The Martini Shot

by George Pelecanos

  Miss Mary was straight Catholic. One time, from in the hall, I saw her praying the Rosary, holding those beads she had, looking up at the bearded Jesus picture on the wall. I had to look away. Didn’t seem right somehow to be looking at her while she was doing that private thing.

  This wasn’t long after Pat’s dad had died of a cancer. I don’t even remember him much ’cause I was too young. Around that time, me and Pat were in a talent show together at our elementary. Up on stage, doing that “Jump” joint. Two tiny white boys in bow ties, lip-synching to Kris Kross. The crowd, kids and parents, went off. My mother was there, and one of her meth-tweak boyfriends, too. Man with a ponytail and a skinny behind.

  Me and Pat was tight all through elementary, middle school, and high school, until I moved over to the tech high to learn the electrician’s trade. We played rec league football and basketball as youngsters, but once we got to high school, neither of us had the grades to qualify for athletics, so we stopped. The way it is where we live, there are smart kids and tough kids, and they get separated early on. The smart kids, they get recognized as such in elementary. They’re put in special classes and are protected all the way in magnet and AP programs on their paths to college and beyond. Dudes like me and Pat got identified way back as unmotivated students with behavior problems, and all the kids like us got thrown together in another group. We were put on what they call a different “track” than those nerd kids. Our track was the one that leads to nothing much. Those people at the schools wished it on us, in a way, and it became so.

  Our neighborhood could be tough. A mix of colors, immigrant cabbies, on-and-off laborers, fathers who worked with their hands and backs if they were still around. Wasn’t like us kids were gonna prove ourselves on the debate team, so what it came down to was, be willing to steal someone in the face or get stole, or be a punk and walk away. We did get tested and sometimes we were outnumbered. Pat had my back most times, and it wasn’t easy for him to step up and fight. He did it, but he was on the soft side. That happened to some who didn’t have a man around the house. Though, I got to say, it didn’t happen to me.

  Me and Pat started smoking weed when we were fourteen years old. This boy named Rollo, a dealer with a genuine rep who lived down in the apartments, turned us on to it. Rollo was twenty at the time. I guess I was ready to try marijuana. Ready or no, I wouldn’t have turned down Rollo’s offer. I didn’t want to look like a faggot in his eyes.

  As we got older, Rollo began to front us pounds of weed that we would split into ounces and sell off to our friends. In that way, Rollo expanded his business in our neighborhood, and me and Pat got free weed to smoke. It was a good deal for all of us.

  Pat really loved being high. He’d get real quiet and happy after firing up. He was a big boy with black hair he kept shaved to the scalp. He had braces on his teeth, but he wasn’t pressed by it. Matter of fact, he smiled a lot. Like his mother, Miss Mary, he had green eyes.

  The deal between us was, I kept our scale and Baggies at my house, in my bedroom. My mother hardly ever went in my room, and if she had found anything, I don’t believe she would have cared. Pat made the calls to kids we knew who were potheads, and both of us did what we called the transactions. Any conversations we had on our cell phones, we used codes. Money was Kermit, meaning green; an ounce was an osmosis; marijuana was M.J., for Michael Jordan. We weren’t stupid.

  We never moved product through the Sullivan house. Pat’s place was for relaxing and being up. Miss Mary must have known me and her son was blazed most of the time, because we were always eating stuff from out the pantry and watching TV and laughing at it even when the shit was not funny, and the shows we were watching were like, UFO shows and shit. I think she was all right with it because her son was safe in the house. Having lost her husband and all, I believe she feared losing Pat to the street. So she knew we were smoking weed. What she didn’t know was that we were dealing it, and all the complications that come with that.

  The police in this county here are all about catching kids in the act of smoking, like it’s some kind of high crime. They even got plainclothes Spanish guys, young dudes who look like they could be in high school, busting Latino kids who smoke in the woods. Young black and white police who do the same to their own kind. Meantime, if you are one of those nerd boys, you are pretty much safe, even if you partake in the sacrament yourself. The smart kids, the ones who been protected their whole lives, can go off to college and smoke all the weed they want in their dorm rooms. Shit is damn near legal for them. Just like it was for their parents.

  Turns out, the police had been watching Rollo for some time. He had two possession charges on him. The first had been dismissed, but he had a court date coming up on the second and an expensive lawyer to represent him. We found out later from this same lawyer, he had been under suspicion as a known drug dealer by one of them county task forces they had. I’m thinking that some kid who got busted for possession identified Rollo as his dealer once the police got that kid under the hot lights.

  The night the bad thing went down, we were driving around in Rollo’s car, an old Mercury Marquis which has the same platform as a Ford Crown Victoria and a Lincoln Continental. What they call the sister car. I didn’t mention that Rollo is black. Means nothing to me, but it’s part of the story. Police see a black dude and a couple of white dudes rolling around in a Crown Vic look-alike, they see, what do you call that, misadventure, and they are going to pull you over to the side of the road. That came later.

  We had gone down to the Summit apartments, which people around our way called Slum It. Blacks and Spanish lived there, many females with their single mothers. There was this one chick I liked to bang whose name was Lucia, and we stopped by her spot. Lucia had told me her mom was out with her boyfriend for the night, so it was a perfect setup. We all sat around in her living room and got smoked up, listening to go-go and some Latin stuff to make Lucia happy, and then me and Lucia went to her bedroom and Rollo and Pat stayed where they was at. Back in the bedroom, Lucia said she was on her period, so I told her to suck it. After I busted a nut, me and her went back out to the living room, and I told my boys that it was time to go. I put a little weed on the coffee table for Lucia, and we left out of there.

  Rollo said he needed to make a quick delivery in the building. We got in the elevator, which smelled like fried chicken and cigarettes, went up a few floors, and followed Rollo down a hallway where he knocked on a door. Behind it someone said, “Who is it?” and Rollo said, “UPS man,” which was the answer they had agreed on. The door opened, and we went inside.

  It was just one person in there, a dude named David, who went by Day. He was on the small side, but cocky. Had braids, like most dudes do these days, trying to be Gucci Mane. He was wearing hundred-dollar jeans, Air Force Ones, and a Blac Label T-shirt. It’s like a uniform around here.

  He said to Rollo, “You got it?”

  Rollo said, “You got the Kermit?”

  Day said, “I’m good.”

  And Rollo said, “Then I got it.”

  We sat around a cable-spool table that had a bong on top of it, matches, an ashtray, and a shoe box top Day used to clean the seeds away from the buds. Day wanted to try the weed. Rollo handed him the Baggie, and Day kind of hefted it in his hand and said, “Feels light.”

  “You think so?” said Rollo.

  Day fired up a piece and poked it through the bowl with a thin rod. He sat back on the couch, holding his breath, and coughed out a stream of smoke. His eyes were already pink.

  “Good funk,” said Day.

  “I know it,” said Rollo.

  “But light.”

  “Now you gonna negotiate.”

  “I could get my scale, you want me to.”

  “You prolly don’t need a scale. With your superpowers and shit, you can just, you know, weigh the bag in your hand.”

  “I’m sayin.”

  “It’s an ounce. I scaled that shit my own self two hours ago.”
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  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m lyin?”

  “We got a difference of opinion, is all. Thinkin, we can meet each other halfway.”

  “ ’Nother words, you want a discount.”

  “This here ain’t no O-Z, Rollo. I just want to pay you for what it is.”

  “Okay,” said Rollo, standing from his seat. “I’m a let you set the price.”

  “Ain’t you want to discuss it?”

  Rollo, his eyes empty, shook his head.

  Day straightened his legs so he could get a hand inside the pocket of his jeans, then pulled out a roll of bills. He began to peel off notes, soundlessly counting with his lips. When he was satisfied, he held the bills that he had separated from the roll out to Rollo. That was when Rollo pulled a nine-millimeter Beretta from out of his dip.

  Rollo swung the heater fast and hard. Its barrel connected high on Day’s cheek. A worm of blood appeared immediately beneath his eye socket. Day touched the wound, split open wide, with his fingers. Rollo laughed.

  “Take the money, Sleepy,” said Rollo, snicking back the hammer on the nine. “All a that shit.”

  I went to Day and grabbed the money from each of his hands. I was excited, I got to admit. I had never robbed no one.

  Pat had stood up and backed away. The color had drained out his face.

  Rollo picked up the Baggie off the cable-spool table, resealed and rolled it, and stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans.

  “Now you gonna take that, too,” said Day, in a low voice. He was trying not to cry. He looked small on that couch. “You not gonna leave me anything?”

  “Leave you with your life,” said Rollo. He eased the trigger down and holstered the Beretta behind his back. He pulled his shirttail out to cover it and said, “Let’s go.”

  We were out of that building quick.

  On the way to the Marquis, Pat said, “Why’d you do that, Rollo?”

  Rollo shrugged and said, “That little muthafucka just aggravate me, man.”

  “Bad for business,” said Pat. He was still real nervous, you could tell. “I’m sayin, if it gets around.”

  “Day ain’t gonna say shit to anybody,” said Rollo. “Day’s a bitch.”

  When we got into the downtown area of where we lived, where they got the restaurants, pawn shops, and movie theaters and shit, we saw lights flashing behind us and heard the burst of a siren. We were being pulled over by the law.

  Rollo cut the Mercury to the curb and killed the engine. He put the gun under the seat. He handed me the bag of weed, and I laid it up under the dash where he had a small space for it in a cradle of wires.

  “They just gonna talk to us,” said Rollo. “It’ll be all right.”

  But the police officers in the patrol vehicle didn’t get out and approach our car. They sat where they were and waited, and soon many other squad cars, their light bars afire, began to appear from different directions. Several uniformed officers came upon us then, their weapons drawn. They screamed at us and ordered us out of the car, telling us to keep our hands raised, and then we were pushed down on the ground and cuffed with plastic bands.

  Day had called 911 on us. I couldn’t believe it. You always left the police out your business. I mean, that shit was just not done.

  The officers found the weed. They found the gun.

  Lying facedown on the street beside me, I heard Pat say, “Mom.”

  All of us were arrested and spent the night in the county lockup. We were charged with drug possession, unlawful possession of a firearm, and using a firearm in the commission of felony robbery. Me and Pat were eighteen, so we were charged as adults. The felony gun charge carried a five-year mandatory sentence if we were convicted of it. Because of the gun thing, the commissioner set our bails high. Rollo stayed in jail several days until his supplier bailed him out with drug money. My mother got a bond somehow. Pat’s mom, Miss Mary, had to put her house up for collateral to get him released.

  I was assigned a public defender. When I saw how young he was, and his cheap suit and wrinkled shirt, I knew I was in trouble. Rollo had his expensive lawyer, who he was more and more in debt to by the day. I heard from this fellah I knew that Pat had got some well-known criminal defense attorney in the county, a man Miss Mary knew from her church.

  I say “I heard” because I had not spoken to Pat since the night of the arrest. Well, not more than a few words. Once we were released, I had called him on his cell.

  “Can’t speak to you, Sleepy,” said Pat. “My lawyer says we shouldn’t be talkin to each other. ’Specially not on a cell. Could be our phones are tapped.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “Huh?”

  “You ain’t give no statement or nothin, did you?”

  “Nah, man…”

  “Did you?”

  Pat said, “I gotta go,” and the cell connection went dead.

  That was our conversation. He sounded scared.

  Time passed and nothing happened. That is how these things go. You get charged and then you wait. We didn’t even have a trial date. But I couldn’t relax. Personally, I felt that I was in a tight spot. I wasn’t gonna cut no deal with anybody, cause that meant I had to roll over on my boys. And yet, I didn’t trust my rookie lawyer to make a good case for me at a jury trial. I could do prison for a short stay, but I didn’t know if I could do the full nickel.

  One day, I saw Rollo out on the street, sitting curbside in his idling Marquis. I slid into the shotgun seat and dapped him up. Rollo had that skunky smell on him. He had been getting his head up, but his high had not taken him to a good place. His face said grim.

  “What you think, Sleepy?”

  I knew he was talking about our chances. “I don’t know.”

  “I need money,” said Rollo. “My lawyer’s costin me. My man put up my bail and I owe him big, too. What I got to do is, I got to be back in business so I can get in the flow.”

  “You can’t do that now.”

  “I know it. But I can’t get back to doin what I do best if I’m incarcerated.”

  “Maybe we’ll walk. If Day don’t show up to testify, they got no case.”

  “I’m tryin to take care of that. What I’m stressed on is Pat. If he flips on us—”

  “Pat’s my boy.”

  “I’m sayin, if he does testify against us, to keep his self out of the joint—”

  “He wouldn’t. He’ll stand tall.”

  “Okay,” said Rollo, looking at me full for the first time, his eyes flat and waxed. “I’m bringin it up, is all.”

  “Pat’s straight,” I said, but my voice sounded weak, like I didn’t believe my own words. Rollo had put a cold seed in my stomach.

  Not long after, I was walking through the business district of our neighborhood, when I saw Pat, Miss Mary, and their attorney, a slick-looking dude in pinstripes, sitting in the local coffeehouse at a window-side table. Pat had grown his hair out some, which made him look less hard. He was wearing khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt. He looked like one of those prep school boys the two of us had hated on all our lives. He was smiling. I stood on the street, watching him. It was September, still warm out. But I felt cold.

  Later in the evening I tried to phone his cell, but he didn’t pick up. He had caller ID, and he knew it was me. It was plain to me that he didn’t want to talk to me no more. I got the feeling that, far as he was concerned, we were through.

  He was coming home from work, this hardware store they got downtown, the next time I saw him. This was in November. He was on foot. Since our arrest he had gotten a job, his first. He was wearing a red shirt with the store logo on the front of it under his North Face fleece, and he had his head down, his arms pumping at his sides, the way he had always moved since we was kids. I had gone to the store earlier in the day, looked through the plate glass that fronted it, and seen him in there, talking to a customer. I figured he was on till closing. And I knew the way he’d walk home after he got o
ff, through that alley that cuts down toward his mother’s house.

  I was sitting beside Rollo, who was under the wheel of his Marquis. In the backseat was JoJo, this man Rollo knew from where he grew up, in the housing units deep in the city. JoJo had been in lockup for a time, but he was home now. Me and Pat had got smoked up with him before, a while back.

  When Pat saw Rollo’s car in the shadows of the alley, he stopped walking. He didn’t back up or nothin like that. But he didn’t come forward, neither.

  “Fellas,” he said, with that easy smile of his. Like he had done no one dirt.

  “Waitin on you,” I said, leaning out the window. “Let’s get our heads up, man.”

  “I’d like to,” said Pat. “But I can’t be dropping a positive if they make me pee.”

  “I got some shit can fix that,” I said, meaning this drink I got up the health store that could erase the marijuana in your urine. Pat knew what it was. He had told me about it originally.

  “I better not.”

  “Come on and visit, son,” said Rollo, his booming voice coming genially from inside the car.

  Pat shook his head, relaxed his shoulders, and walked to the Marquis. He got in the backseat, next to JoJo. Pat recognized him and they pounded fists.

  “How you doin, young?” said JoJo.

  “Working,” said Pat, with a shrug. “You know what that’s like.”

  “Not really,” said JoJo, and everyone laughed.

  “You been all right?” said Rollo, looking at Pat in the rearview.

  “I’m straight,” said Pat.

  “Nothin to report?” said Rollo.

  “My lawyer said I ain’t supposed to talk about the case with you guys.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m a listen to my lawyer,” said Pat.

  “Right,” said Rollo. “You should. I guess what I’m askin is, though, have you heard anything about our chances? ’Cause none of us have heard shit.”