Shoedog

by George Pelecanos

  Constantine looked into the second-story window of the Dutch Colonial. The blue light of a television flickered in the room. In silhouette he could see a thin head rising over a high-backed chair, and from the head, sparks of sparse, white, disheveled hair. He wondered what his father thought, sitting there, old and alone in the middle of the night, staring at the empty, insane images moving across the television screen.

  Did the old man think of his wife? Probably not. Constantine himself rarely thought of her, and when he did it was with effort, a futile attempt to reconstruct her face, her radiance, before the gin and ugliness, before the slow sickness came and drained the blood and youth right from her. Oddly, he found it difficult to bring her image up in his mind, though he remembered the cloth of her brilliant blue housecoat as she sat at the side of his bed, rubbing his back. Sometimes, too, in the dawn hours that bordered between consciousness and sleep, he could hear her voice, saying his name. He’d awaken suddenly, and the sound of her voice would still be in his head, and he would not return to sleep.

  Constantine took his cigarettes and matches from his shirt pocket and put fire to a smoke. He stood there, his arms on the fence, staring up at the silhouette of his father in the window of the house that he’d grown up in, and he lowered his head and laughed. The sound of his laughter carried in the night. A light came on in a house down the alley, and with it the deep bark of a large-breed dog.

  So if the old man came out of the house, what would he do? Would the father recognize the son after seventeen years? He would, Constantine decided. He would look at the long hair, the twisted, drunken face, the muddy clothes, and simply turn around and walk slowly back into the house. There was no reason to think, after all, that anything between them had changed. But standing there, Constantine felt himself hoping, against his cynicism, that his father would leave his chair just then, descend the pine staircase, pass through the small, dim kitchen, and walk out the back door, into the yard, to see and wrap his arms around his son.

  The old man did not walk from the house, and after a while the light went out down the alley and the dog no longer barked.

  Constantine ground his cigarette down into the concrete and walked out of the alley to Broad Branch Road, following that all the way to Military. He crossed to the other side of the street and put his thumb out at the first group of cars. At the tail end of the group an old Lincoln came to a stop near Oregon Avenue. Constantine went to the passenger door, opened it, and got inside.

  Chapter

  14

  RANDOLPH sat low in the driver’s seat of the T-Bird, sideglanced Constantine. He looked at the man, slumped down, his eyes covered by dark shades, his long, uncombed hair blowing in the wind of the open passenger window. Randolph issued a low chuckle as he drove toward Virginia, over the 14th Street bridge.

  “You look like some dog shit today, boy,” he said.

  “But I feel like a million bucks,” Constantine said, stretching left and pushing in the dash lighter. “How’d the rest of your night turn out?”

  “Nice lady,” Randolph said.

  “A little old,” Constantine said, “even for you.”

  “Old ladies,” Randolph said. “They love you right.”

  Constantine touched the hot end of the dash lighter to a Marlboro. He pulled on it, felt the heat in his lungs, watched his exhale shimmer and disappear in the flash of the morning sun.

  “This guy we’re going to see—”

  “Rego,” Randolph said.

  “You know him?”

  “I’ve used him.”

  “He all right?”

  “Grease monkey. Talks nickel-dime bullshit all day long.” Randolph looked over the rail at the brown water of the Potomac River, back at Constantine. “But he’s down.”

  They took the GW Parkway into Alexandria, drove through a poor residential district and then over railroad tracks into an industrial part of town marked by low cinderblock structures and two-story warehouses. Constantine did not recognize any of it. As a boy growing up in D.C., anything over the river had been irrelevant.

  Randolph cut into the last group of warehouses in the complex, stopped in front of an open garage where coveralled mechanics lethargically circled foreign and domestic hood-raised cars parked in the bay. Randolph got out of the T-Bird, made a head motion to Constantine, and Constantine followed.

  They walked around the side of the warehouse to the asphalt alley in the rear. Randolph pushed on a buzzer set next to an entrance to the left of a pull-down garage door. Constantine urinated in the alley while Randolph conversed with a voice coming through the speaker mounted below the buzzer. The door swung out as Constantine pulled up on the zipper of his fly.

  A small man with a thick head of curly blond hair stood in the doorway. He appraised Constantine, smiled at Randolph as he ran his hands clean over the chest of his gray coveralls.

  “Rego,” Randolph said.

  “Randolph,” Rego said, shaking Randolph’s hand. “Come on in.”

  Randolph and Constantine walked through the door, stepped into an immaculate, fluorescently lit bay that held four cars: a Ford, a Chevy, and two Chryslers. All had been painted flat black, stripped of their feathers—no stripes, no monster scoops, no spoilers, no oversized tires or mag wheels—but Constantine could see straight on, knew from the make and model years, that these cars had been manufactured for speed, and for the street.

  “You two want some coffee?” Rego said, out the side of his mouth.

  “I gotta get to work,” Randolph said, looking at the cars. “What do we got?”

  Rego drew a cigarette and matches. Constantine watched with amusement as Rego, in the windless bay, cupped his greasy-nailed hand around the match, a gearhead affectation. Rego exhaled slowly, dramatically. The guy was handsome, almost a Redford type, with blue eyes and deep laugh lines ending at the cut of a square jaw. But the blue eyes were a bit wide-set, the jaw a little slack.

  “You got your Ford Torino here,” Rego said, pointing his cigarette at the farthest car on the left “Cobra model, four twenty-nine Ram Air, with a four-barrel—”

  “Skip the Ford,” Randolph said, looking past Rego. “That the way you look at it, Constantine?”

  Constantine nodded.

  Rego said, “What about the Chevy?”

  “Fuck a Chevy,” Constantine said. His head hurt awfully bad.

  “I guess you two know what you want,” Rego said.

  “We’re lookin’ for somethin’ serious,” Randolph said.

  “I got these Chryslers,” Rego said. “They’re serious as a heart attack.”

  Randolph said, “Talk about it.”

  Rego nodded in a scholarly manner as he dragged on his cigarette. He walked over to a long, clean-lined Plymouth parked third in the row, and touched his hand gingerly to the hood, as if the hood were hot.

  “This Fury should do it,” Rego said. “Nineteen-seventy. Four-forty V-8, automatic, completely hopped up on the rebuild.”

  “Six barrel?”

  Rego closed his eyes with reverence, nodded slowly. “Three two-barrel Holly carbs.”

  Randolph walked to the driver’s side, opened the door, climbed in. He sat behind the wheel, ran his hand along it, gripped it and ungripped it as he studied the dash.

  “What about that one?” Constantine said, pointing his chin down the line at a black sedan that looked benign as a taxicab. “Fast?”

  “Faster than shit through a goose,” Rego said. “Road Runner, four-forty. Six-pack, same year as the Fury. Four-speed Hurst.”

  “It moves, huh?”

  “It really screams,” Rego said, widening his eyes broadly, as if a stranger had just grabbed his dick. “I’m serious as cancer.”

  Constantine got in the bucket of the Plymouth, looked at the tach mounted on the steering column, put his hand on the shifter, depressed the clutch, moved through the gears. He pushed on the car horn, heard the “beep-beep” of the Road Runner cartoon character, shook h
is head, and chuckled. He glanced through the passenger window, caught the eye of Randolph, still sitting in the driver’s seat of the Fury. Both of them got out of their cars and went to Rego, who was crushing his cigarette under the toe of his work boot.

  “About that horn,” Constantine said.

  “Purists,” Rego said, shrugging his shoulders. “If it don’t have the horn, it ain’t a Runner.”

  “Keep it,” Constantine said, considering it for only a second. “It’s all right with me.”

  “The two Chrysler products, then.”

  Randolph said, “Right.”

  “You pick ’em up tomorrow,” Rego said, handing Randolph a folded slip of paper from the pocket of his coveralls. “Here. The drop location is the same.”

  “Plates?” Randolph said, putting the paper in his pocket.

  Rego winked. “Fresh in the A.M., right out of satellite parking at National. They won’t even make the hot sheet by the time you roll. Guaranteed.”

  “All right, man,” Randolph said. “You all straight?”

  “Weiner fixed me,” Rego said.

  “Then that’ll do it,” Randolph said, shaking Rego’s hand. Randolph exited and Constantine followed. The door closed behind them as they hit the alley.

  Randolph and Constantine walked along the side of the warehouse to the parking area, got into the T-Bird. Randolph turned the key on the smooth engine, backed out of his space, put the car in drive, and pulled out of the lot.

  “You sure you all right with that car?” Randolph said, looking at the road.

  “It’s fine,” Constantine said.

  “And you don’t mind that simple-ass horn.”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  “You serious, man?”

  “Yeah, I’m serious.” Constantine pulled hair off his face, pushed it behind his ear, and grinned at his friend driving the car, “Serious as a hangnail, Randolph.”

  VALDEZ and Gorman sat in the black Caddy in front of Constantine’s motel at the District line, Gorman’s thin arm out the driver’s side window, a cigarette dangling in his fingers. Jackson sat alone in his own car, behind

  them. Constantine noticed them as Randolph pulled to a stop on the east side of Georgia Avenue.

  Randolph cut the engine. “Here’s where we split up,” he said to Constantine.

  “You goin’ with Jackson?”

  “Yeah.”

  Constantine nodded past Randolph, to Valdez and Gorman in the Caddy parked across the street. “What am I supposed to do with those lovers?”

  “Go with ’em, have a look at the joint.” Randolph prodded his finger gently into Constantine’s arm. “And keep your mouth shut. Don’t let Valdez fire you up into talkin’ about nothin’, hear?”

  “What are you sayin’, man?”

  “I’m talkin’ about the woman, Constantine. I didn’t mention it ‘cause it wasn’t none of my goddamn business. Any fool can see … listen, man, you got a death wish, that’s your thing.” Randolph cut it, shook his head. He scooted up in the seat, pulled his wallet, pulled a card from the wallet, flipped the card over, and wrote something on its back. “Here, man”—Constantine took the card—“you need me, you can reach me at work, or on the number on the back. You might want to talk, ‘specially tonight. Hear?”

  Constantine slid the card into his breast pocket. He got out of the car and closed the door, bent over and leaned his elbows on the frame of the open window.

  “Thanks,” Constantine said.

  “Ain’t no thing,” said Randolph.

  Constantine pushed away, waited for a break in the traffic. He jogged across Georgia to the black Caddy, got into the backseat. Valdez and Gorman were both wearing shades, staring straight ahead. Valdez took the toothpick that was lodged in the corner of his plump mouth and dropped it out the window. He looked in the rearview at Constantine.

  “You’re late,” Gorman said.

  Constantine looked away. “I was picking out the car.”

  “You pick out a good one?” Valdez said.

  “It’ll do.”

  “Maybe you want to drive right now,” Valdez said, shooting an ugly grin toward Gorman. “Seeing as how you’re the driver.”

  “And maybe,” Constantine said, “you’d like to kiss my white ass.”

  Gorman laughed sharply, punched Valdez in the shoulder. Valdez squirmed in the seat, looked back up in the rearview.

  “I don’t know why Grimes put you on this thing,” Valdez said, “but I hope we all make it through. ‘Cause after it’s over, brother, you can believe one thing: I’m gonna fuck you up.”

  Constantine stared back in the mirror. “Can we just go?”

  Gorman dragged his cigarette down to the filter, flicked it out onto Georgia Avenue, and turned the key in the ignition.

  “Come on, Valdez,” he said. “We sit here all day, you gonna miss your fuckin’ show.”

  Chapter

  15

  RANDOLPH drove north on Wisconsin Avenue, looked across the seat at Jackson. The man had been talking shit the whole trip, since he and Randolph had argued in front of the motel over who would drive. Randolph had ended it when he told Jackson to get his seventies-lookin’ ass inside the car. Now Jackson had brought out his pick—a black plastic comb with a black plastic fist clenched on the end of it—and he was raking the comb up the front of his modified Afro. Randolph hadn’t seen a pick like that in years.

  Jackson whipped his head to the right, rolled his window down, and yelled something out to a large-breasted, long-legged woman walking up the street in a short leather skirt. The woman kept walking, her alternating-piston ass moving with beautiful efficiency, her eyes straight ahead. Randolph gave the T-Bird gas and sped past.

  “Hey, slow down, man!” Jackson said.

  “She ain’t look like she want to talk to you, man,” Randolph said.

  “I’ll make the bitch talk”—Jackson smiled, ran his fingers across his crotch—“right into the goddamn microphone.” Jackson turned his head once again to get a final look, lowered his voice to a mumble. “She looked like Pam Grier, too.”

  Randolph parked a few doors down from Uptown Liquors. The time was a little after eleven, and already there was some early alky action, in and around the shop. Jackson strained his eyes to see through the plate glass of the store: in the back, near the end of the counter, stood Isaac, gathering and breaking down cartons. Jackson knew that Isaac would have to take the cartons out, to the green dumpster in the garage beside the store.

  Randolph checked his watch. “We meetin’ Polk here?”

  “Uh-uh,” Jackson said. “He’s still shacked up with the nappy, that old freak of his. Said he’d swing by later in the day, check the place out.”

  “Then let’s get on it, man. I got to get my ass down to the shoe store, for the noon rush.”

  “You go on,” Jackson said. “I done took the tour yesterday.” Through the glass, Jackson watched Isaac head into the back room, the cartons under his arm.

  Randolph opened the door, put one foot out on the asphalt. “All right, then. I’ll be right back.”

  Jackson put his hand around Randolph’s arm. “Take your time. I know you just the driver, but Grimes wants you to know the place real good. Get yourself an education, hear?”

  Randolph pulled his arm away, shifted his shoulders beneath his jacket as he climbed out of the T-Bird. He walked down the sidewalk to the double glass doors of Uptown Liquors, went inside. When the door closed behind him, Jackson bolted from the car, jogged past the store, and entered the darkness of the small garage.

  He took off his shades, folded them, hung one stem in the pocket of his shirt. Adjusting his eyes, he moved quickly toward the green dumpster. To the side of it, a door opened, and Isaac stepped out into the garage. Jackson stopped walking, watched Isaac put the broken-down sheets of cardboard into the dumpster. Isaac looked bigger, harder up close.

  “What’s goin’ on, brother?” Jackson said.

&
nbsp; “Nothin’ to it,” Isaac said, looking at Jackson for only a fraction of a second, the look disinterested, as if Jackson were a salesman who had come to his door.

  Jackson said, “Got a minute?”

  Isaac closed the lid of the dumpster. This time he did not bother to look at Jackson. “You take it easy, man,” he said, and he turned to walk back through the door.

  Jackson reached into his pocket, pulled the hundreds that were bound with the heavy rubber band, used his forefinger and thumb to fan the stack. The sound of it cut the stillness of the dark garage.

  Isaac stopped walking. He knew the sound, had heard it every night at closing time, when old man Rosenfeld and young Rosenfeld counted out the money. He had gotten used to hearing the sound. But now the sound was aimed at him.

  Isaac turned, squinted his eyes at the hustler with the muttonchop sideburns and the tight green pants. “What you want, man?” he said.

  Jackson slapped the stack of hundreds against his palm. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “quarter past eleven—me and a couple of boys gon’ knock this motherfucker over.”

  Isaac shifted his weight. They stared at each other, listened to the hiss of cars passing by on Wisconsin. Isaac cocked one eyebrow. “What you tellin’ me for?”

  Jackson smiled. “Maybe I’m takin’ a chance. But I been watchin’ you, man. I figure I’m takin’ a bigger chance walkin’ into that shop tomorrow mornin’, havin’ to face you down. So I’ve told you.” Jackson’s smile faded. “And now I’ve crossed that line.”

  Isaac’s eyes went to the money, then back up at Jackson. “You ain’t done talkin’.”

  “Isaac,” Jackson said. “That your name, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sounds like a slave name.”

  “Talk about the money.”

  “I am,” Jackson said. “See, I been in that shop, heard the way that Jewboy with the Rolex and the chains talks to you. The old man too. ‘Isaac, fetch this, Isaac, fetch that’ Thought it might be time for you to get you some, brother.”