Nick's Trip (30 page)

“Bullshit,” Frank said. A cloud of cheap cigar smoke hung between our faces. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch,” I said with wide eyes. “New Year’s special, onetime order. No limit. You get acquainted with our business, we make a new friend.”

The bluesy intro to Jethro Tull’s “Locomotive Breath” played through the Sony. Frank had another slug and belched. The belch watered his eyes and caused his lips to part like two pink slugs.

“One thing I always say, Winston.”

“Wilson. Ron Wilson.”

“One thing I always say. If it’s on sale today, it can be on sale tomorrow. Right?”

“Maybe so,” I said. “But I sure would like to write an order before the clock strikes twelve.”

“Never happen,” Frank said. “I’m not that kind of sucker. Nice try, though. Always ask for the sale.” He rocked back on his heels. “Look me up after the New Year, hear?”

“I will. Thanks.” I extended my hand again, and again Frank ignored it. Instead he turned his head back toward the young expediter.

“Turn that shit down!” he yelled, pointing at the boom box. Then he waddled back like a man carrying something odious in the seat of his pants and shut the door behind him.

The thick young expediter moved to the Sony and reduced the volume by a hair. I closed my book, put it under my arm, and walked through the kitchen toward the lobby. The tall, wiry, pock-faced man glanced up and looked me over as I passed. His eyes were small and heavily hooded, all black pupil, whiteless as a snake’s. I felt them on me as I exited the kitchen.

O
UT ON THE
street I walked quickly back to my Dart. I put the price book in the car and retrieved a heavy wool sweater from the trunk. I removed my tie and put the sweater over my shirt, and my overcoat on top of them both.

On my way back I stopped in a deli named Costaki’s and bought the largest go-cup of coffee they sold. I tore a hole in the plastic lid and sipped the contents as I walked south on Twenty-first. I kept low passing the Olde World and just beyond it cut left down a narrow alley.

The alley ran between Twentieth and Twenty-first. A tan building stood east to west on the south side of the alley, with two green dumpsters positioned and spaced against its side. A doorway cut into the building next to the dumpster closest to Twentieth. I walked down the alley and stepped up onto the curb and stood in the doorway. I could see the Olde World’s back entrance from the doorway, on the north side of the alley.

Nothing much happened after that. Steam rose from the hole in the coffee lid, and the traffic sounds from the right and the left began to soften. I had a cigarette and smoked it down to the filter. A couple of women walked across the alley and quickened their pace when they saw me in the doorway. A bundled bicycle courier rode by, and then a gray Step-Van, both without incident. An hour passed and dusk darkened the alley.

At 7:25 a brown Mercury Marquis drove by slowly and stopped in the alley at the Olde World’s door. From the shadow of my doorway I watched an obese man in a brown coat get out of the Marquis and open the trunk. He removed what looked to be two filled pillowcases and carried them up to the door, where he rang the buzzer. Hands appeared shortly thereafter from behind the door. The hands grabbed the pillowcases, pulling them inside. The obese man in the brown suit walked back to the trunk and closed it, then reentered the driver’s side and drove out of the alley.

I lit another cigarette. By eight o’clock no one else had driven in or out of the alley. There was little sound now, except for the rustle of paper and debris that the wind blew and lifted in tight, violent circles.

I jogged back to my Dart, started it, and drove over to Twenty-first, where I parked facing south on the street, in sight of the Olde World’s window. I turned the radio on and switched it to WDCU. I listened to a Coltrane set, and one by Stan Getz. In the middle of the Getz set, the lights in the Olde World’s window went out. I turned the ignition key on my Dart.

A black Lincoln passed my car and stopped in front of the Olde World. The young expediter who had retrieved the car got out of the driver’s seat and left the engine running. A heavy man in his fifties with bushy gray sideburns walked out of the Old World and moved toward the car. A live cigarette in an alabaster holder dangled between his fingers as he walked. Black twill pants legs showed beneath his double-breasted black overcoat. The heavy man climbed into the Lincoln and drove away. Before
he did it I wrote his D.C. license plate number in my notebook and checked my wristwatch. The time was 8:35.

The expediter zipped his green army jacket and walked north on Twenty-first, toward Ward Park. Frank and the tall pock-faced man emerged from the Olde World right after that. Frank had an inch of cigar in his mouth and a plastic foam cup in his hand, and he wore a corduroy car coat. The tall man had changed into gray slacks and a long gray overcoat a shade darker than the slacks. The two of them walked to a silver blue Lincoln parked three car lengths ahead. Frank unlocked the door and got behind the wheel. The tall man waited in the street until his side unlocked, then climbed into the shotgun seat. They pulled away from the curb. I yanked the column shift down out of neutral and felt it engage.

The Lincoln turned down the alley and at the end of it made a left onto Twentieth. When the taillights disappeared around the corner of the building, I followed. At New Hampshire Avenue the Lincoln cut right and headed northeast. At Georgia it turned left and shot straight north, and at Kansas Avenue it turned right again and resumed its northeastern path.

Kansas was wide and clean and residential, and free of cops. The Lincoln accelerated and stayed at fifty. I kept back two hundred yards the entire trip, running three reds along the way.

The Lincoln cut right at Missouri, crossed New Hampshire, and continued on at the top of North Capitol. Missouri became Riggs, and the Lincoln veered right down a slope that began South Dakota Avenue. We headed southeast then, paralleling Eastern Avenue at the Maryland line. At an arm of Fort Totten Park in Northeast, as the garden apartment complexes decreased, near an industrial section of concrete yards and waste-disposal sights, the Lincoln turned right on Gallatin, along a grove of widely spaced trees. I kept on, easing my foot off the gas.

A quarter-mile past a home for unwed mothers, the Lincoln turned left onto an unmarked, unpaved road and slowly drove
into a break of trees. I continued past and in my rearview watched the taillights fade. I stopped the Dart in front of an isolated row of brick colonials on Gallatin and killed the engine.

I pulled my arms out of my overcoat, put lined leather gloves over my hands, and left the coat behind me on the seat. Out of the car, I ran quickly across the road, through a hard field, and into the grove of evergreens and willows. A dim yellow light glowed in the direction of the Lincoln’s path, and I cut toward it diagonally through the trees, with slow, careful steps. As I neared a wide clearing, I stopped and crouched down behind the trunk of a scrub pine. My breath was visible in the yellow light ahead. Through it, I watched the Lincoln come to a slow stop.

The light topped a leaning lamppost. Next to the lamppost a bungalow stood far back at the edge of the clearing. The woods continued on behind the bungalow. The silver blue Lincoln sat parked next to the black Lincoln that had been driven by the man in black twills. Lights glowed from inside the bungalow.

Frank and the pock-faced man climbed out of the silver blue Lincoln. Frank walked over to the black Lincoln and unlocked the trunk while his partner, tall and unmoving, stood by. Then Frank pulled the two pillowcases out—the pillowcases the expediter had transferred earlier to the trunk when he had retrieved his boss’s car—and shut the lid. They crossed the yard and stepped up onto the bungalow’s porch. The wooden porch gave and creaked beneath their weight.

The two of them entered with the turn of Frank’s key. A square of light spilled out as the door opened. After it closed, the porch darkened, and then there was only my breath against the light of the lamppost, and the headstone cold of the woods around me. I waited awhile to let some nerve seep in. When I thought I had it, I looked behind me once, and again. I swallowed spit and crept low, like a prowler, away from the pine and out into the clearing.

I stopped behind the trunk of the black Lincoln. Soft music
hopped with the intermittent surge of horns played from inside the bungalow, but the clearing was quiet. I could hear my own breathing and feel the rubbery thump of my heart against my ribs. I pushed away from the car, staying low, and stepped up onto the porch, crawling heels-to-ass to a spot below the front bay window.

I raised my head until my eyes cleared the bottom of the window’s frame.

It was a Sears bungalow from the 1920s, modified into some sort of private casino. The walls of the first floor had been removed, leaving one large room with a door leading back to the kitchen. Two twenty-five-inch televisions sat on the left wall, and two different basketball games were being broadcast on the sets. A round card table covered with dirty green felt stood in the center of the room, with six wooden swivel chairs placed around it. Red, white, and blue chips were strewn about the table’s green top.

On the back wall an oak bar ran between the kitchen door and a wood staircase. The kitchen door was open, and the staircase led to a dark landing. Two closed doors were outlined in the shadows of the landing.

One high-backed stool stood at the far end of the bar. Behind the bar Frank poured scotch into a rocks glass filled with ice. The checkered walnut stock of a .38 Airweight showed above the waistband of his khakis, where it was secured by a snap in a nylon holster. Frank replaced the scotch in a small group of medium call bottles illuminated by a naked-drop light from above. A small dirty mirror hung on the cedar paneling behind the bottles. A compact stereo with squat black speakers stood next to the bottles.

The heavy man in black twills stood with a drink in his hand in front of the two television sets, shifting his head slowly between the two games. The blue light from the sets danced across his unemotional, heavy-lidded eyes. The tall, pock-faced man was bent over one of the pillowcases, with his hand inside.
He withdrew a fistful of small white slips of paper, and he turned and said something to Frank, and both of them laughed. A mangled smile turned up on the heavy man’s face as well, but he kept his eyes on the games.

The pock-faced man turned his head back down toward the pillowcase on the floor. It was then that I studied his face for the first time. The scars only covered the right side, and they were chunked deep, and red. The left side of his face was tightly smooth, with street-pretty definition. I lowered my head and crawled away from the window, off the porch.

A small, curtained window was positioned on the right side of the bungalow. I walked lightly past it, to the rear of the house. A narrow set of painted wood stairs led to the back entrance of the kitchen. From the bottom of the stairs I could see a tubular fluorescent light hung on the white plaster ceiling. A string switch dangled from the light. I walked up the stairs, my hand sliding up a loose splintered rail, and looked through a sheer lacy curtain.

Through the tiny kitchen, past the main room, and out the front bay window to the yard, a set of headlights approached from up the road.

I jumped off the steps and hit the ground running. I saw the headlights pass across the house and traverse the ground at my feet, and I heard myself grunt as I sprinted blindly into the woods. Willow sticks lashed my face, and there was the sound of branches snapping at my feet, and the sound of the branches adrenalized my legs, and I turned right and ran harder and faster, as if a fire were chasing me up a flight of stairs. I kept running until I reached the broken grove of willow and pine.

I stopped for breath, looked behind me once more, and ran out of the grove, across the hard field and the road, back to my Dart. I gunned it and drove up Gallatin to the Maryland line at Chillum, where I cracked the window and lit a smoke, hanging a left and then another just after that, back into the District.

The streets were shining and noisy, filled with loud, swerving
vehicles and juiced-up, hard-luck cops on the worst beat of the year. I dodged them all, driving beneath a pearl moon, my fingers tight around the steering wheel, all the way back to my apartment in Shepherd Park.

I TURNED ON THE
lamp switch next to my couch on the way to the liquor cabinet in my kitchen, where I withdrew what was left of my green-seal Grand-Dad. My cat circled my feet as I poured the bourbon into a juice glass, and kept circling as I tossed it back. I swallowed the whiskey, leaned over the chipped porcelain drain board, felt the burn, and waited for the warmth to wash over my face. I poured another shot and let the liquor slop out of the bottle’s neck. Some of it spilled out onto the porcelain. The rest filled half the glass. I had a sip this time and walked out of the kitchen with the glass in my hand to the couch in my tiny living room.

I balanced the glass on the arm of the couch, picked the telephone up off the rug, and placed it in my lap. My cat jumped up on the couch and touched her nose to my arm, then jumped down and walked off, tail up, to the bedroom. I dialed Winnie Luzon.

Winnie picked up on the third ring. “Talk about it,” he said.