by Neely Tucker
Two steps forward, three, and now he took her by the elbows as she had held him, and she didn’t resist, let herself be pulled to him. Her face was inches from his, looking up at him, her head going slightly to the left, quizzical.
“Come back,” he said softly, gripping her arms harder. “You come back to me.”
She blinked and then leaned her forehead on his chin, let the weight of her body go fully into his. They stood there, the taxi driver behind the wheel, paying them no mind.
“You’re a good man,” she whispered. “Dig in. Don’t quit.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“The bourbon, Sully, it’s not your friend so much anymore.”
She pulled back a final time, looked into his eyes again, searching, then put her fingers to his cheeks and kissed him, softly, on the mouth. And then she turned and got in the taxi and it was pulling away, taking her down the street and away from him, bound for the far side of the world.
He watched the taxi disappear into traffic, the ghost of her fingertips still on his skin, and the air around him cooled by a dozen degrees, he would swear it, and he shivered against the sudden chill.
• • •
For the next forty-eight, he laid low, taking her advice, trying to be good, staying around the house, wandering up to the corner store at Fourth and East Cap and shooting the shit with Jimmy, the Korean kid who worked the counter. His parents owned the place. One day Sully had breakfast at Jimmy T’s and sat at the counter, watching Larry do the short-order stuff.
He went home and got the bottle down and reached for a glass and then looked at it and put it back, walking right back out the door, cursing under his breath. Ten minutes later, he was wandering through the tin-roofed main building at Eastern Market, fresh fish at one end, pastries at the other, vegetables and beef and chicken and sausage and handmade pasta in between. Without thinking—he didn’t even realize what he was doing—he was picking up scallions and celery and parsley and then he understood that he was putting together a rémoulade. So then he picked up a pound and a half of shrimp and fresh-caught sea bass, the grizzled clerk with the stained white apron handing him the shellfish and the fillets wrapped in butcher paper across the glass-fronted counter, heavy in his hand.
He came home and put on some Zachary Richard. Went in the kitchen and dusted the shrimp with seasoning form K-Paul’s and crusted the sea bass with a rub he’d cadged from Melvin, the sous chef at Brigtsen’s. He set up the grill and the flame jumped from match to charcoal. Raking the coals out even, he set the sea bass over them, closing the lid, and stepped inside to make the rémoulade.
Lemon juice and oil and onion, the herbs, horseradish, mustard, ketchup, a splash of Tabasco, salt, pepper—it was a birthright; he’d never even seen a recipe. He pulled the fish off the grill, tossed a quick salad, and sat down on the back step to eat.
As he did, he read the paper. There was a story on the Metro front about the protest downtown, about Delores Ellison—they’d put the crowd at several hundred—but he skipped it and tried to be interested in baseball box scores.
That didn’t really last, so he went inside and came back with a couple of books. He had the entire afternoon, the evening. He could lose himself in another world, the hours passing, and suddenly he would look up and it would be dark and he would feel rested, at peace.
The biography of the Laffite brothers lasted a few pages before he felt his mind wandering. The other, an old favorite, The Soccer War, by the brilliant Kapuscinski, didn’t hold him, either, not even for a single coup.
By the time he finished eating, he was back into the paper, this time digging into the want ads. He found three boats for sale, small things that would get up and go on the Potomac or the bay. The one that caught his eye was a ’94 Maxum 2400 SCR, a twenty-five-footer with a V-6 engine. The vinyl seats had a little sun damage and there was a long scratch along the right bow, but it was reasonable. Sully called the guy up and said that if he would tow it to the Gangplank—and if it handled the waves like a pony, not a mule, he’d take it, as long as the trailer came with it.
The next day, he took it out, the bow rising when he gave it some throttle, revving the engine on the Potomac’s choppy waters, loving the speed and the sunshine.
He came back and wrote the man a check on the dock, then settled with the marina for a slip.
In the afternoon, he took it back out, slower this time, past Georgetown, the bluffs of Virginia rising on the left, the George Washington Parkway high up, the trees and brush coming in full, the bluff a mass of green. A bottle of wine, a baguette, the shrimp and rémoulade. Wine, he thought, turning to watch the wake, it wasn’t as hard as bourbon, so that had to be better, right?
He smiled to himself at that, and then felt it fade. Alexis wasn’t wrong about the whiskey. Perhaps she really wasn’t wrong. Maybe it had slipped, unnoticed, from being his long and steady companion, his southern birthright to . . . what? A traitor? Something that had gone from propping him up to knocking him down? Was it possible, you know, that maybe the bottle was sucking the life from him rather than the other way around?
. A vicious little voice in his head had been echoing Alexis’s words ever since she’d said them. Sure, the bosses had been telling him this almost from the day he’d gotten out of the hospital, the seventy-day rehab . . . but they didn’t know shit. They were corporate pinheads who followed protocols somebody somewhere else had written.
But Alex, she was no bullshit. He had always admired her judgment, whether it was to cross the checkpoint two clicks up the road or if this or that translator was going to be trustworthy if the shit hit. She could see him better than just about anyone else, could see past the scars and the limp and the chip on the shoulder . . . and she liked what was there. And still, she had seen something dark and ugly taking root inside him, a mean little animal burrowing under the rage and loss, feeding on it, growing. . . . After a while, he cut the engine and sat out there, just off Three Sisters, the boat rocking gently, watching the sun fade, letting the engine, like his mind, cool by degrees. He forced his mind elsewhere, only to find another dark little voice clamoring for attention.
You were going to find out.
Delores Ellison. From his problems to hers. Who could ever know the mind of the suicidal? She might have been completely deranged by then, driven over the edge by grief and sorrow. It might be a nightmare in her mind and nowhere else.
Still, shifting his weight on the seat, taking the corkscrew to the wine bottle, he didn’t think so.
Delores had been clear that it was something not in the story that she thought he knew or was about to know. What could that be? Who shot Billy and why? Had Billy shot somebody and been much more of a thug than Sully or the police realized?
Or—and here he poured the wine into a plastic cup and recorked the bottle—maybe Billy, gay boy to the end, was slumming tricks down there, blow jobs as a means to his own debasement, and Delores felt the guilt, as a single parent, for him turning out that way. Maybe her suicidal rage was really directed at Sully. This is the source of my shame and I will tie you to it forever, you fucking bastard.
Ah. There it was. The nasty thought lurking in the basement of his own mind: Was her death on his hands, intentionally or not?
“Sorry, Alexis,” he said out loud. “I got to do this.”
He punched in the number of Sly Hastings on his cell and dipped the shrimp in the rémoulade.
“Tomorrow, about nine?” he said, still chewing when Sly answered. “Pick me up in the parking lot of the Gangplank. We have a mutual problem.” He paused, listening. “Something like that. The Hall brothers. Turns out they’re a special problem of mine, too.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“SO MPD AIN’T got shit about who killed your Ellison boy,” Sly said, riding shotgun, slurping sweet tea through a straw, “but you gonna try to figure it out. Hero boy. White man co
me to save all us Negroes. Hoo.”
Sully was riding in the backseat, watching the neighborhood roll by in the darkness, Lionel driving, keeping the Jeep Cherokee—Sly’s second car—right at the speed limit. A little after ten. Sly had been twenty minutes late, then insisted on them getting carryout from Kenny’s up on Maryland and Eighth, on Capitol Hill, then had been more interested in hearing about the whomping the Hall brothers had laid on him than the fact that he’d gotten suspended, or in Delores Ellison’s sad and spectacular demise.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Sully said. “You told me the key to finding out what was happening in the Bend was who killed your mole, dear old Dee. You said we figure that out, it’s likely going to tell us who killed Billy. I got no other leads. Police got no leads. So let’s find out who killed Dee.”
“The South Cap Crew shot up Dee’s car the week before he got capped—”
“Even MPD knows that,” Sully said.
“—and I—you got to let me finish. That interrupting shit is rude, you know it? The Halls, man, you saw what happened when you walked up on them by yourself. They ain’t got no home trainin’. So, we going to try to figure it out the other way. We going to go ask the South Caps if they the ones who killed Dee. You called me yesterday, it gave me the idea. That was good.”
He looked down at his takeout, the Styrofoam container balanced on his lap. “Kenny can ace some ribs. Don’t know what it is with that boy and the vinegar on them greens, though.”
“It’s too much,” Sully said, finishing his. “The salt, too. So when you doing this thing with the South Caps?”
“Right now.”
“Now?”
“You got something better? Yeah. Now. You called me, remember? We going to see Terry Mungo, T-Money. He run that crew.”
They had been looping the Hill in an aimless circle, but now Lionel moved to the far right lane of Pennsylvania and turned, swinging right onto Eighth, the half-ass commercial block of the Hill—fried chicken places, check-cashing joints, the video store, the fire station, the marine barracks ahead on the left.
“I don’t think I need to be—”
“I need me some bodies,” Sly said, “that T-Money don’t recognize. A little show—I’m not calling it force—but a little show of . . . of . . . what is it, substance.”
“You got plenty of heavies,” Sully said. “You don’t need me.”
Sly was looking out the window, studying the pedestrians on the sidewalk, the Jeep slowing. “Oh, but I need you, brother Sullivan. T-Money, he’s gonna think you my connection on this new shit I been bringing in.”
“And why is he going to think that?”
“’Cause that’s what I’m going to tell him. You don’t say nothing, right, but if you got to? Speak that Bosnian you talk. You know, that East European Mafia shit. The Russians! Man, you speak Russian?”
“Nyet, dipshit.”
“Then just do that Bosnian thing. And put some bass in it. You’ll scare the nigga to death.”
“Sly, they had to already seen me walking around. I been all up and down South Cap.”
“Perfect,” Sly said. “You the foreign money, checking on the investment.”
Then, without waiting for Sully to respond, he said, “There he go right there, Lionel, you see?”
Lionel slowed, stopping alongside the row of cars parked parallel to the curb. Sly pushed the button, the window going down, then waved an arm outside. Sully looked out to see a figure in a black hoodie turn and cut to the car.
The man got in the backseat alongside him and brought the door shut in a rush. Lionel accelerated away from the curb. The man pulled the hoodie back, dreads falling down his shoulders, turning to look at Sully, his eyes blinking three-four-five times in recognition, his mouth parting in surprise.
“This right here,” said Sly, not even turning from the front seat, putting the window back up, “is Curious George Ferris. I think y’all done met.”
• • •
Lionel eased down Capitol Hill, the building itself on the right, then turned left on Washington Ave., heading toward the Bend.
“How does this work again?” Sully said. “George here is the Hall brothers’ chief ass-capper and—”
“Curious works for me,” Sly said.
“Now I do,” Curious said, that raspy voice. “Now I do.”
“When did that start?” Sully said. “Down there at the track you—”
“Recently,” said Sly. “Recently he started for me. The Hall brothers, he hasn’t gotten around to telling them about his new employment opportunity.”
Sully looked over at Curious, who was looking at him, then back at Sly in the front.
“He’s your new mole,” Sully said, “is what you’re saying.”
“If you like to say it that way.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Curious George had a broad, expansive face, his dreads perfectly maintained, the tips dyed reddish copper, the brown eyes looking hard at Sully. Nineteen, possibly twenty, could be twenty-one.
“After Dee Dee got popped?” Curious rasped. “Sly, then he approached me.”
“Approached?” Sully said. “He approached you?”
“Don’t get cute back there,” Sly said. “We got business. Now, look here. T-Money, he’s got no idea we’re about to roll up. This how it’s gonna work. Me, Curious, and you get out the ride. That’s gonna look like me, the Hall brothers’ enforcer, and the out-of-town money, all united. Shit. He gonna think we all done ganged up on him.”
The car, now on South Cap, rolled them under the overpass, the McDonald’s on the left, the park on the right, Southwest in all its paint-peeling, dime-bag glory. Lionel turned left again, east now, putting them in the South Caps’ domain. At the stop sign, the ratty little row houses began, window units hanging ass out of the upstairs windows, men on porches, looking.
“Up here, right around the corner,” Lionel said softly.
“Here we go,” Sly said. “Nobody talks but me. We go inside, I talk with T-Money, nice and friendly, Lionel stays put in the ride.” He turned to Curious George. “You got that Gat, yeah?”
Curious nodded, tapping the pouch of his hoodie.
“Keep that outta sight. Keep your hands out your pockets where everybody can see. Somebody bucks? I take my glasses off and wipe the lens? You see that, you open that Gat right the fuck up. Get whatever motherfuckers are at the door, between us and Lionel here. I’ll take out T-Money and whoever’s next to him.” He looked at Sully. “You got that piece you carry? That thing from the war?”
Sully shook his head, no.
“That’s too bad. Shit jumps off, you just run. I hope you quicker than you look.”
• • •
T-Money’s headquarters was a sagging brick row house, seven or eight guys out front on the sidewalk in the early May air, the dim orange glow of blunts and smokes in the gloom. When the Jeep pulled up at the curb, they converged, dropping smokes, grinding them underfoot. Two guys materialized from a parked car, three or four came off the porch, backs squared, baseball caps skewed to the side.
Sly got out and it looked like the freaking Red Sea. The guys on the sidewalk parted, the surprise registering on their faces, the man instantly recognized, feared.
“Hey now, hey now,” Sly said, a toothpick working at the side of his mouth, pushing up the glasses on his nose, reaching out to slap palms. Then he stopped, stretched onto his toes, raising his hands up, stretching like he’d just driven in from Detroit, and unleashed a long, loud yawn.
“What is up, people,” he said, bringing his hands down and pushing the car door closed. Curious got out of the back door, everybody recognizing him, too.
Sully pushed open his door on the street side and got out, the men sizing him up, the only white guy in twenty blocks, riding with Sly motherfucking Ha
stings.
When Sully got to the sidewalk, a chubby dude with an untucked flannel shirt was already bullshitting with Sly, like it was no biggie that Sly had rolled up unannounced in a place where he had no business and was not welcome. Chub Man looked over at Sully, furrowing his brow, saying to Sly, “Hey, fuckface over there—he rollin’ with you, too?”
Sly nodded.
“What up,” said Chub, still looking at Sully. “That face you got—what the other nigga look like?” And he broke up, killing himself here.
“He don’t say much, speak the English,” Sly said. “Nigga’s from Yugoslavia, where they got that war? That shit’s real over there, bombs and shit. Just look at him. I think somebody did that to him with a knife.”
“Ah shit,” Chub said, looking over at Sully. “No foul, though? Right?”
Sully nodded, hunching his shoulders.
“So, okay,” Chub said. “Let’s go see T-Money. Hey, Sly, brother, I know he wants to see you.”
• • •
In the front room, the television was the only illumination, a pale blue glow falling over a sagging-ass couch, a couple of chairs, a beat-to-shit coffee table. By the time Sully edged through the crowd and got inside, the sound was off—it was some sort of rap music channel—and T-Money was sprawled on the couch, a black T-shirt pulled over his bulk, baggy basketball shorts, the man looking like Heavy D, making Chub look like a lollipop.
His legs were open, knees moving back and forth, a bowl of popcorn in his lap, a blunt on the sad-ass end table, smoke just barely smoldering off the end. Cans of Steel Reserve 211, the twenty-four-ounce things, littered the table. There were two women at the back of the room, moving off to the kitchen, when Sully finally got past the crowd.
T-Money looked up at him, the features registering at some level.
“Who this here?” Looking at Sully, but directing the question to Sly.
Sitting on the edge of the coffee table, pushing a pizza carton to the side, Sly turned and looked, like he had forgotten who all was with him.
