King Suckerman
- Автор: Пелеканос Джордж
- Серия: D.C. Quartet #2
- Год: 1997
- Язык: английский
- Год: Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN: 978-0-316-69590-9
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «King Suckerman». Краткое содержание книги:
Vivian turned her head, smiled. She yelled over the music, “You got my cigs?”
“Here.” He tossed her the Marlboro softs and a blue book of D.C. Vending matches with the message “Thank You for Your Patronage” printed on its face. She lit herself a smoke.
Karras put away the groceries, dropped the bag of clothing on the couch next to Vivian. “I got you a few things.” And: “I’m gonna take a shower.”
He went to his bedroom, stripped, wrapped a towel around his waist, and walked through the hall. He stopped, saw Vivian facing the window trying on the halter top, watched the wash of muscle over her rib cage as she reached behind her to tie the knot.
“It fits!” she yelled over her shoulder.
Karras had a cool shower. Thinking of Vivian, the way her body had looked as she tied the halter, it was all he could do to get himself soaped up and rinsed off without reaching down to yank his meat.
“I’m going out,” said Karras, standing over her as he tucked a clean Hawaiian shirt into his jeans. She was rolling a joint with the Tops papers and having a time of it, too. Karras put his feet up on the cable-spool table, one after the other. He rolled up the cuffs, cigarette style, on his Levis.
“Don’t you wanna hang out?” said Vivian.
Goddamn right I want to hang out. It’s my place and there’s a mattress in the back and you’re young and fucking beautiful.
“Nah,” said Karras. “I’m meeting a friend for a beer.”
“Okay,” said Vivian with a shrug.
“Okay.”
Wilton Cooper stopped the Challenger in front of a DGA store in Northeast, cut the engine.
“Be right back,” said Cooper to Clagget.
Cooper went into the grocery-variety market, picked up a six of Near Beer and a jar of Vaseline and took both to the counter. He waited behind an old lady who was pulling pennies from her change purse with arthritic hands. He pulled a paperback off the rack to the right of the counter and placed the book on top of the six. The old lady fussed over her things for a moment and walked away. Cooper asked the clerk to add a couple of decks of Salem longs to the rest of his purchases. Cooper paid, the clerk bagged the shit, and Cooper left the store.
Cooper dropped himself into the driver’s bucket, reached into the bag. He tossed the paperback over to Clagget.
“Got you a present, little brother.”
Clagget read the title, smiling a little as he said the name. “Pimp.”
“By Iceberg Slim.”
“What is it, Wilton?”
“That there’s the Book. The Bible of the Street. Most of what you saw in that movie tonight, they took that shit straight from Ice, man. Read that and you’ll know what’s really goin’ on.”
“Thanks, Wilton.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Bobby Roy Clagget rubbed his thumb along the book’s cover. “Where we goin’ now?”
“Back to the motel. That okay by you?”
“Sure.”
“Thought we’d kick back some, B.R.”
“Sounds good.”
Cooper pulled the ring off a can of Near Beer. “Yeah, you and me, we gonna relax, have us a little fun.”
Karras walked straight to Benbow’s, his neighborhood joint, on Connecticut below the Janus theater near 18th. He wasn’t particularly thirsty, and he had made no plans to meet a friend, but he felt he had to get out of the apartment and away from Vivian. He entered and had a seat at the bar. The tender, a guy named Don, drew a mug of draft and placed it on a coaster in front of Karras. Don looked like he had quaffed a few that evening himself.
Karras raised his glass. “Thanks.”
Don pulled an open bottle of Bud from the ice chest, winked, and drank. “To you, Dimitri.”
Benbow’s called itself a restaurant, though Karras had rarely seen the patrons there partaking in its alleged cuisine. It was a narrow place with a bar, dartboards, a juke, and a couple of heads. When Karras wanted breakfast, he got it at the Jefferson Coffee Shop on 19th between M and N, and sometimes at the lunch counter at Schwartze’s drugstore nearby, but he often took his morning java at Benbow’s. Occasionally he’d go in and make a cup of instant himself, as Don was frequently sleeping one off on top of the bar.
Karras wasn’t much of a drinker. He sipped his draft and listened to the Hues Corporation doing “Rock the Boat” from the juke.
“Hey, Dimitri.”
Karras turned his head at the voice and the tap on his shoulder. Donna DiConstanza, a secretary who worked at the Machinists building on Connecticut and N, stood by his side. She had a feathery Farrah Fawcett-Majors thing happening with her reddish hair and a wide smile showing crooked, yellowing teeth. Donna wore flared Lee jeans and one of those gauzy, brightly colored shirts out of Pakistan that shrank to nothing the first time you put them in the dryer. She had a pair of red Dr. Scholl’s sandals on her feet. Karras had done her, standing up against the sidewalk side of a parked van back on R street, about six months back. It was a cold night, both of them high and with their pants down at two in the morning, Donna’s ass against the frosty metal door of some stranger’s Econoline, and it had been quick.
“Hey, Donna.”
“Where you been, stranger?”
“Here and there.” Karras with the cool, mysterious response, giving her the fifty-dollar grin despite himself.
“Buy me one?”
Better not.
Karras gave her an eye sweep. She looked a little like Bonnie Raitt on the cover of Home Plate. Not as pretty, but sexy in a high-mileage kind of way. He felt something move, sluglike, in his jeans.
“Sure,” said Karras. “Have a seat.”
He bought her a whiskey sour. He drank his beer and she had her cocktail and they ordered another round the same way. A drunk the regulars alternately called Poppy or Popeye — like the cartoon character: The old guy had a toothless, rubbery mouth — came over to talk to them, and Karras ended up buying him one as well.
“I’m from Mars, man,” said Poppy.
Poppy drifted, and the conversation between Donna and Karras went to dope.
“So,” said Donna. “You holding?”
Karras patted the breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt and smiled. He retrieved the joint slyly and palmed it over to Donna.
Donna said, “Be right back.”
She got off her bar stool and went to the ladies’ room. Karras ordered another round, and by the time Don served it, Donna had returned. She had the sourish smell of marijuana on her clothes and in her hair, and she had to grab the bar to get into her seat. She drew a Benson & Hedges from the pack set next to her rocks glass. Karras gave her a light.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“Good weed, Dimitri.”
“Always.”
“Here.” She passed him what remained of the joint.
Karras walked past the back of the bar and along a short hallway, went through a door labeled Gents. The head was tiny, with a buttlittered wall urinal, sink, and clouded mirror. Karras pissed in the urinal, cranked open a casement window above it as he drained. Benbow’s management had run a small but decent speaker from the juke to the head, and the long version of the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” with its insistent, classic bass line, was now coming through. Karras put his back against the door, watched himself in the mirror and grooved on the O’Jays as he smoked down the joint. He extinguished what remained with his thumb and forefinger, dropped the roach back in his shirt.
Back at the bar, Donna was looking a little more drunk and a lot more beautiful in that Bonnie kind of way than she had before. Karras stumbled a little getting onto his stool.