George Pelecanos (31 page)
Authors: DC Noir
"Sir...our
scenarios include a Senator being snatched in a terrorist attack."
"That's
ridiculous."
"So
is
four jetliners being hijacked into flying bombs.
I'm sorry, but you entered our secured zone so now you all have to step out of
the vehicle before you proceed."
Joel
yelled: "In this damn storm?"
"Come
on," said Dick. "We can still make it."
The
black Senate staffer stepped out of the car, kept his hands in plain sight.
"Fuck
me." The Senator stepped into the rain.
Through
the water-blurred windshield, Joel saw three more yellow-slickered cops march
toward the car. One carried an umbrella. One carried a pole with a mirror for
examining the underside of vehicles.
The
senior cop told the driver: "Everyone must exit the vehicle."
Joel
Rudd stood on the road, arms out like Jesus, face turned up to the falling
rain.
Senator
Carl Ness stood under an umbrella held by a yellow-slickered cop and, like his
law-writing aide Dick Harvie, stared at the Capitol Hill wizard they worked
with who suddenly seemed to have gone insane.
"Sir,
we need to pop the trunk. Check it. Then you can go."
"No,"
said Joel. "I'm going nowhere. I'm already there."
The
older cop said: "We're just following the rules."
Joel
turned his flooded face toward that guardian of law and order.
"Rules.
I know about them. In my trunk you'll find a body."
What?"
chorused the cop, the U.S. Senator, and the legislative
director.
"A
lobbyist named Frank Greene. Shot dead."
Rain
beat down on them. Flares sputtered. Police radios crackled routine reports.
Until
a cop opened Joel's trunk, announced: "He's right."
The
younger cop slid his hand back inside his yellow slicker.
An
officer lifted his radio, but his sergeant ordered: "Keep this off the air."
Senator
Ness yelled at Joel: "What have you done?"
Joel
stared at the man he knew so well, had served so long. A thousand calculations
churned behind the Senator's frantic expression. Through the raging storm, Joel
saw the spirit inside that man as clearly as he saw the spirit in himself.
Carl
Ness reached inside his suit and pulled out a white sack.
"Do
you see what you've done?" said the politician. "Do you see what you've put at
risk? Ten thousand lives and you stand there flushing them down the drain."
A
cop exchanged his radio for a cell phone.
The
Senator shook the white sack. "Now it'll take all I've got to make this
happen."
Suddenly
Joel saw it all through the pouring rain.
Cell phone.
Fingerprints.
The cell phone in the cop's
hand as he reported in.
The third cell phone on the Senator's desk when
there should have been only two. A sequence where a bulldog and a politician
set up a "shaky" crusader with a desperate dream girl who they'd schooled. Joel
positioned to structure the corrupt deal over the Senator's "opposition" in
front of witnesses Trudy and Dick. If anyone ever cried corruption, the guilty
fingerprints would belong to fall guy Joel. The Senator's "independent"
campaign committee set up to reap a windfall from the contract winners. The
payoff to Joel and Lena was chump change to distract him, keep him quiet,
drive
more nails into his frame.
The
white sack waited in the Senator's fist for what Joel would say.
The
whole, unprovable, public truth wouldn't save Joel.
Would cut
the balls off a Senator so that he kept his job but had no power.
Would thus sentence 10,000 people to starvation.
Destroy a
woman desperate to be free.
Capitol
Hill's bottom line: It's what you can get done.
Thunder
boomed. Joel never saw the flash. His words tasted like smoke. "The creep got
shot because he welched on paying me for fixing the warplane vote."
"Wait,"
said the youngest cop. "Shouldn't we read him his rights?"
No
one can prove me wrong, thought Joel. Or will want to.
Clarity
shimmered through the hissing red glow of the flares, the spinning
blue-and-blood lights on arriving police cars, the storm-slick skull-white glow
off the Capitol dome. Joel envisioned Lena grimly marching through a D.C.
airport. He wondered where she'd go.
The color of her hair.
"My
fall!" cried Joel.
"What'd
he say?" yelled the older cop.
Whose
partner yelled back: "He said it was his fault!"
But
Senator Ness's face said he'd heard Joel's offer. A look of pure understanding
passed between them.
Like
the noble boss of a doomed sinner, the Senator told Joel: "I'll do all I can."
Joel's
nod sealed their redemptive bargain.
"Cuff
him," ordered the older cop.
Bare
steel clamped around Joel's wrists.
Dick
Harvie lunged toward the prisoner who'd taught him how democracy works.
"Murder,"
said Dick, the word burning in his eyes. "I get that. But how could you, you of
all people, how dare you sell out all the best dreams up here."
Joel
said: "Everybody gets a hill."
The
restaurant had emptied after the Friday lunch shift, so Gibson shoved open the
battered back door to get a quick taste of sunshine. He leaned against the
chain-link fence, pulled his lunch tips out of his pocket, and slowly counted
the crumpled bills.
Seventeen lousy dollars.
He
plopped down on an overturned five-gallon pickle bucket and lit a Camel to mask
the dumpster's ripeness. He added some numbers in his head, trying to figure
out how much he had earned that week. He needed at least another thousand by
the end of the month or he was going to lose his apartment. But if he was going
to continue living off his eight-dollar-an-hour salary while putting his tips
toward the thousand-dollar goal, there was no way
that
seventeen bucks was going to cut it.
He
still had to man the grill until the next guy came on in a few hours, but he figured
that there wouldn't be many more tips coming his way that day. The afternoons
had been slow lately as the stifling summer heat settled over D.C.
The
heavy door groaned opened and Karen, the day waitress, walked squinting into
the sunshine. "There you are," she said. "Want to make a few extra bucks?"
"What
are you talking about?"
"I'm
supposed to hang around till the next girl comes in at 5:00. But I was hoping
to get over the Bay Bridge before it backs up. You want to hold down the fort?"
"You
think I can work the grill and wait on tables too?"
"Come
on,
Gibson,
look at how dead it's been. You can handle
it for a couple of hours."
Gibson
shrugged his shoulders. What the hell. He had been counting on pocketing more
than fifty bucks from the day's lunch shift, and this might get him there.
"Give
me a couple minutes to finish this cigarette," he said, "and I'll be out."
The
Shelbourne Grill was a dying breed for the neighborhood just below Thomas
Circle. Nothing fancy or modern: People came in for made-from-scratch onion
rings and fat burgers, grilled behind the bar by the same guys who served the
beer. The crane-strewn neighborhood was upgrading fast, but the Shelbourne
hadn't seen much change in its four decades. It was narrow and dark, with
seating for around sixty at a worn bar, six uncomfortable wooden booths, and a
row of two-tops. The prices were low and the place only accepted cash, even
though ten times a day they had to send customers scurrying to the ATM machine
at the corner bank across the street.
Working
as a combined grillman/bartender took some getting used to for Gibson. In the
fourteen years since high school, he had bounced around a lot of restaurant
kitchens, but this was the first place where he had worked behind the bar and
around customers. When he first took the job, he wasn't sure he was going to be
able to put up with the patrons' bullshit, but he had been doing it for more
than a year now without any major hassles.
Gibson
only worked the lunch shift, and most of the customers he dealt with were
generally all right: low-key folks from the neighborhood or from the offices on
15th Street, most of whom would rather read a book or paper than talk anyway.
But according to Williamson, who had worked dinners at the Shelbourne for a
nearly a decade, an increasing number of twenty-somethings had been stopping in
at night for a cheap tune-up, in part because of City Paper ads placed by
Barry, the young owner who had inherited the place from his father around eight
months earlier.
Gibson
had dealt with some of these kids during his afternoon shifts. He found most of
them impatient and a couple of them obnoxious, but so far he had managed to
keep things in check. The tips, which cooks never saw at most restaurants, gave
him a reason to watch his temper. And that motivation had intensified since he
learned five months ago that his apartment building was turning into co-ops.
Now, his only chance of holding onto his place, the place he had lived in ever
since his mom passed away a decade ago, was if he came up with the down payment
by the end of the month.
He
stood at the end of the bar and poured himself a cup of coffee.The tables were
all empty and so was the bar, except for McManus, the college kid that Gibson
had just carried all through the lunch shift. He was a preppy little snot who
moved in slow motion behind the bar and didn't even care enough to cut a
sandwich on a bias. The word was that he had been hired because he was a family
friend of the owner. That seemed logical, because Barry wasn't much older than
McManus and, in Gibson's eyes, was just as worthless. Barry was probably locked
in his upstairs office at that very moment, jerking off as usual to a copy of Golf
Digest.
Gibson
looked down the bar at McManus, who was reading the sports section with his
crisp red Nationals cap turned backwards on his head. Asswipe didn't even know
enough to go home after punching out on a beautiful Friday afternoon. He looked
up at Gibson and waved his empty Budweiser bottle.
"Gibster,
can I get another one of these?"
Gibson,
who was half-heartedly filling the salt and peppers, sighed and rolled his
eyes.
"Fine with me if you want to drink up your tips."
He grabbed a beer from the cooler and put it in front of McManus, who nodded
and said, "That lunch shift sucked today, didn't it?"
"You're
telling me. Seventeen dollars in tips ain't working for me."
"I
heard that," said McManus. "Not when I'm only making ten bucks an hour."
Gibson
walked back toward him. "Did you say ten bucks an hour?"
"Yeah,
man, can you believe that? I tried to get more out of Barry but he wasn't
budging.
Said that's the max for a starting cook."
He
turned back to his newspaper, not noticing the color rising in Gibson's face.
Just
then, as if on cue, Barry appeared on the stairway.
"Gibson,
where's Karen?" he asked, as he sauntered toward the bar.
"She
took off twenty minutes ago."
"She
left already? Who the hell told her she could do that?"
"I
guess I thought you did," said Gibson.
Barry
turned his back, began walking to the stairway, and called out over his
shoulder, "Come up to my office.
Now."
Gibson hung
back for a few minutes, refilling the tooth-pick containers so he could gather
his thoughts. Then he walked upstairs, knocked on the door, and pushed it open.
Barry pulled his feet off the desk and tried to pretend he had been doing
paperwork. But Gibson saw the Sporting News peeking out from under the
spreadsheets.
"So,
did you and Karen even think of asking me before she took off?"
"I
told you: I thought she had cleared it with you."
"Bullshit."
Barry stood up, turned his back, and pretended to swing a club at a golf ball.
"It's too late for me to do anything about it at this point, Gibson. But I've
got paperwork to do, so I'm not gonna help you if you get in the weeds."
Gibson
stared at him in disbelief, thinking,
This
idiot is
probably five years younger than I am. He's got a big-ass college ring, a
fifty-dollar haircut, and a dive restaurant that his daddy bought him, but he
doesn't know the difference between a saucepan and a colander. And he doesn't
know how lucky he is that I don't smack that smirk off his face.
"It's
gonna stay slow, Barry. I can handle it," he said. "Anyway, I thought you'd
appreciate it. I've been here since 10 a.m."
