Hell To Pay

by George Pelecanos

  “You threatenin’ me?”

  “Just telling you how it’s gonna be.”

  Strange looked down at his feet. He rubbed his face and again met Tucker’s eyes. “Whatever I’m gonna do with regards to you, young man, I am going to do. You standing there talking bold, it’s not gonna influence me either way.”

  “Course not.” Tucker looked Strange over. “You got principles.”

  “You don’t know me that well to be talking to me that way.”

  “But I do know your kind.”

  “Now wait a minute-”

  “Let me put it another way, then. This is all about what kind of husband I’m gonna be to Alisha, right? Well, I can promise you this: I ain’t gonna end up like you, Strange. Sneakin’ around down here in your middle age, paying to have some girl you don’t even know jack your dick. Out here tellin’ on others when you got a fucked-up life your own self. So do whatever you think is right. I’ve said what I came to say. You want to listen, it’s up to you.”

  Tucker walked back to his car, got behind the wheel, and lit the ignition. Strange watched the Audi back out of the alley. Then it was just Strange, standing on the stones under the humming street lamp, alone with his shame.

  JANINE Baker came down the stairs and unlocked the front door of her house at a little past one in the morning. She had been lying awake in bed and had recognized the engine on Strange’s Cadillac as he had cruised slowly down her block.

  He was out there on the stoop, one step down from the doorway. She looked down on him, rumpled and glassy-eyed, as she stood in the frame.

  “Come on in. It’s cool out there.”

  “I don’t think I should,” said Strange. “I just came by to apologize for being so short with you on the phone.”

  Janine pulled the lapels of her robe together against the chill. Behind her, Strange could see Lionel coming down the staircase. He stopped a few steps up.

  “Tell him to go back to bed,” said Strange softly. “I don’t want him seeing me like this.”

  Janine looked over her shoulder and directed her son to return to his room. Strange waited for Lionel to go back up the stairs.

  “Well?”

  “I’m all turned around,” said Strange.

  “And you’re trying to say what?”

  “I just don’t feel… I don’t feel like I’m right for you now. I know I’m not right for the boy.”

  “You’re looking to give up on us, is that it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I haven’t given up on you.”

  “I know it.”

  “Even while I knew how you been cheatin’ on me these past couple years.”

  Strange looked up at her. “It’s not what you think.”

  “Tell me what it is, then. Don’t you think I been knowin’ about your, your problem for a while now? I might be forgiving, but I am human, and I still have my senses. Smelling sweet like lilacs or somethin’ every time you come back from seeing her. Smelling like perfume, and you, a man who doesn’t even wear aftershave.”

  “Listen, baby-”

  “Don’t baby me. Derek, I can smell it on you now.”

  Her voice was almost gentle. It cut him, Janine being so steady with him, so strong. He wanted her to raise her voice, let it out. But he could see she wasn’t going to do that. It made him admire her even more.

  Strange shifted his feet. “I never loved another woman the whole time I been lovin’ you.”

  “That supposed to mean something to me? Should I feel better because you only been, what, cattin’ around with hos?”

  “No.”

  “What about respectin’ me? What about respecting yourself?”

  Strange cut his eyes. “When my mother was dying, that whole time… that was when I started. I couldn’t face it, Janine. Not just her passing, but lookin’ at my own death, too. Seeing that my turn was coming up, not too far behind.”

  “And now Joe Wilder’s been killed,” said Janine, completing his thought. “Derek, don’t go dishonoring that little boy’s memory by connecting the one thing to the other. All these bad things out here ought to lead you to the ones who love you. In the face of all that, family and your faith in the Lord, it’s what keeps you strong.”

  “I guess I’m weak, then.”

  “Yes, Derek, you are weak. Like so many men who are really just boys on the inside. Selfish, and so afraid to die.”

  Strange spread his hands. “I love you, Janine. Know this.”

  Janine leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. It was a soft kiss, not held long. As she pulled back, Strange knew that the feel of her lips on his would haunt him forever.

  “I won’t share you anymore,” said Janine. “I am not going to share you with anyone else. So you need to think about your future. How you want to spend it, and who you want to spend it with.”

  Strange nodded slowly. He turned and walked down the sidewalk to his car. Janine closed the door and locked it, and went into the hallway and leaned her back against the plaster wall. Here she was out of sight of Lionel and Strange. For a very short while, and quietly, she allowed herself to cry.

  TERRY Quinn sat naked in a cushioned armchair set by the window. His bedroom was dark, and outside the window the streets were dark and still. He stared out the window at nothing, his fist resting on his chin. He heard a rustling sound as Sue Tracy moved under the sheets and blanket. Her nude form was a lush outline as she brought herself to a sitting position in his bed.

  “What’s wrong, Terry? Can’t you sleep?”

  “I’m thinking about Derek,” said Quinn. “I’m worried about my friend.”

  chapter 22

  THE next morning, Strange willed himself out of bed and down to the kitchen, where he brewed a cup of coffee and slipped the sports page out of the Sunday Post. He drank the coffee black while reading Michael Wilbon’s latest column on Iverson and a story on the upcoming ’Skins / Ravens contest, set for that afternoon. Strange then drove with Greco up to Military and Oregon, where he hung a left into Rock Creek Park. He and many others ran their dogs in a field there by a large parking lot.

  Greco ran the high grass field with a young Doberman named Miata, a black-and-tan beauty whose primary markings were a brown muzzle, chest, and forelegs. Generally, Greco preferred the company of humans and chose his few canine playmates carefully. But he took to this one quickly, finding Miata to be an energetic and able-bodied friend. The dog’s owner, Deen Kogan, was an attractive woman with whom Strange found it very easy to talk. In another life, he might have asked her out for a scotch, maybe a bite to eat. But she wasn’t Janine.

  Back on Buchanan, Strange showered and dressed in one of the two suits he owned. He emptied a full can of Alpo into Greco’s dish and headed up to the New Bethel Church of Christ, on Georgia and Piney Branch. Driving north, he realized that he was being followed by a black Mercedes C-Class, a fine factory automobile cheapened in this case by the custom addition of a spoiler and over-elaborate rims. Up around Fort Stevens he circled the block, came back out on Georgia, and looked in his rearview: The Mercedes was still behind him. After his encounter with Calhoun Tucker, he could no longer blame his feeling of dread on paranoia. This was real.

  Strange took a seat in a pew far back in the church, coming in at the tail end of the service. He could see Janine and Lionel in their usual place, a few rows up ahead. Strange prayed hard for them and for himself, and closed his eyes tightly when he prayed for Joe Wilder. He believed, he had to believe, that the spirit of that beautiful boy had gone on to a better place. He told himself that the corpse lying in the ground in that small box wasn’t Joe, but was just a shell. He felt his emotions well up, more from anger than from sadness, as he prayed.

  Outside the church Strange shook hands with the parishioners he knew, and with a few he was meeting for the first time. He felt a hand drop onto his shoulder and he turned. It was George Hastings, his daughter by his side.

  “George,” said
Strange. “Alisha. Sweetheart, you look lovely today.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Derek.”

  “Honey,” said Hastings, “give me a moment alone with Derek here, will you?”

  Alisha gave Strange a beautiful smile and found a friend to talk to nearby.

  “Haven’t heard from you in a while,” said Hastings.

  “Been meaning to get up with you, George,” said Strange.

  “You could stop by for the game. You got plans for the day?”

  “No, I… All right. Maybe I’ll drop by later on.”

  Hastings shook Strange’s hand and held the grip. “My sympathies on that boy from your team.”

  Strange nodded. He had no idea what he would say to his friend when they next met.

  Strange caught up with Janine and Lionel as they walked to her car and asked them if they’d like to have breakfast with him at the diner. It was their Sunday morning ritual. But Janine said she had a busy afternoon planned and that she ought to get a jump on it. Lionel did not protest. Strange told him he’d pick him up for practice Monday night. Lionel only nodded, double-taking Strange with what Strange took to be a look of confusion before dropping into the passenger side of Janine’s car. Strange hated himself then for what he knew he was: another man who was about to drift out of this boy’s life. He wondered what Janine had told Lionel, and what he would tell Lionel himself if he had the chance.

  On the way over to the Three-Star Diner, going east on Kennedy, Strange noticed the Mercedes, once again, in his rearview. The tricked-out car was only two lengths back. They’re not even worried about being burned, thought Strange, and for one young moment he considered taking a sudden turn and punching the gas. He could lose them easily; he’d come up around here, and no one knew these streets and alleys like he did. But he let them follow him, all the way down to First, where he parked his Caddy in a space along the curb. The Mercedes pulled up behind him.

  Strange locked his Brougham and walked toward the Mercedes, memorizing the car’s license plate and confirming the model as he approached. Strange reached the car as the driver’s-side window slid down. Behind the wheel was a handsome, typically unfriendly looking young man with close-cropped hair. His suit and the knot of his tie were immaculate. Strange recognized him as one of the men who had attended Joe Wilder’s funeral. He had been talking to Joe’s mother, Sandra Wilder, by the grave.

  In the passenger bucket was a man of the same age, same unsmiling expression, more flashily dressed. He sat low, with one arm leaning on the sill of his window, talking on his cell.

  “What can I do for you fellas?” said Strange.

  “A man needs to speak with you,” said the driver.

  “Who?”

  “Granville Oliver.”

  Strange knew the name. The city knew Granville Oliver’s name. But with Strange it was more; he had a history with Oliver’s bloodline.

  “And you are?”

  “Phillip Wood.”

  Wood’s partner lowered the cell and looked across the buckets at Strange. “Granville wants to see you now.”

  Strange did not acknowledge this one or give him any kind of eye contact at all. He glanced over his shoulder through the plate glass fronting the diner. He could see Billy Georgelakos coming around the counter, his girth pushing against his stained apron, holding the pine baton that Strange knew had been hollowed out and filled with lead. Strange shook his head slightly at Billy, who stopped his forward path at once. Strange returned his gaze to the driver, Phillip Wood.

  “Tell you what,” said Strange. “I’m gonna go on in there and eat my breakfast. When I come out, y’all are still out here? We can talk.”

  Strange gave them his back, left the idling Mercedes curbside, and walked into the Three-Star. The sound of gospel music, coming from the house radio, hit him like cool water as he entered the diner.

  “Everything all right, Derek?” said Georgelakos, now behind the counter again.

  “I think so.”

  “The usual?”

  “Thanks, friend,” said Strange.

  STRANGE ate a feta-cheese-and-onion omelette sprinkled with Texas Pete hot sauce, and a half-smoke side, and washed it down with a couple of cups of coffee. Some after-church types were at the counter and some sat in the old red-cushioned booths. The diner was white tiles and white walls, kept clean by Billy and his longtime employee, Etta.

  Billy Georgelakos, his bald head sided by patches of gray, ambled down the rubber mat that ran behind the counter and leaned his forearms on the Formica top.

  “Where’s Janine and the boy?”

  “Busy,” said Strange, sopping up the juice left on the plate with a triangle of white toast.

  “Uh,” grunted Georgelakos. His great eagle nose twitched. His glance moved through the window to the street, then back to Strange. “What about it? They’re waiting for you, right?”

  “I told them to wait,” said Strange. He closed his eyes as he swallowed the last of his breakfast. “Billy, you can’t get a better egg and half-smoke combination in all of D.C. than you can right here.”

  “The omelette was my father’s recipe, you know that. But your father taught us all how to grill a half-smoke.”

  “However it happened, it’s beautiful music, that’s for damn sure.”

  “You sure you gonna be all right?”

  “Pretty sure. Lemme see your pen.”

  Georgelakos drew his Bic from where it rested atop his ear. Strange wrote something down on a clean napkin he pulled from a dispenser.

  “In case I’m wrong,” said Strange, “here’s the license plate number of their car. It’s a C two thirty, a two thousand model, in case it comes up.”

  Georgelakos took the napkin, folded it, and slipped it under his apron. Strange left money on the counter and shook Georgelakos’s hand.

  On the way out, Strange stopped by the photograph of his father, Darius Strange, wearing his chef ’s hat and standing next to Billy’s father, Mike Georgelakos, in the early 1960s. The photograph was framed and mounted by the front door. He stared at it for a few moments, as he always did, before reaching for the handle of the door.

  “Adio, Derek,” said Georgelakos.

  “Yasou, Vasili,” said Strange.

  OUT on the street, Strange stood before the open window of the Mercedes.

  “Get in,” said Phillip Wood.

  “Where we goin’?”

  “You’ll find out, chief,” said Wood’s partner.

  Strange looked at Wood only. “Where?”

  “Out Central Avenue. Largo area.”

  “I’ll follow you out,” said Strange, and when Wood didn’t answer, Strange said, “Young man, it’s the only way I’ll go.”

  Wood’s partner laughed, and Wood stared at Strange some more in that hard way that was not working on Strange at all.

  “Follow us, then,” said Wood.

  Strange went to his car.

  STRANGE followed the Mercedes east to North Capitol, then south, then east again on H to Benning Road. Farther along they found Central Avenue and took it out of the city and into Maryland.

  As he drove, Strange mentally recounted what he knew of Granville Oliver.

  Oliver, now in his early thirties, had come up fatherless in the Stanton Terrace Dwellings of Anacostia, in Southeast D.C. His mother was welfare dependent and a shooter of heroin and cocaine. When he was eight years old, Granville had learned how to tie his mother off and inject her with coke, a needed jolt when her heroin nods took her down to dangerously low levels. He was taught this by one of her interchangeable male friends, hustlers and junkheads themselves, always hanging around the house. One of these men taught him how to go with his hands. Another taught him how to load and fire a gun. At the time, Granville was nine years old.

  Granville had an older brother, two cousins, and one uncle who were in the game. Cocaine at first, and then crack when it hit town around the summer of ’86. The brother was executed in a turf dispute involving
drugs. The cousins were doing time in Ohio and Illinois prisons, dispersed there after the phase-out of Lorton. Granville’s mother died when he was in his early teens, an overdose long overdue. It was the uncle, Bennett Oliver, who eventually took Granville under his wing.

  Granville dropped out of Ballou High School in the tenth grade. By then he was living in a row house with friends in Congress Heights, south of Saint Elizabeth’s. He had been a member of the notorious Kieron Black Gang in the Heights, but it was small change, a you-kill-one-of-us-and-we-kill-one-of-you thing, and he wanted out. So Granville went to his uncle, who took him on.

  From the start it was apparent that Granville had a good head for numbers. After he had proven himself on the front lines – he was allegedly the triggerman in four murders by the time he was seventeen years old – he quickly moved into operations and helped grow the business. Through ruthless extermination of the competition, and Granville’s brains, the Oliver Mob soon became the largest crack and heroin distribution machine in the southeast quadrant of the city.

  The center of the operation was a small rec center anchoring a rocky baseball field and rimless basketball court on the grounds of an elementary school in the Heights. There Bennett and Granville got to know the kids from the surrounding neighborhoods of Wilburn Mews, Washington Highlands, Walter E. Washington Estates, Valley Green, Barnaby Terrace, and Congress Park.

  For many of the area’s youths, the Olivers, especially the young and handsome Granville, were now the most respected men in Southeast. The police were the enemy, that was a given, and working men and women were squares. The Olivers had the clothes, the cars, and the women, and the stature of men who had returned from war. They gave money to the community, participated in fund-raisers at local churches, sponsored basketball squads that played police teams, and passed out Christmas presents in December to children in the Frederick Douglass and Stanton Terrace Dwellings. They were the heroes, and the folk heroes, of the area. Many kids growing up there didn’t dream of becoming doctors or lawyers or even professional athletes. Their simple ambition was to join the Mob, to be “put on.” Working out of the rec center, the elder Oliver had the opportunity to observe the talent and nurture it as well.