. “It is. It totally is. I’m interested in, like, actual facts. So I want you to tell me, you know, about something you do know about. I want you to tell me about the night Billy Ellison came down to the Bend and shot himself. Right in the head. You were there. You watched him do it.”

There was a long pause in the car, the air heavy with tension and ganja. Curious, playing it straight, not giving him anything, looking out his window, away from him.

“What make you say that?”

“Because, Curious, he shot himself with the same gun, the very same damn gun , that was used to kill the Hall brothers. That’s weird, don’t you think? One gun, three shootings, same place? Plus, that piece is something like sixty years old. Didn’t you notice, when you picked it up after Billy shot himself, that it was an antique? It was his granddad’s gun from the military. I mean, I don’t know that I would have thought about it, right up until I saw you you pick up Antoine’s gun after you shot him. You did the same when Billy shot himself. Picked up the dead man’s gun.”

Another long, dry, dark silence. The night spun out, slow, dark, eternal, threatening.

“Dude didn’t say shit till the end,” Curious began, the buzz taking him over, scrunching down farther in the seat, talking for three minutes, now five, the sound of his voice low and steady in the silence of the car, him looking up and out the windshield, like there was something up there in the overhanging trees, going on and on in an endless monotone.

“And he was a skinny little motherfucker, you know that? Not big. Not that big at all. He just come down there that night, looking around. Went down to the water, came back up, went back. The Bend, people do weird shit, crack fiends, man, but this… it was like”-he took another toke, pressing his mind for some sort of reference-“like a dog, you know what I’m saying? Looking for something he buried? Like that.”

“And he wasn’t saying nothing?”

“Not shit. That’s what I’m talking about. Like he didn’t even see nobody.”

“How long had he been coming down there?”

“Never seen him before in life. Me or Antoine either one.”

“He hadn’t been scoring down there at all ? Wasn’t buying quantity?”

“You can’t hear? What did I just say?”

“Family tells me that he was moving coke, weed.”

“Not from the Bend he wasn’t.”

“Okay, so.”

“Okay, so, Antoine?” Curious licked his lips, worked his tongue up against his teeth, like he had something stuck on the top side and was trying to push it out. “He was pissed about the boy coming down there to start with, you hear? Like he could just show up? Like he owned the place? We walked up on him when he was way down at the water. The way we did you, that time you showed up. Brother man don’t even turn around. Antoine, he says, Hey motherfucker, I’m talking to you. Shoves him, knocks him two steps, nearly in the water. Then boyfriend turns around and he was crying , just-”

“Billy cried because Antoine shoved him?”

“- crying and-what? No, see, nah. He’s already snotty nosed. Boy was touched, you ask me. So, Antoine, this just pisses him off, the boy acting like a little bitch. He shucks out the Glock and says, Get your ass up and outta here before I clock you, you know? And brother man says, he says, I got my own goddamn gun! And then pulls it out and blam, right in the head. For fucking real. Shot hisself about three seconds before Ant woulda done it for him.”

Sully was steadily looking at him, assessing this. Curious was still slouched back in the seat, the blunt almost gone, the death of Billy Ellison recounted-sad, desolate, forlorn, possibly the only time anyone would ever hear it. Sully did not doubt a word of it.

“Then y’all threw him in the water,” Sully said.

“Ant kicked him two three times, ’cause he was pissed off, but yeah. Tossed him. Nobody wants five-oh walking around up in the Bend, poking their snouts where they don’t got no business.”

“And that left his gun right there.”

Curious flicked a glance out the window, yawning, tired of this. “Where else would it go?”

“And you picked it up.”

Curious cut off his yawn, looking over at him, his eyes bleary in the gloom but a glint underneath the haze.

“Somebody picked it up,” Sully said, “and used it to shoot the Hall brothers. And since Billy’s gone? And since you shot Ant in the head the other day? That leaves you, Curious. Who else could have plausibly picked it up?”

That did it, the glint in the eyes sparking into malice, his face tightening, Curious sitting up in the seat, the shadows in the car moving, shifting, his face hard to make out.

“The fuck you say.”

“The fuck I don’t. You wanted me to tell you what the police knew. I did.”

“You said they found the piece. You ain’t said-”

“They found the piece just like you wanted. You flipped it over there in the rocks, dropped it there, somewhere it looked like somebody tried to get rid of it. That was good. That was smart. You wanted them to go chasing a gun that couldn’t be traced, some crazy-ass old gun that looks like it belongs in a museum.”

“I done-”

“You’re taking over the Bend, Curious,” Sully whispered. “It’s you.”

Silence. Curious eye-fucking him hard , the ganja haze burned away now.

“You been doing it for a solid month,” Sully said. “Dee Dee shot his mouth off about being Sly Hastings’s boy. About being Sly’s muscle for moving in on the Bend. Ha. Dumbass. You saw that opportunity for yourself. It was just sitting there, once he’d pissed on the South Caps and they’d shot up his car. You had free license, man. Everybody was going to think it was them. So you popped Dee and you went to Sly and said, Hey, I’m your man. Moved right on up.”

Curious just looked at him, glaring,

“First time I saw you and Sly, that’s what Sly says, you’re his man. Then you capped Ant, right in front of me, so you can tell Sly you were getting me through the park all safe and sound. That was a nice little play there. Two down. And then the big kill, the Hall brothers. You get them to come outside, who knows what for, and bam bam. Who else would they have trusted enough to come outside on the spur of the moment, and let walk behind them?”

“You-”

“You’re Michael fucking Corleone, laying waste to the five families. You run the Bend now. Does Sly know? ’Cause I’m thinking he’ll cancel you out just for popping Dee without-”

“You think you know this.” That rasp coming at him in the half dark. “And you ain’t-”

“I didn’t know it until John Parker told me about the pistol they found. He thinks it’s a big-time clue, bless his heart. I like the man. But it’s just going to throw the cops off, because it’s never going to be traced. They want to trace it so bad, peg it to one of you lowlifes down there in the Bend. But they can’t. Never will. You’re going to walk, Curious.”

“You talking out your neck.”

Sully took a breath and let it out. It was all so clear now.

“That gun Billy used, that fossil? It belonged to his grandfather, in World War Two. It was some sort of collectible. Maybe Granddad got it issued to him on the luck of the draw, or maybe he was a collector and bought it. But when he died? Billy’s dad inherited it. It was a big deal, a family heirloom. Billy’s dad, he couldn’t get over it. I read all about it in the family papers. Told Billy all about it, like this was his birthright. Supposed to be a, a, what, a man-to-man thing. Kept it in a velvet-lined box on the top shelf of his walk-in closet.